A few days ago Rupert Murdoch suggested that he plans to make News Corp’s content invisible to search engines. It’s saddens me that obviously intelligent men can be so completely out of touch with the way things are. Old media is dead because of people like Murdoch. Sadly, he will wind up taking a lot of talented people down with him because they have an employee mentality instead of understanding that his complete lack of understanding about how the world works now gives them the freedom to become their own masters instead of reporting through the eyes of half a dozen editors.

There’s a rumored deal for exclusive search between News Corp and Bing. Which is fine but also shows a lack of understanding about the way people use the net. People use a search engine because that’s the one they’re comfortable with or feel gives them the best results. Over the years for me it has been Lycos, followed by Altavista, followed by Google (since approximately when they went live). If News Corp’s content is filtered out of Google’s results I’ll read somebody else’s articles. I can think of very few situations in which I feel the need to read a specific journalist’s article particularly in the arena of hard news.

The cold, hard facts are that Murdoch’s only foray into the net is his purchase of MySpace which he paid too much for and bought at the worst possible time. Perhaps that explains his hatred of the net. Whatever. The landscape is littered with the desiccated  corpses of business men who didn’t understand the changing business climate.  There’s a good summary of the situation over at Mashable (which seems to be getting along fine with Google bringing them all that useless traffic).

[Photo by Dave Beckett via flikr]

There was a deal reached this week between the record companies and SoundExchange over music webcasts. It was presented by some as a win for webcasts even though Pandora’s own blog notes that the royalty rates are higher than for any other form of radio. Others such as Techdirt call it a death sentence for Internet radio. One thing I found interesting was that the opinions varied almost entirely depending on whether it was an Old Media or New Media source. I think they’re both right.

What it means is that services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker Radio get a short term reprieve. They’ll be able to suck up the fees and stay in business for a while but I think the royalty rates are too high to be sustainable long term. On the other hand, it will almost immediately kill off any smaller webcasters that are interested in staying legal.

What it means long term is that the recording industry has killed another legitimate source of revenue and if there is no free web radio to listen to people will download and listen to stolen music for which there is no income associated. They should have embraced web radio and given them royalty rates at least comparable to conventional radio – increasing the number of people listening to paid music. Instead they continued their death dance with Clear Channel.

Here’s a clue for you, RIAA. Nobody likes their corporate, sounds the fucking same everywhere, committee programmed bullshit. Some people will tolerate it but the number who will is becoming increasingly few. They are doomed and so are you. But frankly I think that’s a good thing for both musicians and listeners.

In news that makes me feel better about politics than I have in a long time, The Swedish Pirate Party won two seats on the Eurporean Parliament. Most people assume this is a backlash against the grotesquery that surrounded the conviction of the guys from Pirate Bay. Personally, I don’t care  what caused it but it’s good to see people rise up against the bullshit and in-breeding that is modern government. Power To The People, man!

There’s a really good write-up at Torrent Freak that’s maybe not a vitriolic as I would come up with.

Mark wrote a pseudo-review over on Boing Boing of Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soul Craft.  I was a network guy for a significant part of my adult life and felt the same sort of disconnect that he talks about about was afraid to talk about it with anybody for fear of seeming ungrateful. I mean, I was being paid stupid amounts of money and when a large portion of the world’s population aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from it seems kind of pissy to whine about not feeling fulfilled at work. What he says is true though. I remember one time a co-worker and I were doing some consulting for a metal fabrication shop and the IT guy was taking us through showing us what they did. Both of us were taken by the production of real things since neither of us actually produced any tangible things of value in our regular work lives.

If you read the comments below the Boing Boing post you’ll see that I’m not the only one that feels that way. I’m taking steps to correct the absence of actual creation in my life. If it’s something that’s missing from yours I suggest you do too.

Cory Doctorow posts an item over on Boing Boing about a manga collector that has plead guilty to possession of child porn because some of his manga collection includes depictions of  “minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct”, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” For this, he faces 15 years in prison and the remainder of his life tagged as a sex offender and pedophile. For collecting comic books. Read that again. Nobody involved with the case is claiming that Christopher Handley is a pedophile. Nobody is claiming he ever harmed any children. He was arrested and convicted on the basis of collecting comic books that are commercially available in Japan.

But that’s Japan, you say. Should we allow people to purchase film of little girls and boys being abused if it becomes commercially available in Thailand? Who’s there to protect the children? Here’s the thing. I’m all for protecting children from predators. In fact, in cases of clear sexual abuse of children…. where there can be no question of guilt, I’m totally in favor of the death penalty for them since, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to rehabilitate sexual predators. On the other hand, let’s say you’ve got a person who has a proclivity for such behavior and it’s taken care of by looking at some cartoon pictures of nastiness. Maybe it’s ok for him to satisfy his twists via cartoons, eh?

In the subset of manga known as hentai there is some pretty twisted shit. [Feel free to do a Google image search if you're  feeling brave. DO NOT do it if you're at work]. Apparently, the stuff seized by customs involved beastiality of some sort but I have to worry when we have become so puritanical that we have to outlaw cartoon behavior. It seems to me like this is the 60s pornography debate all over again since it the government is claiming that there is no artistic value to the work. But maybe it’s just me.

Here is a lengthier article at Wired by David Kravets.

