Howard Owens

Yahoo! has revamped its home page. I like it. Smart, clean, well organized. But really got my attention was an ad for Citibank. The ad opens initially as a standard big box (300x250), then collapses to a 300x90. Links under the ad say: "e-Savings Details" (the subject of the ad, "Open Ad" (which is just another call to action) and "Ad Feedback" (Yahoo! wants to know what you think of the ad).

What a great, interactive, less-intrusive way to present a banner ad.

There's also a great text ad under the search box.

One of the first rules of Web usability is, "keep it simple."

If you make users puzzle over how to find the information they want, you are more likely to frustrate them than impress them with your creative talent. Link labels should be simple and declarative. Don't hide vital information behind obscure references or metaphors. First and foremost, allow your users to get quickly the information they want.

And for gosh sake -- if you want to sell somebody something, don't make them guess.

With that in mind, check out the online media kit for Boston.com.

Sure, it's snazzy. I love good Flash as much as the next Web geek. But if all I'm after is banner rates, do I really want to sit through this? Once it downloads, it takes a second or two to figure out that you can't just click anywhere to go some place (the obvious answer ... like, "just take me to the next page where there is real information, please,") you have to mouse over specific, subtly highlighted areas of the picture. At least, they labeled the boxes, but what's the metaphor here? Why is a certain box in one spot of the picture and not another? How can I quickly recognize I want this box for rates and another for ad specs (not that those common advertiser questions are easy to get to)? And if I'm a neophyte advertiser, and many are, I'm not going to know what "behavioral" means, so why should I click on that box? OK, now I'm frustrated (I'm pretending to be an advertiser here). I just want to contact somebody to ask my questions. Cool, here's a link to "e-mail." I can e-mail somebody. Click. Oh, no. This isn't an e-mail link. It's some more Flash telling me about Sandy and how she likes to shop for clothes. Drat. Maybe I'll go to Google AdWords after all ...

How is any of this helping advertisers quickly get the information they need so they can make buying decisions? The tag line of Boston.com advertising is "Find Your Focus." Ironic, isn't it?

Lesson: Don't let your Flash guru build your media kit.

Times may be tough for the business of newspapers, but apparently there are still plenty of young people drawn to the allure of life as an ink-stained wretch, however virtual that may be.

I took Billie to Tehachapi today as a Mother's Day treat. We ate at a very nice restaurante (Jake's) and looked around the town a bit and then went for a Sunday drive.

Of course, I took pictures.

Among my favorites:

• This one and this one of an old slaughter house.
• A picture of a dirt road in the hills.
• These hills.
• The Tehachapi Loop.
• An old stove at the Tehachapi Museum.
• The Tehacahpi Museum itself.

Tomorrow it's back to work after a week off.

I find it somewhat surprising that Yahoo! is apparently scaling back its original content ambitions.

"We don't have the ambition to do a lot" of original content, Semel said at a meeting with industry analysts, executives and reporters. "We have the ambition to help lead the way and encourage others to do it for us. ... We don't aspire to have 2,000 creative people working for Yahoo. We are an Internet company."

That makes some sense, but it's also a mixed signal. For the past two years, Yahoo! has given every indication it wanted to produce more original content, from hiring Lloyd Braun to launching the Hot Zone.

I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that Yahoo! is an Internet company. It is, I think, first and foremost, a media company. I see no reason, with its resource and ability to attract talent, that it can't become a very competitive source of original content.

Interesting idea from Indeed.com -- pay-per-click, contextual job ads. This could be a logical evolution for top jobs -- the industry-standard recruitment up sell. Another possible spin for newspapers, as an additional up sell, place recruitment liners as contextual ads in Google and Yahoo! searches. That would be hard to manage, so it would need to be automated, and maybe even self-serve, but I could see it producing a tiddy bit of revenue.

Here's a screen shot of an unfortunate juxtaposition: it's banner ad promoting newspapers as a great advertising vehicle next to a story about declining readership. Ouch.

