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Saturday, February 17, 2007
I don't follow it either but... 
| | I'm listening to a recording of live Dylan from '65 on KRUU and kind of mellowing out before crashing for the night. The show is A Fistfull of Daller's. KRUU is a little station in Fairfield, Iowa with a range of about 5 miles. Unless you listen to the stream or get the feed. All the shows have feeds. And they're good. |
| | "Ballad of the Thin Man". Dylan rasps, Something is happening, and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones? |
| | Mojo? I dunno. I'm in Baltimore, where the frozen slush is melting, making little plapping sounds in the drainpipe outside the window, reminding me I'm deep in the East Coast. Home country. Recalling childhood in New Jersey, when we'd wish it would snow and once again the forecast would say Snow mixed with and changing to rain... And then it would all freeze, crusty and white, too hard to crack or take a footprint. |
| | Here is your throat back. Thanks for the loan. |
| | A memory. I'm in 8th grade, and a Safety Patrol kid at the corner of Maywood Ave and Passaic Street. I'm an accessory to Mrs. Lesh, the crossing guard. I break the boredom by cracking off bits of frozen crust along the sidewalk or the street gutter, and then kicking them out to where they'll get run over by traffic, making up a game with friends that are just hanging out, waiting for me to get off duty. Ten points if the kicked hunk gets smashed by the first car to come along. Five if it's the second one. |
| | He screams "You're a cow. Give me some milk or go home." |
| | Now Daller's playing "Knockin' on heaven's door". It's gettin' dark, too dark to see... |
Flysight
Radio ratings shortcuts
| | Commercial radio. Noncommercial radio. Some of the latter do pretty darn well, though the results in both cases are linkproof. In San Francisco, KQED has a 4.9 average quarter hour share of 12+ listening, which puts it at #3 behind KGO-AM (5.7) and KOIT-FM (5.3) — and well ahead of KCBS-AM (3.9). By the way, KQED/88.5 is by far the largest FM station in the market, radiating with 110,000 watts from atop the antenna farm on San Bruno Mountain. (While KIOI/101.3 is listed at 125,000 watts, that level is reached only at two maximum points on lobes to the northeast and southeast. In other directions the highly directional station is much weaker. Meanwhile, KQED is nondirectional from a site just a few feet away from KIOI's. (By the way, I really enjoy knowing that approximately .01% of ya'll care about this, but I know who you are. This is for you, guys. Rock on.) |
Cover story
Up and Down
| | I snipped the copyright warning out of the weekend's Super Bowl broadcast as an example for my copyright class of how far copyright claimants exaggerate their rights. |
| | "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." |
| | Let's see whether the video, clear fair use, gets flagged by a copyright bot. |
Law enfarcement
| | The Police have a tour website. A show has been added on my birthday, July 29, in Fenway. I'm thinking it would be fun both to be in Boston and to take in the concert there. The Kid likes the band, too. But stadium shows have never been my cup of noise. Soo... we'll see. |
| | When I look for more info, I discover that much of the site is members-only. The privacy policy page weighs in at 8,031 words of tiny white type reversed out of a black background. Reading it at that type size takes me 12 page-down clicks to reach the end. Enlarged to a size I can read takes 24 clicks. |
| | This is just one absurdity caused by lack of VRM on the visitor's side. If the site visitor arrived with a tool that expressed both trustworthiness and the ability to relate in a useful way, most of this crap wouldn't be necessary. |
| | But we've never had a world with working VRM, so The Police Tour Site's lawyers had little choice, I presume, other than to crisp up some boilerplate that's been limp since 2002. ("Effective October 31, 2002; last modified March 07, 2006", the text begins.) |
| | Earth to Police: this kind of crap discourages interest. (Like they're not going to sell out anyway, right? Well, whatever.) |
| | Meanwhile, hypebot, a music industry blog, says this about Building a Relationship Economy, which he credits with "forward thinking": Bold stuff. Maybe impossible. But somehow it gets past the clutter to the root question. How far do we really want to go to engage, listen to and learn from our audience? |
| | The short answer: Farther than your lawyers would like. But then, your lawyers have never met a customer with VRM tools. Because they don't exist yet. |
| | It's not up to the supply side to provide those — not just because the supply side defaults to building silos, traps and other instruments of "lock-in", but because the demand side is in a better position to zero-base something that works. |
| | Nice: Ross Dawson calls the same piece "extremely rich and interesting", and goes on to unpack the thinking behind the paragraph above. A key point of special relevance to groups like The Police: Your client knows you better. |
| | How can Creative Commons help fulfill the VRM vision and vice versa? OpenID enabling ccHost and encouraging the many curators and repositories of CC licensed media to adopt advanced metadata and OpenID are no-brainers. (User-controlled identity plays a big role in VRM, and one can easily see it playing a big role in helping creators manage creative assets and creative relationships across many sites, rather than only within individual silos.) |
I forget what he said, but it's good
Consumption rehab in one post
| | Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it. |
| | That's one paragraph, chosen nearly at random, from among many that say roughly the same thing, and no less artfully. Here's another (can't resist): |
| | If you write like another stupid fanboy who ricochets a pillar of spunk off the roof of his gaping mouth just because something is glossy and uses electricity, you're just doing the work of the companies trying to get rich selling us broken promises. |
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