Wednesday, March 5, 2003
Remember radios?
You can still buy a few good ones. Perhaps the best all-band portable ever made is the Sony ICF-2010, which I saw selling for around $300 at Fry's in Palo Alto. I believe it is discontinued, but there seem to be a few left in the channel.
Equal blog
Reading The Hamster, Eric Hananoki's unabashed lefty blog, it occurs to me that the blog world doesn't suffer the kind of political problems that afflict The Media. Do left-wingers run the agenda, as Rush, Ann and Bernard claim? Or are a bunch of right-wingers really in charge, as Eric Alterman and Bill Berkowitz claim?
Neither. That's what's cool. There are more than plenty of both, and none run a damn thing other than their own blogs.
Congrats
Raging blogs
The Raging Cow thing is getting out of control. Which is exactly the idea, no?
Wondering if anybody's tasted it... and if it's possible, just possible, that the stuff is actually good. Yeah, I know it's a dairy product with the shelf life of motor oil, but still. If it's true... I mean, if the stuff is actually good (hard to imagine, I know; but work with me here)... does that make us less cynical about the marketing?
Just wondering. Some of us could use the t-shirts.
[Later...] Todd Morman in MonkeyTime:
"Extreme milk," indeed. Surely I can't be the only one in blogdom who knows that Alley Cats: The Saga of the Raging Cow was the name of a 1983 porno flick that included - I couldn't make this up if I tried - Ron Jeremy. He's the guy whose 9-and-3/4-inch schlong starred in such classic pre-teen films as Ally McFeal, The Flintbones and Fuck Holes - Gaping Anus.
Good point. Somehow I missed that.
Ah, and here's Glenn Reynolds:
...this isn't a case of conniving corporate criminality. It's a case of crude corporate cluelessness. The "Raging Cow" campaign, I predict, will exude all the hipness of those 1970s-era Soviet rock bands. All the elements of hipness will be there, but somehow the whole will be less than the sum of the parts.
The pointer to that one came from Bloggerheads, which also takes a dim view of the whole Cow Thing. The pointer to Bloggerheads came from Martin Lloyd, who blogs The MBA Experience from Oxford.
Lou Josephs thinks we should start a Yoo-Hoo blog. Maybe. I liked Yoo-Hoo as a kid, I think. Or was I just listening too much to Yogi?
A few words paint a thousand pictures
Brian Dear has been having fun counting search results on various keywords and keyphrases at The White House website. Very interesting results. Dig it.
Free Fi Fo Fun
Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the side of Free Fi:
I think he’s right. The university where I teach, the University of Tennessee, has a high-speed wireless network that covers the entire campus. Now some of the bars and restaurants and coffeeshops nearby are catching on — one even has a big sign advertising “Fast Free Wireless Internet” as a way of luring customers. Right now it’s a big lure — sort of the way air-conditioning was fifty years ago. But soon it will be ubiquitous...
Wireless Internet access is cheap and easy to provide (I have it at home, and so do countless other Americans), and as people get more and more used to it, spaces that don’t have it seem less and less appealing. I think that Doc is right, and that customers will come to expect it over the next few years. In some places, they already do. Kind of like toilets.
LameList disagrees:
As a consumer, I think this would be great. But it is lame-fully short-sighted and naïve for several reasons. First, wi-fi is cheap and easy at the home level — once you have the broadband installed. But providing wi-fi means first the coffeeshop has to upgrade from their twisted-pair POTS dial-up used by their point-of-sale system to broadband access. Then they install wi-fi as a means of access. Saying "it's cheap, I have it at home" is a grossly lame simplification that forgets the need to install broadband in the first place. Starbucks is installing some nifty fat data pipes for their wi-fi. Perhaps if they installed a skinnier DSL line, their costs would not be so high, but then level of service would be reduced.
Lame or not, it'll still happen. Plenty of hotels, coffee shops, libraries, universities and whole cities are already providing free wi-fi for the same reason they provide street lights and public restrooms. None of those are free either — except to the users who expect them for exactly that price.
So here's your take-away quote: Think of pay-fi as the Net's equivalent of the pay toilet.