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FCC's Chairman Powell Starts Blog
The Importance of writes "And he wants to hear from the tech community. 'I am looking forward to an open, transparent and meritocracy-based communication -- attributes that bloggers are famous for!' Powell said on his blog. But does he really get blogging? He says he 'need[s] to hear from the tech community as we transition to digital television.' Perhaps we could discuss the broadcast flag? If you want to leave some comments on his blog, I suggest you do it before Howard Stern mentions it on his radio show."
"Dad keeps calling me all the time. It's always 'Iraq' this and 'Iraq' that. He's so annoying sometimes. I swear. Ooo! On another note, I did get my belly button pierced this past weekend! It is soooo cute!"
Meh, I thought blogs would be personal, it's a lot about his company there instead :/
Who'd have thought the day would come when the government asks for a slashdotting!
"The GNAA are in full support of the broadcast flag."
"1) Remove the broadcast flag. 2) ??? 3) Profit."
"I wanted to post something on your blog about beowulf clusters, but couldn't think of anything."
"The FCC sucks."
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
..if you don't want a broadcast flag, DMCA, Patriot Act, etc etc etc.
If you want to leave some comments on his blog, I suggest you do it before Howard Stern mentions it on his radio show.
It would also probably be a good idea to do it before this gets mentioned on Slashdot.
Oh, wait...
it's already hit howard's forum
t =6353
/. really is, but howardstern.com (especially now the forums) is pegged almost 24/7
http://www.howardstern.com/boards/showthread.php?
i dunno how busy
howard et all are on vacation (for another week i think). when he gets back, i'm sure it will get mentioned. hopefully the rest of his fans can keep it civil (heh) on the fucktard's blog
vodka, straight up, thank you!
He is opening a blog? That is like opening the gates of hell in reverse...
Eric's got a song on his site about the FCC: The FCC Song
His "blog" is pretty interesting but right now talks more about digital TV than anything pertinent to the internet. Still a nice outreach, we'll see how often it gets updated...
In related FCC news, they just passed an order lessening the restrictions on the unlicensed 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz frequency bands.
The news release (pdf) says that this order removes roadblocks keeping deployment of next generation (longer range) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices.
There is also a statement from Chairman Powell himself (more pdf)
-Cary
Fairfax Underground : Where Fairfax County comes out to play
Unfortunately, expect Mr. Powell's blog to be spammed by every idealogue around. Already some pointless jabber about the FCC's "indecency" issues have popped up, some merely wrappers for political bashing. If only that was the worst that it will get..
Sample entry: Monday, 7/5/04: "Well, this morning my wife made *beep* for breakfast, except the *beep* burnt the *beep* toast!"
...
Tuesday, 7/6/04: "Had a meeting with *beep* who's skirt was a little higher then it should've been, showing off her *beep* and making me want to *beep* *beep* her all night long!"
Weds., 7/7/04: "Took the *beep* for a walk around the *beep*. Cashed a check at the store and purchased *beep*, *beep*, and *beep*. Thought the missus might like that!"
Calling that page a blog seems a bit far-fetched to me - it seems more like a news site. On news sites that I know of, people that write opinion pieces are called "columnists" or "contributors" normally. It's called an op-ed, not a blog entry.
Does anyone else question the way this is being termed? After all, if I contribute maybe 10 articles to a news site, does that make my work there constitute a blog?
I hope we abstain from posting messages such as "PLZZ DOOD WHY YOU INCREEZ SIZE FOR MEGACORPS?? YO HANDZ IN POXET OF COMPS YO NOOB!!!!" please. It's like the Mac-community's knowledge of Steve Jobs email, we all know his email adress but we must only use it when we are civil in fear of to not lose the chance of using it in the future.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
...Stop pandering to the centralised media producers. We are already doing them a big favor by granting them a monopoly over the airwaves, why should we grant them further control by denying us the freedom to exercise our fair use rights over digitally transmitted content, a freedom we have had since 1984?
While the idea of running a blog is interesting -- I'm facinated by the idea of alternate and potentially more efficient communication to policymakers -- I'm not sure that the blog format selected is appropriate. You're producing all comments dropped into a page, with no hierarchy, moderation or anything. It's like trying to suck down the contents of a firehose. The advantage of electronic forums is not only one-way communication with the forum owner, but also allowing other people interested in relevant issues to interact with each other and to share ideas and information.
There are a couple of format changes that I'd suggest.
First, threading is just plain going to be necessary for any forum of this size. It's not reasonable to expect people to track interleaved discussion -- and it's efficient to allow the public to correct errors in posts and to associate related information, instead of forcing readers to skim through many, many comments that comprise a series of interleaved discussions.
Second of all, moderation, or some similar system could be helpful. Slashcode is a popular codebase to allow moderation, but the structure only partly deals with moderation abusers -- those that attempt to moderate up viewpoints that they agree with, rather than those that they believe to be correct. Slashcode has a good deal of popularity mostly on forums with communities that generally agree with each other on overall issues. I don't believe that there are any forum moderation systems that try to identify "clusters" of posters that moderate each other up (perhaps this is a research project waiting to happen, if no companies are already working on such a thing). Instead of all posts being assigned a global scalar value representing "goodness", there'd be N identified clusters, and "goodness" from the point of view *of each of those clusters*. Doing so would be interesting, as it might be easier to find the "best arguments" for a particular side, and could deal better with more lobbying-oriented environments like this.
I'm not sure whether the "let's slap some viewpoints on a blog" idea is directly from Mike Powell or whether it originated with a staffer -- I find it exciting, and a good sign when it's coming from the FCC. Thanks again to whoever originated the idea, and to Mike Powell for trying it out.
