The key word is definitely "mini!"

With Kodak and RCA putting out so-called HD versions of their YouTube-friendly mini camcorders, we knew it was only a matter of time before Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of Flip Video mini camcorders, put out an HD model of its own.

Calling it the "world's smallest HD camcorder," the $229 Flip Mino HD looks identical to the standard-definition Flip Mino. It weighs just over 3 ounces, boasts 720p resolution, and has 4GB of memory that allows for 60 minutes of recording time. The release also says that the Flip Mino HD features "all-new built-in FlipShare software for easy saving, organizing and sharing of video from your computer." We're not sure how it's different from the software on the existing Mino, but when we get more details, we'll let you know.

Like the standard Mino, you'll be able to customize the look of the Mino HD at theflip.com/store. I did an earlier post on the whole customization thing, and the one drawback is that while the service is free, you do pay the full $229 list price for the product. Most likely, the Mino HD will retail for less on Amazon and other online stores--I'd guess $199.

Via Skye of Midnight Blue on Twitter; for my recent Videomaker buyers' guide to camcorders in general, click here.

James Lileks proffers key advice for navigating the final new media frontier:

Dull tweet: The plane just landed

Good tweet: The plane just landed in the hudson

Found, appropriately enough, here.

Media Bistro's "AgencySpy" blog explains "why it's vitally important to watch what you say on Twitter":

A representative from Ketchum New York (a PR and Marketing firm) heads to Memphis to give a big presentation to their big client, FedEx, and totally offends everyone who works there before even stepping foot in the building.

Upon landing in Memphis and getting a lay of the land he tweets:

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.'"

Someone from inside FedEx was following Capt. Footinmouth, whose Twitter name is 'keyinfluencer' -- quite possibly the douchiest nickname of all history -- and that person sent the letter we posted below. You'll want to read it, because not only is it amazingly poignant, but because it was copied to "the FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx's communication department AND the chain of command at Ketchum." Thank you Peter Shankman for sharing this story.

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write."

Now that you know what not to do, John Hawkins has assembled "The Super Awesome Right Wing News Twitter Guide For Newbies."

(Main story originally found, naturally enough, here.)

Related: Via Melissa Clouthier, helpful new media definitions--like, um "Twitter!"--are defined definitively, here.

Scrappleface Network News is on the air!

Bill Whittle writes:

[Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber] stated that he did not think reporters should be allowed on the front lines to cover conflicts. This generated a lot of heat: some from the left, whose elitist disdain for Joe was best captured by John Stewart, sneering at him for his lapses in professionalism as he reminded all of us that a career being the primary news source for an entire generation of voters cannot be entrusted to a rank amateur like some common plumber, but must instead be vouchsafed to a person with a far nobler and serious and weighty background ... a career in stand-up comedy, say.

Meanwhile, Camille Paglia unloads on an infinitely bigger media figure.

Update: Related thoughts from Outside The Wire's J.D. Johannes.

Finally added my Twitter feed to the sidebar on the right (along with a few other minor revisions). What is Twitter? For those who have not been assimilated into the Twitter Collective, a recent edition of the B-Cast on Breitbart.TV is a great primer:

The TV channel with one finger poised on the delete key suddenly has an epiphany, Steve Green writes:

Via Charlie Martin on Twitter comes this admission from CNN's Campbell Brown (video at link): "Obama's lofty ideas lack specifics."

Dude, hope and change. How much more specific does the President-elect need to get? I mean, those were good enough for CNN during the campaign.

CNN declared itself and their candidate an idea-free zone during the election; why start now?

Meanwhile, CNN is trashing the newest citizen journalist heading towards Israel. As a viewer, frankly, I'm not at all sure what Joe the Plumber can tell me about the Middle East. But I do know that hasn't lied to me yet about the Middle East, and that already puts him ahead of at least one TV network.

In addition to Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte's new Big Hollywood, John Hawkins has just added Right Wing Video to make a troika of Websites he's running. The new site is your one-stop-shop for libertarian and conservative clips--err, like mine!

As the Professor notes, Popular Mechnics is providing ongoing coverage of MacWorld and CES this year. And so is The Onion, discovering products that, oddly enough, no one else has seen there!

One reader emailed that he wasn't able to view my "In Dodd We Trust?" video earlier in the week apparently because of bandwidth issues. If you've had similar problems, that video is now up on my YouTube page. (The higher res, higher bandwidth version is still available here.)

And if you received a DV camera in your stocking today and want to put it to work, I have an article that recently went live on Videomaker magazine's Website on the rudiments of videoblogging titled "Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog."

The traditional conventional wisdom (and by "traditional conventional wisdom", I mean about as far back as 2002), Bloggers are one-man bands, guys in their pajamas (to coin a phrase) producing material without the traditional infrastructure and interpersonal cooperation found in mass media.

The new conventional wisdom from mass media? Where do we sign up:

Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person "multimedia journalists" who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.

The change will blur the distinctions between the station's reporters and its camera and production people. Reporters will soon be shooting and editing their own stories, and camera people will be doing the work of reporters, occasionally appearing on the air or on in video clips on Channel 9's Web site.

For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into a finished story by an editor.

But technology -- handheld or tripod-mounted cameras, laptop editing programs and the Internet -- have made it possible for one person to handle all those assignments, station managers say.

Gosh--there's a shocking new development.

Welcome to the 21st century, guys--we'll be glad to show you around.

Now available at Ace, TrueValue, Home Depot and Edwards Air Force Base, the Sikorsky Weedwacker:

Dan Rather on the dangers of Big Media:

Investigative reporting, finding out what people in power don't want the public at large to know and disseminating it, is one of the most important roles of journalism in its role as the so-called Fourth Estate. And investigative reporting has gone badly out of fashion. The trend line is against it.

There are reasons. The reasons: It takes longer, it's more expensive than other kinds of coverage, and it causes trouble because the big, huge international conglomerate that now owns so many of the news outlets, they have special needs in Washington. They are asking for favors, these people, needing favors -- regulatory, legislative needs -- of the very people that good investigative reporters would be digging into and exposing, if you will. And this comes in conflict.

But when an army of independent journalists investigated one of Dan's stories, Rather accused them of being on Karl Rove's payroll. (Dan doesn't know the half of it!) And his producer questioned their authenticity, merely because she had never heard of them as late of September of 2004, near the end of the election year.

But all of a sudden, Dan's not a fan of corporate journalism--wonder why?

Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit links to a grousing essay in England's Daily Mail whose headline says it all:

Tomorrow's World it ain't! The fantastic innovations we were promised never materialised... so when WILL the future arrive?

The future is here--it's just not the mid-20th century Jetsons, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey future, which essentially extrapolated out advancements in industrial machinery, but not electronics. The former's development has of course flattened out, while the latter has undergone a tremendous and arguably still accelerating revolution in the last generation.

To wit: I'm writing this post on a self-published blog. I'm in the middle of prepping, in my den, the latest edition of a weekly radio program that will be beamed up to a satellite for national distribution. Earlier today, I was writing the script for my own TV show, which I'll videotape in my garage (which I also use to appear on an Internet-based TV network) and edit on (yet more) software on the PC in den before uploading to the Internet--which itself is a global computer network that didn't exist before (take your pick) 1969 or 1992.

No, I won't be getting into a flying car, or taking the Pan Am shuttle to Space Station V or the Moon anytime soon. But it always astonishes me how much futuristic technology we have right at our fingertips, and completely take for granted.

Just received my copy of the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains my Camcorder Buyer's Guide 2008--complete with a cameo appearance by James Lileks, fresh off documenting hecklers at the GOP convention for the Strib.

(For what to aim those camcorders at--besides protests and hecklers--click here.)

Both my prerecorded Silicon Graffiti video blog and PJTV, Pajamas' live Internet TV coverage out of L.A. use virtual sets, and this new article of mine at Videomaker magazine explains how they work. (This demo reel for Adobe's Ultra 2 product is a pretty good video intro in and of itself.)

Of course, first you need a green screen--but that's a topic I explored at Videomaker last year.

In March of 2007, the election campaign essentially began when a consultant for Sen. Obama released this Apple 1984 mashup, which quickly went viral with over five a half million views:

Yesterday, a blogger at Red State brought things full circle:





But then, I'm rather partial to 1984-inspired videos:


And welcome to the readers of "Dirty Harry's" film blog, who have some kind words to say about our latest production.

Update: More fun from Airstrip One, here.

It's been a while since I've posted at Blogcritics, but I have some initial impressions over there of the beta version of Adobe CS4, focusing on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, all of which have some spiffy new features. I hope to follow-up with the final release version in the not too distant future.

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Young'ins today (or younglings, for you Revenge of the Sith geeks) just don't know what it was like back in the old days, when we had to walk five miles in the snow just to snail-mail out our query letters hoping to impress an editor high atop a far off office tower to maybe--just maybe--publish our wares. Of course, "the old days" means as late as about 2002, so I can absolutely vouch for what Robert Stacy McCain writes here:

Politically, Andrew Sullivan is erratic, and his attacks on Sarah Palin have been wildly irresponsible, but in two sentences of his latest article for The Atlantic Monthly, Sullivan makes a huge point:

If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you'd find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Younger people -- i.e., those under 35, who have started their careers since the online explosion of the mid-1990s -- have no appreciation for how instantaneous Internet communication has transformed the world of the professional writer, of which blogging is the ultimate example.

