The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV -

I have read a couple of articles lately that, together, conspire to depress me a bit. Take this one, for example, The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV -. It's about how strong and vibrant television is now and will continue to be over the next decade. Seems innocent enough. But this morning I read an article from yesterday's Financial Times about the guy who started MySpace and sold it (as part of a larger asset) to Murdoch, and is on to his next big thing. Let's see if I can find that article on the Web...Hmm. 10 minutes later, I can't turn it up. The Financial Times site is not very helpful. The article was just published yesterday. You'd think... Well, enough of that. The point is that the article was really depressing. It was about how pervasive big money has become in the economics of the Web. It was about how one couldn't just come up with a good idea anymore, it had to be someone with lots of financial backing because the dynamics have moved beyond that era.

And I'm putting these two articles together with some of the points Lessig has made over the years in his books about how entrenched media giants have successfully shut down public potential to use new media in ways that threatened to undermine the older business models. He tells these stories in Free Culture and the Future of Ideas. This battle appeared anew most sharply in the net neutrality issue that's been playing out before Congress for the last several sessions, but these articles suggest that the dynamics of the Web itself, even unimpaired by gatekeepers charging more for what we think of today as normal speeds of transmission, have moved beyond the possibility that it can be the force for expansion of freedoms and expression that people like Benkler extol. That the war could already be lost, right when success seems to be within grasp, geez that's depressing.

These articles also make me aware that I am really out of touch with the mainstream (I know, the mainstream is supposedly becoming a thing of the past 'grace a' the long tail, but that's just the point that's at issue here, is it?). The dollars that are being spent on consuming popular culture are astounding, and the preferences mystifying. The image above I clipped from the NBC official tv site. I have no idea who it is or what she does on tv. The image is badly degraded in the copy, compared to the way it displays on the NBC site. That nicely illustrates the 'scared to death mainstream content owner' and the overall point of this post. If you look directly into the eye of the tiger, it's hard to believe you're not just lunch. Game over. How could we have imagined otherwise?

Following Twitter

Ok, so I read about Twitter during SXSW, but didn't feel like figuring it out just then, but when I read about it above the fold in the paper copy of Financial Times that Robert brings me every morning (God it's heaven working at the Library), well, I realized I better get cracking. So I visited the site, signed up, and waited for some light to go on making it all make sense. Of course, that didn't happen. So I read a few blog entries about what all the hoopla is about (this one on the "Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users" is a good one, maybe a little more than I needed to know, but, that's ok), and pondered how this might be a good thing. Still nothing.

I chatted with a fellow Library worker, actually, a real live librarian, Lexie, and we both agreed it would be something to look into, maybe like live chat, but you know, it's not really like that. Well, that was that. I turned to other things.

Then, this morning when I logged on, I saw that Tim O'Reilly's RSS headline was "Twitter ETech!" and I followed the link and voila! Suddenly it's making sense. Just reading a couple of entries from the "friends" who are at ETech (O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference 2007 in San Diego) made me smile. I almost felt like I was there. It is funny, fun, informative, and potentially a big time sink... Well, what else have I got to do? Actually, 4 things are due this week, including the maddening crossword puzzle problem, the maddening xml markup project and a french test with written and oral parts. So, I'll keep it running in a Firefox window and check it out from time to time, mainly because, like everything else, there's no better way to learn it than to do it (my mantra as I slog through tedious grad school required courses).

Class assignment: play around on LibraryThing and Amazon...

Yeah, that's really the assignment. This is pretty amazing. The class is organizing and providing access to information. I'm quite wary, being a Googler from way back, and having done all my legal research for the last 20 years on either the open Web or on Westlaw. So, full text is my mantra. But I'm taking this class and I'm going to figure out what the deal is with catalog records, Dublin Core, xml, metadata generally, etc. etc. So, with the intro to xml readings, we are instructed to check out LibraryThing and Amazon as two different approaches to recommender systems. LibraryThing is just so much fun, it's hard to relate it to xml and metadata. I can't get below the surface of just being amazed at all the cool information I get back for having entered 31 titles into my "library" with a couple of tags on each one. Too easy. So, I just want to read and read and read now. Of course, I have to read, tons of stuff. So this is working out really, really well!

Enhancing your visit to my blog

I've had enough time in these last few weeks to explore the world of bling for blogs, as it was referred to in a nice NYT article yesterday. So I have added a few features to my blog, things that I hope will give readers more information when they visit. For example, I added a feature that shows the Web pages I'm bookmarking on del.icio.us. These sites are tagged and annotated to give you a better feel for what you're likely to find there of interest.
I also added a feature that shows the posts from the blogs I've read recently that I think might be of interest. My rss reader is Google Reader. This is a feature Google Reader provides.
There are lots of other features that can be added as the NYT article shows. But school has started, and my blog enhancing days are numbered for awhile. Posting every couple of days will be attention enough. There has to be some plain ol' fun in all of this, right?