Paul Boutin offers 101 Ways to Save the Internet. A few of my favaorites:
* Upgrade phone booths to Wi-Fi
* Death to fax machines. Send us an attachment instead
* Stop with the jokes
* Turn off your HTML email It makes you vulnerable to viruses – and bugs us.
From a website called Scarf Creations:
“Mike Smith has been a Elvis fan since he was 3 years old, when he heard his dad’s 8 track of Elvis. Mike’s career started when he was 25 years old and he performed in Kennett, Missouri. Mike has performed throughout Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois and Tennessee… at private parties, nursing homes, charity events, country clubs, restaurants, Wal-Mart Super Centers, etc. I perform in three stages of “Elvis” from his wild suits, 68 leather , to his most famous jumpsuits.”
“Besides doing Elvis, Mike works full time for Pepsi Mid-America in Sikeston, Missouri. I have performed 75 shows in the 3 years of my career as an Elvis impersonator and my recent being “The Jailhouse Rock” in Illinois.”
“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who wanted to be free.”
— George Carlin
“The number of religious sites devoted to the King is just staggering: Church of Elvis, The Eighth Day Transfigurist Cult, Elvis Sance, The Elvis Shrine, The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis, The Gospel of Elvis, Little Shrine to the King, and Oracle of the Plywood Elvis, and of course, The First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine.”
The review above was written by Kimberly Villalba Wright. I’m pretty sure I don’t know Kimberly but according to the credits on the review, she “was born in Hollywood, Florida, and has spent most of her life in Mobile, Alabama. She earned a BA in English at the University of South Alabama in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in the Epiphany, Arrowsmith, Doggerel, Dicat Libre, El Locofoco, as well as Poetry Caf. This fall, Wright will begin working toward an MFA in creative Writing at the University of Memphis. Wright currently resides in Kennett, Missouri.”
Kimberly… I’ll be in town Christmas Eve. Let’s hook up, pound some Buds and remember The King.
A recent Yankee Group report says the 30-second TV ad will soon lose top billing as our most valuable marketing vehicle and be replaced by Web-based video advertising. More at CyberJournalist…
From Tod Maffin’s upcoming editorial in Strategy Magazine about the future of television advertising, broadcasters, and the cable companies:
“…we’re at the end of the generation where people lock onto a station and keep with it for an evening. Today, our loyalty is to specific shows, not network or station brands. Nobody stays home to watch Fox TV; we watch Trading Spaces, then flip to This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then flip again. Digital television’s on-screen TV Guides and PVRs just reinforce the behaviour. We tune in by show brand, not station brand. ” [via Lockergnome]
Mark Whicker, writing for The Orange County Register, calls talk shows “a crack in the mirror of America. The reason that mudslinging works on the radio is simple: On the radio, Limbaugh is speaking to the dittoheads, the disciples who swallow everything. On TV, Limbaugh has to address the population as a whole.” [MercuryNews.com]
“Whatever else I’ve learned from going through boxes of old photographs, it’s clear to me now why people take pictures of people. It isn’t just to capture moments, to record history, to make art, or just to fool around, though it’s all those things and more. It’s to tell stories.”
— Doc Searls
So the RIAA is going after music pirates (they call them thieves). Our company produces original content and we get pissed when people rip us off. We’ve even gone to court a few times. What I don’t understand is why the tech world can’t beat this (forget right or wrong for a minute). When the CEO of one of the big record companies gets around to embezzling a few million bucks, he or she will have no problem tucking them away in some off-shore bank. Why doesn’t some Arab country set up secure severs for music swapping? I guess what I’m asking is, is this technically possible? I guess the RIAA would go after the ISP (and everyone else) that makes it possible us to connect to servers in other countries. I just don’t like thinking that Big Business can beat down the Internet.
I found this on Denise Howell’s weblog (Bag and Baggage). I’m unclear on whether these are her thoughts or David Weinberger but it doesn’t matter.
“The Bubble was never what the Internet was about. The Web is not primarily a commercial space, not even primarily an information space. The interest is not there because 800 million people woke up and suddenly decided they wanted to be research librarians. The bubble went away, but the Web absolutely didn’t. The Web remains interesting and important. Nobody would have said a few years ago we’d have 20 billion pages on the Web. It’s not just markets that are conversations, it’s businesses themselves.”