$100billion? There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases. But most of those databases are already manned by DBAs. Some of them may not be up to the task, but most can convert their tables to the specified format if you tell them what that is.
So it seems the task is coming up with a standard format and enforcing it. Security is another question, but again it seems a matter of mandating healthcare providers adhere to a specified standard. But hospitals and insurance companies are quite used to such bureaucracy, so it's difficult to understand where they're pulling this $100billion figure from.
Saying they'd need to hire an entire new class of DBAs and techs to make it happen is silly, since they already exist.
Odds are the figure was thrown against the wall by companies hoping to win a fat contract, and counting on the knowledge that politicians have no sense of what it takes to get the job done. I hope Obama's CIO has the knowledge and grit to tell them to take a hike.
It sort of depends on how fast you want to get there. If you can take a bit of a slower ride, zeppelins would be an excellent alternative. It does not need fuel for lift, just motion. Kitted out with solar panels on its skin and decent batteries, it could conceivably make trans-oceanic trips on batteries. And if the batteries run out of juice, it's not catastrophic.
I am trying to give Obama the benefit of the doubt during this transition. His vote on FISA and his appointments of ex-Clinton people have rankled me. This most recent appointment makes me sigh.
But he has proven himself to be a master of political jiujitsu, and I am hoping that his goals are more progressive than his methods currently appear to this grasshopper. At least they had better be, because if he intends to conduct business as usual then he will see his approval ratings and political support in the electorate implode.
I work in technology in the advertising industry. Every agency demands every campaign is now cross-platform, which means I sit in briefing sessions with the print, out-of-home, and TV people on a regular basis.
The TV people are scared because the desirable demographics, middle- to upper-middle 18-45 yr. olds, are abandoning TV for online. Young males are increasingly losing interest in TV and sports and spending more of their time gaming. The only demo TV has left in substantial numbers are the Baby Boomers.
On top of that, TiVo and other DVRs have been putting a lot of pressure on the TV crowd for several years now, which is why they've started running those annoying banner ads at the bottom of the screen during the program, and have turned every program into a running string of product placements.
Now they're dropping analog signals altogether and forcing everyone to buy converters. A younger person can probably handle the assembly, but why bother when you can watch the episodes you want online or download them via P2P anyway? The Baby Boomers, however, will either balk at the installation (most of them never figured out how to program their VCRs either) or their kids will turn them onto P2P or online video.
I believe that this foolhardy move will be the beginning of the end for television as we know it. Time and demographic change would have done so eventually anyway, but that would have taken another 20 years. It appears that the TV crowd have decided they can't wait that long to shoot themselves in the foot.
I speculate that the only way video will survive in the end is if it becomes interactive on some level, in a choose-your-own-adventure sort of way. It will involve more plot branching and shooting more scenes, and a lot of thought will need to go into it to avoid being too burdensome on the audience, but it will also have its own economies of scale (trunk plot line footage can be re-used many times without losing audience engagement, because the story may take unexpected turns down rabbit holes) and it will be something that you can't pirate because it's real time development.
I live and work in technology in New York. Back in the day I built e-commerce sites, but post dot-bomb I perforce moved into advertising. And as a consultant I have sat in the meetings with the tastemakers in many of the biggest Ad firms, such as McCann-Erickson (makers of the Mastercard "Priceless!" Ads), Ogilvy & Mather, JWT, etc, so I have some perspective on the question of web advertising.
First, let's get the common perception of an overarching, sinister council meeting in smoke-filled rooms to figure out how to manipulate the minds of America out of the way. The tastemakers are hipsters, almost all White, almost all male, in their 30's or younger, and far fewer of them are gay than you would think. They are voracious, almost desperate consumers of popular culture and are nearly all filled with self-loathing because they work in advertising instead of producing any of that popular culture.
At the moment they're all desperately trying to figure out how to monetize online, mobile, and gaming because print is terminal; out-of-home (that's billboards, bus shelter posters, etc) is limited; and the only people who still watch TV in respectable numbers are the least desirable demographic, that is, Baby Boomers in their 50's and 60's. The trendlines for middle-to-upper-middle income males ages 18-45 all show that they're abandoning in droves the activities that have been the mainstays for decades, such as TV watching and sports. So clients are demanding that Ad firms present them with good digital strategies.
But they are woefully ill-prepared to do so, because within the Ad agencies themselves the TV crowd still rules the roost and so does their "you'll take what I give you and like it" mentality. They do not fundamentally understand that within the digital media consumers have vastly more ability to shape what content they see, and how they see it. That is, they do understand that in digital consumers have that ability, but they have no idea what to do or how to behave in that brave new world.