I'm 49 and Sullivan's 44, so we both began our careers when there were no Web sites, when the Internet was something known only to academics and technogeeks, when editorial "gatekeepers" stood squarely between the writer and the reader, and when the only way to gain access to mass readership was to present yourself and your work to these gatekeepers, in person or via mail (I would say "snail mail," but that term did not exist).

Of course, Sullivan started his career at a much higher level -- I used to read his articles in the New Republic when I was a staffer at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune -- but in recalling the limitations of journalism in the pre-Internet age, he echoes my own memory.

Applying for a staff position, you would "send clips and resume" or, if you were a freelancer, mail out manuscripts in hope of finding a publisher. It required the commitment of an enormous amount of time and energy, with a lot of time spent waiting for replies, if any. Mail out a clips-and-resume package on Monday, which might be delivered to the editor on Thursday or Friday, and if you were lucky you might get a phone call the next week.

On my desk is a book, The Proud Highway, a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1955-67. Reading it, you get some sense of the difficulties a writer faced seeking assignments in the Bad Old Days. The young Thompson was a genius (and arrogantly aware of it), but had to spend an enormous amount of time pitching articles to editors, at a time when that meant typing letters on a manual typewriter, and most of the time getting rejected.

All this tended to limit a writer's career mobility. If you got a staff position, you tended to stay wherever you were and work your way up (rather than hop from job to job, as many young journalists do now) since the process of applying for jobs was so laborious. And once a freelancer found an editor who'd publish one of his articles, he would keep pitching that editor, trying to establish a regular outlet for his work. For example, Thompson regularly freelanced for the National Observer, and when he sold a feature to the national men's magazine Rogue in 1961, he kept pitching them for future assignments (without luck).

Though I'm not sure, as Robert writes above, that "blogging is the ultimate example"--or at least text blogging. Because the Internet has also opened up podcasting and video blogging, allowing anyone to do his own one-man radio or TV show, in addition to traditional text-based journalism. It goes without saying that not everyone will alchemically fill those vessels with brilliantly transcendent content (just poke around YouTube for 30 seconds or so)--but the platforms are readily available to virtually anyone. Which is why those with aspirations of becoming the next fill in the name of your favorite superstar pundit here are well advised to read the whole thing.

Videomaker has a sneak preview of CS4, the latest version of Adobe's flagship product line. Watch this space for more on this powerful addition to the Army of Davids' multimedia toolkit.

The great conservative filmmaker and film blogger "Dirty Harry" reviews David Zucker's new movie on his blog. And tune in here for a recent edition of PJM Political featuring audio interviews from Glenn Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and myself with stars Jon Voight and Robert Davi, and screenwriter/executive producer Myrna Sokoloff recorded during the film's premiere at the GOP convention in Minneapolis.

As Glenn writes, "If An American Carol does well this weekend, it'll make it a lot easier for the next film of its type to be made." As someone who's enjoys--on one level or another--the starboard side of the Blogosphere, you can help ensure the film's success; check here for times and theaters near you.

Update: Much more on the film from Kathy Shaidle, at Examiner.com.

Two new multimedia software updates will be making their way into the toolkits of many in the Army of Davids this fall. This week, Adobe announced their latest CS4 lineup of products, updating Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other Adobe products. Meanwhile, Cakewalk has announced Sonar 8, their more-or-less annual update to their flagship Sonar digital audio workstation platform for Windows.

Along with Adobe's Ultra chromakey program and accompanying virtual sets, recent iterations of all of the above products are what powers my Silicon Graffiti video blog. And speaking of video blogging, I have an article in the September issue of Nuts & Volts magazine on that topic. (No, that's not me on the cover; and unfortunately, the article is only available on dead tree at the moment.)

This video, originally produced in January when I was still getting it all together, gives you a sense of what a product like Ultra 2 can do--this was only the second video I had shot with it; and was still learning my around the program, and yet, I think it does a reasonable job of walking the viewer through what's possible via DIY video.

What's next? RAM power! Lots and lots of memory will soon start appearing in your computers; as the 64-bit computing revolution is still in its infancy.

While this weekend's edition of the annual Blog World Expo was all about the ongoing revolution in electronic media, Mr. Gutenberg's pioneering analog blog format isn't going away anytime soon, of course--which is a good thing in my book. (Hey look--a pun!) While Barnes & Noble had a large display in the convention hall selling several existing books on blogging and new media, there were two new books of note discussed at Blog World:

Austin Bay gave me the galleys of his upcoming Fourth Edition to A Quick And Dirty Guide To War--right after Steve Green was done holding up the book, Brian Lamb Booknotes-style, during his interview with Austin for PJM Political on XM and PJTV on, err, PJTV. This is a sprawling (the galleys are over 600 pages) overview of the current wars of the world, and what could come in the future, written by two authors who also review what they accurately predicted--which was quite a bit--over 20 years ago. (Here's the Amazon link to an earlier edition of the book; the new edition is scheduled to hit the streets later this year.)

At the start of the month, I had interviewed Scott Ott for PJM Political. Scott is the proprietor of, and chief satirist in residence at Scrappleface, on the floor of the Republican convention (while Joe Lieberman was performing his sound check on stage in the background). He's contributed a chapter on politics and journalism (Scott, not Joe) for the upcoming book titled, The New Media Frontier, edited by John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton, whom I interviewed on Sunday at Blog World. Their book, featuring an introduction from Hugh Hewitt, debuts at the end of the month. My very early first take? If you can picture a book aimed at Christian Americans that combines Hugh Hewitt's Blog book with some of the broad 3000 mile "medium is the message" overview that Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have provided, you get a sense of The New Media Frontier. I'd even suggest it to the non-religious, who can skip the more proselytizing chapters, for a pretty nifty look at the ability to use the Internet to build broad social networks and virtual communities.

Finally, speaking of books, Stephen Michael Kellat of a Website geared towards libraries and librarians stopped by the booth and interviewed Steve and I about Pajamas Media and PJTV as part of their weekly podcast. I haven't a clue why a library-oriented podcast wanted to talk to us, but hey, we were there and happy to talk to anyone who stopped by, including those who stuck a mic and digital recorder in front of us.

Tune in here to listen; Steve and I appear about 15 minutes into the show, which requires no iPod--or library card!--to hear.

(And click here to see a slide show featuring about a babillion photos of the exhibitors (including Pajamas) and the weekend's events.)

Viva Las Vegas, baby!

Nina and I are in town for Blog World, which kicks off on Friday. If the concentrated geekery of the event wasn't enough, we'll have this to contend with as well:

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sure, an' you'll be tellin' yar fav'rite piratical japes, now? Such as:

Which Texas politician is the pirate's favorite: Dick ARRRRRRRmey. Which Pixarrrrr movie is the pirate's choice? RRRRRratatouille. (Wrong! It's CARRRRRRrrrrs.) Some people find this day tiresome. I find it delightful.

To honor the occasion, it's too bad they're not holding the convention here, instead.

Jake Tapper (the anti-Charlie Gibson at ABC) explores "The Isotoner campaign":

Like any number of Democratic candidates before him -- Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is once again declaring that he is going to take off the gloves and fight back against attacks from the Republican Party.

This is what you're going to hear from his campaign today, anyway, which is unveiling two new TV ads, including this attack ad against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

But just so you know -- this is, by my count, the 4th time Obama's campaign has officially or unofficially made such a declaration that Obama will "take off the gloves" and fight back.

That's a lot of pairs of gloves.

The Isotoner campaign, one might say.

Curiously though, once Obama took off the Isotoners, what voters actually received were a glimpse of John McCain's hands, as Ed Morrissey writes:

Earlier today, Barack Obama's campaign released an ad attacking John McCain for not knowing how to send an e-mail. Their crack research team apparently never heard of Google or Lexis-Nexis, but Jonah Goldberg does. He discovers why McCain doesn't use a keyboard -- his torturers made sure he couldn't. The Boston Globe reported it eight years ago:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

After Vietnam, McCain had Ann Lawrence, a physical therapist, help him regain flexibility in his leg, which had been frozen in an extended position by a shattered knee. It was the only way he could hope to resume his career as a Navy flier, but Lawrence said the treatment, taken twice a week for six months, was excruciatingly painful.

"He endured it, he wouldn't settle for less," said Lawrence, who rejoiced with McCain when he passed the Navy physical. "I have never seen such toughness and resolve."

Making fun of a war hero's severe injuries -- smooth move, Team O. Talk about computer illiteracy! Doesn't anyone on the Obama campaign know what they're doing? Didn't it ever occur to them that a man who can't raise his arms above his head might have a physical barrier to using a computer?

If this is what happens when they takes the gloves off, maybe they should just keep them on in the future.

While McCain is obviously computer literate on some level, telling the New York Times last year that he reads "Drudge, obviously, everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics, sometimes", Glenn Reynolds suggests that his campaign might want to better familiarize themselves with another technology--the video camera:

If I were a candidate, I think I'd bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.

The technology for this is easy - I've got a little Sony HD video camera that records on a chip and fits in a coat pocket or purse - and putting video on the Web is a snap, too.

Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest - but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.

TV journalists won't be happy with this, of course, but it's hard to see a principled basis for objecting.

In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media's power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.

Of course, there are risks for candidates, too. A gaffe-prone candidate, or one who's just bad at speaking extemporaneously, might want to present only edited videos to the public - especially if he or she can count on the news media to be generally sympathetic.

But that just makes the whole exercise more valuable to the public, as whether a candidate is willing to make the raw video available would provide a useful data point on whether the candidate is confident - and whether the press corps is in the tank.