It's a good thing that online traffic continues to grow rapidly.

The LAPD has launched a blog (via LA Observed).

Our online journal is an interactive tool that we use to deliver real-time, unfiltered information. We invite you to take a look inside the Department to learn more about the men and women in blue who have sworn to protect and to serve you.

By using this Blog, the LAPD hopes to maintain an open dialogue with the communities we serve and those who have an interest in the men and women of this organization. We encourage you to express your opinions about current events through respectful and insightful discussion. We reserve the right to refuse to post those comments that contain inappropriate language and/or material. In the near future, we intend to expand our Blogging capabilities to all 19 Area Stations.

They've even enabled comments (moderated).

This is interesting as a form of disintermediation of the media. Big-J journalists might argue that it's merely flakery and doesn't replace the need for real reportage. And that may all be true. But I also believe most readers are pretty smart and can separate the flakery from the useful information. While I believe in aggressive journalism in covering government agencies, I also think it's a good thing for agencies to open up and try to reach the public in an unfiltered manner. The more voices the better.

Of course, the best thing the LAPD could do is not just sugar coat everything. They'll have more credibility if the voice is authentic and honest, and credibility will be important in those times they want to use the blog for a pissing match with local media.

Tim Rutten enters the fray between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times over the worthiness of stories that recently won Pulitzers. Rutten is more interested in the politics. I'm more interested in the journalism. Rutten quotes Times' editor Bill Keller:

"I leave to others, including the court of public opinion," he wrote, to decide "whether the government officials who spoke to reporters about secrets that troubled them were partisan evildoers, as the Journal contends, or conscientious public servants, or something more complicated. Since most of them, including the nearly dozen who were cited in the first warrantless eavesdropping story, have not been publicly identified, it's hard to know how the Journal is so certain of their motives.

In his own words, Keller admits the chief flaw with these stories -- we don't know who the sources are and we cannot possibly judge their motivations. Without knowing their motivations, we can't possibly judge the merits of their assertions.

In today's world, the journalistic attitude of "just trust us" is no longer good enough. Reporters must get their sources to go on the record, or verify their information through public documents or alternative, on-the-record sources. Certainly, anonymous sources should never be used as a sole-source of information, and anonymous sources should never be allowed to speculate or hold forth with opinion. Too much of this kind of reporting comes out of New York and Washington. If Keller is going to allow reporters to produced anonymous sourced stories, then he hasn't a leg to stand on when it comes to defending those stories against attack.

I relaunched HowardOwens.com on May 3.

At the time, HowardOwens.com was ranked #4 in the Google search for "Howard Owens" In #1 spot was my Buzznet site, followed by two articles I'm quoted in. Now, this domain and Buzznet have changed positions. Page rank for the home page remains 5/10.

This is all of interest to me just because I was curious if the search position for this site could change once it was back online, or if I had irreparably damaged its rank by referring all traffic to my Buzznet pages. I wanted to see how long it would take HowardOwens.com to rise back to #1 if I didn't do anything, but just waited. It took about a week.

This is what I've learned about roses this week: Double Delights don't like to be sprayed. With anything.

A couple of my roses in the front had this tiny little bugs on them, and I was also having a minor problem with earwigs. On an impulse, while in Wal-Mart, I bought some Ortho rose and flower insecticide. That evening, I sprayed five plants. This morning, I found a large portion of the Double Delight dappled in black spots. On closer inspection, I found it wasn't only the leaves, but the stems and buds, too. On even closer inspection, I saw it was only one side a leaf, stem or bud. On even closer inspection, I could tell any leaf that was sheltered by another wasn't spotted, and the back of leaves, if pointed in the direction from which I sprayed, were spotted.

I called Ortho (nice of them to put an 800 number on the bottle for just such situations), and the rep said she had NEVER heard of anything like this. After talking everything over in detail, such suggested I go to a reputable nursery and see what they tell me.

