In an email last night, Dark Wraith, an economics professor and HTML coder of no small talent, gave me the low down on the problem Blogger has been having with certain sites. I reprint it here verbatum.
Someone has brought back from the dead an old problem that Internet Explorer used to have with certain javascripts. The culprit right now is Site Meter. Many Websites are not loading tonight in Internet Explorer. This has come out of nowhere, but the problem is easy enough to fix if your site is not loading in IE.
In the old days, certain javascripts that were set at certain places in a Website would trigger a false error in Internet Explorer; now, all of a sudden, that little bug has come back from the dead. The easiest way to solve the problem, if you’re having it, is to get Site Meter off your site; the problem should vanish.
This, by the way, may not Microsoft’s doing. The conspiracy theory version of what’s going on is that it would really, really be to the snoops’ advantage if everyone were using Mozilla-based browsers: way too many “Get Firefox” fans do not know the connection between W3C and Total Information Awareness in that those rigid, school-marm standards of W3C Strict 1.0 are exactly what mass data aggregators need to put everything into databases.
That’s the conspiracy theory overview.
The benign explanation for what happened is that Microsoft’s recent updates have triggered the return of this old, IE bug. A variation on this benign explanation is that the code jocks at Site Meter tried to get fancy and rewrite the calling script, but made a boo-boo that brought the old IE bug back from the dead.
Take your choice of explanations.
The Dark Wraith will keep to himself which one he thinks is pretty much on target.
Once again in a world of spaghetti code and competing platforms, old problems, long thought solved resurface.
Just like the Taliban.
I heartily recommend his site for intelligent discussion, video lectures on basic economics, HTML For Bloggers, and some of the finest political ranting, amusing graphics. . .well, just go take a look for yourself.
There's more...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press" and its Washington bureau chief collapsed and died at work Friday after suffering an apparent heart attack. He was 58 Russert, of Buffalo, N.Y., took the helm of the Sunday news show in December 1991 and turned it into the most widely watched program of its type in the nation. His signature trait there was an unrelenting style of questioning, sparing none of the politicians, business giants and even sports figures who appeared on his show.
Russert, 58, collapsed while recording voiceovers for his Sunday morning interview program, NBC reported. He was initially reported to have suffered a heart attack while working in his office on Washington's Nebraska Avenue, but the network said later only that he was "stricken at the bureau" and subsequently died. Further details were not immediately available.
Russert served as NBC's Washington bureau chief and the host of "Meet the Press," the top-rated Sunday talk show, which had an enormous influence on politics and was marked by his aggressive style of interrogation. As a frequent commentator on the "Today" show, "NBC Nightly News" and other shows, Russert wielded such clout that when he declared that Sen. Barack Obama had wrapped up the Democratic nomination last month, his pronouncement was treated as a news event in itself.
Russert's television career was marked by a voracious appetite for politics and a shrewd understanding of how politicians interact with the media. He also wrote a book about his father, titled "Big Russ and Me." Last week, he moved Big Russ to a nursing facility.
Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw gave MSNBC viewers the news of Russert's death at 3:40 p.m. (GNB Note: Video available at Washington Post.)
Brokaw said Russert had just returned from a family trip to Italy with his wife, writer Maureen Orth. They were celebrating the graduation of their son, Luke, from Boston College this spring, Brokaw said.
Russert served as host of "Meet the Press" longer than any other person and was "one of the premier political analysts and journalists of his time," Brokaw said. He began hosting "Meet the Press" in 1991.
Tributes to Russert began pouring in as news of his death circulated.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said: "Tim was a warm and gracious family man with a great zest for life and an unsurpassed passion for his work. His rise from working-class roots to become a well-respected leader in political journalism is an inspiration to many. Tim asked the tough questions the right way and was the best in the business at keeping his interview subjects honest."
