Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Feb 15
Posted: under Uncategorized.
This started as a long comment in response to Martin Bosworth’s well-sourced screed on Boztopia …but I realized about 1/2 way through that the points I wanted to make were starting to get a little elaborate for just the “Comment” space – and besides, I have far too much experience (and distrust of) the commenting [...] [...more]
This started as a long comment in response to Martin Bosworth’s well-sourced screed on Boztopia
…but I realized about 1/2 way through that the points I wanted to make were starting to get a little elaborate for just the “Comment” space – and besides, I have far too much experience (and distrust of) the commenting features to see it all disappear when I hit the “Submit Comment” button. FYWP. Also.
I hadn’t read “Noir” – but it doesn’t surprise me that Jeter has his dander up about all the freeloading whippersnappers threatening The Way Things Are (which, not coincidentally, is also the way Jeter puts biscuits’n'gravy on the dinner table). The actions of the RIAA/MPAA hitman read like a pure revenge fantasy, and track rather close to what friends of mine who are (or used to be) in the music industry spit&mutter whilst indulging in their mid-afternoon mood enhancers. Music was definitely the canary in the coal mine, for a lot of reasons – the intersection of 1) the young early-adopters who were on the internet, 2) their perception of music as “high-value content”, 3) the utter dickishness of the major music labels towards their customers for decades, 4) the rise of open-source technology like Napster, and 5) starting in 1999, it was suddently affordable to get internet connection speeds in the 56k (or better) range that allowed users to download a 3-6 megabyte song in less than an hour (unlike the previous 2400 or 14.4k modems prevalent prior to that time).
All those forces then empowered those in category #1 to give the finger to those in category #3. A very well-deserved finger, BTW.
Unfortunately, the Law of Unintended Consequences has kicked in, and the rot has spread from the over-coked, over-sexed & over-paid music industry weasels to … well, pretty much everyone else who produces content/intellectual property. News, movies, computer programs, video games … anything that can be digitized and put on Pirate Bay.
I think that the nut graf in Martin’s piece is here:
“What we have now is the worst of all possible scenarios — a world where so-called fans will pirate material, distribute it freely, and then spend endless days on blogs or forums bashing it for not being good. The creators lose money, and the “fans” get to indulge their resentment of them for their work.”
Yeah, I’ve long felt that we’re in a particularly nasty place, both culturally and business-model-wise. Culturally, we’ve reached pretty much the end of the big-ass centralized media behemoths that cram content down our throats by putting it through what Woody Allen called the “de-flavorizing machine.” We’ve seen in the current economic/foreign-policy debacles what the results of too much Groupthink on the national discourse have been. Too few dissenting voices were raised to de-regulating banks & mortgages; to taking on mountains of debt. Too few dissenting voices were raised about the wars we’re fighting, or the whole adventurist foreign policy we’ve pursued for the last 30 years.
So yeah – the move away from the existing news/information models towards a new ecosystem are happening because of the flipside of the teenage disdain for Big Music; the news/information providers (by which I mean the massive conglomgerates that actually own just about every major newspaper, magazine or TV news network) got it into their heads that they could squeeze some really impressive profits out of the beast by cutting back on the costs of production as much as they could, while broadening their market share by making the product as bland and appealing to as many people as possible. Like taking gourmet Kobe beef stuffed with melted Roquefort and turning it into a McDonald’s Happy Meal.
I was there when it started. I saw it happening. When even the editorial department upper managers gushed on and on about the new super-fancy printing press, rather than even knowing the slightest bit about the intense stories that we on the I-team were working on … I knew that the war had been quietly lost. That even the people who were supposed to be in charge of making sure that the news was important & gripping, were now themselves in the grip of some kind of greed fantasy.
So that’s why you hear more & more people griping about “the media” because they’re not getting enough of the core product – The Truth – from it. (Or in the case of some wingnuts, they are getting too much of The Truth, but that’s another argument.)
