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June 07, 2004

Appled, piece by piece

: I can't wait to get the new Apple Airport Express. It took a few reads of the site to figure out all it can do for me:

I can be untethered in hotel rooms.
I can use multiple laptops in hotel rooms.
I can wirelessly play music from a computer on any stereo in the house.
I can extend my wireless network.

First, I got the iPod. Now this. Before long, I'll be an Apple customer again.

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Keys

: I didn't even know that Daily Pundit Bill Quick has a San Francisco real estate blog.

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Honest day's work

: I smell a trend: This weekend, I linked to a report that ex-VC Andrew Anker is now a corp dev exec at SixApart. Now The Times reports that Steve Harmon, an ex-VC, is joining LiveDeal as a corp dev exec.

So VCs are finally getting real jobs.

If you consider VP of corp dev a real job....

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Blog ads work!

: Jeff Sharlet, editor of the (just redesigned) Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU (under Jay Rose), writes to tell me about his experience with advertising. Moral of the story: Ads on blogs worked. Ads on "media" sites didn't. Now you could argue that's true in part because advertising blogs on blogs is a kind of commercial echo chamber. But no, the blogs blew away the competition. Jeff writes::

The Revealer spent 7 k on advertising in the last month or so (most of our budget). We decided to divide it, roughly, between conventional online media and blog ads. Blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water.

The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don't know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I'd estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason's Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing's, beat Beliefnet.

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The (Not Quite) Daily Stern

: WHERE'S THE BEEF? I was just thinking this weekend that there's now a good chance the indecent indecency legislation that was running through and is now hiding in Congress may not pass. The House passed its version. A Senate committee passed its. The Senate has not scheduled debate on the bill.

So perhaps naked Iraqis have displaced a naked tit in our legislators' priorities.

And sure enough, today the NY Times wrote that the legislation is stalled.

But for all the legislative posturing, the prospects for such a measure reaching President Bush's desk before the November election appear far less assured than they did a few months ago.

In the Senate, a measure approved by the Commerce Committee in March has yet to be scheduled for discussion by the full body. The delay in bringing the Senate bill to the floor is tied partly to the broader politics of the Senate, where Republicans, who hold a slim 51-seat majority, have had difficulty passing major bills. But for the senators themselves, there is also the peril of investing too much political capital in a divisive issue, which has pitted some social conservatives and child-advocacy groups against big broadcasters and civil rights advocates.

In addition, the Senate version contains other controversial provisions - including one that would seek to curb violent content on television, not just sex and swearing - that the House bill explicitly avoided.

"This looks like a cheap date to me,'' said Charles Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter. "You come out for motherhood, apple pie and 'decency,' and you know it's not going anywhere.''

Thank goodness for Congressional inefficiency and the common sense that bubbles up as a result. I know that there are legislators who knew they were supporting something unconstitutional. They convinced themselves they had to: How could you be against decency, they cried. But next at least some of them had to ask themselves: How could you be against free speech?

: KERRY, CENSOR: Some commenters tried to make hay out of John Kerry saying last week that he was in favor of broadcast content regulation where children are involved.

He has said that before. I have disagreed before. So has Stern. I don't like Kerry for that. I don't like him for other things, including his stand on media deregulation. But I do like him for many stands. That's politics.

Kerry is against expanding content regulation to cable. Small favor.

: BADA BING: Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute [via Ernie Miller] wrote at NRO who his daughter would not be watching The Sopranos (I, too, shooed my kids off to bed by 9p) and why that's his job, not Michael Powell's:

While all parents face this same dilemma of figuring out what to let their children watch, the choice my wife and I make for our child may not be the same choice the couple across the street makes for their kids. But that's the nature of life in a free society. It's filled with tough choices, especially when it comes to raising kids.

There is another alternative, of course. Our government could decide for us which shows are best for our children, or perhaps just determine which hours of the day certain shows could be aired in an attempt to shield our children's eyes and ears from them. While there are some who would welcome such a move, I would hope that there are still some other parents like me out there who aren't comfortable with the idea of calling in Uncle Sam to play the role of surrogate parent. When government acts to restrict what our children can see or hear, those restrictions bind the rest of us as well, including the millions of Americans who have no children at all.

Even if lawmakers have the best interests of children in mind, I take great offense at the notion that government officials must do this job for me and every other American family. Censorship on an individual/parental level is a fundamental part of being a good parent. But censorship at a governmental level is an entirely different matter because it means a small handful of individuals get to decide what the whole nation is permitted to see, hear or think.

Right.

: SUCKING SUCKS: Kurt Andersen said in his Studio 360 commentary that his producers actually debated allowing his show to air "L.A. sucks" and that some public-radio affiliates bleeped that phrase. That's how far this has gone.

