Esquire profiles Roger Ailes

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I knew Roger Ailes was THE man behind Fox News but I had forgotten –or didn’t know– some of the other facts that make this Esquire profile so interesting. I know, you’re thinking an elite, East Coast rag like Esquire won’t treat Roger in a fair and balanced manner. Who can say? I can tell you that the piece absolutely savages Mr. Ailes.

You have to be of a certain age to remember or care what a lying turd Dick Nixon turned out to be but it was Mr. Ailes who put him in the White House.

He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — “I wasn’t worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting.” And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.

Can he make that horrible lightening strike twice?

“What kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?”

If you love Fox News, you gotta love Roger Ailes because he IS the network.

Scott Adams: Digital Ghosts

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A couple of years ago I imagined a sort of online immortality:

In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.

It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.

The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.

There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.

Today the always brilliant Scott Adams takes the idea a bit further but the similiarities are hard to miss. Just sayin’

When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.

Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.

Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.

When the technology disappears

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“One of the things I love about the iPad, for instance, is when you’re using the iPad, the iPad disappears, it goes away. You’re reading a book. You’re viewing a website, you’re touching a web site. That’s amazing and that’s what SMS is for me. The technology goes away and with Twitter the technology goes away. It’s so easy to follow anything you’re interested in. It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.”

— Twitter founder Jack Dorsey on Charlie Rose

9 years, 5,000 posts

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In a couple of weeks I will have been posting here for 9 years. And a couple of days ago I posted for the 5,000th time. Let me hasten to add, most of those are quotes and links and such, but every one something I found interesting and worth sharing.

There’s not much I can say about blogging that I haven’t said here, countless times. The greatest value continues to be as an archive or, perhaps, a knowledge base (for me).

Twitter and Facebook and all the rest will come and go, but I’ll continue to note and share stuff here.

A little child shall lead them

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I am endlessly fascinated by technology. How we use it and how it changes us. The photo is of a couple of regulars at the Coffee Zone. I remember when dad switched to the iPhone. And later when he started asking me about the iPad. It seems ages ago but it was only months ago.

She plays games on the iPad and watches Netflix movies. But there will soon be nothing she cannot do on the device.

It’s inconceivable (to me) that she won’t have this with her in class. That will be delayed because not all of the kids will have them and etc etc.

I can’t even imagine how this will change education. Of course, education will have to change but that seems inevitable.

We’ve had hallway discussions at our company about the various tablets and platforms (Android, Windows, iPad, etc). My friend Phil (a very smart guy) assures me a lot of companies will take the “safe and secure” route of Windows devices.

But the kids in this little girls class could care less about Word and Excel and all the rest. They want to have fun and create and that will be on the iPad (for the forseeable future). You can take it to the bank.

David Cain shares A Day in the Future

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“Then I turn on one of my favorite machines. It’s about the size of a book. It has a glowing window inside it. A single page. But I only need one page because its contents change at my command. Sometimes there are words, sometimes photographs, sometimes both. The photographs can move and talk. The stuff in the book can be written by anyone in the world, even as I’m reading it. There’s more in that book than I could ever read. It provides me with unbelievable advantages. Anything I don’t know, I can find out in a few seconds. I can get instructions on how to do pretty much anything that has ever been done. I can summon complete histories of almost any person or culture you could name, expert opinions on anything at all, unlimited advice, unlimited entertainment, unlimited information. I can buy pretty much anything from where I’m sitting, and have it brought to my door. I can even write anything I want and publish it myself. I don’t need permission or credentials. The whole world could read it.”

— David Cain shares A Day in the Future

Sports franchises as media

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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.”