Howard Owens

I'm in Los Angeles for Media Center's Mobile Media conference. I've been shooting a little video over the last two days. The camera is my $85 special, but some of the frames are worthwhile. Take a look.

Temple Stark is hosting podcasts ... here.

Are some hitters more lucky than others? Well, with a tool like BABIP , you can figure out who is just getting lucky (or unlucky) and who is getting expected results.

Well, world, another podcast from howardowens.com is on the server (RSS). In this one, I talk about my fantasy baseball team and poker and then chat with Miss Billie about the Pope, Prince Charles, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie. And of course, Miss Billie has some helpful advice for the ladies.

Here we go again ... a third podcast. This time we cover the travails of my laptop, the travails of the San Diego Padres and wrap up with a little more rockabilly and another installment of Miss Billie's helpful hints. RSS.

OK, the second podcast is up. This time my wife participates. We talk about David Shaw's LAT piece on bloggers and confidential source and the movie "Million Dollar Baby" (spoiler alert!). Here's the MP3 link and here's the RSS link.

LAT media critic makes a fool of himself, and Matt Welch is there to shine a light on him sentence by idiotic sentence. Robert Fisk has been rebutted less thoroughly. I really have nothing to add. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Something I've thought about before, and Businesspundit is now suggesting -- the creation of a .blog top-level domain. Makes sense to me. I'm not sure I would register howardowens.blog, but I might.

If you have ever been a record collector, you may have found yourself at some point staring and the label, and your eye wondered to the outer ring where some scribbles caught your eye -- this was the rare practice of LP graffiti. Here's an example on my Buzznet site.

I lied. I did create an RSS feed for my new podcast. Here it is. Will it stay? Will I populate it regularly? Who knows?

I lied on my first podcast. This is just an experiment. I wanted to see if I could do it. And, you know, what? I can. Here it is.

Don't be surprised if I do it again. Don't be surprised if I don't. I imagine I will. It's fun.

Oh, I also lied about the echo ... sounds fine to me. It sounded more echoie in the headphones. Sounds fine listening to it now.

UPDATE: Oops, looks like I lied again. I'm using Icerocket to create my RSS feed, and Ipodder doesn't recognize it is a valid podcast RSS feed, and looking at it, I can see why. The "link" element isn't really a link element, but cdata, which sucks. I can't really have a podcast without a proper RSS feed, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

SECOND UPDATE: So I ran the Icerocket RSS feed through FeedBurner and came up with this feed that actually seems to work with iPodder (it's the whole enclosure thing), so see if this works better for you.

AFP sued. Google blinked.

The first shot of the counter revolution has been fired.

The Topix deal not withstanding, AFP's seeming victory may embolden other media companies to take a stand against the aggregators, especially those such as Google News, Topix and Moreover that don't pay licensing fees (as far as I know, Yahoo! forks over big bucks to the wire services included in Yahoo! News, but none of the others do, as far as I know.)

A few days ago, I was laughing at AFP for not "getting it." I'm reconsidering my elitist sneer.

A pure aggregator, meaning a site that does nothing more than provide links and headlines, is building a business model on the original content of other companies -- companies that often make big investments in the gathering and dissemination of information. Is it really fair for big corporations, such as Google, to take market share from other businesses and give nothing back?

You might argue that Google generates that ever sought-after commodity called traffic, but depending on the site, much of that traffic may be unwanted bandwidth-sucking leeches. If the traffic isn't part of the target audience, the audience the news site can use to generate revenue, such as a local news site looking for a local audience, then Google isn't doing the site any favors.

Maybe it's time for big media companies to say "enough is enough. The free ride is over."

The aggregators do dilute a media company's ability to derive revenue from its product.

Is it unfair for media companies to expect the aggregates to pay a licensing fee to original content companies? I vote for a pay-per-click model.

Of course, media companies that stand up to Google may find themselves in a similar fight with other media companies. Think: branded RSS readers. There's a growing trend there, and you can't exactly expect to include another company's feed in your reader if you're demanding licensing fees from the aggregators. At the same time, I can answer my own counter argument: If you're a media company putting an RSS feed out there, you're just asking for it to be consumed, so what copyright protections do you deserve then? Steve Yelvington has dealt with this issue previously. It's not an easy question to answer. Yet.

So where does this leave citizen journalism?

Try, fair use. It's perfectly acceptable for a blogger to deep link to a news story (AFP or otherwise) and comment on it. The blogger is creating an original derivative work. I don't expect that practice to ever be seriously challenged. Hell, smart media companies realize that is exactly the kind of attention they want.

