Category Archives: Media & Culture

Sports franchises as media

Posted on by

Ted Leonsis, owner of Washington Capitals (NHL) & Washington Wizards (NBA), at Tuesday’s Business of Sports Symposium:

“…we’re our own media company. I announce things on my blog. I get 40 to 90,000 people coming to my blog, depending on the subject. I have a direct, unfiltered way to reach our audience now, and I think that harnessing that is what you have to do as ownership, because we are media brands. We’re in the subscription business. We call them season-ticket holders. We’re in the sponsorship business. We’re in the same business [as The Post]. When someone goes to find out something about me or a team or a player, and they go to Google and they type that in, I want to learn how to get the highest on the list, and I’ve done that. I don’t want The Washington Post to get the most clicks. I want the most clicks.”

Trends in Consumers’ Time Spent with Media

Posted on by

eMarketer has done some meta-analysis of data from dozens of research firms using a variety of methodologies. The result is a series of estimates of how much time consumers spend with all major media, regardless of multitasking or simultaneous usage, from 2008 to 2010. A few excerpts relating to radio:

The average time spent with all major media combined increased from about 10.6 hours in 2008 to 11 hours in 2010. TV and video (not including online video) captured the lion’s share of all media time, about 40% each year. The internet’s share of media time increased over the same period, from 21.5% to 23.5%, as did mobile’s share, from 5% to 7.5%. The share of time spent with magazines and newspapers fluctuated between 8.5% and 11.5%, while radio and all other media—video games, moves in theaters, outdoor media—declined.

Mobile devices received an average of 50 minutes’ worth of attention every day—the same amount of time allotted to newspapers and magazines combined.

While TV, print and radio will slowly lose ground to digital media. Those trends have been most apparent with print media in recent years, but are now beginning to show up in TV and radio usage as well.

Average time spent listening to the radio each day is 96 min. That still strikes me as a very respectable amount of time. The trend, however, is going the wrong way. What are radio operators doing to reverse it. What can they do to reverse it?

“Feel free to play in their walled garden, but don’t forget to cut your own grass.”

Posted on by

“Facebook is an amazing breeding ground for large-scale awareness, and an essential part of a social marketing strategy. But at the end of the day, it’s still someone else’s website. Someone else collects your customers’ email addresses and limits your ability to learn from and remarket to them. If you want to create real, lasting customer relationships, you have to figure out how to use Facebook to get customers back to the place where you have the most control – your own website. That requires a tightly integrated strategy that uses Facebook to deliver customers back to your domain.”

— Alex Blum (read full post)

The Blast Shack (Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks)

Posted on by

I think my first exposure to Bruce Sterling was The Hacker Crackdown (1992). Some years later, I read and enjoyed Distraction (“the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones.”)

He has written the best essay I’ve read on WikiLeaks (The Blast Shack). A few excerpts:

(Bradley Manning’s) war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction.

Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population

Trying Assange is “the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.”

Everybody wants everybody else’s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

(Assange is) a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed.

(Assange is ) just what he is; he’s something we don’t yet have words for.

If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does

American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline.

Julian Assange is “the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.”

Somebody else said it better

Posted on by

In a month this blog will be 9 years old. Should be very close to 5,000 posts by then. My friend George has been following along for the last several years and he says the blog has changed. He says I’m much more likely to post a line or two followed by a block quote from some other source. Or a video. Or a photo. George is of the opinion that I used to write longer, original pieces. I’m not sure he’s correct and it would just take some time to check but I’m willing to stipulate that he is right. So, why the change?

  • I’m less sure of my opinions. And, more importantly, feel less need to share them or -thank god- be “right.” I’m pretty sure I would be unable to pass Scott Adams’ “Ignorance Test” on a lot of subjects I’ve expressed opinions on. Oh, and it has finally sunk in that almost nobody really cares what somebody else thinks.
  • More (better?) places to share thoughts/links. When I started this blog in February of 2002, there was no Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Posterous, etc. A lot of the links and block quotes that used to land here, are shared somewhere else.
  • Somebody else said it better. I think this is the Big One. I read more (and more varied) stuff now than at any other time in my life. The web has exposed me to an almost infinite variety of ideas and perspectives. From people who CAN pass the Ignorance Test. Who DO know what they’re talking about. And who express themselves clearly and powerfully. So, if there’s an idea that I think is worth sharing, I link to them with an excerpt to pique your interest.

