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| Wednesday, May 1, 2002 |
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A shattered mind is a terrible thing to waste 
You know why, but read about it anyway
Sounds of Silence
| | Internet stations of all kinds are off the air today, to send a mayday (literally) for the whole business, which will be killed if CARP's recommendations take effect later this month. |
| | Right now WOLFFM is running a call-in talk show that's being carried by some other stations. I can't get it from WOLFFM's own MP3 stream link, but I can from the one at Radio Paradise. |
| | Right now there's a musician calling in from the D.C. area, saying that the only way he can get his music sampled by the world is through Internet radio. |
| | And over here in SpectatorOnline in North Carolina, Deborah Proctor of the excellent WCPE, a terrestrial classical music that also radiates on the Web, reveals how nasty the CARP process really was: |
| | Independent classical station WCPE tried to participate in the CARP proceedings but was excluded, says Deborah Proctor, WCPE station manager. In January 2001 the Copyright Office indicated that small entities would be allowed to file briefs instead of committing to fully participate in the proceedings -- a costly endeavor in terms of legal counsel. WCPE got on the list and readied themselves to file, Proctor says, only to be rejected from participation by the Recording Industry Association of America, an enormous trade group representing the four or five major record labels in America. |
| | "They essentially got us kicked off the list," Proctor says. "We wanted to file. We wanted to represent ourselves. But in order to do it, all of the parties involved had to say OK." Of the five-page list, Proctor says, only RIAA said no, insisting that all parties participate fully. With an estimated cost ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 for full participation (not just filing briefs), says Proctor, "we just couldn't afford the six-figure bill." |
| | Ultimately, the parties to the proceedings consisted of a powerful mix of artist unions and industry trade associations, including the RIAA, on one side, and 27 large and small Webcasters and simulcasters, including Clear ChannelCommunications, MTVi Group and National Public Radio, on the other side. |
That would be fast
| | I just looked something up on Google, and found that they were crawling this blog today. |
Needs MoWork
| | It turns out Mozilla does have form-filling power, as many readers have pointed out. It's under Preferences/Privacy & Security/Forms. And it offers a lot more apparent flexibility and completeness than IE's system. Though it's non-obvious, you can autofill forms by pulling down the Edit menu and clicking on "Fill in forms. Mozilla guesses what kind of information you need, allows you to check or uncheck any of the entries, and then batch-fills the whole form. (I just did one that required a credit card number, and Mozilla filled it out. Nice.) " Unfortunatley, Mozilla isn't yet smart about auto-completing what the user is typing. |
| | [Later...] The more I use Mozilla, the more I am impressed with it. The tools for managing stuff (links, cookies, forms, bookmarks) seem endless. It's also fast and doesn't crash. |
A rousing duh
| | The general public's ability to answer basic questions about science has hardly changed. For instance, in 2001, only about 50 percent of NSF survey respondents knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs, that it takes Earth one year to go around the Sun, that electrons are smaller than atoms, and that antibiotics do not kill viruses. |
| | Despite its growing popularity, the Internet ranks a distant third as Americans' chief source of news in general. Only 7 percent of respondents to the NSF survey identified it as their main source of information about what is happening in the world around them. In contrast, 53 percent of those surveyed identified television, and 29 percent said that they got most of their information about current news events from newspapers. The corresponding statistics for radio and magazines are 5 and 3 percent, respectively. |
| | [Later... ] Jonathan at Way.Nu says "Doc has it all wrong." He makes a bunch of good points. But I'm not sure what I have wrong. I just said "News about Net use is also kinda downbeat." I was remarking on the NSF's news, which says "only 7 percent..." The "only" is theirs, not mine. |
| | So to set things straight here, I agree with Jonathan, except where he says "using (the Net) for news doesn't even lay to its strengths." I think it does. The Net is good for all kinds of stuff. If I want news about something/anything right now, chances are I'm not turning on the radio or the TV, or scanning the morning paper. I'm going somewhere on the Web. |
World Wide West
| | JD's latest, Why the Wired West still matters, just went up at OJR. The subhead explains: Personal media, contrarian journalism provide counterweights to Eastern media's groupthink. It's a long, well-researched piece. But it's more about media than journalism. Even weblogs are media: |
| | we're becoming more and more surrounded by small, personal media -- Weblogs, the Media Unspun newsletter, Romenesko's Media News site (based in Florida, though Romenesko works out of his home in Evanston, Ill.) -- in addition to the traditional Eastern media powers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News. |
| | Unlike their corporate kin, personal media are more widely dispersed, more diverse, more decentralized. Perhaps more Western, if one thinks of the West as a state of mind rather than a geographic location. |
| | Some good stuff here (I like Western as a state of mind), but if I thought what I'm doing on the Web was about "media," or some kind of "niche focus," I'd hang it up. |
| | Try substituting "journals" or "journalism" for the word "media" everywhere it appears in this piece. I think it improves. But it's still incomplete, since the vast majority of journals on the Web today are weblogs. |
| | I supppose J.D. didn't go into weblogs in this piece because he's covered the topic separately (and very well) before. But by not giving blogs their due, he perpetuates the notion that only the big names matter. |
| | But in fact they matter mostly to other big names. |
| | We're all journalists here, our blogs are all real journals, and we work as stringers for each other. |
| | What's really hard to factor, from an "media" perspective, is that most of us do this on the side. We have other jobs. |
| | Which brings me back to what this piece is about. The Media is a big business, and this piece is about that business. For the most part blogs are not about business. That tends to exclude them from media coverage. |
| | So I guess I wish the piece was more about journalism and less about media. But it's not and that's cool. |
discuss
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