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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
6/6/2001; 1:17:31 PM |
| Topic: |
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| Msg #: |
776 (top msg in thread) |
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8511 |
What kind of shack? 
| | Radio Shack has eleven top level poduct categories on its site, and one hundred twenty-eight categories on its category view page. None are for radios. There is a category called "Radio Controlled Toys," and another called "Radios/Cassettes for Children." The search page is just Ask Jeeves with a local label. Let's see: it has "Adhesives," "Talking Picture Frames," "Awsome RC Riot Cars!" and "Metal Detectors" (in the "Office, Time & Weather" section). But no radios. I was gonna put a link to the non-existent section in the rant below, but the hell with it. |
Stay detuned
| | Just heard from a reader and fellow radio freak that the BBC won't be broadcasting to North America after July 1, 2001. I had no idea. While I don't doubt that this is a Bad Thing, I'm not sure it's worth the effort stop it. How many of us out there (North Americans only — raise your hands) still care? |
| | Anyone besides me and this writer (that's at least two, which isn't an insignificant percentage in this little sphere) still listening? Recently I bought a shortwave radio from Radio Shack. It's actually a re-labeled Grundig. I was amazed at how little is left on the shortwave bands, at least that you can detect here in California. It's almost nothing. And it used to be a huge haystack of stuff. I still hear the hams doing sideband audio and CW (that's ham talk for morse code), but that's about it. I was a ham way back in the early Sixties, and it was fun — but not nearly as much fun as this is. (I was also amazed that there is not a single digitally-tuned portable radio made that's as good as what you get in the average automobile. They all suck. And nobody gives a shit because there's no way to express the choice to buy a good one. Good ones don't exist.) |
| | One of the least-discussed facts about both shortwave and other forms of broadcasting is how much it costs to produce. A typical 50,000-watt AM station sucks about 100,000 watts off the power grid and takes up many acres of real estate. FM and TV stations are a bit less hungry for power and space, except in the vertical dimension. The biggest towers that bristle from the tops of mountains and buildings are usually for TV and FM. And in the flat parts of the country, those 2000-foot numbers that stand out on farmland are nearly always for TV and FM as well. Shortwave facilities typically can take up even more room. I guarantee that the BBC has been spending an enormous amount of money feeding information to North Americans who don't listen on shortwave, and a tiny fraction of that sum streaming the same thing over the Net (I read they don't really, but they claim they do). |
| | So what do we really want? |
| | What I want is celllular distribution of everything that can possibly stream. Point to point, anywhere to anywhere, anybody to anybody. I want to be able to listen to KPIG or Kyle Hojem's oldies show on my car radio, my walkman, my Sony Clié or my laptop, by way of adaptive broadband, 802.11b, DHCP, 3G, iBurst (disclaimer: I consult ArrayComm) and/or whatever else it takes to make it happen. As for subscriptions, I'd be glad to make micropayments to anybody (except maybe Microsoft, which would be smart to make micropayments part of Hailstorm, but don't tell them). |
| | But it won't happen as long as we continue to stick with the idea that this whole business is about broadcasting and distribution of "content." That's the problem with satellite radio, which is finally showing up in a few cars after decades of politial opposition by the commercial broadcasting lobby. It's also why so many new technologies not mandated to manufacturing by government — RDS and AM stereo are two that come quickly to mind — fail in the "marketplace." The only real "market" for commercial broadcasters is advertising. The listeners are not the demand side in any useful economic sense. They pay nothing for the "product," which is chum to bait listeners — the real "product" — for advertisers. I have no direct influence over what any commercial radio station plays, except occasionally by email, which barely counts. The only reason we have FM stereo is that the government required it. Now that satellite radio is here, it's a subscription system that asks listeners to pay for what they otherwise get free. The government isn't making GM stick it in every car. That makes it a pretty bad bet. |
| | I don't care how good satellite radio gets; there is no way it can improve on what's going to be available for free anyway over the Net. I invite subscription broadcasters to prove me wrong, but I doubt they can. Here at the office and at home I have hundreds of "stations" on various "tuners," and with the exception of KPIG and a few public radio stations all of them are Net-only. And some of them are extremely good. What happens to Broadcasting when countless latte-chuggers sitting in Starbucks are listening to the likes of KPIG stream MP3 audio into their headphones at up to 128kbps? Forget the security issues. The connect-hungry public doesn't care. It's gonna happen. |
| | Anyway, I'm sad about the BBC thing. I was also sad to see Top 40 AM radio go away. And I thought it was silly of the CBC to kill off its service on AM when so much of the country isn't reached by FM or Internet &151; and so much Canadian rural territory can only be reached by AM radio at night. But did enough people really care? Nope. |
| | When I was in Hawaii recently, I listened to a pile of AM stations at night from mainland North America — on an ordinary rental car radio. It was amazing how well they came in. There was KTCT/1050 from San Francisco, an outstanding news station from Vancouver on 1130am, KPNW/1120 from Eugene, KFMB/760 from San Diego, and even relatively weak stations like KSFO/560 from San Francisco and KFWB/980 from Los Angeles. When I mentioned this to the self-professed radio authority at the local Radio Shack he just didn't believe me. Or care. And if he didn't care, who would? Yet the whole AM band was set up in the first place so that kind of long-distance reception would be possible at night. Country music wouldn't be here if the Grand Ole Opry hadn't been broadcast at nights on WSM/650 out of Nashville for decades before TV made it into most rural homes in the South. |
