Howard Owens

I always said a good job would fall into my lap. Here it is: director of Internet publishing with Gatehouse Media.

You may never have heard of Gatehouse. It's essentially a new company, but its leadership ( Mike Reed is CEO and Bill Blevins is Internet VP), is rock solid. I'm impressed with both Mike and Bill, and both are respected people within our industry.

Gatehouse operates 450 small dailies, weeklies and shoppers in 15 states.

The job seems a perfect fit for my biggest strengths, best-honed skills and diverse experience. It is clear that I will be treated well and fairly.

I start on Tuesday.

Once the house in Bakersfield sells, we'll be moving to some small town to the east of Rochester, NY. I was in Rochester a few days ago. I like it.

Housing prices are insanely low. Of course, taxes are insanely high. It's not quite a wash, but it's close. The music scene is vibrant. The winters are cold. The public gardens abundant. The towns sparsely populated, but closely packed. It's wine country. There is lots of water (such as Lake Ontario) My first impression of the people: friendly. It is as close to baseball heaven as you can get: At least five major league parks are within half-a-day's drive, with an International League team right in Rochester, and other minor league teams close by, and Cooperstown is a mere 3.5 hours down the road.

The whole thing is bittersweet for my family. They are happy for me, but this wasn't we expected 12 months ago. On the other hand, I'll actually be in better off with Gatehouse.

Don't worry, Bakersfield, Ventura, Los Angeles and San Diego buddies, there will be plenty of time for goodbyes over the next couple of months while I work to get out of this house. If you can, buy it, so I can move on.

Pitchfork is one of those sites that I know it's there, but I've never paid it much attention (so many links, so little time), but Wired says its become the most influential (especially among indie bands) music criticism site on the Web.

One aspect of interest -- while many reviewers are paid, they are not necessarily professional. They are not necessarily good writers.

I think there is a lesson there for all media companies: People gravitate toward what they consider authentic voices. The best and most popular bloggers do not necessarily write in a polished, journalistic style. They make no pretense to objectivity. They are honest, or at least perceived as credible by their fans. User-generated, fan-based content is overtaking professionally derived content all over the Web. Pay heed.

Here's a story worth watching: Forbes.com may have been over reporting its traffic data.

Web site traffic data remains an imperfect science. There are multiple data points that do not always intersect. An over reliance on one data source for site usage metrics is a dangerous thing.

In writing about the Web 2.0 bubble and the current media environment, Jeff Jarvis makes this salient point:

Some of the owners and employees try to blame all this on the public marketplace. But that’s crap. All the marketplace wants is rational business. And private owners can be rogues, too. See the Santa Barbara News Press, where the rich owner is now trying to get $500,000 out of the former editor for daring to stand up on principle. See also rich man Mark Cuban and how he’s trying to redefine journalism. No, those hoping to find knights on shining gold piles are just looking for a means to put off for a little longer — perhaps until their retirement — the inevitable pressure of the market.

Whether public or private, you still have to make sound business decisions that lead to revenue growth and profit. I see no inherent advantage to either public or private ownership. As Jarvis says, it's still all about responding to the marketplace. I disagree with Jarvis's favorite untested hypothesis that public newspaper companies appear to be getting everything wrong. There are multiple business models being followed throughout the newspaper industry. Some appear to be clear losers, but some show potential. It's still too early to say that they're all wrong.

If you're not keeping up with YouTube, you're not keeping up with our culture. Watch all The Daily Show and Colbert Report you want, but you're not keeping up. And if you're one the the lackluster souls stuck on Leno, Letterman and SNL or the nightly news casts, you might as well be watching Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle.

YouTube is taking over.

Here's an NYT piece on Funtwo, a guitarist who performs a stunningly remarkable rendition of Pachelbel's Cannon. See it here.

I am becoming increasingly aware that YouTube is so vast, that it really contains multiple tribes/cultures, from video bloggers, viral videos, highlights from pop culture video and aspiring filmmakers, YouTube is documenting and expanding culture at a rate no other site can match. It's just just a matter of uploading MSM video clips or out-of-focus home movies. More and more people are creating content -- and some of it quite good -- just for YouTube.

There are new stars being born and often these people have no other ambition other than to be heard. YouTube is on the verge of doing to MSM video what craigslist is doing to print classifieds: replacing paid, well-packaged content with amateur, peer-to-peer content.

Between YouTube and other video online, we might soon find our television sets nearly superfluous.