Instead, they double-down on the same old tactics of interruption ("we'll be right back after these messages!"). That's why when TiVo got big advertisers responded by putting those annoying banners at the bottom of the screen during shows, and by making every show a walking product placement; you cannot TiVo those out. And at the moment they're on the eve of hammering the final nail in the coffin of the TV medium by forcing their last demographic, the Boomers, to switch their sets to those able to receive a digital signal. Little do they realize that will make it exponentially easier for consumers to edit out all of the banner and product placement crap and re-post and share them through P2P, while also alienating the elderly who might just remember that they used to play golf and bridge instead of watching TV all night.
That's why it's easy to predict which way web advertising will go: it will be relevant to the consumer's needs, or it will die. There is no place for the interruptive, one-way communication that the TV crowd in the Ad agencies are trying to push, because consumers can very easily switch all that off with AdBlock and the like. One-way, interruptive will not survive on the web, it will not survive on the mobile platform, and it will not survive in gaming. The days of forcing males, 18-45, to sit through tampon commercials are over.
Google has made some progress on serving relevant ads with AdSense, and they have prospered accordingly. But the problem lies deeper than the medium through which commercial messages are delivered. The corporations of the world, at least the ones more than 20 years old, still want to live in a top-down, command-and-control environment where they call all the shots. They want to produce goods and services that people will pay for, but they do not want the rabble to actually talk back to them.
But in digital media, that's precisely what consumers have grown to demand under the democratizing influence of the Web. They demand a
and has been used in at least some news organizations, because more than ten years ago I wrote a data mining program for Crain Communications (publisher of "Crain's New York Business," "Advertising Age," "Pensions & Investments," and "Crain's Chicago Business." They used it to identify trends, which is a crude use of data mining but something used to fill space nonetheless.
So I don't think data mining per se will help citizens and bloggers do more investigative journalism, but the increasing availability of the information in electronic form at all. With the many channels available for publishing information online nowadays, the only thing citizen journalists need to break stories is the ability to write and the will to ask questions. That gives them a huge advantage over traditional media, because for-profit news has a financial incentive to NOT have the will to ask questions.
for the member companies of the RIAA? I think it's more productive for those passionate about this issue to examine the annual reports for the largest members of the RIAA, figure out what their financial point-of-no-return is, and come up with a plan to help them get there more quickly.
Kind of makes me think the world needs an anti-RIAA to coordinate those efforts.
And start thinking about the probable. It is inevitable that newspapers will die off. TV news will likely die too. What will follow? The medium has shifted, but the need for information hasn't gone away.
Perhaps people will have to read the same first sources (ie. govt. documents and press releases) and watch or listen to the same statements the government and business issue, that the "journalists" do now. The only thing we'll be missing is the palaver that the "journalists" wrap around the aforementioned. They long ago stopped adding any value to publicly available facts. They don't investigate anything, and 9 times out of 10 they just regurgitate the press releases that are handed to them.
Curious individuals will always be able to dig for information and blog about what they find. Interesting findings will spread rapidly, go "viral." Controversial findings will be challenged by others. If you've been watching the last few years, you'll find that bloggers have been pushing the investigative envelope far more than "journalists" have.
Everyone who craves the old model still can access the BBC, which to my mind is the only English-language source of journalism left in the world anyway.
They can DRM all they want. I haven't played their pop music game since they killed Napster. Anything I want to listen to I play myself on the guitar. I'm no Jimi Hendrix but I do well enough and the satisfaction of doing well enough is as great as hearing the virtuoso himself.
And I often forget to flagellate myself for not paying performance fees.
It puts me in mind of the tragedy of Afropop Worldwide, the public radio program that features artists from Africa and the African diaspora. I never had any interest in afropop, but somehow I got on their email list and they started sending me links to mp3 podcasts of their radio programs.
One day I thought what the heck and started listening to their archives. It was wonderful, beautiful stuff and completely unlike anything most of us are exposed to in America. And I thought it was terrific that they were smart enough to use the internet to reach new audiences like me and my friends, whom I forwarded the links to.
Then they changed their delivery structure to an on-demand streaming structure that simply will not play, because of "concern about copyright issues." And my and my friends' nascent interest in any of the artists featured on the program has died on the vine, because the artists are so afraid of people hearing their music that they prevent us from hearing their music.
It's a loss, because Western artists can still be discovered through other channels, but for the African artists, Afropop Worldwide is about it as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Sad.
What's really happened is a happy confluence of internal corporate reality, legal reverses, new political calculations, technological innovation, and irreversible shifts in consumer behavior.
The internal corporate reality is that the old, hard-liner Baby Boomers have seen the writing on the wall and taken early retirement to spend more time with their families and write their memoirs, or they have been sacked for year after year of plummeting revenues. They have been replaced with Gen X or near-Gen X people and younger who are not deaf to the scorn of their peers nor to the trends in technology and music consumption.
