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Saturday, December 17, 2005
On the continuing death of Advertising as Usual 
FUDback
| | Recently, Doc Searls wrote a long weblog entry here about how the carriers are considering shutting down the internet as we know it. |
| | Usually, in past experience, if something this scandalous comes up, the blog community (blogosphere) is usually all over it and everyone is talking about it. |
| | Yet now, I don't find many folks talking about this. Is that because Doc is spreading FUD? I don't know. |
| | Well, a little FUD in the general direction of the carriers would be a Good Thing, methinks. Especially when you look at what they're up to now. |
| | And, frankly, there's still plenty of buzz following that Saving the Net piece. And some initiatives as well. A bunch of us spent some time on a conference call yesterday planning out a project that I think will do a world of good. Literally. (That's a shitty teaser, but I'm too tired and busy to improve it.) |
| | Still, Mike may still be on to something. |
| | I ran into Tim O'Rielly yesterday, and asked him if he'd read the piece. He told me that it often seemed to take me too long to get to whatever point I was trying to make, so he tends not to read my stuff. |
| | It was good feedback. Not sure it will change anything; but it's appreciated all the same. |
Close
Transmissions and transitions
| | I only caught a few minutes of the last Howard Stern show on terrestrial radio yesterday morning. I was staying at a friend's house up in La Honda, where KITS/Live105.3, Howard's Bay Area station, comes in poorly. That's not KITS' fault; all Bay Area FM comes in poorly up there. La Honda is nestled in a mountain valley on the San Francisco peninsula, and FM signals have trouble making it over mountains. |
| | Which is somewhat the point. I was driving up to Alice's Restaurant from La Honda while Howard was on an ad break, so I switched to 87.9fm, where my Sirius Satellite radio (attached by suction cup to the windshield of the rental car) puts out a nice clean signal. On Howard 100 (the King of All Media's channel on Sirius) the staff was looking back on what was still presented as if it were live, on the West Coast. |
| | Although trees and bridges sometimes block Sirius' satellite signal (the tree problem is especially bad coming down Woodside Road into Woodside itself), it's actually live. And covers the whole continent. Big advantage. |
| | Even though I didn't catch much of the final show, I did think of a way to explain the complex ironies of Howard's humor to those who can't see it through politically corrective glasses: When Howard seems to be making fun of Wendy the Retard, he's having fun with her; and when he seems to be having fun with Daniel Carver the racist, he's making fun of him. |
| | (Jeff Jarvis normally provides Howard's intellectual cover. I thought I'd spell him for a day.) |
| | I did catch the very end of the show, when the crowd was yelling "How-ard, How-ard..." and the big guy said his farewells (which really weren't — there'll be more of him than ever on Sirius, which is less hard to get in most of the country than Howard was on terrestrial radio). It was touching and well-done. After that, KITS ran a promo for the new show that will replace Howard on the station, starting in January. I don't know how good the show will actually be, but the promo was unbearably lame, just like most morning radio, with all its forced laughter and lowbrow humor. |
| | Even Howard's least subtle moments are far more nuanced and subtle than they seem. That's what none of the copycats ever got. They ape Howard's crudeness and vulgarity, but only at the superficial level. There's nothing else going on. Or worse when it's not even funny, which is usually the case (even though they can't stop laughing). Which is why they suck so bad. |
| | And now, with the FCC limiting aired humor to the innocuous, most of what we get is sonic packing material. |
| | On a semi-related matter, while driving home to Santa Barbara I talked to two people who watched the farewell show on Yahoo. That seemed like another harbinger to me. |
Onage
| | TypePad's outage is over. I missed most of it, having been either driving or in meetings. |
| | When I got home many emails from TypePad bloggers greeted me, mostly letting me know something I could pass along to their readers, since they couldn't. |
| | My (frankly obvious) take: Scaling is hard, especially when you're doing something that hasn't been done before in whatever way you're trying to do it. Which is what most fast-growing players in the Live Web space are up to. |
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