Past

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Happy 95th, Mom

March 13, 2008 in Past | 1 comment

This morning, as I began my walk to the train, I realized that it had been 5 years since Mom‘s 90th birthday party, which was an excellent event, and one she very much wanted to have happen, because she felt it was an important milestone and possibly her last. Which it was. She died several months later, felled by a stroke following minor surgery that went wrong. But she was awake and lucid nearly right up to the end of a good and very full life.

Somewhere around here I have pictures and even a video from that party. I’ll try to hunt them down and get them up on Flickr and YouTube. Meanwhile, it’s good to stay in position to keep spreading the abundance of love she gave for nine tenths of a century.

Honk

February 26, 2008 in Past | Permalink

People have been asking if my voice is back. Thanks, it is, mostly. But sleeping is hard for some reason. Too much good stuff going on, and to think about. And some of me is still on Pacific Time, while here it’s GMT.

Trying once more…

On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual

February 16, 2008 in News, Past | 8 comments

In The end of DAB is nowhere near nigh?, Russell Parsons says,

  …this morning’s announcement from GCap’s that it is closing two digital-only stations, Planet Rock and TheJazz, and selling its stake in national commercial digital radio operator Digital One to Arqiva, strikes a rather more portentous tone.
  With the UK’s largest commercial radio company running to the hills, branding DAB as “not economically viable”, where does that leave the suddenly maligned format? An experiment which is proving burdensome and expensive when set against internet radio or a misunderstood medium that is growing in popularity quarter on quarter?

The key phrase in that last paragraph is the one I bold-faced. This is the first time I’ve seen Internet radio treated with the respect due what will surely be the winning approach in the long run.

Meanwhile, PORS (my new initialism for Plain Old Radio Service: AM/MW, FM, shortwave) is growing ever more anachronistic — and so are efforts either to A) give it with a digital gloss (as do the IBOC digital enhancements to AM and FM, which have made listening worse on old radios while reaching too damn few new ones), or B) replace it with something new developed decades ago (such as DAB), while still sounding like regular old radio stations (while listeners are moving by the millions to iPods and other alternatives over which they are the ones in control).

Everyone’s time is scarce. On the whole, less and less of it will be spent listening to radios as we knew them. Even if the signals they get are called “digital”.

On toiling in Marketing Communications mines

February 15, 2008 in Art, Past | 1 comment

My old friend Steve Lewis and I fell out of touch for almost a quarter century after college, leading almost entirely different lives in different parts of the world. We diverged on graduation in 1969, after having both been philosophy majors. I went on to careers in journalism, retailing, frozen produce wholesaling, ice cream truck driving and radio, among too many others to mention. Steve stayed on an academic track, leveraging Fulbright scholarships and other graces into research and work that had him become fluent in a number of languages and rich in knowledge and experience about countless arcane aspects of history and cuture in the far corners of Europe.

But one thing we had in common: we both also labored in the fields of marketing communications when we weren’t doing other things we enjoyed more.

In his latest Hak Pak Sak blog post, Steve revisits a number of remarkable texts, including a Flemish novel whose lead protagonist’s work recalls some of our own. He describes it this way:

  The Journal, Boorman boasts, has print runs in the millions despite its paid circulation of zero and a full-time staff of nobody. In fact, the publication is an archetypal promotional magazine. Customers can place glowing written and visual portraits of their companies and products in the journal merely by committing themselves to purchasing tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies of off-prints which they pay for in cash or in kind.

An interesting commentary on what’s a little too true about way too much of what at least two of us have had to do for a living.

Late deliveries from the Gmail laundry

February 14, 2008 in Past, problems | 10 comments

I love Gmail for one thing: it launders spam out of mail going to my searls.com address. I have things set up so Gmail picks it up from my server, and I pick it up from Gmail. Last I checked, there were over 22,000 spams in Gmail’s spam box. And the last I went through ten pages (50 each) of those, there were no false finds.

