Margin Notes: India, Ice Cream, A-Rod, Ross

The Parade for India's Independence Day in Toronto, Ontario took place on 14-August-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I was pretty sure I wasn't going to have trouble finding something to do between two Heritage Toronto walks held yesterday in downtown Toronto, and I was right. Figuring that something would be going on at Yonge-Dundas Square, I stumbled upon the parade for India's Independence Day heading down Dundas Street. A good smattering of India's states had representative floats, and a wide variety of music was played. In some sense, the event was one day early, as the holiday is normally celebrated on 15-August, today.

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An ice cream truck sat right across the street from my residence on the afternoon of 6-August-2010

Sometimes, I walk all over Toronto to come up with photos used on this blog, but all I had to do was look out the window recently. There's a daycare facility in the next block along Jane Street, and they apparently arranged to have an ice cream truck come in the afternoon--they had him park right across from my residence and brought the kids out the back and down an alley to the truck. It was very tough to stay inside after I saw that.

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One of the enticing things about the ice cream truck is the music it plays as it approaches. While that music does not come from Muzak, it has been compared with that variety of generic music that comes from the company of that name. What I did not learn until recently is that the end of the company name was derived from "Kodak," basically because Muzak inventor Major General George O. Squier thought it was a cool name.

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A lot of people thought that "A-Rod" was a cool nickname for Alex Rodriguez to the point that pretty much nobody uses his real name anymore. I was asked if I was going to write anything about A-Rod after his recent attainment of 600 career home runs, but frankly while I remember watching many baseball stars in my life, I don't have any notable memories of A-Rod despite seeing him many times in his early career with the Seattle Mariners. That seems to be the plight of the shortstop (A-Rod only became a third baseman upon going to the Yankees)--the good ones just are more reliable than flamboyant, more clutch than memorable.

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A-Rod left Seattle and eventually found his way to New York, but broadcaster Dave Ross did the opposite. As an update to this post on his disappearing podcast, it should be noted that WCBS has quietly restored the podcasts it had taken away, with the Dave Ross commentary here. WBZ still hasn't followed suit. Meanwhile, I have to say it's very weird to hear Ross doing the voice work on Duxiana ads running on ABC affiliate KGO in San Francisco--Ross is clearly identified with CBS.

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As one final radio note, satirist Harry Shearer has brilliantly picked up on the story about National Public Radio becoming simply NPR, resulting in this report.

Media: No Podcast, Forget It

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)'s radio division in the United States, which has gone by a variety of names in recent decades, has had a poor history with the Internet. When the reviled Mel Karmazin, now CEO of Sirius XM, was running CBS radio under the Infinity name, he stated that he would never put a CBS station in the Internet, and indeed none of the famous CBS news or music stations were available on-line.

After Karmazin moved on, all that changed. The big CBS news stations, from KCBS in San Francisco to WINS in New York, started live streams on the Internet, and so did their music stations. A few stations went all-out for podcasting, with WCBS in New York creating a variety of podcast streams, even including the CBS network's Dave Ross commentaries. Over time, a variety of CBS podcasts, from the weekly 60 Minutes and Face the Nation to the four-times-daily Osgood File, made it onto my podcast list.

The signs that trouble was coming started when The Osgood File began to feature advertising. It really didn't bother me that much, since the radio version has a minute and a half of advertising associated with it, and the podcast had only thirty (later forty-five) seconds. If that's what it takes for the podcast to continue, so be it. The information was still free, just like the radio broadcast, and it was easy to listen to at my convenience.

Then, in mid-July, the CBS-owned-and-operated news station in Boston, WBZ-AM, dropped the podcast of its Jon Keller commentaries when it revised its web site. There remained a Jon Keller blog on the web site, but the audio was no longer available as a podcast. One had to visit the web page and click on the link so that an advertisement would show in a special window as the commentary played. I e-mailed to complain and pointed out that Keller's commentary was worthwhile to me if it came as an automatically-downloaded podcast, but if I had to actively go to their web site and click around, I wasn't going to bother. Indeed, I don't know what Keller's cynical mind has contemplating since.

Today, I discovered that they've done the same thing with the network Dave Ross commentaries. The podcast is gone. The commentaries remain on the WCBS-AM web site, but one has to click on them to listen, and an ad comes first. I'm not going to bother--I might think about doing that when I'm home in the evening, but there's no way I'm going to do that while traveling and my time on the Internet is limited.

If CBS is going to stop podcasting, then I'm going to stop listening to CBS programming. There's too much quality programming out there that I can get more easily. The really annoying thing is that they already have a model for incorporating advertising--used for the Osgood File of incorporating the advertising into the podcast--that serves the same purpose of accommodating advertising. They don't need to eliminate their podcasts in order to get advertising revenue. They're making their content harder to access, and I won't be the only one that will ignore it as a result.

Some companies don't get it, and it appears that CBS is in that category again. I've spent my whole life enjoying CBS programming, but it looks like that era may be coming to an end because they're going backwards in their use of the Internet and eliminating podcasts.

