Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

Every movement scrutinized

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“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” — George Orwell (1984)

“They’re not talking to you”

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Herecomes

“Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It’s also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall and pick out clothes. And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing — why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us.”

From Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” This is a fascinating book that takes an academic –but easy to read– look at social networking and how it’s changing society.

Procrastinate like your life depends on it

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Doc Searls –who happens to be the same age as I– draws some insight from the movie No Country for Old Men:

“The central figure, Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a psychopathic killer who personifies death and chance in unequal measure.

His motives? His quarry is money, but that’s just a point on a path. There is no doubt that he will get the money, and that people will die along the way. But death itself has no motive. It is merely inevitable. Like Anton Chigurh. The Terminator, the Alien, the guy DiNiro played in Cape Fear… all the relentless bad guys we’ve known… don’t compare easily with Chigurh. Because all the others could be, and were, defeated.

Death can’t be defeated. In Chigurh, it could only be wounded, because he is death in human form. But he is still death.

Which is on my mind more as I get older. The old men in the movie — Tommy Lee Jones and cohorts of his generation — are barely older than me, if they’re older at all.

Being older, if not yet “old”, requires increased acquaintance with the certainty that Your Time Will Come.

I plan to procrastinate. For some things that’s a helpful skill.”

I’ll be 60 years old next Saturday and, like Doc Searls, mortality has been more on my mind. In coming days I might post a thought or two on birthdays that end in zero and what –if anything– I’ve learned in the last 6 decades (I like the sound of that better than “sixty”). But once the day has come and gone,  I’m going to try not to think/write about it.

Apple wants to be your news and information station

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“An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast. In other words – Apple wants to be your news and information station. The system would allow you to:

* Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
* Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
* Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.

The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.

Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.” – Apple Insider via Podcasting News

Hmmm. A listener in the states served by our networks could include one of our 4 minute state newscasts, a three minutes sports report and a farm report. That “stitching segments together” part is what I find intriguing. Terry Heaton wrote about the “unbundling” of media. Is this a “re-bundling” of media?

If I were programming a local radio station, I’d be damned sure I had a killer local newscast/podcast up on iTunes.

Google gets into local news

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Google News now allows you to localize a section of the stories. Scroll down just beneath the fold for the box to type in your city or zip code.

“This is pretty huge, folks, and it spotlights the need for everybody in the local news business to adopt best practices when it comes to unbundled distribution,” writes Terry Heaton. True enough, as Google News ranked #9 in Nielsen-Netratings for December — higher than USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.

If you’re a local news guy and look at this and say, “Ah, but they missed some stories!” … you’re missing the point.

Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete

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Doc Searls says the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

“We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder. Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods.

Will this someday be an issue for our networks? Radio Iowa. Wisconsin Radio Network. Nebraska Radio Network. Time will tell.

Can getting it wrong be okay?

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Terry Heaton speaks to the “accuracy” of stories reported online. His case in point was the early –and inaccurate– report that Heath Ledger died in the apartment of Mary Kate Olsen.

“What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

So a part of the “process” of news is mistakes, and the ethical question is does it matter in a world of news-as-a-process? I’m not so sure it does, as long as mistakes are corrected — just as, I might add, they are corrected in the news gathering process in professional newsrooms.”

Einstein: “A horse for single harness”

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“My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.

Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.”

Excerpt from an essay by Albert Einstein (Living Philosophies):

Dave Winer podcasts “because I want to say something”

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“There’s a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, but it’s framed this way –> if you can’t get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.

My phone doesn’t have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast.

I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. … I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It’s not why I podcast. … Blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional’s ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.”

You can read Mr. Winer’s full post here.

My colleague David is helping a number of clients with blogs and podcasts and none are ad supported. They exist solely to help tell the client’s story. Blogs and podcasts are inexpensive, effective, easy and fun.

For my part, nothing ruins a good hobby like trying to make money with it.

Too late for web training

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Mindy McAdams (Teaching Online Journalism) points to a very interesting post by Paul Conley. Mr. Conley has held senior positions at Knight-Ridder, CNN, Primedia/Prism and Bloomberg. He serves on the professional advisory boards of College Media Advisers, the national group that works with student journalists, and Northwest Missouri State University’s Mass Communications program. His clients include Primedia/Prism, Reed Business, About.com and IDG.

“I’m urging employers not to offer any training in Web journalism. There are two reasons for this. Here they are:

1. You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.
For someone to work on the Web, they must be part of the Web. That, after all, is what the Web means. The Web is a web. It exists as a series of connections. An online journalist isn’t a journalist who works online. He’s a journalist who lives online. He’s part of the Web.

It’s a waste of time and money to teach multimedia skills and technology to someone who hasn’t already become part of the Web. And there’s no need to teach skills and technology to the journalists who are already part of Web culture, because the culture requires participation in skills and technology.
Or, to put it another way — I cannot teach the Web. No one can. Yet all of us who are part of the Web are learning the Web.

2. When the fighting begins, the training must end.
We cannot move backward to round up the stragglers and train them to fight. It’s too late to try to convince print journalists that the Web has value. It’s too late to tell them that an Internet connection is worth a few dollars a month. As revenue shrinks, we can’t spend money on training. We can’t gather up the print folks and “prepare them as online journalists.”

You can’t prepare people to dig a fighting (fox?) hole. You just tell them to dig. And the ones who don’t dig fast enough, deep enough or well enough, die.”

Wow. I confess that I agree with Conley but would never say it around my reporter friends. What good can come of telling them it’s too late. The train left the station and they can’t run fast enough to catch it.