The problem facing TV and radio is that to some community somewhere, saying something innocuous is going to be considered patently offensive. That's in the nature of indiscriminate broadcast media.

Consider one contemporary slang phrase: "to suck," meaning "to be inferior." Now once upon a time, in the etymological mists of the 1960s and 70s, I guess this intransitive verb referred to the transitive verb -- that is, to a particular sexual activity.

But it simply doesn't anymore in the current usage. To every American child whom our "community standards" are supposedly protecting, to say that something "sucks" just mean that it's lousy, stupid, crummy, crappy.

Uh-oh: the word “crappy” has its origins in an excretory activity, doesn’t it? ...

But for the last few years and especially the last few months, the FCC has dramatically raised the fines for indecent speech. And the FCC is also defining indecency more broadly than ever - in other words starting to ignore the context.

And broadcasters are buckling under. On this program a couple of weeks ago, for instance, in a discussion of a series of paintings about California, we aired a light-hearted sound bite of somebody challenging the idea that, quote, “L.A. sucks.” My producers debated whether to cut the quote out altogether - and decided against, but did feel obliged to warn all our stations in advance. Some of whom bleeped it....

In other words, you can really feel the chilling effect. Which to me is itself chilling.

Because the serious question we face here as a culture is whether we’re going to let our most easily offended communities dictate the rules of what can or can’t be said over the public airwaves.

Because if it’s the word “sucks” today, what’s it going to be tomorrow?

Too far.

: F THE FCC: Declan McCullagh of CNET argues forcefully that the time has come to kill the FCC. He's against how they're regulating both technology and speech.

These signs warn of an agency that is overreaching. If the FCC had been in charge of overseeing the Internet, we'd likely be waiting for the Mosaic Web browser to receive preliminary approval from the Wireline Competition Bureau. Instead, the Internet has transformed from a research curiosity into a mainstay of the world's economy--in less time than it took the FCC to approve the first cell phone licenses.

Michael Powell and George Bush: If you're true deregulators, then deregulate the FCC out of existence.

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Rose-colored eyeshade

: I guess they get tired of train-wreck stories in India.

Editors Weblog quotes the head of the Times of India -- which, I didn't know, is the largest English-language paper in the world with 2.4 million circ -- on making the news sunny even under clouds:

Pradaeep Guha, publisher of The Times of India, the world's best-selling English newspaper, said that his paper's editorial policy is to emphasize good news - even in the midst of tragedy. For example, "Let's say that there has been a train accident. 100 people died; but five were rescued. We will publish this news with the following headline, 'Big Train Accident, 5 Rescued'. We include all the details, but emphasize the positive," Guha explained, adding that both readers and advertisers had responded positively to the upbeat tone.

I should start reading their coverage of Iraq.

: Neil McIntosh of Guardian Online adds that the same company is reportedly selling editorial coverage in "edvertorials." Mid Day had the full story. Neil quite properly laments:

Is there nothing this newspaper group will stoop to in order to please advertisers? Selling advertising disguised as editorial. Adjusting the news agenda to better suit the surrounding ads. What next?

And he wonders when readers will start deserting their titles. But when one title alone has 2.4 million subscribers, I guess you can afford to lose a few.

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Fame and fortune

: The NY Times covers Gawker's custom-publishing for Nike.

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Behind

: I'm going to the Trendwatching event this week but I'm appalled that they and the supposedly trendy Tribeca Grand don't have wi-fi. Untrendy!
I now will not stay in a hotel that doesn't have at least wired high-speed access. Amazing they'd pick a such a hotel for something called Trendwatching!

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Sopranos lines

: My favorite line from last night:

Adriana... She wouldn't do five f'ing years. I thought she loved me...

: Howard Stern's was the discussion over the painting: "You're the general, Ton'!" And my colleague's Peter Hauck's favorite line: "Event planning."
: Yours?

: Turns out Aint It Cool News had accurate spoilers ahead of time.

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The Male Antidefamation League protests

: During a Howard commercial break this morning, I came in on the middle of a Billy Crystal interview on NPR (there's nothing worse than a serious Crytal... it's not fun, it's not funny). The interview, Susan Stamberg, without a micron of apparent irony, what he plays on his "Walkperson."
Arrrrggghh!
OK, that's it. I'm fed up with "man" being a bad word. I protest. I accuse NPR of bias and bigotry against us.

: UPDATE: Stan in the comments says I'm out of it (not the first time) and that "Walkperson" is from an old Billy Crystal bit (which, for all I know, could have been in the start of this fawnfest, which I missed.... anybody hear the interview?). I find no Google guidance on the connection.

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