Photo Story is a nifty little program that turns images and sound into wonderful little videos. It used to be part of Microsoft Plus! and cost $20 but is now free. I’ve posted a couple of Photo Story files here at smays.com but this new version is the best yet. I grabbed some pix form KBOA830.com (the first website I did, back in the day) and tossed ’em in with some jingles that Jeff Wheeler saved. The 5 min video (3 meg .mov download) could have been better if I had taken the time to try to match images to audio but I didn’t (keep your Media Player at 320×240). It’s still a nice look/listen back to the golden days of KBOA. If you don’t have a copy of Photo Story 3.0… download it today.
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Gnomedex: Day One.
You’ve heard the old joke about the guy that robs a bus full of Japanese tourists but the police catch the guy within 10 minutes because they had more than 500 photos of the thief. That was the first day of Gnomedex 5.0. Almost 400 people in attendance. All online, blogging every word.
But not smays. My Thinkpad wireless refused to work which might have been a good thing since I could pay attention and not worry about blogging the event. Pretty big announcement by Microsoft on how they’re integrating RSS in IE 7 and Longhorn. Looked pretty cool to me.
Jonathan Schwartz on executive blogging
Jonathan Schwartz –president and COO of Sun Microsystems– on executive blogging:
“If you want to be a leader, I can’t see surviving without a blog. It’s as important as having an e-mail account and a mobile phone. It doesn’t count if you delegate the task of maintaining your blog to someone on your staff.”
Schwartz says that too often, communicating with employees and business partners is like a game of telephone. You speak to a group of people close to you, and they speak to their teams, and so on and so on. With a blog, “you hop through 12 layers of management to get directly to someone in New Zealand.” It also opens up a channel for receiving feedback and ideas from that employee in New Zealand.” [Fast Company]
I have been (gently) lobbying the COO of our company to consider blogging. He’s a smart and funny guy (neither necessary for blogging) and would be very good at it. But it is a bit like having a puppy. A lot of work and sometimes messy.
Robert Iger on Disney’s New Media strategy
Robert Iger, the future CEO of Disney:
“(We will) not allow management of traditional businesses to get in the way of very, very important migration to new-media platforms.”
Hmmm. Disney probably has enough money to pull that off but I’m not sure how smaller companies (like ours) accomplish this. The landscape might look very different in a few years. [Hollywood Reporter by way of E-Media Tidbits]
Everybody knows (Leonard Cohen)
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
And everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
And everybody knows
— From Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen
Internet radio “not real radio”
David Goldberg is VP/GM for Yahoo! Music, the home of LAUNCHcast. From his keynote speech at last week’s RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter) Las Vegas Summit:
“We really want to replace broadcast radio for music discovery. We believe music will migrate off of terrestrial radio to the services we are offering because we can deliver the music consumers want, when they want it, where they want it,” he explained. “We don’t believe music will continue to be broadcast on analog radio. Terrestrial radio will continue as a very successful, profitable business — but it will be mostly talk (he cited the only formats growing on terrestrial radio as Talk and Hispanic),” he said. And, he explained, this goes for satellite radio as well.
Susquehanna Radio Senior VP Dan Halyburton claimed that since Yahoo! Music couldn’t bring the “personality” and “local community” like AM and FM radio, it’s “not real radio.”
Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario
“In the April 4 print edition of Advertising Age, columnist Bob Garfield laid out a sweeping vision of an advertising industry caroming toward chaos and disruption wrought by the digital media revolution. Boiled down, his theory goes something like this:
The marketing industry is currently whistling past the graveyard and largely ignoring signs of massive, fundamental changes in how the business of mass marketing will be conducted in the near future. The broadcast TV model is working less well each year and will eventually cave in on itself as it reaches ever-fewer viewers with a fare of low-quality programming and mind-numbing clutter. Marketers will increasingly abandon it. But despite their glitzy promise, the aggregate of new digital technologies — from Web sites and e-mail to cell phone content and video on demand — lack the infrastructure or scale to support the minimum amount of mainstream marketing required to smoothly sustain the U.S. economy. The result, as the old systems are abandoned and the insufficient new systems struggle to carry an impossible advertising load, is what Garfield calls “The Chaos Scenario” — a period of serious disruption moving like a tsunami through the marketing business as well as the economy and the broader society itself.”
