|
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Previous topic
|
Next topic
|
|
 Tuesday, June 24, 2003
started 6/24/2003; 8:04:14 AM - last post 6/25/2003; 12:34:08 AM
|
|
Doc Searls - Tuesday, June 24, 2003 
6/24/2003; 12:04:14 PM (reads: 6064, responses: 9)
|
|
Polibloggery 
| | Didn't strike me that way, but maybe that's cuz Iike oatmeal. It's off the diet, but still. |
Hearing voices
| | "Legitimate excecutive" voices like Mr. Meckler's? OH MY, ouch. chest pain. severe. Let's read the humanity in the snippet pulled from his blog in the article, shall we? All together now: |
| | "If an organizer truly pushes the intellectual side first with a well thought out and honest seminar program, critical and financial success ultimately comes one's way. Just like the movie `Field of Dreams' ‹ `if you build it, they will come.' " |
| | If you write one more word, I will puke. |
| | What exercised Jeneane was possibly the most inane piece about blogging to date, braying the news that corporations blog. Of course they do. Just as corporations think, care, love, fuck, sweat and smell, they blog. |
| | Note Tom's Cycle of Ignorance at Big Papers about subjects like blogging. Too long to copy over here, but worth reading. |
Signs of death
| | Got lots of emails pointing to Signals from Nowhere, by Walter Kirn in the NY Times Magazine. Outstanding recollection of what Real Radio was all about in its golden age, which ended when ownership deregulation allowed Clear Channel to buy up everything: |
| | You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I'd reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication — Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What's more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes. |
| | I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ''morning zoo'' hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn't help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes. |
| | What a miserable trip. I heard America droning. |
| | Recently, I found out whom to blame: a company called Clear Channel Communications. The mammoth buyer and consolidator of hundreds of independent local radio stations — along with its smaller competitors, Infinity Broadcasting and Cumulus Media — is body-snatching America's sonic soul, turning Whitman's vivacious democratic cacophony into a monotonous numbing hum. |
| | No matter where a person lives these days (particularly in Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel runs all six commercial stations in town), he's probably within range of an affiliate, if not three or four, since the company buys in bulk: pop stations, rock stations, talk stations, the works. Worse, quite a few of these stations don't really exist — not in the old sense. They're automated pods, downloading their programming from satellites linked to centralized, far-off studios where announcers who have never even set foot in Tucson, Little Rock, Akron or Boston — take your pick — rattle off promos and wisecracks by the hundreds, then flip a switch and beam them to your town as if they're addressing its residents personally, which they aren't. They don't even know the weather there. |
| | What results is a transcontinental shower of sound that seems to issue from heaven itself, like the edicts of the Wizard of Oz. |
| | Here's a fear: That local newspapers will get just as killed as local radio, by the deregulation of media ownership. What happens when Clear Chanel or Cumulus Media buys up the local newspapers? |
| | But what I really don't understand is, if it's so awful, why do people listen? After all, without listeners there would be no advertisers and ClearChannel would be dust. |
| | I answered in a comment there at his blog. |
Are all banks like this?
| | My accountant just told me that my bank, Washington Mutual, says it will take 4-6 weeks to process a check from a Canadian company. Shoot, they're from a border state. You'd think, huh? |
| | If I had time, I'd go in and bother a banker. But it's not mission critical, so fuggit. |
The Live Web Lives
| | Something going on there. |
First things last
| | Doc, The Dial as a group blog in 1840, you gotta be thinking even older than that for examples of the best early blogs. Think about 1770 or even earlier. What about Captain Cook with his journal, 19th April, 1770 still on the Internet. Some blogging here! Pity about the reverse chronological bit. They hadn't invented how it was possible to have the most recent blog at the top, they were a little constrained by the modems of the time. The modems were so slow it took six months to connect back with London, maybe we should have imported America's network then and been better off rather than relying solely on British technology. In fact blogging was pretty primitive in those days -- they had to actually use pen and paper and then they had to wait 230 years for it to get blogged onto a computer. We have progressed a little since then, we actually do it straight onto a computer. |
| | In fact, what better examples of bloggery we have than all the explorers of Australia who each maintained blogs (they called them 'logs' in those days). Independent, strong, risk-all kind of guys who didn't just speak about being great, but actually went and got things done. That's the Australian blogging spirit. |
| | And if we can get this item passed, the world will be an even better place. |
discuss
|
|
Ian Marsman - Re: Tuesday, June 24, 2003
6/24/2003; 4:29:37 PM (reads: 387, responses: 0)
|
|
|
The transaction time for "foreign" cheques is probably the same whether it's a Canadian or Dutch or whatever cheque. It has been my impression that the US is rather self-contained and self-sufficient. This leads to a rustiness when it comes to interacting outside of its boundaries. Based on this premise, the proximity of Canada to the US is irrelevant. In Canada, processing of a cheque drawn on a US bank account takes five business days. If you live in places like southern Ontario you can often find bank machines that will give you US cash and take US cheques.
