"Paul Kedrosky: "I'm particularly fond of SmashingTelly given how it, in effect, Tivo-ifies the web"... Guy Dickinson: "David Galbraith has turned Smashing Telly into well, the new TV."... Fimoculous: "Best Blogs of 2007"... The Guardian: Video sharing on the net has uncovered a hoard of TV gems...and a number of sites have been established to lead us to them. Take smashingtelly.com."
about
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
Gell-Mann is possibly the single most important human being alive. Worth a listen. I particularly like his innocent, eccentric giggling at his own jokes and his enthusiasm – the mark of someone who has never been coached in public speaking by a PR flack, because he transcends that kind of crap and appears genuine.
Playwrights and poets currently garner more cultural prestige than innovative computer makers, but this may be partly because the present rarely has the prestige of the past even if the here and now is where great art is born. The most prestigious art form of Ancient Greece was Lyre playing, hardly a venerated activity now.
I would argue that in a hundred years people will not have heard of most of the people that cover the arts sections of the broadsheets, but that Steve Jobs will be remembered not just as an industrialist, but as a cultural innovator – an artist.
Jobs is considered sartorially elegant, yet he dresses from the waist down in high waisted, beltless, over-length, bleached jeans and sneakers – like an average suburban mall shopper. He is though of as a great speaker, but his delivery is sometimes horribly rehearsed and his voice thin and nasal. But, listen to this speech from when he had just recovered from cancer, it is a masterpiece. For me this is the thing above all others, to show people who don’t get what all the fuss is about when he speaks at a tawdry trade show, tomorrow at the Moscone Center, and people cover it like it was the sermon on the mount.
BBC 1 43 min 31 sec Dec 11, 2007
This year’s prestigious BBC lecture is given by the entrepreneur that puts founders of web 2.0 companies to shame – Craig Venter.
