Sometimes it's the stupidest things that make you realise how amazing and cool and awesome the Internet truly is.
Yesterday, we saw a fire truck leaving its station while we were out and about and, for the first time in about, oh, twenty-five years, I thought about a TV show I loved as a kid - Emergency!I went on YouTube and of course, the opening credits for the show were there as well as a few related clips and scenes.
I can't wait for that inevitable day when ALL creative content like this, including full programs, is out there, ready for us to access.
As someone told me recently, when you're at the end of an era, that's when the people who will suffer most from the change hold on the tightest.
Translation: goodbye current copyright laws, hello future!
Talking about some of the most useful sites online during the past three months mixed with my ongoing interest in online broadcasting inspired me come up with the following list:
Five Things The Internet Is Killing 1. The Music Industry - I saw a stat somewhere that 80% (!) of teens in the US hadn't bought a single CD in the last year. That's not a good sign if your (inflexible) business model is selling overpriced CD's!
2. The Movie Industry - see above. It's a bit slower death since the file sizes are bigger and it's harder for the average user to get high quality video displayed in an enjoyable format compared to outputting high quality music to a stereo or even just decent speakers from a computer.
3. Real Estate Agents - I keep hearing these commercials that slam "do it yourself" real estate sales sites while talking about all the expertise a realtor brings you. Frankly, they reek of desperation. Selling or buying a home yourself is a natural for the strengths of the Internet - many-to-many reach, incredible cost savings (realtors usually charge around 7% for their service), unlimited space for featuring photos and specifications. Plus, ultimately, who's going to care the most about selling a property - the person who sees it as a house or the person who sees it as a home?
4. Traditional Software - increasingly, people are using online applications that they don't need to buy, install or update instead of their more traditional cousins. MS-Office is the most obvious example of software that Google and others are trying to replicate online but I don't think it'll be long before pretty much everything you do locally on your computer is available online and the only piece of software you'll need is a web browser.
5. Newspapers - I think classified ad revenue is down something like 20%, subscribers are down 15% in the last few years (disclaimer: all stats quoted in this and any other post I do - are usually from memory. Don't quote them in your academic papers without verifying them!) Online competitors now provide news that is interactive, has alternative perspectives and is more timely. Some newspapers are migrating online but still use old school subscription models or pay-per-article (boo G&M after what, a week?) The New York Times gets it right - all their content is available as soon as it's published, its archived, searchable and free.
Bonus: One Thing The Internet Is Not Killing Books - outside of music, more ink (real and digital) is spilled proclaiming the death of the book than anything else. To paraphrase Twain, "the rumours of [the book's] death are greatly exaggerated." I'll always remember going to a national publishers' conference in 2000 where the e-book was all the talk and one presenter said that by 2005, more than half of readers would be using e-books over regular books. Really? Even most of the tech-types I know don't use e-books yet. I don't think e-books aren't without their merits and we're heading to more of a Movie-Television relationship. When TV first came out in the 1940's-50's, commentators warned about the death of the movie theatre. Instead, they developed a symbiotic relationship. I think that's what will happen with "real" books and e-books. E-books will continue to gain traction with users but also continue to co-exist with traditional books.
(Here's an article I found on this topic which discusses many of the same ideas I'm talking about.)
This song is one of my favourites and this version by an Australian shadow puppeteer guesting on the David Letterman show is unbelievable. The baby's hand brought tears to my eyes.
I've had a few different jobs in my life. One of my favourites was my college summer job where I visited various small towns around Saskatchewan as a traveling cable TV salesman. (Yes, I know a "vacuum cleaner salesman" joke just popped in your head. Don't bother - I've heard it.)
But this job was different from being a "typical" traveling salesman. I was a huge TV fan back then (not so much vacuum cleaner fan) so I was actually selling something I enjoyed and knew about. Mini-satellite dishes like Bell and Star Choice were just coming into existence so my sales job was a lot easier as the only TV entertainment options for people were cable, a giant satellite dish that filled up your yard or the three channels that were available via what my friends and I lovingly called "FarmerVision". (The Internet wasn't available outside of universities either at that time so no BitTorrent competition either. )
I was paid a decent hourly wage but also had an escalating commission structure on top of that which moved this job into the stratosphere of college summer jobs. This escalating structure meant I got a certain amount for every new cable subscription I sold, a certain amount for every package of channels (we had four) I sold to either new or existing subscribers and even a certain amount for selling extra outlets (for those who'd never heard of a splitter.) I also got a generous per diem that could be stretched quite a bit by sharing hotel rooms with two other students hired to do line work while I did sales, eating cheaply and staying with family or friends in communities where I knew people.