For all the bloggers defending Google, they might want to think about where they would be without big media creating the content they love to disparage. Good reporting, hell, even bad reporting, takes money to produce. Media companies deserve the same opportunity as anybody else to derive a profit from the fruits of their labor. The non-licensing aggregators do pose a threat to media revenue models.

One final point that needs to be made -- AFP is a little different from many of the media companies included in Google News. AFP is a wire service. It sells its stories to customers, and Google was able gather AFP links from AFP's customers, thereby diluting the overall value of AFP content to potential future customers. Also, it's safe to assume that Google competitor Yahoo! is paying AFP to publish its stories. So the stakes are a little higher for AFP than many other media companies. You might argue that AFP could tell its customers to block Google's robot (with a robot.txt), but what if an AFP customer doesn't completely comply? What is AFP going to do, start suing its customers? I don't think so. The only option was to go after Google.

Noir fans, laophiles, mystery fans and just plain anybody fasincated by bloody crime will want to check out the 1947Project, a blog that takes you through that that post-war year crime-by-sordid-crime. (h/t LAObserved).

Remember the days when office conversations began with, "Did you see Seinfeld last night?"

Around my office, at least among the people I chat with socially, conversations are more likely to begin with, "Have you watched Deadwood yet?"

Call it the TiVo Effect.

If you're a consumer, remember, Hollywood hates you.

Broadband Directions lays out evidence that digital video is on the verge of massive, disruptive growth. (Via Digital Journalist). For related posts, go here and here.

This is the kind of future media companies need to prepare for:

What happens when you have 100 megabits per second connections on the edge of the network? In your homes, or in your pockets, or in your cars -- an always-on 100 megabit per second pipe that wirelessly networks your life. No, we are not talking about fast pipes to the Internet, but simple easy networks all around you.

. . .

So what does this all mean? Put another way, what are the implications when millions of people start creating ad-hoc wireless networks among themselves? Well, if you zoom out to look at the big picture, the most obvious implication is the rise of truly distributed peer2peer networks randomly and serendipitously popping up in meet space that have absolutely no central points of control.

Imagine high school kids and college students all over the world sharing anything and everything that is digital every time they meet up, directly with one another. And as we know, whatever the kids do first is likely to be the future for the nearly billion others who will be similarly equipped.

What we're talking about here is a bandwidth explosion on the edge, where the infrastructure will be funded and built by the people, for the people . . . all without any central planning or capital outlays by the Internet access duopoly of cable and telcos. And the realization of such bandwidth nirvana by way of grass-roots deployment will lead to "social computing" in the truest sense.

We're talking next year, my friends, not 10 years from now, or so this post suggests.

I love what Jon Stewart did to Barry Bonds tonight ...

We're going to talk little bit about baseball. By way of an apology, Barry Bonds, star slugger for the San Francisco Giants, is having a bit of a rough off season. He had surgery on his knee last week and as you know he's suspected of steroid use, which he's never actually denied, but a woman last week claiming that he was his mistress for nine years has just testified under oath that Barry said he had been taking steroids since 2000. So it's really starting to pile up on him and yesterday he held an impromptu press conference to take some accountability and put the blame for his troubles where it belonged.

[Cut to Bonds]

Bonds: You guys wanted to hurt me badly enough. You finally got there.

Reporter off camera: You say you guys. Who do you mean.

Bonds: You. You. You. You. The media. Everybody

[Cut to Stewart] Sorry. And I am sorry. I do take responsibility. I do remember, this was years ago, when I saw Barry Bonds for the first time and I remember saying to him, "You're skinny. And very weak. You might want to do a little (mimes sticking a needle in his arm)." So I do take responsibility for convincing him to do steroids for long, long time. And about having a mistress, again, I should never have begged him to fuck someone outside of his marriage.

And that about sums up the problem with Barry Bonds. Selfish. Arrogant. Clueless.

Here's a couple of things on radio and podcasts:

Chris Anderson has a wide-ranging post on how long-tail economics and digital evolutions are changing radio.

The Boston Globe reveals some of the challenges of podcasting, such as lack of professionalism, no revenue stream, small audiences, and though it can be done cheaply, it ain't free for the content producers. Of course, some of those bugs could be considered features. One of the charms of podcasts is its unmanaged sense of real people opening the doors of their lives to anyone who cares to listen. Something Newsweek doesn't seem to get. It's new podcast is really just NPR-light. It's slick and professional, but lacks personality. It's a test: Is there a future for corporate podcasts? Of course, the good news is that a big media company is showing enough gumption to experiment with a media concept that 95 percent of the populace knows nothing about.

