Dadblog

"The yuppification of the UK occurred pretty much on course with our own, but the Brits were still left with a salt-of-the-earth underclass. As a class-bound society, they accept their lower class (after all, without a lower class, they couldn’t be a class society), even mythologize it."

"Channel 4 has more nominations than any other TV network for this year's Royal Television Society programme awards, with 20 for shows including The Devil's Whore and The Sunday Night Project." Kapow!

""Everything in the middle [between aggregation and high quality] will die away and you're going to see that in every industry, which is why we're launching a big glossy magazine in the middle of a recession," he says."

"In remarks featured in the latest edition of the RTS magazine, Television, out today, Bland also said: "The idea that Channel 4 has a right to exist for ever, or indeed the ability to exist for ever, just flies in the face of the way the market's changing. We cannot afford to maintain Channel 4 with its public service remit in its historic form … The moment has come for privatisation of Channel 4.""

"The broadcaster also said it is seeking to sell social networking website Friends Reunited and online business directory Scoot. It will scale back regional web TV service ITV Local, which will no longer operate as a standalone business, and is also "considering options" for Freeview multiplex business SDN." Bonfire of the Strategies

"George’s theory is that IP networks are to the 21st century what railroads were to the 19th. Over the last six months the CCIE numbers have been steadily going down. Last August the U.S. CCIE number went down by one. The last report in January the number of U.S. CCIE’s grew by eight. Over the last 50 or so days the number has grown by 83 new CCIEs in the U.S. Is this a change in trend? Are the markets starting to bottom? With all of the bad news in the press, you have to want to be a contrarianIf this were the Dow Theory, then the prediction would be that companies are creating more CCIE’s in anticipation of expansion and adding new networks. "

"The point: it takes orders of magnitude more time to do the copyright clearances than it does to create the work. Think about it — it could well have taken azz10 15 minutes to synch up these tracks on Songsmith — and easily 10 or 100 times more work would be required to do so in compliance with copyright law. That is an absurd state of affairs. Multiply the waste involved by 100,000 for each of the Songsmith videos posted on Youtube. And then mulitply that by 1,000,000, for each of the Songsmith videos created and not posted on Youtube. That's what I mean by a failure to scale. This is, remember, all supposed to be about encouraging creative work. In the old days, with a (much) smaller number of relevant events needing copyright protection, the ratio of creative work to law-compliance work may have been reasonable. But it is reasonable no longer."

"So here's a chink of light. February 2009 wasn't nearly as dreadful as it could have been. A lot of sites struck traffic records — including io9, Gawker, Deadspin, Jalopnik and Jezebel. In total, we drew 297m pageviews — some 34% over last February's level and 50% up if you account for the sites we spun off in the meantime. Comments — so much improved in the last year — grew even more rapidly. Now that Defamer has been consolidated under Gawker, we don't have a single weak site. And I'm not even going to tell you how much our ad revenues were up in February. Because that rate of growth is in part a statistical fluke. For the year to March, it looks like we could be as much as a fifth up over last winter."

This is the perfect Daily Mail article. I've been meaning to blog about it but can't summon the energy.

"The Communication Workers' Union has hired the US company behind Barack Obama's successful email recruitment campaign for the presidency to advise it in its fight against the government's plans to partly privatise the Royal Mail. Blue State Digital, which has staff in London, has met leaders of the CWU several times in recent months and will be advising the union on online campaigning, including instant communication with supporters and online petitioning against the plans."

"McLuhan: No, and so the only alternative is to understand everything that's going on, and then neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and frustrate them as much as you can. I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."

"Starting mid-day on Monday, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include "cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the 'SoHo of Brooklyn.'" Each site will be helmed by a writer/editor from the paper, a Times official told us, but will draw upon contributors from the neighborhood as well as some free labor from the CUNY journalism program. Readers will be able to post everything from short films to wedding announcements, and a map-based real estate listings section will tie back to the Times' main real estate site."

"At 77, I believe that Rupert Murdoch is about 30 years from "retirement", and the job of deputy is still rather a claustrophobic task, albeit handsomely remunerated. The signs from the UK, which could be misleading, are that neither James nor Elisabeth look like budging. That's again not surprising in a family business. But perhaps this time it really does signal a significant change."

"People go to your home page not to find stories to read, but to harvest headlines on the off chance one or two of them will be of sufficient interest for a click. That's one reason newspaper.coms are foolish to let aggregation sites such as Topix display all of their headlines and leads.
Topix is in the business of creating a substitute home page for your community news. By aggregating all of your content, as well as other media covering your town, they are aiming to create an experience for users that says, "You don't need to visit all of these other sites. We're all you need. We've got all of the headlines (which you will only scan) and free classifieds, to boot (not that Topix free classifieds seem to get much traction). At GateHouse Media we asked Topix to stop aggregating our content because we couldn't figure out what value we derived from Topix trying to steal our audience."

"The FT.com website now has 109,609 subscribers, up 9% on last year, while almost 1 million people have registered personal details to gain access to more articles free of charge."

"Mr Johnson is understood to have held talks with BT last year about a tie-up, although the option was shelved because Channel 4 favoured a link-up with BBC Worldwide. But it now appears both BT and Channel 4 are re-evaluating the possibility of merging BT Vision and Channel 4. It is believed that the Government also sees logic in such a tie-up, although a tie-up with BBC Worldwide still remains high on its agenda."