by David Burn | Sep 24, 2004 | Digital culture
Mainstream press organizations are at once embracing blogs as source material, while also discounting them as coming mostly from men in their pajamas. Why any one blog gains traction among mainstream journalists, I can’t say for sure. I suppose existing readership has a lot to do with it. When a writer has thousands of daily readers, which some popular bloggers do indeed have, journalists correctly respect that kind of thing, and they are no doubt forced to question their own numbers.
Dan Rather’s recent “document situation” didn’t pass muster in the blogosphere, and I’d say that’s a good thing. I think the ongoing nature of the story is overblown, and totally hypocritical coming from other equally-guilty, faux journalists. Regarding the role bloggers now play in fact-checking a story, I’d say it’s a positive development for society. Knowledge is power and the blogosphere is a living web of knowledge. An intelligent, interconnected community working, mostly for free, to keep it real. Like Linux–the open source operating system created by a Finnish student and made better by thousands of contributors around the globe–the story of the day, whatever it happens to be, is now being made better by bloggers.
This cat has an interesting pro micro-fame slant on why bloggers blog.
by David Burn | Sep 23, 2004 | Music
Brad Serling, the creator of the famous live downloads site nugs.net, and more recently a partner with Phish in LivePhish.com, is a young entrepreneur to watch, and I must admit it, admire. He’s a Cornell grad, dot com techee, and live music aficionado. He’s provided music-on-the-web consulting to The Dead and many other prominent bands. He’s also doing what I do with Leftover Cheese, except on a much larger scale. Where I get about 2000 listeners a month, his streaming audience, according to reports, tops 50,000 a month. nugs.net also presents dedicated streams of live Phish and live Cheese, exclusively. That is, the bands are working in concert with nugs.net, letting Serling and crew handle the digital distribution of their intellectual property. And why not? Bands make music. Fans and geeks are only too happy to package and distribute it for them. Makes sense to me.
Check this USA Today article on Serling and LivePhish dot com.
Or this in-depth discussion on technology at Jambands.com.
by David Burn | Sep 22, 2004 | Music, Politics
English citizen Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, the legendary 1970s folk singer was taken off a flight from London that was forced to land in Bangor, Maine yesterday. Islam, who was born Stephen Georgiou, took Cat Stevens as a stage name and had a string of hits in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Wild World” and “Morning Has Broken.” He abandoned his music career and changed his name in the late 1970s after being persuaded by orthodox Muslim teachers that his lifestyle was forbidden by Islamic law. But last year he released a re-recording of his 1970s hit “Peace Train” to express his opposition to the war in Iraq.
Does this man look dangerous to you?
by David Burn | Sep 22, 2004 | Politics
Thanks to Open Secrets dot org, I finally found one category where Cleveland Congressman, and my favored Presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich, managed a clear victory. Kucinich gathered the highest percentage of campaign contributions worth less than $200. At the opposite end of this pole, Democratic Senator from North Carolina, Smilin’ John Edwards, is the man large donors love to like.
by David Burn | Sep 22, 2004 | Media
Veteran Canadian war correspondent and former soldier, Scott Taylor, managed to survive five days in captivity in the northern Iraq city Tal Afar. The radical terror group, Ansar Al-Islam, in collusion with U.S.-backed local police, tortured him and repeatedly threatened to decapitate him for being an Israeli spy. According to Taylor the presence of his news articles on the web helped prove his journalistic claims and secure his freedom.
After his release, Taylor noted that the resistance to American forces in Iraq is more organized now than ever, and growing stronger by the day, as anxious-to-die-for-their-cause recruits are in plentiful supply. Taylor claimed today on Democracy Now, that it will take three times our current military presence in Iraq to fight these religiously-informed combatants. Which clearly spells D-R-A-F-T, under a Kerry administration or another four-year farce from Bush.
by David Burn | Sep 22, 2004 | Go Big Red
Given that I am a full-fledged member of the Burn clan (Scottish in origin), one might think I’ve made the pilgrimage to northwest Nevada in September for the annual pagan art ritual, Burning Man. I have not. I put this event in the same category as a Goa Gil production–something I know is right on, but thus far elusive to me personally.
