Category Archives: Media & Culture

NAB Radio Show down with New Media

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Scott reports there are at least eight sessions on “New Media” at the NAB Radio Show going on this week in Dallas:

1) Pod Squad – Getting the Drop on Podcasting
2) Text Messaging – Where U @?
3) How to Make Your Radio Station Website the Newspaper of the Future
4) Promotions with New Technologies
5) Harnessing the Power of Blogging
6) Radio’s Future in Focus: What Millennials REALLY Think
7) It Ain’t Just Radio: Where Else Can You Find New and Bigger Revenues?
8) Email marketing

Let’s hope Scott fires up that Blackberry and files some dispatches from a few of these sessions. We’ll post them here if we get ’em. They’ve got some people who know their stuff on the blogging and podcasting panels. (Scottie: Make Roger buy the tapes for those two sessions.)

Early adopters and the masses (Hugh MacLeod)

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“I’m astonished at how long it takes an idea to filter from the early adopters to the masses. What sort of person just read the Da Vinci Code or just discovered the iPod? I was standing in a nice store in a nice suburb and heard one 25 year old explain to a 30 year old what gmail was… it’s so easy to assume that everyone already gets it.”

— Part of the answer to one of ten questions Hugh Macleod posed to Seth Godin

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Ben Brogdon)

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A few days ago I posted on getting an email from Ben Brogdon who used to work in radio down in my neck of the woods (Northeast Arkansa/Southeast Missouri). As I always do, I Googled Ben and got a hit on the Broadway musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It ran from 1978 until 1982 (later made into a movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, Charles Durning et al) and Ben played in the Rio Grand Band, part of the original Broadway cast. I pinged Ben to see if he was “that Ben Brogdon”:

“Yassir, tha’s me. We had a western swing band in Nashville for the fun of it, and a friend of ours who produced Asleep at the Wheel (and some of Bob Wills later stuff, and Willie Nelson’s early stuff, and who also played with Buddy Holly when he was killed) hooked us up to the powers-that-were, and we went to New Yawk on a trial basis and just stayed a while. It was a great experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I honestly didn’t like living there very much. I will have to say, though, there sure was a lot of great music to hear, and some incredible restaurants. The play, by the way, was a lot better than the movie. I still sorta keep in touch with one of the authors of the play, Larry L. King. He lives in D.C., and still writes some. Great guy with a great mind.

In case you’re interested, I’ve worked with some kinda big name acts, but most of them were country. (Stonewall Jackson, Dottie West, Donna Fargo, Barbara Mandrell, and others). I did work a club in Nashville where we backed a lot of different people doing showcases, or even just settin’ in, and got to play with Tony Orlando, Lou Rawls and others. All in all, I’d say I’ve played bass for about 150 name or near name acts. And the number of great instrumentalists I’ve been fortunate to pick with still amazes me. I don’t know if you’ve heard of some of them, but Lenny Breau and Danny Gatton, as well as Roy Clark, Chet Atkins and some others are some who I’ve gotten to pick for. Now, please, I’m not name dropping, but I’ve been in the bidness a long time and have been very lucky.

If you saw The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas in New York at the 46th street theater in ’78 or ’79, I was probably playing bass. I left and went back to Nashville after about two years. You’ll also see me on a blues website, I think, and I’m on a lot of steel guitar things.”

Talk about your brushes with near greatness! Ben has agreed to let me interview him and we’re working on the details but it sounds like he’s got some great stories to tell. Stay tuned.

Hollie Farris and the Senath Light (Ben Brogdon)

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I recently received an email from Ben Brogdon, a long-time radio guy (KLCN, Blytheville, AR) who stumbled across one of my websites:

“I Googled my old hometown radio station, KLCN, Blytheville, AR, and found a link to your Early Days At KBOA site. I sat and read every word of it, looked at every picture, and finally went to bed at 6am.”

Ben is a musician at Dollywood and played in a jazz band in college with Wendell Crow (Sheryl’s daddy). We bounced emails back and forth for a few days before he brought up “the Senath Light.” This is (was) a well-known paranormal phenomenon (that I never witnessed).

“Actually, I never saw the light. Oh, we’d drive up from Jonesboro when I was living there playing in bands, working at radio stations, and attending class on occasion, and we’d sit patiently, not making a sound, those who smoked wanting a cigarette REALLY bad, and wait, but it never came out while I was there.

Others told me they had seen it, though. One of my jazz mates at school, Hollie Farris, a trumpet player who has the distinction of being the only white musician James Brown has ever had, and who QUIT a gig with Steve Winwood to go back with JB after he got out of prison, DID stand under that tree in the middle of the road and supposedly got KNOCKED CLEAN OUT COLD by the light hitting him in the head, which most assuredly changed his life and his thinking process from that moment on.