So I went to White Forest and talked with Charlie. Yup, it's chemical burn, he said. He said Double Delights are particularly sensitive plants and should never be sprayed with anything. Ever. He also recommended cutting away all the damaged canes. Drat. They are all the ones with unbloomed buds.

There are about four different routes I can drive to work, and home. I like to switch it up. One of the routes takes me down Chester Avenue, and I always pass this Army-Navy store and swear, one of these days I'm going to stop by there and take a bunch of pictures. Today, I finally did it. I've posted the pictures to Buzznet, and they start here.

If I understand this piece in SFGate by Joe Garofoli correctly, though his thesis isn't clear, it is: We don't need to worry about Media News acquiring more Bay Area papers because in the new media era, the idea of big media consolidation is inconsequential. (via Romenesko)

He's probably right.

What may not be so right, though, is this comment:

The painful irony for newspapers, said Amy Mitchell, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is that those new-media news aggregators are using newspaper stories without having to pay for them.

"These aggregators are eating their own seed corn," Mitchell said. "They're taking readers away from newspapers -- and advertising -- and that leaves newspapers with fewer resources to cover local news."

Now, it's not clear which aggregators Mitchell is talking about, but not all aggregators are created equal. Some aggregators merely slurp up wire service copy and spit it out as their own (most of the portals), but a few actually direct traffic to newspaper Web sites. Google News is one, but Yahoo's new local news channel holds the promise of generating a nice chunk of traffic for to local news sites.

While smart site managers realize the best site traffic is that which enterers through the home page and clicks around on six or seven links before leaving, you can't complain about one of the most popular news sites on the Web regularly sending you visitors. And if you're one of the smart news sites with user registration, you have a much better chance of converting these visitors into more loyal members of your audience.

Of course, you're really only interested in site visitors with roots in your community, which is why the Yahoo! experience looks so tasty. It pre-qualifies local visitors for your site in a way that Google doesn't.

Newspaper Web sites could use more such aggregators.

From Steve Yelvington:

Speaking truth to power isn't just about confronting the government and big corporations. As the Internet shifts power to individuals, we need to be speaking truth to the blogosphere as well.

Those who know Steve know he's a big champion of citizen media, so this isn't just some big media suit slamming the blogosphere.

Creators of citizen media don't always get it right, and when they get it wrong, big media needs to call them on it. If this is the new era of "journalism as a conversation," it isn't a monologue. If bloggers expect big media to suck it up and take its lumps when it's wrong, then bloggers need to know they are going to take it on the chin once in a while, too.

Kudos to the LAT for fighting back. It is this kind of dialogue that makes us all better informed.

The Ventura County Star, where I once plied my trade, is stepping up its multimedia efforts, according to Editor Joe Howery.

This is a good thing. Some of their efforts harken back to ideas we hatched more than a year ago. Ventura, with its lack of TV competition, is especially fertile ground for Web video production. It will be interesting to see how far they take it.

This morning was a morning of roses.

Mostly, this morning was about deadheading. The Betty Boop and Playboy both needed serious deadheading, but all of the plants had some expired flowers.

I also cut a few and made this rose arrangement.

Among my 32 rose plants (the most recent, a Honey Dijon (a rose hybridized locally by Jim Sproul) my mother bought me last weekend), is one red rose that I have not yet identified. It's stunning. The rose is a perfectly shaped hybrid tea (I presume) that is a rich, dark red, and sits as a single flower atop a very long stem. I've had a hard time photographing this flower (it's so red) with my limited digital cameras, but here is a picture of four red roses in a vase.

Even though I've been unable to identify this rose (for now, I'm calling it the "One Red Rose," because of it's long-stem, single bloom sensibilities and in homage to The Blasters), I've decided to try and propagate it. I stuck four cuttings in four pots today and covered them with 3-litre cola bottles.

As for my previous propagation efforts, three of the Bakersfield Centennial roses are sprouting. The rose I've now identified as a Queen Elizabeth (though I'm still not sure) seems to have taken root, but no new growth yet. The Double Delight cuttings didn't take, so I trashed those two cuttings today (I needed the pots for the One Red Rose, anyway).

