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Thursday, April 18, 2002
Musicians, meet the music bazaar at least half way 
Hey!
| | It's "under construction," he says. I always wondered: Why the preposition under? |
| | I'm also reminded of what Ron Wilson, who runs SFO, said about airport construction not long ago: it will never end. All major airports will be rebuilding something or other for the duration. |
| | Same with blogs. Same with life. |
Go ergs
| | Blogging is just a game changer. I know it's really not as simple as this, but I want to say something like: weblogs are to print media as TV is to radio. Just as the Web has already done, blogging spurs print publications to change their preconceptions, methods and means. It's about agility. Blogs send a wake up call, forcing both old and new ways of working to rapidly adapt. But it doesn't have to be "adapt or die." Just adapt. Adapt and grow stronger, hopefully — at least adapt. |
| | And yes — this counts equally for both worlds. As there's room for both, so too must both continue to change. |
Peacerolling
Blopulism at work
| | I't happening. Bloggers are starting newspapers. Read Ken Layne here and here. Amazing. |
How Big Dumb can Big Government be?
| | Rebecca wonders How can the government simultaneously prosecute Microsoft for its monolpolistic practices, and consider granting them one. Good question. |
| | It's like this. A lot of your bigtime GOP types think (along with the editorial page of the WSJ) that The Market is something that naturally favors bigness, and bigness is therefore goodness. The Market has favored Microsoft with success, and Microsoft is therefore an exemplary company. A good company. Because morality is strong, and strongness is moral. Might makes right, more or less. This isn't in the founding documents of Conservative Thought, but it's there in the language. |
| | Let's face it: the Bush Administration never would have procecuted Microsoft. The Case is a Clinton Era legacy. That's why the current Justice Department settlement is so favorable to Microsoft. "Why should the best people be punished," Dan Quayle once asked, to applause, at a Republican convention. He was talking about progressive taxation, but the subject might as well have been antitrust litigation. George Lakoff explains the deeper reasons for the apparent ironies. |
| | Rebecca also asks, Is there an open source alternative? Maybe. I'd look into what PingID is up to. (Disclaimer: I'm on its advisory board.) I'm sure there's lots more out there, and I wouldn't just look to open source stuff for the answer. I'd look to independent developers of all kinds. Most straddle the open/closed source divide, which on close inspection in most cases is not a divide at all. |
| | Even our bodies have lefts and rights, no? |
| | How much you wanna bet this czar doesn't last the term? |
What's the scheme(a)?
| | Eric "Badass" Norlin has been sniffing around the unseen places where apparently separate topics in fact constitute Venn diagramatic circles that actually overlap (there must be a less complex way to put that, but hey, that's how my daft-first thinking works, and I don't have time to improve it right now). |
| | Anyway, I think he sees something. |
| | Outlining is the key. or a key. I'm working in an outliner right now. It's me. It's the way I work and write — the way I've thought since ThinkTank showed me The Way. It's how I organize my world. The way I collapse and expend, make a topic more imporant or less, hoist it so it matters more or de-hoist it so it matters less. |
| | Not sure where I'm going with this, and I have other work to do anyway. So I'll just leave it with hmm.. |
Politics as Unusual
| | Hypocrisy or extreme irony? Eric wonders. I think it's more like , well, mumbling irony or something. Yes, NPR is basically a lefty .org; but it also happens to have a shitload of listeners, since it's the only national news and public affairs network of any quality whatsoever. |
| | Here's where I'm in extreme agreement with Cato: I want NPR weaned from the last 2% it still milks from the federal teat, and I want it — and its hundreds of affiliates — to realize what a gold mine they have in something commercial radio does not: listeners who are also customers. A real commercial relationship. Accountability to millions of loyal customers. What an incredible fucking privileged position these guys are in. Amazing. |
| | And yet they waste their time, and enormous amounts of market karma, flattening real community radio — a potential distribution channel — all over the place. They did it when they got the FCC to kill off the sub-100-watt Class D license a couple decades ago; and they did it again when they joined with their paranoid commercial brethren to do the same to low power FM a couple years ago. |
| | I did a survey a couple days ago. I don't think I made a big enough deal about it. So here we go again: |
| | Blogrolling lists are the online equivalent of presets on a car radio. Many of us punch down our lists in the morning to catch fresh news and commentary. Does this cut into news radio listening? Since you started reading blogs, has your news (including public) radio listening — |
| | - Increased?
- Decreased?
- Stayed about the same?
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| | Mine has decreased. I get more news here. |
| | Compare anybody's blogrolling list (or Blogdex, or Daypop) with any day's programing on Morning Edition. Again, there's an AND relationship between all of them. But if you had to make an OR choice, which would it be? For me, it would be the Web. And blogs are most of my presets on that dial. |
Not made possible by
| | TIAA Cref. That's tea eye aay aay kreff dot org. |
| | Or is it com? Or is that how it's spelled? I've listened to that guy who does the sponsorship bumpers on NPR — you know, the one who draws out his woorrds. dot coommmm — crediting something called TIAA Kref, or -CREF, or Kref, or something, for years now. And I still don't know how it's spelled or if it's a .org or a .coommm. |
| | I think this is it. Oddly, there's no cross-promotion of NPR, or anything welcoming NPR listeners to the apparent (TIAA-CREF.org) site. |
| | I was led on this quest by Dave's one-paragraph opening nonsponsorship mention of Leaf, Kabraiser, Heimann and Bernstein, another peripatetic NPR program supporter. I had always thought they were spelled something like, Lief, Cabraser, Hyman and Burnstein. Who knew? |
| | Hmm. I just went to look up that company, copying and pasting Dave's text, and came up with... Well, let's see what results you get. |
| | These guys, whoever they are, get even less leverage on the Web than TIAA-Whatever, from having their name announced to millions of people making coffee and driving to work in the morning. Nor do they get any help from NPR, which says nothing about its sponsors on the network's Web site. |
| | Here's a test. Grab a pen. Any pen. Good. Now, without looking at it, what does the pen say on it? If it's not a Bic, chances are you don't know. Doesn't matter whether it's a bit of schwag given away at a trade show, or some manufacturer's brand. It has exactly zero influence on you. Its "brand" is entirely useless. |
| | I'm sure these two companies, whatever they're called, think they're getting "good PR" out of sponorosing Morning Edition and other public radio shows. If I were advising them (which in a way I am, right here), I'd insist that some kind of link would show up on the sponsored shows' Web pages. And I'd do a lot more on the Web to attract other inbound links. |
| | Spending that much money (even it it's a swap-out, which is possible) on sponoring the most popular show in morning radio, while remaining too nebulous for Google to grok, is just inexcusable. |
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