I try to avoid both of their shows like the plague, so it's fun to step back and be a neutral observer in this hilarious cat fight between Greta Van Susteren and Anderson Cooper that Newsbusters links to. On her blog at Fox News, Van Susteren writes:

“We’re a news program,” while Ms. Van Susteren’s show is “not a news program,” Mr. Doss told TVNewser on Tuesday. “It’s missing-person-of-the-day. There’s an audience for that, but it’s not what we do. We’re covering the world, not just covering who’s missing today.

Not a news program?

Now why is he picking a fight? and why is trying to make less of us at 10pm ? Is it because we consistently beat them and have for years?

This is silly that the CNN executive producer of Anderson Cooper is taking a swipe at our hard work but I am going to defend my staff from what is intended to pretend our show is not news.

Yes, now let me KEEP THEM HONEST:

Let’s take a look at this…I asked someone to get me some information (I am busy at 10pm so do not get to watch their show.) What CNN is doing at ten? And how do they conduct themselves? Credibility or not?

To paraphrase MS/NBC’s Keith Olbermann, yes many in the news industry behind the scenes - even my friends at CNN - laugh about the fact that CNN’s 10pm show has been a “marketing experiment.” It has been rumored that in one year they spent about 27 million dollars in advertising of Anderson Cooper in their experiment. No network has ever spent that kind of money just to market one person. By the way, the President of CNN told me that Anderson Cooper has a staff of nearly 60. We beat them with our staff…of about 12.

It's an army of Gretas! To whom, size matters not, as the Muppet-like president of the Dagobah Network News likes to tell his staff of young apprentices.

Don't miss the ridiculous T-shirt promoting Cooper that Van Susteren highlights at the end of her post, which illustrates a moment that sums up absolutely perfectly the swank and cutting-edge sophistication of the legacy media and its political party:

When I was assembling the ancillary B-Roll material for the latest Silicon Graffiti video, I wanted to do a segment that charted the growth of electronic media, from three national television networks in the 1950s, to several hundred at the turn of the century, and then compare that to exponentially more rapid growth of the Blogosphere, from a few million in 2004 to 112 million plus today, according to Technorati.

I had remembered a pretty cool Edward Tufte meets Spirograph chart of the Blogosphere from very shortly after we went online in March of 2002, and used a screen capture of it, which appears at about the 5:05 mark of the video, rotating 360 degrees via a little 3-D animation to add some kinetic energy to an otherwise still photo:

But to the best of my knowledge, the above chart hasn't been updated for several years. I wish I had known about a successor to that format a couple of weeks ago, as I would have surely incorporated it into that portion of the video. It's a somewhat similar map of the Blogosphere galaxy, though the emphasis appears to be on a few hundred of the top political sites. Which makes sense--the Blogosphere is so huge today, it must strain even Google and Technorati's capabilities to map it all.

I'm happy to say that we made the cut--here's our position in the political Blogosphere--center right, but not too far out into the whichy thickets, which makes sense:

And here's a close-up of that quadrant of the galaxy, and some of our neighbors orbiting nearby:

(Found via the expert Blogospheric navigators at Hot Air and Protein Wisdom.)

This is a riot:

"Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we've got 800 people in Chicago who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground!"

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, "Journalists as 'Overhead'". Which illustrates that the author can't comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can't force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren't footing the bill:

"This is the first unit of Tribune that I've talked to that doesn't generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead," Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company's Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don't consider themselves overhead — they describe themselves as fulfilling a key role newspapers play in a democratic society.

No, reporting the news is a key function in a democratic society. But the medium in which consumers receive that news is subject to change, as other dinosaur media conglomerates are discovering the hard way.

And as that YouTube allusion from Zell highlights, news isn't exclusively a top-down business anymore.

Related: "Will there always be print newspapers? The editor of The Washington Post said he thought so, though others might think he's in denial:

In November 2007, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw predicted the print edition of The Washington Post would “probably” be dead in 10 years. But Downie disagreed.

“I can’t see that,” Downie said. “Obviously I’m of an age where I can’t see so far out into the future, but I can’t see that.

Arthur C. Clarke could...41 years ago:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

Meanwhile, this rather less exploratory prediction from Downie is definitely a two-edged sword:

Mid-size market newspapers may be in trouble, according to Downie. The small community newspapers and the newspaper titans – like the Post and The New York Times – will in some part be immune to the evolution of media, as it makes it way in a digital age.

Yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the Times will be immune to the evolution of news--that was one of the predictions made in this classic multimedia presentation beamed back from 2014.

Jonathan Leake, the science editor of the Times of London writes that the Internet "could soon be made obsolete":

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

I'd be happy--well, temporarily at least--with this speed Internet, which I wrote extensively about in 2000 through 2002 for various publications, let alone what the Times is describing.

But they can't fool me. When Glasgow University's Prof. Britton says, "future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine", it's all just hegemonic code for digital-era sweatshops without end, as the other Times across the pond notes.

(Geez, hyperbole much, boys? Incidentally, the superfast Internet article was found via the pieceworkers slaving away inside the digital-era sweatshop housed on Maggie's Farm.)

Update: Ed Morrissey shouts from the hilltops, "Finally — I belong to a victim class!"

Preach it, Brother Ed, preach it! Bloggers of the world unite--you have nothing to lose but your Sitemeter stats!

"IDC said in 2007, the digital universe equaled 281 billion gigabytes of data, or about 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth."

45 gigs? Somebody's clearly not trying. Between DIY music, podcasts, radio shows and lately video, I've gotten to the point where this looks nigh-essential.

(Via the Bettie Page fans--and consequently, note presence of NSFW photo--at Liberty Peak Lodge.)

(Bumped to top--Ed)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here's a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that's being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there's an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

Five years ago over at Tech Central Station, I described, using the terms that Virginia Postrel created in The Future and its Enemies the ongoing civil war in California, between the dynamists of Silicon Valley up north, and the stasists in Hollywood down south. The computer industry creates software that empowers individuals to blog and produce their own music, video, and other multimedia applications. Hollywood, in the form of both the movie and music industry, wants to keep content in their control as much as possible.

Roger L. Simon writes that just as with the original Civil War, the south isn't likely to win this one, either.

About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.

In and of itself, that's an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site. The hosting of the video itself is supplied by any one of numerous online video hosting sites, which helps to reduce what was once a significant expense: the high-bandwidth, and associated costs, of online video.

As I've written before, watch for more and more micro-TV stations to pop-up on the 'Net, using a variety of formats, from green screen and virtual sets to the Breitbart.TV model, to England's 18 Doughty Street Website, which is Internet TV on a fairly large scale. But still far more streamlined than traditional over-the-air and cable networks.

I wonder if the executives at CNN and other networks are aware of the growth of Internet TV, and if it bothers them? Blogs are much easier to start of course, which is why newspapers are acutely aware of the Blogosphere, and their fear is palpable in their their often hysterical reactions to the Internet over the last decade. But as traditional television ratings hit new lows, and more and online video content goes live on the Web, could we see a similar reaction from the TV networks?

We will when advertisers latch onto online video programming in big numbers. When something like the daily Breitbart.TV show opens and closes with ads from Toyota and Proctor & Gamble, we’ll know once and for all that after sixty years, traditional TV really is just another legacy medium.

Update (1/12/08): Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv emails, "Scott was referencing the traffic to the site -- Breitbart.tv as a whole", not the individual B-Cast show itself. While we regret the error made above, the basic points remains valid, I think: all those video clips viewed by those clicking into Breitbart.tv means time spent away from CNN, FNC, and traditional television. And a show like the B-Cast is proof that a quality long-form news show can be made, with smart use of the right technology, at a cost infinitely lower than the traditional networks spend.

A blogger linked to by Steven Den Beste explores the limits of multiculturalism:

I read a great comment by one of my favorite intellectuals, Camille Paglia in Salon last month critiquing the concept of multiculturalism. In short, the problem with multiculturalism is that it requires monocultures that have to not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism. But you can’t really make other people subscribe to multiculturalism or else all those cultures start to bleed together and lose all of their individuality. Japan loses its “Japaneseness”, Turkey loses its “Turkishness”, Germany loses its “Germanness”, and so on unless you’re really good at making up history, like when Japan claims things from China, Korea, or the West as being Japanese. Now you’ve just got one homogenized culture left.