The legal reverses include losing individual cases and having entire methodologies banned by the courts, but what's perhaps worse is that defeating the RIAA has become a teaching exercise for entire law schools. When future generations of lawyers are being trained to fight evil with your organization as the EVIL, you know this particular strategy is in trouble.
The new political calculations are what others have mentioned and discussed here, that they're now pinning their hopes on winning the debate over net neutrality. But they don't have a good shot at that because too many other players' interests, players who are much bigger and richer than the RIAA, are aligned against them. Never mind the consumers, since they never count for the people like those in the RIAA who like to play like they're Masters of the Universe.
Technological innovation continues, well, at least in the forms in which people use it to access music. iTunes is the model now for how people get new music. CDs? Please. Downloads in all their forms are the way anyone under 35 now gets their music. Artists may be in the music business, but the RIAA is in the CD business. The RIAA would have as much luck trying to force everyone to go back to 8-track as trying to force them to go back to CDs.
Consumer behavior has irreversibly shifted against the RIAA. As others have pointed out, the cartel made sense when it was hard to produce professional sounding music and difficult to distribute it. Both those barriers have been almost totally eliminated. Musicians can do it all themselves now, and fans can find them through so many channels like Facebook, etc. that are outside the control of the cartel. But it's not just the How and Where that have escaped the cartel's control, it's also the What. The average band and average fan have a wealth of indy music to sample and find influences in that is beyond the wildest dreams of those brought up under the tyranny of the old cartel system. And they have found the quality of the stuff out there to be much higher than the synth-pop that cartel-produced music ultimately devolved into.
So the RIAA is the walking dead. The record stores like Tower Records have already gone. The parlor game now is to guess how much longer the RIAA needs to bleed before they implode entirely. Their abandonment of the legal strategy is a strong indication that we don't have much longer to wait. If this recession/depression lasts longer than 6 months, the RIAA will not survive the year.
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
I applaud the BBC folks for thinking so creatively about spin-offs playing off against Doctor Who, and vice-versa, but it falls apart against the reality of the region-segregation that they still like to practice.
It's a pity, because many BBC shows are more cutting-edge than Hollywood fare these days and they would play really well here as-is. Except, Hollywood likes to re-produce and re-package them as watered-down, lamer versions. A couple examples are "Coupling," a Friends-like show written by Steven Moffat that was hilarious, that Hollywood tried to Americanize and which was done so poorly that it was DOA; "Top Gear," which is an entertaining auto program and which would do just great here, but which Hollywood has again felt the need to destroy by Americanizing it. "The Office" and "What Not to Wear" are two other examples.
Accordingly, maybe Bit Torrent is the only real way to go in the end.
The future of search is not clogging every query result set with commercial links. You almost can't access legitimate information anymore, because every search returns advertisement after advertisement. It's almost to the point where you might as well go straight to wikipedia instead of bothering with Google.
who say they refuse to cooperate with the incoming administration make me laugh. What part of a 79% disapproval rating for their, that is, Bush's administration and their work do they not get? It has been de rigeur to clap their hands over their ears, say nah-nah-nah-i-cant-hear-you, and ignore reality for years in their places of work, but the reality train is about to run them over and they better get the hell out of the way.
Obama doesn't seem like a vindictive guy, but absolutely pissing off the incoming teams at NASA, NSF, and all the other agencies that fund research and buy big dollar systems with these antics is a 100% sure-fire way to kill your career dead, dead, dead. What company, university, or lobbyist is going to hire a guy who is persona non grata if not dickhead #1 with the only game in town, aka the federal government?
But I applaud them for trying. Do you remember any other President ever asking you for your opinion or providing you an online tool to do so? I sure don't.
Slashdot's moderation system is the best I've ever seen, and is light-years ahead of the dreck that is Digg (No, I really don't want to see another top 10 list or diatribe about legalizing marijuana, kiddies). So Change.gov would do well to emulate/., but give them time--they took it live two days ago, for heaven's sake. It took/. years to arrive where we are now.
Lastly, I have designed many of these sorts of feedback systems professionally, and I can tell you that even the most staid brand team in the most monolithic giant corporations DO read the comments they get back from customers. And at the current level of feedback they've gotten, ~3K in the last two days, even one lazy intern could read absolutely every post and pass the uniques and interesting ones along to decision makers.
From my survey of the questions, it's even easier given that the potheads have spammed their usual questions, "when are you going to make cannabis legal?", the dittoheads have spammed with their usual talking points, "when are you going to reveal the true nature of your relationship with Rev. Wright?!", and your well-meaning but ridiculously esoteric single-issue people have spammed with theirs, "When are you going to normalize relations with Cuba?"
