I think a good yardstick for whether I’ll be interested in what someone has to say on Twitter is whether they follow and respond to @newmediajim and/or @Scobleizer.
If they do, I’ve found I’m typically not going to be interested in anything else they have to say.
If you don’t use Twitter, I don’t expect you to have any idea what I’m talking about.
Amber is quoted several times in a Wired article about the fallout from the Elliot Spitzer story.
“Lots of people were at South by Southwest [when the Spitzer story broke] and didn’t have time to check e-mail every five minutes,” says Amber Rhea, organizer of the upcoming Sex 2.0 conference in Atlanta. “It didn’t matter. They used Twitter, text messaging — they did interviews with hardly any advance notice.”
Rhea says that for the first time, there’s a critical mass of people putting forth a concerted effort to make sure the media can’t ignore sex workers. Building on a foundation built by former sex workers of the past 30 or so years, many of whom went public with books, articles and speaking engagements after they retired, modern sex workers have the message — and the means to get it out.
Check it out!
Here’s the video we shot last night for Sex 2.0, which I think turned out great other than my camcorder not being very good at shooting anything indoors. Borderline NSFW.
The camcorder is a low end Canon ZR500. It does great outdoors or if there’s ton of light to work with, but not so much the rest of the time. I bought it basically to answer the question “do I want to make videos?” The answer is yes I do, so now I’m eying something a little higher end. The Canon HV20 looks like a good choice.
Anybody have recommendations for a high-end consumer or prosumer camcorder? Anybody have anything good or bad to say about the HV20?
DPG has a new web site. It’s noteworthy to me because it runs Drupal, which is also what the Georgia Podcast Network runs.
Y’all have any thoughts about it one way or the other?
Drupal is pretty awesome once you learn how to use it, but the learning curve is steep. We didn’t really know how to use it when we made the current version of the podcast site, and there are a lot of things about how it works that make me cringe now. If we ever get the redesign finished, I’ll write about all that once we have a nice shiny new site up and those flaws aren’t there for everybody to see.
h/t Andre for the link to the new site
Here’s something interesting from ConvergeSouth that didn’t take place in a session. Leonard Witt, a friend and Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, has posted an interview with Jason Calacanis. Calcanis founded Weblogs, Inc. (which he sold to AOL for $30 million) and is currently CEO of Mahalo. The interview is one of six that Witt will post soon about the future of journalism.
There are several noteworthy tidbits in the interview, but what I found most interesting was this statement:
If you’re going to make an online business work, it’s pretty hard to make it work if you’re getting less than 100,000 people to read it. Some of these local publications, maybe they get a couple of thousand people reading it a day, it’s hard to make a business out of that.
So, if you believe Calacanis, goodbye Neighbor Newspapers, Creative Loafing, The Sunday Paper, the Rockdale Citizen, the Gwinnett Daily Post, a couple of television and radio stations in every market, etc. etc. etc. Hello faceless conglomerate and a big fat vacuum of local information that would need to be filled by something practically for free since there’s apparently no business model.
I think that will be true for the outlets that don’t get very creative finding ways to make money outside the standard models. Let me throw a hypothetical out, and you tell me what you think.
UPS started out as a package delivery company. As they grew, their logistics systems and the required expertise to run those systems grew in size and complexity to the point that they had more advanced knowledge of supply chains than possibly any company in the world short of Wal*Mart. Somebody over there realized they could sell this knowledge to other companies as a consulting service. The unassumingly-titled UPS Consulting Services is born. For $500 per hour, UPS comes in and evaluates your supply chain, finds what’s wrong, and tells you how to fix it.
While I’m sure UPS Consulting Services is only a small part of UPS’ business, I’d bet it’s a very profitable part. It seems there’s little or no overhead other than paying the consultant who evaluates the client’s company. Even if the consultant is drawing $250,000 per year, UPS would see more than $750,000 profit from each consultant working a 40-hour week over the course of a year.
Here’s the hypothetical: would there be a way for media companies, particularly small local media companies, to package their skills as a service independent from the news-gathering process?
The difference between UPS and many media companies may be the scarcity of available expertise. If you go outside UPS, there really aren’t very many companies with that level of knowledge about supply chains in the real world. Even less are offering that knowledge as a consulting service. That scarcity is what allows UPS to charge what they do.
Most of the potential services that a media company could offer that come to mind are media conceptualizing or production services, an arena that already has plenty of competition. So they’d have to offer something extraordinary on top of those services.
Take the founders of Rocketboom, for example. They have an audience of around 1,000,000, and yet still struggle with revenue from advertising alone. How do they make real money? One way is they produce internal videos for corporations like Nokia.
What they have that’s scarce is the ability to communicate with an Internet-savvy audience. That’s probably not a good model for a long-term business, but it’s working for them in the short term.
What do small local media companies have that’s scarce enough and in demand enough to charge a premium for? Anything? Bueller?
Well, I didn’t get time to blog as it turned out. I did snap some photos, (sort of) lead a session and post a podcast of said session.