Margin Notes: Autumn, Start Menu, Dr. Abdullah

Fall colors surrounded the Humber Marshes in Toronto, Ontario on the morning of 25-October-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The fall colors are now near their peak in Toronto, Ontario as seen above--unfortunately, the weather hadn't been conducive to viewing them until the skies cleared just today. If the forecast is to be believed, all the leaves might be gone before another sunny day appears here, so most people may be reduced to looking at pictures of colors from other regions on their computers.

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Some computer users are delighted that the Windows 7 operating system was released on Thursday. Leave it to the CBC's Jian Ghomeshi to point out in his "Q" monologue that the "Start Menu" has been eliminated. Ghomeshi mentioned that Microsoft had paid big money (about $10 million) to use the Rolling Stones single "Start Me Up" to promote the Start Menu. What he didn't mention--but was pointed out back in 1995 by technology talk show host Leo Laporte--is that the choice of music was especially appropriate because of the lyric "You make a grown man cry" which Windows 95 certainly did to many grown men.

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Also notable on the radio in the past week is that National Public Radio in the United States has started doing some of its hourly newscasts from NPR West in Culver City, California. Since the launch of the network, its hourly newscasts had originated in Washington, DC. In addition to the top-of-the-hour afternoon newscasts last week, the bottom of the hour newscasts from Anne Taylor during All Things Considered were also "from NPR West."

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NPR is one of several news organizations that suddenly seemed to start calling the second place finisher in the recent controversial elections in Afghanistan "Dr. Abdullah Abdullah." Previously, many of them had simply called him "Abdullah Abdullah." Is the fact that incumbent Hamid Karzai is now tainted by the rigging of the election suddenly now making it "necessary" for the media to paint Adbullah as more credible, instead of as a borderline extremist as he was originally portrayed? Personally, I had never understood why more attention had not been paid to Abdullah, the former foreign minister, in either a positive or negative light since it became clear from polling that he was the likely second-place candidate.

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I increasingly consume media whether from NPR or elsewhere through podcasts. Long-time readers of this blog may recall my lament that I could never catch up on podcasts from about a year ago. Well, for the first time I can remember since October 2007, I had a completely empty podcast directory in iTunes yesterday. It will be interesting to see how long that lasts.

Media: Why I Don't Twitter (Much)

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A friend once told me that he didn't think podcasting was such a big deal, because if you could download the files, then subscribing to a podcast was just a different interface to do something that was already possible. That was largely true for engineers like my friend and me, since we did download MP3's and other sound files of programs before podcasting had been invented. However, my answer to him was that the new interfaces available in iTunes and other programs designed for receiving podcasts were so easy that people who previously didn't know how to download files could have them automatically delivered to their computers. Indeed, podcasting has now allowed millions of people that previously would not have listened to all kinds of programming to listen at their leisure. The phenomenon even prompted me to write on this blog about people effectively becoming their own radio program directors using podcasts.

Twitter is a similar kind of advance. It was already possible to set up a mailing list to reach a group of people via e-mail (in fact, it's been possible almost since the inception of the Internet), and if those recipients had a "smart" phone, they could receive those messages on their mobile device rather than just via e-mail. (Similarly, properly equipped individuals could send to their lists from a mobile device.) Twitter just makes it orders of magnitude easier, especially from a subscriber's point of view. Managing whether one wants to "follow" the "tweets" or messages from a given person is almost trivial using the Twitter interface. The ease of use of the interface is why Twitter has become the hottest thing in technology in 2009, with even National Public Radio's 92-year old Daniel Schorr sending "tweets" (albeit reportedly with help).

Besides the interface, the other distinguishing characteristic of Twitter is that messages are limited to 140 characters. Some people consider it a challenge to write something meaningful in 140 characters, but in general I consider it hopeless. Most of the time, I probably don't provide enough context and explanation for my ideas in this blog--trying to express such ideas in 140 characters is essentially impossible. Markos Moulitsas tried about a week ago, tweeting "Geithner is starting to look like Obama's Rumsfeld." If there was every anything that needed a full essay expanding an idea, it was that one. As talk show host Dave Ross pointed out, his next tweet three hours later was "At park, my 2yo is beating up on 5yos. She doesn't take crap from anyone. My 5yo, on the other hand, gets beat up"--which clearly didn't need more explanation, but nobody outside of his family really needed to hear about.

I see the point of Twitter in following a breaking event--getting the perspective of someone watching a sporting event, for example. Tweeting that you are okay after a major earthquake might be an efficient way to avoid having to call all your friends and relatives. If following a steam train to take pictures of it, following someone tweeting the location of the train would be useful. My life simply doesn't have those kinds of events going on very often, so this blog makes much more sense as a forum to share with the world.

So, technically, I'm on Twitter. But, unless there's some sort of real-time event going on, don't expect me to be sending tweets--or following anyone. And, remember, you can subscribe to this blog using a RSS feed, if you are so inclined--that will provide far more information than following me on Twitter.