Category: Rants

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Starring At The Bar

Now that I have some stability in my life, I’ve been thinking and wanting to spend more of my time and attention on the things in life that I am truly passionate about. It’s mostly nerdy things, wanting to blog more and start yet another podcast or three, get back into computer programming, maybe learn an instrument like piano or how to play the guitar that i got for Christmas years ago, gathering dust in the corner.
I get inspired by great content and the people that are behind it, but at the same time, while listening to great audio podcasts like Radiolab, I imagine the eight year old version of myself starring up at the monkey bars on the school playground; the bars seemed just out of reach, but at the same time, a lifetime away.

There are great podcast like You Look Nice Today and Radiolab that while listening I am just amazed at the level of production and the amount of time that has to be put into each episode.  There is an almost dibailitating thing by spending too much time watching and listening to everyone else’s work, especially when I’m are just starting out and don’t have a body of work to show, that scares me from taking the first step in creating something of my own. I think of shows like Radiolab and This American Life as the shows that all others are judged by and the little lizard brain that I spend way too much time listening to and following it’s advice has scarred me into inaction much of my life.

I get these fits of energy and focus, where I am able to shut out the voice in my head and actually create something, anything with my mind and hands. There is usually a process that envolves me buying yet another domain name in hopes that this time (about the 70th time) that I will actually make something and keep up with it. A podcast that maybe goes 6 episodes or a new blog with 4 posts is my normal tolerance to stick with something. I feel at times as a litterbug on the internet, littering the web with these scraps of content that exist forever, never to decompose.

This single blog post is something that I have kept coming back to and rewriting for almost a month. Each and every time, starting by reading and deleting most of the words that I somehow thought were good and descent writing on one of my sleepless nights, but I have to come to a point where I can let my work out and let it stand for me, and in a way that is a very vulnerable thing.  Maybe I should just click publish.

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Foursquare & Gowalla Need City Managers

It has been almost a year since geolocation services like Fourspare and Gowalla came into the iPhones of nerds (myself included) that made the annual pilgrimage to Austin Texas for South by Southwest Interactive. The Austin based Gowalla had a significant marketing presence at last year’s conference while Foursquare was stronger out of the gate, being the must have app for SXSWers looking for the hot parties and the who’s who’s of the tech world each night and filling out their badge sashes with the all-night benders that are a SXSW staple. Gowalla picked up steam throughout last year, and now many people (myself and most of my friends) use both apps whenever they remember to check-in somewhere.

Continue reading “Foursquare & Gowalla Need City Managers”

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The Internet and Stupid people.

Below is a post I wrote for discussion in my Mass Media and Behavior class about Stupidity and the Internet.

The topic of stupidity and its suspected growth has become a topic for conversation in the culture. Movies like Idiocracy and the documentary titled “Stupidity” have investigated the roots and imagined the possible future world of idiots. I think what lies at the root of the issue is a lack of critical thinking about our lives and the world around us.

In Idiocracy, Mike Judge shows us his vision of the future we’re headed for as people become mindless zombies and are beholden to the large corporations that infiltrated the government. I personally would enjoy having a Brawndo-esk energy beverage piped into my home, but not replacing water as in the movie.

I hate to go on a education bashing rant as I aspire to become a teacher, but I feel that there is a lack of using critical thinking skills as a way to examine the world. In school we are taught the scientific method as a way to test our hypothesis about a science experiment but that valuable analytical process isn’t applied to other arenas.

Everything we’ve learned and discuss in class involves looking beyond the first glance and analyzing the issues and motives of the people who bring us the news and entertainment.

I think the internet and the growth of new media can lessen the brain drain of TV with the larger variety of content the reaches targeted audiences and engages audiences better. Certainly spending countless hours watching cat videos on YouTube isn’t going to expands one’s horizons, but it is the interaction through the internet that engages people. A recent study from the University of Stiriling showed that avid facebook users had an increase in working memory capacity versus control and social networking and youtube study participants.

It was in colleges where the internet was born and raised and academia as a whole has a vested interest in seeing knowledge spread and the internet not become a vast wasteland. Most teachers dislike Wikipedia, but I see that as a missed opportunity for academia to open the gates spread the knowledge for the betterment of society. Projects like MIT’s open course ware are all about sharing the mountain of accumulated knowledge. Sir Isaac Newton was famously quoted as saying “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He was referencing the great minds that had come before him and their learning making his discoveries possible, and I think that the internet can be a tool to help others jump up on our backs and see farther.

