Dave’s Midlife Blog

Well, I’ve not been here. I notice that the last post I wrote was right after the Blacksburg shooting. Since then, my daughter has matriculated at Virginia Tech, my house has undergone a major renovation, and I saw a lot of baseball games.

Nothing much that many people will be interested in, I guess–but plenty has gone on.  Baseball has consumed a lot of my attention this summer. The Washington Nationals had a much, MUCH better season than anybody predicted, finishing with a record of 73-89. That doesn’t sound so good, unless you consider that the major sports press predicted before the season that the Nationals would be “historically bad.” For example, Gary Graves in USA Today compared the Nats with the 1962 Mets. (more…)

In this morning’s Washington Post, Frank Ahrens reviewed a new book by Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. Ahrens points to the conventional wisdom of a year ago, that held that the ownership of the major media (meaning radio, television, and music) was overly consolidated. Ahrens avers that the media world has turned upside-down in the past year. Clear Channel is selling media properties, as are the New York Times, Knight Ridder, Walt Disney and others.

And to anybody who listens to or looks at media on the Internet, it’s obvious that there is no more media hegemony. When I was 10 years old, 73 million people saw the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (more…)

I’m in the middle of a massive server move this week, and I’m getting more education than I bargained for.

I’m trying to move three domains (thewordnerds.org, davesmidlife.com, and daveshepmagic.com) to one account at BlueHost. The BlueHost folks are very helpful, their servers are apparently robust, the company is the beneficiary of many good online reviews, the service is cheap.

As you can see if you are one of the six people worldwide reading this post (ever), davesmidlife.com came over without a problem. It’s a little old WordPress blog and nothing more.

The big, important one is for The Word Nerds. The blog seems to have moved okay, and the forum has also successfully moved (although I still have to install anti-spambot modifications).

I am quite concerned that my iTunes does not see the Word Nerds podcast feed, but it may be too soon after the repointing of my domain name. Maybe the Internet is still looking in two places for my site. (Man, I hope so. This looks unsettlingly like a problem I was having with GoDaddy before I dumped them.)

Also, my K2 WordPress theme for The Word Nerds doesn’t work, so I’m using plain vanilla, with no graphic header and no sidebar links, for the time being.

Several domains that I own, that I intend to forward to the ones above, are not forwarding properly.

I am learning a lot about MySQL, WordPress, domain name assignments, and the Internet in general. However, I would have been happy with somewhat less education and somewhat more transparent functionality.

Okay, that last post was an attempt to blog a picture from my Flickr account, pure and simple.

I moved this blog to a new server last weekend. I very, very stupidly had my domain name registrar point my domain name to both the old GoDaddy server and the new one, at mwsmedia.com, at the same time. This, of course, caused myriad problems, which are now solved.

EXCEPT…WordPress won’t allow me to upload a picture to my WP space since I moved servers. I have tried setting write permissions on the relevant directories, but I haven’t found the combination yet.

If anybody is familiar with setting WP write permissions from a Mac environment, using Fetch, I’d appreciate some input.

Yeah, so it’s been many months since I’ve updated this blog.

Sorry about that. I guess my main blog/Web 2.0 energies tend to go toward The Word Nerds and its attendant forum.

Tonight I’ve been all obsessed with trying to make the K2 theme for Wordpress work right. It’s not working right. Sidebar modules aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.

So I’m spending all this energy making the shell of this blog work right and look good, and in the meantime there’s nothing in it.

Okay. I’ve got to get myself to just spit out little blog entries without worrying about writing brilliant stuff.

You four people who continue to faithfully read this blog deserve my heartfelt thanks.

The problem with my blog (well, one of the problems with my blog) is that it’s so hit-and-miss. I don’t write to it regularly. This is probably why nobody reads it except my closest friends.

So here’s my blogging regime from now on: I’ll post something on or about every Wednesday. Never mind whether I have a big, earth-shaking essay to write. I’ll put up something every Wednesday at least.

Regularity is, I think, one thing that has enabled The Word Nerds to develop a considerable worldwide following. It’s a pain in the ass to crank the thing out every week, but it makes all the difference in the world. It’s the basic time structure of the show: whatever we have to say, we say it every week.

Today I found out, somewhat by accident, that the first “mainstream” magazine about podcasting, ID3 Podcast Magazine, would not appear in print after all.

I had signed up to subscribe to this through Dan Klass’s website, and expected to get a print copy in the mail this month sometime. I also received a login ID and password to get access to the online features of the magazine.

When I tried to log in today, my information didn’t work. The magazine’s website didn’t recognize the information they had given me. Frustrating!

But I also found out, just by prowling around the site, that the print edition of this magazine will never come out. This is instead going to be solely an online publication, and paid subscribers will receive their money back.

This is no surprise to me, really. I always wondered whether the podcast world really had need of a paper magazine that arrived in the snail-mail every month, just like Atlantic Monthly or National Geographic. This is Web 2.0, after all! We can create radio shows that go out to the whole world and each other. We’re all subscribed to 20 or 30 bulletin boards or RSS feeds or blogs or whatever. I read the New York Times online. I link to the Washington Post whenever I can in my blog.