discuss
|
|
Ralph Brandi - Newspapers are long dead
6/24/2003; 5:41:10 PM (reads: 382, responses: 3)
|
|
|
|
Susan Kitchens - Re: Tuesday, June 24, 2003
6/24/2003; 7:41:50 PM (reads: 354, responses: 1)
|
|
|
|
Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, June 24, 2003
6/24/2003; 7:54:29 PM (reads: 392, responses: 0)
|
|
|
I fuck up all the time.
It's just me. Fixed.
discuss
|
|
Doc Searls - Re: Newspapers are long dead
6/24/2003; 7:56:14 PM (reads: 414, responses: 2)
|
|
|
Not all of them. Nor all of local radio, for that matter. The Santa Barbara News-Press and KEYT radio are both still alive and well here in Santa Barbara. The latter is an excellent little local all-news station.
But those are the exceptions. The rule is uglier every day.
discuss
|
|
Ralph Brandi - Re: Newspapers are long dead
6/24/2003; 11:13:25 PM (reads: 502, responses: 1)
|
|
|
You're very lucky to have a locally owned newspaper in your town. Our local paper, the Asbury Park Press, was sold by its local owners to Gannet about five years ago, and the quality has dropped significantly. Locally-owned papers and radio stations are something to be cherished. That's amazing that you've got a local all-news station; that's truly rare. I know of another one, WILM in Wilmington, Delaware. The PD there, Allan Loudell, is a long-time DXer and has a real passion for radio. Fortunately for him and for Wilmington, so do the station's owners. That's all too rare these days.
Not to be critical, but if the standard was "not all of them", then Clear Channel would have nothing to be ashamed of. They only own about 10% of all the radio stations in the country. They're still a scourge on the supposedly publicly-owned airwaves....
discuss
|
|
matt goyer - Re: Banks
6/24/2003; 11:31:58 PM (reads: 404, responses: 1)
|
|
|
I can't speak for American banks cashing Canadian cheques but I know that here in Canada at most banks it takes 28 *business* days to cash an American cheque/money order/...
As I work for an American company this was clearly unacceptable for me and after much wrangling I had a message placed on my account by a senior bank officer dictating that USD funds should not be held. So, I'm sure if you know someone well placed in your bank you too may be able to enjoy immediate access to funds which are rightfully yours.
Of course the whole situation is ridiculous. This is the year 2003. Surely it this day and age of PayPal and Hyperwallet allowing 'reasonable' cross border transfers the banks themselves would have progressed a little with cheque clearing..
FYI: My bank, RBC (a Canadian bank), owns a bank in the US, RBC Centura, and transfers from my RBC Centura account to my RBC account take 48 hours. So, it even takes an unreasonable amount of time when the banks are all owned by the same parent company.
discuss
|
|
Doc Searls - Re: Newspapers are long dead
6/25/2003; 4:26:57 AM (reads: 515, responses: 0)
|
|
|
The Asbury Park Press was a great local paper when we read it (in what was then Brick Township), back in the 50s and early 60s. As I recall, WJLK/1310 was a fine local radio station too. I forget the call letters, but there was a great jazz station in the 70s on 107.1 in Long Branch. I'm sure both stations are drones by now.
And I agree about Clear Channel. But the problem is larger and more systematic than that. Really sad.
discuss
|
|
Ian Marsman - Re: Banks
6/25/2003; 4:34:08 AM (reads: 507, responses: 0)
|
|
|
Hmmmm. I just deposited a cheque in US funds last week. This cheque, like all others I've deposited before drawn on a US bank, has a 5 business day hold. Perhaps there's some variation due to amount of cheque or bank. You are correct that this should not take long time either way.
discuss
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
