Three Unrelated Thoughts

The only thing these three little thoughts have in common is that they entered my mind within a few hours of each other.

First, our Media Economics professor, Frank Mulhern, raised an interesting question last night: why does "the news" spend so much of its time and energy giving stock updates? People who don't own stock don't care, people who own a few stocks probably aren't in it for short term gains and probably care very little about daily fluctuations in price, and the active traders are most likely very aware of what the market is doing because they're getting live updates on the web. Who's left?? 50-somethings who can't get enough of Maria Bartiromo?

Next, one of my classmates said that he heard that Rex Grossman became the first non-politician to have his Wikipedia page locked down because it was being constantly defaced after the Super Bowl. As you can see, his page is locked, but I don't have time to look up whether or not the "first non-politician" claim is true. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If more people would have heard of Wikipedia in 2005, LaTroy Hawkins would have been the first. The numbers don't tell the story (btw-baseball-reference doesn't track blown saves?), but Cubs fans remember.


Finally, isn't it interesting that the main component of iTunes logo is a CD, when in fact iTunes is bringing about the end of the CD as we know it? Physical media is less relevant every day, due in large part to iTunes, Gmail, Flickr, and other forms of digital distribution, and yet iTunes chooses the CD as its visual cue. What would be a good analogy for this? Cell phones using the traditional land-line phone handset as the icon for "call"?