In contast to all this new online media, I received my subscription renewal notice in the mail yesterday for Genii, the Conjuror’s Magazine. I will renew my subscription to Genii, because it makes sense. The secrets of magic are ancient and arcane, and they resist being disseminated wholesale on the internet. (Which is not to say they cannot be found on the internet; but serious magicians deplore the internet publication of the arcana of magic and illusion.) Magicians do love their books and paper magazines. 

There’s a place for old media, and there’s a place for new media. But the fate of ID3 Podcast Magazine makes me wonder further what the future of “paid” media will be.

I have been blogging or messing around with this blog (mostly the latter, actually) in just about every free moment this week.

WordPress is very cool software, and I’m starting to feel that I’m getting some control over it, but how many rotating header images do I really need? It took pretty much all of two days to master what I needed to do with the photos in PhotoShop, and now there they are.

Of course, the more I do this the fewer posts I actually put up here. Yikes.

Okay, this is it.

Incidentally, the rotating header photos are from my own little mid-life. Most from home, some from schools where I teach. I may stick others in as the spirit moves me.

Particularly since I spent two days learning how to make the headers.

Okay, you all, I finally did it. I managed to get WordPress installed on my own hosting account, under my own domain name, and here it is. All posts from this one on will be posted in WordPress.

There are still several things that are not “right” about this new scheme. I feel overwhelmed, for example, by all the possibilities. I cannot figure out what I’m supposed to do to upload and post pictures. I am not thrilled with the default template (theme) I’m using as of today, April 23. (In case you’re reading this deep in the future–woooooeeeeeuuuuu–I was using the WP default theme, with a little blueness in the header.)

But these things will come. I am truly amazed at the things I’ve been wanting to do all this time and just couldn’t. This is definitely software written for serious bloggers. I want to be one of those when I grow up…

IMPORTANT NOTE: For all posts prior to this one, “categories” listings point to tags at del.icio.us, using the very clever scheme suggested by Freshblog and Ted Ernst. (Sadly enough, the link to Ted Ernst’s blog on this seems to have died.)

[Actually, Ted has moved his own blog to WordPress, which is why I couldn’t find the article. Here it is. Thanks to John, the Freshblog guy, for pointing this out in the comment below.]

From now on, however, the categories will be categories within my WordPress account.

After I’ve settled on a template, I’ll put the del.icio.us categories list back in my navigation bar for awhile. But I’ll start using WP categories right now.

Oh, one other thing: as I’m writing this post, I haven’t yet updated my Feedburner feed. So if you’ve subscribed to it through the feedburner feed, it’s not working yet. I think I’ll drop that link out of my nav bar, since WP supports RSS just fine.

[Edit later on: I have now changed my Feedburner account to point to the new WordPress RSS feed. My stats said I had something like eight subscribers through that feed, so what the hell, I might as well keep it current.]

First of all, I mean the word “amateur” in the post title in the purest sense: one who does an activity out of love for that activity. In that sense I am an amateur podcaster, since I do it out of love (so far); and I’m even an amateur magician and musician, even though I do both of those things for money rather often.

As consumers of mediated information (”mediated” being, of course, related to “media”), we have long been used to, and willing to, pay for media content, including the print media. Now, with the explosion of blogs and podcasts, absolutely everyone with a computer and decent internet hookup can and may publish.

Will there remain a place for “professional reporters” or “journalists” in the future? Even in this blogpost, I can link to a related article in the Washington Post and cause the Post to point back to my blog–thus undermining the privileged position of the “professional” journalists who are paid to write for that great newspaper. (See? I just forced the Post to link back to me by linking to a blog entry by Howard Kurtz, their media writer.)

When everybody can create content, will there remain a demand for “professional” content that people will be willing to pay for? Will there be a way to earn a living in the future as a journalist? (This question was posed by Annik Rubens to Steffen of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in edition #315 of Schlaflos in München. If you understand German, it’s a great discussion.)

Lately I have become a fan of a charming husband-and-wife podcast called Me and the Bean, produced by Chad and Amanda (”me” and “the Bean”) in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. I don’t think I am showing any disrespect to them when I say that their podcast is a modest project. They don’t line up celebrity interviews or discover new musical artists (although one of Chad’s projects, Locals Only, features independent music from around northwestern North Carolina). All they do is talk about their friends and their lives as parents of young kids.

Me and the Bean is like a semi-weekly newsletter to friends. We all listen, from all corners of the globe, and respond to them via email, voicemail, and MP3 audio files. It is nothing like “regular radio,” nor does it aspire to be.

When I wrote down the notes from which I’m writing this entry, I was listening to the show. Chad had just read an email from somebody who was listening while doing one of those mind-numbing survival jobs, like cleaning offices or something.

It occurred to me that podcasting beguiles the time in an empowering way. Not only is there a customizable content stream to listen to, but it’s a kind of content anybody can create. So you listen to your own special list of podcasts, and then you create your own audio files and respond back.

An audio podcast is essentially much different from a blog. With a podcast I can take the content with me; for a blog, I generally need to be online and hooked up to the Internet to truly get the essence of it (links and trackbacks and comments). To read a blog on a web-enabled cellphone, for example, would be just too tedious. I cannot participate in a blog, even in receptor mode, while riding on a subway train.

But while writing the notes for this blogpost, I was hearing (i.e., consuming) Me and the Bean (and Schlaflos in München and all the other shows to which I subscribe) on the Orange Line of the Washington Metro while riding home from an afternoon in DC.

Categories: blogging, podcast, media, annikrubens, meandthebean