Years ago, before it was glutted with reality shows, MTV was the arbiter of pop music. But the channel abandoned music videos around the time the Internet fragmented the music industry, creating niches within niches—and listeners who found themselves increasingly isolated. Recently, YouTube rolled out its YouTube 100, a weekly top-100 chart of music videos […]
Monthly Archives: May 2011
Briefliest Noted
Sometimes, I just have nothing more to say here about my Brieflier Noted posts. What, I’m going to summarize a summary of a summary? That reminds me of my junior-year English class, in which we didn’t read great works of literature but instead read something called Masterplots, which, as far as I now can tell, […]
G-Force
Last week, Google announced its much-anticipated music service, Music Beta by Google, which allows users to upload their personal music collections to the cloud and listen to them on any computer or enabled Android device. Because the songs are stored online, they don’t take up space on a device or hard drive; when users are […]
Secret Life
Anne Frank lived in hiding in Amsterdam for more than two years, and last April, the Secret Annex Online, a site devoted to the exploration of Prinsengracht 263, launched to show what the house looked like during the time that the Frank family lived there. “I wander from room to room, climb up and down […]
Lit Bits
Two weeks ago marked the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online cultural magazine founded on the belief that literary criticism can flourish on the Internet. “Contrary to the notion that the literary arts are dying off, we believe a reading renaissance is underway in America,” says the founding editor Tom Lutz, […]