I also worked with a piano player from Caruthersville who could talk to spirits, and was told that he had actually TALKED to the light, which surprised me, since we all knew if you made a sound, it would disappear. BUT, having him sit in my house and tell me it was inhabited by spirits, which I had suspected, and then say once when we were watching a storm that it would kill 35 people, and it DID kill 34, I somehow believe he may have talked to the light.”

Why do I blog? So I can “meet” people that played with Holly Farris, the only white musician to play with James Brown.

Phone Whores

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In case you are not familiar with a term that I just made up, a phone whore is a woman who goes to the airport with no magazines, laptops, books, puzzles or other means to entertain her. All she has is a phone, and she’s going to use it, no matter how many people are annoyed.

The phone whore is motivated by the desire to talk with people. The phone asshole (male variety) is motivated by the need to have everyone on the flight know he’s negotiating important business deals and that he has staff members that must receive his wisdom.

— Scott Adams

 

Your online presence

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A thoughtful and well-linked post by Jim Mathies, wondering how a potential employer might reflect on his (Jim’s) online persona. I’ve posted on this topic a few times and thought about it again last week following an interview with a young man who was interested in a job with our company.

The job in question is web-related so I asked if he had anything online that I could look at. “Not really,” he responded. He read a little surprise on my face and added, “I have a My Space page.”

When I pressed him for a look, he reluctantly pulled up his page, which launched to the sound of music that could best be described as “urban.” And there was a nice photo of the young man striking a bit of a “gangsta” pose. (Like I’d know)

He seemed a little uncomfortable so I attempted to reassure him that I’d rather see his My Space page than some dry, lifeless resume.

But, as Jim’s post (and the NYT article that prompted it) reminds us, a lot of who we are it “out there,” just a Google or Technorati search away. I have no doubt I have written something that would keep a prospective employer from hiring me. But I wouldn’t want to work for a company that would not hire me based on something they read here. Younger bloggers might not have that luxury.

So, do you let the world know who you really are by letting it all hang out on your blog? Or, do you craft a sanitized, lifeless, carefully worded resume? Most pros would argue for the resume and they’d probably be right. Unless I was doing the interview.

Keeping customer data secure

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Some dumb-ass working for the government takes a laptop full of veterans’ records home and it gets stolen. Naw, that doesn’t surprise me. Big accounting firm like Ernst & Young pulls a similar stunt and loses 230,000 records belonging to one of their big clients. Okay, that’s a little hard to imagine… but it happened. Could it happen at a company like Amazon? Not if we can belive Werner Vogels, the company’s chief technology officer:

“…to get to Amazon customer credit cards you will need a small army of Marines. Although recently we have been discussing (how) to place physical and electronic booby-traps such that the servers will self-destruct when compromised, to deal with such full physically attack …”

Now that’s what I call contingency planning. I always to try buy from/through Amazon. Mr. Vogels is one of the discussion leaders at Gnomedex.

TiVo Guru Guide

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The guys at TiVo have rounded up a bunch of critics, editors and experts to pick as many as 10 of the best programs in their interest areas for each week and update their lists at least once a month. They’re calling it the TiVo Guru Guide. TiVo users who share their interests can elect to have the shows recorded and have a selection ready whenever they sit down. Program pickers will come from Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, H2O (Hip-Hop on Demand),CNet.com and Automobile Magazine. The Guru Guide will be available on the roughly 1.5 million TiVo units owned by direct subscribers to TiVo service. It won’t be available to the 2.9 million who get TiVo via DirecTV. So it’s a cool idea I can’t take advantage of.

I might actually use this (if I could) because I like/trust TiVo. I’d like it even more if I could rate the pickers. For example, they could offer movie picks from 5 different “experts.” Over time, based on their picks, I might narrow that down to just one or two whose opinions most closely match my own. [via Buzz Machine]

“Everybody is a network”

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“Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.” — Jeff Jarvis

You need to read the full post to appreciate the point Jarvis is making. I’ve been thinking about how it applies to the various networks our company owns. And what does it mean to “own” a network? We have contracts with the radio stations that make up our networks. We own the satellite uplink and the downlink receivers that distribute our programming to those radio stations.

Our company has purchased other, smaller networks. And it was the affiliation contracts and the contracts with advertisers that we perceived to have the greatest value. Has that changed? Is it changing? Stay tuned.

Tattoo: “Do Not Resuscitate”

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A great grandmother wants to make it absolutely clear where she stands should she ever become incapacitated. So, at age 80, Mary Wohlford of Decorah, Iowa, has had the phrase “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” tattooed on her chest. In addition to the tattoo on her chest, Wohlford has a more binding document in a prominent place. She has signed a living will and has hung it on the side of her refrigerator.

Sorry, Mary, but it doesn’t matter what you want. The Pope and Jerry Falwell and some dicks in Washington will decide this matter for you.