I predict, however, that we'll see this strategy adopted soon, quite possibly in this election cycle. The news-media monopoly continues to decay, and technology continues to march on.

Back in 2005, I quoted a passage from Bernard Goldberg's second book on media bias, Arrogance, from the chapter titled "File It Under 'H'"--for hypocrisy:

Read More »

Make way for An Army of Davids An Army of Sarahs!

(And yes, we do need more Pun Control!)

Well, out of control of old media, that is. In the Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield explains, "Candidates use Web for cheap, edgy ads". Your friend and humble narrator is mentioned here, right after Matthew discusses McCain's "The One" ad, which pokes fun at a certain obscure young Chicago community organizer's rapid rise to the dizzying heights Hollywood stardom:

Besides demonstrating how the Web can be cost-effective, "The One" phenomenon is illustrative of another way the Internet has become useful for the presidential campaigns: helping them spot organic political themes that they can help develop into larger ones. The inspiration behind the ad is straight out of the conservative blogosphere where it has proven enormously popular with center-right readers long dissatisfied with the elite press' love affair with Mr. Obama.

That inspiration isn't restricted to just online ads, either. Just this week, the McCain camp released an ad that looked astonishingly similar to a parody ad created by blogger Ed Driscoll, which combined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's famous "3 AM" ad with a second segment telling viewers that Mr. McCain also could be relied upon to respond to a crisis situation.

It's highly likely this will continue to happen, Mr. Driscoll told me in an e-mail.

"While a campaign still has to spend large sums of money buying advertising time on TV, as the older generation still glued almost exclusively to the television tube begins to fade away, watch for the Web to continue to grow in power as the political advertising venue," he said.

He's exactly right. It's simply a matter of time.

Matthew was of course instrumental in organizing the sprawling Newsbusters blog. He emailed me yesterday afternoon alerting me that the above article would be online today, and asked me if I was in St. Paul. I wrote back that indeed I was--and was immediately following him on C-Span in this online video shot on Wednesday.

Capt. Ed writes:

CNN reports that the thankfully moderate impact of Hurricane Gustav will mean that the Republican convention will get back to business. At this point, they have no article with specifics, but apparently their sources indicate that the Gustav-imposed restrictions on campaigning in St. Paul will be lifted. The schedule will return to normal, and the speakers originally slated to speak tonight will do so.

As for Monday's events, you can watch a full recap on PJTV for free, several segments of which feature yours truly.

Maximum Pajamhadeen Roger L. Simon did a Herculean effort supervising the Army of Davids it takes behind the scenes to make PJTV's ability to debut live on location (which I'm not sure if a traditional TV network ever tried). He then switched seamlessly into host mode--and even blogged about it in the midst of the action:

How was it? Well, to be honest, in sixties parlance, it was a trip. There I was (only 75% befuddled) sitting in the high director's chair passing the baton to Cindy McCain and Laura Bush on stage, trying to sound suitably solemn about the hurricane and glad I was on with Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and James Lileks - all gentlemen who know how to move their mouths... because let me tell you you run out of ideas fast. This is especially true because, as the world knows, this is a convention in temporary postponement. Luckily for us we are only streaming about three hours today. Coming up... some intereviews I did with American Carol director David Zucker and Jon Voight (who plays George Washington in the film). These guys are members of the Friends of Abe (FoA), a Hollywood organization started by Gary Sinise for the folks in the entertainment industry who think the battle against Islamic facism might actually be worth fighting. This org was supposed to be hush-hush but the cat has now gotten far out of the bag. (Yes, I'm member - though we don't have cards.), so Zucker and I talk about it. Anyway.... tune in on our convention coverage and let us know what you think. But be gentle, dear reader.

Roger's being remarkably modest. It was difficult to get a sense of how the complete package looked to viewers from the snippets I saw on various monitors in the booth. But Nina and I watched a good hour of the coverage late last night back in the hotel room, and the finished product, which includes not just the remote from Minneapolis, but also the virtual studio back in L.A., a video feed from the convention floor, and several pre-recorded segments, looks incredibly smooth for an opening night's effort.

An addendum to the last post: Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler issued an apology for his Wolcott/Moore-style joke rooting for Hurricane Gustav.

As Glenn Reynolds writes:

What's interesting is that the apology came before the story was picked up by the traditional media. It was just blogs and Drudge, but it forced a public apology.

200,000 or so unwanted YouTube views within the span of a couple of days will do that to you.

Greetings From Minneapolis! I have arrived; the convention may now proceed. Unless of course it doesn't.

But if it does (and hopefully that means that Hurricane Gustav's force will have greatly diminished before hitting land), this clip should aired on the Xcel Jumbotron in prime time and referenced by several candidates in their speeches:

Ed Morrissey asks:

This also prompts a question of ethics, which all of us should consider carefully. Should private conversations between politicians get videotaped surreptitiously like this? If so, then perhaps Fowler and many, many others should take better care about having a laugh at the misery of others, even among friends.

Plenty of traditional liberal journalists have turned off the record remarks of politicians and celebrities into major stories. (Which is ultimately part of what earned them their "drive-by media" sobriquet from Rush.) As Roger Ailes noted several years ago:

Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

And there are numerous additional examples of such moments, a few of which are described in the above link.

But as is its wont, the Internet amps these sorts of moments not up to 11, but 1100. George Allen's Senatorial re-election in 2006 was sunk by his "Macaca" gaffe, which was part of a coordinated effort by the left to videotape Republican candidates during every possible appearance (and then some), waiting for any sort of gaffe that could be turned into a YouTube clip and exploited by a friendly news organization such as the Washington Post, which ran over 100 stories on Allen's gaffe in the space of about less than three months, in which he apparently mispronounced his campaign staff's nickname of the young mohawk-haired James Webb campaign operative assigned to tape him.

Whatever the explanation, Allen's gaffe, given massive exposure from the Washington Post and other quarters in the MSM ended his senatorial career, which ultimately lost GOP control of the Senate, and sank Allen's presidential ambitions. In its wake, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos gleefully wrote:

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them.

The "tape 'em all, let YouTube sort it out" philosophy began on the left, but its eventual boomerang was merely a matter of when, not if.

Two and a half years ago, I asked, "Will Video Kill The Blogosphere Star?" Now we know: the two parties are about to have a pretty bigtime merger, in beautiful downtown El Segundo.

Say, that new John McCain ad in the above video with a 3:00 AM cameo from Hillary looks awfully familiar--almost as though it was created months ago...

Update: Welcome Instapundit, National Review Online and Riehl World News readers--please look around; there's lots here you may enjoy, both on the blog, and our video page.

If you enjoyed my "Atlas Mugged" article on mass print media and its successor, then you'll definitely want to read this recent piece by Mark Harris on the Wired Website:

For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up.

"People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us."

Detroit and the newspaper industry each thought the same thing--despite numerous predictions from futurists of diversification just around the corner in each industry. Why should Jurassic television be any different? And the Wired article doesn't even get into the next wave of video technology, which is slowly beginning to level the playing surface in much the same way as the Blogosphere did to print.

And speaking of Jurassic and futurists, if you missed a recent edition of my Sillicon Graffiti video blog I did on the topic, I explore what Michael Crichton and Alvin Toffler had to say about the media and demassification:

Glenn Reynolds asks:

IS IT JUST ME, or has Technorati become almost useless lately? Seems like half the time it doesn't work, and the other half the time it's days behind. What gives?

I found it to be that way for quite a while, to be honest. I sort of assume if one of their servers crashes, some sort of backup kicks in with old posts, but this seems to be happening at an accelerating rate in recent weeks.

Hopefully it will be back to 100 percent by the end of the summer, as this fall will no doubt be a peak period of usage, for obvious reasons.

Forget The Clone Wars--this is the best Star Wars (and Matrix) homage this summer:

(Via the Anchoress.)

Which actually isn't saying all that much these days: take a look at Redacted's IMDB page. If you assume $9.00 a ticket, with its absolutely pathetic $65,087 domestic gross, that means Redacted was seen by about 7,232 people during its initial run in theaters. (As John Nolte likes to write, "Anyone care to debate how Hollywood's money driven?")

In contrast, my recent "2004: An MSM Odyssey" video was viewed by 8,507 people according to Brightcove, its Webhost.

...And I can safely guarantee that my budget was just a smidgen lower than Redacted's five million dollars.

News from 2004 reaches Tim Rutten!

Old Media Dethroned
Edwards' admission signals the end of the era in which traditional media set the limits of acceptable political journalism.

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it -- reporting that turns out to be largely correct -- and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

The whole story of the 2004 election was that the gatekeepers were dethroned--the Swift Vets made their case against John Kerry by doing an end-around old media by running their commercials on the Internet, and Dan Rather's case against George W. Bush was demolished in a tidal wave of distributed information sharing, first via Free Republic, which was joined shortly thereafter in the Blogosphere. Both stories demonstrated precisely how Old Media's role as a gatekeeper was dethroned:

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds reminded us--well, the left, to be precise--of Eason Jordan's admission that he was willing to allow CNN to lie for Saddam Hussein, in order to able to put "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" on the CNN Chyron. Jordan finally came clean on this propaganda coup for Baathist Iraq in mid-2003 after Saddam fled US soldiers in an op-ed titled, "The News We Kept To Our Selves." Evidently, the L.A. Times thought they kept the news of 2004 to themselves as well.

