Day: November 8, 2010

Simon Reynolds has spotted a Gang of Four song ("Natural's Not In It") used in an X-Box commercial. It's just the guitar intro--they had to cut away from lyrics that say:

The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love, a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
Remember Lot's wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the perfect life
This heaven gives me migraine
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure

...which seems especially relevant for a Wii type game ("a new purchase - the body is good business"). The advertisement transposes the gritty lower class "punk" milieu of Gang of Four to nicely dressed people spazzing out in upscale suburban living rooms as they run in place and kick virtual soccer balls. You really have to admire the high-paid advertising "Mad Man" who came up with the line "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." This person probably has, like, an English major.

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz:

Given all of the information that has leaked out about private info on Facebook well, leaking out, I decided to get aggressive with the settings:

I removed all applications that accessed my data;

I turned almost every privacy setting to maximum;

I deleted nearly all page, group, game, and application requests

This was overdue. Maybe I am being paranoid, but Facebook is starting to get a bit creepy . . .

This inspired some comments, mostly from people bugged by Facebook ("Facebook is STARTING to get a bit creepy?").This comment from "spridgets" is unfortunate if it's typical:

As much as I agree with you that the privacy fails are a problem, I’ve found that Facebook is become much like a RSS feed, and there are several media outlets and bloggers that post their updates there, without which I would be checking their sites far less often.

I shouldn't care about someone who uses "fail" as a noun but suspect spridgets is the typical lazy person who trusts ZuckerBorg to aggregate his/her news and won't go looking for it outside of that comforting gated news community. This is why a good, independent (non-Apple, non-Facebook) newsreader would be nice to have. Bloglines appears to be continuing but no idea what will happen to it when the new owner, MerchantCircle, takes over from Ask.com. The word Merchant in the name suggests that Bloglines will soon be trying to sell me stuff.