Adam Curry is a former radio and MTV deejay, an early Internet entrepreneur, and one of the creators of podcasting. He appears to have been so busy doing all those things that he skipped his high-school earth science and biology classes.

In his Daily Source Code edition #560, for March 9,  Curry gushed about a “fantastic” program he saw on channel 4 in the UK, “The Global Warming Swindle.” (Listen to the DSC at about 24:37 from the beginning to hear this segment.)

As Curry presented it, this TV program is about the “other side” of the global warming “debate,” in which the notion of man-made global warming is challenged. Read the rest of this entry »

Prompted, I am quite sure, by the stunning photos posted on Dave’s Midlife Blog two days ago, NBC4, the local NBC owned-and-operated TV station, took a crew into the stadium site to photograph its progress.

I have to admit they got better pics than I did. But then, they were allowed to crawl all over the upper deck, while I had to peer in from outside.

So talking about Big Media, I found myself watching large portions of the Oscars show on TV on Sunday, by accident. It was on in the kitchen while I was surfing, hacking, and blogging. Wow, what a long program! Hollywood people really, REALLY like themselves, don’t they?

The reaction of Tom Shales of the WaPo was to put down the whole event as a “bore and a horror” (a proper response for the TV maven of a major East-Coast paper, I guess). Tom didn’t particularly like Ellen DeGeneres as the host. The Boston Globe was even more curmudgeonly, suggesting that Ellen put everybody to sleep. I don’t know what Matthew Gilbert at the Globe is thinking. It wasn’t Ellen who put us to sleep. It was the whole pompous affair. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking more about this “Bum Rush the Charts” thing. Just trying to figure out why I should spend my 99¢ on a band whose music doesn’t do much for me.

Who stands to benefit? Well, Podshow, certainly, to the extent there’s any publicity wash from this campaign. Black Lab, no doubt: lots of people who really don’t know or like them buying their track. But “amateur media”? Come on, give me a break!

Black Lab is a band whose music I don’t really love; it’s just not my style. Even Podshow’s number one satellite repairman P.W. Fenton said the same thing on his most recent Digital Flotsam podcast. I’d never listen to them on my own.

So my participating in this campaign is like putting 99¢ into some Salvation Army kettle somewhere, Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

“Our family tree can be cut down and used to build our coffins.”

Bill’s cousin Gilbert, when he informs Bill that they are the lone survivors of the family line. (This episode aired February 18, 2007.)

Mike Judge is a clever guy, in my humble opinion.

Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their fingers and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.

This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.

I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.

Okay, a week and a half after Macworld, I find myself still abuzz about that iPhone.

Steve Jobs may be a genius presenter, but even so, it looks like a really neat product. Yes, I know it’s not open to the installation of other applications, but I don’t run any downloaded applications on the Sony-Ericcson W600i I use right now. The apps on the iPhone (Safari, in particular) are all I’m ever going to use on a phone/PDA.

I won’t buy one as soon as it comes out. I’ll give myself some months to cool off about it, and to let Apple get the bugs get worked out. But I probably will get one. I’m already a Cingular customer, so I wouldn’t have to switch. And I don’t have a video iPod, so that might be a marginal justification for that aspect of it.

Okay, y’all tell me now how stupid and starstruck I am. I don’t care. If it does the things Jobs showed off in the demo, and if it’ll connect up to my Prius’s Bluetooth connection, then I’m sold.

I’ve been a loyal, satisfied Apple Computer user for 20 years. I first bought a Mac Plus in late 1986 or early 1987 in order to work on a Ph.D. dissertation. I always thought they were the computer company “for the rest of us,” as they used to say.

But now it seems as though they’re just one of the big boys.

They’ve sent PodcastReady a cease and desist letter instructing them to stop using the word “podcast” in their business name.

Wha?

The word podcast entered the New Oxford American Dictionary last year. It was named the “word of the year” by Oxford University Press. It’s been around for two years. It is now accepted as the word designating an independently-produced audio made available for downloading on the internet.

Now Apple says it’s their word. I guess maybe they have their reasons, but this really looks like hubris to me.

The Apple iTunes Music Store, of course, has a whole division devoted to “podcasts,” but now, apparently, it’s only okay to call them that if you are using the iTunes Music Store to find them.

Ridiculous. I may mention something about this in the podcast–uh oh, I mean independent audio production–I do later on today.

I think Apple may be surprised at the breadth of negative response about this. My own podc…independent internet audio show has several thousand listeners who are NOT podcasting geeks. However, they all use the word “podcast” to refer to these things. I heard the word used at a high school back-to-school night earlier this week, by a non-geek French teacher who plans to use them in class. “Podcast” is what they’re called. We’ve had this discussion for the past two years, and we’ve all agreed that the train pulled out of the station in the fall of 2004.

So if we don’t call them podcasts, what do we call them?

(If you’re a blogger, please blog about this. Apple pays attention to the blogosphere.)

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.