In his look at Alan Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind two decades on, Mark Steyn writes that, not all that surprisingly, such a bland confection is about as filling as a can of Diet Coke:

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

As Steyn notes, "We are all rockers now"--and he's right. Just listen to what's playing on your local department store's muzak, which is probably indisuishingable from your local Classic Rock FM station:

Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

That’s another reason I don’t like the term “popular culture”—because hardly any individual examples of popular culture are that popular. I don’t mean that whatever the current Number One single is this week will sell far fewer copies than the Number Ones of the 1940s, but in the sense that a gangsta rapper is not as popular as Puccini was ninety years ago, or Franz Lehár a century ago, or Offenbach. Popular culture has dwindled down to a bunch of mutually hostile unpopular popular cultures. The only thing about it that’s universally popular is its overall undemanding aesthetic.

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

Which is, ironically enough, quite a contrast to the music that it replaced, the music of our parents and grandparents: In the 1950s, decades before rock and roll became The All-Pervasive Aural Wallpaper Of Our Lives, the average person had all sorts of cultures available to him, as they were absorbed into the American pop music of the time: boogie-woogie, Calypso, the Samba, the Waltz, the extended harmonies that Gil Evans was employing in the 1950s under Miles Davis' trumpet, these are all byproducts of extremely divergent cultures, as is European classical music of the prior centuries, which pop arrangers happily stole from, royalty free.

Hey, I love the late John Bonham's 16th-note kick drum patterns as much as the next guy, but it's amazing how much of the rest of pop culture got trampled underfoot along the way.

Update: On the other hand, "It's an obvious impossibility for an entire genre to not stumble into eternal truths on occasion and one place where rock consistently does so is in the bleak view of the battle of the sexes."

I have a piece online at Videomaker today with some thoughts on how to choose which online video distribution sites are right for you, such as YouTube, Brightcove, Motionbox, etc. It's built around a fun interview I had this past summer with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, veteran television journalists who left Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV to become partners with Andrew Breitbart to form his Breitbart.TV division.

Variety explores the prospect of "A dark latenight ahead" as "Writers strike reality sets in":

While the networks have been repeating the mantra that "screens will not go black," it won't take long for TV viewers to see the impact of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The canaries in TV's creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would "Saturday Night Live." Comedy Central's latenight stalwarts "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.

"Boom -- our show just shuts down," said "SNL" vet Amy Poehler. "It's just done. There is no backlog of scripts." (For more on latenight and the strike, log on to Variety.com)

Primetime comedy and drama series will feel the pinch immediately, though the on-air effect will be delayed at least a few weeks for most shows as they air completed segs. Cruelest blows will hit the frosh crop of shows that are just starting to get a toehold with viewers, including ABC's "Private Practice," "Pushing Daisies" and "Samantha Who" and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory."

The repercussions of scribes going out will surely be felt at Hollywood's major talent agencies. It's widely expected that a prolonged strike would result in serious layoffs; some agencies have already sketched out strike contingency plans involving salary deferments and other cost-cutting moves.

Fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

You certainly didn't--I liked this video much better in its first iteration:

(Via Jonathan Garthwaite.)

Jeff Jarvis:

Roy Greenslade, a fixture of British journalism — former newspaper editor, now journalism professor and newspaper columnist and blogger — writes a powerful post today submitting his resignation to the National Union of Journalists there.

Read the whole thing--it's the 21st century equivalent of the head of United Buggywhip Workers telling his comrades that this newfangled horseless carriage device just might possibly pose a moderate threat to how their industry does business.

Update: So what's the future of news (besides the name of a terrific blog on that very topic)? That's a topic that Michael Malone, ABC's "Silicon Insider" discusses at length with me here.

To follow-up on my post yesterday about the divergent paths of old and new media, Reason magazine is producing their own videos, which feature high quality production values, and a pretty good anchorman to boot:

Why yes, that is a Blog World Expo button on our sidebar, and thank you for noticing! See you in Vegas in less than a month!

Fellow Silicon Valley resident Alan D. Mutter writes, "As if the mainstream media didn’t have enough trouble navigating the uncharted realm of digital innovation, they are losing many of the young, technologically astute employees who could be their guides":

“What am I doing here?” a talented young designer and programmer working at a publishing company asked me recently. “These guys don’t get it. I’ve got to get out. I’m just wasting my time.”

Like the others quoted in this article, the young journalist is not being named, so as to protect his livelihood until he bails out of his MSM job.

