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| Monday, March 6, 2006 |
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Family farm 
and the winning coverage award goes to...
| | I actually watched the Oscars last night. Or the second half anyway. |
| | I loved that Three 6 Mafia won Best Song for something with bleeps in it. And that Crash, a movie nobody saw that's already out on DVD, won Best Picture. I loved Reese Witherspoon's award and speech because she reminds me so much of my daughter Colette, who rocks too, and looks like Reese might be her sister. And I dug Phillip Seymour Hoffman because he ran his mom at the top of the credits. Good men happen without good moms, but the odds are shorter. I was lucky to have one too. |
| | Also, Mr. Hoffman is a great character who can act so well that his characters are profoundly independent of everybody, including the actor. Jim Carey played Andy Kauffman beautifully, but was still Jim Carey. Phillip Seymour Hoffman played Truman Capote beautifully, and was only Truman Capote. |
| | joan was racist, sexist, agist ... and she had a sign that she held up after talking to a woman denoting whether or not she had fake tits or real ones. |
| | 199 years old and she still owns the red carpet. if i was a star all id do if i was at the oscars is turn joan around and kiss her ass right there on camera. her dress was incredibly horrible, but shes funny as hell. she even made her daughter do a skit with her where they pretended to be the brokeback fellas. bizarre and funny. i love her. |
Power from the people
| | Eric Norlin on The Interaction Economy: The "readership" is part of the new continuum of content "production," and aggregated communities of value occur via the tools of syndication technology. |
| | But consolidation these days — when small is the new big — is about dinosaurs huddling against the cold, about Gulliver losing out to all those damned Lilliputans. Distribution is not king; in fact, it’s a rotten business. Content is not king; hear the whining from that end of the world. The scarcity economy is over. Openness kills monopolies. Don’t congratulate AT&T. Pity them. |
| | Except for the fact that the merged dinosaurs own more and more of the pipes, and large lobbying organizations in Washington, and have plans for screwing the Net royally. |
| | Not that they'll succeed, which is what Jeff implies. |
Muni why-fi
| | Rochelle owns their own power plants - they are their own utilities - they even provide dial tone and cable tv to their residents. Unusual, yes? |
| | But in the mid 1990's, they decided to become their own ISP as well. Using the right-of-way on their own power/phone poles, they put up a fiber-optic OC3 ring around the city. Connected to a load-balanced pair of T1's from two seperate upstread providers, with options to buy more bandwidth as needed. They put in a rack of modems and sold dialup to their citizens as a traditional ISP of the time. They offered an attractive package to lure businesses to settle there - lots of low-cost land (many abandoned city-owned buildings downtown), tax breaks, and a fiber-optic cable into your phone closet with high-speed Internet access at a low cost - when fractional T1 cost in the thousands per month (circa 1995). |
| | The goal was to make Rochelle into a town where businesses would want to be located. Close to Chicago - but not paying Chicago real estate prices. |
| | So now I'm wondering, how's it doing? |
Back when "mash" was a drink
Running from screaming
| | On a recent flight from Nashville to Los Angeles, I had the misfortune of sitting near a two year old boy who was traveling with his father. The boy was completely out-of-control and spent most of his waking hours screaming "no" or "mine" and carrying on like he was all that mattered in the universe. This is the curse of a child determined to be the center of attention (or is the curse for those who are nearby?), and it got me to thinking about how all of us who've been a part of mass media have employed similar strategies. |
| | After all, attention in a crowd goes to the one who screams the loudest. |
| | This is a core principle of mass marketing and, of course, one of the reasons people are rushing to get seats at the back of the plane to escape all the screaming... |
| | But if you can bring yourself to back away from the crowd and the noise, you'll find a second significant (and undiscussed) failure of mass marketing. We — those of us who use mass marketing — have been sucked into believing the hype associated with our own screaming. This is perhaps the greater failure of mass marketing, because it's left us vulnerable to circling the wagons around false claims — claims that the people increasingly see through as self-serving and, to be blunt, bullshit. |
| | Consider the television news industry. If you talk to people who don't watch the news anymore, you'll discover that this hype is one of the big reasons people have walked away. We regularly raise the stakes for viewers on some stories to the life or death level, and they know both intellectually and intuitively that it isn't true. But in declaring it so, we fall into the trap of believing our own hype. We convince ourselves that the story lives up to the tease, and that, folks, is very rarely the case. |
| | This isn't just the case with TV news. It's everywhere. We're so awash in hyperbole that the only people really to trust are those we choose to be members of our own postmodern tribes — friends, sometimes family, acquaintances, references from friends, people who've "been there, done that," and others that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. This is the success of the Diggs and the youTubes of the Media 2.0 space, but it's basic postmodernism. |
| | And since they know that our messages tilt towards bullshit, guess what? There's an inherent element of bullshit in our brands, those bastions of faith upon which mass marketing are built. What is branding anyway, except a marketing metaphor borrowed from the cattle industry of centuries gone by. Why "brand" my cattle? So I can find them in a crowd. |
| | He give a list of eight recommendations that are good for more than just his clients in the TV news business. Check it out. |
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