Speaking of the garden, check out this picture of Festus. He's waiting for a bird to land for a snack at the top of the wall. Even if he got so lucky, there is no way Festus could ever catch that bird. He's the slowest, most clumsy cat I've ever seen. Some people might say it's cruel to feed birds in a yard where there are cats, but Billie and I think we're probably being more cruel to Festus. It's the ultimate tease.

UPDATE: After a trip today to White Forest Nursery and the Kern County Rose Society show, I think I've identified the "One Red Rose" as "Opening Night."

I want to stop calling it citizen journalism.

The phrase "citizen journalism" carries too much baggage. Big-J journalists object that some blogger with a political opinion and a few hyper links ain't a journalist. And the word "journalism" has the potential to make your average citizen then reporting what you observe takes college training.

Besides, not all non-professional content is journalism. Some of it is pure entertainment. To have value, average-person content need not be journalistically sound nor slickly produced. I would prefer if it were honest or authentic, but it probably doesn't even need to be that. It just needs to work as a piece of communication.

"Citizen media" also reminds us that average-person contributions are more than just digital words. They can be audio or video.

J.D. Lasica argues that the word "citizen" is also a misnomer. I think not. Yes, "citizen" has a certain legal meaning within the boundaries of national jurisdictions, but it also has a broader meaning. It also means a person who is not a servant of the state. In liberal Western tradition, a citizen is a free person. Citizen media is independent media.

I feel very tempted to drive down to Pasadena tonight. I probably can't convince Billie to go, though.

Should newspapers really put their archives behind paid-only archive walls?

Chris Anderson takes a swipe at the answer.

I've been having doubts about the paid archive strategy for a while, and for very long-tailish reasons.

On one hand, some people -- especially attorneys -- will pay good money to access archives. Also, if your archives are surfaced in Google, the majority of traffic they might attract is out of market (icky traffic, not sticky traffic). However, a newspaper archives contains a lot of great content that can be optimized as well as provide valuable background for readers -- the kind of background that might be relevant and useful, but not necessarily worth a buck or two. Archive content can also be aggregated in interesting ways -- everything about a particular neighborhood, or issue, or school, or person grouped in one convenient location.

The revenue from archives doesn't seem all that great. The big question, though, is can it generate equal or more revenue once it is effectively accessible?

One thing I've done over the past few days is catch up on some business reading. Among the reading, a series of articles on disruption and innovation given to me by a friend in the industry.

During my reading, I highlighted a few things that I thought worth commenting on. I may or may not do posts on each of these items.

Flipping through the articles tonight, first up, "The Disruption Opportunity" by Clark Gilbert and originally published Summer of 2003 in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Second graph:

... established players have more time than they think, provided they take off the blinders that keep them from seeing beyond their current customers. Disruption is not an immediate phenomenon -- it can takes years and even decades before the upstart business encroaches heavily on the established market.

Let me begin by saying, I don't think newspapers have decades left before disrupters encroach on established markets. It is a matter of only years in this fast-paced digital era.

That said, any sense of panic some newspaper executives might feel is misplaced. There is time, and there are opportunities.

I want to talk about some commonly perceived disruptors to newspapers, but before I do, I want to reiterate a quick definition of two types of disruption: There is innovation that disrupts because it begins by serving unmet needs, and there is innovation on price (making something good enough to compete, but pricing much lower than established players).

I would contend that no real price disruptors have hit the newspaper industry yet. You might object, "craigslist," with its free classifieds, but what makes craigslist successful, where it is successful, isn't an issue of price, it's an issue of meeting unmet needs -- such as building community around finding an apartment or a job. Even Ebay isn't competing on price -- it's competing on ease of transaction, another unmet need.

With that in mind, let's step through common disruptors.