Send them a well-worded, thoughtful, and properly spelled question and I guarantee you it will be read and passed up the chain.
He also has a Nobel prize and has become a moral authority on climate change and energy ever since his film, "Inconvenient Truth." He has deep experience in government and has done extensive thinking about energy and environmental policy. In short, he both knows what he's talking about and can get things done.
Perhaps Chu has that, too, but his lack of name recognition will constrain his effectiveness.
to this kind of asymmetrical warfare. If China cripples the US economy with information warfare, or even by ceasing to by US debt, then the US loses the ability to buy cheap Chinese crap. If no cheap Chinese crap is bought, the peasants get restless and start doing things like protesting in Tiananmen Square, which is what happened the last time the Chinese economy was doing anything but growing by leaps and bounds.
Given a situation in which the United States and China and Europe are going through rocky economic times, which government is most likely to fall and whose society to fall into utter chaos? I would say China's.
Unlike America or Europe, civil society and non-governmental organizations are strongly repressed in China, because they represent a challenge to the CCP's power. In free societies, however, they augment the government's power and can function even if something happens to the top leadership in the government. In China, the instant the soldier stops point a gun at everyone, everything turns Malthusian. Given enough unrest, even in China you arrive at a point where there are not enough soldiers to go around and point guns at everyone.
So in the end I rather suspect these kind of "asymmetrical" weapons will turn out to be boomerangs.
It will be a joyful day if Obama can win the election and signal an end to the United States injecting its toxic whackadoodle mix into the global vein. I do believe it's not a coincidence that normally reasonable countries like Canada, Australia, Germany, and France have been electing right-wing politicians as well.
I saw the awful Gates & Seinfeld commercial last night where Gates does the Robot, and commented to my wife that Microsoft must have the lowest advertising ROI of all time. It's mind boggling that a company with that much money could do so poorly with their advertising campaigns. They can certainly afford to do better, so why don't they?
It's surprising that Crispin Porter is their agency, since they're about the highest rated in the advertising game. Perhaps it's something about Microsoft that exudes a lameness that overwhelms all else.
You really have to think that after 10 years of consumers telling the labels and studios what they want, and then voting with their feet when they don't get it, it would have sunk into even the head of the thickest *AA dinosaur. In the annals of colossal stupidity, the last 10 years of IP wars will have to rank pretty near the top.
The average age of TV viewers was recently reported as 55 years old. That means the average television audience is 10 years older than the demographic that advertisers pay top dollar to reach, 18-45. That higher average age also means that most of those watching are the least likely to be paying attention to esoteric issues like format changes. Many of them will be quite upset when their TV stops working, especially with a 30% increase in the price of groceries and $4/gallon gas happening at the same time.
So the TV industry heads are going to alienate a significant chunk of the last group of people who still tune in to their programs.
Aging demos, TiVo, writer's strikes, death of the upfront season, competition from other media, and ill-timed format changes are all going to bring the television industry down.
as are varied views within the structure. No one wants to live in a big, faceless glass box, nor look at big, faceless glass boxes. But if you have a large structure with integrated greenspace and human-scale details within the superstructure, to help fix the eye and give a sense of place, then it's not hard to imagine a million people living within it happily.
Think Central Park--There are tens of thousands of people in it at any given time, but because it's made of little hills and dales and stands of trees you never see more than 20 people at one time and it doesn't feel crowded. If you did a similar thing in three dimensions it could work.
are the true Knights Templar, and that we have hidden the treasures of the world beneath a highly recognizable public building (no, not that one).
Claims about us secretly directing the destiny of nations and peoples are greatly exaggerated, though. I've been in fifteen years and still only get to oversee Botswana.
It's a good sign that the RIAA is successfully preventing the public from hearing the product turned out by the big labels. Younger demographics, who are their target, do not listen to the radio nor watch TV. They get their music through their friends and online. The more successful the RIAA is at cutting off the online channel, the less access they have to the people they want to reach.
Older demographics already have all the Huey Lewis & the News and Led Zep tracks they could ever want, so they're not going to make up the shortfall. So, the more draconian laws like this the RIAA can get passed, the faster they'll accelerate their disappearance.
It's going on 10 years since they declared war on the music-listening public. I can't wait until we never hear the acronym RIAA again.
If SaysMe TV does work, all of us who are pissed at the direction things have taken the past 8+ years should remember it and use it in the future. I am very angry about FISA, and intend to punish those of my congresspeople who voted for it. Sadly, I don't think SaysMeTV will help us in this fight. Still, it's a great tool if it works.
