RapRadar: Elliot Wilson, former editor of hip hop magazine XXL, is launching what he hopes will become the Huffington Post of Hip Hop. Which is just a horrible slogan. Basically it'll be some HuffPo-ish mix of blogging, journalism, and hip hop celebrities writing guest columns. "If Jay-Z wants to express his feelings about Obama, there's not really a forum where he can do that right now," Wilson says. This is false.
Chance of Survival: Not great, but theoretically possible. XXL was a quality magazine. If he can replicate that online, he could build an audience. Problem: XXL already replicated itself online. Problem 2: Audience doesn't mean advertisers. See Vibe magazine, currently.

The Wrap: Ex-NYT correspondent and Gawker opponent Sharon Waxman launched this Hollywood/ entertainment news site thing last month. Bad timing, but hey.
Chance of Survival: Ehhh.... moderate? It'll have to get better. Waxman has some money at her back, which is good. But she has some very entrenched competition in Hollywood. If something happens to Nikki Finke, then... slightly less of a chance of failure.


BastardLife: This is Genre magazine editor Neal Boulton's "pansexual sex & relationships site for ALL men." No idea what that means. Is 'pansexual' different than 'bisexual?' It's a question you may be able to find the answer to at Bastardlife.com
Chance of Survival: As a forum for Neal Boulton's personal musings, decent. As a moneymaking venture, very low. Unless pansexuality takes off as a recession thing.


Alpha Kitty: Atoosa Rubenstein was a big shot editor at Seventeen magazine. Then she left to run this "Alpha Kitty" project. Which, as best we can tell, now consists of her Myspace page and a Youtube channel.
Chance of survival: Ummm.. good? But the chance of making money with this is nil, as far as we can tell. Although to be completely honest I'm still not sure what this thing really is.


The Daily Beast: I made up a little haiku about The Daily Beast, ready?:
Tina Brown glamour
Fancy online articles
No advertising

Chance of Survival: Unless Tina comes up with a brilliant plan to monetize this site, it will be a victim of its launch timing and its utter lack of urgency to come up with a workable business plan. She will burn through Barry Diller's millions, subsidizing many worthy writers in the process, then eventually fold. It will be a nice place to go back to and read the archives one day, though.

[Disclosure: Neal Boulton has owed me freelance money forever, so I may be biased.]

The movie business has always been late to catch on to trends. But the swift shifts of technology make the studios' sluggishness all the more embarrassing.

Universal and Pirates director Gore Verbinski have acquired rights to make a movie from a Wall Street Journal article written in 2007 about a woman virtually widowed by her husband's Second Life addiction.

The problem: Ric Hoogestraat, the subject of the story, makes an unappealing leading man: He's a 53-year-old homebound diabetic. And Second Life, the virtual world in which Hoogestraat's hunky avatar, Dutch Hoorenbeek, "married" a user who was not his real-world wife, makes for a lousy villain. How do you make a movie about a place where nothing really happens? Once Verbinski gets to understand the boring porn-and-kink-filled universe of Second Life, I suspect he'll discard that whole angle. And he'll also drop the notion of an unattractive lunk as the hero. And then, if he doesn't drop the whole idea, he'll make a movie that really has nothing to do with Second Life at all.

We should have expected this, though. I asked Chris Null, the editor of FilmCritic.com, for suggestions on just some of the technological trends Hollywood has missed. Here's the list we came up with:

Movie: Hackers (1995)
Trend: Errr, hackers.
Why it was late: Hackers had been a known media phenomenon since 1971, when Esquire published a feature story on phone phreakers. By 1995, the Internet was making hacking tools so easy to distribute that amateurs known as "script kiddies" were taking over the scene. But hey, the movie had Angelina Jolie!

Movie: You've Got Mail (1998)
Trend: Email
Why it was late: An AOL inbox was trendy around 1990. By 1998, most people worth knowing had bozofilters set on anything from an @aol.com address. And movies with Meg Ryan.

Movie: American Pie (1999)
Trend: Webcams
Why it was late: The Internet-broadcast deflowering of the main character, Jim, relied on technology that was an Internet-culture phenomenon in 1996 (remember JenniCam)?

Movie: Chat Room (2002)
Trend: Chat rooms
Why it was late: The first text-based chat room dates back to 1974, but the notion of cybersex hookups was commonplace by 1998. The first example of deception in the course of a courtship is a few millennia before that. The first and last usage of the phrase "surfin' for cyber bootie" dates to 2002.

Movie: Cellular (2004)
Trend: Cell phones
Why it was late: The cell phone was invented in 1973, or 1944, depending on whom you ask. But the idea of cell phones as a means of rescue permeated society after September 11, 2001 — which is when this Kim Basinger kidnap thriller might have felt timely.

Movie: Firewall (2006)
Trend: iPods
Why it was late: Portable MP3 players had been widely identified as a security risk by 2004, making Harrison Ford's $100 million iPod heist implausible. Plus we'd moved on to Nanos by then.

Not all of the deparated are worthy of such reverence. Will anyone weep for O At Home or Cottage Living? Rather didn't think so. Here are three I wish were still on the newsstand.

Spy
Though its circulation topped out at 194,000, Spy touched us all by destroying the '80s cult of celebrity. Spy, which launched in 1986, never lost its acidic insight as it morphed from a New York insider rag to a mainstream national publication. It established literary practices which Gawker readers might find commonplace: Dubbing Donald Trump, for example, a "short-fingered vulgarian." It died, at long last, in 1994 — just in time to inspire a generation of disenchanted Web writers, like Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman, who launched Suck.com, an unabashed homage, in 1995. (I worked at Suck.com for one blissful year.)

Sassy
I kept stealing this magazine from my high school gal pals. (Yeah, it took me a while to figure out I was gay.) Teen magazines are clearly doomed; drawing the Facebook generation away from laptops and cell phones is a hopeless cause. But if Sassy were still around, they might be driven to the newsstand to try out this newfangled ink-and-paper contraption. The reason why: Sassy spoke authentically using the real language of teenagers. Sort of the way Web publications have so enthusiastically adopted LOLspeak!

Upside
Launched in 1989, this magazine was the first of the tech-and-business titles that proliferated during the '90s and died after the dotcom bubble burst. (All of which are gone: The Industry Standard, eCompany Now, Business 2.0, and, for all intents and purposes, Red Herring.) The writing was uneven, but in its best days, it tweaked Silicon Valley like no one else. A cover showing Wired founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe as Adam and Eve provoked hilarious outrage among the digerati. (Anyone have a scan of that cover? Please send it to me.) The magazine's decline had a tragic note: Aaron Bunnell, the magazine's Web chief and son of publisher David Bunnell, overdosed in 2000. The elder Bunnell kept the magazine going for another two years.

That's my list of magazines I wish were still publishing. What's on yours? Did anyone actually read Cottage Living? I'm sort of dying to know.

1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap.

2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too!

3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card.

4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich.

5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope.

[Pic via Newsweek]