RSS feedI’ve talked before about the copyright revolution and how the big record companies are in their death throws. Most file sharers would say “oh der, obviously!”, but there’s more to it than just them vanishing from the earth and the rest of us just carrying on regardless. (For starters, who get’s the Ferraris?)
The wonderful Gizmodo points to an AP story New Device Allows Recording at Concerts. Apart from looking like another cool fad or an attempt to cash in on the MP3 revolution (there’s that word again), this is actually an important indicator that things are changing.
The record companies do in fact provide a valuable service for artists: publicity. The millions of marketing and publicity dollars traditionally spent on artists gets them in the faces of the people who’d most likely buy them, and this tends to convert into filthy lucre. As an artist, you need to make the call, independance and high percentage of small profits, or sell out and miniscule percentage of a huge profit. Of course in the case of the big corporates, you then need throw in the millions of dollars that you owe back to them, as the costs are passed on to the artist. But if you do it right, there’s money in them there hills.
So when the majors have gone, what will be left? Well, for starters we’ll have more artists, because more of them will be getting airtime. But more importantly, artists will derive their income from a whole range of sources, including concert tickets, merchandise, and of course CD sales. But we’ll also see new and innovative ways for artists to produce income, and technology like eMusic’s eMusicLive vending machine is one of these. After the show, you can purchase a copy of the gig in MP3, copied to your own flash drive, or if you don’t own one, you can buy one from the same machine
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
* Ever wondered why every credit I give to another site is fabulous, fantastic, or wonderful? Me neither.
You gotta love the CIA’s attempt to reinvent themselves. Courtesy of the ever wonderful Boing Boing, the CIA has a web site for kids, complete with happy smiley faces of people that I assume are doing what they refer to as “intelligence work”, and at least one photo of what looks like a covert operative. How do I know? Well, they’re in a dark raincoat, with a 1950 cold war hat, under a single street lamp. I thought covert meant under cover, but of course I was unable to check the Australian Macquarie Dictionary to be sure.
Anyway, if you dig deep, you get to this classic description of “Who We Are & What We Do”.
We collect […] information from many sources: newspapers, magazines, and foreign radio or TV broadcasts, which are overt or “open.” Some sources are “covert”–that is, other people’s secrets. We persuade these people to tell us their secrets. The other way we collect information is …
Woah boy! Of course this is exactly what we need to be teaching our children, how to persuade people to tell us their secrets. You probably don’t need the definition of persuade, but here it is anyway.
To induce to undertake a course of action or embrace a point of view by means of argument, reasoning, or entreaty
Probably not exactly what the CIA uses as a primary persuation tactic, but amusing none the less.
“Look, tell me your godamn secret, or I’m going to have to continue arguing with you!”
We now turn to the page describing The People, with a lovely photo of the happy intelligence workers around the CIA logo. That’s where we learn that…
If you like to write papers, long and short, if you like to put puzzles together, solve mysteries and have the patience to go through a mound of different types of information to do all this, then the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is for you.
Yes, that’s right girls and boys! Or of course unless you’re a child between the age of about 7 and 13, in which case, school and Nancy Drew mysteries are probably best for you. When you grow up, then you can start persuading people to tell you their secrets.
Finally, here’s the U.S. secret service in action, persuading interviewing a boy about his anti-war drawings.
The secret service in Washington DC had not yet commented yesterday.
Obviously the persuading is continuing.
I sure hope the other WBF guys are reading this, because it’s right up their alley, no pun intended. The ever wonderful GLOBALIZE THIS! today pointed out that each year, the U.S. exports US$30.4 billion in bull semen. The fully grown cattle are then sold back to the U.S. at a ratio of around 10:1 against cattle exports. The thing that made me stop and think, was the similarity between the exportation of bull semen, and G.W.’s imperialistic vision of the free world. “Amusing. Not funny, but definitely amusing.”
I’ve been struggling these last few weeks over whether I should let fly at a well known market research organisation who have recently yet prematurely embraced blogging. Several of their management staff have blogs, yet seem to have no idea what to use them for, and more often than not simply throw mud at other bloggers they disagree with. I’m still reading one of their blogs, having cast the rest aside, and if it weren’t for the collection of material I’ve been saving for my uber anti-blog post, I’d have dumped them from my reader months ago.
Yet I haven’t yet written about them, and I don’t know if I will. I have no problem correcting other writers when they are wrong, but slamming an entire company for stupidity? When I was younger, in those torrid 1980s BBS days, I wouldn’t have bat an eyelid, abusive verbage would have streamed from my keyboard. In those days, it was give as good as you get.
