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June 28, 2004

Geekgasm

: Jason Shellen has a moment of rapture when his Treo talks to his TiVo to record 60 minutes.

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Apple & RSS

: Apple just announced adding RSS to its Safari browser and Vivek Shankar (of the Northwestern Hyperlocal project) just sent me the link to the demo. Most cool. Nice features, such as a slider to change the length of the listings. Amusing note: They say the feeds are ad-free, not something the client can control at the end of the day. Bottom line: How long before it's in IE?

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Dear Bill Gates,
:
: Jay Rosen sends Bill Gates an open letter with suggestions for his rumored blog.

Do a newsy blog. Something like: Bill Gates reads the headlines. Gates on politics and world affairs. Gates on the spread of freedom and markets, war and peace, public education, AIDS prevention, the limits of technology, the misery of Africa, and the difficulty of solving messy global problems. Gates on why the politicians are sometimes a joke. The big picture Gates. The occasionally angry Gates. Even the ranting Gates. The man who had to expand his knowledge in order to extend the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to its practical, global and problem-solving agenda.

Jay, ever the media historian, says there have been three ways for the rich, powerful, and famous to deal with media: (1) Lock them up. (2) Ignore them. (3) Hire a flack. This is a fourth way (a la Mark Cuban): Speak to your public directly.

Jay also gives Gates some practical suggestions: Hire a blog assistant. Ignore the lawyers.

I'm with Jay on the overall notion: Who needs to be humanized more than Bill Gates? Who needs a means of talking directly to the people without enough filters to clean up the Hudson more than Bill Gates? What modern business mind would be more fascinating to step into more than Bill Gates?

Plus, we fellow bloggers can suddenly find ourselves in the same club with Bill Gates. And we can all hope to get a little Gates link love (a microlanch?).

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And more Moore

: The Sun-Times has two good stories on one page about Fahrenheit followups. In the first, reporter Tom McNamee does a straightforward fact-check on the film. In the second, a MacArthur genius got so upset over the film that he found himself starting a revolution with nothing but his pooper scooper:

Saturday night, a 64-year-old man was walking his Doberman through a South Side neighborhood where residents have been complaining about dog owners not cleaning up after pets.

Patrol officers stopped the man -- community activist Sokoni Karanja, a onetime recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship -- to see if the dog, which was on a leash but without tags, had a license, police said.

But, officials said, Karanja became agitated and threatened to sic the dog on the officers. A scuffle ensued, and Karanja was arrested and slightly injured.

"He just saw 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' and apparently he was telling the police officers, 'George Bush does not control me,'" said Prairie District Lt. Dave Caddigan.

Police Capt. Eugene Roy said "the best way to summarize is he was distraught and upset after viewing the movie, and his wife attributes his behavior to that."

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More Moore: Health next

: Well, this is good news/bad news:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next.

Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

The bad news: If Moore does as blunt and bad a job of it as he did with war and politics in Fahrenheit and gun control in Columbine, it ratchets-up and dumbs-down the debate. What we don't need is more polemic and preaching to the converted and the sick. What we do need is intelligent, well-researched, strongly argued media that will set and change the agenda in both parties. Once upon a time, I might have thought that Moore could contribute to that debate. But that's my real problem after Fahrenheit: He merely seethes and it's too damned easy for the other side to ignore the slob seething in the corner.

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The Daily Stern

: Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute writes in the conservative National Review that the Senate had its head up its ass -- well, he didn't quite say that; I did -- when it sneaked in its indecent indecency bill last week. First, he argues that playing nanny is not government's job:

Parents like me should be rejoicing that our judicious and morally upstanding leaders are taking steps to protect our children from the filth in this world.

But there is another, less popular way of looking at the issue. That is, whatever happened to personal responsibility?

I have a serious problem with calling in Uncle Sam to play the role of surrogate parent and I would hope some others out there do too. Particularly troubling to me is the fact that so many conservatives, who rightly preach the gospel of personal responsibility about most economic issues, seemingly give up on this notion when it comes to cultural issues. Art, music, and speech are fair game for the Ministry of Culture down at the FCC, but don't let them regulate our cable rates!

He goes on to reveal the corner the censors are painting themselves -- and us -- into, for their primary rationale is that broadcast is pervasive and that's why it is excused from the First Amendment to the Constitution. Except broadcast isn't pervasive anymore; it's dying. Cable, satellite, and the Internet are pervasive. Does that mean they have to/want to regulate the speech on all those media? Uh-oh.

As traditional broadcasting dies a slow but certain death, do we start censoring "indecent" speech on cable, satellite, the Internet, and everything that follows?

In a free society, different people will have different values and tolerance levels when it comes to speech, and government should not impose the will of some on all. When it comes to minding the kids, I'll take responsibility for teaching my own about the realities of this world, including the unsavory bits. You worry about yours. Let's not call in the government to do the job for us.

Amen.

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In defense of the taste of the masses

: I was a TV critic during broadcast TV's -- and American pop culture's -- true golden age, when television was filled with good shows and those shows were also the most popular, proving -- against all popular snarking -- that Americans, the masses, do have good taste.

TV has changed but that doesn't mean we've lost our taste.

Kurt Andersen wrote/spoke about this on Studio 360 this week.

Television in the 90s was defined by smart, well-written prime-time network sitcoms like Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Seinfeld and, of course, The Simpsons.

But in the 90s the best shows were also by and large the most highly rated shows. That had never happened before. And mainstream TV was arguably superior to mainstream motion pictures. That had never happened before either.