Russert was born May 7, 1950, in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of Irish American parents. His father was a World War II veteran who worked two blue-collar jobs while raising four children in a working-class neighborhood in South Buffalo. Raised as a staunch Roman Catholic, Russert attended Buffalo's Jesuit Canisius High School and went on to study law at Cleveland State University.
He got his start in New York Democratic politics, working on the political campaigns of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gov. Mario Cuomo. He served as chief of staff to Moynihan from 1977 to 1982 and was a counselor in Cuomo's Albany office from 1983 to 1984.
Russert was hired by NBC's Washington bureau in 1984 and became the network's Washington bureau chief four years later.
Tim Russert speaks to the crowd during the Democratic presidential debate between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama in Cleveland on February 26, 2008. photo Mark Duncan/AP.
Dave Winer said that "the Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts." Russert stood as a symbol of an institutional journalistic hierarchy for many of us, and bloggers right and left railed against him mightily. He took arrows on behalf of many who practiced the journalism of his era, and stood his ground.
He is survived by his father, who is in his late 80s. Condolences to all his friends and family.
Well said.
In addition to his father, Russert is also survived by Maureen Orth (his wife), and a college-aged son.
Traditional journalists (broadcast and print) have not and can not and the vast majority of them will never successfully meet the opportunity (to them it's a threat; not even rising to the level of a challenge, let alone an opportunity) of the Internet.
They simply don't get it.
Russert was no exception.
The question I wonder about is, was Russert the way he was because he simply had too much invested in defending the media and traditions in which he was so successful, or was he the way he was because he was that way?
My guess -- with Russert (I'd say the opposite for O'Reilly) -- is the former. Which is one of the nicest assessments I have to say about Russert. It means he could have, might have, broken free.
Due to the expansion of the inter-tubes and user-friendly net tools, the writing on the net has transformed into a conversation. Commenters, writers, and even trolls are a part of the dialogue going on in millions of conversations across the globe.
This means many things, but one thing for sure is it means there are a lot more public arguments going on. They range from Pie-fights to genuine intellectual discourse. But one thing is clear, for many this is a new experience and finding the best way to voice your opinions and be open to the thoughts and ideas of others is often a fine needle to thread.
…there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well.- Paul Graham
Graham’s site has this great overview and advice posted on “How to Disagree.”
You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it.
h/t to Terri in Tokyo (who hates conflict and confrontation)
When I heard this story...it just kind of summed the ridiculousness of this so-called “Silly Season” up...
It's Clinton, Not Obama. No, It's Obama!
Pa. Authorities Say A Man Stabbed His Brother-In-Law In Argument Over Clinton And Obama
NORRISTOWN, Pa., Feb. 27, 2008 (AP) Montgomery County authorities say a man stabbed his brother-in-law during an argument over who should get the Democratic nomination for president. What's more, Jose Ortiz, 28, who's charged with felony assault, is a registered Republican.
District Attorney Risa Ferman said Ortiz supports Hillary Clinton and Sean Shurelds supports Barack Obama. She told reporters Monday that the two got into an argument in a Collegeville home Thursday night and Shurelds tried to choke Ortiz. She says Ortiz then stabbed Shurelds in the abdomen.
Shurelds was taken to a hospital in critical condition, but is expected to recover.
Initially, I laughed at the tale, thinking just how stupid and over-the-top it was—and then something kind of hit home about it.
You've got family—people actually linked through marriage and relation literally knifing the hell out of one another over a presidential primary choice. Words and whupass. Blades and blood.
I could conceivably see that level of emotion in terms of a General Election, where I think we can agree that the polarizing battle between the opposing sides is more pitched and the stakes even greater. A continuation of the policies of the last eight hellish years versus a choice that would effectively end most of that. A punch-out or two I could see over the heated emotions, policy differences and stakes involved.
But THIS is a Democratic primary battle we're talking about here—and we've got a dude laying in a hospital bed in Pennsylvania over it, and his assailant—his Brother-In-Law in jail maybe years over a difference in candidates.
