Monday, July 21, 2003
To prevent a chicken, you have to break some eggs
A few days ago Salam Pax reported this:
I was reading some of the stuff I wrote last October, I wish I had the rage I had in me then. Now I just feel disappointed, my city is becoming fuck-up-central. It is frustrating, how long do you think the coalition forces can keep their cool in the face of the constant attacks? How are they going to deal with the constant sabotage of infrastructure? We have no country or government anymore; they used to talk about "nation building" we ended up with nothing.
Today, he added,
This is the fifth interpreter I hear about. Just like the policemen who were attacked almost two weeks ago, the interpreters are seen as ligitimate targets by Islamists and Ba'athists. A taxi driver was telling me the other day that those Iraqis who collaborate with the Americans are even worse than the americans "they are the devil hidden in saint's clothes".
The first interpreters I heard about were killed execution style, blind folded and had a sign saying "this is what happens to collaborators".
Salam works as an interpreter.
Blog du jour
The Julie/Julia Project is both a tribute to Julia Child and the blog of Julie Powell, "government drone by day, renegade foodie by night." Of her mentor, she says, Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she's a day, and no one can touch her.
RadioActive
Craig Crossman of radio fame in Knight-Ridder papers: New utility program makes it easier to open Windows. It's about Buzz's ActiveWords.
Quote of the day
The basis of ethics is man's right to play the games of his choice. I will not trample on your toys and you will not trample on mine; I won't spit on your idol and you will not spit on mine. Creditied to Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Rolling Ball Web site, which I found by way a post on Deep Fun.
Hall monitor
While following Old Radio links around, I found that Claude Hall has a site that ought to be a blog.
Claude is the former Radio/TV editor for Billboard, and for years wrote the magazine's Vox Jox column — a must-read for anybody in the music radio business, back when disk jockeying was still an art form.
One of the high points in my brief radio career was meeting Claude at a conference in New Orleans in the fall of 1974. I was a nobody surrounded by the radio stars Claude wrote about every week; yet he took a real interest in my questions, and was very enjoyable company.
I've achieved most of my goals in life with the exception of having a best-selling novel, Claude writes. And, while it's rather late for that, I'd settle for a few good readers.
Hey, let's give him some. The novel is Murder at the Busted Bird Cafe. The latest chapter is here.
Here's Claude's poetic eulogy to dozens of deceased DJs from radio's golden age.
Talk about branding
Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags.
Thanks to Eric Norlin for the link.
A nostalgic look at the slo-mo death of Radio as Usual
I see Roger McGuinn also has a fine collection of transistor radios, three of which are the enviable Zenith Royal 500 (which still rocks, after all these years). I had a Royal 400, which featured one less transistor and a bigger speaker (unless you count the Royal 500H). My parents bought it for me in 1962, from the VIM store in downtown Hackensack. I wanted a radio good enough to pick up WMCA at Camp Michikamau, as I recall.
WMCA/570 was the Top 40 station back then. But its 5,000-watt signal was aimed toward New York, protecting a station in Syracuse on the same channel. The camp was in the direction of the station's null to the Northwest. There were three other Top 40 stations in those days: WMGM/1050, WINS/1010 and WABC/770 — all with 50,000 watt signals. WMGM came in well at the camp. WINS was inaudible (today it has a new transmitting pattern that's better both day and night). WABC was freaking huge.(This explains why.) But I was a WMCA loyalist (like I had earlier been a loyal fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers until the bastards left for L.A.), and it bothered me that my old Continental 6-transistor radio couldn't get the station very well at Camp Michikamau. I never went back there to test out the radio; but I do remember using it to get a faint WMCA signal at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in the middle of the day when our family camped there in August, 1964. Of course, WABC sounded like a local.
I always had a thing for underdogs.
Of course, now they're all mostly dogs. Some old, some dead.
And I'm wondering how many years will pass before both AM and FM are gone — which they will be, if Internet radio ever gets out of the copyright chokehold that the RIAA had the feds put on it last year.
Too bad X and P aren't musical notes
News you can't use: Byrds founder Roger McGuinn files then cancels a lawsuit against Microsoft for illegally using the first four notes of "Eight Miles High" in the closing theme music for Windows XP.
[Later...] Some seem to have missed that this was a *joke*. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Microsoft also figures prominently in a Dave Barry column on technology located (presumably with permission) on Roger's site..
You are what you have no choice about eating
Here's ReplayTV's New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood, by Eric A. Taub, in the New York Times, offering more evidence that commercial television would rather have you for a consumer than a customer, The piece begins,
Last month the maker of ReplayTV, a line of digital video recorders that allows consumers to record and store hours of their favorite television programs on hard drives instead of tape, agreed to remove two features from its devices that simplified life for consumers but complicated business for entertainment providers.
ReplayTV's new 5500 model, which will go on sale next month, will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically without recording them or to send recorded programming over the Internet to other ReplayTV users outside a home network. The recorders will, however, still be able to store large libraries of programming indefinitely and allow users to skip manually through recorded commercials in 30-second increments.
Brings to mind an old piece, There's No Demand for Messages, which still makes some good points, five years after it was written — not long before TiVo and ReplayTV invented the PVR business that commercial broadcasting has been trying to throttle ever since. An excerpt:
To put this in perspective, imagine what would happen to the TV business if mute buttons delivered "we don't want to hear this" feedback directly to advertisers. It would crash the whole industry's business model in a heartbeat.
Let's face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It's not coincidental that they're both ugly. Beauty isn't a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information.
The bulk of advertising — all $160 billion of it (which buys a lot of art) — is a conversation between advertisers, media and agents for both. That conversation has enormous flywheels that were forged in the Age of Industry, and carry assumptions that are totally obsolete in a new age when the human beings we've been calling "consumers" are no longer dumb targets in a position only to absorb messages and displace cash.
Remember this essay's title? The main reason I got out of advertising and PR was this epiphany:
THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR MESSAGES
Let me see a show of hands: who here wants a message? Right: none. And who wants to shield themselves from messages they don't want? Exactly: everybody.
TV advertising has negative demand. It subtracts value.
The day will come, hopefully soon, when we will measure demand for advertising on a customer-by-customer basis, and not just by its indirect effects on large populations. When that happens, and direct vendor- customer conversations start adding serious value for both parties, that new conversation will disintermediate most media. Companies will drop advertising like a bad packet.
Deep down in its little stone heart, the TV advertising industry, along with those who depend on the gargantuan inefficiencies inherent in TV advertising's antique business model, don't want viewers to be involved in the industry. They don't want consumers to become customers. In their business model, consumers are products sold to advertisers. They are not customers. Giving them the means to become customers means giving the market the means to kill old business models and create new ones. Since they can't imagine the latter, they lobby and litigate to protect the former. Very effectively, too.
Required re-reading: Larry Lessig's Free Culture keynote from last year's OSCon.