As for the Funtwo phenomena, I've stumbled across a few instructional type of guitar videos, some videos of people performing their own guitar instrumentals, but until I read the Times piece (hat tip to my wife), I didn't realize that a whole community has sprung up around teaching each other guitar and critiquing each other's work.

When I popped on YouTube this morning, I found this featured video -- no kid, but an old man with an old guitar doing some Travis picking that is certainly worthy of study and emulation. Watch it and you'll find links to to others.

Personally, I've enjoyed YouTube for its long tail of old rockabilly videos (I need to get back to posting some of those again soon). But I've also randomly checked out the homemade videos, the video bloggers, and the stupid, silly, unartistic things people upload for no redeeming reason whatsoever. But it's clear that for those who completely immerse themselves in YouTube, there is a wealth of entertaining, educational and socially significant content being posted every day. It's a content cavern so vast that no MSM outlet can match it -- and the site isn't even a year old yet.

If I were a musician or a music label, I wouldn't dream of releasing a song without an accompanying video to place on YouTube.

If I were an aspiring filmmaker, I would create videos just for YouTube, such as this one by the son of one of my former professors (If you're not Nazarene, you may not appreciate all the humor of Nazbo Rap, but it's a well done piece and reasonably popular on YouTube).

There isn't much caution in my pronouncements about the ascendancy of YouTube, but I think all the trends are in its favor: Expanding broadband capabilities, greater acceptance by people to creating their own content, the growing availability of inexpensive and easy to use production tools, and a market domination that isn't likely to be challenged any time soon. I think we're a long way from seeing YouTube crest in its popularity.

UPDATE: More evidence of YouTube's cultural significance:
Jon Fine of Business Week spends
an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who Lonelygirl15 is.

Ah, those where the days ... I remembr romping around Ventura with Bob Benz and LBJ.

We've been selling some stuff on Ebay recently with some success. The best sellers so far has been poker books. CDs did OK. Baseball cards, not so much, though I did get $46 for my Roger Clemens rookie card.

Now we're into clothing, clothing accessories and collectibles.

Right now, we have 19 items on Ebay, with more TK. If you like vintage clothing, my wife is still some great pieces.

The current surprise of the moment is this belt buckle, which is approaching $32 in bids with a bit more than a day left in the auction.

This old leather jacket my dad gave me when I was a kid has five people watching it, has generated two questions (including somebody offering $45 for immediate purchase), but no bids yet. One day left of this one.

I'm also selling the Padres windbreaker I've had since I was about 11 or 12.

I just listed this very cool cowgirl duster from my wife's collection.

In the music-death category are these items related to John Lennon, Curt Cobain and Country Dick Montana. The CDM items are of particular interest to me simply because its so closely tied to my personal history. I knew Dan McLain (Country Dick) in high school, was friends with co-founder of the Beat Farmers Buddy Blue, and wrote an award-winning obit about Country Dick in 1995.

Don't ask me why I saved all this crap. I don't know.

If you're interested, bookmark my Ebay page ... we'll try to add stuff every day for the next couple of weeks. And if you live in Bakersfield, watch this blog for an announcement of our upcoming garage sale, where we'll sell off even more stuff we don't need that TBC paid for us to haul over here from Ventura (and that doesn't count the three garbage cans of stuff I've thrown out in the last week).

• Visit the Bakersfield Museum
• Go to a Blaze game
• Visit the Wasco Rose Garden
• Do some sightseeing in the Ridgecrest area
• Drive Route 66 out to Needles, then come back through Palm Springs and visit the nature garden there
• Visit Mono Lake
• Take my wife to see the Grand Canyon
• Visit a couple of life-long friends
• Eat one more meal at KC Steakhouse
• See one more Padres game

From Lou Minatti, I learn that there is a new blog dedicated to the Bakersfield housing bubble. That's not exactly music to my ears.

For those who missed the announcement earlier, check out this fine piece of Bakersfield real estate.

Very nice redesign from the Dayton Daily News. The basic layout reminds me of a site that was redesigned earlier this year.