The alternative to this has been fairly well delineated by various Digital Triumphalists over the years – a disaggregated, disintermediated army of indie/citizen reporters, all reaching out to the audience to broaden the stories & suggest new avenues via comments and, well, trackbacks like this.
The problem is that the economic model to make this pay – consistently pay, mind you – is not there yet. Google AdSense? Don’t make me laugh. Partner/Affiliate programs? OK, if you’re in a tasty niche. But for the vast majority of indie content creators, the internet gives just enough revenue to do the absolute bare minimum for survival. Not enough to produce any kind of long-term or complicated content effort – no long investigative journalism projects here. Or moves with a special-effects budget that’s more than the costs of craft-service chili dogs.
I think that there are some interesting models emerging, that blend all sorts of revenue streams. They’re just not completely baked yet – but the interviews that I’ve been doing lately, for my next big case study for the NAA, are starting to make me think that they are not as far off as I had feared. I think that online video, social media, and mobile – all combined (as or Mr. Creosote would like it “All mixed up in a bucket”) will make it possible for us grimy content creators to keep doing high-quality work.
Feb 09
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Signs were there that DVD sales were about to implode; industry ignored all warnings To anyone in the newspaper industry, the parallels are eerie. The disruptive technology is introduced, and people with the ability to look beyond this quarter’s P&L statement say, “Oh-oh. Something’s in the wind. We gotta take a look at this, maybe [...] [...more]
Signs were there that DVD sales were about to implode; industry ignored all warnings
To anyone in the newspaper industry, the parallels are eerie. The disruptive technology is introduced, and people with the ability to look beyond this quarter’s P&L statement say, “Oh-oh. Something’s in the wind. We gotta take a look at this, maybe start shifting some resources into R&D, or we could blow up in a couple years.”
To which the guys at the top of the company, whose fat year-end bonuses are tied to keeping costs to a bare minimum, while sucking off as much spare cash as possible, say, “You’re out of your mind. Things are going great. You wanna break them? Siddown and shut up – we know what we’re doing – look at all the money we’re making. Instead, we’re going to double down on our bets, and buy up & consolidate our monopolistic position.”
And then the day arrives. The P&L shows a massive die-off in the one area that the whole house of cards depends on as a crucial revenue stream.
The guys at the top immediately point fingers at the internet & start screaming.
That day arrived last week at Sony Pictures, and The Media Wonk has a great write-up, running down all the relevant stats and the various time-wastes along the way. He points fingers at Blu-Ray as a massive time, money & effort Black Hole that hasn’t stepped up to replace the revenues that are being lost via plain old DVD sales going bye-bye. Viz:
The need for a viable post-DVD digital strategy has been blindingly obvious for most of the past decade. But instead of focusing on that existential challenge, the industry wasted four years on Blu-ray, an absurd format that addressed no identifiable consumer demand that could not have been met years earlier, more cheaply and with less consumer confusion with readily available alternatives, like HD DVD or even red-laser DVDs.
The industry is still wasting time and resources trying to invent uses for Blu-ray to justify the time and cost sunk into it.
Hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off doesn’t mean that what happens in the meantime is beyond your control. It means you’re asleep.
If I can extrapolate from the behavior I’ve witnessed in my friends, some of whom are the greatest TV & movie aficionados I’ve ever met; the type of people who can go one for an hour about how David Duchovny’s characterization of Fox Mulder owed more to John Wayne in The Searchers than, as is commonly (and erroneously) thought, the seminal Darren McGavin in Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
When DVDs came out, they were such an improvement over the jittery, fragile VHS tapes that we loaded up on them. All the extras – the audio tracks, the Easter Eggs – oh, they were sah-weet. We’d have parties where we’d go through our favorite movies and break it all down – because now, when we freeze-framed, it was a perfect picture, not that damned bent image with static bars at the top & bottom, the way VHS shafted us.
