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Monday, July 21, 2003
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 Monday, July 21, 2003
started 7/21/2003; 8:54:10 AM - last post 7/31/2003; 7:37:12 PM
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Doc Searls - Monday, July 21, 2003 
7/21/2003; 12:54:10 PM (reads: 9063, responses: 9)
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To prevent a chicken, you have to break some eggs 
| | I was reading some of the stuff I wrote last October, I wish I had the rage I had in me then. Now I just feel disappointed, my city is becoming fuck-up-central. It is frustrating, how long do you think the coalition forces can keep their cool in the face of the constant attacks? How are they going to deal with the constant sabotage of infrastructure? We have no country or government anymore; they used to talk about "nation building" we ended up with nothing. |
| | This is the fifth interpreter I hear about. Just like the policemen who were attacked almost two weeks ago, the interpreters are seen as ligitimate targets by Islamists and Ba'athists. A taxi driver was telling me the other day that those Iraqis who collaborate with the Americans are even worse than the americans "they are the devil hidden in saint's clothes". |
| | The first interpreters I heard about were killed execution style, blind folded and had a sign saying "this is what happens to collaborators". |
| | Salam works as an interpreter. |
Blog du jour
RadioActive
Quote of the day
| | The basis of ethics is man's right to play the games of his choice. I will not trample on your toys and you will not trample on mine; I won't spit on your idol and you will not spit on mine. Creditied to Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Rolling Ball Web site, which I found by way a post on Deep Fun. |
Hall monitor
| | Claude is the former Radio/TV editor for Billboard, and for years wrote the magazine's Vox Jox column — a must-read for anybody in the music radio business, back when disk jockeying was still an art form. |
| | One of the high points in my brief radio career was meeting Claude at a conference in New Orleans in the fall of 1974. I was a nobody surrounded by the radio stars Claude wrote about every week; yet he took a real interest in my questions, and was very enjoyable company. |
| | I've achieved most of my goals in life with the exception of having a best-selling novel, Claude writes. And, while it's rather late for that, I'd settle for a few good readers. |
Talk about branding
A nostalgic look at the slo-mo death of Radio as Usual
| | WMCA/570 was the Top 40 station back then. But its 5,000-watt signal was aimed toward New York, protecting a station in Syracuse on the same channel. The camp was in the direction of the station's null to the Northwest. There were three other Top 40 stations in those days: WMGM/1050, WINS/1010 and WABC/770 — all with 50,000 watt signals. WMGM came in well at the camp. WINS was inaudible (today it has a new transmitting pattern that's better both day and night). WABC was freaking huge.(This explains why.) But I was a WMCA loyalist (like I had earlier been a loyal fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers until the bastards left for L.A.), and it bothered me that my old Continental 6-transistor radio couldn't get the station very well at Camp Michikamau. I never went back there to test out the radio; but I do remember using it to get a faint WMCA signal at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in the middle of the day when our family camped there in August, 1964. Of course, WABC sounded like a local. |
| | I always had a thing for underdogs. |
| | Of course, now they're all mostly dogs. Some old, some dead. |
Too bad X and P aren't musical notes
| | News you can't use: Byrds founder Roger McGuinn files then cancels a lawsuit against Microsoft for illegally using the first four notes of "Eight Miles High" in the closing theme music for Windows XP. |
| | [Later...] Some seem to have missed that this was a *joke*. Sorry if that wasn't clear. |
| | Microsoft also figures prominently in a Dave Barry column on technology located (presumably with permission) on Roger's site.. |
You are what you have no choice about eating
| | Last month the maker of ReplayTV, a line of digital video recorders that allows consumers to record and store hours of their favorite television programs on hard drives instead of tape, agreed to remove two features from its devices that simplified life for consumers but complicated business for entertainment providers. |
| | ReplayTV's new 5500 model, which will go on sale next month, will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically without recording them or to send recorded programming over the Internet to other ReplayTV users outside a home network. The recorders will, however, still be able to store large libraries of programming indefinitely and allow users to skip manually through recorded commercials in 30-second increments. |
| | Brings to mind an old piece, There's No Demand for Messages, which still makes some good points, five years after it was written — not long before TiVo and ReplayTV invented the PVR business that commercial broadcasting has been trying to throttle ever since. An excerpt: |
| | To put this in perspective, imagine what would happen to the TV business if mute buttons delivered "we don't want to hear this" feedback directly to advertisers. It would crash the whole industry's business model in a heartbeat. |
| | Let's face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It's not coincidental that they're both ugly. Beauty isn't a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information. |
| | The bulk of advertising — all $160 billion of it (which buys a lot of art) — is a conversation between advertisers, media and agents for both. That conversation has enormous flywheels that were forged in the Age of Industry, and carry assumptions that are totally obsolete in a new age when the human beings we've been calling "consumers" are no longer dumb targets in a position only to absorb messages and displace cash. |
| | Remember this essay's title? The main reason I got out of advertising and PR was this epiphany: |
| | THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR MESSAGES |
| | Let me see a show of hands: who here wants a message? Right: none. And who wants to shield themselves from messages they don't want? Exactly: everybody. |
| | TV advertising has negative demand. It subtracts value. |
| | The day will come, hopefully soon, when we will measure demand for advertising on a customer-by-customer basis, and not just by its indirect effects on large populations. When that happens, and direct vendor- customer conversations start adding serious value for both parties, that new conversation will disintermediate most media. Companies will drop advertising like a bad packet. |
| | Deep down in its little stone heart, the TV advertising industry, along with those who depend on the gargantuan inefficiencies inherent in TV advertising's antique business model, don't want viewers to be involved in the industry. They don't want consumers to become customers. In their business model, consumers are products sold to advertisers. They are not customers. Giving them the means to become customers means giving the market the means to kill old business models and create new ones. Since they can't imagine the latter, they lobby and litigate to protect the former. Very effectively, too. |
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Ralph Brandi - Zenith
7/21/2003; 4:39:37 PM (reads: 746, responses: 2)
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I had a Royal 500 as a kid. I used to sneak it into class and listen to the Detroit Tigers broadcasts through an earphone. Never once got caught, either. What a great radio. :-)
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Doc Searls - Re: Zenith
7/21/2003; 8:49:47 PM (reads: 805, responses: 1)
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Were the Tigers on WJR back then?