First up, Monster and Hot Jobs. A few years ago, the newspaper industry was full of angst about this threat to recruitment revenue. Everybody was trying to figure out how to beat Monster. Now, in 2006, Monster is largely beat (though no newspaper has fully recovered the lost revenue, as far as I can surmise), thanks largely the industry-owned CareerBuilder (Tribune, Knight-Ridder and Gannett) and strong counter measures by local newspapers. While it can be argued that Monster and Hot Jobs were competing on price (being cheaper than newspapers, but not necessarily cheap), they really tried to position themselves as some how more comprehensive and easier to use. Unfortunately for them, points for convenience go to the tool that delivers the best results. And for most jobs in most markets, that's still newspapers.

If a disruptor exists on the job front, it's craigslist. Craiglist is particular good for helping college students find jobs, and also is job-source extraordinar for the wired elite, which in a way were both unmet needs in the marketplace. Craigslist is worth watching as a disruptor because they have staked out turf by helping some people get jobs done that traditional classified advertising wasn't doing, but going back the quote above, craigslist disruption is not an immediate phenomenon. Craigslist has done more to expand the market (with the possible exception of the Bay Area) than to take business away from newspapers.

We in the media tend to get all hyped up about things that much of mainstream America just hasn't discovered yet, such as Craigslist and blogs.

Craigslist is also tapping unmet needs in the housing market by making it easier for wired, but lower socio-economic people (i.e., college students and recent grads) find housing in a way that better suits their needs, primarily because the housing ads in craigslist are less formal and more friendly. Or at least that's my read on it.

Craigslist also succeeds because it is a social networking site. This may be where it is the biggest threat to newspapers, which is a topic I'll get back to.

Another oft-cited disrupter is Ebay. Ebay has also filled a big unmet need -- creating a way for people to sell single items cheaply to a global market. This has an enabled a whole industry to blossom -- people who make their living selling lots of stuff on Ebay. While classified managers often look at Ebay and bemoan the loss of business to the auction house, typically most of what is sold on Ebay never would have made it to liner columns anyway. Ebay has expanded the market at an explosive rate, but whatever business Ebay has taken from newspapers has been marginal (at least on marketplace items). Of more concern is the growth of Ebay Motors, which points the way, potentially, for further encroachment on newspaper classifieds from what is now a well funded challenger with huge market share. That said, I think there is an opportunity for newspapers to leverage Ebay's success by becoming affiliates. If you can't beat 'um (and you can't beat Ebay) join 'um.

I'm not so enthusiastic for a-joinin' 'um when it comes to Google AdWords, another digital innovation that is often looked at as disruptive to newspapers.

Here's my problem with AdWords and AdSense -- Google retains the relationship with the advertiser, not the newspaper. Also, when newspaper Web sites drop the AdWords JavaScript on their pages, even if they're getting 70 percent of the revenue, they are still extending Google's already sizable market reach and helping the strong get stronger. As a competitor to newspapers, Google is quite strong enough without us helping them grow. (Of course, I use AdWords on HowardOwens.com -- why not? It's quick, easy and as a small publisher, I don't have the options afforded bigger players).

Clickable text ads are great, and every newspaper Web site in the world should have PPC ads, and if there were not alternatives to Google, and I don't mean just Overture, then I would say, "go for it." But there are alternatives. One of the strongest is Quigo, which many newspaper companies now use.

But how disruptive is AdWords? I would say, right now, not very. As I point out, AdWords hasn't caught on with locally owned small businesses. But that doesn't mean that it won't. Google continues to modify and improve what it offers advertisers, and small advertisers won't remain dense forever. Meanwhile, AdWords and AdSense continue to generate gobs of cash for Google, which pays for day-after-day innovation and invention. Google is a major threat to all media.

The last disruptor to talk about in this post is social media, such as MySpace and Facebook.

Newspaper executives should ask themselves every day, "Why didn't we build a great search engine?" Or, "Why didn't we create a great auction site?" Or "Why didn't we come up with a better, Web-centric classified model sooner?" But more than anything, newspaper executives need to ask themselves -- how did we miss the boat on social networking?

