WriteLarge.com

Got a take down notice from the Oconomowoc Enterprise at Ocono.com. I feel so grown up now.

Oh Internet, I am ready to give up on you and move to the Next New Thing.

On a totally unrelated note, I played through the first half-hour of Final Fantasy Seven again today while I was jogging in the basement. 1997 was a strange place in the video game world.

The AP really doesn't get it. I point you to Making Light:

The Associated Press ... has now published a web form through which intimidated parties can give the AP money in return for “permission” to publish as few as five words.

In this spirit, I will shortly be putting up my own Web form through which people can PayPal me money in exchange for my promise to not blow up the moon.

At least the RIAA dirtbags pretend that they're protecting copyright on behalf of the artists. (They're not, but that's a discussion for another day.) How much of those "permission" payments will end up in the hands of the AP member who wrote the article in the first place?

This is just another greedy money grab by the established fat-cats who see that their industry is dying and think that they can sue there way back to the 1950's when we had lots of trees to cut down so paper was cheap and people actually cared what the traditional press had to say.

But let's talk about the hypocrisy at work here. The press is happy to cry "fair use" when they're stealing beer can logos and clippings from private speeches in order to cover the news-- (in the sense that you _honestly_ consider everything that's not in the two main news sections of any given paper news).

This gets at the thing fundamentally wrong with the traditional press, and one of the main reasons I left it. The press seems to have forgotten that they aren't special. The tools of a good reporter are the same tools available to any member of the public. Reporters don't have any special rights or magic (beyond certain shield laws, which, believe me, have never been exercised on my behalf).

My friend Ryanne from The Watertown Daily Times.

Microsoft is the Ziggy of the software industry. Think about it. Everybody knows who Ziggy is and most people hate him. And then some people take great pleasure drawing a nipple on his voluptuous nose.

Case in point: Today's ZDnet.com's article breathlessly entitled "XP SP3 performance gains - Nothing to write home about."

The article does little more than draw a giant nipple on Microsoft's voluptuous nose, running a series of benchmark tests on various computers to prove that what was essentially a hot-fix roll-up service pack doesn't magically accomplish something beyond the scope of it's intended design.

May I suggest the following story for next week's headlines at ZDnet: "XP Service Pack 3 does nothing to protect users from tiger attacks." Then we can all point and laugh at Microsoft for being so large and stupid that it can't see the implicit danger of tiger attacks and don't they have any engineers in Redmond they can throw at the tiger attack problem?

This kind of reporting is easy kicking at the cat. It's lazy journalism at best and irresponsible at worse.

I installed SP3 on an old laptop last night. The experience was less than flawless and less than easy, but you know what? I only had to reboot twice. That's roughly six times less than I would have had to reboot in a pre-SP3 world. And that, in my opinion, is a service pack done right.

A church on Wisconsin Avenue freakin' exploded, man! Ask me what it was like on scene! Ask me!
I don't Freakin' know! I don't cover breaking news any more!
I've been quietly blogging at Ocono.com for a month or so, and today was the first time since I left Journalism that something happened in the city that I kind of secretly wish I could cover.
Of course, breaking news isn't really Ocono.com's forte, but I thought a Google news search was probably in order. You hate to leave your readers looking for news you're not offering them, but you hate to pretend news isn't happening.

The Wauwatosa Public Library has a great and growing Graphic Novel collection. It's given me access to a lot more Graphic Novels than I'll typically get a chance to read. So, here are  reviews two of my latest grabs from the Library, presented in photographic and minimalist terms.

Good Comic.

Bad Comic.

After this post made was highlighted at the Consumerist, I got a call from a local radio station to tell the story. I love the Consumerist! Not just for the traffic, but because the kind of Journalism the consumerist does is Journalism that matters.
So, this morning, I did a ten minute segment on Glen Gardner's morning show at WTDY in Madison. Didn't have my recording setup at home with me, so I didn't capture the interview to share, but I did have a nice conversation. My favorite part was when we started talking about how Justice was really my motivating factor.

Regardless, it seems like a decent station that WTDY.

Also, my brother-in-law Jessie made a cameo on Fox 6 last night. I'm not really sure what he's doing there with that plank, but that's ok. He had to have tons of dental work once because of an accident that happened while he was working on my car.
Fox6's links go away after a time, but here's a screencap:

I'm pushin' an Elephant up the stairs. I know this. But let me tell you, in December, I got almost _no_ Telemarketing calls from advertising reps. The first week of January, I've received at least 13. I don't even bother checking my voicemail at work because it's someone looking for a call back about any possible spending I might have in mind for their special "Womens Health" Pull-out section.

With the new year, I have made a commitment to spend less time looking at or even considering print advertising. Unless you're going to deliver me the kind of metrics that I get from online ads, don't bother calling, mkay?

Seriously, Print is dead. Why advertise in a medium that nobody cares about, can't demonstrate its effectiveness, and is old before the next edition comes out? Am I under-estimating the shopping power of old people in nursing homes who still read their daily newspaper? Maybe. But I guess I don't really care. I know for a _fact_ that Google Pay-per click is driving traffic to my website. I have to take my rep's word that my print ad is.

Look, Newspapers and Print Periodicals still have a vital role to play in our society. It's just too bad that the lazy bastards who run them can't be bothered to figure out a way to re-monitize their products so that they'll be around in five years to continue to fill that role.

There will always be a niche audience who reads Newspapers and print periodicals. But that niche is going to get more and more unimportant to me going forward.