Photo by Rick Egan. Click image for his photo site.
by David Burn | Sep 22, 2004 | Media
Okay, there might be one real TV journalist left. His name is Lou Dobbs and he uses his show on CNN to take big business to task for shipping our jobs overseas. Last evening, he did his viewing public a big favor, giving Independent candidate for President, Ralph Nader room to unload his message, free from the biting interruptions of talking heads like of Sean Hannity, Robert Novak or Chris Mathews.
Here are highlights from Nader’s blistering tirade:
~ Amazing saga, what happens when you put this system under stress, Lou. And the bile and the mucous and all this stuff pops up. And basically, it’s political bigotry by the Democratic Party against competition, against small parties, against independent candidates.
~ 10 times more registered Democrats in Florida deserted Gore for Bush than deserted Gore for the Nader-LaDuke ticket, and that was true around the country. So you think they would concentrate on that? You think they would concentrate on actively registering nine million African-American voters. 90 percent whom vote Democrat.
~ This is a decadent party. It’s decayed. It’s surrounded by corporate consultants, corporate advisers, and loaded with corporate money. And it’s got to be challenged. I hope progressive Democrats after the election will really purge that party from its corporate domination because it’s just losing elections for the last 10 years to the worst of the Republicans, at the local, state, and national level.
~ I’m going to propose in the next few days, and I hope to advertise classified ads in China and Mexico, an “outsource your CEO” program. And I’m going to ask for bilingual people in the third world, who are experienced, successful in management, who’d be very pleased to replace the heads of IBM and General Electric and General Motors at 1/10 of the executive salary, and probably work even harder.
by David Burn | Sep 21, 2004 | Politics
Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the soon-to-be retiring Republican Senator from Colorado, in full Cheyenne head dress. Campbell, a native American, led the ceremony at today’s grand opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, on the Washington, DC mall. Nighthorse Campbell then appeared on the Senate floor in native garb and delivered an appropriations bill.
by David Burn | Sep 21, 2004 | Politics
This graphic pretty much sums it up. When we turn these numbers on their heads by involving the majority of lower income Americans in the electoral process, the underrepresented will then have a voice, and not until.
Thanks to Inequality dot org for the chart.
by David Burn | Sep 21, 2004 | Digital culture, Literature
My current penchant for making blog entries, often several a day, leads me to question, “Does this web-based activity cut down on my overall production of essays, poems and stories?” I suppose it does. I continue to produce literary work, hoping against odds for professional representation. Yet, this new essay from Columbia Journalism Review, on the process of publishing a book today, paints a bleak picture of the traditional book publishing business, making one question the value of traditional book authorship. Here are some of the none-too-flattering details from Gail Beckerman’s interesting piece on the selling and production of Stacy Sullivan’s book:
~ Nearly 175,000 books were published in 2003, a 19 percent increase from the previous year, and a mountainous climb from the 45,000 published in 1991.
~ At last count, the Publishers Marketing Association tallied 86,641 legitimate publishers with at least ten books in print. Of those, 1,804 had two hundred or more books to their name.
~ In the 1940s, an average issue of The New York Times Book Review was sixty-four pages long, more than twice today’s length.
~ In the Los Angeles Times only 1,500 books a year are reviewed or mentioned out of the more than 100,000 published.
What conclusion may an aspiring author/prolific blogger draw from such findings? In the crowded marketplace of ideas one might get a chance to be heard, and the opportunity may even take the shape of a book, but it would be foolish to expect a consistent stream of income to be generated by this process. For that, the author/blogger needs a job. The book can play a huge role, however, in determining which job the writer eventually finds himself with.
