I have heat now, although I'm not convinced it's not going to cut out again the next time it rains. But at least it's toasty inside.

Margaret over at MightyGirl linked to BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, a highly (but subtly) satirical website making fund of various racist attitudes. Reading the letters received by the site, it seems that about half of the people get the joke, and the other half are utterly outraged by the whole thing. I was curious as to who the prankster was, so I did a whois on the domain and found out that it was owned by one "Jonah Peretti." I then did a google search on this name and hit paydirt. It seems that Peretti is the guy who tried to order customized sneakers from Nike with the word "sweatshop" stitched on them, and set up a "rejection hotline" in New York City as an experiment in spreading news by word of mouth.

He's was talking about the rejection line phenomenon when he made the following statement in this article:

People think of media as this monolithic thing that chooses to cover one thing or another. But really, it's people who make media, and they hear stories from friends of theirs. Social networks tie into the way mass media works.

The subplot is I'm trying to demonstrate that the Internet hasn't become totally corporate. Individuals with very little money can still reach millions of people.

This is along the lines of the point I was trying to get at with my little "media" diatribe a few months back (here and here).

(Argh! In looking for those last two links, I discovered that Blogger had shredded all but two weeks worth of my archive! One of these days I gotta move this sucker off to a better publishing system. All the cool kids seems to be using Movable Type these days, so maybe that's the way to go.)