Looking at the Nielsen top 10 in the 90s actually used to made me feel a little better about my fellow Americans. Western civilization wasn't necessarily in decline.

But that golden age, like all golden ages, was too good to last. In 1999, among the top shows were still ER, Frasier, Friends, 60 Minutes and The X-Files. But then within just a couple of seasons, the highest-rated programs were mostly,…not so good.

And ever since, most of the shows at the top of the ratings have been mediocre series...

Or worse. And he cues a clip from Survivor.

Kurt, of course, finds greater meaning in this:

So…what happened?

Some of it is just a matter of inevitable, uncontrollable boom and bust cycles, like farming. We're in a drought. But there's also an unmistakable generational underpinning to this trend line.

He says it was baby boomers who, as an audience, created the boom but it is also baby boomers who, as TV executives, are causing the decline:

And in response to the rise of cable TV, those big network executives are running scared…and making panicky, safe, second-guessed, uncreative programming choices, in favor of the dumb and the bland.

In other words, it may have been baby boomers who made prime-time great in the 90s…but it is also baby boomers who are turning network TV back into an unsatisfying wasteland today.

Interesting analysis but I'll argue that Kurt got it wrong. He's looking at media the old way -- just as folks who analyze weblogs on the basis of the power law do: This analysis says that the biggest shows/blogs/pubs/entities are what matter most because they're the biggest.

That's no longer true. In a world of extreme choice and consumer control, in a world of a zero-barrier to entry to publishing and of exploding TV, in a post-mass-medium world, you can't judge our taste or take our pulse based on the biggest. You have to look at the whole.

So when judging our taste on the basis of TV, you have to include cable and HBO in your sweep. HBO is now the fountain of the best TV in history and also the most daring TV because it can be, unfettered as it is by ratings and advertising. We watch those shows and even pay for them. We still have taste.

We also have lots of special interests that can now be satisfied by lots of cable channels: My wife and I could sit there and watch hours of home-redo shows yesterday. You can watch history or news or music or whatever you like. We still have taste.

There is more TV than ever. There is more great TV than ever. The audience for TV is bigger than ever. We still have taste.

So what about broadcast TV?

It is now just another niche. It's the biggest niche, but that's a matter of circumstances, economics, and habits; it is now the default, when-there's-nothing-better-on choice. They said for years that TV was a lowest-common-denominator medium and that wasn't true; as Andersen and I have argued, in the '90s, when given a chance to watch good shows, we did. But now we have other places to watch those good shows. So broadcast TV becomes the fast-food joint on the busy highway with the high rent that will slap out burgers; it's the tabloid sitting on the stands next to The Atlantic; it's the volume business; it's the LCD on the LCD screen. But you can't judge our taste as a culture based on what is shown just on broadcast TV anymore.

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A place for my stuff, cont.

: Blogfriend Rex Hammock just sent some amazing links continuing the wishful thinking about getting a place for all my (and your) digital stuff:

: Rex found this remarkable new service made available to every resident of Indiana (finally, a good reason to live there!): SimIndiana gives hooked-up Hoosiers free "word processor, e-mail, contact manager, spreadsheet, personal information manager, and file manager" and -- far more important than that -- a place for all that stuff:

If you create a document in SimWord® (SimIndiana's word processor), you do not have to save it to a disk or to a computer’s hard drive. With SimIndiana, you have the option to save your document in your virtual drive on the SimIndiana server.

The SimIndiana server is accessible on any computer with an Internet connection. Each user is provided a virtual disk drive on the SimIndiana server where files and folders can be securely stored and shared with other SimIndiana users.

SimDesk, the company that does this, has a similar deal in Houston. Damn. I want it. Do I have to move to get it?

: Rex also sent me the text of a story about a digital Place for My Stuff that he's running in one of his publications soon and with that, a bunch of links, including this one on the Digital Living Network Alliance -- which "established ground rules for building compatible electronic devices that can share movies, music and other media."

But far more fascinating is this link Rex sent for a truly visionary 1945 article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in which he envisioned the functionality of computers and, yes, a Place for My Stuff, not to mention the Web and Google:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory....

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

Welcome to that future.

(My original posts here.)

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The Stern bloc

: The Times writes about the New Democratic poll (days after we did) and its discovery of a Stern voting bloc:

Unfortunately for Republicans, a lot of these voters tune their radios to Mr. Stern, who has been crusading to oust President Bush. Mr. Stern is angry at the Federal Communications Commission, which cracked down on stations that broadcast a show of his that discussed anal sex and what the commission called "repeated flatulence sound effects."

Mr. Stern, who has backed Republican candidates in the past, has a mother lode of swing voters in his audience, according to a poll by the New Democrat Network, an advocacy group. Its pollster, Mark Penn, calculates that this "Stern Gang" of swing voters makes up 4 percent of the likely voters this year, nearly as large as the entire Hispanic vote in 2000.

But one bit of solace for Republicans is that Mr. Stern's listeners go to church frequently, which tends to correlate with voting Republican. The poll showed that Mr. Stern's listeners were slightly more likely than nonlisteners to call themselves born-again Christians and were three times more likely to attend church daily. The pollsters did not ask why they went to church after listening to Mr. Stern, so there is no way to calculate how many were performing an act of contrition.

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The transfar in Iraq

: By now you all know that power was transferred in Iraq, ahead of sked.

Stuart Hughes beat all the big guys breaking the news on his blog.

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