Morning Reading: 9/17/06

Back in Bubble 1.0, there were a lot of hugely popular message boards (the Bubble 1.0 version of interactive blogs, etc.). There were hugely popular boards on investing, politics, sports, etc. For a while, we thought the sky was the limit. Until users, moderators and third parties decided to replicate the boards and there was a gradual user-base dilution. It was probably inevitable, but it spelled the end of the mega-boards. Now the same thing is happening to Wikipedia. I don’t know if this will have the same effect or not, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Frank Gruber’s Tech Cocktail is scheduled for October 12 in Chicago.

The Mu Life on the role of tags in social bookmarking.

I have never signed the back of my credit cards. The Straight Dope says I was right.

Google has formed a political action committee to reach out and touch some politicians. I hope they focus on network neutrality, and not their plan to gather all our data and use it to push ads in our faces.

The Washington Post on the much ado about nothing that is movie downloads.

My 8 year old has discovered the computer. It’s something parents need to prepare for in advance.

Tags: kents news, links

The Demise of Radio

In the New York times article about the plight of traditional radio, Richard Siklos sums up the problem in one sentence, while talking about a particular commuter who has tuned out over the air stations:

Mr. Glassman, who is 51, said he turned a deaf ear to radio primarily because of the advertising and because he finds the playlists of his favorite stations too mainstream and limited.

It’s a two-headed monster that is killing traditional radio. The first is the limited playlist that appeals to a very limited demographic. Back in the day, narrowly crafted stations weren’t an option and so people found the station that was closest to their taste and stuck with it. Now, thanks to satellite radio and online services, there are an infinite number of programming choices. What used to be good enough simply isn’t any longer.

The other, of course, is advertising. I’ve talked about it plenty- people’s lives are hectic and stressful enough these days. They will no longer tolerate someone screaming in their ear about how some car dealer will not be undersold, etc. People want radio, which is primarily a car-based experience, to be a relaxing influence- not just another run at their wallet.

It’s funny though. I talked the other night about listening to WOWO at night on my little transistor radio when I was a kid. I bet I logged hundreds of hours listening as I fell asleep. I don’t remember the ads. I’m sure they were there. Maybe they have gotten more intrusive. Maybe now that I am part of the targeted demographic, I have lost the ability to tune them out. Maybe technology like XM and TIVO have spoiled me. I just know that I can’t remember hearing the ads I can no longer tolerate on WOWO when I was a kid.

And I know that for a few bucks a month, I don’t have to tolerate them. That, together with portable music players and CD-Rs full of MP3s, is what will eventually spell the end of traditional radio.

Right now, the majority of radio listeners (230 million to 11 million) still suffer through traditional radio. That tells us two things.

One, that there are other negative forces at work against traditional radio, such as the loss of greater numbers of younger listeners. My hunch is that many of the people who listen to traditional radio are casual listeners- who have the radio on because it is the only option in the car, but who are not committed listeners. I also expect more and more people are gravitating towards talk and sports radio, which is generally local by defintion and probably less subject to listener erosion than music radio.

Two, what is a bad situation now for traditional radio is only going to get worse and more and more people gravitate to other music sources.

HD Radio will stem the bleeding, but it won’t stop the migration to ad-free pastures. Radio stations can go online, but that doesn’t help the narrow playlist problem.

If there’s a way for traditional radio to regain momentum, I certainly can’t see it.

Tags: xm, radio

Many Gates and Many Keepers Make for a Shallow River

Shelley Powers has a post today about the Gatekeeper thing. Sometimes I think Shelley sees herself on one side of the gate and sometimes I think she sees herself on the other. As she points out today, the truth is probably both- there are multiple gates and, at least to some extent, everyone is a gatekeeper of sorts.

She gives a brief history of the word gatekeeper, and then says one thing I agree with and one I don’t. Followed by a conclusory truth that I believe is undeniable

I agree with her that “the high ranked sites tend to give and withhold flow more as a matter of obtaining more for themselves than to enforce a specific viewpoint or behavior.” It’s like anything else, those who have want to keep and those who don’t want to get. Like democrats who were born wealthy, it’s easy to argue for the little guy- as long as the little guy stays little and the big guys stay big.