If you like The Daily Show, then you'll like this site, especially if you don't have TiVo, or otherwise miss episodes from time to time. And kudos to Comedy Central for allowing this kind of viral marketing to advance unhindered.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like Comedy Central might have forced the site down. Maybe. And if you follow the link to Lost Remote, I've left a couple of thoughts in the comments.

There was a time when this blog got 600 visitors per day. These days, excluding Google referrers, we do well to get 20, which is why I found Susan Mernit's post on growing blog traffic rather timely.

Let's see how I stack up:

• Post consistently (fail ... I sometimes go a week between posts ... just too busy, and sometimes I'd rather play poker)
• Post in the morning (fail ... I'm not a morning person and if I'm up early, I often feel compelled to get to work as early as I can)
• Post frequently (fail ... but only slightly ... I don't post from work and won't, but often on days I do post, I post several posts)
• Write what interests you (pass ... that's all I do ... less politics these days, because I have less interest in politics right now ... what fascinates me is how media is changing)
• Share and give credit: (pass ... look at my blog roll ... and I often link to other bloggers ... can't say I'm getting many of those same bloggers to link to me, thought)
• Have a point of view (pass ... and least I think I have a POV)
• Listen (pass ... I think I do this all the time ... I'm interested in lots of stuff and what a lot of people have to say about all of those things)
• Have fun (pass ... of course, or else, why blog?)

But another way of looking at Mernit's post is what it means for online news sites. Many of those same points of advice would serve well any MSM site -- post consistently, often with items of interest and share and give credit -- be part of the conversation, not over it. And always have fun!

Wil Wheaton shares some interesting thoughts about blogging and how it works for him, and quotes a Salon piece on celebrity blogging:

There are as many different types of celebrity blogs as there are celebrities: We have blogs from celebrities who have fallen out of the spotlight and who want back in, at least in some marginal way (Rosie O'Donnell); blogs from celebrities who are too big to need blogs but who still maintain them, at least in some cursory faction, to maintain the illusion of intimacy with their fans ( Gwen Stefani ); blogs from celebrities who actually seem to enjoy recording their thoughts about mundane day-to-day activities and manage to do it in a conversational, entertaining way ( Moby ); blogs from celebrities who feel strangely compelled to lecture us on the meaning of the universe ( Fred Durst ); blogs from celebrities who feel strongly about politics ( Barbra Streisand ); and, most fascinating -- and most readable -- of all, a blog from an actor whom few of us have thought much about in recent years but who has become a kind of touchstone for many people in the readersphere who are simply attempting to do what they want to do with their lives and finding it more difficult than they ever imagined ( Wil Wheaton, who appeared in "Stand by Me" as a child actor and in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as a teenager, and then seemingly dropped off the Earth's surface).

My rules for blogging have long been (not that I follow them), update frequently, write what you know (a.k.a. have a niche, or as Susan Mernit says, a POV), and write with a personal voice. Wheaton nails the personal voice/POV part of it.

One of the problems I find with many journalists who enter blogging without first fully absorbing the culture is that they don't get the personal POV part, the need to be personal. For anybody steeped in a journalistic sense of media (whether they've ever actually been a journalist), I think it's very hard for them to get personal and too highly value the veneer of objectivity. They won't write about their cats or their car break downs or their night out at a great restaurant. They focus too much on the facts, on the reporting, and not enough on themselves. Hell, I probably write less about myself than I should. One of the strengths of blogs is the chance to get to know another human being, which is one reason I've never been a big fan of group blogs. When you know somebody -- not just his views, but all of the personal detritus that goes along with living in a tumultuous world -- it gives the things he has to say on issues of importance a seeming greater credibility. Or so I think. That's my experience, at least. If you're going to blog, you need to learn how to loosen the tie and open a vein.

Now you can time-shift AM and FM radio broadcasts. Now you can record Rush Limbaugh or your favorite Air America show, or maybe a baseball game and listen to it on your iPod at your convienence. It's almost as if commercial radio can compete with podcasting without doing a thing.

It was an alarm-clock Saturday morning after a late night Friday LA blogger party, not that I had to greet morning's first rays ... I just had to get up and drive out to Moorpark for a CNPA-sponsored event for high school journalists.

