media

Unbundling cable TV is still a bad idea

NPR's David Folkenflick reported Friday on the continuing campaign to change basic cable TV from flat-rate to "a la carte" pricing. He explained Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's efforts as an attempt to impose conservative "family values" restrictions on cable, removing from basic services anything that might offend.

Being silly about Facebook's valuation

Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook is being interpreted (by the AP, among others) as placing a $15 billion value on the whole operation.

This is silly for a number of fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that Microsoft isn't trying to buy Facebook, but rather has other objectives in mind.

Anyone who has watched Microsoft for any amount of time knows the pattern: Partner, learn, copy, crush.

Only one click away

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.

Past, present, and future

I haven't posted much lately due to a heavy work/travel schedule ending in several days of vacation in Istanbul. At the moment I'm burning some time in an expat bar near the Sultan Ahmet mosque. My plane leaves at 5 a.m., so I'm closing down the bars and not bothering with a hotel tonight.

Reinventing the wheel, Maslow's hammer, and programmer archaeologists

I was struck by Susan Elliott Sim's posting on Slashdot titled "No more coding from Scratch?" To me, the responses seemed to scatter far from the mark. We are reaching a point where the rules of technology development shift at a fundamental level.

This has a direct bearing on those of us working in media, as technology and media are now deeply interconnected. I'll illustrate some of the implications of that.