He summed up the frustration of the twenty- and thirty-something professionals who grew up with a keyboard at their fingertips and an iPod, or at least a Walkman, plugged in their ears. They use modern media the way their generation does, not the way their fifty-something bosses wish they would.

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the strategic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

“In most organizations, the people with the most online experience have the least political capital,” said one mid-level online editor at a newspaper. “It seems like the pace of change inside media is slowing, tied up in politics and lack of expertise in managing technical projects – while the pace of change is continuing apace outside our windows.”

I don't have too much else to add to Glenn Reynolds' comments on the Washington Post's Marc Fisher's drive-by shot at XM satellite radio's new POTUS '08 channel, or Pajamas' weekly contribution to the 24-hour channel, PJM Political. Except to note that, just as former CBS (and later CNN) executive Jonathan Klein was unnerved that "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" could expose Dan Rather promulgating forged documents (to borrow from Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon's weekly introduction to the PJM Political), it might surprise the WaPo's Fisher that the elements that go into the PJM Political show are assembled almost entirely in a series of home studios. Including the Glenn & Helen Show, Austin Bay's Blog Week In Review, James Lileks' segment, and my own interviews linking them together. Not to mention all of the editing, mixing and mastering, which I do on an a high-end PC designed primarily for music production, and armed with some pretty nifty audio software.

And while I'm proud of what we've been able to do on PJM Political, I still think the ultimate example of DIY production is England's 18 Doughty Street. Every day, they self-produce hours of high-definition live television for the Internet out of a London townhouse. I'm not sure if I'd want to do that! (At least not on a daily basis.)

As Mutter writes in the above link, the 20 and 30-somethings working in the nation's newsrooms know that this sort of programming really is the future of news--even if their bosses would rather stick with a model that's been outdated since Tim Berners-Lee found a way in 1989 to run a user-friendly graphical Web on top of an Internet that was already two decades old.

(And just wait 'til the 64-bit revolution in computing really starts to power the Army of Davids and their multimedia efforts.

(Via Small Dead Animals, whose graphic of a large and equally dead flyblown reptile couldn't be more appropriate for their post.)

Found via Kathy Shaidle, New York magazine does a drive-by profile of Matt Drudge, without the cooperation of Drudge himself:

Phillips and Drudge’s greatest collaboration was the speech he gave at the National Press Club in June of 1998. Doug Harbrecht, then–press-club president, invited Drudge over the objections of many members who wondered how he could invite Drudge “into the sanctum sanctorum of American journalism.”

It was a staggering speech. Drudge was both revolutionary Tom Paine and dreamy populist. “I used to walk these streets as an aimless teen, young adult. Walk by ABC News over on DeSales. Daydream. Stare up at the Washington Post newsroom over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in. Didn’t go to the right schools. Never enjoyed any school, as a matter of fact. Didn’t come from a well-known family—nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty … I would never be granted any access, obtain any credentials … There wasn’t a likelihood for upward mobility in my swing-shift position at 7-11.”

The best line in that speech was Drudge’s statement that “It’s more fun to talk about Godzilla than watch it.” He was introducing the reporters to the new hierarchies of the information age, when events, from Putin to Godzilla, would collapse into so much spectacle for a surfer on the Net. Seriousness doesn’t interest Drudge; phenomena do. As he wrote in his book, “Politics is as Important as Hollywood. Is as Important as Science.” Drudge flattens all hard news into collage, and it is this, more than anything, that angers the old guard.

Indeed it does. Not the least of which is New York magazine itself.

Since Drudge doesn't need publicity from New York magazine, why would he bother being subjected to their snark? In a way, it's sort of reminiscent of the reluctance displayed by William Shawn of the staid New Yorker to be profiled by New York back in the mid-1960s, when the magazine was an insert in the scrappy New York Herald Tribune employing writers such as Tom Wolfe and the young Jimmy Breslin. Nowadays, New York is as much a Tiny Mummy as the New Yorker itself. Both are fighting a rear-guard battle attempting to keep pace in the rapidly changing world of Internet journalism that Drudge helped to usher in.

(Incidentally, tune into this week's edition of PJM Political, either on XM #130 when it's rebroadcast tonight at 11:00 EDT, or tomorrow, when the podcast version will be online, for a few minutes with Andrew Breitbart, Drudge's Sancho Panza.)

