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Friday, September 20, 2002
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 Friday, September 20, 2002
started 9/20/2002; 2:21:12 AM - last post 9/21/2002; 11:36:50 PM
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Doc Searls - Friday, September 20, 2002 
9/20/2002; 6:21:12 AM (reads: 9526, responses: 5)
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Older but wider 
| | I needed an excuse to use that headline before I forgot it. |
| | I'm down about 17 pounds now on the Atkins diet. My gut's almost gone. I'm wearing pants I haven't worn in five years. Don't think I'll quite look like my picture in time for Digital Hollywood, but I can still dress he part. |
Blog of the Day
| | PopTech, the Blog. it's a wonderful conference that I'm going to miss again this year. But I'll be following it on the blog(s). |
Speak loudly and carry a big schtick
| | The paper, called "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" is a dismal historical low-water mark among American documents, since it couches a lot of talk about dominating both the domestic and foreign policies of many other nations in terms of freedom and free enterprise. It would shock the Founding Fathers and sicken even Teddy Roosevelt, who was a master diplomat that understood a nation may not unilaterally dictate policy to the rest of the world without risking the rise of a massive coalition against it. |
| | After a quick scan it looks to me like a series of Bush speeches, from which each section opens with a quote. It's thick with clichés ("... we realize the best defense is a good offense"), and it does have a highly unilateral tone to it; but that's nothing new. |
| | More later after I read the thing carefully. |
Yes
| | I believe all four Cluetrain ringleaders will be there, too. Or at least nearby. Or something. |
| | Whatever, it's gonna be an great show. |
Sunrise
Awakening
| | Reminds me of what my old friend Mary Ellen once said when she was still single: There are three kinds of men: other women's husbands, gay guys, and your basic jerks. |
| | Unfair, of course. Also funny. But hey, if you're gonna be unfairly funny, at least make it ring kinda true. For me, one of those nice guy types Dawn talks about, there's a lot of unfair truth to what she says. |
| | Bonus link: Moxie's Men of Blogistan. Reminds me that I'm gonna be in Los Blogeles for Digital Hollywood on Monday and Tuesday. Gotta hook up with Moxie and some of these other guys and make some trouble. |
May the blogs yet wave
| | If you want to host a community online, don't kid yourself into believing that giving reporters weblogs and calling the reader comments "community" is the same as the real thing. Weblogs operate on a spectrum from media outlet (e.g. InstaPundit) to communal conversation (e.g. LiveJournal), but most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast. Likewise, most comments are write-only replies to the original post in the manner of Letters to the Editor, rather than real conversations among the users. This doesn't mean that broadcast weblogs or user comments are bad; they just don't add up to a community. |
| | This is true. I have a sense of both location and community here on the blog. But the sense of it is that being on the blog is very much like being on the radio. |
| | For me this is a Good Thing. |
| | Sitting down at the keyboard in the morning, like I just did at 5:30am, feels to me very much like it once felt sitting down at a microphone in a broadcast studio. My setup here in my office, surrounded by keyboards (two), screens (three) printers (two) and speakers (three) feels very much like an old-fashioned broadcast studio, with turntabes at each elbow, contol board, cart machines, clipboard, box of index cards, microphone on a boom and a big clock on the wall. I'm one of the least organized people I know, but I do have an extreme awareness of time that I'm sure is a legacy of my days in radio, when nothing was more important than watching the clock. That's why the clock at the office is one of those Atomix jobs that never strays from Perfect Time and has a big white face with plain black hands. The only thing wrong with it is the second hand, which isn't red. Second hands ought to be red. |
| | My favorite years in radio were the ones I spent in various capacities working at WDBS, the little commercial FM station owned by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. You had to work to get the signal iin Chapel Hill or Raliegh, but that was part of the station's appeal, I think. At its best, 'DBS was deeply part of the low rent hippie/student counterculture of the time, which was the mid '70s. |
| | The personalities were important to that culture, but the music was what really mattered. We were the station that "broke" Phoebe Snow's first album, plus countless others I don't remember. Music back then was a huge community thing. It involved the clubs, the artists, the record stores and the listeners. Our slogan was a Jackson Browne line: "Let the music keep our spirits high." Which it did. |
| | A number of 'DBS folk moved on to Raleigh's WQDR in the late '70s and early 80s. 'QDR was an FM staiton with a huge signal. Its community was more regional than local, and less countercultural (the Sixties had finally ended, basically). But music was still what the station was about. 'QDR was one of the first album rock stations in the country, and for awhile the only popular FM music station in the market with live disc jockeys. |
