Because the business of television has become an exclusive club, closed to new members, some producers are turning to the Internet to have a voice. And, of course, the Big Six are doing everything they can to own and control that as well. Already, it’s impossible to make an “overall deal” — the time-honored arrangement in which producers are kept on retainer to develop shows for a particular network — without agreeing to be exclusive to the network on the Internet as well as television. The logic of this defies all laws of economics; producers pledge fealty to networks because they (the producers) don’t have the millions it takes to shoot, distribute and broadcast their own programs on television. Producing for the Internet, on the other hand, costs as little as $30,000 an hour, and “broadcasting” costs much less. Virtually anyone can do it.

Read the whole article…

We’ve been talking about this for so long that it hardly sounds like a revelation to me anymore. Maybe it’s my close proximity to one of the major epicenters of new content delivery, but realizing that the internet is your next hub of entertainment just isn’t a new idea for me.

Aha, but, what *is* interesting here is that this is Marshall Herskovitz trumpeting this concept… in the LA f’ing Times!

Uh oh, Big Media. Some of the smarter (and, honestly, richer) kids are tired of you bullying them and they’re taking their ball to their own back yard, which isn’t as small as you remembered it being. And they have their own playground. And cameras. And fat internet pipes. Uh oh.

I think Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz’s challenge is to not fall victim the very situation they despise once their plans start to pan out in the direction they want. The fact that they’re debuting to MySpace, and not “MySpace, Facebook, and iTunes” goes to show that we have a long way to go still. The institutional gatekeepers seem to exist in every mature system, don’t they?

Anyway, I do wish them the best of luck with their quarterlife project! I’ll be watching.

Technorati Tags: herskovitz, quarterlife, zwick

Continuous Partial Attention wiki:
Cory Doctorow:

Linda Stone — a superconnector of great insight — coined the term “Continuous Partial Attention” to describe a new phenomenon, distinct from multitasking. It’s the attempt to stay involved in as many connections and networks at once as possible, and it can be nerve-wracking, though the temptation to indulge in powerful. Now Linda’s started a wiki devoted to the subject.

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task — we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch — we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

Link
(via Joi Ito)

Aha. That’s what that’s called. Ok, back to work.

Hey, I make and sell these patches, right here in campbell, California. You can buy one right now from my storefront on Etsy.com, or email me at steve at somejunkwelike dot com. Shipping discounts on bulk orders, and yes, I can put these on hats, bags, whatever… you front the cash, I’ll deliver the goods. Let’s do some business

Technorati Tags: embroidery, geek, humor, omg, omgwtf, wtf

domestic price is US$5, overseas is US$6.  Slap one on a favorite hat or jacket, and see what conversations it starts for you… for me, it’s been pretty amazing so far.

Technorati Tags: embroidery, omg, omgwtf, patches, wtf

If you were handed an OMGWTF patch recently, that was me. You can get a small sewing kit from the grocery store in the “gadget section”… usually next to lik, the shoe polish, combination locks, and lightbulbs. You don’t need to get real fancy, you just need to get it to stay on whatever you’re going to put it on. Your backpack is a pretty good place, or a purse, a shoe, or maybe at the hem of your jeans or something. Please send me a photo of your OMGWTF patch in action!

Bruce Sterling Visits:

We walked down to Sharper Image on Santa Cruz Ave. in Los Gatos and looked at some of the robots for sale.  Bruce is into design these days, he's been a guest professor at Art Center in Pasadena, and has a book on Ubiquitous Computatoin coming out from MIT Press.  This morning when I woke up he was gone, off to get some righteous bucks from the Global Business Network in SF.  You gotta get up pretty dang early in the morning to keep up with my man Bruce!

I feel very strongly that the Native Hawaiians have an inherent human right to self-determination and self-governance. I just listened to Senator Daniel Akaka speak on NPR about the difficulty he is having being seen by the Majority Leader and getting this bill to the floor. Apparently, the Republicans are holding this bill up.

Hawaii is built up with hotels, pollution is increasing with heavy traffic, and sea life is suffering due to excessive commercial boating. Because of these types of destruction, the ecology is shifting. The pace of life is feeling more and more like California. And Native Hawaiians are forced to live amongst such destruction without holding any power.

If they are not granted sovereignty, I fear that they will soon have no place to go that they can call their own. True Hawaiian paradise will be lost. This is why it is so important that land is preserved and set aside for the Native Hawaiians. I’m hoping that the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 (S. 147) will be passed. Is there anything else we can do together to assure this?