I think, however, that the desire to keep what you have- be it traffic or attention- is but one of several gatekeeping forces at play in the blogosphere. Another is the smell of money and the desire to marginalize those who might lay stones along the road to riches. And perhaps the most powerful force at play is the human need to belong, which carries with it its dark twin- the need to exclude others. The same forces at work on the playground still apply in the boardroom and the blogosphere- the exclusionary tactics are just disguised a little better and cloaked in new jargon.

river I don’t agree with Shelley’s river metaphor- at least the idea that too much water is bad for the river. In the case of the blogosphere, the internet serves as a deep and boundless ocean just a few miles downstream. As such, the danger is not that the river will overflow and become chaotic. The danger is that the river will dry to a trickle- fed only by the pontification of the river kings and the chorus of sychophants. A shallow river is bad for the river animals and, ultimately, for the ocean itself.

As evidenced by my conversational manifesto, I have largely turned a bored ear and a blind eye toward those whose primary motives are self-aggrandizement and/or making money. No blowhards and no tupperware parties please- just good conversation. It’s not about traffic- no one is a better conversationalist than Doc. It’s about sharing, at least in part, a basic assumption about why we blog. I blog to talk, to have fun and to learn. So do many others.

Shelley’s conclusory truth plays right into this point: “I have found over the years that elevation really comes from attention downstream rather than up…. We grow our audience from each other.”

Exactly. That is the key to getting permanent, sustainable traction in the blogosphere. I would add one additional point to this conclusion: we grow our audience from others who share our basic philosophy about blogging. People who blog for the same purpose can form a more natural bond than a mix of bloggers, some of whom want to talk and learn and some who want only to make a buck off of the first group.

In the real world, it is a great offense to try to make money off of your friends. So why is this tolerated, encouraged and even worshipped in parts of the blogosphere? What do you want your blogsphere to be? A flea circus full of gamblers and confidence men who promise, but will rarely deliver, the opportunity to join them in their greatest caper, or the functional equivalent of a comfortable living room where you can talk with friends about topics of mutual interest?

I know which one I prefer. And it’s not the one I see so often when I pull up my feeds.

But the one I want is out there. Waiting. Full of people who want the same thing I do from blogging. And who aren’t waiting to toss an ad in front of me or sell me a bill of goods.

I am putting together a plan to create a little pocket of conversation with other bloggers who share my beliefs. Nothing formal. Just a group of people who choose, at least for the time being, to float down the river together.

Stay tuned.

Tags: blogging, blog building, gatekeepers

Buggy Like a Fox?

I love Firefox, and it is hard for me to imagine changing browsers. But I have had nothing but crash after crash since updating to version 1.5.0.7 a couple of days ago. Among the many web sites that consistently crash Firefox, but work in IE, are the Time Warner, Houston page, Feedburner and Webshots (which is a great application for hosting images like the one below).

UPDATE: Actually Webshots is great for losing photos when it died. I lost this one and tons more.

I expect I am not the only person having these problems.

Tags: firefox

RanchoCast – September 15, 2006 Edition

The All-Vinyl Edition

I’ve been converting some old, hard to find LPs to digital format lately, and now you get to hear the fruits of my efforts. All vinyl. All great songs. Most of which you’ve never heard.

I played a cover of Sixteen Tons that will blow you away, two gems by one of the most under appreciated psychedelic rock bands of all time, a classic by Bobby Bare, a song I used to hear all the time on WOWO back when it was a music station, a song by the greatest guitar player you’ve never heard of, and much more.

Tech talk covered the Web 2.0 myth of infinite advertising and how to convert LPs to MP3s.

Good stuff, so check it out.

Morning Reading: 9/15/06

Microsoft may be about to put Works online. But Microsoft has reservations because it knows what too many don’t: “On the one hand, consumers are quite reluctant to be bombarded with ads. The introduction of advertising with productivity software has to be pretty elegant. Some consumers don’t like it at all.”

There’s a new version of 2 of the 3 photo applications I use: Photoshop Elements and ACDSee.

~~Dwight Silverman~~ on Zune, Microsoft’s new media player.

Tags: kents news, links

Music Matters

Great post by Richard Querin today about music- both management and songs. He talks about the various programs he has used to organize and play his digital music. Richard is in a deep Linux phase, so he uses MOC. Here’s my story.

Unlike Richard, I made a concerted effort to move my music onto my computer. Back in the nineties I undertook to rip all of my CDs. The first time, when hard drives actually cost real money, I just put the best songs in my digital library. Later, I went back and put all of the songs in there. It took about 3 forevers. I’m not sure exactly how many CDs I have, but it’s in the thousands. Once I got the old CDs ripped, it became pretty easy to rip the new ones as I bought them.