| | From 'DBS I moved on to start an advertising agency with two of the station's listeners who had sought me out because I was this guy who said funny shit on the air (as "Doctor Dave," from which my nickname was later derived) and wrote more of it in the station's little monthly local arts (mostly music) magazine. They wanted somebody who could write clever copy. |
| | One of our first accounts was 'QDR, which we helped kick ass by coming up with a perfect slogan, "The Live One," and putting it on billboards and bus cards all over the place. It wasn't long before the competing stations had to drop their robot automation systems and put real disk jockeys on the air. |
| | My point with this nostalgic ramble is that there were real communities involved with those stations. Broadcasting and community-building aren't mutually exclusive. Look at KPIG and Radio Paradise. Yes, they broadcast, but the people they serve are a highly involved constituency. |
| | That's what I sense here on the blog. I'm sharing stuff with people who share stuff with me. It's not a lot more complicated than that. |
| | Bonus links: Raleigh-Durham Radio History . Nice rundown of the AM dial history there too. Can't find one for FM.Here's what's left of 'DBS in Duke's archives. All in one box. Like a coffin.A picture of my old friend Jim Davis (who later became cheif engineer at half the stations in town) in the 'DBS studio when the statoin was still a mono AM "carrier current" student station that radiated through the campus power lines. |
Happy trails
| |  While I was busy looking at the Space Weather page to see if there was a chance of catching an aurora tonight (yes, they have been seen this far south), Mary Lu called and told me to get my ass outside to watch the rocket that just took off from Vandenberg. |
| | It was already past Hawaii, I guess, by the time I got out where I could see the trail in the sky, to the West. But it was spectacular. The photo above doesn't do it justice, but does give a sense of how surreal it looked. Better than any aurora we're likely to ever see here. |
| | This picture, taken by Jim Young at JPL's Table Mountain observatory, gives you a much better idea. He was using a real digital camera. I was using a Sony camcorder that also shoots 1-megapixel stills. Not bad, considering. |
Klinkage
| | Turned out all my post links over the last three days (the ones behind the little blue arrows) were screwed up. Sorry. My bad. Fixed. |
discuss
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Rod K - Re: Three kinds of men
9/20/2002; 2:23:45 PM (reads: 843, responses: 1)
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Reminds me of what my old friend Mary Ellen once said: There are just three kinds of men: "other women's husbands, gay guys, and your basic jerks."
I would add one more category, Widowers who used to be other women's husbands.
Which leads to my emerging view that there are several basic kinds of women: other men's wives, girls that are almost young enough to be your daughter, basic jerks, and other men's wives they couldn't stand and divorced or visa versa.
Rod
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adamsj - Re: Three kinds of men
9/20/2002; 10:54:20 PM (reads: 1048, responses: 0)
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Rod said: "I would add one more category, Widowers who used to be other women's husbands."
This is so true! Although I'm deleriously happy with my current wife, who was married and divorced before marrying me, many of my happiest relationships were with widows. That they didn't last says, I suspect, something bad about me.
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Steven Tulsky - Re: Raleigh-Durham Radio
9/21/2002; 6:53:50 AM (reads: 2597, responses: 2)
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Doc,
One other interesting sidenote on the Raleigh-Durham radio thing. As I recall, WQDR, with its novel album rock format, was the first station to be programmed by what was to become a very successful national radio programming consultancy. I forget their corporate name, but I believe that the brain behind them was Bob Pittman, who went on to become a big player in MTV, then AOL, and finally the number two guy at AOL Time Warner before he got blown out of there about a month ago.
Raleigh-Durham was a radio market led by some great local broadcasters (Carl Ventors, Jim Heavner, etc.) who kept the level of innovation far above what one would have expected of their market size and location.
Steve Tulsky (another old WDBS rat)
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Doc Searls - Re: Raleigh-Durham Radio
9/21/2002; 3:15:07 PM (reads: 1156, responses: 1)
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I believe WQDR was the first station consulted by Lee Abrams, who was then with Burkhardt-Abrams. Kent burkhardt did Top 40 and Lee did AOR — album oriented rock. I also believe Lee also coined that term, although the format had already been around in various forms.
I also think he was 24 or so when he consulted QDR. Amazing.
Lee is now the programming chief for XM Satellite Radio.
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Steven Tulsky - Re: Raleigh-Durham Radio
9/22/2002; 3:36:50 AM (reads: 1202, responses: 0)
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Yup, Lee Abrams was the name I was blanking on. But somehow I have it in my head that Pittman was involved as well. Earliest I've been able to confirm on his bio is that he was PD of WNBC in 1977 at the age of 23! I'm not sure how he got there from his roots in Jackson, Mississippi, or how it might have included any involvement with 'QDR. So maybe I just have a wire crossed in my brain.
Steve
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