Photos (click the link to this post if you’re reading this through an RSS reader):
Podcast:
See also:
Blog posts from Extraface(1, 2), Dave Cohen (1, 2, 3, 4), Jeff Haynie, Tim (1, 2), more on Technorati
Due to the possible impending death of Internet radio, Jimmy the Hand and Moe Beers will drown their baby in the bathtub tonight.
Listen tonight at 8 p.m. on Carp Circles Radio. If you’re on Yahoo Messenger, check out the webcam at user griftdrift.
Even though I knew today was going to be Internet Radio Day of Silence, it was still jarring to fire up 3WK in iTunes and hear Monty Python skits instead of semi-obscure 60s and 70s rock.
So what is Internet Radio Day of Silence? I’ll let 3WK tell you.
3WK has, along with most U.S. webcasters, declared today, June 26, as a DAY OF SILENCE. This is our way of showing our listeners what Internet radio will sound like if a new sound performance copyright fee is allowed to go into effect.
New Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) sound performance copyright fees are so high it will make existence impossible for 3WK and most webcasters. This new increase will not only hurt the fledgling webcasting industry, it will also devastate independent labels and musicians who look to internet radio as a primary source of airplay and promotion of their music. If most independent webcasters disappear, this directly affects the musical choices available to you, the listener.
Among local companies, Earthlink Radio is participating. In fact, pretty much every major (in terms of audience size) webcaster and webcasting company is participating except for Last.fm. Visit this site to view a full list.
The new rates are scheduled to go into effect July 15, and are retroactive to Jan. 1, 2006. Effectively, this will put most internet radio stations out of business.
As Techcrunch notes, since large broadcasting companies are incapable of winning new listeners over with compelling content in an open market, they have resorted to lobbying for laws to push the competition out. And they’ve succeeded.
What can you do? Call and/or write to your Congressman. Be polite but make it clear you are unhappy. If you’re in Georgia (which you probably are if you’re reading this), I recommend pointing out that this is precisely the interference with the free market that many of them ran for office promising to prevent.
Here is contact information for the Georgia delegation:
Jack Kingston, 1st District
Phone: 202-225-5831
Fax: 202-226-2269
Email:jack.kingston AT mail.house.gov
Sanford D. Bishop Jr., 2nd District
Phone: 202-225-3631
Fax: 202-225-2203
Web Email
Lynn A. Westmoreland, 3rd District
Phone: 202-225-5901
Fax: 202-225-2515
Web Email
Henry C. “Hank” Jr. Johnson, 4th District
Phone: (202) 225-1605
Fax: (202) 226-0691
Web Email
John Lewis, 5th District
Phone: 202-225-3801
Fax: 202-225-0351
Web Email
Tom Price, 6th District
Phone: 202-225-4501
Web Email
John Linder, 7th District
Phone: 202-225-4272
Fax: 202-225-4696
Web Email
Jim Marshall, 8th District
Phone: 202-225-6531
Fax: 202-225-3013
Web Email
Nathan Deal, 9th District
Phone: 202-225-5211
Fax: 202-225-8272
Web Email
(10th District is vacant)
Phil Gingrey, 11th District
Phone: 202-225-2931
Fax: 202-225-2944
Web Email
John Barrow, 12th District
Phone: 202-225-2823
Fax: 202-225-3377
Web Email
David Scott, 13th District
Phone: 202-225-2939
Fax: 202-225-4628
Web Email
Cross-posted on my Georgia Podcast Network blog.
Update 11:46 a.m. See also: Griftdrift.
FINALLY, the AJC has made all their news sections available as RSS feeds. I emailed them about this like two years ago and they sent me the email equivalent of a shoulder shrug.
Amber used to work at Cox and brought places like the Waco Tribune into this century long ago, so it’s not like they didn’t know how to do it. But this is a positive development nonetheless.
UPDATE: I never would have read this chilling obituary of former city of Atlanta official Robert Sumbry if I hadn’t subscribed to the Atlanta news feed. I knew there had to be somebody there still doing good reporting, I just didn’t ever get to see it because the home page is littered with headlines about Prince William getting back together with his girlfriend and Foxy Brown getting mugged:
Update June 25 10:05 p.m. Apparently these have been around for a while and I just never noticed them.
This is like, uh, a good, like, uh, demonstration of, uh, the self-policing nature of the blogosphere. Yeah, that’s it.
Maybe I should be like Amber and install a plugin to automatically update my blog with a digest of Twitter tweets. Then I wouldn’t even need to write “real” posts.
about 2 hours ago from txt 
Furious D: Now where am I going to go to beat SEC football fans at their own picks game while hopped up on goofballs?
CJ: I tried to establish a hot dog stand this year and was advised by the Health Dept (Dekalb Cnty) and by a...
Tony: This is a bunch of crap. Where am I supposed to get all my University of Georgia football news now?
Jen: As soon as college football starts, he’ll be back. Book it.
Blue: Say it ain’t so, Russell Tanton? First it was “my pit stop on the information superhighway.”...
Georgia Podcast Network