I have never shared my music files and I have never bought music with DRM.

I have, however, become my parents, as my musical era of interest generally ended shortly after I finished graduate school. Other than alternative country, some Americana and a little newish blues, I don’t buy many records recorded after 1987.

My application of choice for music management and listening is J. River’s Media Center. It handles large libraries well and has a lot of good features. I have never understood why it didn’t generate more buzz among music fans.

One of the great pleasures of having a digital music server is to put the player on shuffle and hear some songs you forgot about. Sometimes ones that really move you. Richard gave a list of songs he’s come across like that.

Here are some off the beaten path songs on my server that remind me fondly of days gone by, in no particular order.

Les Dudek – I Remember You
LeRoi Brothers – Pretty Little Lights of Town
Raging Fire – A Family Thing
Al Green – You Ought to Be with Me
Atlanta Rhythm Section – Champaign Jam
Bob Seger – Get Out of Denver
Stephen Stills – Change Partners
Paul Davis – I Go Crazy
Fred Knoblock – Why Not Me
Ten Years After – I’ve Been There Too
Starbuck – Moonlight Feels Right
Starland Vocal Band – Boulder to Birmingham

Music and computers really compliment each other. If I had to rummage through a bunch of CDs to find the record I wanted to hear, I’d rarely listen to music.

Tags: music

Ads as a Barrel of Monkeys: More on YouTube’s Revenue Potential

barrellmonkeys Fred Wilson has a post today with some more thoughts about YouTube’s revenue potential. Recall that he previously posted that YouTube could generate as much as $150M in annual net revenue. I had some tongue in cheek comments to his ensuing conversation with Jason Calacanis- all of which were ignored since no one could respond with a straight face to my assertion that people aren’t really fired up about the ability to spend their free time tagging ads.

Fred’s latest post begins with a back and fill that would make Kinky Friedman proud: “Most people got the fact that I was trying to stimulate a conversation more than project revenues for a specific company,” and then goes on to talk more about the revenue issue.

First, about that 10 second ad at the beginning of each video clip. Fred seems to agree now that such an ad would reduce views, but argues that the degree would depend on the video content. SNL clips would be less affected. Home videos would be more affected. I think that’s right. Getting that content would be the hurdle. You could try to turn YouTube into a de facto TV highlight station- at least until the networks sue it into the stone age (or, as Fred points out later in the post, demand the right to embed their own pre-clip ads). Regardless, ads at the beginning of clips will reduce the views, as well as the good karma surrounding YouTube. Not to mention the fact that the networks are going to want to draw people to their web sites, not YouTube, to see their content.

Fred seems to have abandoned, at least for the moment, the position that the ability to tag ads would mitigate the reduced views. Fred won’t engage me on any of this stuff, so I have to deduce his overall philosophy about Web 2.0, ads, etc. It seems to me that he begins with a basic assumption that people will accept ads in exchange for certain content (YouTube, HD radio, etc.). Maybe, but I believe the threshold for that content is a lot higher than Fred thinks. While only anecdotal evidence, I have heard a lot of complaints lately about the increasing number of ads that roll before movies at the theater.

What is less anecdotal is that people will clearly go out of their way to avoid ads presented by TV networks, who have more experience than anyone else in producing what is supposed to be interesting content. Showtime, HBO, XM, TIVO and many other businesses are based, at least in large part, on the desire for an ad-free experience. YouTube would be better off adding ads solely as a way to force people to pay for premium memberships just to avoid those ads. In sum, I am convinced that the public’s aversion to ads is much greater than Fred admits.

Next, Fred says that the whole purpose of a service like YouTube is to blur the lines between content and advertising. He says content and advertising should be one and the same. Look, people have been trying to blur that distinction for tens of years. The beers make funny commercials that people will watch- once or twice. After that, it’s back to this fast forward button. Do you really think ads on YouTube are going to fool people into believing they’re something they’re not? Of course not. And unless you do a new ad for every clip, people are going to be asked to sit through the same ads over and over.

After thinking about it some and considering the comments of the worthies, Fred says maybe post-clip ads are the way to go. I think exactly nobody will watch them, but I like that idea better because it means the advertisers are the ones betting on the post-clip ads being a barrel of monkeys- and not just saying that while forcing up-front ads on people who just want to watch a 30 second clip of a cat in a jar. I suspect, however, that the people who buy ads would value post-clip ads a whole lot less than pre-clip ones.