Just...the dumbest Goddamned situation I could imagine.
And we're—meaning those of us on the left side of things—“progressives”— doing a rhetorical version of the same dumb-ass thing those two relatives did. We're cutting each other, and in effect—the party to bloody pieces over this primary season. Going way beyond mere hard talk and policy debate, but rather, devolving into the sort of partisan bloodlust that reminds me of the worst elements of European soccer hooliganism. It's not just happening here. If you're something beyond the casual blog-checker you can see the ugliness in places you hold near and dear. Old haunts you now think hard about clicking over the threshold to because of the infighting and nasty tone that's seemingly ramped up as this season's gone along.
On the whole, I understand it. This is without a doubt the LONGEST primary season in my memory—and I go back as far as 1968 with these, as well as the most-covered. No mere three TV networks and a clutch of radio chains reporting. Throw in cable news, the internet—fact-checking and reporting on those—as well as the work of the thousands upon thousands of folks in the blogosphere, and you have more opinion and analysis out there than anyone could have imagined even a mere ten years ago. There's so damned much to chew over and obsess over, and over-obsess over, and more time to do it that I really can understand how people might have even more invested in things than ever before. We're to put it bluntly—bombarded with it all. And thus, an increased level of the temperature of the feedback from us—and you, the target of it all is to be expected.
But the level of invective—going back to the knives again for example, and the way we treat each other—people ostensibly on the same side of the battle has been at best, fierce and at worst, downright venomous. To the point where friendships have been damaged and in some cases ended, where spite and ill-feelings have balkanized people into “gotcha” camps where we wait for any moment available to not just point out issues and inconsistencies, but pounce, pillory, purge and piss on, yes...family.
I'm not talkin' 'bout everybody standing around “Kum-ba-ya/We Are The World” style and singing the same pithy lyrics that in the end don't mean shit. Disagreement is some bomb-ass shit. If disagreement wasn't allowed, 99% of all blogs would shut down, leaving only those devoted to cat fanciers—and then they'd go to war over the merits of the tabby versus the calico and chew each other's heads off accordingly. Disagreement is part of the process—we write, we agree or disagree, you comment, and you agree or disagree. It's the “Wild West”. Everybody's got a gun.
In the movies at least, you didn't shoot another man in the back, or blow away the unarmed. We may all disgustingly spit in that nasty spittoon in the corner, but you don't spit on another man's boots.
Emotions get hot. Especially around “Primary Days”. The 72 hours before and after one of these countless “make or break/brawl for it all” days of intra-party reckoning wind people up in a major way. Sensitivities get ramped way the hell up. Small slights are conflated into fighting points. People gloat, people mope. Emotions are rubbed raw and others ride high on 'em. With all that “heat and smoke” we sometimes don't see as clearly as we should and our senses betray us. Mistakes get made. And that goes for all of us.
No one is immune to the fuck-up.
But too many of 'em can wreck a community—any community. Long-standing ones and the relatively new. And we, progressives need as many spaces and communities as we can possibly have to blunt the right wing's edge in talk radio and broadcast media.
Thus, I think a little bit of sensitivity would go a long way for us. Here on the internets, we—you the readers and us the content creators tend to be uncannily tuned into things, down to what we call ‘meta” levels. And in being so tuned in, we know the ebb and flow of things—the emotional undercurrents and when they spike and lull. We know the buzz-words—the nice ones and the fucked up ones. But most of all, I think we know—I think we know—that in then end, we're on the side of good. In knowing that, think about those two brothers cited at the top of this post, scrappin' and stabbin'.
We don't need to be stabbing each other.
Take a moment to discern. When you read, when you post, and when you comment. Roll it over in your head. Look at what you're writing—what you're saying before you hit “publish”. Say it aloud. Re-read what you're replying to or what you're putting out there as your opinion or reportage. Nothin' wrong with being tough. Drippin' a little venom. Bring the snark! But remember—for the most part (beyond the obvious trolls), you're dealing with friends and fellow travelers.