| | Anyway, that's my radio rant for the day. |
Release early, release often
| | Finally got around to reading the hard copy of the May 2001 Release 1.0, where Kevin Werbach does an excellent piece on weblogs. Titled "Triumph of the Weblogs," it sources Lawrence Lee, Dan Bricklin, Dave Winer, Evan Williams, Don Bulens and myself, among others. He kindly gives me the last word: "I think Weblogs are what we expected Web pages to be in the first place." |
| | I don't (or barely) remember saying that, although I agree with it completely. A funny difference between talking and writing is that it's usually easier to remember the latter, especially if you're writing for publication. You draft and redraft it, run it past an editor, give it a last proofread, perhaps. And then you see it in print a few hours, days, weeks or months later. Blogs are somewhere between conversation and Writing (with a capital W). They're printed blurts that lithify into word balloons that float in cyberspace for the duration, making them searchable transcripts of thinking-out-loud. |
| | Few of us speak in final draft (not surprisingly, those of us who do are likely to be lawyers). Usually what we say is living proof of what Garrison Keillor says about English: that it's "a preacher's language" because it allows us "to speak until we think of what to say." Most of what we know isn't highly explicit, and our expressions of it start with approximations of what we mean, or think we mean, or might eventually discover we mean — often with the help of the other person in the conversation. But when we speak, every word vanishes like snow falling on water. If we're lucky the other party reflects back a sign of understanding, or an improved expression of the same point. Whatever else happens, if the conversation is successful it proves that we traffic in meaning more than words. |
| | Blogs are heaps of words that stick to the water: annotated transcripts of conversations that have no sides. They are the accumulata of What We Know, of open-ended conversation with who-knows-who. And perhaps I mean that last phrase a bit more literally than I intended when I wrote it eight seconds ago. |
| | Eric Norlin said this in his blog the other day (scroll waaay down to find it): |
| | The prominent voices of the weblog community (Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Ev Williams and Dan Gillmor — to name just a few) have emerged in total; sprung to life as web pages that garner, in some cases, as many hits per day as "major" news sources. And their growth seems generated by the fact that all interlink to each other. This is to say that the value of the weblog community lies in the interactions and conversations that take place between logs. To read one log is not enough - the readers must find themselves swimming in the complexity of the community. When contrasted with the mass media, the stark quality of this difference is revealed. Mass media is bound and determined to keep readers within the boundary of its world — to emphasize the importance of action over interaction. |
| | Lately I've been noticing how a few of us seem to be emerging as the Leading Bloggers of Our Time. And while I do read those other guys pretty often (Dave a little more than the rest because Scriping.com is such a fecund garden of news... See what happens? I just went over there to copy the link to his site and he's got this link to something by Jamie Zawinski I can't ignore.) But I'm much more interested in the growing list of folks on my links page, or that show up in my referer logs. Plus some I keep forgetting to include, like Marek's brilliant Soapbox, where I just discovered further confirmation of my belief that weblogs have more integrity with what Tim Berners-Lee wanted the Web to be than just about anything else out there. |
| | In college I was nominally a philosophy major. In fact, thanks to one obsessive professor, I majored in Michael Polanyi, whose magnum opus was the nearly unreadable Personal Knowledge. Polanyi's point was that knowledge is profoundly personal, and his only quotable line to that effect was "we know more than we can tell." (That he worked seven single-syllable words into one sentence is such a remarkable exception that it may by itself provide evidence of God.) What we know is tacit and what we can tell is explicit — and it is important not to mistake the latter for the former (or, for example, to insult the former by quantifying it as "intellectual capital" or whatever). Anyway, many years after I began forgetting all the stuff I learned about Polanyi, I heard John Seely Brown speak at PC Forum. He outlined an epistimology that began by borrowing Polanyi's classification of personal knowledge — tacit and explicit — and extending it to the social space, showing (see the drawing). in other words, lots of knowledge is social. |
| | Blogs, I believe, are much different than diaries, with which they are often compared. Their very setting attests to a social as well as a personal purpose. I believe they are about sharing and growing what we know and what we can tell. |
| | I also believe they will succeed where "knowlegdege management" (and every other kind of management) has failed. It's the same reason online bazaars like eBay are succeeding where every business intermediary with a 2 in the middle of its acronym is struggling. They're about us. They organize themselves around whatever topic gets us going, for as long as the topic stays interesting. Then we — whoever we are — move on, keeping safe in the tacit what those who operate only in the explicit will never understand, much less "manage." |
What you'll do for your kids
| | Good piece in the Mercury about leaving Silicon Valley. Funny: when I moved to Chapel Hill in '74 I thought I'd never leave. Then I thought the same thing about Silicon Valley within days of arriving (on August 16, 1985). Now I feel that way about Santa Barbara. |
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