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Newspapers and the Internet Today

Below is a post I wrote for discussion in my Mass Media and Behavior class about newspapers and their role in the digital age.


Newspapers like other old media formats has had to find ways to coexist and continue to be profitable in the digital age. The subscription and classified revenue models that newspapers subsisted on for decades is in rapid decline as subscriptions continue to drop because more and more people are getting their news from internet and TV.

With the growth of ebay and craigslist the money that newspapers would get from classifieds ads has been drastically decreasing as well as more and more advertisers are finding better success and higher engagement with internet advertising putting more strain on newspapers.

Today it was announced that the New York Post is going to close its bureaus in New York, Chicago and Las Angeles; another strike for newspapers. With the growth of the internet the number of news outlets has grown and the pace that information travels is something that Gutenberg could have never guessed. Even now the 24 hour news networks are having trouble keeping up with breaking news and more and more people are using twitter where breaking news can travel the globe in seconds. MSNBC has recognized this shift and partnered with a leading twitter account, “BreakingNews”, to share content and assets with each other.

The way that people access the news has also changed, RSS readers and search engines are huge sources for new content and News Corp has recognized an opportunity to profit. News Corp signed a deal with Microsoft and their new search product Bing.com that will give Bing exclusive access to indexing News Corp content. News Corp has been vocal in their opinion that search engines should be paying newspapers for access to their content and the deal with Microsoft told to be worth one hundred million dollars could be the first in a wave of print publications that begin to limit access to their content. Several newspapers have tried subscription models with minimal degrees of success.

There has been a rash of newspapers going out of business or consolidating, reducing competition and consumer choice in print, but blogging more a viable reality than ever. It’s odd, colleges are reporting an increase in the number of journalism majors yet regular jobs in the media are on the decline. There is a twitter account called “themediaisdying” all about reporting the painful death of old media. The opportunity is for journalists to dive deep into topics that interest them and they can become their own boss. A battle that has yet to be tried out in the courts is in matters of freedom of the press, where reporters need to keep secret their sources and the court system will someday have to create the water test of what nowadays can be counted as the press.

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The Music Industry

The below is a rant I wrote for a school discussion topic for my mass media behavior class and I thought I would post it here too.
The digital revolution and the growth of the internet has vastly changed the music business with the availability of cheap multiple track recording software, and the sharing and social networks the internet has made possible. I think that the idea of “making it” has drastically changed in the past fifteen years. I am reminded of the movie, Airheads, where the protagonists take hostage of a radio station in attempts to get their demo tape aired and get a recording contract. The idea that today any artist would be signed by only listening to their demo tape is laughable as well as the idea that signing the record contract would make the artist rich.

The digital age and file sharing has greatly hurt record companies and radio stations, but has been used by artists new and old to grow and strengthen their fan bases. For artists, selling records is no longer where the majority of their money comes in from, it’s from touring and merchandise, and ancillary revenue streams that come from being a star. The business of selling 20 dollar CDs as been replaced with 99 cent download singles and 3.99 dollar ring-tones; for too long record companies and the RIAA fought to protect their old business model instead of innovating and embarrassing new technology. They thought for too long that using DRM would force people to purchase their licensed digital goods, but often forced consumers to other places to find music.

Radio stations too are fighting to protect their long held business models in the new landscape of audio options that consumers have as the number of devices that listeners increases. With satellite radio, iPods, CDs, and internet radio, and others there is no lack of choices in audio entertainment where terrestrial radio once dominated. Video killed the radio star and the internet killed the radio station; radio stations can no longer charge their outlandish CPM rates with declining listener-ship and cheaper, more effective targeted advertising that is available on the internet. Radio ownership deregulation reduced the variety in programing and the days where DJs had actual influence on which songs get played are long gone. Clear Channel has national syndicated programming that airs across the country reducing costs and jobs; this also gives them huge sway with record companies that are trying to get their music played.

