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| Tuesday, December 12, 2006 |
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No surprise there 
| | To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. |
| | Also, The message? The end is near and the savior has come. |
Making change from the subject
| | The blogosphere is NOT a billboard for greedy companies to spread their lying shit all over. Sure, there are good, noble, honest companies who want to spread the word about their products in every venue they can. I'm very much into ecommerce and online marketing, but there are rules and limits. |
| | We use the blogs, forums, and other venues online to advise each other. If I say I like Audacity audio editor from SourceForge, a FREE open source tool, you should know that nobody pays me to say that. |
| | If we all start accepting payment, products, or other compensation, nobody will trust us anymore...and the blogosphere will become just another advertising medium. Look at what happened to radio, television, mail, telephones: lying commercials, junk mail, telemarketing. |
| | That said, we've started running ads on IT Garage for stuff that are often so far off-topic that I'm sure we won't see a dime's worth of click-through. Sometimes we get a whole pile of ads for garage door openers. |
Energizer puppy
| | Almost a complete waste of time. Funny for the first few seconds, anyway. Needs music, I think. Mash away... |
I like "Volcania", "Lavaland" or "Glaceland".
A bigger world of more opportunity
| | The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace — some played two million or three million times — tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals. |
| | Unlike the old media roadblocks, however, their filtering can easily be ignored. The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution system. |
| | The entertainment business is already nostalgic for the days when it made and relied on big stars; parts of the public miss a sense of cultural unity tha at may never return. Instead both have to face the irrevocable fact of the Internet: There¹s always another choice. |
| | One small point in addition to the item I bold-faced two paragraphs up: The junk pile may be bigger, but there are many more paths, and much shorter ones, to much broader frontiers, than ever before. More cream can rise more ways to a bigger top. |
| | Case in point. Many of the pieces in that last link are essays or column candidtates that were rejected by print publications. Four of them were rejected by eWeek alone. |
| | In fact, I had given up on ever going back to professional journalism (which I had left in 1978, and by then my pro work was pretty minimal) until 1998, when Phil Hughes offered me the Linux Journal gig that I still have. I will be eternally grateful to Phil for that — and to Dave Winer for getting me to start blogging in that same timeframe. (It also helped that Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I got Cluetrain going back then too.) The success of all three efforts attests to the opportunity-supporting nature of the Net's vast fecundity. |
Whatever floats (or sinks) your boats
| | Question: What it the constructive opposite of rearranging deck chairs on Titanics? Is it building better boats? Better sailors? Or better oceans and icebergs? |
A red sky for a red eye
| |  | Shot that picture going 200 miles per hour on landing at Logan at the end of a redeye flight from Los Angeles. The photo set includes some nice shots of LAXhenge, L.A.'s Bladerunner-like refineries and waste tereatment plants, of vast civilized areas glowing under a layer of puffy low clouds, and of the moon over the whole basin. Blessedly, I slept through the rest of the trip. For photo buffs, the shot was made at f4.5 and 1/160th sec at 1600 ISO with a Canon 30D and an 18-200 Tamron zoom lens set at 50mm. My regret is that I did not shoot it with my much sharper and faster 50mm f1.8 Canon lens. But... whatever. It came out. |
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