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]

This is maybe the coolest thing ever (probably not more than the second coolest though). It’s a polar exploration exploration lab designed by Matthiew Tarrit. It’s currently only a concept which means, like all extra-cool things, that it’s unlikely to ever see production but he gets props anyway.

Core 77 via Gizmodo

I have a Blackberry. I know a lot of other people who have a Blackberry. I know more people with assorted phones with qwerty keyboards on them. What this means and apparently what advertising/marketing  monkeys have failed to grasp is that a lot of us aren’t looking at standard phone dials anymore.  That means that we don’t have ABC above the number 1 and it makes it hard to decipher alphabetic phone numbers. What that also means is that when somebody asks me to dial 800-CleverNumberThatSpellsTheirName I either have to go to a site like phonespell.org or, more often than not, not call them.

When I was taking marketing classes, the object of advertising was to make people want to use your product or service. This fails in the most astounding way if you make somebody want to use your product but then make it really difficult to get to.  I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this since Blackberrys  have been required equipment for every upper level management wonk for approximately the last 10 years.

I mean, seriously, I understand that numbers are tricky for people to remember but it’s nothing like trying to remember what letters appeared above what numbers on a phone dial and decoding that in your head. I could totally buy into phone “numbers” becoming alphabetic like domain names but since telephone companies have all the innovative capacity of Neanderthals I don’t see that happening any time soon. They still seem to think area code splits are a good idea. I’m hoping Google Voice (and services like it) will change this someday.

This is where the WordPress for Blackberry app will be so cool. I’m at Raleigh Downtown Live and I’m posting to my blog. I realize I could do that before with the plugin I had but it was rending a web page on a really small screen and it was kind of a pain in the ass to deal with. This is a native app and I can save stuff and come back to it. Very cool

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.

I just downloaded and installed the WordPress for Blackberry app so now I can blog from wherever I happen to be. Honestly, I don’t see me doing huge posts from my phone but it will be extra cool from breaking stuff while I’m away from my computer.

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.

SC Gubanatorial Candidate Attorney General Henry McMasters got bitchslapped by federal court today. District Court Judge Weston Houck issued a consent order prohibiting him or anybody in his office from prosecuting Craigslist in relation to ads posted by third parties.

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.

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