Jim Connelly

The Weekly ‘Loper – May 7, 2006

May 7, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you spent your week dissecting Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner joke-by-joke trying to determine if it was funny and hit a nerve (it was and it did), here’s what we were looking at:

Yahoo’s 21st Century Entertainment Network — Yahoo! is making the transformation from a 20th Century Web Portal to a 21st Century Digital Lifestyle Entertainment Network.
Are the Browser Wars Back? Nah. — But there is a bit of a to-do between Microsoft and Google over a little tiny search box that could lead great big revenues.
ABC’s Online Programming – First Impressions — By the time that Kassia finished jumping over all of the obstacles ABC kept putting in her way, she was too exhausted to watch an actual program.
The Real Reason iTunes Songs Are Still Only 99 Cents — A good conspiracy theory should always start with the accountants.
Today, I Am Cranky — What part of “World Wide Web” does NBC not get? With their Today Webcasts, pretty much none of it.
That’s What I Like: Drive-by Truckers — Jim takes a look at his current favorite band. A very very very long look, so bring a bottle of whiskey and the live version of “Free Bird.”

What’s In A Name?

May 7, 2006 by Jim Connelly

What’s in a name? Well, if yours is Jay Black, it might be worth up to a half a million dollars.

Altogether now: who? Did you say Jack Black? Frank Black? Lewis Black?

Nope. Jay Black, the lead singer of the very very little-remembered 1960s band “Jay and the Americans,” may have to give up his name in order to help pay nearly $500,000 in back taxes.

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That’s What I Like: Drive-by Truckers

May 5, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Patterson Hood writes the greatest death songs. That’s was always going to be the begnning of this piece. And it was the beginning at the House of Blues in Hollywood last night, as the band he leads — the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the world (my current favorite anyways), Drive-by Truckers — kicked off a killer set with the greatest of all their death songs, “The Living Bubba,” about a musician they knew who died of aids, but who spent the last year of his life touring.

“I can’t die now, cuz I got another show to do.”

Of course, the secret to Patterson Hood’s death songs is that they’re really about life: something that’s always been there, but I really never figured out until recently. Maybe he didn’t either.

And the secret to the the greatness of Drive-by Truckers is that they’ve not only figured out to make the three guitars work, but also how to make three singer/songwriters work.

Apple Calls the iTune

May 4, 2006 by Jim Connelly

We love our iPods and iTunes here at Medialoper, so here’s some team coverage on one of the bigger stories of the week. As you probably know by now, Apple won its latest round with the music industry by refusing to move from their flat-rate pricing model to a more tiered model where new releases are significantly more expensive than long tail catalog product.

And while yesterday Kirk had a real nice insight as to why the record companies backed down, I have a slightly different take.

Are the Browser Wars Back? Nah.

May 2, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Hey kids, remember the Browser Wars? They took place wayyyyyy back in the mid-1990s when Microsoft realized that the Web as experienced via Netscape could steal the desktop right out from under their thumb. So they figured, “we gotta get us a piece of that action,” and launched Internet Explorer.

Which totally sucked for a couple of iterations, until IE 4, which was good enough to combine with their natural monopoly on the business user and eventually lead to Netscape’s downfall.

This all took a few years, and anybody working on the Web at that period had to do QA testing for about a dozen different Browser/Operating System combinations. My guess is that many were somewhat happy for MS to win the browser wars, even as they mourned a technology that essentially changed the world.

The Perpetual Campaign Ad

April 30, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Is there anything on TV more infuriating than the political ad? If you agree with the candidate or issue, then you really don’t need to see it, and if you disagree, then you end up tallying all of the distortions of your reality that you see in the spot.

Each time an election draws near, I often wish that the fast-forward could go a little bit faster, or that I didn’t watch things like the World Series in real time, as I get pounded over and over with shoddily-produced, unhumorous ads that all look and sound alike.

However, as is often the case, what pisses off the consumers is seen as good news for the executives, so it is that Cable ad executives are looking forward to the plethora of spots that will plague the rest of us.

The Weekly ‘Loper – April 30, 2006

April 30, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were busy emptying your savings account to buy another tank of gas, here are some of things that we were discussing:

Is The Future Of Magazines Glossy? – Turns out that the future of magazines might just be email, baby.
Television As A Hunter-Gatherer Experience – Why we’d all be better off if the networks decided not put their shows on their own websites, and stuck to using portals.
Dancing About TV – A look at TV critics who blog about TV on the side.
‘Loper Challenge! Test Drive Pandora – Check out Pandora and let us know what you think — you could win a Medialoper T-Shirt: suitable for wearing!
That’s What I Like: eMusic – Kirk discusses what just might be the only online music download service that looks at things from the perspective of the music lover who wants to listen to anything, anywhere, anytime: eMusic.
This Lawsuit Isn’t Just A Cheap Trick – Why The Cheap Trick / Allman Brothers lawsuit against Sony Music could be a heckuva lot bigger than say, Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers.
Google’s Puzzling Move – Are those “Crack the DaVinci Code” ads at the bottom of every search results page the precursor to the decontextualization of advertising on Google?

How To Figure Out Who Will Win The HD DVD Format Wars

April 27, 2006 by Jim Connelly

We’ve made a lot of fun of the HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray format wars, and rightly so. After all, it’s very entertaining to point out the parallels to VHS vs. Beta, and — more ominiously — SACD vs. HDCD (everybody say “huh?”); the troubles getting product to consumers and the possibility of no backwards compatibility with older HD TVs.

Obviously, watching high-definition films in the privacy of your own home is such a perfect 21st century idea I guess it’s no wonder that more than one consortium of evil multinational technology and entertainment companies had it at roughly the same time.

TiVo’s Dual Tuner: Only Halfway There

April 26, 2006 by Jim Connelly

My heart jumped when I saw the headline: TiVo Introduces Dual Tuner DVR. While I’ve always been a ReplayTV person, I recently jumped ship to a cable-company provided Scientific Atlanta DVR where the total lack of an usuable user interface has nearly obliterated the fact that it has a dual tuner and can record HD programs.

In retrospect, it was a dumb-ass move, but I’m addicted to those beautiful HD broadcasts of The Sopranos and 24. So, if TiVo was introducing a dual-tuner standalone product (they already make one bundled with DirecTV), I was on board: maybe someone else won’t make the same mistake that I did. Then I read a few more stories about it. And: sigh.

Dancing About TV

April 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

The infamous quote goes like this: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” What makes it so infamous, of course, is that it’s attributed to so many people, and nobody seems to know who actually made it up.

Fine. It was me. Can we move on now? In any event, the point of the quote — my quote — is that it’s nearly impossible to use one art form to describe another art form. Either that, or it was “piss off, you fracking critics!!”

Maybe. While it might apply to writing about music — there are only so many times you can use the phrase “jangly guitar” — in no way does it apply to writing about that other great art form: TV. And nowhere can you find so much great writing about television than on the internet, especially now that several TV critics have their own blogs.

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