Leave the knives for the enemy. Gut him—not your “brother”.
Tough as this time is, the over-the-top personal attacks and casting of aspersions I see in places I no longer frequent because the community got fucked, makes me want to spit acid like the “Mother” Alien in the movies. Let's extend ourselves a little and give a wee bit more benefit of the doubt to each other—poster, commenter, and community, all. Weigh a person's words not just against the heat of the moment, but against their history and track record as a whole. Step back. Take a breath. Disagree. Be fiery as all holy hell. But I think of it this way—this is practice, and it's the middle of the week. We can go up against each other in drills and knock heads and trash talk. Work hard. Offense against the defense. But you don't go berserk in practice ripping up the knees and concussing your fellow teammates.
Save that crazy for Sunday, against the real fucking enemy. We don't help the team wiping each other out.
As I said about the actual stabbing incident, it was just...the dumbest Goddamned situation I could imagine. The participants ended up in two of the three potential places you can end up while bugging out like that. The hospital. Jail. Or the morgue.
The virtual stabbing going on about us? Equally Goddamned dumb.
Enough of that. Seriously. As no one wants to go to the blogospheric equivalent of those three shitty places. Word.
And with that, back to drills, Gatorade™, and looking for choice bulletin-board material from the other side to stoke the fires with—so we can get to work against our real enemy, John McCain. The video clip below is the kind of whup-ass we need to see. The mighty stiff arm of “The Tyler Rose”—Texas' immortal Earl Campbell wiping out an opponent. Earl's wearing #20 in the tan jersey, moving from right to left from the middle-right to the top left (how appropriate) of the screen.
Quarterlife, by the Creators of My So-Called Life & thirtysomething has been picked up by NBC* and will air for broadcast, eventually... whenever.
You can watch it right now right here on GNB, and on MySpace. Or at Quarterlife.com
The show is being edited* in 8 minute episodes. These will be re-edited later, into one-hour format for broadcast on NBC*, which just picked up the show on Monday.
Because they wholly own the material themselves, and are financing the entire cost of production, Executive Producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz aren't impacted by the writers strike. They'd be striking themselves. Nothing in the strike prevents writers from writing for themselves; that would be silly.
There are three broadcast windows:
MySpace -- and its 110 million users -- gets a 24 hour broadcast window.
Quarterlife.com -- a social networking site Zwick & Herskovitz are putting together, will have a window.
iTunes and other sites will have their own window. And now, ABC will also be part of this third broadcast window.
Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are undertaking an ambitious new-media project that will see them revive onetime ABC pilot "Quarterlife" and distribute it via MySpace, as well as create their own social-networking site.
Duo will produce and variously write and direct episodes of the show, which centers on twentysomethings grappling with life and love in Chicago.
In conjunction with the television project, Herskovitz and Zwick are set to launch Quarterlife.com, a social-networking site that will bring together the 18- to 34-year-olds around topics ranging from career to romance to the arts.
With the MySpace deal, Zwick and Herskovitz become two of the most established Hollywood producer-creators to try an Internet-only project. Their series will test most directly the Web 2.0 idea that with the right talent and partners, creators can circumvent traditional networks or studios.
"This come from a long-standing frustration with where the business of television has gone in the last 10 years," Herskovitz said in an interview. "Ed and I have a great interest in being independent, and for several years, we've realized the Internet offers that possibility."
This is the first major deal I know of, which has started out on the internet, and is moving to network broadcast.
More interestingly, the guys are NOT losing their creative control. That was one of the major deal points -- that the network will leave them the hell alone.
Have a taste below. I'm going to run what's available, which is the Trailer, and the first five (roughly 8 minutes each) episodes.
These people brought you My So-Called Life. They truly know how to tell a story. And no, I haven't seen all five episodes myself yet.
