Category: Uncategorized

Web 2.0 Is A Lie!

It is over. The emperor has no clothes. Time to get out your old Web 1.0 t-sirts and accept the bitter truth:

Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed Tuesday. A tiny 0.16 per cent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one per cent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.

Oh. My. God.

You know, this really surprises me be cause, you know, everybody at work blogs, right? Non-stop. And nobody looks at me like I have three heads when I say the word “blog” any more. And I am making thousands a month from my Google ads. That is the beauty of the new e-conomy. It’s like earning piles of cash for doing next to nothing…or is it the other way around.

[Ed.: I should have dubbed this “Wake Up To Web-ality Week” but who knew this would be the week the wheels started to fall off. Secret – I use bank tellers.]

Ahoy! Pirate Radio Ahead!

US based web radio is about to get a massive hit and it will be interesting to watch how it plays out:

The new fees, which will apply until 2010, will charge a flat fee per-song, per-user in addition to a $500 fee for every channel owned by a station. Fees will increase every year until 2010. Radio stations with multiple channels, such as NPR, would be charged thousands of dollars, which they claim will cripple them. Previously, stations paid an annual fee plus 12% of their profits. The fees will start on 15 May 2007 and will be collected retrospectively for 2006. Webcasters will be allowed to calculate retrospective payments by averaging listening hours.

My first reaction is to call NCPR and make sure I pay my fair share. That one station is the main source of music in my life now. I rarely by CDs anymore as I have about 400 plus 150 lps and cassettes and 45s and I pretty much never get around to using them as much as I might – though I have to admit the vinyl did spin last Friday night. [Ed.: T-Rex was right – we were born to boogie.] But what of the amateur hobbyists like Darcey’s Friday Night Blues and Beer or Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio? Sure these are both Canadian but how and when will a fee like this apply? How can I pay it when it does arise.

Don’t get me wrong. I think there should be a fee. Sadly, there were plans to have nice and useful hidden fees attached to purchases of media of one sort or another but the hyper-libertarians and whacko self-proclaimed “user rights” advocates got to that idea and gave it the boot – my nickles! my dimes!!! they shouted so that a direct fee structure will be imposed granting people the right to be coat tail on both the artists and the medium that provide the access to the good stuff. So now we are stuck with the wrong end of the pipe holding the bag and a reasonable likelihood that the access to intelligently selected music on the web will dry up.

How should we pay the piper anyway?

Reopen The Constitution, I Say!

I don’t know what all the fuss is. A suggestion that Quebec join in the constitution – after 25 years wandering in the wilderness with nothing but a far superior Charter of Rights to keep them warm – sparks this sort of reaction:

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has rejected suggestions by Quebec Opposition Leader Mario Dumont to reopen the Constitution, blaming Prime Minister Stephen Harper for encouraging the notion with unclear promises for more provincial autonomy. “The thing [Mr. Harper] needs to do to prevent a problem is to speak out and say very clearly which powers, which responsibilities, he wants to transfer from the federal government to the provincial government,” said Mr. Dion in an interview Sunday. “If he continues to be vague and confused, I think it’s not good at all for the country. He owes that to Canadians.”

I want a constitutional debate. And I want in, too – personal autonomy needs to be beefed up. The misguided will also want a kick at the can about property rights. And a place for First Nations and municipalities as semi-free states. And weakening or strengthening the courts so our rights will not be at the whim of politicians. Whatever.

Why not have a big national chat about it? The only down side is really the intense tedium. What people forget is not that the nation almost fell apart – it’s that the country almost ground to a halt in the 70s and early 80s with unending live TV coverage of hearings taking up all the channels. People from NS will also remember the embarrassment of seeing all the others laughing in the background whenever Premier John Buchanan decided to speak up. Now that we have more than three stations to watch I suppose that is not a problem. But really – don’t expect a lot of “amending formula” jokes. This stuff is mostly boring.

