Saturday, August 5, 2006
An optimistic view
Brian Oberkirch: General IP makes his way to the Little Big Horn.
Quotes du jour
The idea that information is property is one of the really bad ideas of the twentieth century. — Brewster Kahle, at Wikimania
Also, If there's one lesson from the Library of Alexandria, version one, it's "Don't have just one copy".
Required blogging
The people, and the bloggers, of Lafayette, Louisiana, are fighting the good fight for real broadband in that town, rather than i-gravy that their local duopoly would rather give them on top of cable TV and phone service. It's a tough fight, because private utility monopolists don't like any more competition, or public accountability, than they already have. Worse, they're litigating and lobbying against local control at every level. I've written about this before. The Lafayette Pro Fiber folks noticed and responded here (which I'd missed when it ran last week). Go read it. Not for their kind words in my direction, but for news that they lack attention and support from others who care about this very real fight, which is going on across the U.S.
If we care about this fight, and we should, our allies in Lafayette deserve more support than they're getting. Let's give it to them.
Flying long
I just put up the photoset from the flights from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to Boston a couple days ago. Shown above is the only picture from the SBA-LAX leg. It's my two legs, showing how much room they have in seats 9B and 9C, which nonfrequent flyers on Embraer 120s often avoid because they are the main exit row on the plane.
My seat on the 757 out of L.A. was a nice one for shooting pictures: near the back of the plane, on the shady side. But the window was terriby scratched up. And the air below was cloudy, hazy or both, most of the way. So there aren't too many shots. I also went back to my old Nikon Coolpix 5700 (a model now pushing 5 years old), since the new Canon 30D is in the shop. But I did shoot some stuff that's interesting as subjects, if not photographically distinctive. One example is the Lockheed Martin Helendale RCS Facility, where stealth airplanes and stealthy materials are tested. Here's a very interesting story about that.
Air America is running out of gas
Seems Air America is moving off it's flagship New York station, WLIB/1190, and going to WWRL/1600.
"We are excited about our new affiliation and the platform this move will establish for Air America in the years ahead," says Jim Wiggett, acting CEO of Air America. That's in MediaBuyerPlanner. Same thing here, obviously from the press release.
Pure spinnage, of course. Nobody who knows anything about New York radio is eating it.
More like it is Air America losing altitude in New York, from UPI.
Compare the signals. WLIB by day. WLIB by night. WWRL by day. WWRL by night. (Only watch what's inside the red lines. That's where the signal is strong enough to be competitive.)
I was just talking with Dean Landsman about it. (Dean is a veteran broadcaster and broadcast consultant — one with a long and strong track record with urban programming.) He put the coverage issue much less kindly than the maps in the last paragraph. WWRL's signal, to put it mildly, is not competitive. At night it barely gets into all the boroughs, and it's nowhere in the suburbs where much of the listenership ought to be.
This blog post pretty nails it: this new "Flagship" is sort of like moving from the "QE II" to the "Titanic".