"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Next Gen Video

While Google Video and YouTube are casting the widest net for video content online (and MySpace and others are gunning for a more personal view on things), I think the real services to watch are the ones with fucking revenue sharing. Three I noticed today: eefoof.com, lulu.tv and revver.com.

These are where the action is at: if these business models mature, we should hit a tipping point at which it becomes economically viable for small and efficient home/hobby producers to make the leap into some stage of "professional" production, funded by the revenues from their viewers.

This is what the entertainment industry most fears: a population that can amuse itself.

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Corporate Bureaucracy

Interesting NYT article on how bad customer-service can be:

To listen as Mr. Ferrari tries to cancel his membership is to join him in a wild, horrifying descent into customer-service hell. The AOL representative, self-identified as John, sounds like a native English speaker; he refuses to comply when Mr. Ferrari asks, demands and finally pleads — over and over again — to close his account.

One of the things that always irks me about conventional political wisdom is that red tape, bureaucracy and organizational ineffectiveness are the exclusive province of the State. "That's what you get from government," and the like. The truth is that large business organizations are as bad or worse, and are fundimentally less accountable.

In most cases the actual answer is to increase transparency, which is something that all bureaucrats (State, Business, Non-Profit or otherwise) resist. Gotta be done, though.

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Corporate Bureaucracy

Interesting NYT article on how bad customer-service can be:

To listen as Mr. Ferrari tries to cancel his membership is to join him in a wild, horrifying descent into customer-service hell. The AOL representative, self-identified as John, sounds like a native English speaker; he refuses to comply when Mr. Ferrari asks, demands and finally pleads — over and over again — to close his account.

One of the things that always irks me about conventional political wisdom is that red tape, bureaucracy and organizational ineffectiveness are the exclusive province of the State. "That's what you get from government," and the like. The truth is that large business organizations are as bad or worse, and are fundimentally less accountable.

In most cases the actual answer is to increase transparency, which is something that all bureaucrats (State, Business, Non-Profit or otherwise) resist. Gotta be done, though.

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Clearing Brush / Pirate Utopia

It's a holiday weekend, and I been doing the American thing, clearing some brush. I can report this to be one more point you can count me in solidarity with the President on. He and I share few enough points in common, and I feel it's important to recognize these. Clearing brush is good hard work, and it's fun.

Clearing Brush

And here are a couple other photos of me in front of the blackboard I hung in my room. I think this may figure into future video art.

Pirate Utopia

Pirate Utopia

And Nick and his woman and Luke have just arrived. Gotta go now.

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Sy Hersch: Last Stand

More about Iran, worth reading in its entirety.

I found this bit interesting:

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’ ”

It seems like a lot of people want to be on the historical record for standing up to the Bush administration at one point or another. This is essentially the rationale Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wi) gave last week on Meet the Press for wanting to censure the Prez over his extra-legal phone-tapping program.

I wonder at what point wanting to be on the record as opposed to something that happens stops being enough.

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Sy Hersch: Last Stand

More about Iran, worth reading in its entirety.

I found this bit interesting:

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’ ”

It seems like a lot of people want to be on the historical record for standing up to the Bush administration at one point or another. This is essentially the rationale Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wi) gave last week on Meet the Press for wanting to censure the Prez over his extra-legal phone-tapping program.

I wonder at what point wanting to be on the record as opposed to something that happens stops being enough.

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