Jim Connelly

New York Times Blog Not An Online Video Milestone

June 28, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Came across a small piece on the CBS news site that made me laugh. It was essentially touting the fact that New York Times TV Critic Virginia Heffernan now has a blog dedicated to web video.

That’s not what made me laugh: I’ve read Heffernan’s writing ever since her Salon days, and it’s great that she’s leaping into this frontier. I’ll even betcha that it was something she asked for rather than was assigned.

What made me laugh was this bit of old-media-on-old media-puffery, courtesy of the CBS News website:

Bare Bones “Backups” For Your Digital Music

June 27, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Yesterday, Kirk wrote a great post delineating four ways of protecting your digital music collection. His overarching rules of maintaining a mindset of total paranoia and redundancy redundancy redundacy are absolute gospel truth.

If you don’t know where or how to start, or don’t have the time, money or tech-savvyness to do things like store your music offsite in a safe-deposit box, or build a RAID, here are a couple of strategies for incorporating back-ups into your natural music-geek lifestyle. None of these are are foolproof, nor should they replace the methods that Kirk proposed. But they might be natural offshoots of things that you are already doing with your music.

The Weekly ‘Loper – June 25, 2006

June 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were trying to score, you know, just one lousy goal, here’s what we were looking at:

More RIAA Madness: Part 1, In League With The Terrorists? – Some people might wonder why the RIAA hates normal, ordinary Amercans so much.
Naked DSL and Beyond – My VOIP Adventure: Part I – Kirk wonders: why pay four times more for his phone service when he can go with VOIP? It used to be because DSL was bundled with the land line, but not anymore. So he’s switching to Vonage.
Nickling and Diming New Media – None of those payments are exactly “micro.” And they add up pretty quickly.
More RIAA Madness: Part 2, The All-Seeing Ear The All-Seeing Ear hears all. And it’s coming for you . . .
It’s Not A Pirate’s Life For Them – Oh Disney, why do you insist on continually fracking with our collective childhoods?
That’s What I Like: Google – We sometimes forget just how life-altering Google really is. Kassia reminds us.
Thank You For Choosing AT&T – My VOIP Adventure: Part II – In which AT&T thanks Kirk for disconnecting his service. And Kirk uses Vonage to order Indian food.

Are Downloads Licensed Music or Traditional Record Sales?

June 23, 2006 by Jim Connelly

According to at least one major label, they are both!! It just depends on whether you’re an artist or a consumer . . .

I know that it’s old news that Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers are suing Sony over download royalties: a while back, Kassia did an excellent analysis on it.

The other day, however, I came across a posting on P2Pnet.net (love that name!) that discussed this very topic. The posting had an excerpt from an article in the Internationl Herald Tribune that reminded me just how two-faced the record companies really are when it comes to this issue, and why you have to take it with a grain of salt when they say that they’re (all together now) “just trying to protect the artists” with their draconian download restrictions.

Algunos Pensamientos al Azar Mientras Que Mira la Tarde Rebroadcast de Galavision del fÃƒÂ³sforo de la Copa del Mundo Entre Paraguay y Trinidad & Tobago

June 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Mi espaÃƒÂ±ol de la High School secundaria aspira. No puedo reconocer una palabra que estÃƒÂ¡n diciendo, a excepciÃƒÂ³n de “pelota del buena.” ¡Y, al parecer, tiene de convertido riguer para todos los anunciadores de Galavision para hacer el GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLL entero! cosa, no justo de Andres Cantor. ¿Y por quÃƒÂ© no? ¿Es la mejor llamada de todos los deportes, asÃƒÂ que quiÃƒÂ©n no desearÃƒÂa hacerla? Sin embargo, el ayer por la noche allÃƒÂ era ÃƒÂ©ste: ¡”GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL! ¡GOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL!! GOOOOOOOOOOL — offsides.” Ooops. ¡Sin embargo, otra palabra que reconozco!

More RIAA Madness: Part 2, The All-Seeing Ear

June 20, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Yesterday, you may recall, I discussed the RIAA sending cease-and-desist letters to the people who upload videos of themselves lipsynching to popular songs.

But that’s just the beginning: we’ve learned who they are targeting next, and in a Medialoper Multiverse Exclusive, are revealing it to you today.

More RIAA Madness: Part 1, In League With The Terrorists?

June 19, 2006 by Jim Connelly

It just seems like harmless fun: people filming themselves lipsynching popular songs, and then sending the results to YouTube and Google Video. People have always done stuff like this: probably the fifth film ever made — after an accidential shot of the floor; sex; a cute puppy running around; and someone else filming the filmer — was somebody pretending to play a Scott Joplin song.

And people have been doing it ever since: it’s a Great American Tradition to totally make a fool of yourself on video pretending to perform a song you love. God bless the U.S.A.

Of course, sometimes other people see these videos, and there are unintended consequences.

The Weekly ‘Loper – June 18, 2006

June 18, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were wondering how the officiating could be so bad at the world’s biggest sporting event, here’s what we were looking at:

Could ‘a la Carte’ Cable kill Pat Robertson? – No, not literally. He’ll go when the Lord calls him, and not a moment sooner. However, the a la carte cable that the Evangelical Right wants (in order, as always, to protect us from ourselves) may seriously damage the viewership of his network. Ah, sweet, delicious irony!
The World Cup Goes Mobile – A small prediction: with the advent of video for the mobile phone, they’ve gotten as small as they are ever going to get. They will start trending larger, though probably not back to 1980s size.
Do Consumers Care About DRM? – Not nearly enough, it turns out. Yet. In other news, flash mobs? Dead.
Convergence Gone Bad – In the 1970s, convergence was still a pretty new concept, not a fact of life, so that lead to debacles like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring contemporary megastars Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees — as well as a host of others — strutting around lipsynching to Beatles tunes. And yet somehow, it bombed. We await the remake with Eminem and Green Day.
That’s What I Like: IMDb – Another fun use for the IMDb: find all of the connections between Joss Whedon’s shows, JJ Abrams’ shows, and 24.
Un-Spun – Like TV Guide, which reinvented itself as a gossip-laden spoilerfest, Spin magazine responds to marketplace pressures by going in the wrong direction.

Un-Spun

June 17, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I just want to take this opportunity to say goodbye to Spin, a magazine that I have read faithfully for two decades. My subscription lapses in a couple of months, and for the first time in probably that entire two decades, I have no interest in re-upping.

Not because I’ve rejected flesh-and-blood magazines for the pleasures of the online world, either: my life still has plenty of spaces for the physical reading experience, especially that of the magazine. It’s something else entirely. You see, Spin has reinvented itself . . . as Blender 2.0.

Sigh.

[Read more…] about Un-Spun

That’s What I Like: IMDb

June 16, 2006 by Jim Connelly

This was how we watched television in the 20th Century: we would crowd around the tiny TV, watching shows whenever the broadcasters decided to show them — or maybe on a VCR, where we fast-forwarded past commercials on an ever-blurry tape. When a familiar actor or actress showed up onscreen, there would be some conversation about where we may have seen that person before, but nobody could actually remember.

This is how we watch television in the 21st century: Instead of the tiny TV, we have a nice HD; instead of the VHS, we have the DVR, and whenever a familiar face, or even a “Hey It’s that Guy!” shows up on the screen, we fire up a wireless-connected laptop, because it’s time to IMDb that person.

The IMDb, of course, is the Internet Movie Database. And it’s become a verb around our house because it is, without a doubt, one of single greatest examples of how the Internet changed everything.