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Friday, September 16, 2005
Beyond delivery 
| | It's interesting to think about the container transport concepts behind "getting" as a synonym for understanding. When you "get" what somebody says, you're saying a sum of knowledge has been delivered to you, in a form you can use. "I gather..." makes a similar assumption, through the same deep unconscious metaphor: knowledge is a substance, a commodity: something you can harvest and ship. |
| | Terry Heaton's The Matter of "Getting It" is what brought this thought train to mind (again leveraging the commodity model). Terry works in television, and spends a lot of time, thought and effort at bringing clues to the folks that most of us still watch, every day, whether they get those clues or not. Three core paragraphs: |
| | Former FCC Chairman, Michael Powell, had his own terminology for the change. "Application separation," he said, "is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and it will change things forever." The essential nut of his statement is that one no longer needs to own the infrastructure in order to publish, distribute or broadcast content. This is turning the media world upside-down, and most of the traditional media response, I'm sorry, falls under the category of "they just don't get it." |
| | It's turning the media world upside-down, because smart people now have their hands on the tools that used to be exclusively ours. They're innovating ways to communicate using those tools, and people are responding. Cumulatively, observers call these innovations Media 2.0. This is the new wine of media, and the initial response from traditional businesses has been to try and pour it into the old wineskins of Media 1.0. |
| | This is no small thing. In the old, mass-marketing world, it was essential that all roads flow FROM the media entity, whereas the new model demands the opposite. The road now flows TO the media entity. Local television seems the least capable of understanding this, for our brands are attached to transmitters that beam down on everybody. The only way we know how to make money is to attach ads to the roads that flow away from us and our brands. |
| | Terry goes on to give a lot of good advice. Meanwhile, however, I think we have a deeper problem, and that's with the concept of knowledge as a solid substance. |
| | Think how much of what we talk about here is provisional. It's not thought out all the way. Often (usually?) it can't be delived as a finished product because it isn't finished, and won't be for a long time. |
| | Much of what we do is pass along interesting information about subjects we won't be done talking about for a long time. Like fixing New Orleans, for example. No ideology maps perfectly to it. Blaming contributes little to it. Yet it has to be done. And we'll make a lot of mistakes along the way. We won't learn from those mistakes if we understand them only as good or bad news, or reports on who screwed up what. |
| | TV is kind of the same way. |
Slice of Mom
| | Chris Hill leverages phone messages from his mom in  The Peanut Butter Crisis. My mom has this tendency to leave me the most bizarre voice messages. Thanks to Skype, I can record them now if I want. I kid you not, she left me six messages within 24 hours regarding peanut butter. My mom's (thank god) starting to mellow out a bit in her old age, but I don't think empty nest syndrome ever really goes away... |
Benchmark suckage
| | Since Katrina we've been watching a fair amount of television, mostly on news and weather channels. Three questions: |
| | - Does any network this side of QVC have more advertising than the Weather Channel? It's as if even their ad breaks have ad breaks.
- Where would local TV be without ads for car dealers?
- Why are car dealer ads, especially for Toyota, so extremely bad? I mean, is a Toyotathon ever not going on? How can a company that makes such solid cars support such shitty advertising?
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| | I don't really care that much. Still, I'm curious. |
Relief perspectives
| | My company and our customers were ravaged by Katrina. Many employees had no house to go back to, and many more had homes that had suffered significant damage. When I was offered the opportunity to help salvage what I could for our affected employees, I went for it. As important as IT planning and architecture is, it certainly wasn't as urgent as helping out storm victims. |
| | So what did I do for most of a week? I was part of crew of ten folks from throughout our company, five of whom are in IT. We tarped roofs to prevent further water damage. We removed drenched carpet and tile, ruined furniture and appliances, and anything else that fell victim to the incredible storm surge. Anything above the water line, we boxed up and moved to storage. We even moved some wood furniture that had been treated for mold and other badness to storage for one family. |
| | There were definitely some grim moments. On the way to tarp a roof near Ocean Springs, we passed several houses with a red X on the door or the roof, indicated that someone had died in the house. We worked on a house in Pass Christian that was on a rise about ten feet above the bayou, and sat on concrete pilings ten feet tall. The waterline in the house was two feet. We sat on the back deck of the house eating lunch, imagining the storm surge that had brought water to our knee level, 22 feet up, stretching out over the vastness of the bayou. |
| | On the whole, though, it was a very positive experience. It was a lot of hard work in very hot and humid conditions, but it was great to something tangible to help. |
| | In summary, don't blame the Feds. Pogo had it right. We the people have met the enemy, and it is us... (Submitted modestly by an official of a small City Public Works Department and military reservist with 12 years experience in natural disaster response planning and contingency ops experience) |
| | Update: looking forward to any thoughts or comments... |
| | Follow that last link to read the whole thing and post responses. |
Looking for width support
| | A friend is moving to rural Arkansas to be near his ailing mother, among other things. While getting ready to go, he's seeking broadband recommendations. There's no local broadband, from cable or DSL. Cell service is also out. Dial-up doesn't work, and suffers a lack of local numbers anyway. What's left? I'm thinking satellite. Beyond suggesting a perusal of Broadband Reports, I'm not sure what to suggest, exactly. How about the rest of ya'll? |
Way up, North
| | Well, the promised auroras didn't make it down to the Lower 48 (probably because I alerted half the family by email, crying wolf for the second time this week). SpaceWeather.com explains: |
| | AURORA WATCH: A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 15th, but it did not spark the strong display of auroras many people were hoping to see. In the CME's wake, however, a fast solar wind stream is blowing past Earth and buffeting our planet's magnetic field. This could cause mild geomagnetic storms. Sky watchers in Canada and Alaska should remain alert for auroras tonight. |
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