|
Sunday, December 4, 2005
The one-company dial 
| | I don't care how many channels you put on a service like Sirius'; they all come from one company, and sound like it. |
| | To be fair, Searls is fair and has many good things to say. He also makes it clear that it's still new to him and that the jury is still out. |
| | Well, I don't think you'll find me saying too many kind words about Clear Channel. They're one big reason why I now subscribe to Sirius. (As an aside, I do give Clear Channel a kudo for maintaining podcast aggregator KYCY/1550am (called KYOU) in San Francisco, in spite of no ratings whatsoever.) And Ed is right that Sirius does have some programs with real personalities and real expertise that produce excellent radio. Last night the kid and I both enjoyed Cousin Bruce Morrow on Sirius 006, the Sixties Channel (which I'd link to if Sirius' site wasn't such a PITA to navigate). And for months we've been enjoying Norm N. Nite on Sirius 005 (check how long that takes to load), the Fifties channel, through our DishTV satellite connection. |
| | But those guys are on only a small percentage of the day (or the week, in Norm's case). Most of the time the music "stations" are a format-for-a-demographic on CD shuffle. |
| | What I still want is something that risks surprising and delighting me all the time. Maybe Howard Stern will bring that. We'll see. Terrestrial radio at its best (25+ years ago) was a main street of hometown stores. There were chains, sure; but on the whole the dial was filled with real people with real personalities trying to please listeners they treated like customers, even though listeners didn't buy a damn thing from the stations. No matter how big Sirius' dial is, it's still a one-company town — and sounds like it. |
My subject search feed dependency
| | His point: I seem to be blogging all over the place. This is a little bit true, since I can now blog at Linux Journal in addition to IT Garage, my Podblog and here. |
| | But if you look at the posting frequency at those last two links, you'll see my blogging at either is anything but prolific. My podcasting (subject of the last link) ranges between minimal and absent. |
| | That last one is what led me to discover, for example, more evidence that online advertising is, well, less than ideal. The Icerocket search at that last link brought up a sponsored link that reads, |
| | Ugliest Dog in the World, Sam
Sam the ugly dog has passed on, but you can remember him with this 2006 calendar. 12 beautiful photos of the world's ugliest dog.
www.lulu.com |
| | The link leads to lulu.com, but not to calendars for Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog, who died a couple weeks ago (as we see in this Icerocket trend). A search for Sam inside Lulu does bring us (slowly) to the calendar itself. So I suppose the system works, sort of. |
| | But my point is, I got myself a topic, and took a whopping... lessee... five minutes to research and write the whole thing up. This entire post took half an hour, but that's counting the time I spent caring about the other subject searches (above) for nonblog (mostly work-related) reasons. |
| | In other words, the blog is an avocational steam valve on the side of my vocational work. |
| | A confession. When aggregators first came out, I took a tiny bit of an interest in them; but didn't develop a dependency on them until subject search feeds came along. Now I don't know how I got along without them. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