I used to listen to CKLW at night in New Jersey and New York in those days, on the Royal 400. Dunno what happened to it. I think it finally broke.
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Chad - Re: Monday, July 21, 2003
7/21/2003; 9:06:51 PM (reads: 690, responses: 0)
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re: the advertising content, it seems like AdWords is a harbinger of a future where people can get EXACTLY what they want offered to them. For instance, I was looking for a new DSL provider recently - had to do an incredible amount of searching. Can't I just ask for it?
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Ralph Brandi - Re: Zenith
7/22/2003; 1:32:17 AM (reads: 958, responses: 0)
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Yup, with Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey at the mic. That should help you place my age within 20 or 30 years. :-) I was very sad when Tigers baseball moved from WJR to WXYZ (now WXYT) some years back. WXYZ has an unparalleled history in radio (original home of the Green Hornet, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, and the Lone Ranger), but WJR has 50,000 watts. It was my desire to hear the Tigers on WJR after we moved to Illinois when I was 11 that got me into radio and DXing in the first place. WJR really gets out. About three years ago I was returning to New Jersey from a visit with relatives in Detroit, and on the drive home I was able to listen to WJR almost a hundred miles into Pennsylvania -- at high noon.
CKLW was an amazing station, totally the station everyone was listening to when I was growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. I love that it even showed in the ratings in Cleveland, their signal was so massive. There was a shortwave pirate station about five or six years ago that did a letter-perfect recreation of the old sound of The Big Eight. That was a trip to listen to. Sadly, I don't have the Royal 500 any more, and even if I did, CK isn't what it used to be....
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John - Re: Monday, July 21, 2003
7/22/2003; 5:48:56 AM (reads: 735, responses: 0)
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Doc,
hoping to get you some broader readership (in online marketing circles) and to spread the 'cluetrain' type of message, I've posted a link to this entry on Up2Speed.com: here.
-john
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Frank Patrick - Re: NYC Radio - Shep?
7/30/2003; 7:21:59 PM (reads: 774, responses: 3)
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Your piece on 50s/60s NYC radio got me all nostalgic myself. Were you around the area long enough to pick up on Jean Shepherd before he went big time with NPR and A Christmas Story?
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Doc Searls - Re: NYC Radio - Shep?
7/30/2003; 7:30:26 PM (reads: 930, responses: 2)
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I was around. Listened to Jean through all the mid-late 60s, when he was on WOR, which we could also get at night in North Carolina. Jean was on at 10pm, as I recall.
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Dean Landsman - Re: NYC Radio - Shep?
7/31/2003; 10:19:35 PM (reads: 1045, responses: 1)
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Shep was on WOR 710 AM after the 10 PM 15 minute newscast, Monday through Friday, until 11 PM (when another 15 minute newscast aired). On Saturday nights he broadcast live from the Gaslight (or maybe it was the Limelight, or some other _____light club) from 10:05 (after a 5 minute, briefer weekend newscast) until Midnight.
After Midnight he remained onstage at the club for another hour. The post-WOR content, free of WOR concerns regarding what their audience might tolerate, and Shep free of any FCC matters, would ramble freely, like a folksy sort of Lenny Bruce/Garrison Keiler hybrid.
I come by this information from tapes and first-hand reports, as I was too young to go see him, and by the time I was in my late teens and might have gone to see hum, other diversions (girlfriend, rock music, the 60's)were taking precedence.
Shep passed away in October of 1999, but it seems like only yesterday.
Excelsior!
A wonderful Shep site can be sound here.
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Frank Patrick - Re: NYC Radio - Shep?
7/31/2003; 11:37:12 PM (reads: 1058, responses: 0)
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Yup -- That's what I remember, although first hand with the radio under the pillow.
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