Of all the most obvious paths for newspapers to pursue, helping people connect with other people was far and away the most obvious. I've felt this way since 1995, when I got my first AOL account and plugged into the writers community. I immediately saw the connection between what newspapers do -- binding communities together -- and what digital communications could do.

Among the articles on disruption I've read recently is one detailing the history of Knight-Ridder's digital efforts. In the late 1970s, KR pioneered Videotex. In a 2003 HBR article by Clark Gilbert is a quote form Bob Ingle, executive editor of the Mercury News, that is as enlightening as it is depressing:

We lost $50 million on videotex. We recognized the potential threat to our newspapers in 1978, launched, but found out that most of the user activity was not around the newspaper content at all. People were using the product more for e-mail, bulletin board discussions, and games than they were using it like a newspaper. This was no so compelling to the company because we were looking for newspaper ramifications and they weren't there. So in 1986, we shut it down.

A more nimble company would have recognized the opportunity.

Of all the disruptors, social networking is the one that cuts the closest to the heart of the newspaper franchise -- being the hub that holds communities together.

When newspapers stopped focusing on the communities they served, and instead starting paying more attention to big-J journalism, they lost a valuable part of their business model. Big-J journalism has its place and was an important development in the history of mass communications, but it isn't what sells newspapers. People, community, connections is what sells newspapers, or any medium.

Sure, threats to classified revenue are worrisome, and we don't want to see retail dollars slip to Yahoo! or Google, but revenue begins with people -- people who make your brand a habit, whether online or in print. When a MySpace or a craigslist or a Yahoo! Groups becomes a habit for a reader of any age, newspapers have lost another battle.

So where are the opportunities? In social networking, first off. In user-generated content. In multimedia (newspapers can disrupt television). In directories (newspapers can disrupt phone books). And the battle is not lost on the classified front, by any means. Newspapers just need to fight hard. The digital era is one big ball of opportunities for newspapers willing to invest, think strategically and find the best course of action.

Wow -- KCRW has purchased the Google keywords "Howard Owens."

I Googled myself because I was curious if Google still crawls howardowens.com, since I had shut the site down for so many months (it does), and noticed the AdWords ad on the right. Hey, KCRW, you're welcome to place an ad directly on my site, if you're so interested!

They also purchased Matt Welch, and Ken Layne has two ads on his search. Maybe I'm not so special after all.

Important article from Forbes on local search.

Google itself isn't even making the most of the local-search market share it has. About 25% of all Google searches are local, but only about 10% of Google's ad revenue--about $220 million in its last quarter--comes from ads generated through local searches, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

Do a query on Google for your local community, i.e. "Springfield," and look at the AdWords ads returned. You'll see plenty of results for travel and real estate, but not much else. If any of the ads were placed by locally owned and operated businesses, they will most likely be Realtors. Now append that search with something like "plumbers" or "insurance" or "restaurant," you are not likely to see any local results (though plenty of out of market results, including start ups going after directory business).

Local search advocates need to address these twin challenges: While we in the media and marketing get keyword advertising, the concept really hasn't penetrated popular small business culture yet, and even for those small businesses that know about it, they don't get it. I've run a small business and dealt with many small business owners and there is a common trait among small business owners -- they are all too busy to want to worry about self-service advertising. It's human nature -- it's hard to go outside of our comfort zones and learn something new, and doing self-service advertising, and to do it well, isn't easy. It takes work.

Of course, I think this is where local media companies will have an advantage over Google and Overture -- we can become the service agencies that help local advertisers manage their "self-service" advertising.

That's one reason this McClatchy deal is interesting.

What local media companies -- except, now, McClatchy -- need to watch out for, of course, is start ups that step in and start brokering AdWords within their own communities. That is a potential disruption waiting in the wings.

Here's another start up looking to get into local search.