Key features:

• Horizontal, tabbed navigation
• Local news emphasis
• Good sized main photo (could be bigger, but that's hard to do on a content-heavy site)
• The modular structure will make it easier to make changes as managers learn about how people actually use the site
• Good ad sizes (great size for multimedia, which Dayton seems to do a good job of selling)
• Reasonably good emphasis on blogs and multimedia
• Good positioning on text ads

Some tweaks I'd make:

• Advertising belongs on the left side of the page (where people's eyes flow more naturally')
• The advertising column should be consistently advertising, not advertising and content (imho)
• I don't see any place for user-generated content
• Interior nav element duplicates horizontal nav for classifieds and verticals
• Interior pages need breadcrumb navigation
• Story pages could use more "related" links so they properly serve as secondary entry pages
• Latest headlines need time stamps (I didn't see time stamps on story pages, either)
• The site needs integrated search, but at least you can find obits or weather through the search box (search should also be bigger)

Overall, it's a winning design, I think. There are some especially nice subtle touches that give the design some extra pizazz. The light blue is an increasingly popular color scheme for online news sites. I think it works, but I'm a big fan of it. I would like to see a little more spot color.

I congratulate Dayton the wide range of staff-written blogs, but where are the community blogs?

Are you interested in some Bakersfield Real Estate?

Well, our house is for sale.

This is a for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) project. The links above will take you to a page I built for the house sale, with a description, pictures and two panorama tours (more to come).

If you would like to help me sell my house, here's a simple way to help: Link to my house page.

In a review, BusinessWeek slams Google Video for not enough good content, not easy enough to use, and paid video that isn't worth paying for.

I got a note this morning from a local rockabilly band I didn't know about: Fattkatt and the VanZippers.

Here's their MySpace page, and some music here.

They also have two videos on YouTube (click on the link and their second video appears in the suggestion box to the right of the main vid).

CNet is planning a new food site, giving my former employer's FoodNetwork.com (E.W. Scripps) a little competition. Chow.com will be aimed at the young and the hip, with user-content, off-beat video and unusual recipes.

It sounds like a smart plan, but as the article notes, food on the Web is a popular but crowded market, and the market leaders are well established.

Pete Krasilovsky writes about Google adding coupons to its maps application. It's a good analysis, but it's important to remember, Google has yet to do a great job at attracting small-business, local advertisers to AdWords. Why should coupons do any better? Small business owners are notoriously slow to adapt to new technology and new opportunities.

Which keeps online coupons in play for local media sites, regardless of what Jeff Jarvis says (who hasn't seen a non-newspaper innovation yet that he hasn't called "a stake in the heart of local newspapers"), because newspapers have the local knowledge and relationships to take such programs a step or two beyond merely self serve.

But the clock is ticking.

E&P offers a fairly comprehensive take on legal issues surrounding blogs on news sites (both staff written and volunteer) and other user-generated content (including comments on stories).

Lee Gomes spends some time with the AOL search database and discovers free music and sex are popular search queries.

The fact that "lyrics" is the most popular search word explains why there are so many lyric sites that seem to exist merely to display banner ads, force popups down your browser, and generally assault you with blinks, flashes and gaudy colors.

Celebrity searches are big, which doesn't surprise me since the most common search hits on howardowens.com recently are "Rick Sutcliffe drunk," "Xavier Nady married" and "Connie Chung fired."

Many searchers ask questions, more probably than a few years ago, which makes one wonder if Ask Jeeves wasn't just a bit ahead of its time, and if natural language search doesn't need to improve. In a natural language search is the Google page rank method really ideal?

Gomes found that a lot of people type in full URLs, including "http" into the search engine form. I suspect that is largely an AOL phenomenon. I've found over the years that many people come to RVClub.com by typing the full URL into the AOL search box, but I haven't seen that pattern repeated with any other site I've been associated with, and not so much from other search engines. It's worth noting, however, that Google and AOL handle such such searches completely differently. Google sends you right to the page, whereas AOL serves up a search results page. This could change the referrer results in Web logs.

YouTube's founders are audacious enough to think it can strike a deal with every record label to legally add every music video ever made to the online video site.

Two thoughts: First, I don't think they can do it. I don't see the record labels going for it (unless they've suddenly gotten smart about the Internet), and it's not like there are only four or five record labels to deal with. There are hundreds. Second, won't the site lose some of its user-generated-content luster if it gets too heavy into being a conduit for MSM content? (NOTE: I mean, let the users decide what they want to upload, even if its MSM-created content, or let the artists do it themselves).

Just thoughts.

This morning, the NY Times publihes a nice profile of E.W. Scripps.

