You are currently browsing the daily archive for August 9, 2008.
Since CNN bothered to make James Burgett one of its heroes (an honor he richly deserves) why not maintain the video that says so? Why does a video have to “expire”? For that matter why should the rest of the CNN links on that story, other than the one to the ACCRC, go to expired or 404′d CNN locations?
Bulletin to CNN: I’d gladly pay to see that video (or after seeing it). But on my terms, not yours.
Today I got three attempted spam comments from MindCafe.org and one from Jaworski Coatings. I just want to make sure they’re publicly flagged as spammers. (Note: I’m not bothering with others that are purely evil and impossible to shame in any case.)
With linkful sourcings of Darren Rowse, Richard McManus and Mark Rizn Hopkins, Duncan Riley in The Changing Blogosphere and Blogging 2.0 shows me how full-circle blogging has become:
| Blogging 2.0 runs counter to the prevailing ethos in blogging, which is maximize your Google juice, your page views, your links in, and refrain from sharing that traffic with others, without putting the end user first. Blogging 1.0 is all about maximizing the opportunities for the blog owner while ignoring community, where as blogging 2.0 maximizes the experience for the end user (reader). |
| In focusing on the experience for the end user, via linking, sharing and enabling the conversation across many places, blogging 2.0 rallies against today’s accepted norms. |
So… what was blogging back when there was no advertising on it, and few of us wanted any? Back then the prevailing ethos was nothing more complicated than writing linky, interesting and helpful posts for readers rather than just for traffic. For a lot of us, that’s what it’s been all along.
Sounds to me like “Blogging 2.0″ is a lot like blogging before it became flogging.
A wise warning from Shelley Powers:
| At issue is not that broadband companies are becoming overwhelmed, but that the same companies providing broadband are beginning to perceive that online video offerings such as Netflix WatchNow, Hulu, iTunes, and so on could become an eventual threat to their bread-and-butter operations: offering entertainment packages. Capping broadband use to prevent competition is against the law in this country. If this is the situation, when reason fails, the courts will then need to become engaged. I have to think the ISPs know this, and such knowledge will give them pause. |
The trick for carriers is not to protect doomed business models, but to pursue benefits to incumbency other than trapping and milking customers the usual way.
The Net is a sea of bits: a rising tide that lifts all but the boats that defy its nature. The carriers have enormous advantages here, and not just in billing out the usual scarcities, or leveraging the lame assumptions all carriers, cable included, inherit from the late Ma Bell.
For example, I have Verizon FiOS at my apartment in Boston. I get 20Mb of symmetrical service for about $65 a month. On top of that they offer some premium services, only one of which I want: offsite backup. I’d try to get it, but there’s no link to the service on that page; just a promo. So I’ll give up on that for the moment (I’m in Santa Barbara anyway) while I point to the Verizon FiOS Internet for Business pricing page. Here the prices start at levels much higher than home pricing. What’s the difference? I can see reasons for charging a bit more, but why that much? How much business does this kind of Old Skool captive-market tiering prevent rather than encourage?
For that matter, why should my Internet service take a back seat to television, which soaks up most of my actual fiber-to-the-home bandwidth. Says here that’s 2.4Gb downstream and 1.4Gb upstream. Most of the downstream is devoted to live TV that I don’t watch. Most of the upstream is wasted.
Think about what could be done with that capacity. Don’t think about any business that now exists, much less of protecting it. Just think about what new uses and businesses could grow in those wide-open spaces. Think about how those new businesses would justify even more fiber-to-the-home build-out by Verizon and everybody else.
We have a friend over here who is new to chat. So we got her going on Gmail so she can talk with a variety of others with different clients. But her new Gmail account tells her in the chat window that chat is off and that she must sign out and sign back in again to make it work. It doesn’t, and still says the same thing. Any ideas? Thanks!
During the long drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara yesterday we looked forward to vegging on the couch and taking in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, recorded earlier but presented in prime time by NBC on its local affiliates.
With our nice Sony flat screen, fed by our top-end Dish Network receiver, we figured to be watching the show in high-def. But Dish wasn’t obliging. Seems that getting the locals up in HD is a bit of a chore. Dish doesn’t publish a schedule for that, but DirecTV does. Here’s the list of 150 markets where DirecTV will be introducing local HD channels to the whole HD line-up, gradually, month by month. Santa Barbara’s not on it. Being the number 200-something market, we’re pretty far down the priority list. Since DirecTV and Dish compete pretty much across the board, I’m sure Dish will be just as slow at getting those to us.