So why am I putting all five available episode up and telling you it is worth watching?
I trust these guys as story tellers. Enjoy.
*This paragraph has been corrected a couple of times since first published. First, NBC is airing quarterlife, not ABC. Second, it is not clear how the show is actually being produced at a technical level. Some reports have it that the show is being produced in one-hour format then made into web episodes. Other reports indicate the story arc is being broken in one-hour format, but the individual web episodes are being written in 8 minute web episode format. (Standard practice would be for as much shooting of the episode to be done at once as possible, to save costs.) Either way, it seems clear the web episodes will have to be re-edited from their current roughly 8 minutes each (8 minutes * 6 episodes = 48 minutes) to standard broadcast "one-hour" length of about 41 minutes plus commercials, for the show to air. GNB regrets the error/confusion. ABC was the original vehicle for the project several years ago, but they passed, leaving the producers free to take and adapt it as they would, which is how the project ended up being available for NBC.
The New York Times paywall will come down for almost all of its website effective midnight Tuesday night.
In a triumph of the open nature of the internet -- that anyone with half a brain could see coming two years ago to the day -- the NY Times Company announced Tuesday that the it was canceling its two-year old Times Select program (refunding customers on a pro-rata basis) and making its site available to the public. Furthermore, The Times is making its archives available as follows: from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
The Times Select program ran for two years to the day amid wide-spread complaints that it cut The Times' best columnists off from the rest of their readers. Among those complaining were many of the The Times' columnists. The columns ended up being widely circulated and reprinted anyway, through blogs, emails, and newsletters.
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.
The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.
Experts say that opinion columns are unlikely to generate much ad revenue, but that they can drive a lot of reader traffic to other, more lucrative parts of The Times site, like topic pages devoted to health and technology.
The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.
Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.
The Los Angeles Times tried that model in 2005, charging for access to its arts section, but quickly dropped it after experiencing a sharp decline in Web traffic.
Charging for online news is stupid. News is a commodity. From Google News to Huffington Post, from thousands to tens of thousands of local newspapers around the globe to literally almost five million blogs and growing, the world is abuzz with what's going on. The problem isn't getting the news -- it's filtering it.
What people need are great editors, people they trust to reach into the data-flow and pull out that which matters. No one can listen to everything, and no one person's taste matches up with everyone elses.
The New York Times simply failed to understand that no one pays to get more crap in their inbox -- even really good crap by terrific writers. It's a crap mountain out there and I ain't paying to add more shit to the pile I already don't have time to read. If some article is so goddamn good (that my Mom convinces me) I just have to dig down through the dung to read, well, she can either cut and paste me the whole thing herself, or point me to a site carrying the article regardless of The Times' stupid policies.
In other words, all Times Select did was piss people off, drive potential customers away, and lose them advertising dollars. Smooth moves ex lax.
It's not just us bloggers, most Americans don't trust the media, left or right, especially the Washington media, who is more concerned with Beltway antics than the news. If Judy Miller was covering Baltimore City Hall, she would have been fired years ago. But people kept defending her when she was compromised
I wouldn't worry about Atrios breaking stories, he's an economist, not a journalist. What I would worry about is the fact that demographics are moving the most desireable readers to the Internet and their opinions are more important than yours.
Want to build a business on the internet?
Give away your best stuff.
You heard me. Take your best stuff. Now give it away.
Know what will happen? The same shit's been happening since the dawn of the net.
TERENCE MANN Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.
Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.
Giving your best stuff away, your real problem will be something you've never dreamed of -- which is why real hackers today get great jobs at Google, not at Microsoft -- you poor deluded war-pushing hack.
Your sin isn't even sitting in a grand office envying your father, sucking up to the Bush administration and aiding and abetting the world into one, two, ah-ah, can you count, maybe three wars. Your sin is letting the world pass the Gray Lady by on your watch while allowing print Journalism to take a fucking dive... What? Did you think you had a freaking monopoly on news?