My portion of the program was on media convergence. The keynote speaker was LAT reporter Chris Reynolds. He gave a great talk, but what was most interesting was in our chat afterward, was how much our lives have crossed without ever intersecting until now. In the late 1970s, while he was a student at Patrick Henry High School, I was a student at neighboring Grossmont. He went to work the San Diego Union and covered Santee. A few years later, I covered Santee for the Daily Californian. His father was journalism professor at Grossmont College. A few of my pals, including Buddy Blue and Barry Jantz, went through that program. Both Chris and I eventually moved to Ventura for media jobs.

Among Reynolds' anecdotes was about how in journalism good luck can become bad luck and sometimes come back around to good luck again. When he was a reporter at the Union, he read a story one morning about how the high court had ruled that police did not need a search warrant to go through people's garbage when it was parked on the public curb waiting for pick up. He happened to know where police chief (now sheriff) Bill Kolendar lived. Reynolds reasoned: If it's OK for the police to go through my garbage, than it must be OK for me to go through police garbage.

After pitching his editor, Reynolds ran the story past the corporate attorney who saw no legal problems.

One morning at 4 a.m., Reynolds piled three bags of Kolendar's refuse in the back of his Datsun and drove to Balboa park to sift through the chief's discarded mail, credit card bills and Weight Watchers cartons. It was one of those stories, Reynolds noted, that just falls into your lap. The "garbology" expert he found to comment on his findings only made the story better.

With the story nearly written, Reynolds knew he needed to call Kolendar for comment, but at about this time he remembered that Editor-in-Chief Gerry Warren was friends with the top cop and he suggested that his A.C.E. give Warren fair warning. Warren's first words were, "Not in my newspaper." The story was killed.

Now, for the rest of the story. About 18 months later, Reynolds interviewed for a spot on the LAT's Ventura staff. In the group interview, one of the editors asked Reynolds if he had ever had a story spiked and why, so Reynolds told the tale of Kolendar's garbage and Warren's cronyism. The story so entertained the LAT editors that Reynolds interview was a breeze the rest of the way, and he got a better job for more money at a larger paper.

Speaking of the LAT, last night I met Rob Barrett, the new GM for interactive at the Times. Barrett's wife is Ruth Shalit (picture).

Barrett strikes me as exceptionally intelligent man, though shy. He's just starting at the Times and indicates he has a new level of authority to make changes, so it will be interesting to see what he does with the site.

Thanks to Brian Linse for letting us invade his home, and to Jackie Danicki for the invite

More pictures from the bash on Buzznet.

UPDATE: Cathy and Jackie have more on the party.

Dan Gillmor posts a fairly compelling argument that there is a gathering storm to ensure bloggers are not defined as journalists. H.R. 581 is worrisome, but some commenters refuse to sing along with the chorus that Apple's favorable "Think Secret" ruling is a threat to free speech or bloggers.

Steve, for example:

I also fail to see what's wrong with Apple's suit. Calling Think Secret a blog is a bit of a stretch, for one thing - it's just a commercial website selling advertising space, period. And if they knowingly solicited Apple employees or other NDA-covered persons to break their NDA's, then that is against the law. Apple isn't even suing for damages from what I understand, they are just suing to get the names of their own employees who have broken their NDA's. That sounds like normal business to me - the NDA's don't mean anything if they can't be enforced (including discovery). How'd you like it if a commercial operation like Think Secret posted your personal information, and you had no recourse to find out at least how they got it?

Good point. If you're going to have NDA's, they have to mean something. Now, you could make an argument that open source development is a smarter business model than a world of NDAs and encrypted business plans, but is it the blogosphere's or a journalist's place to force companies to reveal its trade secrets?

There is a certain journalistic hubris that equates the need for open government with full disclosure by private enterprise. The two do not equate. We are the government, and the people have a right to know everything about its government. Businesses are sovereign, even publicly traded companies. They have a right to keep secrets, just as any private individual has a right to keep secrets.

Again, you may not like NDAs, but NDAs are legally binding contracts. Companies that choose to use NDAs should have the right to enforce them. This isn't a threat to free speech. It's a threat to innovation, unless you believe that the only way to innovate is to do so through open source, and I think that's a coin toss. There is a compelling argument to be made that  private enterprise will have little incentive to innovate if businesses can't maintain the competitive advantage of deploying a new product when its ready for market, which means competitors must play catch up. A world where Apple can't keep secrets is a world where Apple can't innovate. I prefer a world where Apple can innovate.

One thing I've wondered about with IPTV is will it be the domain of big corporations setting the viewing agenda for customers, or will (like the Internet itself) empower users to seek out content of interest and need. In other words, I could see SBC limiting content choices to the offerings available only from other big corporations.