Why yes, that is me on XM Satellite Radio, interviewing Michael Barone and Jonah Goldberg, on Pajamas' new hour-long show, PJM Political, in-between producing the show. It's been an absolutely insane month assembling all of the elements of the show but needless to say, I hope you'll tune-in each week, on XM's channel #130, the POTUS '08 network. This week, we feature:

Bill Bradley (our weekly host)

Michael Barone

Austin Bay

David Corn

Jonah Goldberg

Jack Goldsmith

Jeff Goldstein

Stephen Green

James Lileks

Richard Miniter

John Podhoretz

Glenn Reynolds

Helen Smith

And Roger L. Simon, our executive producer and Maximum XM Pajamahadeen.

More details here!

Update: The XM show and yours truly is mentioned briefly at about 5:50 into the above interview with Roger and Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters and Blog Talk Radio, which will be one of the sources of content for the XM show.

MIT's Technology Review looks at the processors of the near future--expect "Massively multicore processors" as their CPUs. And as I wrote earlier this year, boatloads of RAM, as well.

With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:

This should have happened four or five years ago, but I'm glad to see that aerial Wi-Fi is finally, err, taking off in the US:

Alaska Airlines said on Tuesday it plans to launch an in-flight wireless Internet service.

Alaska Air said it will test a system from Row 44, a provider of broadband communication for airlines, on a Boeing 737 aircraft in spring 2008. Based on that trial's outcome, it plans to equip its 114-aircraft fleet.

Alaska Air said the technology will allow passengers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices, such as laptop computers, PDAs, smartphones and portable gaming systems to have high-speed access to the Internet, e-mail, virtual private networks and stored in-flight entertainment content.

Customers connect to the system through wireless hotspots installed inside the aircraft cabin, the airline said.

Alaska Air said it and Row 44 have worked together for two years to bring in-flight broadband to market.

Bring it on!

As I've written before, the past 25 years have seen a quiet revolution in home music recording, that's right in line with the growth of other "Army of Davids" technologies that dramatically empower individuals. In 1982, the breakthrough product that made home recording possible was the cassette four-track recorder. These weren't one half of the eight-track deck that you had in your '77 Chevy Vega; they used an ordinary stereo audio cassette, but played that cassette in only one direction, so that there were now four individual, synchronized tracks to record on. You could put a drum machine (another newly designed product) on one track, a bass guitar on another, an electric guitar on the third and a vocal on the fourth, and voila! Instant DIY song. (Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album was home-brewed using a cassette four-track machine.)

But most musicians wanted to do more than that--and these days, companies such as Boston-based Cakewalk offer products that give the average home musician as many tracks as his PC's memory and hard drive will hold. Not to mention PC-based software synthesizers that are also infinitely more flexible than their 1980s counterparts. George Martin and Quincy Jones cost a lot more to hire, but the same basic technology they use in their recording studios is increasingly accessible to those recording home.

Having launched in 1987, Cakewalk are currently celebrating their 20th year of business, and my interview with Greg Hendershott, Cakewalk's CEO, is an attempt to bridge the gap between those early days and now. Ideally, it will make a good overview to those new to PC-based recording, but dying to dip their toes into the water. It's 20 minutes long, 18.7 MB in size, and can be downloaded here, or via our Apple i-Tunes page. (No iPod required; virtually any PC can download and play an MP3.)

OK, now that headline is definitely hyperbole to get your attention. But as the New York Sun notes:

Fifteen years ago, the notion that an amateur filmmaker could write, shoot, edit, and project a professional-grade film in only 48 hours would have been a near-impossible thought. But times change quickly, and for the 2007 filmmaker, in the age of Final Cut Pro and YouTube, the idea is a challenge rather than an impracticality.

For our thoughts on adding a professional sheen to your slightly smaller scale video productions, click here.

Update: In City Journal, John Robb explores the flip side of the Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids" meme:

Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past.

Robb's article is titled, "The Coming Urban Terror", which also dovetails into Mark Steyn's latest essay.

Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds, who's celebrating his sixth anniversary on Instapundit. And while he links back today to what he was writing about in August of 2001, his current site lacks one of the most important elements that made his unique prior to 9/11: the Blogger.com button. You can see it here, on this page archived by the Wayback Machine.

