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Sunday, July 21, 2002
Wisdom of the ages 
| | If a rabbit was a Jedi, what would it use for a light saber? A carrot! |
| | At which point the kid pulls a big plastic carrot out of his pants. |
Links of the day
| | Bernie Dunham, the maestro behind the wireless connectivity on many cruises, has finally (after much prodding, but hey, he was busy) put up a blog. |
Screenrolling
| | My friend Freddy Herrick is one of those names you don't see until the credits have crawled a screen or two. He's done a lot of TV and movies, usually as a guest star. |
| | But mostly he's a writer (among many other things — he's had an amazing life). I hadn't read any of his stuff until he brought over one of his scripts, a "screen novel: called "Final Option." It sat around for a couple months looking thick and intimidating, so I didn't get around to reading it until last week. I couldn't put it down. It's a terrific action story about a hard-living commodities trader who gets tangled in a conspiracy that only gets creepier and more absorbing as the story accellerates. |
| | Freddy hasn't been in the Hollywood circuit for a long time. I've never been, but I'm hoping a reader or two might be in a position to give this script the chance it deserves. If you're one of those readers, write me and I'll make the connection. |
Red herring salad
| | Relatively speaking, he's right. But the piece still treats the subject of blogging more as a popular movement than as a legitimate form of journalism: |
| | Blogging, aficionados say, is revolutionary because it puts the tools for disseminating news into the hands of what traditional media somewhat patronizingly refers to as "consumers" (or, more kindly, "readers"). Just as desktop publishing popularized DIY publications design and digital video tools are making it possible for almost anyone to make a movie, blogging tools are turning Joe Schmoe into Joe Schmoe, reporter. |
| | Yes, but what about the professional law professors, journalists, business executives, photographers, sci-fi authors and software creators who happen to commit highly original journalism with their blogs? Are they all Schmoes? Is anybody really a Schmoe? |
| | "Our hope is that the two communities, bloggers and mainstream reporters, can feed off each other," says Grabowicz. "Bloggers can learn the mechanics of newsgathering. Journalists can take in more discussion, criticism and analysis of news." |
| | "Our intention isn't to co-opt anyone," he continues. "What we'd like instead is to change the one-way-street nature of journalism a little bit. Before, it was, 'We dictate, you listen.' Now we're listening as the public dictates." |
| | But it's still an us 'n them thing. There are many communities of journalists, they all overlap in some way, and no small number of bloggers are pro journalists. All of them are readers as well as writers. So why is "the public" such a separate entity? |
| | Interesting word, public. |
| | The Web, where blogs are published, is a public place. It's in the public domain. As a form of journalism native to that public place, blogs are not like desktop publishing. They are a form of public publishing. Like public radio and television, recipients can pay for it if they like, but the goods are free for the taking. |
| | The differences between blogs and traditional pubs are really about publishing, not about journalism. Traditional publishers generally want to charge for content, even after the paper it is printed on has turned to fishwrap. Bloggers don't. The free and open nature of the Web's public space is a deep and abiding problem for traditional publishers. It's not for bloggers. That's the story. The journalism issue is a red herring. |
| | Joyce Slaton clearly understands that, but (in the short but strong tradition of mainstream journalizing about blogs) instead defaults in her concluding paragraph to the very language she earlier called "patronizing": |
| | But blogs have one serious advantage over paper zines — the distribution channel is wide open and costs nothing. Who cares if every mainstream news source on the planet launches its own blogs? Disgruntled media consumers can still publish a blog reeking of whatever they feel is lacking in mainstream news for less than the price of one good restaurant meal and get it out to everyone on the Web. With words so cheap and Web space even cheaper, no mainstream news org can co-opt, corporatize or sully what anyone interested enough to blog can say. |
Post-oink blues, cont'd
| | What continues to amaze me is that nobody — from Congress (which stupidly passed the DMCA), to the CARP, to the Librarian of Congress, to the Copyright Office — even began to imagine any business model that would pay these new royalty rates. From start to finish it was big guvmint doing big bizniz' dirty work. |
| | There was, and still is, a broad consensus around keeping the Internet free of tax laws that stifle growth. Yet what we have with the CARP/LOC ruling is a new royalty regime that effectively taxes an entire business category — Internet radio — out of existence. At least in the U.S. |
| | Anyway, there are two ways we need to go with this. One is to fight the insanity, to roll back these destructive laws and the regulations based on them. The other is to create a whole new system that's beyond regulation, and beyond the reach of the RIAA, the MPAA, the record companies, the film industy and all the other hegemonizers of the doomed entertainment industry. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Sunday, July 21, 2002, Rod K, 7/22/02; 3:24:03 PM Re: Sunday, July 21, 2002, Bernie Dunham, 7/22/02; 2:33:35 PM Re: Sunday, July 21, 2002, Stan Krute, 7/21/02; 12:26:32 PM Re: Sunday, July 21, 2002, lou josephs, 7/21/02; 11:09:58 AM
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