But lately I haven’t been getting mail to Searls.com. Didn’t know what it was, but my wife just figured it out and provided helpful tech support. I needed to go into Settings in my Gmail account, then to Accounts, then down to Get mail from other accounts, and see when my mail was last picked up. Turns out it was 9 February. Here’s what the Fetch History said…

Now it says this:

So, some questions that maybe some of ya’ll can answer…

  1. Why did Gmail choke on the “timed out” message from my mail server, and not go back again?
  2. Why was it checking my server every several minutes before, and only every hour or so now?
  3. Can I make it speed up somehow? If so, where are those controls?

Here’s hoping my own conundrum may be helpful to others as well. No idea.

It is one helluva spam filter, I gotta say.

Remembering Tom Lantos

February 13, 2008 in News, Past | 1 comment

Andrew McLaughlin has an excellent tribute to my late former congresman, Tom Lantos. A sample:

  During Committee meetings, he made a deep impression on me as a forceful orator, a sharp questioner, and a committed defender of due process and the rule of law. On the handful of occasions when I accompanied senior staffers to brief him on an investigation or upcoming hearing, I witnessed a different side of him — warm and gentlemanly, curious, incisive, skeptical. Flowing from his experience as a young Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by escaping from Nazi labor camps to a Budapest safe house protected by Raoul Wallenberg, Congressman Lantos’s life’s work was aimed at securing human rights and civil liberties for the oppressed and disenfranchised, both at home and abroad. In pursuit of that cause, he followed his conscience, full stop. He demanded that institutions with power over individuals — governments, armies, corporations — act not only out of crude self-interest, but true to a higher moral calling to protect the rights and interests of the people they affect.

Quite a guy.

The Shopping Cart Index

February 11, 2008 in Past | 1 comment

When I added John Robb’s Brave New War to my Amazon shopping cart, I was greeted by a new (for me) set of Important Messages at the top, telling me how much each item in my cart had gone up or down in price since I placed them there. Three have decreased in price. Five have increased. Not drawing conclusions from that, but I am drawing.

Lets tawk

February 6, 2008 in Future, Past, problems | 6 comments

There’s a New Conversation is happening next week in New Yawk (my home skyline, though I’m from Jersey… you know, where New Yawk teams play). Wednesday, 1PM at the SAP Customer Center, 95 Morton Street. It costs money, but less than some cheap seats at professional ball games.

It’s a Cluetrain follow-up. Occasioned by the fact that it’s coming up on ten years since David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I started the conversation that ended up as the website and a book that still sells well.

Odd that Cluetrain is now marketing canon in many circles — and that “conversation marketing” is hot stuff — yet so much of the execution is no less bullshit than what we ranted against back at the turn of the Millennium.

What will we talk about? As they say where I grew up, Hey, you tell me. And the rest of us. I have ideas, but let’s start with yours. Put ’em in the comments below.

Also sprach Gabriele

February 4, 2008 in Journalism, Past | Permalink

I took three years of Deutsch in high school, but I gave them all back when I was done. Still, I do recall enough to gather that Gabriele Fischer put Das Cluetrain Manifest to good use in her latest editorial in brandeins Online, titled Gesprächs-Angebote.

Via Nicole Simon.

Public Media in a Zero-Distance World

January 27, 2008 in Future, Journalism, Past, problems | 3 comments

Public Broadcasters Opt for CC is the encouraging title for an informative and linky post by Michelle Thorne at icommons.org.

By subsuming all electronic media, and by placing every recording and playback device at zero functional distance from each other, the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder.

Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods. It’s also why they’re thinking hard and long about the role their online transmissions and archives play in a world without physical borders. That’s what Michelle’s article is about.

After visiting positive moves made by a number of institutions, Michelle’s final paragraph makes clear that the challenge is only beginning to be met:

  However, despite many positive strides, creators working for public broadcasters still often find themselves at odds with their institutions’ more traditional copyright policies. In-house legal departments can be reluctant to embrace user-generated content, remixes, downloads, and third-party material, and at times, they may endorse restrictive DRM while resisting new and open media formats. As more and more publicly-funded content goes online, it is important enable and empower users, rather than leaving enriching material to digitally decay.

She could easily have put depressing links behind every one of those “howevers”. If I had more time, I’d do it myself.

Still, it’s good to see movement in a positive direction. I’ll be looking to see more when I attend the IMA‘s Public Media 08 conference in Los Angeles next month.

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