Back in 1977/78, when punk was first breaking on the West Coast, I lived in San Diego and there was no place (at first) for under-age punks and new wave fans to see live, local music. But that didn't stop Dan McLain (then drummer for the Penetrators and proprietor of Monte Records, and later better known as Country Dick Montana, drummer and larger-than-life singer/drummer for the Beat Farmers), from pushing for places to play, usually rental halls. This created the San Diego scene. Eventually you had the Skelton Club and a club in an old theater in La Mesa and weekly shows at the Lions Club in North Park.

San Diego was a big city and it there were fewer than a handful of places that catered to DYI music.

My band played garage parties and tennis courts. This helped us build a fan base of, oh, four people. There was Dave, Sherry, Brian and our drummer's mom.

Bakersfield, much smaller -- but seems to have a pretty vibrant local scene. There are pizza joints and old warehouses and shopping malls and ice cream parlors. N.L. Belardes, my primary source for all local music news and reviews, writes about a pizza restaurant not far from my house that is now now hosting punk shows.

If you're a under-age, aspiring musician, Bakersfield offers plenty of opportunity, and I think that's good for the music and good for the kids. And it's great for them that somebody like N.L. is documenting their scene.

Dan McLain, Buddy Blue, R.I.P. The music lives on.

[youtube]9a2nRubG6ZU[/youtube]What's most amazing about that video of Buddy doing "Peggy Sue" is that I've never seen it before. I have no idea what or where it's from.

(NOTE: 11/12006: the original video embedded in this post has been deleted from YT)

• Peggy Sue (the more familiar Ed Sullivan performance)
• That'll Be the Day
• Oh Boy

In the vid of Buddy on Sullivan, watch the drumming of J.I. Allison. He is amazingly relaxed and limber.

What's most amazing about that video of Buddy doing "Peggy Sue" is that I've never seen it before. I have no idea what or where it's from.

• Peggy Sue (the more familiar Ed Sullivan performance)
• That'll Be the Day
• Oh Boy

In the vid of Buddy on Sullivan, watch the drumming of J.I. Allison. He is amazingly relaxed and limber.

What's most amazing about that video of Buddy doing "Peggy Sue" is that I've never seen it before. I have no idea what or where it's from.

• Peggy Sue (the more familiar Ed Sullivan performance)
• That'll Be the Day
• Oh Boy

In the vid of Buddy on Sullivan, watch the drumming of J.I. Allison. He is amazingly relaxed and limber.

There are a couple of home movies of Buddy. Here's one from his tour of England. Here's footage of the UK tour shot by Norman Petty (this looks like it was part of the "Real Buddy Holly Story" documentary).

Gary Busey played Holly in the biopic "The Buddy Holly Story." Here he is doing "It's So Easy."

Of course, one of the great performance of last season's American Idol was Taylor Hicks singing "Not Fade Away."

Related links:

• Wikipedia
• BuddyHolly.com
• Rockabilly Hall of Fame
• Buddy Holly Center (in Lubbock)
• Buddy Holly Online
• Buddy Holly Archives

[tags]rockabilly, buddy holly, music[/tags]

It's a source of local favorite trivia: The Rolling Stones mention Bakersfield in the song "Far Away Eyes."

Black Dog found a great video of the Stones performing the song on YouTube.

The Stones are often held up by rock critics as an example of English bands adopting American blues, but what often gets overlooked is how important country music is to them. What's more is, when the Stones go country, they do it very, very well.

Could the fact that 71 percent of college students read their campus newspaper offer a glimmer of hope to a dying newspaper industry?

Maybe there is a lesson here: It is not news on paper that turns off young readers, but the nature and relevancy of the content? That's not necessarily a startling revelation, but the success of college papers might offer a guide on how to reinvent community newspapers.

Or maybe campus life is just a unique microclimate that the lessons are nontransferable to the world outside?

Black Dog travels to Knott's Berry Farm, sees an old flame, is kind to a gang banger, and drives on the freeway -- yes, it's all (and more) in one post.

Here's an idea from Lost Remote, get your audience to start posting your video to YouTube.

This could be a viable viral way to promote your news site among users who may not already be inclined to visit your site.

Here's the thing: You're site probably isn't reaching all the local audience it could and traditional marketing isn't going to reach them, either. A little guerilla marketing could help.

You might even want to think about doing it yourself.

Or why not create a video blog specifically for YouTube?

Also, think about pulling in YouTube feeds of appropriately tagged content.