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$100billion? There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases. But most of those databases are already manned by DBAs. Some of them may not be up to the task, but most can convert their tables to the specified format if you tell them what that is.
So it seems the task is coming up with a standard format and enforcing it. Security is another question, but again it seems a matter of mandating healthcare providers adhere to a specified standard. But hospitals and insurance companies are quite used to such bureaucracy, so it's difficult to understand where they're pulling this $100billion figure from.
Saying they'd need to hire an entire new class of DBAs and techs to make it happen is silly, since they already exist.
Odds are the figure was thrown against the wall by companies hoping to win a fat contract, and counting on the knowledge that politicians have no sense of what it takes to get the job done. I hope Obama's CIO has the knowledge and grit to tell them to take a hike.
It sort of depends on how fast you want to get there. If you can take a bit of a slower ride, zeppelins would be an excellent alternative. It does not need fuel for lift, just motion. Kitted out with solar panels on its skin and decent batteries, it could conceivably make trans-oceanic trips on batteries. And if the batteries run out of juice, it's not catastrophic.
I am trying to give Obama the benefit of the doubt during this transition. His vote on FISA and his appointments of ex-Clinton people have rankled me. This most recent appointment makes me sigh.
But he has proven himself to be a master of political jiujitsu, and I am hoping that his goals are more progressive than his methods currently appear to this grasshopper. At least they had better be, because if he intends to conduct business as usual then he will see his approval ratings and political support in the electorate implode.
I work in technology in the advertising industry. Every agency demands every campaign is now cross-platform, which means I sit in briefing sessions with the print, out-of-home, and TV people on a regular basis.
The TV people are scared because the desirable demographics, middle- to upper-middle 18-45 yr. olds, are abandoning TV for online. Young males are increasingly losing interest in TV and sports and spending more of their time gaming. The only demo TV has left in substantial numbers are the Baby Boomers.
On top of that, TiVo and other DVRs have been putting a lot of pressure on the TV crowd for several years now, which is why they've started running those annoying banner ads at the bottom of the screen during the program, and have turned every program into a running string of product placements.
Now they're dropping analog signals altogether and forcing everyone to buy converters. A younger person can probably handle the assembly, but why bother when you can watch the episodes you want online or download them via P2P anyway? The Baby Boomers, however, will either balk at the installation (most of them never figured out how to program their VCRs either) or their kids will turn them onto P2P or online video.
I believe that this foolhardy move will be the beginning of the end for television as we know it. Time and demographic change would have done so eventually anyway, but that would have taken another 20 years. It appears that the TV crowd have decided they can't wait that long to shoot themselves in the foot.
I speculate that the only way video will survive in the end is if it becomes interactive on some level, in a choose-your-own-adventure sort of way. It will involve more plot branching and shooting more scenes, and a lot of thought will need to go into it to avoid being too burdensome on the audience, but it will also have its own economies of scale (trunk plot line footage can be re-used many times without losing audience engagement, because the story may take unexpected turns down rabbit holes) and it will be something that you can't pirate because it's real time development.
I live and work in technology in New York. Back in the day I built e-commerce sites, but post dot-bomb I perforce moved into advertising. And as a consultant I have sat in the meetings with the tastemakers in many of the biggest Ad firms, such as McCann-Erickson (makers of the Mastercard "Priceless!" Ads), Ogilvy & Mather, JWT, etc, so I have some perspective on the question of web advertising.
First, let's get the common perception of an overarching, sinister council meeting in smoke-filled rooms to figure out how to manipulate the minds of America out of the way. The tastemakers are hipsters, almost all White, almost all male, in their 30's or younger, and far fewer of them are gay than you would think. They are voracious, almost desperate consumers of popular culture and are nearly all filled with self-loathing because they work in advertising instead of producing any of that popular culture.
At the moment they're all desperately trying to figure out how to monetize online, mobile, and gaming because print is terminal; out-of-home (that's billboards, bus shelter posters, etc) is limited; and the only people who still watch TV in respectable numbers are the least desirable demographic, that is, Baby Boomers in their 50's and 60's. The trendlines for middle-to-upper-middle income males ages 18-45 all show that they're abandoning in droves the activities that have been the mainstays for decades, such as TV watching and sports. So clients are demanding that Ad firms present them with good digital strategies.
But they are woefully ill-prepared to do so, because within the Ad agencies themselves the TV crowd still rules the roost and so does their "you'll take what I give you and like it" mentality. They do not fundamentally understand that within the digital media consumers have vastly more ability to shape what content they see, and how they see it. That is, they do understand that in digital consumers have that ability, but they have no idea what to do or how to behave in that brave new world.