And then something happened. We had a whole shelf – maybe a coupla shelves. Maybe even a whole room – full of DVDs. Alphabetized, categorized.
And we didn’t watch them anymore.
Why should be drag out a DVD, fire up the player, switch the Video1 to Video2 – just to sit through something we’ve already seen … when the TiVo has something fresh & new? There has to be a real dearth of new material that’s any good before we’ll go to the archives for some nostalgia.
The success of the studios & networks in setting up all these TV channels & alternative means of distribution of content has also been its undoing. If I don’t have to shell out $24 for a movie – when I can just stream it over Netflix, or better yet, see something new on my DVR – then why would I spend my increasingly scarce hard-earneds?
Technology alone didn’t change consumer behavior. It wasn’t the internet’s fault. It’s just that when alternatives opened up – when true competition arrived on the market – all of a sudden, the old Walled Gardens, with their high price to enter and their restrictive DRM – those places became not so fun to hang out it. So we all left. Gradually, but in increasing numbers.
The crisis that newspapers have faced for the last 5-10 years — the TV and movie industry is about to fall into that same Black Hole, for the same reasons, and apparently is determined to attempt the same half-measures to turn the clock back to where it used to be. Look for a lot of appeals to Congress for restrictive legislation, blaming “piracy” and “content thieves,” and then resorting to a death spiral of cutting costs and putting out shoddier products.
Dec 23
Posted: under Uncategorized.
I’ve been using the brilliant experiment by the Guardian this summer in my trainings – they [...more]
I’ve been using the brilliant experiment by the Guardian this summer in my trainings – they
Dec 18
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage [...] [...more]
Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest
I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage Against the Machine, and which I still use to get the adrenaline flowing. It’s been showing up in Twitter trends for the last week or so, which is unusual for a 15-year old minor hit by a band that no longer even exists. I just figured that the protesters in Denmark were using it for their soundtrack – even though it’s aimed more at the LAPD police culture that got exposed in the wake of the Rodney King beating.
But it turns out that the story is a lot more complex than that. Check out this excellent post by blogger FreakyTrigger that explains it in-depth.
In a nutshell:
- It started with Alterna-punks hating on the type of syrupy (treacly?) disposable pop that gets rammed down our throats by these music contest shows
- To try to prevent the winner of “X-Factor” from dominating the charts, they’ve started buying multiple copies of RATM’s “Killing in the Name” – a song that is pretty much as anti-pop as you can get. A scream of pure fury against The Establishment. Perfect.
- RATM even launched into the heavy cussing chorus live on BBC5 and had to be censored
- Buying Killing in the Name online is actually somewhat convenient, because you can buy as many copies as you like electronically, and it only costs .69euro (99cents)
- But what this really boils down to is paying 99 cents to vote against something that millions of other people are voting for
FreakyTrigger sums it up thusly:
Plenty of people have pointed out that these are good times indeed for
Sony, who make money off both tracks. But it’s also a fascinating case
study for marketers, because it pits two of the big “social media
marketing” ideas of the late 00s up against one another. On the one
hand the crafted, immersive, interactive experience – on the other the
power of the flashmob and the viral. Who’s gonna win?
Is there a business model for media here? Probably somewhere – in some kind of controversy, if you give people a frictionless way to express their anger and resentment, and make the price barrier low enough, you could hit on something.
Check out MoveOn.org raising $1 million so far against Joe Lieberman, ever since he started threatening to filibuster any kind of decent health care reform.
Dec 14
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Leaf Boat, originally uploaded by Wordyeti. The heavy rainstorms of this past weekend were much-needed, and therefore much-welcomed in Los Angeles. The anticipated apocalyptic mudslides in the fire-ravaged areas never materialized, but that hasn’t stopped the local TV news crews from speculating on how horrible the damage would have been. If only Mother Nature had [...] [...more]
The heavy rainstorms of this past weekend were much-needed, and therefore much-welcomed in Los Angeles.