The next time a Scripps or a News Corp is looking for an investment that will help them grow their businesses, they should consider a strategic acquisition of technology -- before Google grabs it. I'm thinking of Findory or this new site, Spotback. Vin Crosbie, I think, would approve.

Kodak is finding that it's transition from analog to digital is a bumpy ride. After losing $298 million last quarter, the 125-year-old company plans to lay off another 10,000 workers. That brings total projected layoffs to 37,000. However, digital sales are up 29 percent to $1.6 billion, compared to $1.26 for film-based sales.

Kodak is sometimes cited in articals on disruptive technology as an example of a company that initially stumbled when faced with a disruptive threat, but then turned it around. It doesn't look like the turnaround is quite complete yet.

Yes, HowardOwens.com is back. At least for now. At least while the mood strikes me.

I would like to think that it will strike me for a while. This time.

Blogging won't be my life like it has been at times in the past.

I have some thoughts on media on want to write about. I'll probably also share this and that about my life. Maybe one or two people will find it interesting.

Well, at least for now.

I'd been so busy that I hadn't posted for several weeks, but I was still doing a little photo blogging when I could, so I thought I would just direct all my traffic to my Buzznet site for a while.

Maybe I'll start posting again for a while ...

It didn't take LJWorld to replace Rob Curley.

Spent Sunday in Santa Clarita at the Cowboy Festival. The annual event is held on Melody Ranch, the former Gene Autry property and long-time Hollywood studio where many westerns, including Deadwood, have been shot. In fact, I walked through the doors of the Gem, not that that means much, since it's just a facade. I'll tell you, the balcony of the Gem and the Bella Union look a lot bigger on TV.

Bands seen: Wylie and the Wild West, the Sons of the San Joaquin, and Whit Smith and the Hot Jazz Caravan.

All were excellent -- Wylie is particularly entertaining -- but Whit Smith stole the show, and he was the one I really wanted to see. Whit is the guitarist formerly of Hot Club of Cowtown. Since the Caravan is a new band, they were a little rough, but all are outstanding musicians, so I expect they'll be putting on just about the hottest shows around before long.

Unfortunately, no pictures from Melody Ranch. They have this inexplicable and insane policy of banning cameras. I would have used my camera phone for a couple of shots anyway, but the battery was going dead.

We did meet an old-timer on a back road near a black wooden barn who said he worked the ranch before Autry's widow sold it. He claims to know where Autry's horse Champion is buried, and he took us to the spot. The old guy had a camera with him. He said he didn't care about no no-camera policy. They could kick him off the property if they liked. He doesn't particularly like the new owners, whom he claims kept a desk Gene had given him.

Kim Komando addresses the proliferation of online gaming, the WTO and the Justice Department ...

Since 2002, the DOJ has pressured media companies to pull ads for online gambling. Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio company, stopped airing ads for online casinos that year. Other mainstream media companies have followed suit.

If you ever wonder, however, about all of the online poker commercials you see, you'll notice that what they're advertising are "play money" games. Poker Stars, for example, runs ads for PokerStars.Net, which is an entirely play money site. The real money site is PokerStars.com. A pretty slick way of getting around any real or preceived government prohibition on gambling ads.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone contributes another chit to the poker hype machine.

Associate Press is planning to charge its local members -- members who already pay high membership fees -- to publish AP news on its Web sites.

I met a couple of AP execs this week and I spoke with one of them about this plan -- where's the ROI was my question, especially when Yahoo! is already consuming all of APs feeds? The first response was along the lines of the huge fees Yahoo! pays for its feeds and how that helps keep members' costs down.  OK, but how does that help a local news site if Yahoo!'s position of the feeds (along with a host of other Web sites) totally devalues the content?

AP does very little to drive page views for local news sites, so what does AP think it's providing that is worth paying for?

A pair of my bosses, Bob Benz and Mike Phillips, have floated an idea on OJR to create an open-source news cooperative. Commenters on the article have pointed out some potential pitfalls, but considering the alternative -- paying AP for content that has no real value -- a news co-op seems pretty attractive.