Though sometimes it's tough to tell which is which. First up, Andrew Ferguson gets "Lost in the Personasphere":

My first glimpse of the personasphere came several years ago at a county fair. It was like all county fairs, an all-American overload of colored lights and hurdy-gurdy noise and questionable smells. I'd always thought it was an experience that nobody could be bored by. Then I saw a gaggle of four teenage girls walking together along the midway. They were yacking away, as teenage girls, you might have noticed, sometimes do-but they were yacking into their cell phones. Walking four abreast, they were huddled in their personaspheres, each in her customized bubble, talking to someone who was far away instead of the friends that plan or chance had placed beside her. They were lost not only to one another but to the noise and color around them.

Since then, the appliances that furnish a personasphere have grown in number and complication. Walk down any city street and you'll see people deploying one gadget or another to construct their bubble, ignoring the nearby in favor of the faraway. Here comes a kid talking excitedly into a cell phone, followed by a businessman calling up a webpage from his iPhone, followed by an office hack scrolling through the messages on his Treo. Meanwhile, life erupts all over the place, unnoticed. If this were a just world, I'd get to see at least one of these busy people walk into a lamppost or fall through an open manhole, the way people used to do in silent movies. They never do, though, at least not while I'm around. This must not be a just world.

But it is a very distracted one-though maybe distraction isn't the fitting word. A distraction is supposed to be something that draws you away from immediate experience, pulls your attention from the matter at hand. The personasphere involves experience once removed, pressed through a piece of hardware; in the personasphere, immediate experience is the distraction, an annoyance that takes you from the now-primary business of texting, phoning, websurfing-being elsewhere. Faced with the real world, we draw our personaspheres over us like a cloak against the cold.

I'm a silver-lining guy, as my friends will tell you, always searching for the upside in any given situation, so I'll mention one nice thing about this cocooning, this withdrawal of everyone into his own personasphere: It has served to prove the techno-utopians wrong once again. From the dawn of the Internet through the coming of the Wi-Fi era, the utopians told us that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture.

We can see how mistaken they were. Consider the man lost in his personasphere, at dinner, on a bus, in an elevator, scheming into a cellphone or tapping a message on his BlackBerry. If technology has brought him closer to distant friends it has also made it easier to detach himself from those near at hand. As his world expands, it shrinks-roughly to the size of his busy, excitable, unutterably lonely self.

And the flipside? Kyle Smith of the New York Post is about to receive comment number #300 on his review of Wall-E:

As always, I am humbled by the number of people who, upon reading a lukewarm reaction to a cartoon about cute robots, managed to reach down deep and bring up some deeply crazed fury.

To be fair, some futurists, such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler in 1980's The Third Wave, didn't predict, as Ferguson wrote, "that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture." Just the opposite--it's the technology itself that's atomizing a once mass culture, as we've gone from three national TV networks in 1968 to 112,000,000 blogs in 2008. But within that atomization, there is room for shared bonds to be forged--even if it occasionally involves fending off a crazed Wall-E storm.

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.

The PR firm that represents Fretlight contacted me last month and asked if I wanted to write a review of the Fretlight guitar teaching system. When their CEO showed up with a guitar in his hands yesterday to demonstrate, I thought it would also be a great excuse to shoot some video:

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.

Mark Tapscott has some kind words about my piece in Tech Central Station yesterday on 18 Doughty Street:

As if it's not bad enough that executives and shareholders at ABC, CBS and NBC have to deal with continuing decline in their audience numbers, Tech Central Station goes and publishes a glowing piece on the old broadcast model's executioner.

Tapscott writes:

It's much the same set of factors that are driving traditional newspapers to move from dead-tree-only products to internet-based news and related content products and services. The internet-based news entity can dispense with the printing press, the circulation department, the costly staffs that man both, as well as lots of other traditional positions throughout the organization.

Similarly, the internet-based entertainment and news network has no need of broadcast towers and associated equipment, nor the expensive lobbying staff in Washington to keep the FCC from getting troublesome.

In short, the economic model is fundamentally changed and the price of entry is dramatically lowered. And when the price of providing a service or product drops, the number of providers of that service or product increases, as does the spectrum of consumer choice. Competition is the consumer's best friend. Government-sanctioned monopolies granted to myopic big businesses are the consumers' biggest enemy.

Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news. In short, 18 Doughty Street and the technologies that make it possible is among the best developments in years for advocates of informed public policy discussion.

I disagree with only one element of that--whereas Mark writes, "Competition also makes it more difficult for peddlers of ideological bias to disguise it as legitimate news", I'd argue that increased competition allows consumers to get their news with a worldview that matches their own. That doesn't mean the end of liberal bias, as, I believe, Mark is inferring. In fact, as the favorite "COD-piece" of the Strib's Jim Boyd told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

Jonah Goldberg: I think there is a certain irony here. I have argued for a long time that I think a lot of newspapers need to move in the European direction, where they just are honest about their biases, because one of the things that drives normal readers nuts is when these newspapers pretend to be objective when they’re not.

HH: Right.

JG: And at least in the British press, the press says hey look, this is our perspective, this is where we’re coming from. The irony here is that I think a liberal paper could actually do well if it were honest about it. But because a lot of these papers, they’re dishonest about it, and they pretend in this sort of arrogance that they’re speaking from the voice of God about how the world really is, it drives a lot of people nuts, and that’s what I sense is part of the problem with them.

As I think I wrote in the Doughty Street piece, because (partially due to governmental regulation) airwaves were originally so scarce on both sides of the pond, radio, and then television, had to maintain a veneer of objectivity simply to get a license to get on the air.

The Doughty Street model proves that the Internet can recreate all of the broadcasting that traditional local television station does--everything else (the content of the shows, where and how they're videotaped) is a matter of scale. And thus any group can build the Internet-equivalent of a TV station that fits their worldview perfectly. So that could very well be the Internet video equivalent of Town Hall--and the Internet video equivalent of Air America.

"160Mbps downloads move closer for US cable customers"--that's something that Internet2 has been working on since the mid-1990s. See my article about them from a few years ago at Tech Central Station.

Over at CE Pro, the trade publication for custom home theater installers, I have an article on 64-bit computing. The video above explains the concept in terms of audio, but the same concepts apply to video production as well. Think Hot Air, 18 Doughty Street, or the next multimedia site is going to take advantage of the near unlimited RAM that 64-bit computing promises in the coming years to help shape their content?

Me too. Which is why this number is only going to shrink--and the resultant hysterical reactions from Old Media will only increase in concurrent response.

If, as Marvin Olasky wrote yesterday, the death of David Halberstam closes a chapter on the legacy media, La Shawn Barber explores how it's facing the future: "Newspapers Agonize Over Allowing Comments".

Can't say I blame them, actually.

Marvin Olasky makes a great point, writing that the death of David Halberstam in a Bay Area traffic accident on Monday may be looked back upon as a chapter in journalism closing. Olasky compares it to Buddy Holly's death signifying the end of 1950s-era rock & roll, even if the echoes of that style of music would linger on until 1964:

These days, reporters regularly gather to bemoan the demise of old journalism and the rise of blogs. Future historians will peg Monday's death of David Halberstam, 73, in a California car crash, as a signpost of the old era's end.

Halberstam was the first big-time journalist with whom I ever had dinner, in 1969 or 1970 when I was a college student. My fellow leftists and I venerated him for winning a Pulitzer Prize on the back of anti-Vietnam War reporting that had gained the ire of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. As William Prochnau, author of "Once Upon a Distant War," later noted, Halberstam in his reporting of those he distrusted ''didn't say, 'You're not telling me the truth.' He said, 'You're lying.'"

Compare that with fellow Jurassic journalist Marvin Kalb, who wouldn't commit to saying on the air yesterday whether or not he thought Bill Moyers and George Soros are on the left. More from Olasky:

We loved that -- Halberstam wrote like a god -- but four decades later, the epigone of Halberstamism is found in books like Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Unlike some of his successors, Halberstam was a hardworking reporter who didn't grab for sneering laughs, but his 1965 book about Vietnam, "The Making of a Quagmire," has inspired journalists for four decades to look for a quagmire as soon as the first American soldiers set foot on sand. [Sometimes before they set foot on sand--Ed]

Halberstam's perceptiveness and blindness were both evident in an interview he gave to the San Jose Mercury News in 1993. He said he was worried about journalism's future because "The public perceives us as being too powerful and too arrogant." But he went on to state his version of the problem: "We give a jarring perception of reality to people." Journalists knew reality, and people weren't strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

Cue Nicholson's nostril-flaring "You can't handle the truth" riff.

Halberstam was the best and brightest of the old journalistic era, which will not be resurrected. He elegantly wove tales of government and corporate mendacity. He orated brilliantly about oppression. He worked hard, gained disciples and received not only numerous honorary degrees but something more important -- articles upon his death with headlines like "Halberstam was my journalistic hero" and "Saying goodbye to a mentor."

According to song, the day Buddy Holly's plane crashed in 1959 was the day the music died. When a car broadsided the one Halberstam was riding in, he died almost instantly as a broken rib punctured his heart. The journalism he was the heart of, one where reporters claimed to possess gnostic wisdom, is also dying. We've entered an era of citizen journalism, where everyone has a camera and YouTube replaces You Believe What I Write.

I think it's safe to say that to a man, the Marxist and socialist elite journalists of Halberstam's era believed in Marx's 19th century smokestack-era theories that eventually, the workers would own the means of production and enjoy the full fruits of their labor.