Once I hit various new sales thresholds - 50 subs, 100 subs, 150 subs - and so on, the amount I got for selling any one of those items I listed jumped as well. In my best summer, I sold over 300 new subscriptions, my company won a national marketing award and the escalation in commissions became so lucrative that I made more than half of what I made per year while working for literary non-profit organizations in those four months!
The whole point of this trip down memory lane is that I'm pretty excited to have been given a similar assignment for the next few months at my current job. Although there's no escalating commissions to be seen, I will be on the road pretty much every day visiting each of the 46 rural libraries that make up our region to do some one-on-one computer & Internet training with our branch librarians, holding a drop-in time when local residents can bring any technology questions to me for assistance and doing a one-hour presentation on "Everything You Wanted To Know About The Internet (But Were Afraid To Ask)". In fact, I'll be visiting many of the towns that I visited while working for the cable TV company all those years ago. I'll have some downtime between sessions in most communities so my blogging shouldn't fall off (it'll probably increase to be honest!)
"The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who
download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be
to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health
and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations."
My French isn't good enough to know if a Le Devoir article linked from this TorrentFreak post is saying that this is a national policy of the GRC (er, RCMP) or one that only applies in Quebec. But either way, this is a pretty rational stance from the police and it makes me happy to hear that I can download to my heart's content exercise greater freedom in my choice of online activities.
On a semi-related note, the Writers Guild of America is on strike with appropriate compensation for sales from electronic media being one of the major issues. (Writers in Canada dealt with a similar situation a few years back - as new technology that no one foresaw when initial contracts were written came into being, corporations tried to put up works (reviews, essays, articles, etc.) without additional compensation. Needless to say, writers wanted to be compensated for the reproduction of their work, no matter the form it appeared in. I can't remember how this resolved itself - anybody? Bueller? Bueller?)
Anyhow, if you're missing "The Daily Show, one of show's writers did this update from the picket lines:
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has put up over 13 000 segments going back to 1999. That's pretty cool...or at least it would be if I could get any of the videos in the archives to load.
Maybe the site's just being hammered with traffic because it's so new. But it almost makes you wish some of these media giant properties would skip the proprietary site designs and media players and just put it all up on YouTube instead.
[Edit: Just saw that there’s also a proposal to make all of the books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize available for free online as well. Following up the Radiohead announcement,
that now makes the announcement of a major music, TV and book release
for free online within a very short period of time. So, the big
question is - which will be the first big Hollywood movie to follow
this model? We should all avoid buzzwords where ever possible but this
really does feel like a paradigm shift. Oh, and the commentator I
linked to about Radiohead says they won’t make any money but the
goodwill they recieve from fans for the move will pay off in the long
term. But another commentator speculates that Radiohead have made $10 million already,
more than they made from their last three albums combined. The truth is
probably somewhere between these two extremes but I’d lean towards this
being a very profitable move for the band.)]
Okay, from the useless celebrity gossip world (of which we are all guilty adherents, I'm sure), the car crash that was Britney Spears' "performance" at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this week is grabbing a lot of attention.
If I had a bit more time, I'd do this mash-up properly but for now, you can enjoy a fairly funny juxtaposition - an MP3 of a Travis cover of the song that launched Brit's career against a video of the VMA meltdown.
For this to work properly, 1. click "play" on the video below and pause at 45 seconds, muting the sound in the YouTube player (note: it is very likely the clip be removed from YouTube soon since all other earlier versions of the same clip have been so if you're going to try this, don't wait.)
2. open this link in a new tab and let it play past the introductory remarks, clicking back to the YouTube tab before the singing starts.
3. click play on the YouTube video so the video clip and the performance of the song start at roughly the same time.
