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]

Stan Schroeder posted an article on Mashable titled If Free is the Enemy of Good, Then Color Me Bad a couple of days ago about Paul McGuiness and him being a bitch. That’s not what Stan said because he’s considerably more cultured than I am.  Paul McGuiness, for those of you out of the loop on such things, is the Manager for U2. I’m going to make the first of what will probably be many ugly comments now and ask —have you ever noticed that the bands or band apparatchik or clingers-on that are constantly bitching about the Internet or peer to peer file sharing or people stealing music are from bands that haven’t been relevant in 20 years? Bono is as swell a humanitarian as they come but how many people can name a song they’ve recorded from this century? Metallica–ditto.

The problem is that all of these people have stopped making music (if they ever were) and become part of the general whoredom that is the “recording industry”. They have been at it sooooo long that they believe they are entitled to drink Cristal poured over the breasts of $10,000 a night hookers. So they don’t want people to listen to their “music” unless they’ve been paid for it. When the actual music in the world is almost completely made by people who would gladly give it away just so people can hear it (BTW, Thanks, Trent. The Slip was the bomb). I’ll bet there are 50 bands in Raleigh that would pay to have people hear them play*.

At any rate, this is not the first time Paul has opened his hole and said something stupid. The funniest part is that he’s the fucking manager which means that he doesn’t have any talent and he’s basically sponging off U2′s success.

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*In fact, I knew a guy in a band a few years ago in Raleigh and that’s essentially what they did… after paying for the rentals on equipment and assorted expenses they were lucky if they split enough money at the end of the night to cover their bar tab.

This article by Stan Schroeder over at Mashable about a guy named Ed Morita who got a tattoo done of a WordPress logo in a sort of biomech background. I thought it was pretty cool although the artwork wasn’t that great.

Stan Schroeder at Mashable wrote an article about Nine Inch Nails latest bit of coolness. They found a place that has 400Gb of raw HD footage from 3 of their shows and linked to it from their website.

He notes that Metallica (a band that I really used to like and completely lost all respect for when they started to speak) would have armed itself with a squadron of lawyers and sued.

NIN, in this instance, is acting more like The Grateful Dead who used to allow fans to plug into the soundboard to record pirate tapes. An dlook at the following they still have.

Back in July (yeah, again, fuck you — I just recently discovered that Viigo on my Blackberry had gone Microsoft and was feeding me articles for Techcrunch & Mashable from July), Mark Hopkins wrote an article called Old Media Deathrace 5000 in which he discusses which of the Old Media variants will die first.

His spin is that radio will go first. He talks about another article by Duncan Riley in which Riley says that TV will be the first to go. Just because I’m an arrogant prick I’m going to throw my opinion in and say, with qualifications, that I think they’re both wrong.

I think newspapers will be the first to go. My qualification to that is it assumes that newspapers aren’t already dead and just haven’t recognized it yet. Furthermore, here’s the order I think they’ll go in: Newspapers, TV, Radio.

Traditional newspapers are, for all practical purposes, are already dead. I mean really does anybody know anyone under 60 that stills reads a newspaper on a regular basis? I get all my traditional news online. Now it’s possible that some of you may consider that Old Media in a new dress. But I don’t — so there. I rest my case.

[In a stunning display of serendipity, Michael Hirschorn agrees with me in his article in the January/February issue of The Atlantic]

[And as if to further indicate my genius-osity, today it was announced that the  Seattle P-I was put up for sale and if it hasn't sold in 60 days it will go web only or be shut down entirely]

Next to go will be traditional TV.  This has already started in several significant ways: TIVO/DVR, Hulu, and other on-demand types of video delivery.

Last to go, IMHO, will be radio and here’s why — there isn’t any equivalent service available for use in the car that’s free. Yes, there’s SiriusXM. I have it because Triangle radio sucks for air (but that’s a post for a different day) but alot of people won’t pay for radio. There’s Pandora and it’s associates but there’s no current way to easily use it in the car. There are ipods but that’s not a passive activity. If you’re driving in your car and want to listen to some tunes without actively programming your own deal you’re stuck with Clear Channel minions or paying for satellite service.

That said I can’t wait for traditional radio to crash and burn  because I think Clear Channel and the major record labels are largely responsible for the sucking that is modern radio.

And that’s the name of that tune.