George is right. smays.com has become more about aggregation and curation. Maybe a little like my personal card catalogue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back here to find a quote or a video or reference that would otherwise be lost (to me) forever.

Pandora Radio

Posted on by

Top 40 radio was just what it sounds like. The 40 most popular songs played over and over and over. The idea –as I understand it– was people would rather hear the popular songs more frequently than have a bunch of new stuff mixed in.

The little station I worked at had a longer play list. Maybe 100 to 150 songs? It was pretty loose. Nobody got too upset if you mixed in something not in “the box.” But it was pretty easy to get burned out on the most popular songs if you played them every…single…day.

By the time I left in the mid-80s, I’d heard about all the music I needed for a while. And the only easy way to listen to music at the time was… on radio stations with very “tight” playlists. Somebody else was picking my tunes.

It was nearly 15 years before the iPod rekindled my interest in music. I ripped the few CD’s I had and started buying music on iTunes. It was nice.

The idea of “streaming” music didn’t immediately appeal to me. I wanted to “have” the songs. But when Pandora came along a couple of years ago, I gave it a try and was immediately hooked.

Now I start each day at the Coffee Zone (6:30) by popping in the ear buds and firing up one of my “stations” on Pandora. More on those in a moment.

When I hear a song I like, I give it a thumbs up. If I don’t care for the song, thumbs down immediately rejects it. I think you can reject up to 5 songs an hour. If I want to give my station more variety, I can add and artist or a song and Pandora will start mixing in similar music. It isn’t perfect but over time, Pandora gets better and better at playing songs I like.

And I can have as many stations as I want. If I’m feeling funky, for example, I jump over to my Al Greene station.

Pandora keeps a record of every song I vote up or down, including the date and time I did so. You can check this out if your interested. I can also bookmark songs and/or artists and post a link to Twitter or Facebook.

I was surprised by some of my choices. And by the percentage of new music by artists I’d never heard of. And songs I don’t think I’d hear on our local radio stations. And certainly not commercial-free. You can listen to 40 hours of Pandora a month for free. I opted for the paid version (Pandora One) which cost $36/year. Best money I spend.

Apps for the iPhone and iPad, of course.

Where is Your Mind Right Now?

Posted on by

This kind of moment has been happening more and more often. The most encouraging part of it is that it doesn’t seem to matter what the content of the scene is, only whether I’m aware enough to absorb it without assessing its implications to my personal interests. When my interests and preferences aren’t informing the picture — when I am not looking at it in terms of what it’s adding or taking away from me — it’s like I can watch it without being there. I am alive and aware without the normal heaviness of being a needy, self-obsessed human being. And that is where beauty is found. — (raptitude.com

This reminds me of the massive amount of data that floods into our brains every second. Every sense is pumping information that gets translated by the mind.

I have this fantasy of waking from a coma with no memory and being bombarded by this… tsunami? … of data. The light, sounds smells hitting my consciousness as if for the first time. What would that be like? Could we survive it?

Our minds (brain?) would throttle it back to something that would not make our heads explode. But what if we want to go the other way? Take the throttle off. Let the data come streaming in. But that’s not right. The data IS streaming in. We’re just not really experiencing it. What if I want ever photon? Every 1 and 0?

It seems logical that we have that capability. The hardware is the same. It must be the software that has robbed us of seeing all the world has to offer.

Perhaps if we reformat and reinstall?

Twitter and the Power of Giving People a Voice

Posted on by

“Many people are still focused on Twitter as a tool for promoting movies or TV shows, or see it as a toy that geeks and their friends play with to amuse themselves. The real power in what Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone created (and what Ev Williams later financed and built into a company) could well be that it is the simplest, the easiest and arguably one of the most efficient forms of mass publishing — or at least micro-publishing — ever invented.”

My favorite line from the post: “… a tweet can be passed around the world and back before newspaper reporters are even getting their shoes on.”