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Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Killer kontent 
| | Dave: Vlogging comes to mass murder. The question on the floor is, Should NBC release all the original video files sent to them by Cho Seung Hui? I say yes, in that same post. |
The bleed goes on
| | BAGHDAD -- Five car bombs exploded in and around Iraq's capital Wednesday, killing at least 172 people and injuring more than 220 in the deadliest day since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a much-publicized security crackdown two months ago. |
Next step, just M. Drop the TV.
| | Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org, in Forbes: Viacom's MTV Claims 'Radical' Digital Strategy. Graden promises something I thought was already supposed to be the case: every show will have a heavy digital component. Graden: "We can either stay in the mass or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers." Um, yeah. What he said. |
Temporary message buffer outage message
| | My cell phone, a Treo 700p, has croaked. First it gave me a message I couldn't cancel telling me something was failing with a sync I wasn't doing. Then the display turned into a grid of eight colored blocks that would not yield even to a "hard" reset or battery re-insertage. Fortunately, I have this other phone that somebody sent me to try out. Mostly it's sat in a drawer. But I took it along on the current road trip, just in case. Glad I did. Just one problem: since it's not my phone, I can't get messages on it. |
| | So this is a message to anybody trying to leave me a message on the dead phone or the working phone with a number nobody (including me) knows: don't call if what you want to do is leave me a message if I'm not available. Send me an email or something. |
| | Credit to Verizon: their tech support picked up right away at the end of the call center choice maze, and they're sending a replacement Treo that will intercept me on my travels sometime Friday. |
Will work for pixels
| | Gary Turner is is looking for a gig. If nobody calls, then I¹m considering putting myself up on eBay, he says. So I might not hire him for sales. But I would hire him for something else. Like, knowing how the world works and what the Internet is really for. Stuff like that. |
No stay of execution for Internet radio
| | Back in early March, I posted Internet Radio on Death Row, which provides extensive background on a subject I've been covering for Linux Journal since the early 00s. To that and countless other sources Sheila adds the artist David Byrne, whose Your Government Working for You unpacks issues from both the supply and demand side of this nascent industry. That's because David is a webcaster as well as a rock star. Sez David, |
| | It points to another victory for the oligarchs — the big 5 record companies and the media companies that own them. Count one more for the big guys. The reasoning that it's for the benefit of the artists rings a little hollow as most artists heard this argument re: cracking down on file sharing, and most never see money from their record companies anyway — so the line about ³we're doing it for you² is pretty suspect. |
| | Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges. (I wonder if Gonzales, Cheney etc. have any pals in there?) |
| | The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this "market value" come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I¹m confused. (I think I¹m supposed to be confused.) Who is determining this value? In this case the CRB seems to be looking towards agreements made between the major record labels and the largest commercial webcasters, but this is hardly a free market model. It also seems to ignore the fact that the "value" of a song would change depending on the context — if I'm listening to a web radio stream I can't control what I hear, which is different from purchasing the track. |
| | What happened here is that the RIAA has decided, with complete agreement from the Copyright Royalty Board, that this is their music, that they control it, and that they are going to set the terms by which it is used. Period. So, unless Congress changes the rules (and remember that they created the Copyright Royalty Board, and that this whole mess goes back to the DMCA, which Congress passed in 1996 and has shown no appetite for changing), Internet radio is going to have to pay these fees, or die. |
| | So far most of the thinking about sources of money for these fees has been along the usual lines: more advertising (for commercial stations) and more donations and subscriptions (for noncommercial stations and small commercial ones). |
| | I think there's one more: Equip willing buyers to make the stations willing sellers. I wrote about that last month in A Public Market for Public Music. The bottom lines: |
| | We've been talking about how "the customer is king" and "the customer is always right" for many decades. Lately in the tech world we've been talking about "user in charge". Yet those things are not broadly true — not as long as the payoff for entrapment exceeds the payoff for liberation. |
| | We have to build tools for liberation. Developing easy ways to pay for free goods would be a fun place to start. |
| | The answer, once again, is to equip the user with the tools needed to make the market happen. It's the only way. |
News grounds for discussion
| | We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too. |
| | Good points. We also need to become proficient at tools that haven't been created yet, partly because we can't create them. That's because the most personal devices — mobile phones — are among the least friendly to development of tools by those on or close to the "ground" Dan talks about here. Mostly we have to wait for combinations of carriers and phone makers to grace us with tools they jointly decide, on their own long-term joint calendars, to provide us with. |
| | We need open phones and open development environments for those phones. And we need carriers that are open to both, for their own good, and for the good of markets that grow in wide open spaces. |
| | In an open market, the mobile phone applications that matter most won't just come from the carriers' and phone makers' development teams. They'll come from the individuals and groups who stand to benefit most from them. And that will benefit the equipment and carriage suppliers as well. |
Sometimes the most you can say is nothing at all
| | Back when it was still true, Don Norman said "Microsoft is a conversational black hole. Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape." |
| | I used to think the blogosphere was large enough to provide enough distance from black hole subjects that at least some illumination was possible. Now I'm not so sure. Some black hole subjects have event horizons that out-distance anyone's ability to bring constuctive thought to bear on a subject — much less to support the telling of helpful stories in mainstream media, which too often subordinate fact-providing to story-telling in any case. |
| | I was awakened to this suspicion three Mondays ago, while talking about blogging to a class in a local college. The teacher projected a browser tuned to Technorati on a screen, clicked on a Top Searches link, and there, at the top of the page, was a blog post that associated my name with death threats. |
| | Since then perhaps hundreds of thousands of blog postings have dealt with the controversy; yet the ratio of opinion to fact in the case verges on the infinite. At a certain point I realized that it was impossible to shed light on a subject that had become a black hole. That point was reached when one person's name had become synonymous with the controversy. I realized then that I would only make things worse by mentioning that person's name — no matter how much Good Stuff I had to say about the subject. |
| | Which brings me to the Virginia Tech massacre. There are black hole aspects to this one as well. |
| | Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to find ways to help the people working with one company that finds itself in a fortuitous position to help students, schools, and the rest of us learn something useful from this tragedy. Specifically, they can help people help themselves, and each other, when emergencies like this one happen. |
| | Can I possibly name this company and not have naming them taken as a promotional move? Maybe, but I don't think so. I've already had a little experience with that, and the results were discouraging. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't help them. It looks to me like the best way to help for now is to work offline to make sure they have something actually useful to provide, rather than good intentions alone. So that's what I'll do. But don't expect me to blog about it, or report on it, unless there are concrete facts that give opinions something to stand on. |
| | Meanwhile, here's a thought I've brought up before: We don't have a commons yet. This world — the one for which the Net is merely deep infrastructure and little more — is barely civilized yet. It's still new. We're not even sure yet how to get along as families and friends and tribes, much less how to build towns and cities and a rich civic life. We try, but do we succeed? In some ways, and in some places, sure. But here, in blogland? I dunno. |
| | As William Gibson famously said, "The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed". That applies to degrees of future as well. Sometimes I think we've gone and invented internal combustion and electric distribution before we've worked out hunting and gathering, much less agriculture. |
| | But I don't know. That's the way it feels today, anyway. |
| | Here's an interesting thing: Nearly all the good, fun, productive, potentially world-changing work I'm doing right now is mostly off-blog. This is true to such a degree that I'm starting to believe some things are better not blogged about. At least, not much. Or not yet. Or both. What I want is real, solid stuff to talk about. So I'll blog to help that happen. Not just to talk about it. |
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