RIP Reader, ESPN and Crowdsourced Creation

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2013 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of March 18, 2013



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. 

Crowdsourced Creation                                                                                                        

One of the coolest things that the Internet allows us to do is called crowdsourcing.  If you’re not familiar with the term it is a way of getting services provided or tasks accomplished by calling on a large group of people.  The idea is an old one really.  It’s called “Many hands make light work”.  Crowdsourcing has been used by all kinds of groups to do all kinds of things.

Here are just a few examples - movies have been made, translations done, the Department of Defense has done some research using crowdsourcing, satellite photo review searching for lost people, creating texts that are accessible to the visually impaired, creating maps, creating an encyclopedia, environmental monitoring.  Heck you can even fund a new album for your band by crowdsourcing the finances!

But of all those projects (and several of them are really cool) I think THE coolest one was the project that crowdsourced the design of a sports car.  A company called Local Motors wanted to see if they could use the Internet community to design a race car more efficiently and less expensively than the old school way.  What they got took only 18 months and three million dollars to develop the Rally Fighter, an eight cylinder, 430 horsepower racing machine.  Cost?  $99,900.  There is one other small catch.  You have to build the car yourself.  Included in the price is a six day stay at the factory, all the instructions you can use (including wikis and videos) plus the assistance of the Local Motors expert staff.  Pretty amazing really.

The old school way requires a large design team and layers of corporate bureaucracy.  Sometimes that creates great cars.  Most of the time it just generates pretty good ones.  And Local Motors isn’t done.  They have a design process underway for a military vehicle for the folks at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm (and ironically the origin of the World Wide Web) plus they have community challenges out there for the creation of a new pizza delivery vehicle for Domino’s (which explains part of their current ad campaign) and the best design for a driving shoe as requested by Nike.

Imagine hopping into your crowdsource designed car, opening your crowdsource created map to plan your trip while you listen to a crowdsource financed album from your favorite band.

The mind boggles.

The March of Time                                                                                                       

If there is one entity in the TV world that stands pretty much unchallenged right now it’s the network that has adopted the title of “World Wide Leader in Sports”, ESPN.  Yes there are other sports networks out there, most of them focused on specific sport, a few of them trying to be more all encompassing but the reality is that second place in this particular race is so distant that first place can barely be glimpsed.

Now I’m a big sports fan and I watch more than my share of ESPN.  At the same time I’ve recently become more and more annoyed with the sports network.  Maybe it’s just because it’s my least favorite sports month of the year.  March.  When most of the sporting media world in the U.S. seem to forget that there’s anything other than basketball going on right now.  Between the avalanche known as March Madness and ESPN’s over emphasis on the NBA trying to find any other sports on the “World Leader” can be problematic.

And yes I said over emphasis on the NBA.  Now I know that this will bring on the howls of the hoops fandom world.  They would have you believe that pro hoops is on the verge of becoming the second most popular team sport in America behind only the NFL.  Everybody loves the NBA.  What would you add in?  Football is off season, Baseball is only spring training and it’s not like the NHL is a major sport.  But there’s a problem with that argument.

It’s the assumption that the NBA is more popular than it really is.  Take a look at the attendance statistics for the 2011-12 seasons.  Baseball and football are way out in first and second place.  It’s baseball for overall attendance and football for per game attendance.  But when you take a look at the hockey versus basketball numbers it’s very interesting.  Because the NHL actually draws a little better.  

So why the imbalance in coverage on ESPN?  That’s easy.  They have a basketball contract but no hockey contract.  That may be the opening some new competition needs.  And both NBCSports and the deep pockets of Rupert Murdoch and FoxSport Network are coming.  FoxSports is quite upfront that they are gunning for ESPN.

Maybe we’ll end up with just another “World Wide Leader in Sports We Have Contracts With” but at the moment I think I’d take that happily.

Next On Tonight

It has become something of a tradition here on The View From the Phlipside to note the passing of folks that I believe deserve a final salute but who may not get it.  Today we’ll alter that just a bit by offering a salute to a lesser known but sorely to be missed computer application.  Farewell to Google Reader.

Google Reader is (for a few weeks more) an RSS aggregator.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It’s an old online application but a potentially useful one.  Think of it as a simple subscription system that allows you to sign up to follow your favorite web sites.  An aggregator is the application that handles all those subscriptions.  

Now there are three groups of people on the subject of Google pulling the plug on Reader July 1.  People like me for whom Reader is a part of our daily lives.  We are not happy.  There are people who think, for various reasons, that Reader needs to die.  And then there’s everybody else.  Who mostly don’t care.

Here’s the reality - RSS has been around for a long time but not a lot of people use it.  And the number has been falling especially the last couple years.  So there is a reasonable argument for Google’s decision.

What’s really stood out for me has been some of the arguments made by the “Reader should die” camp.  This is includes Dave Winer who is actually one of the guys who helped create RSS.  What jumped out at me was this quote “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.”

And that’s the rub isn’t it?  We’ve become accustomed to getting cool stuff and services on the Internet for free.  The problem is that free is a tough business model to make work.

But here’s the challenge I’d offer in return.  When cable took on “free TV” (which wasn’t really free of course but a different topic for a different day) conventional wisdom said it couldn’t be done.  So why is pay TV virtually universal these days?  Because they offered something over the air TV couldn’t.

Just dumping free services doesn’t guarantee that we’ll move to fee based services unless there’s an improvement in our experience.  In the end you can take away our Reader but you can’t make us pay.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Book Review - I Invented the Modern Age-The Rise of Henry Ford

I Invented the Modern Age - The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow  I grew up in a car family.  My father's first job out of college was the culmination of a lifelong dream.  He went to work for Ford Motor Company in the Body Design Department (A document in the family archives seems to indicate that he was the first draftsman trained outside of Ford to be hired in that department).  For a fan of well written biographies and histories of American business icons Richard Snow has written a must read book.  For automotive history and especially Ford fans Snow has written a must own one.