When the information revolution finally came (surprisingly peacefully--we simply all went down to Best Buy and bought PCs and cable modems), the workers not only had an infinitely greater variety of news sources when compared to, say, Halberstam's 1965 quagmire mass media three TV network salad days. They could make their own news and opinion if they wanted to. And the men of Halberstam's era hate this new era--really, viscerally hate it.

It's the new reality. But I guess some legacy journalists just aren’t strong enough to handle the shrink-wrapped truth.

Not surprisingly, Don Imus loses his CBS radio gig in addition to his MSNBC cable TV simulcast; veteran magazine editor Myrna Blyth has a piece in NRO today on the power to bully the legacy media grants to those it gives airtime:

I have never listened to Imus, and the only times I’ve seen him have been when I was flicking through channels in a hotel room, trying to find the morning news. But what struck me the few times I did watch him was his amazing arrogance. And, while I know we’re not supposed to criticize people for their appearance, this funny-looking guy in a funny-looking cowboy hat sure does get a lot of power when he’s sitting behind a microphone. David Frum in his Diary gives an example of Imus’s arrogance. For years, right up to this current fracas, he has been able to freely use his power to sneer at others and get the audience to laugh along. Imus, quite simply, is a bully, and he’s made that pay big. And like a bully about to lose a fight, he has started sniveling and proclaiming what a good and generous guy he really is.

The other great bully on TV right now is Rosie, who has her daily soapbox on The View. It’s her schoolyard bullying tactics, which she so effectively employs on that girlie show, much more than her crackpot conspiracy theories, that I find most objectionable. Day after day, like a true grade-school tyrant, she shouts down anyone who disagrees with her, steps on any applause another opinion might elicit, and, like Imus with his sidekicks, gets the other women on The View to agree with and support her.

Rosie is also an expert at playing the victim and making excuses for herself. As she constantly explains, she suffers from depression and her mother died when she was young — and she is very generous, too. Of course, Rosie, in true bully fashion, is afraid to have anyone on the show who might have the power to say, “Hey, Rosie, put up your dukes,” and then, through argument, win a fair fight with her.

Maybe the next media tempest will be when Rosie goes too far. Although she is very well protected, it probably will happen, and the pundits will once again have the chance to talk about the one thing they all agree upon — the enormous power those in media now have.

A couple of weeks ago, Libertas had a great post on A Face In The Crowd, Elia Kazan’s's seminal late 1950s movie about a populist figure given a national platform by television who quickly becomes a demagogue. When I saw the movie for the first time on TMC or AMC in the late 1990s, Andy Griffith's performance in the lead role (which instantly put him on the map in Hollywood) reminded me instantly of James Carville; some might instead see Rush or O'Reilly in it. But it really is a dramatic foreshadowing of how today's media both invents public figures, lets them run fast, loud, and out of control, usually until its too late, and then quickly pulls the plug on them, and is well worth your time on DVD or next time it's on cable.

In one sense, the current hyperventilating by Imus, Rosie, Sharpton, et al represent the death rumbles of an eighty year old mass electronic media in an era when everyone will eventually have his own blog--and heck, if they want it bad enough, their own TV station. But considering how well a fifty year old movie still depicts today's events, the medium may change, but not the urge to demagogue it.

Clive Davis writes:

Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.

It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.

And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.

Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.

Tammy Bruce checks in with the state of the computing art in 1989.

Maybe someday, I'll be able to send faxes from the beach, too!

And speaking of RAM, forget two megabytes--you'll be able to put a whole heckuva lot more than two gigabytes in your PC in the coming years.

J.R. Taylor looks at a surprisingly conservative-sounding Pete Townshend, circa 1980, and observes:

We got The Who’s Who Are You in 1978, and 1980’s Empty Glass was a great solo effort. All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes made for a fine follow-up in 1982. Let’s include 1977’s brilliant Rough Mix—where Townshend collaborated with Ronnie Lane—as part of the era. The Who released the underrated Face Dances in 1981, and then It’s Hard in 1982…and that last one had Townshend showing that he could stand to recharge his batteries.

As Taylor notes, "This was a good time to be a Pete Townshend fan".

Indeed it was--I really worshiped Townshend during that period, both with The Who (whom I saw at Philadelphia's old JFK stadium in 1982 during their first of what would eventually feel like semi-annual farewell tours) and on his own.

There's one more album of Townshend from that period that Taylor leaves off his list, and that's Townshend's Scoop, the first of an ongoing collection of his demos. Scoop was part of a very strong DIY ethic that was bubbling up in music during that period, both from the "anybody can play!" ethos of punk and new wave, and from the release of the affordable four-track cassette recorders. Townshend would eventually use these himself, along with much more sophisticated hardware. Four-track cassette recorders allowed a budding musician to "write" his own songs onto cassette by recording a drum machine (another early 1980s innovation) onto track one, bass onto track two, rhythm guitar onto track three and vocals and a lead instrument on track four. The tools available today are infinitely more sophisticated, but things had to start some place.

There's a music store poster from around 1983 promoting Scoop that I had framed to hang above my assorted tools of destruction a while back to remind me where I came from. Because virtually everything creative that I've done since flows in some way from that period, beginning with learning music and how to record it, and then figuring out that if I could be creative there, I could explore other media as well. And I suspect I'm not the only one blogging who had similar insights around that time.

Hugh Hewitt is promising "$1,000 to the best YouTube-posted ad promoting A Mormon In The White House".

Details here; meanwhile, Jonathan Garthwaite asks, "Will a YouTube Video Decide the Next President?"

Just click:

More details here; for our interview last year with Even Coyne Maloney on DIY video, click here.

Jules Crittenden checks in with the dark side of the high tech DIY-movement: Cave 321-B, North Waziristan.

(For those who may not remember the budding pop stars of the dimly receding past of long, long ago, such as 2004, here's what the above title refers to.)

If you think that elite journalists are the only ones feeling threatened by the growing number of blog-savvy DIYers , you haven't met the graphic designers who "seem to live in terror of amateurs with Pagemaker", writes Virginia Postrel.

Eying the vacationing Glenn Reynolds' slick Insta-studio, Neo-Neocon writes that she's got "podcast studio envy", and posts a photo of her more minimalist rig.

My setup? Somewhere between the two, I'd say. Here is a triptych to give you an idea of how it looks.

(That last shot shows my Sweetwater Creation Station PC resting atop my Roland VG-88 pedalboard, via a simple wooden stand I built last fall.)

In early 2006, just as YouTube and Google Video were first making their mark, I wrote about the intersection of the Internet and television first for TCS Daily, and later, on the topic of IPTV for The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine. (Not on the Web at the moment, unfortunately, and somewhat ironically.) While there have been a number of great Websites that incorporate video clips (and the production values of Michelle Malkin's daily "Vent" segments on her Hot Air site are first class), from what I've seen of it so far, England's 18 Doughty Street Website, with its slick-looking evenings' worth of longform programming has really managed to put all the pieces together in an exemplary fashion. In a recent post, Jeff Jarvis explains what makes them tick.

As IPTV allows for full-length programs to be downloaded into television set-top boxes via broadband, expect many more channels like this. If I was an angel investor looking to fund the TV station of the future for the Web and/or IPTV, 18 Doughty Street, its format, and especially its production values, is the model I'd crib from as carefully as possible.

The latest in Libertas' series of "Put Up Or Shut Up", an excellent guide to indy film/digital video making, is online, and deals with audio. There are loads of great tips, including this comment right at the start:

Sound matters more than picture. If the picture’s fuzzy, out of focus, or gone completely, it’s better than bad sound. Bad sound immediately takes you out of the film.

And speaking of location sound, I've been having lots of fun with this product, Samson's Zoom H4 portable digital recorder. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for the types of projects Libertas has been describing, but for location work for short video podcasts, it seems to do a pretty darn good job. The base of the recorder has a pair of XLR-inputs for use with professional mics. And for certain applications, it's small enough to hold on camera as a handheld mic itself, especially with the black foam cover over the two small condenser microphones located at the top of the unit. It records audio onto a Smart Card, which can simply be popped into the computer to import into your audio or video editing program afterwards.

It's also useful in the studio as well--I've been using it as a digital backup recorder for the Pajamas' Blog Week In Review audio podcasts, just in case.

In late December of 2005, I wrote:

Over Christmas Eve dinner, my wife and a couple of friends and I discussed the growing amount of firsthand reporting in the Blogosphere, including Iraq the Model's real-time reporting for Pajamas on the Iraqi elections. I mentioned that such efforts are having an impact beyond the Blogosphere. For example, when the Miami NBC affiliate reported the story of a Chalk's seaplane crash last week, the first photo to accompany the story was taken not by a professional reporter or photographer, but someone who simply happened to be on the scene with camera-equipped cell phone.

One friend sardonically quipped that eventually, we're going to start seeing people sending photos from their cell phones from inside a plane as it goes down.

Fortunately, that latter half of that equation wasn't an issue for blogger and licensed private pilot Jeremy Hermanns, but on a recent Alaska Airlines flight when the cabin accidentally depressurized, he was able to document the event with his cell phone camera and later, blog about it.

Such quick thinking isn't just limited to amateur journalists of course, as the dramatic video of yesterday's Indonesian jet crash highlights:

Wayan Sukarda, a cameraman for Australia's Seven Network who was aboard, managed to scramble off the plane. He shot dramatic video of passengers fleeing the plane as black smoke, then orange flames, poured from the fuselage.