The following graph from this Fortune article doesn't completely answer the question, but it does offer a glimpse of how IPTV will work ... search as a content drive, which I take to me access to ALL media content on the Net, including stuff you and I might make ... death of the channel/content is king:

Enabling users to mix and match video and data to suit their needs is where SBC partner Yahoo comes in. The pair are developing a special onscreen guide that directs users to TV programs, movies, and select online content such as photos and music. As viewing options proliferate, Yahoo will have a key role in helping consumers manage their IPTV experience. "I'm not so sure that in a world of unlimited channels we'll actually sit there with a clicker," says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel. "How does Yahoo help? It's called search."

If SBC means to only try to recreate what cable offers now, just using broadband to deliver programing, then SBC really has nothing and it will fail. However, if they can offer user empowerment in a manner that even goes beyond what a cable/dvr marriage offers now, it could be a hit, especially if the goal isn't to convince people to switch from cable/satellite to IPTV, but to use Internet-powered set top boxes to supplement existing options. Supplement, not supplant.

Then, when I read stuff like this, I think maybe SBC doesn't get it ... doesn't get the incredible business advantage it can gain by smart use of the broadband technology it can deliver to consumers:

Third, the technology for IPTV has already been proven to work and is in use in Hong Kong, Canada, and even some small pockets of the U.S. In Hong Kong, where PCCW launched IPTV more than a year ago, about 400,000 homes have signed up for the service, which offers 12 channels -- all other programming is sold a la carte. However, it hasn't been without its glitches, and one of the demonstrations in SBC's suite at the electronics show seemed a bit slow, as if too many software programs were running at once. Certainly SBC, which doesn't even have a customer trial running yet (the first is planned for this summer), can ill afford the kinds of mistakes that plagued its early rollout of DSL.

Now comes the hard part. It's not regulation or technology that worries Wall Street; it's the need to fill the new system with shows that people want to watch. "You can always get the service to work," says Rich Nespola, CEO of the Management Network Group, a telecom consultancy. "The question is whether any telco can negotiate successfully with the entertainment industry."

Is SBC seriously thinking that it needs to be the one delivering the content, a content provider, like an old-fashioned channel? As far as I'm concerned, the only thing SBC needs to do is deliver the box and open the channel. The Net will take care of the content.

Do you download a dinosaur blog?

I'll be on a panel in June on capturing the youth market -- the holy grail of the news business's quest for growth -- and I'll be there as a dissenter. My basic theme: Pay attention to your local market and improve the quality and diversity of content and services. There's too much hand wringing in our industry about the youth market, and not enough attention paid to where the entire user experience is heading. However, when it comes to youth, one thing is clear: mobility is key. My bet is that most of this generation will never own a landline, a component-based stereo system, a non-IP-enabled entertainment center, or subscribe to a newspaper. But as they grow older, the same issues that drive young adults to get more involved in the civicscape (kids, schools, environment, taxation, utility bills) will turn them increasingly into news consumers, local news consumers. It's inevitable, if the news is delivered in a way they find convenient, personalized and empowering. The key isn't to tap the youth market today, but to be ready for them tomorrow. I think.

Chris Anderson offers 10 reasons why radio is hosed.

Ian Brill points out that The Lone Gunmen is now out on DVD. My question: Does include the episode about terrorists attempting to digitally hijack a passenger plane and fly it into one of the twin towers? Based on what I'm reading in the Amazon reviews, apparently not.

When American Idol got down to 24 contestants, I picked my top 10, predicting that the winner would come from that 10. Idol is now down to 12, and my top 8 all made it through.

Now, I'll pick my top six:

1. Anwar Robinson
2. Nadia Turner
3. Jessica Sierra
4. Bo Bice
5. Constantine Maroulis
6. Anthony Fedorov

You'll notice that there are some names here that didn't make my previous top 10. One thing about Idol, as the competition goes on, some performers pick up the pace and find new depths to their talents, and others succomb to the pressue. Robinson and Turner were good from the beginning, and Bice and Sierra have really shown the most improvement. Maroulis has stumbled badly, but I still see a lot of potential there and wouldn't be surprised if he found his feet again. My dark horse pick is Scott Savol. Carrie Underwood has an incredible voice, and is beatiful and charming, but lacks emotional depth. She doesn't know how to pick good songs.

My prediction -- the eventual winner will come from that top six ... technically, if you combined my previous prediction with this one, you're left with Robinson, Turner, Maroulis and Fedorov.