REPORTS OF ITS DEATH...

One of the big new memes on the Web is the imminent death of radio. A couple of posts at I Want Media today tell part of the story: at the same time U.S. lawmakers are looking at increasing fines for "indecent" radio, Howard Stern has announced he'll move from the public airwaves to satellite (unregulated) radio in 2006.

Couple that with the buzz over podcasting, and you've got some serious talkin' going on about the future of radio.

Radio's been a dead medium for me for several years. I don't use it for music very often any more, because there are no stations playing any music that I want to hear. I occasionally have CBC on but even then it's not much more than comforting background noise to whatever else is going on (surfing the Web, dusting the furniture, etc.). Some days my entire radio listening time is the 30 or 40 seconds after the clock radio alarm goes off in the morning.

Will satellite, politics, podcasting and the Internet kill off broadcast radio in the long term? Probably. The question is will anyone care?

8:27:10 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

IT'S THE CONTENT STUPID

Vin Crosbie explains why he's dubious about RSS, which is being promoted to mainstream media as the Latest, Greatest Way to get info to people. The problem isn't RSS feeds, he writes, it's what's being fed.

When readership of the contents of newspapers and magazines has been steadily declining for 40 years, the problem is the contents not the conveyance. We already know that simply shoveling the contents of periodicals online won't reverse that decline. The problem hasn't been that the conveyance was newsprint but the contents.

Likewise, simply shoveling that contents into RSS won't reverse that decline. If the more compelling (i.e., multimedia) HTML format didn't reverse the decline, then a plain-text format like RSS won't either. The solution isn't to find new ways to distribute the declining content. The solution is to solve the problem of that declining content itself.

Sounds about right.

8:13:30 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

BYE BYE COMMENTS

A record day for comments down at the old Weblog, three of them rolling in over a half-hour span.

Unfortunately all three of them were spam, courtesy of those brain-dead, lame-dicked trolls (I'm trying to retain a modicum of civility here) who seem determined to bring to the Internet the kind of asshole behaviour (to hell with civility) you get from some door-to-door salespeople or psychotic streetfolk. (Note to trolls: the existence of an email address, comment button or anything else on the Internet is NOT an open door for you to drag your shit through. Further note: FOAD.)

Seeing as I can't turn those idiots off, I'm turning the comments off. If you'd like to respond to anything here (and I welcome responses), you'll have to email me at mark at tamark dot ca. I'll post worthwhile comments as new entries in the blog so that if conversation is called for, we can get it going.

7:48:02 PM  LINK TO THIS POST