When my local neighborhood finally recieved broadband around 1999 or so, I began reading some of the same big boys I knew from my previous dial-up days: Drudge, National Review, Reason, and World Net Daily amongst them. There was also the Brothers Judd, in its pre-blog, book review-dominated early days, which seemed like massive self-publishing project.

Eventually I discovered e-zines, including, I believe Mickey Kaus, maybe Andrew Sullivan, and definitely Virginia Postrel, since Reason, which she was then doing a superb job of editing, frequently promoted her personal Dynamist site. But e-zines seemed like a fair amount of work to me to maintain, based on my HTML skills--or lack thereof--back then: they had to be designed, new pages had to be FTPed up at least daily, lest the site start to develop cobwebs, and the whole thing seemed like the technological equivalent of custom tailoring: a lot of hard work and individual craftsmanship.

I knew there were also blogs, but those seemed like an entirely an entirely different kind of flying altogether, as Ted Striker would say. (Who’s this Shirley he keeps referring to? What's her blog's URL?) Or as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Prior to discovering InstaPundit, rightly or wrongly, I thought of Weblogs as being online diaries for teenagers to describe their latest trip to the shopping mall. It was only because Glenn used Blogger's software at the time that it began to dawn on me that a Weblog could do much more than simply be a daily personal diary for the world to see. I think I had a reaction similar to a young Woody Allen seeing Mort Sahl for the first time, and realizing there was a different form of humor than just one-liners and shtick, or a young musician hearing Charlie Parker and thinking, "Wow--there really is more to jazz than swing...!"

And I imagine a lot of people had the same thought, as they began to discover the Blogosphere on or shortly after 9/11, and eventually realized how flexible the medium of blogging could be.

Of course, the dinosaur media had the inverse reaction, but that's not all that surprising. Despite being in the business of reporting news, they're often the last to notice any kind of technological change. Once they do notice, if its one that threatens their livelihood, and especially, if it threatens their status, they'll attack it no end.

Patrick Ruffini writes that conservatives established a very healthy foothold on the Web in the late 1990s, but technologically, some of those sites are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, if you'll pardon the mix of anatomical metaphors:

When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.

The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.

And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Read the rest for Patrick's examples.

10,000 geeks will look at this video clip and think: "Man, I'm glad we Windows / Star Wars / Star Trek / furgasm fans aren't as crazed as these guys":

Online Videos by Veoh.com

(Triumph could have had a field day in this line, incidentally.)

Cost:

DV tape cassette: $4.95
12 pack of Diet Coke: $3.95
Confusing the hell out of the WSJ? Priceless.

As I wrote a couple of hours ago:

Speaking of Big Media, oh to be a fly on the wall in this newspaper's editorial boardroom.

Today, the Journal writes, "Just who sponsors Hot Air’s ad, and other similar ads popping up across the Internet, is unclear".

Allah highlights their multimillion dollar production values; Mickey Kaus could not be reached for comment.

Update: "Maybe it will help the WSJ to be owned by Murdoch". Heh--but don't tell these guys that.

Just got off the phone with Andrew Breitbart, Liz Stephans and Scott Baker on the nuts and bolts of Breitbart.TV and video hosting in general for an upcoming article. They also alerted me to their 18 minute video interview with Drew Curtis of Fark.com on his new book, It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. And lord knows there's plenty of that.

Fresh off their article titled, "Hollywood's Hope For Record Summer Fades", Reuters brings yet more news of fresh disaster in the legacy media world: "Networks hit new lows in grim weekly ratings".

Here's are two reasons why: one is technological. The other is sociological. Combine them, and it's perfect storm for TV.

Byron York has a great post on how the Web has helped to shine a light on the shady backroom machinations to get the amnesty immigration bill passed:

Here’s something new. The first true Internet-Age presidential campaign was in 2004. The first major Internet-Age Supreme Court nomination was Harriet Miers, in 2005. Now, in 2007, we’ve got what is arguably the first truly major down-and-dirty Roberts-rules-of-disorder parliamentary battle fought under the searchlight of the blogs.

