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April 26, 2005

Car stereo help

: I just bought a new car (very boring: replaced my Lexus RX300 with 115k miles with a Toyota Highlander) and I want to get a car stereo that meets these (simple) requirements:

1. It must have an input jack for my iPod, Sirius, etc.

2. It's OK if it has Sirius built in but I'm also fine with keeping that separate so I can carry Sirius back and forth.

3. CD and cassette and playing MP3s would be nice but not necessary.

That's not much. I mainly want that input jack so I can plug any of my gadgets into it.

Advice?

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More stereo comments.... I accidentally double posted the car stereo question and both posts got comments so I'm keeping this here because I don't want to lose the advice here. Thanks, all!

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Holding hands

: Bush is going to regret this photo.

: UPDATE: Great layout of the picture in a Texas paper.

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It takes a village to be a newspaper

: In a wonderful comment under a post below, Bala Pillai of Maylasia.net pointed to an interview that has an eloquent expression of what news should be -- a parallel to Hugh McLeod's oft-quoted (by me) contention that newspapers must stop thinking of themselves as things but as places where people come together to do good things. Bala Pillai:

I remember in my village where I grew up in Malaysia. When there was no media there. When we needed to find out what was happening in the neighboring village. We’d send one of us over. He’d go over. And talk to the headman. Get the party platform from him. And on his way back he'd go have a haircut at that village's barber. And there he'd get the grapevine. And between the two versions he narrates to us...See that was media for us that were news....

See what matters most to the village = media ok the reason is this... media used to be equal to community... because what mattered most to community equaled to the community... and what mattered most = media = community, as time went on, specialists creeped in... And in time the agency phenomena took over. Agency phenomena = agents become principals (another e.g. --> govt servants become masters) and thus media diverged from community. Media no more represented community. Nature abhors these divergences. It pushes towards equilibrium. So there was pressure to have facilities to enable this convergence and thus social software and citizen journalism

Beautifully put.

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The star shat in the woods

: PunditGuy is having a proper fit over celebrities discovering the unpaved earth:

Drew Barrymore Quote of the Day: "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

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The great American pastime, remixed

: Andrew Sullivan goes to a baseball game:

LOVED IT: I take it all back. The Nationals-Phillies game was great fun at RFK last night. Vile but irresistible hot dogs; a new foodstuff known as dippin' dots; occasional flashes of excitement interrupted by really hot guys with guts spitting into the grass; and, the piece de resistance, Karl Rove down front, chatting on his cell-phone. We had a blast.

Does Karl Rove qualify as a hot guy with a gut spitting?

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Exploding TV

: Rafat Ali has the story behind the Open Media Network, another means -- like OurMedia and Brightcove -- to distribute multimedia content without a old, closed network. I downloaded the ap and player (it wouldn't work via Firefox, only IE) and watched my favorite vlog, Rocketboom.

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Tipping point... or melting point?

: Just got the Wilson Quarterly with its cover story on "The Collapse of Big Media." Getaloada the intro:

Collapse is not too strong a word to describe what has happened to America's major news media. Stripped of their old economic and technological advantages, befuddled by the changing character of their audiences, and beset by new competitors, they are reeling from the blows recent scandals have dealt to their credibility and presige. Their old authority is one, and with it, perhaps their ability to define for Americans a shared realm of information, ideas and debate."

Youch. That pretty much summarizes the melting point.

: Stats from WQ compliled from many sources:

* Daily newspaper circ from 1990 to 2003: 62.3 to 55.2 million
* Number of daily U.S. papers from 1990 to 2003: 1,611 to 1,456
* By age group, percentage of Americans who read a paper yesterday: 18-29 - 23, 30-49 - 39, 50-64 - 52, 60+ - 60
* Time spent by 8-19 year olds on all media: 6 hours, 21 minutes; time spent on print media: 43 minutes
* Combined viewership of network evening news: 1980 - 52 million, 2004 - 28.8 million
* Median age of network news viewer: 60
* Percentage of people who believe all or most of what's on: network news - 24, CNN - 32, FoxNews - 25, C-Span - 27, PBS NewsHour - 23

: See also Chris Anderson's many stats on the media meltdown here.

* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

: See tipping-point posts here, here, and here. And much media here.

: And from PaidContent, see links to the Deloitte report on the not-so-bright future of network TV and Mary Meeker's powerpoint on the ad challenges. See this amazing chart from Meeker's presentation. Compare the ad dollars spent per household in each medium and guess where this is going:

And see this on classifieds in papers vs. eBay (and this doesn't include CraigsList!):

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(Unfortunately in-)frequently asked questions

: The Media Center -- the real forward thinkers and nudgers in the news business -- asks a few great questions in their latest brief tome (a pdf):

OLD QUESTION: What is the future of newspapers?
REALLY ASKING: Will editors and reporters have jobs in five years?
SHOULD ASK: How is a connected society informed? What’s paper got to do with it? What future are newspapers and TV networks creating? What story do they represent?

OLD QUESTION: What’s the no-kidding business model for newspaper companies?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust this Internet thing?
SHOULD ASK: Which business models enabled by the Internet and mobile, digital technologies best serve an informed, connected society? Can news enterprises reimagine their businesses?

OLD QUESTION: How do we make money?
REALLY ASKING: How do we continue doing what we’ve always done, maintain high margins, and control markets?
SHOULD ASK: What are alternatives to the advertising subsidy? What business models can capitalize journalism-based businesses? What is the value proposition for new forms of journalism?

OLD QUESTION: From where will journalism come?
REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust other citizens with journalism?
SHOULD ASK: How will a generation of talented storytellers use multiple forms of media to create and share stories that are relevant to the citizens of an always-on world?

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Flying over the shark

: Now everybody's going to have to blog from an airplane to say: wow, you'll never guess where I'm blogging from: an airplane. (See also the airborne email in Meeker's PowerPoint.) And then they'll IM. And then they'll Skype. And then they'll land.

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The cup will put you to sleep but the coffee will wake up you

: I missed this before but 601am belatedly wakes me up to the news and I hadn't even noticed because the brown this-cup-is-too-hot-for-human-consumption thing covered them up but Starbucks, ever in search of a new form of cultural pap, is quoting grande celebs (that is, merely medium) on its cups, and some of them include: Al Franken, Goldie Hawn, Ken Auletta, Yo-Yo Ma, Keith Olbermann, Melissa Etheridge , Ken Burns, Jonah Goldberg, Po Bronson, Quincy Jones, Chuck D, Deepak Chopra. Gag me with a double latte.

Noah benShea's quote: "Do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children, and their children’s children." That belongs on a doilie, not a cup.

And Goldberg's: "Everywhere, unthinking mobs of “independent thinkers” wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them." That is here because it wouldn't fit on a Hummer bumpersticker.

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Anybody for a new agenda?

: A few polls indicate that Bush hasn't picked the right agendas out of his hat.

: ABC News/Post poll on Social Security:

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling Social Security?"
April '05: Approve - 31 percent, disapprove - 64
Sept. '03: Approve - 43, disapprove - 46
Not a good trend line, eh?

"Would you support or oppose a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?"
April '05: Support - 45, oppose - 51
Sept. '03: Support - 64, oppose - 31

"Who[m] do you trust to do a better job handling Social Security: Bush or the Democrats in Congress?"
Bush - 32 percent, Democrats - 50

: ABC News/Post poll on judicial appointments:

"The Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others. Do you think the Senate Democrats are right or wrong to block these nominations?"
Right: 48 percent, wrong: 36 percent

"Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?"
Support: 26 percent, oppose: 66 percent

Try energy policy, George. And health care.

: UPDATE: Ankle Biting Pundits is growling over the polls.

: AND: I repeat my wish for open-source polling.

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