Sukarda even called the network as the plane was crashing, a colleague told The West Australian newspaper. "He was screaming, 'The plane's crashing.' I thought he must have seen another plane crash. I didn't know it was the one he was on. You could hear all the alarms and sirens going off, people screaming," said Channel Seven's Danny Sim.

An explosion and fireball ripped through the air, apparently as the fire reached a fuel tank, according to the video. It showed dazed and burned victims, including Indonesians and Westerners, sitting on the floor or lying on gurneys in the airport terminal.

Further reason to keep a digital video or still camera, or at least a cell phone camera handy at all times.

Reuters has an interesting piece on Esmee Denters, an 18-year old resident of Oosterbeck, who's become the Dutch "It Girl" of YouTube:

Nearly 20,000 fans have subscribed to her YouTube channel to receive automatic updates, with about 200 added a day, putting her at No. 22 on the all-time most-popular list.

Denters has since traveled to the United States and met a veritable who's who of the music industry's leading executives, from Jason Flom to Antonio "L.A." Reid to Tommy Motolla. She has recorded demo tracks with Kelly Rowland and is fielding TV deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

As Reuters notes, "The obvious logical next step, then, is a record label deal, right? Not so fast":

"We may decide not to get together with a label," Denters said via phone, waiting for a flight from Los Angeles to New York for another round of meetings and recording sessions. "We may try new stuff. I've already accomplished so much on my own, we'd like to see what we can do with that."

Artists like Denters, emerging from the realm of user-generated media, have learned to tap the viral power of the Internet to do what acts a generation ago could only dream of -- build a grassroots following numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort.

But being talented and building a fan base is only part of the equation. Artists who decide to go it alone must bear the full financial weight of the various aspects of a music career -- recording and production fees, distribution costs, marketing and promotion expenses and more.

These costs are falling in the digital age. Recording and production fees can be extraordinarily cheap, depending on the level of sophistication desired. Tech-savvy artists can further cut costs with a good laptop and ProTools.

Distribution can be done digitally through such firms as the Orchard or INgrooves, which take a flat percentage of each sale for their efforts. Physical sales can be handled by CD Baby at $4 a pop. There are a gaggle of online services designed to host commerce and promotional sites for unsigned acts as part of a "music social network," most notably PureVolume and Sellaband.com. Companies like Musictoday can serve as a one-stop shop for artists for Web site hosting and design, digital downloads, concert ticket sales, CD replication, fan club management, and merchandise sales and fulfillment.

For licensing, digital services like Rumblefish, PumpAudio and even some digital distribution firms like the Orchard promote their clients' work to advertising firms and film producers and charge only a percentage of the licensing fee in return. And since they've taken no recoupable advance, these artists get to keep all the proceeds.

In a TCS Daily piece back in 2003, I explored the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, particularly in the music industry, where so much can be done by a talented DIY-artist. These days, all of the technology visible here in Peter Gabriel's 1980-era studio easily fits into a PC with a good high-end sound card.

Because it's so much harder to achieve great visuals rather than great sounds, it will be a while before things level out in the movie industry. But fortunately, Hollywood's doing an excellent job of lowering their own standards, while technology on the grass roots level continues to become more and more powerful.

Update: NRO's Peter Suderman looks at American Film Renaissance, one attempt to level the playing field. It's a very good piece, but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with him when he writes:

Hollywood rarely markets its movies as explicitly “liberal films,” and, as the pageantry of the Oscars shows, the films themselves can be almost an afterthought. No, the movie industry may consistently pull the lever for the bluest of the blue state candidates, but the color it cares for most is green.

But only to a certain point.

Jaron Lanier writes:

My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.

At least what Lanier is going through with Wikipedia is better than the off-and-on update that Beach Boy Mike Love's Wiki page seems to be undergoing at the moment. (After writing this post, I've checked Love's Wikipedia profile a few times this week. The A-word seems to appear and disappear quite frequently.)

(Via Charles Johnson, who spots further examples of what Lanier calls "Digital Maoism".)

Remember this 1993 AT&T commercial narrated by Tom Selleck? Pretty amusing to watch it again today and realize that all of the gee-whiz technology in the ad is either here now already, or particularly in the case of the clunky looking PDA/tablet computer with an AM-style telescoping antenna sending (oooooh) faxes from the beach in the last shot, already obsolete:

(Not sure which, if any, of these technologies were actually brought to us exclusively by AT&T itself, but still, it was a stylish look at the minor wonders of the near future.)

A month ago, I linked to the Newark Star Ledger's nascent video blog site devoted to all things New Jersey (designed by Sekimori, who previously overhauled this site's graphics), and wrote:

Hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

David Corrigan wrote me yesterday about his own video blog, a well-produced site whose name says it all: South Jersey Video Magazine.

Here's a recent sample, with footage of an impressive snowbound tiger and other critters "enjoying" a typically harsh New Jersey winter. Sadly, no sloths involved, but I can't tell you how representative the interviewed veterinarian’s accent is of the region I grew up in.

As Charles Johnson writes, "In the post-9/11 world, this is how you deal with airplane hijackers": Air Mauritania passengers beat up hijacker.

Update (2/17/07): More details here.

Izzy Video is a Weblog and accompany video podcast series created by Arizona-based videographer Israel Hyman. If you're interested in improving your video podcasting efforts, or any facet of video production, tuning into a few of Izzy's how-to video podcasts certainly wouldn't hurt.

(Hat tip: Pajamas' Andrew Marcus.)

Err, no that headline isn't quite what it sounds like at first glance: Austin Bay, host of Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast, has an excerpt from his new pamphlet in a recent edition of the L.A. Times.

(Bugmenot works well of course, if you'd like to read the article without registering.)

Wow, maybe it is 1968 all over again: Jack Webb is back, and this time, he's on the side of Truth, Justice, and the Techno-Rapping Way, baby!

I lived in New Jersey for over 30 years, so I'm happy to see Newark's Star-Ledger launch TV Jersey:

New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesn’t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, we’ll promote. Just tag your videos on youtube with tvjersey, and we’ll find them. (We’re going to start using some other services soon.) We might find them even if you don’t. And you can always send us ideas and links at video [at] tvjersey dot com. Together, we’ll build the TV station we deserve.

And there's no reason why other sites can't join them, if Jersey-centric Websurfers detect a bias or tone they're uncomfortable with, or aren't happy with the site's amount of coverage. And speaking of which, hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

Update: Further thoughts from Jeff Jarvis; interesting comments as well, immediately below them.

Glenn Reynolds' pro-gun op-ed is in today's New York Times.

For the past few months, I've been having a lot of fun playing with Roland's VG-88 guitar modeling system. It's a pedal board loaded with 260 different patches that a guitar player can dial through, much like a keyboard synthesizer player. Want your guitar to sound like a nylon string classical guitar? An acoustic or electric 12-string guitar? Jimmy Page's Les Paul? Eric Clapton's Stratocaster? A guitar synthesizer? All those tones are in there, and many more.

The product has been out for a while, but just for the heck of it, I knocked off a lengthy review for Blogcritics, which you can read by clicking here.

Speaking of the Long Tail and pop culture, accompanying the buyer's guide for DVD production and editing hardware and software in the latest "dead tree" edition of Videomaker magazine is my introduction to the topic.

And for those feeling really ambitious, don't miss the ongoing guide to shooting your own production that's been running at Libertas. Just keep scrolling through their "Put Up Or Shut Up" category.

(Previous thoughts on the topic here.)

I'm doing a piece on 64-bit computing for a magazine article, and thought I might toss-in Bill Gates' infamous “640K of memory should be enough for anybody” quote from 1981.

However, employing meticulous research that would have made Socrates blush, (in other words, hitting Google), it turns out that the quote is something of a myth:

By BILL GATES (c.1996 Bloomberg Business News)
[...]

QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said, "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." What did you mean when you said this?

ANSWER: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known. When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers.

We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the now-infamous "640K barrier" came from.)

A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel's 386 microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address space. Modern operating systems can now take advantage of that seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of address space won't prove adequate as time goes on. Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.

Giving Gates the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't gilding the lily in 1996, I wonder how many quotes and incidents from this decade will be near universally "remembered", even if they hadn't actually happened.

And speaking of 1981, this quote from that year is rather more prescient than the imaginary Gates line.

Blogger "One Angry Christian" links to an AP photo with a caption that reads:

An Iranian student holds an anti-president placard, reading: 'Fascist President, Polytechnich is not your place', as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unseen, speaks at the Amir Kabir Technical University, in Tehran, Iran, Monday, Dec. 11, 2006. Iranian students staged a rare demonstration against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday, lighting a firecracker and burning his photograph in the audience as he delivered a speech at their university, the state news agency said.

Unlike America's "peace" (read: anti-Bush) protestors, there are real stakes involved for this fellow, as One Angry Christian writes:

This guy, hands down, gets my "Man of the Year" award. There isn't a person who is closer to the evil that is destroying western civilization who is risking more than this guy.

Apparently, about now there are some "vigilantes" looking for him. I'd be willing to bet my next check they're government agents. This is a far cry from the imagined "persecution" that so-called "peace protestors" get here in America. In Iran people who protest are actually hunted down and murdered along with members of their family.

But of course, this Iranian would never be considered by Time--he's protesting a leader that the magazine recently dubbed a beneficient "global Everyman" and "Champion of the disposessed".

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

And so are you! Talk about a cop-out; it's tough to argue with this assessment from Libertas's "Dirty Harry":

Now, I’d prefer to be named Man of the Year, but we live in particular times.