The anticipated apocalyptic mudslides in the fire-ravaged areas never materialized, but that hasn’t stopped the local TV news crews from speculating on how horrible the damage would have been. If only Mother Nature had cooperated. Which it still might. So stay tuned.
Any little touch of fall-like weather always makes me somewhat homesick for the Upper Midwest in October. Even though it’s December in Los Angeles, and that means that the weather there is sub-Siberian.
Dec 03
Posted: under Uncategorized.
The note sent out by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg today showed why there is such a need for privacy control & reform on Facebook & other social networking sites. Man, this was a real eye-opener for me. Like 350 million other users, I got the notice that Zuckerberg had sent out a mass message to [...] [...more]
The note sent out by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg today showed why there is such a need for privacy control & reform on Facebook & other social networking sites.
Man, this was a real eye-opener for me. Like 350 million other users, I got the notice that Zuckerberg had sent out a mass message to us all, telling us of the reforms that Facebook is making to its service. Wondering if there was anything other than the removal of the long-obsolete regional groups (which had been leaked as a trial balloon weeks ago), I clicked through and read the missive.
Down at the bottom, I saw that there were about 32,000 comments. I figured that there must be some kind of flame war – predictable whenever anyone associated with Facebook changes anything. Or doesn’t change anything. Or participates. Or fails to participate.
But instead I found the comment thread completely overrun with spam.
[NB: The photo uploader for this blog is down, due to Dreamhost moving all our web properties to a new server. But go ahead and click through, and you'll see an amazing profusion of come-ons for free iPods, Macbooks, yada yada.]
It surprised me that even a message from Facebook’s founder is vulnerable to such crude spam. You’d think that Facebook would have monitors on duty to weed out the spammers.
This also calls into question the much-touted “350 million user” benchmark that Facebook announced this week. If there are this many brazen spammers trying to piggyback oin Zuckerberg’s message, how many other user accounts are just there to try to hock us all into clicking through onto some exploit site to turn our computers into part of a pr0n and v1@gr@ bot-net?
I think that the elimination of the regional groups is a step in the right direction. But now that so many of us are spending so much time on Facebook & other social networking sites, it is even more imperative that these sites start policing their userbase.
facebook, spam, zuckerberg, scams, social networking, privacy, intrusion, control, weed out, sock puppets, haxxors
Nov 04
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Tags: DDoS, internet freedom, journalist, Kazakhstan
Beatings, midnight phone calls and a culture of fear This is the transcript of my interview with an independent journalist in Kazakhstan. He was commiserating with me about my hospital stay, and mentioned that he too, had suffered because of his political beliefs. I grabbed my little camera, and asked him to describe what happened [...] [...more]
Beatings, midnight phone calls and a culture of fear
This is the transcript of my interview with an independent journalist in Kazakhstan. He was commiserating with me about my hospital stay, and mentioned that he too, had suffered because of his political beliefs. I grabbed my little camera, and asked him to describe what happened to him.
Read More
Oct 22
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Tags: Almaty, DDoS Attacks, future of media, monetizing web, Newspapers, television, TV, video on the web
I was impressed by the enthusiasm and hope of the students that I met in my last stop - the ancient city of Almaty, nestled in a valley, surrounded by the foothills of the Himalayas. And I was also humbled by the courage being shown by the few remaining opposition journalists.
These people have been hounded from their jobs at newspapers and TV stations. The papers are being shut down - in fact, this morning, a famous journalist is being kept in jail - allegedly for murdering a man in a car accident. But everyone in the country pretty much knows the score. [...more]
I’m done with my training sessions for journalists in Kazakhstan, and this trip really stretched the boundaries of my knowledge. These are the issues that I was asked to address:
1. DDoS attacks that rival anything else in the world, taking down any journalist who dares to challenge the government
2. How to use the web to help in investigative reporting
3. How to monetize web content
4. How to grow web audiences in a country where the internet penetration rate is below 20%, and the ad marketing is in its infancy
5. How to use social media to help publicize your web page – or to get the news out when your page is taken down (see #1 above)
6. How to start migrating video content from broadcast to the web
7. What kinds of changes will the future hold for traditional media
8. What skills do journalism students need to build to make themselves employable down the road
…and many more.