Getting Rid Of The Internet

What! Is there some kind of weird thing happening here? Just one year ago – one thin year – I asked the question whether we should turn off the internet […well, not “we” as in this bunch around here but the “we” that we are all part of, a small bit of which “we” has actually the power to turn off the Internet…] and now they […by which I mean people with more power than “we”…] are thinking about shuttin ‘er all down.

Will there be room made for me and my dopey blogs? Why would there be? Western world creates a miracle of a communications system and it – aside for the fact that it is structured like something out of a terrorist’s dream – it is filled with the empty babble of dingbats like me, people selling old paper cups on eBay and the hacking and spamming and fisking and all the other vacuous dingbattery that goes on around the world. Why would anyone in charge actually make room for that…for me…for we?

What will it look like when the Internet goes off-line? Wanna bet when it’s going to happen? How would we report the winner?

Morton Loses…But Named Champions Anyway!


My people – my pale, pale people.

It is all coming together. For those in the pool, the answer is 6(a). See, the Morton lost today but so did Stirling. So that leaves Morton top of the league with two games to go. Automatic promotion. Respect: Stirling’s the town where I learned about ska in 1980 at Dad’s pal’s house (aka “me auntie’s”) care of Dad’s pal’s late teen daughter (aka “me auntie’s kid”) and that Specials 7 inch ep she controlled. And Stirling was the scene of “the epic bender” in 1986. Entered a pub and the bartender shouts “yes, the Canadians are going for it!” Entered the next pub and there is the shorter guy hitchhiking out of town at the end of Gregory’s Girl. I also realized Scots kids tucked in their wool sweaters on that trip…like, in their pants.

Anyway, the Greenock Morton actually advance to the First Division – which is the second division – for next season. Playing with the almost big boys. Woot. Photos above from an excellent set at Inverclyde Now in which the photographer does a great job not only of capturing the emotion of the visiting Greenock supporters but also gets a great range of the various jerseys sported by the fans – I love the blue tartan one. A great set by a thoughtful photographer turning his back on one story for another. I think we have about eight Morton jerseys in the house, two or three scarves, a pennant – and a few pins, many old programs and those cloth badges. And books…I have books…and away socks. And programs and a Jimmy Cowan cigarette card from around 1948. And other stuff.

Big big day. A wee dram of the good stuff in my Greenock Golf Club 1890-1990 tumbler tonight. More championship Morton chat at greenockmorton.net and from The Greenock Telegraph. Grannie would be proud.

A Canard, I Say!!!

While the story is interesting in its own right, the summation is the business:

The objection that reform would mean that rural interests would be ignored is a canard. The change would require candidates to present positions that galvanized all Americans. This is the truer and more certain path of democracy.

A canard! The claim to evoke rural interests is often a canard. A specious one, at that. I, in fact, am going to take up that accusation as a day to day sort of turn of phrase: “That, sir, is a most specious canard.” Like the continuing existence of the Electoral College itself. A specious canard and perhaps even a trumped-up one.

April Showers Bring Friday Bullet-pointy Chatt-a-ramas

This week. This was a short week. Short weeks are good in that Friday comes faster but it also has the air of less than a full week off as much as less than a full week of work. But was another week in your life. And it has passed.