There’s a lot of discussion about having paid video links and organic ones at the end of each clip, much like the ad configuration Google has bet all of its shareholders’ money on. I agree that Google’s sponsored links was a good idea- and I will admit that on those instances in which I am looking for something I need to buy, I have followed them. But no matter how hard you try to feather up the dog to look like a chicken, people will always know what’s intended to entertain them and what’s intended to separate them from their money. Another distinction is that when people search via Google, they are often looking for something they need- be it a product or some information. So they are pre-conditioned to buy. When looking at YouTube, people are generally looking for entertainment- free, immediate entertainment.

Fred’s basic assumption is set forth in the following sentence, describing a theoretical Nike ad: “If your video is great and the audience loves it, passes it around, etc….” That’s just it- an ad can only be so great. Sure, Terry Tate is sort of funny. But for every Terry Tate there are hundreds of boring ads no one cares about. One Terry Tate cannot turn the ad industry into a thousand Terry Gilliams.

But I have an even bigger question.

Why is it so important that YouTube make $150M a year? Why can’t it be like the corner market, serving its customers well and making a nice living along the way? My biggest problem with the VC/Web 2.0 combination is that scale is completely out of whack. Hitting singles and doubles doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. Everyone is wildly swinging for the fences.

And mostly missing the ball- and the point.

Tags: youtube

Morning Reading: 9/14/06

If your computer is responding a little too fast and you want to slow it down a little, help is on the way. Symantec has announced its 2007 lineup of resource hogging applications.

Idiocy run amuck: PETA, who has done more to make normal people apathetic about animal rights than the NRA and the fur industry combined (and I am no fan of either), has bashed Steve Irwin in the days after his death. Meanwhile, someone has written a computer game called Terri Irwin’s Revenge. (via TDavid)

Gizmodo has an excellent review of the new Blackberry Pearl. I’ve used SureType a long time and it works perfectly once you get used to it.

Here are the top 10 cameras used to take photos on Flickr. Mine’s number 8, though 1 and 4 are close cousins.

Newly added to blogroll: Ed’s Tavern.

Podango is now in public beta. I don’t have time to be a station director, but I’d certainly consider adding my podcast to the music or tech slate.

X-Drive is live. If you have a (now free) AOL account, all you have to do is log in. You can configure it to allow drag and drop uploading via My Computer- just like a local hard drive.

When I was in high school, I had a buddy whose parents were really strict. So whenever we’d go to concerts (in Charlotte, a couple of hours away) and he was away from the controlling element, he would go wild– drinking, partying, etc. We called him the concert kid.

SimplyHeadlines.Com will turn your RSS feed into an email newspaper- thereby making what’s new, cool and unknown to most something old, not so cool, but understandable by your mom. It wouldn’t accept my feed, so it may be controlled by Hugh’s secret cartel.

TVSquad on the Monkees TV show.

Tags: kents news, links

Should Digg Pay Its Users?

I am pretty ambivalent too, but I mostly agree with Mathew about paying Web 2.0 users.

While I don’t like Digg, because I find getting my news via popularity contest unsatisfying, when I wonder over there, I want to see content that people thought was interesting, not content tossed up in the name of making a half cent or two.

Additionally, if Digg or its Web 2.0 brethren do start paying users, the only people who will add content just for the money will do it wrong- either by gaming the system or by adding a bunch of unworthy stuff.

Remember Newsome’s Rule: add the prospect of money to any equation and things get very complicated.

Rob Hyndman (in a comment to Mathew’s post) says “The type of work may be new, but it’s work nonetheless. And it strikes me that advocates of the view that it shouldn’t be compensated are either (A) waxing nostalgically and lyrically about a time when the ‘sphere was pure as the driven snow, and motivated only by benevolence and the kindness of pixies (so long as it means only other people should work for free), or (B) hoping to keep using the labour of others for free, at least until after the liquidity event.”

I think that’s probably true- I’m certainly interested in protecting at least part of the blogosphere from the insanity that ensues when every single act is about chasing the almighty dollar. But if we’re going to look at Digg the way Rob suggest, we have to look at the rest of the ‘sphere too.

Sure, Kevin got filthy rich off of content provided by others. But most of Web 2.0 and Google are all walking down the same path.

Add a link, look at an add- it’s all the same thing.

Tags: digg, web 2.0