I’ve been unable to find the full article but did find a report about the article (audio – transcript) at OntheMedia.org.
I might have mentioned this before but it bears repeating. My dad was a radio guy for 30+ years and I’ve been at it –in one form or another– for 33 years. Radio has been “berry, berry good to me.” And during the dozen years I worked in local radio, I estimate I wrote and/or produced 60,000 commercials. And I believed they “worked” for the advertisers who paid for them. And they believed they worked. And many of them did work. But I now wonder if wasn’t a little like believing the wine turned into blood. A matter of faith, based on… faith. Commercial transubstantiation.
Word of mouth was probably always more effective than radio or TV or newspaper ads. But how many people can one person talk to in a day? Not so many in 1955. In 2005… with a website… you can reach a lot of folks. And when Doc Searls says he likes this IBM Thinkpad, I believe him. Or Halley Suitt recommends an author. Or Chris Pirillo tells me he likes his iRiver mp3 player… I believe them. Because I “know” and trust them.
When I’m shopping for a (fill in the blank), I go online and read the reviews of real people. And yes, some shrewd marketing type could spoof me with a bogus review, but a hundred (a thousand!) others would have a different opinion. It’s getting hard to lie/exagerate/bullshit your way to a sale. Bob Garfield said it much better:
“The total democratization of media, combined with ultra-targeted ads consumers actually opt to see. We, the people, cease to be demographics. We become individuals again.”
Practical Living Will
I, Steve Mays, being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by any artificial means. Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of peckerhead politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it.
If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and ask for a cold beer, it should be presumed that I won’t do so ever again. When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my spouse, children and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day. Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn business, and pay attention instead to the health, education and future of the millions of Americans who aren’t in a permanent coma and who nonetheless may be in need of nourishment.
Under no circumstances shall any politicians butt into this case. I don’t care how many fundamentalist votes they’re trying to scrounge for their run for the presidency in 2008, it is my wish that they play politics with someone else’s life and leave me alone to die in peace. I couldn’t care less if a hundred religious zealots send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me. I don’t know these people, and I certainly haven’t authorized them to preach and/or crusade on my behalf. They should mind their own damn business,too.
If any of my family goes against my wishes and turns my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back from the grave and make his or her existence a living hell.
— Author unknown
Bill Gates on education
Bill Gates to the nation’s governors at the National Education Summit on High Schools: “America’s high schools are obsolete.” Some data points from Gates’ keynote: The US has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. Only 68 out of every 100 ninth-graders graduate from high school on time, and most need extensive remediation after that. Only 28 of the original ninth-graders make it to their sophomore year in college. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow,” said the Microsoft chairman, who is hiring about half of his new talent overseas.
The internet is the network no one owns.
That jumped out of a post by Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine and –at first glance– it seems too obvious to mention. But the company I work for was started by a man who built and owned (owns) a radio network. He didn’t own the radio stations but he owned the network that provided them content (news, sports, ag). Others might have been able to produce the content but (back then) had no affordable way to deliver that content to the radio stations. When our founder put in a satellite uplink, we had an even greater advantage. Faster, cheaper, better quality.
We still have the satellite uplink and the downlinks and we work with more radio stations than ever. But more and more of our content is now “delivered” to our affiliated stations via the internet. Very close to not needing the satellite system at all. If we were starting the company today, it would almost certainly be web-based. And the podcast explosion is sure to add another interesting dimension.
Other nuggets from Jeff Jarvis’ post:
* The audience often knows the news before we report it.
* A blog is a little First Amendment machine (Jay Rosen)
* Google is a brand killer. People find what they want from any source and don’t credit or remember the source.