Instead, they double-down on the same old tactics of interruption ("we'll be right back after these messages!"). That's why when TiVo got big advertisers responded by putting those annoying banners at the bottom of the screen during shows, and by making every show a walking product placement; you cannot TiVo those out. And at the moment they're on the eve of hammering the final nail in the coffin of the TV medium by forcing their last demographic, the Boomers, to switch their sets to those able to receive a digital signal. Little do they realize that will make it exponentially easier for consumers to edit out all of the banner and product placement crap and re-post and share them through P2P, while also alienating the elderly who might just remember that they used to play golf and bridge instead of watching TV all night.
That's why it's easy to predict which way web advertising will go: it will be relevant to the consumer's needs, or it will die. There is no place for the interruptive, one-way communication that the TV crowd in the Ad agencies are trying to push, because consumers can very easily switch all that off with AdBlock and the like. One-way, interruptive will not survive on the web, it will not survive on the mobile platform, and it will not survive in gaming. The days of forcing males, 18-45, to sit through tampon commercials are over.
Google has made some progress on serving relevant ads with AdSense, and they have prospered accordingly. But the problem lies deeper than the medium through which commercial messages are delivered. The corporations of the world, at least the ones more than 20 years old, still want to live in a top-down, command-and-control environment where they call all the shots. They want to produce goods and services that people will pay for, but they do not want the rabble to actually talk back to them.
But in digital media, that's precisely what consumers have grown to demand under the democratizing influence of the Web. They demand a
and has been used in at least some news organizations, because more than ten years ago I wrote a data mining program for Crain Communications (publisher of "Crain's New York Business," "Advertising Age," "Pensions & Investments," and "Crain's Chicago Business." They used it to identify trends, which is a crude use of data mining but something used to fill space nonetheless.
So I don't think data mining per se will help citizens and bloggers do more investigative journalism, but the increasing availability of the information in electronic form at all. With the many channels available for publishing information online nowadays, the only thing citizen journalists need to break stories is the ability to write and the will to ask questions. That gives them a huge advantage over traditional media, because for-profit news has a financial incentive to NOT have the will to ask questions.
for the member companies of the RIAA? I think it's more productive for those passionate about this issue to examine the annual reports for the largest members of the RIAA, figure out what their financial point-of-no-return is, and come up with a plan to help them get there more quickly.
Kind of makes me think the world needs an anti-RIAA to coordinate those efforts.
And start thinking about the probable. It is inevitable that newspapers will die off. TV news will likely die too. What will follow? The medium has shifted, but the need for information hasn't gone away.
Perhaps people will have to read the same first sources (ie. govt. documents and press releases) and watch or listen to the same statements the government and business issue, that the "journalists" do now. The only thing we'll be missing is the palaver that the "journalists" wrap around the aforementioned. They long ago stopped adding any value to publicly available facts. They don't investigate anything, and 9 times out of 10 they just regurgitate the press releases that are handed to them.
Curious individuals will always be able to dig for information and blog about what they find. Interesting findings will spread rapidly, go "viral." Controversial findings will be challenged by others. If you've been watching the last few years, you'll find that bloggers have been pushing the investigative envelope far more than "journalists" have.
Everyone who craves the old model still can access the BBC, which to my mind is the only English-language source of journalism left in the world anyway.
They can DRM all they want. I haven't played their pop music game since they killed Napster. Anything I want to listen to I play myself on the guitar. I'm no Jimi Hendrix but I do well enough and the satisfaction of doing well enough is as great as hearing the virtuoso himself.
And I often forget to flagellate myself for not paying performance fees.
It puts me in mind of the tragedy of Afropop Worldwide, the public radio program that features artists from Africa and the African diaspora. I never had any interest in afropop, but somehow I got on their email list and they started sending me links to mp3 podcasts of their radio programs.
One day I thought what the heck and started listening to their archives. It was wonderful, beautiful stuff and completely unlike anything most of us are exposed to in America. And I thought it was terrific that they were smart enough to use the internet to reach new audiences like me and my friends, whom I forwarded the links to.
Then they changed their delivery structure to an on-demand streaming structure that simply will not play, because of "concern about copyright issues." And my and my friends' nascent interest in any of the artists featured on the program has died on the vine, because the artists are so afraid of people hearing their music that they prevent us from hearing their music.
It's a loss, because Western artists can still be discovered through other channels, but for the African artists, Afropop Worldwide is about it as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Sad.
What's really happened is a happy confluence of internal corporate reality, legal reverses, new political calculations, technological innovation, and irreversible shifts in consumer behavior.