Journalism ethics 101 we won't cover today. If you haven't learned them yet (you haven't), well, tough. Asshole.
But anyone running business on what is now called the internet since the mid 80s (*raises both hands and feet -- promptly falls over*) knows how you build a business here on the Al Gore's internets is you take your best stuff and you give it away.
If your best stuff is any good, people will come. Leading to why Google rules and Microsoft is trying to come up with a world-changing hit before its Office & Desktop monopolies vanish into Web 2.0 & the rapidly coming yeah its actually already here Web 3.0, where who the hell needs a freaking operating system anyway? Or Microsoft Office? Or a desktop/laptop computer?
What Google knows is, if you've got people coming to get your free stuff, you can monetize the traffic.
Wha. Huh. Wazyu?
The more people, the more ways to slice and dice them into traffic streams, each stream worth something. This stream gets sold books on military history, this one rice cookers, this one pay-to-click ads for Battlestar Galactica, that one political advertising for John Edwards, and over there AT&T long distance service along with direct mail for Porsche automobiles. While those folks get phone calls asking about their portfolios. And everyone has the choice of making donations, participating in subscription drives, buying ad-free versions of the product, and so on.
The more people that come, the more ways to sell and there's literally no limit. It all starts with giving away your best stuff for free and building a demand for your stuff. Stuff (your brand identity) = demand. Demand = people. People = opportunity to monetize. And monetizing is the golden goose, making offers very directed to unique people and groups of people.
Pinch, being of my Dad's era, just doesn't get the internet. He utterly missed how this is done. The people he put in charge of bringing The Times online? Either they didn't get it or Pinch simply wasn't willing to listen when they told him he should just give his shit away without any return, yo. "That simply isn't how we do things here. It isn't how we play ball. It's not how we play cricket." He insisted they find a profit center which he, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., could freaking understand, God Dammit. Or go to work with those ruffians from The Post.
So they gave him a profit center. Heh.
Yo slick. You fucked up. But if you pull your head out of your ass, you might still pull this off. This horseshit about keeping some of your archives from 1923-1986 still on a pay-as-you-go basis ain't gonna fly though. What part of GIVE YOUR STUFF AWAY do you not understand?
Or do we just have to wait for Prince to take over when you die?
I mean, come on Pinch, why the hell would you invite us in and then try and hold back, you prick-teaser you. Trying to be a good boy for mommy and daddy and the Church, not giving it up too soon? Listen Pinch, you invited us in. But now here we are, all hot and bothered and ready for action. We've got our hand down your pants and oooooh, you've got such a big one baby! Stop wiggling around and let us take you all the way. Open your archives to us sugar -- no one likes a prick tease.
Know what happens when you monetize all those beautiful people coming in because you just TRUST the goddamn system like everyone else does, and give away ALL your best stuff?
JOHN KINSELLA Is this heaven?
RAY KINSELLA It's Iowa.
JOHN KINSELLA Iowa? I could have sworn this was heaven.
John starts to walk away.
RAY KINSELLA Is there a heaven?
JOHN KINSELLA Oh yeah. It's the place where dreams come true.
Ray looks around, seeing his wife playing with their daughter on the porch.
NBC wants variable and bundled pricing -- to be able to charge more for one show than another, e.g.: $4.99 for a hit show, and $0.99 for Studio 60, and to require you to buy two related shows, say a hit bundled with a flop staring the same TV star. Apple says variable pricing will just confuse people. NBC says Apple only cares about selling iPods.
What's really going on is more complicated. First, NBC (and the other networks) are trying to get control of their own distribution back from Apple. With most online music sales flowing through Apple, the networks don't want to see online film & television distribution patterns get locked in to Apple as well. Right now there isn't enough distribution to make any real difference in anyone's bottom line, but over the next three years all that will change, which is why everyone's negotiating now.
