learnandteachonline.com

Howard Owens talks (among other things) about the value of trying small seat-of-the-pants ideas that can move a media property forward. Yes.

Insistence on applying metrics stops these little efforts, Owen says. I think there's also a print mindset that likes things always finished, which is antithetical to the mind of the online tinkerer, who perpetually works in draft, and likes it that way.

Print editor: Is it done?

Online editor: No, it's never done. Isn't that great?

Print editor: I hate that part. How can you stand it?

Online editor: Well, the downsides are balanced by all kinds of joys. The least of them: can you snatch back your magazine out of the reader's inbox?

Concreteness and product and sure bets versus flux and process and experimentation.

Don't mean to pick on the Bill Moyers Journal site. I've seen other traditional media get podcasting lingo wrong too. I wonder if they know it makes them look, like, not with it when they're trying so hard to get with it.

YOU DON'T "SIGN UP" FOR PODCASTS AND RSS FEEDS. You just get them. Sorry, didn't mean to yell. I know you're trying. It's hard to get really mad at public broadcasting. Heart in the right place sort of thing.

Must be a holdover from standard language about signing up for email newsletters. Or maybe they're afraid people will be afraid of the word "subscribe."

Maybe this widget has been around for a while but I only noticed it today at the bottom of a story about disputed war casualty counts. (You may have to log in to WaPo.) Made in Flash and served on the Clearspring widget platform. I'll check out Clearspring.

Dave's wondering if the television networks, who are making a killing on downloadable episodes on iTunes, will start making programming for the internet.

Anybody who loves a show that gets cancelled hopes there's some chance it will come back. I've thought about this, and I believe that really hardcore fans will accept a different or scaled-back form of the show or book or movie they can't get enough of.

Think about Star Wars novels. Almost-serious readers will devour them, when they wouldn't be caught dead in the checkout line with a novelization. There's something like the same phenomenon in fanfic. It's fanatics wanting more of the world they love.

The trouble is, it's not in the interest of the broadast networks to make something for the obsessed enthusiast; the audience is too narrow.

I've had a couple of ideas along these lines. One is citizen's performance and the other is big business.

The citizen idea: make podcasts of fanfic. Just adapt the better stories as audio plays.

The entertainment biz idea: carry on a series in animation. It used to be expensive to paint every frame, putting the cost up around live action, but not so anymore. Actors would be more likely to sign on for a sound recording session scheduled at their convenience -- lots of them do it for games (hey, maybe the game makers could get into producing these). It wouldn't matter if the sets had been struck. (I remember hearing that the dismantling of Rosalyn was the main reason Northern Exposure could never be revived without a lot of expense.)

I'd watch an animated Northern Exposure or West Wing or ThirtySomething or L.A. Law. Would you? Not necessarily, but you might love to see your own faves revived. Americans are getting more with animation in the last 15 years or so. It's definitely not just for kids anymore, though I don't think we're anywhere near as accepting of it as legit art as the Japanese.

Doesn't it seem like a natural for a place like Comcast to offer pay-per-download TV programs like iTunes does? It could have something to do with its being an AT&T spinoff. The former Bell cousins tend to be kind of heavy and sluggish on their feet, not poised to act quick on what's hot now. I worked with one of the cousins for a couple years and loved it but the bureaucracy was a big roadblock. I think at organizations like this the expectation of slow movement is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Or, what do I know. Maybe that's not it at all and there's some FCC stricture against it. LOL!

This American Life's staff finds it parody-worthy too.

The band member they have doing it doesn't get it quite right, not announcery enough.

You know what's really got me steamed? The "in a world" announce style has broken out of theatrical release trailers and into TV show promos and commercials. Next time you're watching an NBC show think about noticing it when they pimp their own network shows.

Wouldn't it be funny to hear a woman doing that trailing-off-to-gravel-at-the-end-of-sentences thing? Just thinking about it that way makes you see what a stupid fad it is, and offers a hint that it might be some macho thing?

I'll admit it; I can fall for a gravelly male voice as quick as the next woman. Listening to Nick Nolte or Kris Kristofferson makes me go weak in the knees (though Clint Eastwood somehow doesn't do it for me) -- and the hero in my unfinished novel has a voice like that. But it doesn't work on me when it's packaged up in a formula. Nothing does, at least I don't like to think so.

So sad about John Spencer who played Leo McGarry on West Wing. I've always liked him as the matter-of-fact streetsmart guy on WW and on L.A. Law.

Here's the eerie thing. Near the end of the last episode shown, everybody including Josh and Leo are thinking Josh needs Leo's seasoned input in plotting 11th hour campaign strategy. And Leo says ...

Listen to the 17-second mp3.

Nice personal piece on watching portable video by David Carr in The New York Times.

"With the new iPod, I could start at the beginning of the series and view "Lost" at my leisure. The average episode lasts 44 minutes, about the length of my commute. Watching "Lost" on the bus next to a large man working his way through a crinkly bag of nuts is a deeply satisfying media experience. Goodbye crinkly nut man. Hello Claire and John Locke. (It is a bonus that the man can't see the image from the side, as hard as he tries.)

"So this is how we end up alone together. We share a coffee shop, but we are all on wireless laptops. The subway is a symphony of earplugged silence while the family trip has become a time when the kids watch DVD's in the back of the minivan. The water cooler, that nexus of chatter about the show last night, might go silent as we create disparate, customized media environments."

Nice writing. Is this the sort of thing we'll miss if traditional newspapers go away? Nope. Why should it matter how the words are delivered? There's equally polished work on the web, and there will be even more when more people are doing it for a living.

This is funny! Market Watch picks up a Hollywood Reporter story on a report by Nielson Entertainment Research.

The report tells of the creator/seller split for audio and video downloads. A comment on the growth of on-demand media is the funny part: "The issue is how to best monetize the opportunity and understand the underlying economic models." The concept of "consumer as programmer" is a challenge for businesses, Nielsen said.

The reference is to entertainment programmer of course, not computer programmer. How many years since Cluetrain came out, and there's more enlightened talk, but no walk. I sure don't see any abatement in corporate command and control. They just try to keep it disguised.

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez complains in an NPR audio comment about the demise of newspapers and asks to be saved. But he doesn't offer any suggestions for making print newspapers more relevant in the new century, he just proposes doing TV commercials that tell people how great newspapers are just the way they are, a bargain for 50 cents.

Somehow I don't think that will turn the fleet around. Then he takes a pretty awful potshot at bloggers: "...'til all you've got to chose from are one of the thousands of fly-by-night internet news sites, or one of the millions of blogs posted by unapologetic biased hacks who haven't left the house in five years. Boy are you going to miss us."

The shirtiest bit (28 seconds) .mp3