Read some great news over on The Debian User last night:
Why not offer computers, pre-built with Linux, to the people I like, or to their friends and families? I’m not a great coder, but as a former sysadmin I know my way around hard- and software enough to set up solid systems. So if these people (Debian Developers and such) provide all that great software, I could at least offer them some hardware, right?
Going that way with ZaReason was only the next logical step. Why re-invent the wheel, or try to set up competition, when there could be co-operation?
After months of hard work Wolfgang has launched a EU branch of ZaReason something that makes this happy ZaReason user just plain giddy. Congratulations and best of luck!
Not just a measure of time but an indication of what an emotional and physical drain it has been. Quick itemized list, some important, some trivial, all easily digested…
- Gabi
- Battling a cold post flu shot
- Management’s Mom
- Four days in hospital,
five to go two weeks in a rehabilitation center
- Work
- Me
- New EC2 instance sizes that boost the operational specs through the roof
- Working hard to rebuild and redeploy
- Still love my job
- Management
- Politics galore
- Working harder than ever
- Talking more and more about wanting to be a SAHM
- Music
- Heavy into my Autumn Jazz phase
- (Davis + Coltrane) * Live set in Copenhagen = Heaven
- Robert Mazurek’s playground is my new bliss
- Ahmad Jamal’s Poinciana, how the hell have I gotten by with out it?
- Baby Elephant is a tad disappointing, could be me though
- Japancakes continue to rule my world with there two new ones
- Reading
- Behind two months on Linux Journal
- Reading a paltry 10 pages a week of Blue Mars
- Unloaded nearly half my pile of old paperbacks on Book Mooch and Paperback Swap
- Blogging
- CSS rebooted a couple of weeks ago
- Completely missed on the Blog Action Day
- Going to try and get back into it with some write ups about the new EC2 products
- Ubuntu
- Gutsy Gibbon, mmmmm, nice!
- My ZaReason laptop still rules
That’s about it.
…as if my mind is an open book I stumble on this:
As wealthier, more news-focused audiences leave mainstream outlets, those outlets will be forced to reach out to different groups to fill the holes in their audience - groups that probably have lighter definitions of news. In other words, a small group of coverage-rich news media will get richer while the rest get poorer in their content.
Is that good or bad? Both, probably. But good or bad, if we drift down that road, it will mean a different kind of democracy and a different society.
Just think, there may come a day not too long from now when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s baby not only finds time on the network news - as baby Suri did last week on CBS - but leads the newscast. The good news is you won’t have to watch it. The bad news is a lot of others will tune in and possibly find little else. (The Economist effect: Not all news media are dumbing it down)
I seem to notice that the waters are rising up the sides of my little ivory tower. Anyone have a life raft?
Apparently, Theron over at Thought Mechanics felt that my circular logic, specious and fallacious arguments, ad hominem attacks, and overall wishy-washy attitude was just the right seasoning to add to the mix and has asked me to hop on as a contributor. Seriously though, it is an honor to be invited with a group of sharp thinkers on a site with a large and diverse readership. Hopefully, I can pull my own weight or at the very least make for an entertaining punching bag in the comments section! So stop on by and see what we are chewing on for the week.
So I’ve been reading Thought Mechanics for a while–the idea of someone real local blogging away appealed to me–when this item leapt out at me. Courant has a good write up, Teacher Fights Sex Statute, as does WFSB.
Now, connecting the dots, Parlin at Thought Mechanics mentions he played in a band with Glasser. The Glasser I went to school and worked an after school job sacking groceries at Geisslers with played drums and exhibiting a great talent for it played in a number of homegrown “super groups”. Everything seems to add up from the ages, locales, and time frames.
If that is the same Matthew Glasser than damn all I have to say is Gary Glitter will likely be looking for a drummer when he gets out.
Sure the byline reads, Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer, but the article On the Launchpad: Unlocking the iPod is written like a self-congratulatory shill piece typically pumped out by over paid PR firms that Astroturf the news outlets. Minor massaging it is no different than this piece found over at MacNN. Hell, just Google for it and you’ll see close variations on a theme. From business to politics to health-care to world events this type of mouthpiece writing is prevalent and it does a disservice to the consumer of the news. Then again, if you follow the money, who is the real customer?
Not you and not me. The real customers are the ones paying for the placement of these pieces and they are paying for readership. It is the same model as broadcast television where the viewing public is the product and the customer is the advertisers, same model as Google AdWords. So what bothers me about this more than advertising? PR is insidious in that it clothes itself the trappings of authority and responsibility alluding to the notion of substance. Advertising is much more easily spotted in that it does not often pretend that it is any more than what it is, though there are exceptions it is less disturbing and damaging than PR which inserts itself in and amongst items that might actually be news.
PR pieces are laudatory and do not ask the obvious and sometimes difficult to answer questions. In the case of Navio that would be, “How is this different than every other closed source solution that has preceded it?”, “So, tell me, I’m going have to buy yet another device for playback of music and movies?”, “Great, another phone-home solution that will also act as a layer between me and my hardware and likely cause nothing but headaches when I want to burn a CD of photos from my kids first birthday. Why?” I suppose that I ask too much from the Fourth Estate.
To Navio, the PR machine, and all the news outlets that run this crap without asking the tough as well as easy questions, I say screw you.