To Dish’s credit, my call for help got escalated to a high-level support person who was far more helpful than the first person I talked to. He said that a steady fiber-optic link had to be established between each local affiliate and Dish’s uplink center near Denver. This takes time, and accounts for the hold-up.
Turns out CNBC and USA have a lot of Olympics coverage too; but not, apparently, of the opening ceremonies. Not that I could tell, anyway.
Some of the time we can get HDTV over the air from San Diego and Tijuana, which are more tan 200 miles away, across the open Pacific. But last night (only a few hours ago as I write this) only the ABC signal came in. NBC is the Olympics network, and the San Diego NBC affiliate, KNSD, wasn’t there. (Over-the-air (OTA) digital transmission is kinda binary. You get it or you don’t.)
Our “local” NBC affiliate is KSBY from San Luis Obispo. Its low-def signal on Channel 6 is a long way off in any case, and at the end of its journey here slams into the 4000-foot high Santa Ynez mountains. The station’s HD signal, on UHF channel 15, might as well be coming from Alaska, since UHF signals don’t travel nearly as well as VHF (channels 2-13).
So we settled for KSBY’s low-def picture, which reaches us by a route that leaps mountains by running a 50,000 mile route from San Luis Obispo to Denver to a satellite over the equator and then down to us here in Santa Barbara.
It’s all actually a pretty messy system, considering.
And I’m expecting it to get a lot messier after next February 17th.
Here’s a photo tour of another Channel 6 transmitter site, also doomed to go dark in February.
During the long drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara yesterday we looked forward to vegging on the couch and taking in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, recorded earlier but presented in prime time by NBC on its local affiliates.
With our nice Sony flat screen, fed by our top-end Dish Network receiver, we figured to be watching the show in high-def. But Dish wasn’t obliging. Seems that getting the locals up in HD is a bit of a chore. Dish doesn’t publish a schedule for that, but DirecTV does. Here’s the list of 150 markets where DirecTV will be introducing local HD channels to the whole HD line-up, gradually, month by month. Santa Barbara’s not on it. Being the number 200-something market, we’re pretty far down the priority list. Since DirecTV and Dish compete pretty much across the board, I’m sure Dish will be just as slow at getting those to us.
To Dish’s credit, my call for help got escalated to a high-level support person who was far more helpful than the first person I talked to. He said that a steady fiber-optic link had to be established between each local affiliate and Dish’s uplink center near Denver. This takes time, and accounts for the hold-up.
Turns out CNBC and USA have a lot of Olympics coverage too; but not, apparently, of the opening ceremonies. Not that I could tell, anyway.
Some of the time we can get HDTV over the air from San Diego and Tijuana, which are more tan 200 miles away, across the open Pacific. But last night (only a few hours ago as I write this) only the ABC signal came in. NBC is the Olympics network, and the San Diego NBC affiliate, KNSD, wasn’t there. (Over-the-air (OTA) digital transmission is kinda binary. You get it or you don’t.)
Our “local” NBC affiliate is KSBY from San Luis Obispo. Its low-def signal on Channel 6 is a long way off in any case, and at the end of its journey here slams into the 4000-foot high Santa Ynez mountains. The station’s HD signal, on UHF channel 15, might as well be coming from Alaska, since UHF signals don’t travel nearly as well as VHF (channels 2-13).
So we settled for KSBY’s low-def picture, which reaches us by a route that leaps mountains by running a 50,000 mile route from San Luis Obispo to Denver to a satellite over the equator and then down to us here in Santa Barbara.
It’s all actually a pretty messy system, considering.
And I’m expecting it to get a lot messier after next February 17th.
Here’s a photo tour of another Channel 6 transmitter site, also doomed to go dark in February.
This is worse than sad news. One winces to read Elizabeth Edwards post about it on DailyKos. It ends,
| I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time. |
Celebrity voyeurism is the neon-lit armpit of every culture infected by it, especially when its light and stink surround the wounded. As voters, however, we can breathe a sigh of relief that the country was spared another Bill Clinton: a man whose little head told his big head what to do — at risk to everybody else’s, starting with his own family.
Nice to learn that Joe Frank, one of the greatest radio artists of all time, is back. In a way. You can listen in a browser to .wma selections from albums he sells. It would be nice for Joe to make those available as .mp3s as podcasts.
Maybe when we get this put together we can find a new way for him to make money with his art.
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