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Thursday, December 8, 2005
Hello, my ________ is/isn't... 
Anon and anon
Researchers need to get some clues
| | A couple weeks ago I got an email, from some research organization (or a media organization sourcing a research organization... I forget which), about how hot podcasting is. |
| | The numbers came from BridgeRatings, specifically this podcasting outlook from November 12 of this year. I don't know how I got to that last link. I'm just glad I kept it in a piece I was writing for a future Linux Journal. Right now I can't get there from the front page of the BridgeRatings site, which is purely promotional. |
| | Then a few minutes ago, I got an email from the Center for Media Research, the URL of which is http://www.centerformediaresearch.com/, which redirects to http://www.mediapost.com/research/index.cfm?loc=1 . Chop off everything after the first slash, and you get to Mediapost.com. Search there for "podcasting", say, and you get asked to join or log in. I was already joined, so I logged in. The results were thin and went nowhere. The first search yielded a list of a few articles and events. The second came up with a big blank page. So did clicking on any links in the first search. Basically, it hung. In more ways than one. |
| | Meanwhile, back at the mediapost.com/research page, I see a personal thank you for registering, a list of what the Center for Media Research provides, and links to things like Research Roundup and Reports and Studies. Now, like most journalists, I'm on a constant hunt for facts and statistics. So I click on links like those. |
| | The first link goes to a message that says "Watch for the first weekly Research Roundup to be posted here." And nothing else. The second goes to a message that says, |
| | The Center is working with multiple partner sites to bring you direct access to hundreds of market and media specific research reports, studies and whitepapers. If you come across others, or would like to make your studies available here, please let us know. |
| | Over the next 2 weeks, we'll highlight a number of those studies on this page. We'll let you know in the daily or weekly newsletter as soon as these highlights are available. |
| | In the meantime, here are direct links to two of our data partners' sites. |
| | Looking around some more, I somehow found my way to a page titled "RESEARCH BRIEF" and subtitled "Daily Market and Media Intelligence." Below that is today's day and date. Below that are a pile of Back Issues, the most recent of which is dated 2/22/05. |
| | Seems to me that much of the research business, and the email bulletin business that oozes out of it, are both archaic beyond excuse. |
| | There is so much good, hard, interesting and useful information out there, right now, syndicating itself to the world. Why not harvest some of that? Why not syndicate your own stuff, so you can join the growing syndisphere? |
| | Advice: screw the email bullshit. And screw the promotional index pages. Start syndicating reports. Start blogging. Sure, keep issuing press releases for the shrinking population that still looks for clues in that clueless source. But get hip to what's happening in Live Web development. |
Back in the saddles
| | A couple years ago, after other bloggers noted several thousand scatterd posts remarking about how I seemed to be a walking Bermuda Triangle of equipment failure, I quit carping. When stuff broke down, I sucked it up and blogged about other stuff. |
| | That's what I've been doing the last several weeks. Both my main two machines — an IBM ThinkPad T40 (running SUSE Linux) and a 17" PowerBook running started going to hell. |
| | The ThinkPad's fan got loud and exacerbated the already annoying ringing in my ears. It also decided it wasn't going to connect to the Net reliably, or run FireFox without a siezure. Thunderbird IMAP email performance also slowed to a crawl. Its backup machine, a no-name notebook running Linspire's Linux, was also flaky. |
| | Meanwhile, the PowerBook was giving me the SCOD (Spinning Colorwheel Of Death) more and more often. Its fan also got noisy for the first time. And then it got a dented corner that essentially closed the CD drive slot. Plus, the 80GB drive was nearly full (too many photos and videos). |
| | So I've been living mostly with an old 400MHz original Titanium PowerBook that a generous reader gave me after my Powerbook at that time appeared to have been stolen (never did figger that one out). It can't operate off batteries and has other problems, owing to coffee having been spilled down its keyboard somewhere along the way. I gave it to a friend who was down and out, but he couldn't use it, so it's served as a workstation for my accountant, when she comes in once or twice a month. I'm glad it works, but it's slow beyond endurance. For somebody with as little patience as I have, this last week has been one long hair-pull. |
| | Well, now the PowerBook is back from the shop, where it got a new 120Gb hard drive and 2Gigs of RAM. The old internal drive is now an external firewire drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move everything from the old drive to the new one, and this thing is like a New Machine. (Except for the screen, which is getting dim, but I can live with that for now.) |
| | Also, soon as the the PowerBook showed back up, the ThinkPad decided it would de-flake as well, at no cost, all on its own. The fan is back down to a tolerable (but still annoying) whir, and FireFox is working fine. I'm still in spam hell in Thunderbird, but that's not the TP's fault. |
| | Anyway, it's great to at least be in a position to get work done again. And I'm glad I only got to bore ya'll just once about the whole ordeal. |
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