July 2009
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An opportunity for the AP
It helps to recognize that the Associated Press is exactly what its name denotes: an association of presses. Specifically, newspapers. Fifteen hundred of them. Needless to say, newspapers are having a hard time. (Hell, I gave them some, myself, yesterday.) So we might cut them a little slack for getting kinda testy and paranoid. Reading… Continue reading
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Ya gotta be born sometime
Seems I share a birthday with Benito Mussolini, Dag Hamarskjöld, Elizabeth Dole, Peter Jennings, Ken Burns, Wil Wheaton and about 1/365th of the world’s population. I also see here that ENIAC, “the first general-purpose electronic computer“, and I were fired up the very same day in 1947 — ENIAC at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and I… Continue reading
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Are newspapers a larval stage?
“Saving newspapers” is beginning to look like saving caterpillars. Or worse, like caterpillars saving themselves. That’s was the message I got from Rick Edmonds’ API Report to Exec Summit: Paid Content Is the Future for News Web Sites, in Poynter, back in early June. In The Nichepaper Manifesto Umair Haque points toward a possible future… Continue reading
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What’s 10,241,704.22kb between ex-friends?
[Later, on 1 October 2009… This matter has been resolved. The charge for going over has been dropped, the service restored and good will along with it. Thanks to both @sprintcares and the chat person at My Sprint.] So I just got a “courtesy call” from Sprint, a company I’ve been talking up for a… Continue reading
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Cluefest
In the month since it hit the streets (at least here in the U.S.), I’ve been surprised at how little those who like Cluetrain know about the new, 10th anniversary edition of the book. Many assume that it’s a fancy new edition of the same old thing. That’s true to the degree that it comes… Continue reading
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Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station
In his comment to my last post about the sale of WQXR to WNYC (and in his own blog post here), Sean Reiser makes an important point: One of the unique things about the QXR was it’s relationship with the Times. The Times owned QXR before the FCC regulations prohibiting newspapers ownership of a radio… Continue reading
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Earth: Bringer of Lunch
The kid goes to bed every night lately while treating himself to a classical piece on his bedroom stereo. Tonight, our last (a bonus, thanks to a plane that didn’t fly) in Santa Barbara before returning to Boston tomorrow, he played one of his favorites: The Planets, by Gustav Holst. Noting that Holst only set… Continue reading
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From Z to A
I understand Zappos selling out to Amazon (even the Amazon logo, which leads from A to Z, makes sense of it) but the news still depresses me. Zappos is a cause as well as a brand. That cause is relationship. As Wikipedia (currently) puts it, Zappos uses a loyalty business model and relationship marketing. The… Continue reading
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A jovian black eye
When I read that an impact had been spotted on Jupiter, I figured it was somewhere other than the equator, which would be a bulls-eye. Even Shoemaker-Levy, a huge comet broken into a string of pieces, slammed like a series of machine gun bullets into Jupiter near its south pole. But this one was bigger.… Continue reading
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More on WNYC(s) + WQXR(s)
Edward Rosten and I have been having an interesting dialog in the comment section of my last post, which was mostly about WNYC buying WQXR from the New York Times (which has owned it forever) for $11.5 million — and moving QXR’s classical programming up New York’s FM dial from 96.3 to 105.9, where the… Continue reading
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WQXR goes to WNYC, WBCN leaves FM dial
Heard this morning on WNYC that the New York Times has unloaded its remaining broadcasting asset, which consists of the channel and facilities of WQXR, which has been a classical music landmark for as long as it’s been around. (One way or another, since 1929. Wikipedia tells the long story well.) The story on WNYC’s… Continue reading
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Data pointage
How Teenagers Consume Media: the report that shook the City carries approximately no news for anybody who watches the changing tastes and habits of teenagers. What makes it special is that it was authored by a fifteen-year old intern at Morgan Stanley in London, and then published by the company. It says teens like big… Continue reading
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The Cox Cure
Had a nice long talk yesterday morning with Cox’s top tech guy here in Santa Barbara, and work continued on the poles and wires outside my house, according to a note left on my door by a field tech supervisor. The service has now been up, without failing (far as I know) since then. Most… Continue reading
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Cox Tech Hell, Day 21
I’ve left two messages with the very nice senior tech guy who came out on Monday and confirmed the problem without solving it. Another guy came yesterday when the problem wasn’t happening, and gave me the number of the senior guy to call. Anyway, no response so far. Meanwhile, the usual: hjigh ping times and… Continue reading
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A good man is hard to lose
I remember talking to Nick Givotovsky the first time* at an early Internet Identity Workshop, when he pulled me aside to share some ideas, and immediately stripped my gears. The guy was as smart as they come, and articulate to an extreme equaled by few. I had to stop him every few sentences to get… Continue reading
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Connectivity hell, Part III
To their credit, fixing my problem has become a higher priority with Cox. A senior guy came out today, confirmed the problem (intermittent high latencies and packet losses), made some changes that adjusted voltages at the modem, and found by tracing the coax from our house to the new pole behind it that the guys… Continue reading
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Miss Taken Identity
Funny… Thanks to a quote in a caption (“We play the hands of cards life gives us. And the worst hands can make us the best players.” from this blog post here) — sans quotation marks — Mahalo thinks this Flickr picture by Oftana Media is one of me. Continue reading
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The Trillion-Dollar Market
Forget financial markets for a minute, and think about the directions money moves in retail markets. While much of it moves up and down the supply chains, the first source is customers. The money that matters most is what customers spend on goods and services. Now here’s the question. Where is there more money to… Continue reading