  • Later Update: man’s only trump card soon to be lost thanks to science.
  • Lunchtime Update: NYCO knows where the bees are.
  • Update: please consider and vote for the best of beer poetry. The prize is a weekend of free beer so make your decisions carefully.
  • Speaking of passing, this was the week that Kurt Vonnegut died. I first read his books when one should – in my late teens. In my mind, I vaguely lump him with the also late Peter Sellers but he is almost the opposite. Sellers was a big jerk personally and only celebrated the absurdities of life as an angst-ridden professional. Vonnegut advocated contentment, humour and compassion for this life in all he did, even as he suffered from personal depression.
  • One of my constant bloggy reads throughout the years has been Ian at xtcian.com and he is celebrating his fifth bloggiversary today with a retrospective. I’ve followed him through his medicated post-9/11 volunteering singlehood to his medicated becoming a husband through his medicated struggles as a movie maker through his medicated struggles as a TV writer through now his days as Daddy. Because he comes to the game as a good writer he is, in my opinion, the best personal blogger on the net. And I say that even though his regular updates with pictures of his kids are the second nicest photos of family – after mine…which, of course, I never post because I have a clue about data mining and biometrics.
  • I have been trying to think of analogies in Canadian culture on the Don Imus now-firing. I think that it is a good thing that this pervasive voice was fired for saying such a foul thing – and saying it in such an offhand…even, dare I say, entitled manner – that was focused on a specific and small group of young people who achieved only excellence. The closest I can think of as an equivalent would be Don Cherry calling our national women’s hockey team Pepsis and sluts. But he never would. He may be a dope but he is not cruel. I think that is the thing and maybe it is the thing that broke the back of the shock-jock’s status even with all his good work for charity.
  • The Tiger points us to the photo of the week. I miss Jean like I miss Ed Broadbent.
  • The BBC is running an interesting series examining anti-Americanism. Being at a peak of pro-Americanism in my personal life these days (what with baseball being my main sport of obsession now, what with my upstate day-tripping, what with listening largely to NCPR and WFAN for my radio diet, what with my exploration of BBQ and what with the dreary nature of Canadian politics compared to the gold mine that is local New York state politics) I find anti-Americanism beyond my understanding. I am fortunate in what I am able to do and have a more than a couple of projects on the go that get me involved in cross-border discussions. But was not always the case – I suppose, like me, many more Canadians can say that compared to say in the 80’s. Is this, too, due to free trade?

What a load of bullets. Usually I struggle with these but those whipped right out. Now for coffee to be followed by spelling mistake correction.

One Hitter

It was a pitchers’ duel last night between the Sox and the Mariners. Dice K was really good but Seattle’s Felix Hernandez was an entire class better. It was quite the thing to see screw ball action pitches in the top of an inning being followed by 99 mile an hour fastballs in the bottom. Hernandez’s calm no-hitter was broken in the eighth. He’s had only four hits against him this year and at 21 may be the real phenomenon of the next couple of decades.

Matt Campbell’s photo above (European Pressphoto Agency) was in The New York Times this morning and continues the paper’s dedication to great baseball photography. The interesting thing for me is how it captures how the green of Fenway acts as sympathetically to highlight the colour of the grass and the red dirt. A classic shot, given the location of the ball and Ichiro’s foot.

Camera Bombs

This story reminded me of an idea I had years ago:

Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.

My idea? After Rwanda and the Bosnian war and news of slaughter and the concentration camps, I wondered why it was that there were no camera bombs out of which hundreds of little C-U-See-Me style cameras on parachutes are deployed over sites of atrocities broadcasting direct to satellites, landing unseen or picked up by those on the ground to record what was happening to them. The lack of video for CNN to show over and over has been as much the difference between the war on terror and larger human rights disasters like Darfur.

Group Project: What If Kaiser Meant More Than A Pickle’s Neighbour?

Marvel Comics had a comic series in the 1970’s called “What If…” or maybe it was “What If???” I actually have a box of comics within reach that likely has a copy but I am too lazy to reach out my arm to answer the punctuation question. Which goes to show I have my priorities and values right on track.

But all the ceremonies and discussion about Vimy Ridge got me thinking. And not thinking about what if the radioactive spider bit Aunt May instead of Peter Parker. People sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Soviets had, say, taken West Germany or if the Nazis had beaten back D-Day or even if Napoleon had taken Moscow. But what would have happened if the Germans had won WWI? What if the Americans never entered the war, Mexico aligned with Germany in secret, Belgium disappeared, France lost its top chunk but moved on, Britain kept its navy but never had the General Strikes, maybe the Whites won or never fell in Russia and Nazism never popped up as a reaction to the economic ruin that was imposed on Germany.

What kind of world would we have today? Would it be in any way recognizable? Is it the part of recent history that most changed the world?