Second, variable pricing would let the music companies, networks, movie studios, all the folks in the big power positions (producers for short), keep punishing and controlling acts they don't like. People respond to pricing signals in very clear ways. High prices = good. Low prices = bargin = not so good. If act A is priced at $4.99 per song/tv episode, the signal is, this is a hit. Buy it. Right next to it, act B is priced at $0.99 per song/tv episode because they refuse to negotiate a new deal on crappy conditions or roll over and spread them for the big label or any one of 100 other reasons to get them on the shit list of the producers.
Variable pricing lets the producers control who has the hits and who doesn't, because buyers equate price with quality. Apple has steadfastly refused to budge on variable pricing, thus giving power to all acts to be heard equally. Sure, the big companies still have advertising and other ways to position their acts. But Apple's dominant position in the market means their one-price-fits-all structure is truly radical. It says: We don't care who you are or what your reputation is. Everyone has the same chance to be heard and seen and purchased. If you're good, you'll tend to rise to the top.
NBC, the other networks, and especially the record companies want to keep control of their acts. This is the opening salvo. Look for Apple to win this round as NBC is in last place of the major networks and needs to keep their shows visible. Negotiations continue in a friendly manner. Yesterdays contract cancellation was triggered by a time provision in the current contract, not because anyone is mad. If you're a Battlestar fan as I am (the best show on television!) you'll likely still be able to download episodes when the show starts up again in January. Google News Hosting AP Content
Google announced its popular news aggregation service, Google News, will start hosting AP Wire Service and three other major news service feeds directly, instead of referring readers to other newspapers.
Consistent with its normal search practices, Google stated it would not give its own hosted content any special preference in news results. Major newspapers said while this might cut into their online revenue and they'd watch for that, most Google-related traffic came to them for stories written by their staff.
According to Google, hosting the AP and other major wire services also allows Google to make Google News more efficient, only showing the primary wire service feed for a given story, rather than requiring readers to wade through multiple versions of the same feed posted by different papers.
Um... I like most of this.
The part I don't like is Google News not showing the various newspaper versions of the wire feeds. I like being able to see what matters in what parts of the world. It's one of the ways I surf the textuality of the world. I can make a quick assessment of what weight editors across the world give a story just by doing a keyword search on Google News and seeing how many entries pop up. Doesn't matter if it's the same story. What matters is that 150-200 or 1,000 different editors came to the decision to run the story. If only 10 did, that says something else. If Google takes that away, they're taking away a valuable tool.
Furthermore, often you'll find a local paper has added something to the feed. I'll blast through 20 versions of the same feed but then perhaps Baton Rouge or Scotland has added local color that lends different perspective. The Houston Chronicle is fairly good for this. Need to wait and see how Google implements of course, but these are my concerns up front. Diversity in news is important.
Ah... Just read the actual announcement from Google. *smiles* While they are doing duplicate removal of stories, the duplicates are available with a single click. Good Google. Have a cookie.
RED Digital Cinema Ships First 25 Cameras
Academy Award Winner Stephen Soderbergh has been filming Guerrilla and The Argentine with a beta camera for six weeks. Academy Award Winner Peter Jackson shot a 13 minute short film Crossing the Line (download the 1K trailer: 293 MB, 30 seconds, quicktime - right click, save as) a few months ago. Academy Award winner Jim Cameron has five on order. Red Digital Cinema is shipping cameras!
The RED Camera is the hottest most revolutionary camera for making movies in our lifetime. And I've had camera 346 on order for a year and a half, due to be delivered this November. Ten times less money than a camera that does a quarter as much from Sony, RED puts true 35 mm film quality in the hands of independent film makers. Instead of spending 50K on going to film school, now you can build a full film production and editing suite of your very own. The secret to being a writer? Write. The secret to being a film maker? Make movies. Want to know more? Or even more?
RED is to film what high end digital cameras were to shooting photographs with film. Sure, there may always be a market for film cameras, but now it's a whole new world.