Yes, I… I am Person of the Year. Me. Little old me. Me, who sits in his underwear eating cookies sniping at Hollywood from behind a pseudonym. I don’t feel worthy, but smarter people than me know better. Obviously, I’m just insecure. Why should it feel wrong being honored in such a way? So what if I’m not risking my life to build a school or stop terrorists from killing people I don’t even share a language with?

So, thank you Time Magazine. Thank you for a little perspective regarding my own importance. I feel so much better now knowing the world could not survive without me, and the porn addicts, the fantasy gamers, the chat roomers, the emailers, the gamblers, anyone over thirty still living with his parents, and all the lousy short filmmakers…

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin expresses her disgust with Time's annual wimp-out in video form. Paraphrasing a quote oft-attributed to G.K. Chesterton, Rush Limbaugh adds, "When you believe in nothing, you will believe anything":

And they farmed out the decision-making process! They had consulting groups made up of various kinds of people. It's almost like TIME Magazine was acting like Congress. Got a tough decision to make? Farm it out! Get some "blue-ribbon panel" in here of people that don't know what they're doing to make suggestions and then go with that rather than make the decision yourself. It's not that I care about the Person of the Year that much, but I'm a marketing guy. They have destroyed and made a joke out of what once was a very, very high honor: to be named Person of the Year. It's something people sought out. They just rendered it a meaningless joke. We're all winners! This is typical: We're all equal. They didn't have the ability to pick one person because that would signal everybody else out is a bunch of losers, or as un-worthies or what have you.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Time has no credibility. None. I don't care who they pick. That doesn't mean they won't get it right but that hardly means we should care much if they do. The magazine which had the guts to pick dictators and tyrants when they deserved it has, in recent years, gone the rout of People magazine. Even when they go in a controversial direction, it's invariably controversial in way designed to be not-too-controversial. "Now, Twice the Controversy But Half the Calories!" What was it a few years ago? Whistleblower women? And in 2001 when it deserved to be Osama Bin Laden, they went with Rudy Giulliani. How nice! I don't bash corporations much, but this seems to be one of those conventions that gets approved by a committee of suits before it goes anywhere.

This year's "choice" makes it official: the shark has been jumped, the concept should be retired. It's pablum.

Update: Mickey Kaus asks, is William Beutler "eerily prescient" or is Time "just preternaturally predictable"?

"The wide collar, fat tie, and three-piece suit–please say the seventies aren’t coming back…"

The seventies took a brief vacation from 1981 to about 1989--or to 2002 if you're really feeling charitable. Other than that, when did they ever leave?

I have a lengthy review of the latest incarnation of Cakewalk's Sonar PC-based multitrack recording program, over at Blogcritics.

Near the end of the piece, I tried to give a brief preview of the multimedia of the very near future: 64-bit computing. While Sonar 6 works great with good ol' Windows XP Professional, it's also compatible with the 64-bit version of Windows XP. One big, big advantage of 64-bit computing? Currently, Windows XP supports up to four gigs of RAM.

64-bit Windows supports a whopping 128-gigs of RAM, and the 64-bit computing in general apparently has a theoritical limit of 16 exabytes! (Insert bug-eyed emoticon here.)

Of course, 200 years from now when we're beaming people up and storing their data in the pattern buffers, we'll wonder how mankind got anything done with a pitiful 128-gigs of RAM. But for the next decade or so, that sounds like a potent future for home multimedia creation. Needless to say, though--Hollywood won't be happy.

In Opinion Journal, Om Malick explores the importance of software platforms:

A couple of years ago, in the days before YouTube, a short video clip spread like wildfire on the Internet. It showed the fourth richest man on the planet, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, doing a crazy jig onstage at a conference, screaming "developers, developers, developers." Truer words have never been spoken--or repeated. Without "developers," Microsoft would not possess its desktop monopoly or billions of dollars in profits.

Those developers are the little platoons of software programmers and product-inventors who turn operating systems (like Microsoft's Windows), Internet browsers (Firefox), game devices (PlayStation) and much else into something more than themselves--into "platforms" upon which a whole economic ecosystem rests. It is impossible to imagine Dell Computer's success, or that of Intuit Corp. or even Electronic Arts (the videogame company) without the platform that Windows constructed with the help, so to speak, of Microsoft. Windows is but one example of many software engines that have propelled mega-billion-dollar industries and created wealth beyond compare. Just as the internal combustion engine led to the formation of the modern automobile industry and ended up driving so much else in the economy (think only of steel and gasoline), invisible engines are now powering the vast postindustrial economies in which we live and work.

Such is the persuasive thesis of "Invisible Engines," by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee. The authors document the rise of platforms, outline the strategies by which they are developed and marketed, and offer little-known details about popular devices--Sony's PlayStation, Apple's iPod, Palm Treo--that have become essential aspects of our modern lives.

No wonder the American left and the EU want/wanted to topple Microsoft and long for the 1950s--or at least the 1970s, when things were so much simpler at the tail end of the industrial revolution rather than its information-based demassified successor.

Hollywood Reporter reports that when Cory Lidle's private plane "crashed into an Upper East Side apartment building on Wednesday, Fox News Channel delivered early live video to its viewers from the crash site using a hand-held mobile phone souped up with streaming video".

Around 2000, long before anyone heard of the Blogosphere, I actually did an article on the future of news gathering for a short-lived magazine for cell phone users in England. Click here for a reprint.

I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.

Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.

For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.

At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.

Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.

Woody Allen's first editor once wrote a book about his craft titled, When The Shooting Stops...The Cutting Begins. In the recording world, mastering is what begins when the mixing ends. The goal is to provide to the final gloss, sparkle, and punch to a recording, and when making a CD, ensure that all of the tracks are of uniform consistency, so that the listener doesn't encounter one track that's very thin, brittle and trebly, followed by another with loads of bottom, but no mids or high-end.

In the professional recording world, mastering is typically done in studios dedicated to the task, and because it's as much an art as a science, mastering engineers who've, err, mastered their craft are highly sought after professionals, which is why if you check the liner notes of your CDs, names like Bob Ludwig and George Marino pop up so often.

A few years ago, the Cambridge, Mass-based Izotope company created a high-end mastering plug-in for the computer recording world called Ozone, which I reviewed for Blogcritics back in April of 2004. Recently, I stopped by their booth at the Audio Engineering Society convention in San Francisco this weekend, and spoke with Izotope's Mark Ethier via telephone. While part of the conversation is dedicated specifically to Ozone, there should be enough of an introduction to audio mastering in general for someone new to the subject.

And speaking of which, Mark mentioned some publications that are well worth reading to anyone interested in PC-based recording: Izotope's own 64-page introduction to mastering, an excellent primer on the topic, which is available in PDF format by clicking here. Once you've thoroughly digested it, pick up a copy of Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science by Bob Katz, and/or Mixing And Mastering Audio Recordings By Bill Gibson. They're the master class in mastering. So to speak.

Click here to listen to my interview with Mark; or stop by our Apple iTunes page. In either case, no iPod is required, virtually any computer with a broadband connection can stream an MP3.

(And for more DIY-madness, that's me on guitar, bass, synth, and a bunch of Acid loops on the intro and outro bumper music--which was mastered in Ozone, along with the rest of the podcast.)

Reason unwittingly manages to combine the central theses of two of the more important books on the Internet and technology this year. Their Website features an essay that mashes together the recurring "small breweries empowered by modern technology" subtext of Glenn Reynolds' An Army Of Davids, along with the Long Tail of the Internet meme of Chris Anderson.

Just promise you'll drink something other than Bud when you read it. Unless you're Jonah Goldberg, of course--but that's a whole 'nother meme.

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

Nick Schulz, my editor at TCS Daily, has a great podcast on Townhall.com with James Glassman, who launched and publishes TCS; and Glenn Reynolds, whose Army of Davids book began life there in his ongoing series of columns. It's a fun listen; just click here to tune in.

One person who has been absolutely brilliant at spotting trends and extrpolating their consequences into the future has been Alvin Toffler, whom I spoke with in September 2001, less than a week after 9/11. A galley copy of his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, just arrived--look forward to a review of the book, and hopefully a an interview with Toffler as well, in the not-too-distant future.

Also in the mail was a review copy of Cakewalk's new Rapture software synthesizer. Look for a review of that as well.

And speaking of Toffleresque books, I have a review of An Army of Davids, as well as a profile of its author (I think he's a blogger or a law professor, or something like that), over at TCS today.

(Please note that I didn't choose the photo, which makes Glenn look like a bit like he's being grilled by a Senate subcomittee.)

I couldn't do it.

Oh how I envied Jeff, Roger, Steve, the Manolo, the GPs and Andrew Leigh. Oh how tempting it felt to live blog the Oscars myself. But that would mean...watching the Oscars. (Sadly, I lack Goldstein’s ability to accurately live blog an event I’m not directly observing...) And despite owning God-only knows how many movies on disc and tape, and loving the experience of seeing a great film in a darkened theater, I just couldn't make myself watch the Oscars.

Instead, I decided to make a little entertainment of my own.

For a variety of reasons, I've been neglecting recording my own music since the fall of last year, although I was in mid-recording of a new song. But last night, armed with a relatively new acoustic guitar, a decent condenser mic, and a copy of Sonar 5 that I haven't really explored in depth yet, I recorded a variety of guitar licks. This evening, I "comped" them down into a single pretty darn good lead line, and then played stand-up bass underneath--or at least an extremely realistic sampled synthesizer version of stand-up bass. I had forgotten a big part of the enjoyment of music making for me is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call "Flow": that hypnotic trance-like state when you're honing your craft, and creating something new.