The internal corporate reality is that the old, hard-liner Baby Boomers have seen the writing on the wall and taken early retirement to spend more time with their families and write their memoirs, or they have been sacked for year after year of plummeting revenues. They have been replaced with Gen X or near-Gen X people and younger who are not deaf to the scorn of their peers nor to the trends in technology and music consumption.
The legal reverses include losing individual cases and having entire methodologies banned by the courts, but what's perhaps worse is that defeating the RIAA has become a teaching exercise for entire law schools. When future generations of lawyers are being trained to fight evil with your organization as the EVIL, you know this particular strategy is in trouble.
The new political calculations are what others have mentioned and discussed here, that they're now pinning their hopes on winning the debate over net neutrality. But they don't have a good shot at that because too many other players' interests, players who are much bigger and richer than the RIAA, are aligned against them. Never mind the consumers, since they never count for the people like those in the RIAA who like to play like they're Masters of the Universe.
Technological innovation continues, well, at least in the forms in which people use it to access music. iTunes is the model now for how people get new music. CDs? Please. Downloads in all their forms are the way anyone under 35 now gets their music. Artists may be in the music business, but the RIAA is in the CD business. The RIAA would have as much luck trying to force everyone to go back to 8-track as trying to force them to go back to CDs.
Consumer behavior has irreversibly shifted against the RIAA. As others have pointed out, the cartel made sense when it was hard to produce professional sounding music and difficult to distribute it. Both those barriers have been almost totally eliminated. Musicians can do it all themselves now, and fans can find them through so many channels like Facebook, etc. that are outside the control of the cartel. But it's not just the How and Where that have escaped the cartel's control, it's also the What. The average band and average fan have a wealth of indy music to sample and find influences in that is beyond the wildest dreams of those brought up under the tyranny of the old cartel system. And they have found the quality of the stuff out there to be much higher than the synth-pop that cartel-produced music ultimately devolved into.
So the RIAA is the walking dead. The record stores like Tower Records have already gone. The parlor game now is to guess how much longer the RIAA needs to bleed before they implode entirely. Their abandonment of the legal strategy is a strong indication that we don't have much longer to wait. If this recession/depression lasts longer than 6 months, the RIAA will not survive the year.
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
I applaud the BBC folks for thinking so creatively about spin-offs playing off against Doctor Who, and vice-versa, but it falls apart against the reality of the region-segregation that they still like to practice.
It's a pity, because many BBC shows are more cutting-edge than Hollywood fare these days and they would play really well here as-is. Except, Hollywood likes to re-produce and re-package them as watered-down, lamer versions. A couple examples are "Coupling," a Friends-like show written by Steven Moffat that was hilarious, that Hollywood tried to Americanize and which was done so poorly that it was DOA; "Top Gear," which is an entertaining auto program and which would do just great here, but which Hollywood has again felt the need to destroy by Americanizing it. "The Office" and "What Not to Wear" are two other examples.
Accordingly, maybe Bit Torrent is the only real way to go in the end.
The future of search is not clogging every query result set with commercial links. You almost can't access legitimate information anymore, because every search returns advertisement after advertisement. It's almost to the point where you might as well go straight to wikipedia instead of bothering with Google.
who say they refuse to cooperate with the incoming administration make me laugh. What part of a 79% disapproval rating for their, that is, Bush's administration and their work do they not get? It has been de rigeur to clap their hands over their ears, say nah-nah-nah-i-cant-hear-you, and ignore reality for years in their places of work, but the reality train is about to run them over and they better get the hell out of the way.
Obama doesn't seem like a vindictive guy, but absolutely pissing off the incoming teams at NASA, NSF, and all the other agencies that fund research and buy big dollar systems with these antics is a 100% sure-fire way to kill your career dead, dead, dead. What company, university, or lobbyist is going to hire a guy who is persona non grata if not dickhead #1 with the only game in town, aka the federal government?
But I applaud them for trying. Do you remember any other President ever asking you for your opinion or providing you an online tool to do so? I sure don't.
Slashdot's moderation system is the best I've ever seen, and is light-years ahead of the dreck that is Digg (No, I really don't want to see another top 10 list or diatribe about legalizing marijuana, kiddies). So Change.gov would do well to emulate /., but give them time--they took it live two days ago, for heaven's sake. It took /. years to arrive where we are now.
Lastly, I have designed many of these sorts of feedback systems professionally, and I can tell you that even the most staid brand team in the most monolithic giant corporations DO read the comments they get back from customers. And at the current level of feedback they've gotten, ~3K in the last two days, even one lazy intern could read absolutely every post and pass the uniques and interesting ones along to decision makers.
From my survey of the questions, it's even easier given that the potheads have spammed their usual questions, "when are you going to make cannabis legal?", the dittoheads have spammed with their usual talking points, "when are you going to reveal the true nature of your relationship with Rev. Wright?!", and your well-meaning but ridiculously esoteric single-issue people have spammed with theirs, "When are you going to normalize relations with Cuba?"