But wouldn’t that just be doing what they’ve been doing? Where do you draw the line between correcting inaccuracies, and highlighting stupidity?
I’m still thinking it through, but it made me want to finally put together a manifesto for my blogging. I’ll have it up over the next few days, but for would be bloggers, jumping into this very public space without much thought, insist upon writing up your own guidelines/manifesto. Why are you blogging? What do you hope to gain from it, and what if anything do you hope to give to your readers?
Meanwhile, perhaps check out this piece (from my work blog) on the privacy issues of blogging. The golden rule, if ever there was one, is know why you’re writing, what you’re writing, and for whom you’re writing. Oh, and don’t forget to have fun!
CNet continues their usual negative Apple spin in saying Apple’s Jobs nixes iPod partnerships. Well, no he doesn’t, he just “nixes” RealNetworks wanting the iPod to support RealAudio. You remember RealAudio, the proprietary audio steaming format that isn’t free and doesn’t work on Windows or Mac default media players so you have to download a client to listen to it. Yep, how stupid of Apple not to want to degrade their wonderful product by propping up a bunch of has beens and their proprietary and dying media format. That’s a no brainer, and CNet should know better.
I had to stop at a servo today to get some milk, and the conversation with the guy behind the till goes like this:
Ya lose a bet?
Gee, haven’t heard that one for a while.
No, your hair’s blue. What’s the occasion?
It’s always blue.
Wow, what does your boss say?
I’m the boss.
[ laughs ] Here ya go mate, have a good day!
…
Of course it depends on the part of town. In Newtown for example, nobody bats an eyelid, and if they do, it’s ’cause they’re thinking…
Geez, all the same colour, why would you bother?
Anyway, if you bump into someone with coloured hair, and you think you have a classic opening line which will cause them to fall to the floor instantly and die in pain from the hilarity of your sharpened wit, think again, because we’ve heard them all before. Here’s the top openers for males:
- You lose a bet?
- What’s the occasion?
- Who are you going for?
- Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
- How about them blues last night! (insert sporting team here)
- You clean the toilet yesterday?
- Why’d you colour your hair blue?
- Dickhead!
Degrading sure, but most neanderthals tend to leave you alone if you then spit back at them:
Yeah mate, chicks get off on it.
And accordingly, the truth hurts when the top openers for women are:
- Hey, love your hair!
- What a great blue!
- Didn’t you used to have red?
- I wish I could do that!
- Which blue is that?
- Where’d you get that blue?
- Can I come home with you, and have your children?
Well, I made that last one up, but it’s the thought that counts.
If you’re in Sydney this Tuesday evening, come and see the opening night of the 2004 season of Scared Scriptless (new web site still in progress), Sydney’s longest running Theatresports® show. We have a new venue this year, The Arthouse Hotel in Pitt St., opposite the old Greater Union Pitt St. cinema. While the building used to be the The School of Arts and dates from 1830, the site uses stoopid Flash and frames and so technically (and inaccessibly) dates from the mid-90s.
One of the most popular search queries that used to bring people to this site, until of course I accidentally told Google that I had nothing interesting to say, was ugg australia. Perhaps, some would argue, that Google is only now getting it right.
Anyway, what was once a shining beacon in the dark and torrid sea of sheepskin boot results, is once again but a mere single blog entry on Richard BF’s web site.
In other words, I used to rank fairly high on the first page, between two popular ugg boot sites, before you’d scroll off into page after page after page of ugg boot sellers.
I’m looking forward to once again fighting the good fight, where good old Aussie bludgeoning know how makes the Australian ugg boot once again a world commodity. But before I go and stick my foot in a freshly skinned merino, here’s a sheep wearing glasses. I can’t believe we’re now killing academics for footwear!
If you’re reading this via the RSS feed, then my apologies for all the repetition. I had to fix a few formatting errors in various items. If you’re not reading this via the RSS feed, why not?
I was amazed back in the 1980s, as IBM and other companies were inventing Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM), the manipulation and display of individual atoms. I remember when IBM researchers were able to write the word IBM, atom by atom. But I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope until this recent post on Gizmodo. It looks like an old Capsella kit, which surprisingly, you can still buy.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen any STM images, you should start at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. And to think that atoms were once the smallest elements in the universe, and actually seeing them was only something we dreamed about.