May we never see th
The airwaves could still belong to the people. AM/FM, ClearChannel, et al do not start stations, they buy them. Anyone who can prove that a channel is still free to use can and will quite easily get a license.
The problem is that some of the old independents started to use research and play to the lowest common denominator. And people actualy liked it, so more followed and soon the people that knew how to play this game best bought more stations. And more people tuned in. And more independents decided to cash in and sell to these compnaies. The people sold out.
If people didn't like that kind of radio, they wouldn't have tuned in in the first place and not created this market.
All the FCC has tried to do is _limit_ this practice with anti monopoly laws, their rules certainly didn't create it.
I'd think someone as high-profile as the chairman of the FCC could, oh, maybe beg? maybe pay? to get the golf advertisment removed from the middle of his blog post. Oh, wait, this is the FCC here, no? Never mind. ;)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Mood=Censory. I got a new CD this weeked, all of the bad words hurt my ears! And no, not even I know what the broadcast flag is for! :P
I hate sigs.
this is just a move by the fcc to "relate to the public"
specifically the internet community, the ones who protest against the broadcast flag the most, think he's gonna listen to you? no.
Think he thinks you'll listen to him? yes.
Pretty much doing this to "make us understand and accept" the broadcast flag more than likely.
The first blog post is pretty much about the FCC itself, so he's prolly trying to get people to see the fcc as a buncha good guys who are trying to protect people from themselves and any questionable material that may make them question their corporate overlords and the government, and to ensure that we pay our dues to them as well.
I might sound paranoid, but just looking at the first post, it's gona be nothing but a propaganda blog to try to make those who read it go with what the fcc wants to do.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
You already have those rights. Turn the fucking TV or radio off, or, change the channel.
Please, don't encourage the government to "protect the children".
Adding more unlicensed spectrum would potentially allow for more than three non-overlapping channels (1,6,11) in 802.11b/g. Having a few more ISM bands could be VERY useful.
I guess you can attribute that perceived confusion to two reasons.:
Many terms lose their meaning over time, or take a new meaning altogether. This is most often seen in Corporate Marketing speak, and in Politics. Someone will use a catchy term to mean a new thing they are trying to push (for economic or political gain). Think about "user friendly" for instance, or "N-Tier" in the marketing of IT. In politics, linguistics is also used this way, as Chomsky and others pointed out. Terms lost meaning over time or come to mean something else.
Think about what "convergence" was about. When two things eventually become the same by merging features from both. For example, the IP protocol used to be a data only packet protocol. Voice used to be on switched circuits only. Now this is all converging with VoIP and such. The same could be underway in journalism and opinion columns with blogs being a merged form of what we now use for blogs and what op-eds are.
So, it may not be confusion after all. It could be evolution as well.
Just a thought.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
meritocracy-based communication -- attributes that bloggers are famous for!'
I accidentally read "mediocrity-based communication". Sounds about right for most blogs (with a few notable exceptions).
If Chairman Powell is open to blogging, maybe he's open to the old Slashdot 10-Question interview? We've already had an FCC chief technologist, why not they guy who runs it all? He says he wants to hear from the tech community...
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Mr. Powell, welcome to blogging, and as one respondent noted, "Welcome to Hell".
I wanted to post my comments regarding FCC regulation, digital TV (and associated DRM measures), and indecency - if for nothing else than to establish my position with you and with the community on where I stand on these issues. If you note, they fall very much in line with what others have written here.
I am a "tech savvy" (actually, that is an understatement) citizen of this country. I am also a voter.
Regarding regulation, I understand that for the public airwaves, there must be some form of regulation, otherwise, in the end, the airwaves would be filled with nothing but static, as station after station stomped the commons with overlapping broadcasts. Whether it is TV or radio, the result would be the same; an unlistenable (or unwatchable) morass of grey static.
However, the current situation and regulations make it impossible for a truely free market to exist. Current licensing fees and regulations make it impossible to easily and cheaply set up low power FM radio stations (even in markets where such stations could be set up without interference). This has left commercial radio (like ClearChannel) the only choice in most markets, which isn't a choice at all. National Public Radio (NPR) also struggles with these regulations.
The situation with television is even worse. While startup costs have always been a limiting factor for small (independent) television stations, those costs
have dropped rapidly in recent years, allowing the possibility for someone to broadcast a TV station from their home. However, licensing costs, fees,
paperwork, and other FCC regulation issues have made it impossible for such services to become available.
In a way, cable TV was an attempt to get around this issue, and in some ways, it has succeeded. By confining the "airwaves" to a coax broadcast medium, and utilizing a different spectrum for broadcasting, many more channels could be delivered to the consumer's door. This availability of channels has spawned the concept of "niche" channels - it seems now if there is an interest, there is a channel (or two, or more) for it. The content for these channels is created by privately owned companies (and the networks) who sell through distribution channels to the cable broadcasters. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is what we have.
The internet is rapidly changing all of this. The internet was originally developed as a "network of ends", where everything connected to this network was "smart", but the network itself remained "stupid" - its only job to shuffle around the packets of information via openly developed and published protocols. Such a network is inherently robust by its nature and structure.
A network of "smart" endpoints means that anyone can become (in concept) a broadcaster. I, or anyone else, can for instance, build a server (serving web pages or anything else), and put it on the internet, and others can find it and read (and/or download) information off of it. It is a different way of distributing information: Instead of the "push" model of traditional broadcasting, the internet is based on the "pull" model, where those that want information must seek it out and request it from the servers. This model has proved itself to be very popular. Content "pushing" has been tried for the internet, but the popularity of such implementations bombed very quickly. The population of the internet has spoken, "pulled" content is what we want.
Consumers have long requested this model for television: Pay-Per-View programming is
Reason is the Path to God - Anon