The Internet was critical to the immigration bill’s first failure. If not for the blogs, the bill’s deceits and flaws would not have been so well or quickly exposed, and "comprehensive reform" would probably otherwise have passed within a couple of days. Now we’re at yet another new level. The public is being exposed to a basket of legislative tricks–of a sort that are rare in any case, and surely of a kind that have never been subjected to mass and rapid-fire public exposure. The undemocratic character of all that is happening here is being conveyed to the public in short order and with clarity–often through the medium of Senate aides themselves.

Do the Senators now called "Masters of the Universe" understand this? Presumably, senate aides, who certainly read the blogs, have communicated to their senators how dangerous it is to be exposed in this fashion. But maybe some senators still don’t get it. They seem to think they can get away with backroom maneuvers in an era when blogs are serving as virtual fly-on-the-wall cloakroom cameras.

Earlier today, in "Off the Table," I argued that passing this bill is not going to make the immigration issue go away. On the contrary, the blogs-eye-view we’re getting of all this sausage making is going to be frozen in the public memory for a very long time. It’s going to inspire new campaigns, and it’s going to haunt the Masters of the Universe–and the Amnesty 8, too. I still don’t think they quite realize this. In fact, the Masters’ false belief that quickly passing this bill is going to somehow get this issue off of their backs is the method behind this their deceptive madness. They don’t seem to realize that they’ve already been caught with their pants down.

"Masters of the Universe" tend to have a fairly short-lived stay on Mount Olympus. Certainly, nobody's used that title to describe bond traders in a long, long time.

Update: "I have only my intuition to go on. My intuition tells me that it is impossible to be cynical enough about what is transpiring here".

SciFi.com gives us a sneak preview of what the laptop of the future will look like. As to what it will have inside, see my recent CE Pro article on 64-bit computing.

Of course, this is all contingent on the UN's forecast of the world coming to an end in 2015 not coming true, but somehow, I think we'll muddle through...

Bill Quick, who gave the Blogosphere its name, believes that its starboard side was crucial in sinking--for now at least--the near-universally reviled immigration bill:

And I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. First, we exposed the crudely hacked polls that claimed amnesty was overwhelmingly favored by those they polled. Second, we publicized the polls that showed the true state of affairs - that Americans hated this travesty - and thus gave folks who thought they were alone in their opposition the comfort of knowing that, far from being a lonely minority, they were part of a whopping majority. Third, we turned up the heat on congress, and kept it on flambe until the bill was toast. Fourth, we exposed the bill itself to public scrutiny, so that voters understood what was being attempted supposedly in their name. Fifth, we acted as instant response teams to the lies being told about the bill by the hacks, flacks, and whores desperate to pass it on behalf of the special interests they fronted for.

Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over.

The right blogosphere has put many notches in its belt - Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Ports Dubai, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales (for SCOTUS), the destruction of the GOP congressional majorities, and now the Bush/Kennedy/McCain amnesty plan. This one was the biggest yet.

Pat yourselves on the back, folks. And welcome to the big leagues.

On the other hand, Politico writes that it's not over yet.

From what I've heard, once you go dual, you never go back. I'll let you know--I'm experimenting with dual 19-inch LCD monitors. Surprisingly, it was a PITA to install, because apparently my PC's ATI videocard, which is designed to simultaneously pump out both VGA and DVI video--and hence allowing two monitors--apparently had a defective DVI output. But now that I've replaced the card, and have both monitors working, it seems like it should improve workflow with recording programs such as Cakewalk Sonar, and video programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. Not to mention experimenting with rotating the monitor 90 degrees for Word documents.

Besides, it looks bitchin' cool to boot. Maybe I'll add a third!

We've written about Annie Jacobsen a couple of times here back in 2004 and 2005. The author of Terror In The Skies and the original column (which originally appeared on a financial Website called Woman's Wall Street that Jacobsen frequently contributes to) that the book derived from received plenty of skepticism from--shocker--those wishing to displace their fears of terror.

Ed Morrissey notes that in light of the details contained within an FBI report obtained by the Washington Times via a Freedom of Information Act request, "It appears that a few people may owe Jacobsen an apology".

I wonder if Snopes will update its page on the incident Jacobsen described to reflect the background information on one of the passengers in question that Ed describes.

Update: Related thoughts from Philip Pidot, who notes, "Maybe Jacobsen was lucky to suffer only derision and disregard. Today, she might well have been slapped with a defamation lawsuit".

Read the whole thing.