Category: Media

Matt Welch has the 411 on his newspaper deal with Dick Riordan; it’s a weekly, not a daily as we’d previously thought. The cast of writers, and the ad fare, will be upscale from the coffee-house weeklies. Sounds like a noble venture, a likely success, and a welcome addition to the southland media scene.

The Corner on National Review Online has all the details on the cannibalism at STATS, the devils who fired Iain Murray for blogging.

I won’t be subscribing to the STATS newsletter for $25/yr, and I hope no one else does either.

The Media Matters show on PBS is a typically smarmy piece of not-for-profit condescension that can take any story and make it boring by a pedantic presentation. Their segment on blogs tonight was preceded by a piece of self-congratulatory self delusion on the premise that Op-Ed pages have changed Administration policy on Iraq, and another one on sensational photographs that was too odd to watch. The coverage of blogging was simply bizarre; they profiled four east-coast bloggers, Megan, InstaReynolds, Anil, and young master Willis, and I do mean profiled: they shot the segment in a Blade Runner-on-acid style that made the people look like cyborgs conjured up in a back room at the CIA lab where the AIDS virus was invented and the black helicopters come for maintenance.

This was apparently intended to make blogging off-putting and surreal to the traditionalists who still get the news from the papers and the McNeil News Hour. Despite the hammy presentation, Megan came off nearly as bright and articulate as she is on her blog, Reynolds showed symptoms of literacy, and Anil came across much better than he does on his blog. Willis looked and sounded like a sedentary teenager with a broadband connection and a deadbolt on his bedroom door, but he smiled and was very pleasant.

I don’t have high expectations of anything on PBS, and this show met them. They did spell the URLs correctly, and for that we should all be grateful, and now a whole new generation of people who watch PBS at 11:00 PM know that it was bloggers, and not James Carville and Sid Blumenthal, who put the Trent Lott story in the news. That’s PBS for you.

Oliver Willis has some intesting observations about blogger diversity, and Kim du Toit sets him straight.

UPDATE: I noticed that the jpegs on Oliver’s site are less ethnically diverse than the Frisco Blog Party, and mentioned as much in his comments; he then banned me from leaving further comments. Pot, Kettle, etc.

Who needs cat blogs when we’ve got Brat blogs?

Virginia Postrel should be blogging again any day now.

Stefan Sharkansky hosted a nice little Frisco Blog Bash last night at Perry’s Bar and Grill. Most of the regulars were there — Peter Pribik, Steve Happy Fun, the Weidners, and Joanne Jacobs, and we met new friends Stefan, William Quick, Mike Silverman, Andrew the Punning Pundit, Brian Tiemann, Wes Dabney, and Michael Bruce. It was great fun, and I think Stefan might have picked-up the bar tab, which is an act of true heroism with this bunch.

And no, Quick and I didn’t have a fistfight; he’s a bright and charming dude in person.

A few days ago I bemoaned the tech press and the poor job it did of reporting on the Great Internet Bubble, closing with an off-hand slap at Dan Gillmor, the lead tech journo at Silicon Valley’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor’s Sunday column was a critique of Apple that was reasonably good, but this entry from his blog illustrates exactly what I was talking about:

The cable and telephone companies now poised to dominate [broadband], thanks to a federal government that is pushing the idea of a new oligopoly in Internet connections, will let you download at a relatively high speed. They will not permit the converse.

There are several reasons, beyond the merely technical problems (which could be solved) of an old infrastructure. One is to prohibit unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials. The other is to ensure that competitive media have no chance of getting established.

It’s all about control. As usual.

That’s right – Gillmor says a conspiracy of government and communications companies has forced broadband into a one-way communications model in order to protect copyrights and a media monopoly. Wow.

This is so breathtakingly stupid, it’s hard to know where to start in taking it apart, but I’m going to try anyway, silly as I am.

In the first place, the companies that provide “broadband” connections to the home don’t have a stake in the media, publishing, or TV business. In Silicon Valley, your choices are AT&T Cable (which I use) and SBC DSL (which I used to use). Neither of these companies has holdings in Hollywood, and in fact, both would benefit financially from the transfer to more stuff over their networks, copyrighted or not. In fact, the only industry that has stood up and opposed the DMCA is telecom – Verizon in particular has had its lobbyists complain to Washington that the Act would be disruptive to its network. So Gillmor has the good guys confused with the bad guys from the start.

Second, while the “technical problems” preventing cable and DSL networks from offering as much upstream bandwidth as downstream bandwidth “could be solved”, they can’t be solved for free. So the issue for these businesses — and they are businesses, not charities — is whether they should spend money on providing something that people don’t want — high-bandwidth web servers in each and every home — or something they do want, inexpensive, high-speed downloads to each and every home.

The implications in terms of time, management, security, and utility of personal web servers dwarf the mere technical issues in the design of the network, even though the latter are far from trivial. Certainly, those of us who wish to publish personal web sites are able to do so for very little cash outlay through hosting companies, so there’s really very little consequence of the “one-way” nature of today’s broadband networks.

Gillmor, like so many other supposedly technical journalists, wades into an important topic with no understanding of the underlying technical or commercial issues and tries to bludgeon it to death with a cudgel of ignorance wielded from his position astride the Digital Rights hobbyhorse.

It doesn’t work.

UPDATE: Gillmor offers an explanation for why he wrote such lameness in the next entry to his blog: Dave Winer made him do it. That makes it all OK, I guess.

Dave Winer, a fellow who’s been blogging almost as long as I have, is on-target in his criticism of the Industry Standard’s behavior during the bubble:

Read this op-ed by former Industry Standard editor James Ledbetter to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom.

Which goes to show you that stopped clocks are right twice a day; in this case, Winer’s down on all journalists, all the time, so this criticism (link via Doc Searls) doesn’t stand out especially. Doc maintains that his Cluetrain Manifesto was an attempt to promote alternate mythologies to the Entrepreneur Hero, but I can’t say he succeeded, since the Cluetrain reads like so much snake oil to this disinterested observer.

That being said, a lot of us techies are circumspect about another bubble, especially the efforts of some to create one around WiFi, blogging, and related mobile computing and personal publishing stuff. The folks who create military tech feel an obligation to somehow ensure that it’s used responsibly, and those of us who create the civilian variety would at least like to see that it’s not used simply to fleece mom and pop out of their life savings, as it was during the Bubble when investment bankers touted tech stocks they were underwriting to their brokerage clients. New regulations in the securities industry will help keep this form of abuse to a minimum, but we also need a tech press that’s capable of delivering reasonable criticism of business models and technologies instead of just cheerleading everything that comes along.

I don’t see that sort of a press developing, and if it did, it would certainly start in Silicon Valley. The local paper, the Mercury News, is as clueless about technology as the Des Moines Register, touting the Allen-Boxer Broadband Bill as if it were actually worth the paper it’s written on.

Investors aren’t going back into the market until they’re confident, and a robust business press is key to developing this confidence. I suppose it will have to come from the blogs. The business press reads us — Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show invited me to appear based on these musings — but we’re going to have to do a lot better than cheerleading for WiFi or knee-jerk boosting Open Everything to win credibility.

This is going to take some time.

Speaking of AOL, media dude Michael Wolff explains why it’s losing money in this New York magazine article You’ve Got Sex:

Here’s the real rub: AOL’s fundamental business — which has always been a level or two down from the family-oriented opening screen — is dirty talk. But now there are better places to talk dirty.

The only convergence at AOL/Time Warner is that of one-hand typing and on-line shopping for dates. Wolff’s an insider, and the article fairly oozes insight.

via Arts and Letters.