Did someone order some Irony? - Steve Case is resigning as the Chair of AOL/TW, and in his resignation announcement he said this: ""Despite the current cynical view on Wall Street, there is growing evidence on Main Street that consumers increasingly desire and demand more choice, convenience, and control from the media they consume..." Uh, yeah. Word has it his next job is to start writing for the Simpsons.
11:51:51 PM
SuperBowl Prediction - assuming that the Raiders go on to beat the Jets (it's 24-10 in the 4th Quarter), I predict that the Raiders will face the Tampa Bay Bucanneers in the SuperBowl. Why? Because that will allow the press to dork-out hyping the Jon Gruden-left-Oakland-for-Tampa Bay angle. And you have to remember that the SuperBowl is not about a gridiron struggle of blood and guts; it's about media hype and players preening in front of cameras and microphones. And, speaking of media hounds, if it is TB vs. Oak then I hope that Warren Sapp gets a dose of what he doled out to Chad Clifton. But, fair and square. Just like it was when he hit Clifton.
6:30:05 PM
AOL's Steve Case to step down - I just got this word in my E-mail box (courtesy of the Wall St. Journal's online service that emails you very important news). I noticed that about 2 minutes after it showed up in my E-mail box the NBC Evening news did a "this just in" announcement about Case's decision to give up his chairmanship. Anyway, we all know that AOL is in trouble. You have to think this is just another small step in the deck-chair rearrangement initiative.
5:56:20 PM
News Aggregation - My recent post about News Aggregators has spurned a few E-mail comments from people. One person who blogs, but doesn't use Radio, was confused and didn't seem to understand that he could use Radio's aggregator without having to make use of the blog function. He said that Radio's webpage doesn't make this clear. It does talk about the aggregator, but it could probably do more to hype its functions (maybe it needs its own page). I think that Radio's News Aggregator is the best aggregator on the market, and I think it's a mistake not to pitch it as a standalone product. My guess is that any blogger who used it would eventually become curious about its blogging features and would then start to try it (the old Trojan Horse trick). But forget about bloggers. There's only so many people willing to pay for software that it is useful only if they are willing to write; there are a lot of people who would pay for software that would help them quickly gather information for them to read.
Then, I see that Chris Cloud is trying to get the Aggregator to grab news from sites that don't have RSS/XML feeds. Normally, you wouldn't be able to do that, but you can with Radio if you use the RssDistiller add on from Evectors. It requires a little tinkering to get it to work with the sites that you really want to have, but it's worth it if you want to get content from sites that don't publish in RSS format.
There is a lot that can be done with News Aggregators. Now, with News Alligators it's a whole other story.
5:13:03 PM
About Schmidt - David Weinberger didn't like the movie and has a well written review. I haven't seen it, but I agree with David that the movies that get slotted for recognition at Oscar time are selected with yawning predicability. By the way, here's another movie with a great actor that you should avoid like the plague. It's so bad I consider it a waste of energy to take the time to explain why.
4:56:47 PM
Copyrightholders' desire for control may exceed its grasp- Dan Gillmor's back from the Consumer Electronic Show and feeling optimistic. I think he's right to feel optimistic. The Content Kings can try the hard-sell and they can fulminate and they can even shower politicians with cash, but if they don't give us consumers what we want we won't buy their stuff. They can't make us buy; they have to entice us. It's as simple as that.
4:29:07 PM