Send them a well-worded, thoughtful, and properly spelled question and I guarantee you it will be read and passed up the chain.
He also has a Nobel prize and has become a moral authority on climate change and energy ever since his film, "Inconvenient Truth." He has deep experience in government and has done extensive thinking about energy and environmental policy. In short, he both knows what he's talking about and can get things done.
Perhaps Chu has that, too, but his lack of name recognition will constrain his effectiveness.
to this kind of asymmetrical warfare. If China cripples the US economy with information warfare, or even by ceasing to by US debt, then the US loses the ability to buy cheap Chinese crap. If no cheap Chinese crap is bought, the peasants get restless and start doing things like protesting in Tiananmen Square, which is what happened the last time the Chinese economy was doing anything but growing by leaps and bounds.
Given a situation in which the United States and China and Europe are going through rocky economic times, which government is most likely to fall and whose society to fall into utter chaos? I would say China's.
Unlike America or Europe, civil society and non-governmental organizations are strongly repressed in China, because they represent a challenge to the CCP's power. In free societies, however, they augment the government's power and can function even if something happens to the top leadership in the government. In China, the instant the soldier stops point a gun at everyone, everything turns Malthusian. Given enough unrest, even in China you arrive at a point where there are not enough soldiers to go around and point guns at everyone.
So in the end I rather suspect these kind of "asymmetrical" weapons will turn out to be boomerangs.
It will be a joyful day if Obama can win the election and signal an end to the United States injecting its toxic whackadoodle mix into the global vein. I do believe it's not a coincidence that normally reasonable countries like Canada, Australia, Germany, and France have been electing right-wing politicians as well.
I saw the awful Gates & Seinfeld commercial last night where Gates does the Robot, and commented to my wife that Microsoft must have the lowest advertising ROI of all time. It's mind boggling that a company with that much money could do so poorly with their advertising campaigns. They can certainly afford to do better, so why don't they?
It's surprising that Crispin Porter is their agency, since they're about the highest rated in the advertising game. Perhaps it's something about Microsoft that exudes a lameness that overwhelms all else.
You really have to think that after 10 years of consumers telling the labels and studios what they want, and then voting with their feet when they don't get it, it would have sunk into even the head of the thickest *AA dinosaur. In the annals of colossal stupidity, the last 10 years of IP wars will have to rank pretty near the top.
The average age of TV viewers was recently reported as 55 years old. That means the average television audience is 10 years older than the demographic that advertisers pay top dollar to reach, 18-45. That higher average age also means that most of those watching are the least likely to be paying attention to esoteric issues like format changes. Many of them will be quite upset when their TV stops working, especially with a 30% increase in the price of groceries and $4/gallon gas happening at the same time.
So the TV industry heads are going to alienate a significant chunk of the last group of people who still tune in to their programs.
Aging demos, TiVo, writer's strikes, death of the upfront season, competition from other media, and ill-timed format changes are all going to bring the television industry down.
as are varied views within the structure. No one wants to live in a big, faceless glass box, nor look at big, faceless glass boxes. But if you have a large structure with integrated greenspace and human-scale details within the superstructure, to help fix the eye and give a sense of place, then it's not hard to imagine a million people living within it happily.
Think Central Park--There are tens of thousands of people in it at any given time, but because it's made of little hills and dales and stands of trees you never see more than 20 people at one time and it doesn't feel crowded. If you did a similar thing in three dimensions it could work.
are the true Knights Templar, and that we have hidden the treasures of the world beneath a highly recognizable public building (no, not that one).
Claims about us secretly directing the destiny of nations and peoples are greatly exaggerated, though. I've been in fifteen years and still only get to oversee Botswana.
It's a good sign that the RIAA is successfully preventing the public from hearing the product turned out by the big labels. Younger demographics, who are their target, do not listen to the radio nor watch TV. They get their music through their friends and online. The more successful the RIAA is at cutting off the online channel, the less access they have to the people they want to reach.
Older demographics already have all the Huey Lewis & the News and Led Zep tracks they could ever want, so they're not going to make up the shortfall. So, the more draconian laws like this the RIAA can get passed, the faster they'll accelerate their disappearance.
It's going on 10 years since they declared war on the music-listening public. I can't wait until we never hear the acronym RIAA again.
If SaysMe TV does work, all of us who are pissed at the direction things have taken the past 8+ years should remember it and use it in the future. I am very angry about FISA, and intend to punish those of my congresspeople who voted for it. Sadly, I don't think SaysMeTV will help us in this fight. Still, it's a great tool if it works.