“Give the finger to the rock and roll singer, as he’s dancing upon your paycheck”

what’s not to love about this album? Also, dude, seriously consider he might have done this on a 4 track.

Technorati Tags: beck, music

Pretty cool. A very simple idea, but extremely useful. So useful, that I’ve come to rely on that kind of technology to be able to pass obnoxiously long URLs to gallery pages like this one:

http://sc-fa.com/blog/2008/07/06/steve-cooley-showing-at-workssan-jose/

which isn’t really all that obnoxious, but it sure looks like it when you pass it to someone in an email and the URL breaks because of the wordwrap or something. So, since tinyurl.com wasn’t returning URLs, I made my own small URL maker.

It’s basically three components: a DB table, a form to make ‘em small, and a landing page where the small urls turn into big ones. Now if I only had a short domain name..

HEY, I do! http://3rl.us

so, said large url turns into: http://3rl.us/e8c31 which is much smaller.

AND, I added a hit counter, so I can see how many times a URL has been pinged. Now all i gotta do is dive into the widget making world and make my own for my small url maker.

oh yeah! make your own small URL here: http://3rl.us

9) For God’s sake, fly that damn magnet correctly. It’s not a Jesus fish! It’s a ribbon! The round part goes UP. Just because the text runs along one bow of the ribbon doesn’t mean the magnet must face 90 degrees off-center right at all times.

Just yesterday I saw one of those ribbon wielding drivers with a bumper sticker that largely said “GOD WILL BLESS AMERICA WHEN AMERICA RETURNS TO GOD” and then right next to it was a car with a sticker that said “ONE NATION UNDER GOD”… and no shit, the word out of my mouth was “Jesus!” I’m probably going to hell for that one.

Red LEDs to Grow Lettuce better: “This is pretty neat- using red LEDS to grow lettuce is 60% more efficient than fluorescent light when growing vegetables hydroponically. The red LED technology produces 7000 heads of lettuce per day all year round in a 10-floor building on just 1000 square meters of space. The lettuce matures more than three times as fast under the LEDs than outdoors. The Metaefficient site also has a lot of other interesting products that are just, better. Maybe when we’re all done with our POV projects we’ll grow plants.”

(Via MAKE: Blog.)

Riiiight, “lettuce”. I’m sure lettuce is the only green plant that grows better under red LED light.

TIME.com gets it wrong as well: “

TIME runs a story on new iPod killers – but their story shows that complete lack of research happens in traditional media as well as in blogs – just look at the following L

TIME.com: Attack of the Anti-iPods — Apr. 11, 2005:

What about iPod’s notorious lack of endurance between recharges, the sealed case that means you may have to scrap the thing if the internal battery dies, and the proprietary digital-music format that joins you at the hip to Apple’s iTunes online store?

How wrong can you be?

- Battery life on my iPods – 5 hours or so. Maybe some of the others are better, but then again my iPod is extremely easy to recharge.

- Scrap the thing if the battery dies??? Hey – even Apple offers new batteries, and if you go to Amazon they sell batteries!

- Joins you to the hip with Apple’s online store???? – I have never bought a song there, and I have still managed to fill my iPod.

TIME – your journalists disappoint me. Employ someone who do their fact checking.

”

(Via Tor’s weblog.)

Boy oh, man, did you ever hit the nail on the head. This is the reason why blogs will overtake the world… Why give your money to a traditional media publication when the quality of the work is this bad? If you want badly fact checked stories, you can get them all online..for free, got it?

Otherwise, a podcast is an inherent content protection mechanism that reduces your interweb visibility as a contributor, unless you’re famous (in which case the inverse is true), and is currently un-indexable by any search engine… unless you have some kind of voice-transcription software going while you’re recording your program… and make that available on your site.

Is it great new technology for talk-radio kinds of content? Maybe. If the content is high-quality. For niche-market music? Yes, definitely. I think once the novelty of receiving early adopter talk-radio style content from a feed wears off, music is where podcasting will see it’s greatest application. Ok, maybe movies, someday… and tv shows. Although, the Konfabulator “new widgets feed” does send the actual widgets to me with rss attachments. That’s pretty freaking cool.

One session of Adam Curry and Dave Winer spending a couple of hours saying “Wow, this is a podcast! We have technical glitches just like a radio program! Let’s talk about podcasting some more!” … well.. that was enough for me. And, I’m sure every talk-radio-podcast will spend a couple of sessions doing that. “dude! we’re on the air! But it’s not on the air! But we’re podcasting! Dude, is it recording?”

like I said.. wake me up when the little-known musicians start finding this delivery mechanism.

Update: deeje says “you know what? I agree.”