Attorneys General have long been known as attention seeking assholes (ref: John Ashcroft). SC’s Henry McMasters is no different. He started by  flapping his gums about criminal prosecution of Craigslist  for having prostitution ads available on-line in SC. So Craigslist removed the ads. Then he kept yammering because you can’t get to be governor by having people comply right away. So today Craigslist filed a lawsuit in federal court. McMasters hasn’t got a leg to stand on in court so what does he do? That’s right class… he declares victory and spins the whole thing into we won.

And people wonder why I don’t like politicians.

Michael Arrington’s Post over at Techcrunch is better than mine because I just start ranting pretty quickly.

I was listening to the Two Guy Named Chris morning show on the  radio station over in Greensboro the other day when they started talking about John and Lorena Bobbitt. At one point one of them said something like John had “pushed her to it” or something similar.

Here’s the email I wrote:

Hey guys. I pass through the area pretty regularly and catch your show. Much better than anything that’s on in Raleigh. I have a bone to pick with on regarding Monday’s show (5/4). During one part of the show you were discussing John & Lorena Bobbitt on some TV show together. One of you (I don’t remember who) said at one point “he drove her to it” and in general everybody one the show seemed to think what she had done was alright.

I dare you to turn that around and see how it sounds. Find the most heinous, unredeeming  bitch that cheated on her husband  with his best friend. Imagine that she constantly demeaned him and was a controlling nag and then imagine that he beat the piss out of her. Not permanently mutilated her anything… just, say, broke her  nose and blacked her eyes. The roll the phrase “she drove him to it” around in your mouth for a while and see if it feels ok. Even better… come up with whatever back story you like involving a guy beating his wife up, tell it on the air and then say “he drove her to it” . When Biggie stops answering the phones, maybe you’ll see my problem.

For what it’s worth you all aren’t the only one’s that do that. There’s a show on Oxygen called Snapped that from the few minutes I watched appeared to be a show explaining what some no good bastard had done to deserve getting killed by a woman. I’d love to see a show on Spike called Bitch Asked For It and watched the feminists climb out of the woodwork.

Why is it alright for a woman to mutilate a man but the slightest hint of violence toward a women brings instant condemnation? Just something to think about.

Thanks for having a great show.

Chris Demm responded the next day. I won’t quote his email because I didn’t ask him if it was alright. Essentially he said that he didn’t necessarily think it was ok for her to do but that since the jury thought so then it must be. Which wasn’t really my point. What I was getting at was that if the situation had been reversed (ok, I know that it’s unlikely that a woman can force a man to have sex with her, but let’s just go with it ok?) nothing that she did would make mutilating her ok. That’s what law enforcement is supposed to be for.

There’s a post over on Wired about one of the finalists on the latest America’s Next Top Model and how she used to have picturescirculating on 4chan‘s /b/ board in 2005 where she was known as Creepy-chan then she went a little less goth and started being referred to as Cute-chan. Then the pictures stopped and she showed up on ANTM. She needs some piercings and tattoos but otherwise seems like she might be interesting.

I don’t know why but radio ads seem to bother me more than tv commercials do. I can’t recall a time that I thought about changing the channel on the tv because of a commercial but I sometimes do when there’s a really bad radio spot on. Maybe it’s because there’s no visual component to distract me and I can focus completely on how stupid it really is. I’m not sure.

These probably aren’t running everywhere and apparently the one thing the Internet doesn’t have is mp3 files of radio commercials so you’ll just have to take my word for it if you haven’t heard them.

Current contenders, in no particular order,  are:

1. The Burger King “Awesome”. Two stoner/surfer dudes, probably in a basement somewhere, talking about “awesome endsdays at awesome king”. Seriously. There’s more of this goofiness but that’s the best part.
2. Safelite Autoglass. Mark, a technician at Safelite, tells us about his last customer that waited too long to get a chip repaired and it turned into a crack. Which is fine except that he tells the story in exactly the same way you’d read a Winnie the Pooh story to a 3 year old. Safelite, there’s a voicemail on the clue phone. It says to hire professional talent to do your commercials. We don’t need radio drama especially when the storyline pertains to a cracked windshield.
3. Bojangles. A guy orders two sausage biscuits at the drive-thru. The girl on the other end says it’ll be ‘one eighty-nine’. Guy goes non-linear about it being a hundred and eighty-nine dollars. Girl explains that it’s a dollar eighty-nine when what she should do is say, “Please pull out of line you’re too fucking stupid to eat.” I’m willing to suspend disbelief but this has the exact same effect as him screaming “All your base are belong to us” when she tells him the price.

Like I said, there are plenty of TV ads that are really bad. I’m not sure why they don’t bother me as much. There are fewer different commercials on radio so maybe it’s just that you reach some sort of tolerance limit or something.

Cory Doctorow posted an excellent examination of the current darling amongst media doomsters over on Boing Boing about the actual math behind the Spanish Flu of 1918. It’s not my intention to minimize the grief that had to accompany the deaths of so many people (my grandfather’s 1st wife died in the epidemic).  Modern medicine and instantaneous communication really does limit how likely it is that an epidemic of the severity of the Spanish Flu will happen again. Honestly, the Black Death is estimated to have killed a quarter of the population in Europe but that was during a time that medicine was little better than magic (we’ll set aside for a moment that it’s sometimes not much better than that now). They didn’t have anitbiotics or an understanding of germ theory or a grasp of how the disease was transmitted. It killed 25% of the population. In 1918, medicine was better but antibiotics weren’t available and it killed 2.5%.

Is it possible we could move along to the sensationalist photo-op, Big Media?

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