Hour after hour, what adventure authors writing for the 30s-era pulps I loved to read as a kind, described this kind of landscape as being the lair of lurid mustachio'd villains...
I was impressed by the enthusiasm and hope of the students that I met in my last stop – the ancient city of Almaty, nestled in a valley, surrounded by the foothills of the Himalayas. And I was also humbled by the courage being shown by the few remaining opposition journalists.
This was only a juvenile golden eagle, but he still weighed about 20something pounds. He seemed well-cared for; the guy who had him was petting him and feeding him, so I figured his life couldn't be too bad. Of course, I did want to just toss him in the air and see if he would fly away....
These people have been hounded from their jobs at newspapers and TV stations. The papers are being shut down – in fact, this morning, a famous journalist is being kept in jail – allegedly for murdering a man in a car accident. But everyone in the country pretty much knows the score.
It’s just that the government no longer really cares what anyone thinks about what they’re doing. They aren’t even making the effort to disguise the fact that they’re eliminating anyone who stands in the way of the runaway kleptocracy.
And that’s a really bad sign.
I will be writing much more about this issue in the weeks to come. I shot some amazing, shocking, heartbreaking videos of journalists begging for help. Our help. Any help.
Coming from the feeling of brotherhood that permeated the Online News Association conference a couple weeks ago, it was hard not to feel personally affronted by what is happening to our digital kin in Kazakhstan.
Oct 18
Posted: under Uncategorized.
It seems that more and more blogging services are turning on to the fact that most blogging input templates are pretty damn annoying. I say this as an advocate for the medium. I also speak as one who has seen hours of work evaporate as the interface crashed, or timed out, or whatever. I'd like [...] [...more]
It seems that more and more blogging services are turning on to the fact that most blogging input templates are pretty damn annoying. I say this as an advocate for the medium. I also speak as one who has seen hours of work evaporate as the interface crashed, or timed out, or whatever.
I'd like to hope that someday it will be as seamless as creating a page in Issuu is – that one day we'll just be able to create pages with custom designs, including Flash, video, audio, Silverlight, what have you, and be able to upload them into a CMS that will adjust on the fly to these new designs. Somehow I doubt that – at least as long as Microsoft is making code for their browsers that deliberately breaks all the previous rules of CSS, just to ensure that their latest Office suite sells (and yeah, I'm looking at you, IE 6).
Anyway, I'm gonna see if attaching a photo to this post in any way results in a photo appearing in the blog post.
This is me on the main plaza in Astana, aka "What the capitol city of Mars would look like if designed by Albert Speer & Walt Disney's offspring."
Oct 13
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Astana – Journo Professors, originally uploaded by Wordyeti. These are the journalism professors from the university here in Astana, Kazakhstan, that were in my training session. I ran a little long – they didn’t want to let me go — the students & faculty are intensely interested in how the rest of the world is [...] [...more]
These are the journalism professors from the university here in Astana, Kazakhstan, that were in my training session. I ran a little long – they didn’t want to let me go — the students & faculty are intensely interested in how the rest of the world is using the internet to report & gather the news.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to really pull out all of the tools in my bag of tricks, because we didn’t have an internet connection. And yes, I realize the irony inherent in that.
The market here is right at the cusp of where things start to get interesting for the media – internet penetration is at about 18% (although some skeptics scoff at that, and say that it more like 2%). But it’s at 20% that we start to see the development of all kinds of new businesses, and that’s what is on the minds of the editors. They have seen the crisis that has eveloped the media in the U.S. and they most definitely do NOT want to go there…