A topic that wasn’t covered in either side is the consolidation of music venues and ticketing agencies and the impact that has on newer artists. Earlier this year, Live Nation and Ticketmaster announced a proposed merger worth 2.5 billion dollars that would merge the largest ticket seller and largest venue/concert promoter. Luckily the merger has been meet with some vocal opposition, mainly in the UK as the merger would almost certainly create a monopoly on first rate concerts and shows. Already large music acts like Michael Jackson and Madonna sign deals with Live Nation because they no longer need the support of a record company to get their music out there, but the problem is for newer and indie acts that can be locked out of Live Nation venues. The merger could mean higher ticket prices and could almost eliminate the secondary ticket market.

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Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog on the Emmys

Last week Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog made news winning the first Emmy for a show that never aired on TV.  This was just another in the line of firsts that Dr. Horrible’s has blazed since it debuted on the net last year and became a run-away success, showing that the internet TV business model could be profitable.  Last night Dr. Horrible broke into the Emmy broadcast in a skit that poked fun at the advancing new media early day technological problems. Some on twitter found the skit in poor taste, but think it is just cute as the old media is trying to combat new media and we will see who will have the last laugh as more and more of our entertainment is found online.

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Where did all my followers go?

Many twitterers awoke Friday morning to find that they had a significant drop in the number of people following them. On Thursday, twitter admins pushed several changes through the system to help identify and clean out spam accounts as well as clear up some lingering database issues that reported incorrect data for some users.  I, myself, saw a drop of more that 60 followers following the recent change.  As one might imagine, the sudden and drastic change in follower count alarmed and angered many users.  I feel these users don’t really “get” twitter and are fixated on increasing the number of followers they have, but I feel they are really missing out on what twitter can offer to those who engage in the community and provide useful content.
Twitter Fail Whale is back
Creative Commons License photo credit: playerx

Having been a twitter user since January 2007, I can regale new users of a time when there was free access to the public time-line, and the top users were almost exclusively the nerd famous, with the top user with the most followers switching back and forth between Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose.  Those times are now just a distant memory as twitter has become infiltrated by spammers and self branded social media experts. Not long after twitter integrated the trending topics section into the main site design, did those topics become the opponent’s flag in a online capture the flag game where spammers latched on to twitter and spew forth their wares in attempts to gain the recognition of being on the trending topics list. Trending topics is a whole other issue as its usefulness has decreased and doesn’t give any back story as to why something is a trending topic. When you click on a trending topic in hopes to find out why it is a trending topic, you are bombarded with dozens of users tweeting out that same question as well as an alarming amount of users that send out tweets just listing all the trending topics in hopes that someone will click and follow them.

Fighting spam is something that twitter has to be very proactive in if they are not turn into a myspace of friendster. If twitter were a comedy club, spammers would be hecklers shouting out nonsense in attempts to get attention. The spammers feel they have a right to be there, but are ruining the show for everyone else that came to the show. To the people dismayed at their loss of their fake followers, I say get evolved, and engage users; if you provide value to people they will follow you.  The true value of twitter is in the conversation.

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A scientific view of America’s Economic problems and a way out

At this years TED Juan Eriquez gave a great talk analyzing what caused the problems that we are facing today in the economy and how we can be headed on the right track back to a growing and strong economy (remember those days). I agree with and take heart his theory that how we can create the new economic growth is to invest into science and children. The previous administration has set back America’s bio-tech efforts by almost a decade with his banning of federal funding for stem cell research. In Eriquez’s talk he urged the well to do venture capitalist types that gravitate to events like TED to invest into these growing technologies like biotechnology and robotics.

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PepSuber

As part of Pepsi’s new re branding campaign and super bowl promotion, Pepsi teamed up with Saturday Night Live to produce 3 Pepsi themed commercials that aired during last night’s broadcast. There is an unofficial pepsuber twitter account for Pepsi fans. There was some outrage from people that SNL sold out, but I think that it is the kind of interesting innovative marketing promotions that advertisers need to think of in order to stay competitive in the down market. The Pepsuber ads are just one part of Pepsi’s whole super bowl weekend ad push called Refresh Everything. They are also doing the Pepsi smash concert and there is the Will Arnett hosted Refresh the Super Bowl Party online at YouTube, where they produced short clips and invite people to upload videos of their own Super Bowl parties. All three SNL ads are posted below and the Refresh Super Bowl Party ad too.


http://www.refresheverything.com http://youtube.com/pepsi