Funniest part so far: Charlottesville paper put their balloon’s picture and location in their paper online: http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/05/ten-red-balloons-and-ones-in-charlottesville/
#1 in SF? Supposedly fake, but the pictures look good
From Nancy Broden (http://twitter.com/nancybroden) with photos of Union Square in SF, so assume they are too?
I’m working on my KGEM-TV show — Click2Discover — and getting ready to do a show about Twitter. This blog hooks up via open APIs with both my Facebook Notes and Twitter.
It wasn’t until I was working on materials for my Media 2015 class this week, which is on the past 100 years in broadcasting, that I had a dawning glimmer about early radio.
There is a lot written and referred to about the various NBC radio networks and how the FCC from 1940 required them to spin off/sell NBC Blue, which became ABC over time (and after buying the name).
What is well written about but not focused on in the business lingo as much is how early radio was very much like early Internet. Individuals and small companies broadcast podcast-like music and discussions — way before there was advertising or a business model to support it. Westinghouse’s first radio station, often touted as the birth of broadcast radio, was from a shack built on the top of their building by one of their engineers, who had been broadcasting from home.
Also interesting was the interplay between newspapers and that early radio. At first, 2,000 newspapers were eager to showcase the playlists and schedule of the first radio station, that KDKA in Pittsburgh. Years later, radio news was thrown off of the wire services, as newspapers realized it was competing for customers.
We focus so much on the Internet and the “official” business models of Big Media that we sometimes forget that much of media in the US has been the world of small players and local interests. We also forget that this is a special place here…where much of media in other countries is government owned. And media is often family owned and not just the big corporate world that we seem to revere or fear.
The Internet brings back that peer-to-peer that actually thrived for the first time with early radio. And versus radio, which had to struggle with AT&T for national carriage across the miles, we have nearly instantaneous fibers, but with some of those same carriers, to carry those messages between communities…but take that speed of space and time for granted.
More to follow.
I’m sitting at the lovely Vino Volo at the Philadelphia airport, enjoying the artificial ambiance of wine flights while on a long layover. I did my usual walk around the airport, looking at use of personal technology. There are the usual host of folks clustered around the wall plugs. In fact, the gentleman at the table next to me just changed tables to be near the wall plug in the restaurant.
More netbooks were evident than my last trip, not surprising. I’m also seeing more SmartPhones being used for between-flight entertainment.
What I haven’t seen that much is the number of retail stores with “add ons,” especially for power. An entire aisle of the cellular accessory store here is just energy cords and attachments for phones, netbooks, and laptops.
I mentioned this to the gentleman who just plugged in to the wall next to me. He called it “keeping us power happy.”
Is this a big hurdle/revenue opportunity — keeping us “power happy”? Or with the gentleman that was at the program in Lisbon with last week, who has a netbook with 6 “real” hours of usage?
So I’ll keep watching for the power-happy users at my itinerant airport visits…and keep asking the question of social implications and challenges to this limit.
Or maybe this is just how we’re supposed to meet people at airports….
Peter Shankman posted this on his post, and got that idea from Bad Pitch Blog. But this 1993 series of AT&T ads does ring a very strong bell as to 2009:
So we have collapsed time and distance — and have gained what? Most of these ideas resonate with connection and transaction, carving out all the layers of distance and time, but making them instead invisible…and where is AT&T in most of this? Shifted into the mobile value chain of it, that isn’t really highlighted here at all?
So does it help to see the future if you pass along the blessings to others instead of maximizing it yourself?