The ability to make your own entertainment is a big, big part of the Army of Davids culture, and one reason why, as I wrote a few years ago for TCS, that Silicon Valley and Hollywood are engaged in a quiet culture war with each other--Hollywood wants its audience as passive as possible, but Silicon Valley (and the rest of the computer industry, no matter where it's located) makes its money by selling tools that allow people to either make their own entertainment, or modify Hollywood's product to their heart's content via iPod playlists, video mash-ups, and all sorts of other ultra-high-tech playtimes.

While we frequently tee-off on the L.A. Times (who in the Blogosphere doesn't?), this essay by Patrick Goldstein is a pretty accurate snapshot of the clash between top-down and bottom-up culture:

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Glenn Reynolds writes:

Hugh Hewitt...observes "The Party ought to require every member read An Army of Davids. (Who's got the rights in the PRC Glenn?)". Why limit it to Party members? I think that everyone in China should read it!

And they very well may. But Alvin Toffler told C-Span's Brian Lamb an instructive story about how The Third Wave circulated through China in the early 1980s:

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I was about to link to my annual "the Grammy's ratings are the lowest ever, and here's what it means post", but Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn presented a unique twist on the story this afternoon:

HH: I want to close on a lighter note. Last night, American Idol outperformed in the ratings the Grammy's. The lesson to be drawn from this cultural first, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I think in a sense, that's the...anyone can be a celebrity now. That's the great...you know, Noel Coward said years ago that television is for being on, not looking at. And that was fine when you were Noel Coward, and the ordinary people...Ella Fitzgerald or Bob Hope, and the ordinary people watched you. Now, you don't have Bob Hopes and Ella Fitzgeralds and Noel Cowards, and the ordinary person has rightly figured out that he can be as good as them. And those ratings demonstrated it, compared to the Grammy's.

And there's all sorts of empowering technology available for anybody who wants to make his own records.

Man, it's like...An Army of Davids out there!

(I interviewed The Professor yesterday; expect lots more on this topic, in the not too distant future.)

In the mail on Friday was a galley edition of Glenn Reynolds' upcoming An Army of Davids book. It's a great read and a terrific topic, and I'll have lots more to say about it in the not too distant future.

(And chances are, if you have a blog, so will you...)

Glenn Reynolds writes that Ted Kennedy--and other elites like him--are the victims of a self-fulfilling prophesy. He quotes Kennedy scion Christopher Lawford, who observed Teddy a while back when he:

"took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Glenn responds:

[blogger Phil Bowermaster] notes that the whole coastal-elites-and-media establishment is not just going to fall apart -- it has to a substantial degree already done so. But while this is bad news for the Dan Rathers of the world (and perhaps for the dateless columnists at some big metropolitan dailies) it's not so clear that it's bad news for the rest of us. In fact, I suspect that the elites' discontent comes in no small part from the fact that ordinary people are becoming more powerful all the time, making the elites just a bit less elite with each passing year.

That's a point I've been making in this column for years (you can find some examples here, here, here) and it's also the theme of my forthcoming book, whose title, An Army of Davids, makes the theme pretty clear. And with the Davids getting more powerful, it's no surprise that the Goliaths are depressed. No doubt buggy-whip makers felt similar emotions at the birth of the automobile.

But while the members and hangers-on of yesterday's power structures are mulling their reduced prospects, ordinary people seem to be doing pretty well, as the economy continues to boom, small businesses to form, and new kinds of enterprises take off. We certainly don't view government with the same awe we felt before Watergate broke, or journalism with the same respect it had before Dan Rather struck, but all available evidence suggests that it was our earlier attitudes that were misinformed.

At any rate, [Peggy] Noonan is surely right that our current elites are not up to the task of steering the country. They're too ignorant, too insulated, and too concerned with "getting theirs." Fortunately, they're also a lot less important than they used to be. As blogger Justin Katz writes:

"if the functional elites are too resigned to that trouble to lead our society through it, the underclasses now have the technology -- and the faculty -- to pick up the slack."

Absolutely. And as the rapidly blogged response to Noonan's column -- something that was itself made possible by technology that didn't really exist ten years ago -- demonstrates, people are already doing it. Faster please.

This is a prospect that also frightens not just the elites in government (such as the aforementioned Senator Kennedy) and journalists, but also Hollywood. As well it should.

I first began experimenting with multi-track music recording in the mid-1980s. This speech by Brian Eno, titled "The Studio As Compositional Tool", was the Rosetta Stone for me, opening my eyes as to the incredible possibilities of multi-track recording.

I was in the process of OCR'ing my old photocopy of it, when I found someone had already typed and uploaded it to the Web--which is fine by me. One minor correction to the piece: it's subhead says, "From Downbeat [magazine], probably 1979". It's actually from two issues: July and August of 1983.

For anybody who's thinking about home music recording and has never experimented with it, this article is an eye-opener. Everything that Eno describes as possible in a commercial recording studio is now available to the home recordist with a PC and a decent soundcard. All he needs to get started is a program such as Cakewalk's Home Studio or Sonar or Sony's Acid, and it's off to the races.

(Also on Blogcritics, where I'm a regular contributor.)

Alex Beam's essay is indeed out, and the InstaPundit links to it, and a variety of comments (including mine--thanks!) here and here. The best comment may be Glenn's own: "when you parachute in and try to do a story about something you don't understand overnight, you're going to look stupid. And you do."

I had started an article on the backlash by reporters using traditional media against Web logs on Friday (when I had a few minutes to kill and the laptop was handy), but I didn’t have an ending. Fortunately, James Lileks has given me an ending, an introductory framing device, as well as great essay in and of itself (go read it, we’ll wait for you).

Back? OK, as you just read, Lileks has gotten a wonderfully tactful email from from Alex Beam of the Boston Globe:

James, weren't you once a talented humor writer? Why are you churning out this web dreck? I can't tell if these bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting your humor work, because I can't claim to know it well enough, but I certainly have my suspicions.

Feel free to respond: I am writing a column (deadline: Monday 11 am) on bloggers who might benefit from a less arduous writing schedule.

Alex Beam, Boston Globe

It’s been fascinating watching the backlash of reporters used to traditional media against Web logs. Part of it, of course, is their reaction to self-publishing, the same way that investment advisors were terrified by do-it-yourself investing, from Charles Schwab discount brokerages in the 1980s to E*Trade in 1998. But another part of it is simply knee-jerk cynicism. When Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer invented the New Journalism of the 1960s, the reaction by traditional reporters and media critics was one of cynicism and disdain. Capote called In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel”, because novels had class, and he didn’t want to get his new book lumped in with this bastard form that non-fiction journalists had invented.

It doesn’t help that much of the most successful existing online journalism has been slanted (in varying degrees) towards the right—Matt Drudge, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonah Goldberg all immediately come to mind. But almost anytime that something new comes along, such as Web logs in general, and this Instapundit guy specifically, reporters are by their very nature cynical. The irony of Web logs is that they allow people to build a following by bypassing the traditional avenues of publishing. So, as I said in my Spintech article, anybody can have a blog, and the more offbeat the topic or slant, the better. The very journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, the individual over big business, are slanted against letting those individuals have a way to communicate their own viewpoints!

(And incidentally, Beam is bitching about a guy’s writing which damn near brought tears to my eyes (his piece comparing Israelis getting slaughtered by a Palastenian suicide bomber with day to day life in the US). If my wife wasn’t sitting next to me, while I was reading it, I would easily have started blubbering—it was that powerful. When the last time an old school newspaper columnist could generate that level of emotion?)

Speaking of losing it, where was I? Oh yeah, journalists, who claim they’re for “the little guy”, but slanted against individuals having a way to communicate their own viewpoints. Yes, it’s wonderful irony. But of course, it could just be that traditional newspaper reporters know that perhaps, just perhaps, the old ways of doing business are numbered. When I interviewed Kerry Northrup, an American who is the Executive Director for the German-based Ifra Centre for Advanced News Operations, he and his employer had a number of revolutionary ways for newspapers and reporters to do business, based on available, advanced technologies. But too many editors worship at the 1970s Watergate-era school of Ben Bradlee and Lou Grant, instead of Matt Drudge and other 21st century reporters. And yet, you can slow down progress and change, but you can't stop it--you simply go with it, or eventually get run over.

Unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Lileks says:

people on the web are not paid to be important. They usually aren’t paid at all, of course, but the point of putting up a blog isn’t to be Influential, or to Redefine the Dialogue, or any other of the hoary old clichés. People put up blogs because they have something to say. If they post six times a day and three posts blow chunks, so what? Better that than a columnist whose every piece is stooped with the awful weight of its author’s ego. (I’m not referring to any columnist in particular; choose your favorite.) In any case, the number of “amateurs” who warrant repeat business is amazing. Just found, via InstantMan, an Israeli blog. It’s on my list of daily visits. Took one click to put him in the bookmarks. For a newspaper to do this, several things would have to happen…

So what do newspapers have going for them? Physicality. Presence. Persistence. Raise your hands: who saved a newspaper from Sept. 12? And who printed off an archive of website from that day? Reading a website will never have the same solid satisfaction as reading a paper, which is the old medium’s great advantage. If only they didn’t feel as if their heft and institutional weight conferred credibility or ingenuity, because it doesn’t.