“Radio analysts say Clear Channel, along with other broadcast radio stations, is being pushed online and toward new technologies by a fragmentation of its own market and by growing competition from satellite radio. Mix the power of Internet radio with those new delivery tools, and terrestrial radio begins to look increasingly fragile, unless it’s online too, some observers worry.” — CNET
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Concrete TV
“Concrete Ron describes himself as “perhaps the greatest video editor of all time”, and anyone who’s ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn’t argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of “raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort” in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup.”
List making
I don’t make lists the way I used to. Many years ago I became a voracious list-maker. I attended lots of time management seminars and read lots of self-improvement books and was very much into being effecient and effective. It occurred to me last week that I no longer do very good job of making lists. I’m much more likely to scrawl something on a Post-It not. Or enter a new Task in Outlook. As a charter member of Anal-Retentives of America, I started wondering why. Here’s the best I could come up with:
For most of my 35 years as a working adult, I was responsible for “managing” others. Now, I’m pretty much responsible only for my own work. I can still appreciate the need for organizing and prioritizing my work but I just don’t seem to take the time make those nice, neat, numbered lists (with the A, B or C designations). It would be easy enough to check (15 years of Day-Timers in the upstairs closet) but I’ll bet most of those list items involved telling someone else to do something or checking to see if someone did what I told them to do. Only now, in retrospect, do I see how much I hated those little “nag lists.”
Maybe it’s like a bunch of people that all want to reach a common destination. They can get there much faster, and more comfortably, if they get on a bus. Everyone can shout out the best route but, in the end, only one person can drive. For some, the slave galley is a better analogy.
A few years ago I decided I didn’t want to drive the bus, even if it wasn’t headed in the direction I wanted to go. For now, I’m enjoying the ride… but I don’t mind walking.
Microsoft’s new search engine
I took Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin tonight and can’t say I was impressed. Looked a lot like Google but it’s hard to knock them for that. And it probably does some things that Google doesn’t but I didn’t take the time to try find out what they might be. I did an image search for “Steve Mays” and came up with two photos that truly capture the real me. But I’m a Google Boy to the very end.
This Internet thing.
NYU economics professor Nicholas Economides describes the Internet (35 years old in September) in terms of the industries it’s displacing. The U. S. Postal Service is becoming obsolete. In the last five years, more than one out of every 10 radio listeners between the ages of 25 and 34 have stopped listening (Clear Channel, Citadel and Cumulus Media have seen share prices drop 23%, 40% and 26% respectively in the last year). Newspapers have watched revenue from help-wanted ads plummet by more than $3.7 billion in the last five years. And telephone service is almost certain to see some big heavy changes.
Republicans
Regular visitors to this space have heard me flex my political cynicism in previous posts. I’ve often said it doesn’t matter who we put in the White House. They’re all lying politicians… blah, blah, blah.
But this campaign –and the prospect of four more years of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft– has given me the willies. Im fearful. This time, I think it matters a lot. So I’m talking through my fears here.
I didnt plan to watch the second debate but got hooked and couldnt turn away. At one point I recall thinking that if Kerry did too well in this debate and the next, an accident might befall him prior to the election. Shudder.
Those of you that have found your way here before also know that Im prone to let others do my thinking –or at least my talking– for me. George Carlin, Dennis Miller and others just say it/write it better. Like Garrison Keillor, who rails on Republicans in his new book, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America:
“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom, panjandrums of Ponzi marketing and the grand poo-bahs of Percodan, censors, spin dentists, Swiss bankers, hit men, body snatchers, mouth breathers and tongue thrusters, testosterone junkies, oversexed hedge-hogs, brownshirts in pinstrips, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, randy preachers, marsupial moms and chirpy news anchors, UFO scholars, johns, shroomheads, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, wizened aliens, aluminum-siding salesmen, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, braying, smirking, scratching on the national blackboard, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, who for almost four years has looked as if here were just about to say something smart, not much introspection going on here, no inquiring minds eager to learn about the world, not much chances of anyone picking up a book that isn’t on the official reading list and hearing a still small voice, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk, supported by millions of good folks who do not share the anarchist dream but sleep well with this West Texas sphinx for a nightlight. Republicans: the No. 1 reason why the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”
Roger –who is too smart and too kind to be the Republican he believes himself to be– said he was bothered less by the things Keillor is wrong about than by the things he is right about.
22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet
From the Pew Internet Project: ” 22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet. The percent of seniors who go online has jumped by 47% between 2000 and 2004. In a February 2004 survey, 22% of Americans age 65 or older reported having access to the Internet, up from 15% in 2000. That translates to about 8 million Americans age 65 or older who use the Internet. By contrast, 58% of Americans age 50-64, 75% of 30-49 year-olds, and 77% of 18-29 year-olds currently go online.” That last one is interesting. Would love to know what % of 18-29 year-olds listen to the radio.
Or wherever your final destination may be
I really hate flying. I hate everything about it. The short list includes:
* The shitty little bags of pretzels
* The chemical smell of the toilets
* The morons that refuse to check the baggage and slow the boarding process to a crawl as the park their fat asses in the aisle trying to shove stuff into the overheads. These same dumb-asses can’t grasp the concept of “wait until we reach the gate before standing up and pulling your shit back out.”
Air travel makes me resent people in wheelchairs…and old women on walkers…and children. Funerals and weddings of loved ones will get me on a plane again but it will be an act of duty and obligation. If I don’t look like I’m having fun when I get where I’m going it’s probably because I’m not.
Yes, Key West was warm and beautiful. And only a real party-pooper would complain about getting there and back. But the math doesn’t work for me. I need 100 hours of fun for every hour of travel time, and I never get it. And I never will. Let’s try this. I’ll spend a weekend on the beach with you for every weekend you spend sitting next to me while I surf the web. Come on, it’ll be fun.
Eastern Standard Tribe (Amazon summary)
“Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels. Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy. Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals.” — Amazon review of Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow. Or you can read it for free.
What the Internet Is
“World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else”
There are mistakes and there are mistakes.
Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We’re not going to do that again.
Other mistakes we insist on making over and over. For example, thinking that:
…the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while advertisers spray them with messages.
…the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should filter, control and otherwise “improve.”
… it’s a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of instant messaging systems on the Net.
…the Net suffers from a lack of regulation to protect industries that feel threatened by it.
–Doc Searls and David Weinberger