Journalists around the globe are pouring over the search data exposed by AOL and painting some not very pretty pictures of many netizens.

John Battelle thinks the snafu is a good thing from one perspective: It puts the online privacy debate in a whole new light.

The New York Times used the data to find one specific person.

USAToday summarizes the scope of what we've learned about how people assume they have greater privacy than they do:

User 1515830 is apparently an overweight woman with little willpower. She searches for the number of calories in certain foods but later searches for "baked macaroni and cheese with sour cream." Tragically troubled, she searches terms having to do with incest, depression, psychotic drugs and "I hate men." She also seems to be a teacher ("teaching positions in Denver Colorado"), probably lives in Ohio ("divorce laws in Ohio") and is shopping for curtains.

This is what's so fascinating about AOL's gaffe. AOL has made one of the secrets of search very real: It is the closest thing to the content of people's minds.

We're candid when we search because it seems anonymous and private. "Most people assume the Internet is a more private medium than it is," says Greg Lastowka, a Rutgers law professor specializing in the Internet.

As AOL has shown, search records are, in fact, like a diary. The intention is that they remain private, but they can wind up in someone else's hands.

The bit in the piece above about the guy searching for ways to kill his wife recalls the issue of "pre-crime" makes me think once again that Minority Report was more prescient than maybe we first realized. I haven't seen that movie since it was in theaters ... I think I'll try to rent it today.

John Battelle, in his book The Search, talks about the "database of intentions." That database isn't always a pretty picture, as this CNet story shows.

[youtube]IOpo1QiMXLc[/youtube]

• High Blood Pressure (same as above)
• Be-Bop-A-Lula
• Be-Bop-A-Lula (The Girl Can't Help It)
• Rip It Up
• Baby Blue (Hot Rod Gang)
• Rocky Road Blues (poor sound quality)
• Long Tall Sally (1963, in leather and on crunches)
• Dance to the Bop
• Dance to the Bop (Ed Sullivan)
• Blue Jean Bop
• Spaceship to Mars
• What'd I Say'
• Dance in the Street
• Roll Over Beethoven

I had never heard of Gene Vincent until I was a sophomore in high school and Ian Dury released "Sweet Gene Vincent." Here's a video of Dury performing the song with The Clash.

Related Links:

• Rockabilly Hall of Fame
• History of Rock
• Wikipedia

As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to start work on customizing my NetVibes page.

I just discovered NetVibes because it showed up in my referrer log, but apparently its been around since September 2005 or so.

Netvibes is built on Ajax using many of the same principles as the Google customized home page, but a tiny bit slicker and more advanced.

I've been using a customized home page of one kind or another for six or seven years. I used to build my own in ColdFusion, then about a year ago I started using the Google personalized page, which I liked enough to not want to hassle with rebuilding my own page (which became out of date when I changed jobs), but what I see of NetVibes so far, I think this is a keeper.

No news site that I'm aware of has given customization a serious try in a number of years. I know the initial experiments didn't go well, but that was before the invention of Ajax. Personalization is the wave of the future, but I think we can pretty much predict that news sites will be left in the dust of this innovation as well. However, if you want some ideas on where to begin with imagining what a customized newspaper.com site might start with, look at Google's personalized page and NetVibes.

[youtube]n3xtqEv99eE[/youtube]

• C'mon Everybody (same as above)
• C'mon Everybody(alt. version)
• Summertime Blues
• Money Honey
• School Days
• Don't Blame On Me
• Teen-age Heaven
• Twenty Flight Rock (from The Girl Can't Help It)
• Cotton Picker
• Sittin' in the Balcony(very poor quality)

Cochran was covered by a lot of artists over the decades, none so famously as The Who Live at Leeds. Here's a video of The Who doing Summertime Blues (note: opening 40 seconds is overdub of Eddie's original, then the live song starts).

Here's the trailer for The Girl Can't Help It, which starred Jayne Mansfield.

In the movie La Bamba, Brian Setzer played Eddie Cochran.

Related Links:

• Remember Eddie Cochran
• Rockabilly Hall of Fame
• Wikipedia Entry
• Bobby Cochran, trading on his famous uncles name
• The Cochran Connection (UK fanzine)

Jay Rosen has his own way of attacking the whole journalists vs. bloggers debate, which swelled up again like an ugly canker sore.

My only comment is: Journalists operate at a disadvantage so long as they think in terms of "us vs. them." It is all "We."