The title comes from a statement made by Ford himself.  It might easily be written off as the expression of a massive ego (and folks like Edison and Tesla might take exception) but there's a very real argument that it is Ford who takes America and the rest of the world into modernity.  By creating a car for every one and then perfecting the manufacturing process to create it cheaply Ford changed the whole structure of our world.  The Model T changes life in both the rural and urban setting.  Without a car for the working man there are no suburbs.  It changes the life of farmers because now their world is no longer contained within the circle of the horizon.  No one else, then or since, can lay claim to have changed society as fundamentally as Ford.

The book is also the story of two different Henry Fords.  Ford the younger who raised the daily wage to $5 much to the outrage of his fellow automakers.  The man who insisted on lowering the price of the car year after year to insure that the most people possible could own one (he eventually sold more than 15 million Model T's alone).  The Ford who chartered a ship and sailed to Europe in an attempt to end World War I.  Ford the elder became a distant, mean spirited man who drove away those closest to him in business and at least tacitly agreed to turning his largest factory into a grim place run by gangs of thugs.  His relationship with his son Edsel is believed by some to have driven the son to an early grave.

In the end Snow walks you through the stages of Ford's growth and fall.  The book is eminently readable and the story will draw you right in.  If there's a complaint to be made the author occasionally drops in a personal comment that seems out of place.  (Snow dislikes the term "flivver" as one of the nicknames for the Model T as an example.  Not sure why I'm supposed to care or would be interested.  That knowledge certainly adds nothing to the otherwise great book)

As I said before if you're an automotive history buff or a Ford Motor Company fan this is probably a 5 star Must Own rating.  For the general audience I think we'll settle at 4 stars.

"I Invented The Modern Age - The Rise of Henry Ford" will be on shelves starting May 14, 2013.

Rating - **** Recommended

View From the Phlipside Radio - Cars and Media

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.

By now I’m guessing you’ve caught on to the fact that I am seriously into the media.  Maybe even beyond the point that a grown man of advancing years should acknowledge but there it is.  What you may not know is that I am also something of a car guy.  I come by that honestly because my dad was a big time car guy.  His first job out of college was in the design department at Ford, on their honeymoon he took my mother to the Detroit Auto Show and before I was allowed to drive his cars I had to be able to explain how an internal combustion engine worked, identify the major systems of a car and be able to change a tire and the oil.  I grew up in a serious car household.

So imagine my unfettered joy when two of my great passions come together in a single story.  In the last week or two the folks at Ford and the the folks at National Public Radio have announced a partnership that will put a special app in new Fords that will give you direct access to programming from NPR.  That story in and of itself is no big deal even if you’re an NPR fan as I am.  

What got me about the story is the ever increasing amount of media that is now available in cars.  And it begins to worry me.  The worst idea, putting a video screen in the middle of the steering wheel, seems to have died off.  Which is wonderful from my point of view.  Even so you’re seeing more and more screens in cars.  The Tesla electric sports car boasts a 17 inch screen that basically takes over all the functions of the dashboard.  At the other end of the cost scale the brand new Dodge Dart has a screen for dashboard functions plus a second one for things like climate control and sound system.

But what really worries me is the advent of voice control for media in cars.  All of this MIGHT be a distraction if you let it but what happens when people from anywhere in the car can start affecting distraction inspiring stuff inside the car?  In my lifetime car radios were options.  Now we have music, phone, video, web access, and most of them can be fired up by a three year old in the back seat.

Somewhere along the line we need to remember that we are in a vehicle that weighs around a ton or more at speeds that can be well in excess of a mile a minute.  We drive them in situations that require great concentration.

Forgetting that, even for a second, can get you in a lot of trouble.  Something else my father taught me.


Call that the View From the Phlipside

View From the Phlipside - Top Gear U.S.

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.

American TV has a long history of borrowing program ideas from other countries or genres.  “All In the Family” is the example of such an adaptation done perfectly.  The basic concept of the the British orginal and the American version is virtually identical.  What made “All In the Family” a winner was that the characters and situations were made uniquely American.  In doing that they created a show that could stand on its own without feeling like a cheap imitation.

So there was both a certain amount of excitement and a certain apprehension when I heard that one of my favorite shows was being brought to the U.S..  “Top Gear” is an amazing international hit that has wracked up awards in both the U.K. and the States.  If you’re not familiar with it’s a show about cars that appeals even to people who aren’t really into cars.  The reason for its success is simple, the interplay between the three presenters (as they are labeled by our British cousins) - Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May (or as they are referred to by the ladies in my family - the tall one, the cute one and the slow one).  They are grown up boys playing with toys and having a great time with it all.

Now there is nothing more American than cars, so a “Top Gear U.S.” would seem an obvious winner.  Based on the first episode which aired last week on the History Channel, not so much.  

And they fail for the same reason that the original version succeeds.  Chemistry among the hosts.  Our guys don’t have it.  They strike me as frat boys with depth neither of personality or knowledge of cars.  I grew up in a car family.  I had to learn to change the oil and the tires before I was allowed to drive my father’s cars.  I know car guys when I see them.  And these three, racing driver Tanner Foust, comedian Adam Ferrara and racing analyst Rutledge Wood, just fall flat.  Add in that the U.S. show slavishly imitates every aspect of the original and this one is a dead loss.  Even their names are wrong.  The ENGLISH guys should be Tanner, Adam and Rutledge, not the Americans.

How bad is it?  NBC took a pass on the show.  If the worst network in America isn’t interested someone should have taken notice.  Call “Top Gear U.S.”  a tow truck and take it straight to the junk yard.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.