Program scripts from week of November 19, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Turning Out the Lights
There’s an old saying that what goes around comes around. Also that there’s nothing new under the sun. A lot of folks in the digital media world want to believe otherwise. And yet reality just keeps jumping up and biting them in the butt. For all the nearly religious chanting that it’s a whole new world with new rules blah, blah blah in the end some things never change. For example in the end if you want to play in the big leagues of the media there’s a simple gold standard for success. You either make money or you don’t. If you’re not competing in that arena then you’re a really talented amateur. Now really talented amateurs can do a lot of really cool things. But you’re not playing in the big leagues.
Of course the down side of playing with the big boys is that they’re relatively unforgiving. They don’t try to be nice, they don’t cut you any slack and they’re not going to give you a break. A year ago YouTube decided it wanted to play with the big boys. They knew they needed to move away from just being the host of endless Gangnam Style and laughing baby videos. The big leagues required original high quality content so they created “channels”. These were folks that received at least some financial support from YouTube to create that kind of must see video content. A year later and YouTube has taken a long look at those channels.
Well that makes one of us.
As it turns out most of us have paid zero attention to the majority of the channels. So in the very near future most of those channels will face some cold hard reality. YouTube will be pulling the plug on 60% of the channels. The reason is simple economics. YouTube dropped as much as five million dollars per channel and over half of them didn’t turn enough of a profit. The channels that showed some potential will continue to have the support of the video media giant. The others will be left to their own devices AND expected to continue to work on paying back the original investment.
It’s a brave new world out there on the digital frontier. Some people have managed to forget just how tough the frontier has always been.
Google Books
You may not have noticed but the folks at Google have been working on digitizing the world. All forms of data, all forms of information and everything in print. This includes books. And that has created a little bit of problem. You see there are folks out there who actually kind of own the publishing rights to some of those books. Turns out they’re not really happy with having their property offered up for free by Google. So in that great American tradition they’re settling it in court.
The good news is that it seems like they have actually come to an agreement. At the center of the disagreement is Google’s Library Project, which they describe as “An enhanced card catalog of the world’s books”. What they were doing was scanning books from public libraries, making the books searchable and offering snippets of them online. That resulted in groups representing both the publishers and the authors bringing suit. This settlement covers the publishers only. Google maintains this is all covered under the concept of “Fair Use”. The courts have yet to rule on that issue.
Now the deal would seem to be a win-win-win for Google, the publishers and readers like you and me. Google is one step closer to moving forward with the project. The publishers get the right to exclude a title from the project if they so choose. And the rest of us get a better way of finding books online. Financial terms, if any, have not been disclosed.
I will note that the publishers did get one thing they may not want. They get a free digital copy of every book in their list. I’ve looked at a fair number of those Google scanned books and a lot of them are a mess. Seems like maybe some of the scans put more emphasis on quantity rather than quality.
Given that these legal shenanigans date back to 2005 getting some kind of settlement done is a good thing. Even the publishers acknowledge that there will be a growing influence of e-books in the years to come and having a digital card catalog works to their advantage.
Getting it done right is just as important.
Facebook Creeper
I have to admit I was a little cranky when I heard about this next item. A little cranky and a little creeped out. You see I just discovered that someone has created a page about my relationship with the Lady in My Life. For those of you new to the world of the Phlipside that’s my long standing nickname for my wife. We’ve been together for over 30 years. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t upset to discover that someone has been collecting photos of the two of us, scanning our personal social media postings and amassing them all on a web page. A web page I knew nothing about and for which they did hot have the permission of me or my wife. That’s pretty creepy.
Now the bad news. You probably have one too. If you’re on Facebook and are listed as being in a relationship then Facebook has probably created a page about you and your significant other. Did a chill just run up and down your spine? Check it out at www dot facebook dot com front slash us.
The pages are called Friendship Pages and they’re actually not new. The social media giant introduced them two years ago with a certain amount of fanfare but they promptly slipped off of most people’s radar pretty quickly. Let’s face it Facebook is constantly changing things, adding features and generally running amok.
What I find creepy, that is creepy beyond the fact that Facebook is doing this at all, is that it happens without my permission or knowledge and the fact that there’s basically nothing I can do about it. You can not make the page go away. You can not opt out. The best you can do is crank up your privacy levels nice and high to limit what the creeper page can post about you. That, of course, is the best defense against any online creeper out there.
My question is simple. Why do I need to protect myself against Facebook? In what possible alternate universe did the brain trust at Facebook decide that turning itself into the world’s biggest creeper was a good idea? Unfortunately this is symptomatic of the overall attitude within the Kingdom of Zuckerberg. An attitude that they know better than we do how to run our lives online and control our information.
Now they’ve decided they know what I want said about the most significant relationship in my life. And that makes Facebook a creeper.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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