Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Polibloggery
Lance points to a fine poliblog, by an actual pol, in his own voice. In that same vein, Lance thinks Dennis Kucinich's blog, also authored by the man himself, reads "so much like processed oatmeal."
Didn't strike me that way, but maybe that's cuz Iike oatmeal. It's off the diet, but still.
Hearing voices
I also got mail on the Corporate Blogging piece in the Times. My fave response is from Jeneane, whose gut reaction to Alan Meckler's CEOblog (profiled in the Times piece) is over the ... bottom:
"Legitimate excecutive" voices like Mr. Meckler's? OH MY, ouch. chest pain. severe. Let's read the humanity in the snippet pulled from his blog in the article, shall we? All together now:
"If an organizer truly pushes the intellectual side first with a well thought out and honest seminar program, critical and financial success ultimately comes one's way. Just like the movie `Field of Dreams' — `if you build it, they will come.' "
If you write one more word, I will puke.
What exercised Jeneane was possibly the most inane piece about blogging to date, braying the news that corporations blog. Of course they do. Just as corporations think, care, love, fuck, sweat and smell, they blog.
Note Tom's Cycle of Ignorance at Big Papers about subjects like blogging. Too long to copy over here, but worth reading.
Signs of death
Got lots of emails pointing to Signals from Nowhere, by Walter Kirn in the NY Times Magazine. Outstanding recollection of what Real Radio was all about in its golden age, which ended when ownership deregulation allowed Clear Channel to buy up everything:
You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I'd reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication — Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What's more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes.
I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ''morning zoo'' hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn't help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes.
What a miserable trip. I heard America droning.
Recently, I found out whom to blame: a company called Clear Channel Communications. The mammoth buyer and consolidator of hundreds of independent local radio stations — along with its smaller competitors, Infinity Broadcasting and Cumulus Media — is body-snatching America's sonic soul, turning Whitman's vivacious democratic cacophony into a monotonous numbing hum.
No matter where a person lives these days (particularly in Minot, N.D., where Clear Channel runs all six commercial stations in town), he's probably within range of an affiliate, if not three or four, since the company buys in bulk: pop stations, rock stations, talk stations, the works. Worse, quite a few of these stations don't really exist — not in the old sense. They're automated pods, downloading their programming from satellites linked to centralized, far-off studios where announcers who have never even set foot in Tucson, Little Rock, Akron or Boston — take your pick — rattle off promos and wisecracks by the hundreds, then flip a switch and beam them to your town as if they're addressing its residents personally, which they aren't. They don't even know the weather there.
What results is a transcontinental shower of sound that seems to issue from heaven itself, like the edicts of the Wizard of Oz.
Here's a fear: That local newspapers will get just as killed as local radio, by the deregulation of media ownership. What happens when Clear Chanel or Cumulus Media buys up the local newspapers?
[Later...] Matt responds:
But what I really don't understand is, if it's so awful, why do people listen? After all, without listeners there would be no advertisers and ClearChannel would be dust.
So who loves this shit?
I answered in a comment there at his blog.
Are all banks like this?
My accountant just told me that my bank, Washington Mutual, says it will take 4-6 weeks to process a check from a Canadian company. Shoot, they're from a border state. You'd think, huh?
If I had time, I'd go in and bother a banker. But it's not mission critical, so fuggit.
The Live Web Lives
Minding Mark's Words about GlobeAlive...
Roland Tanglao: GlobeAlive + Blogosphere + software = goodness.
Mark Carey at Web Dawn: GlobeAlive as a pillar of the Blog community.
Clay Shirky at Corante's Social Software blog: Mark Carey Explains GlobeAlive.
Something going on there.
First things last
Microdoc: Captian Cook Blogger of The Free World...
Doc, The Dial as a group blog in 1840, you gotta be thinking even older than that for examples of the best early blogs. Think about 1770 or even earlier. What about Captain Cook with his journal, 19th April, 1770 still on the Internet. Some blogging here! Pity about the reverse chronological bit. They hadn't invented how it was possible to have the most recent blog at the top, they were a little constrained by the modems of the time. The modems were so slow it took six months to connect back with London, maybe we should have imported America's network then and been better off rather than relying solely on British technology. In fact blogging was pretty primitive in those days -- they had to actually use pen and paper and then they had to wait 230 years for it to get blogged onto a computer. We have progressed a little since then, we actually do it straight onto a computer.
In fact, what better examples of bloggery we have than all the explorers of Australia who each maintained blogs (they called them 'logs' in those days). Independent, strong, risk-all kind of guys who didn't just speak about being great, but actually went and got things done. That's the Australian blogging spirit.
Doc, Ben Franklin being a blogger -- yes, I will give you that one...
That Cook reference is to an item from Project Gutenberg of Australia. Terrific archive. The Projects Gutenberg are to me among the Web's crowning achievements. Same with the Internet Archive. This stuff is our Library of Alexandria. or a core part of it, anyway.
And if we can get this item passed, the world will be an even better place.