Glenn Reynolds suggests local blogs as a great area to target for future growth. Media consolidation has turned most local TV news into little more than weather, traffic, crime reporting and cross-promotions for other TV shows and most local newspapers into little more than classifieds and AP wire reports, there is a real opportunity for grassroots journalism.

If politics isn't your interest, local blogs focusing on the music scene, restaurants, or retail can do just as well. Review local bands' shows, shoot a little video, post some interviews with fans or musicians, and you'll soon be well-known in your area. You may even find people willing to pay to advertise on your blog, or to donate in support of your efforts.

Modern technology -- especially the combination of easy web publishing, cheap web hosting, and rapidly spreading access to broadband internet -- means that a single individual can compete with Big Media organizations on a surprisingly equal footing, if he or she picks the area carefully. While there will be lots of attention given to warblogs and blogs focusing on national politics between now and the Presidential election in the fall, I think that over the long term it's blogs focused on other areas that have the most potential for growth, and for affecting the world on a day to day basis.

Atlanta is very underserved by real reporting. Who's in?

A month after it's debut at Macworld, Apple's Garageband is hitting it's stride big-time. Wired's headline article this morning is all about the energy and communities that are popping up to support the $49 music creation tool.

Weedshare is a great idea for music filesharing - Weedshare pays their users to share their music collection in the proprietary weed format and share them online. You can listen to any Weed file for free three times (in Microsoft Media Player), after that you must purchase the song to keep listening to it.

The artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed collects 15%. Essentially an upside-down pyramid scheme.

Weedshare is based on the broken DRM system in Media Player, which means that you can lose all your music when changing machines and can't burn an audio CD for playback in standard audio devices, but is a cool idea for all that.

Weedshare could be very viable IF supported by the record companies and if the client was also a weed format ripper. The music industry would get a free production and distribution network for their product - rewarding loyal fans for sharing. Of course the music industry would have had to figure out reasonable pricing and allow access to their entire catalog.

This is brand-new and can't be expected to have wild success from the start, but a Kazaa (lite of course) search for -weed- as suggested in the weedshare FAQ resulted in 4,850 files (including the screamingly funny "Weed With Willy"), but no weedshare files.

A good idea, but too little too late and Big Content has been attacking their customers so long it seems impossible for them to see an oportunity for change.

HP CEO, Carly Fiorina pledged that HP will ensure that their new line of consumer electronics devices put the needs of Big Media companies ahead of the needs of her buyers at her keynote at CES: "Starting this year, we'll strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights." The addition of DRM functionality which will limit the ability of users to do what they want with digital content they have paid for on hardware they have also paid for.

I'm really curious how HP believes they will be able to charge a band-name premium for devices and PCs with anti-user "features" and off-shored customer support. If I was an HP shareholder, I'd be really, really curious.

Unless the Big Media companies are susbsidising this initiative in some manner, HP will have to rely on ease of use, customer service, new laws outlawing "white-box" PCs, components and no-name media devices from Asia that aren't laden with anti-customer "features" or customer stupidity to keep their market share.

The keynote didn't mention media company partnerships, HP's ease of use isn't any better than any other "brand-name" PC maker (and worse than many) and what little customer service they still have has all been offshored I guess Carly is putting on her hopes for keeping market share on new legal protections and stupid customers. Why not, it's worked for the telecoms for decades.

Here are two nice pieces that dovetail nicely. The two sides of the coin of innovation if you will. In the first, Russell Roberts writes about the iTunes store receiving Time magazine's Coolest Invention of 2003 - why it is a valuable invention and that the future of the US is in the development of similar innovative products which have massive network economic effects:

Invention of the Year? When you think of an invention, you think of the light bulb, the cotton gin, the airplane, the television, the transistor, the cell phone. But an online Music Store? That's not a "real" invention, is it?

For the pessimists, honoring a software program that does nothing more than transfer music from place to place is just another sign of America's decline, another step on the road to an all-service economy where America makes nothing. Another step toward an economy where all we do is sell cosmetics or french fries to each other or try to sustain our standard of living by doing each other's laundry.

I'm a little more optimistic about the future. OK, a lot more optimistic. Some very talented people designed that iTunes Music Store. It works beautifully. It lets me buy a single song for 99 cents or an entire album for just under $10. I can listen to a sample of the music in advance. I can discover new artists by looking at what else people bought who like what I like. When I buy music at the iTunes Music Store, it's easy to keep it organized on my desktop or loaded on my iPod. The confluence of the iTunes software with the iPod is one step closer not to an all-service economy, but one step closer to the world where all the music ever recorded is stored on a single simple portable device. Someday, that device will be embedded in my toenail and by doing some simple dance step, the song I want to hear will reverberate through my brain at the same time a holographic display of the artist performing it is suspended in midair.
[...]
But in 2003, iTunes can be more profitable and enjoyable for humanity than a new way to work with cotton. We already are pretty good at cotton and shirt-making. Most of our shirts come from overseas and they're cheap because of technology that's already been developed that raises human productivity and lowers costs. There isn't much profit in making it a little bit better through some innovation. So in 2003, iTunes can be more profitable than a better cotton gin. If anything, it's a sign of our prosperity rather than a cause for alarm.

And while I like the convenience of iTunes and marvel at the aesthetics and ergonomics of the iPod, the iTunes Music Store is more than just a way of selling music. It's more important than just another music store opening at the nearby mall. By creating a profitable interface for downloading music via the internet, iTunes gives the musicians of the future an increased incentive to create new music and get it into listeners' ears with the click or two of a mouse. That's pretty important if you have a soul and music speaks to it. That's most of us.

We will never be reduced to only doing each other's laundry. That can only happen if laundry is all we know how to do. The road to prosperity in America will always rely on finding ways to leverage what we do best. And in 2003, what a lot of us do best relies on transferring information or using it in creative ways. Music lovers, rejoice.

On the glass is half-empty side of the equation, we have Richard Florida, author of the highly recommended "The Rise of the Creative Class", who is no less enamoured of the importance of innovation, taking a really substantive look at the flight of the "creative class" from the US to greener pastures, why it is happening and what might be done to reverse the trend.

Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change.
[...]
Peter Jackson's power play hasn't been mentioned by any of the current candidates running for president. Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the "safe" jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents' fate.

But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy. Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs.
[...]
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here."

Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic change in the country's political-economic demographics. As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with "blue" patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the "red" parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands. The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America's creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it's what's really at stake in the 2004 elections.

Starting with trends corporate trends in outsourcing of software development and hardware design, the politicization of science in stem cell, security and environmental areas making research in the US difficult or impossible and exacerbated by a political climate that is making scientific conferences and university posts in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere more attractive because of the difficulting of obtaining visas.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to science; other sectors are beginning to suffer. The pop-music magazine Tracks, for instance, recently reported that a growing number of leading world musicians, from South African singer and guitarist Vusi Mahlasela to the Bogota-based electronica collective Sidestepper, have had to cancel their American tours because they were refused visas, while Youssou N'Dour, perhaps the globe's most famous music artist, cancelled his largest-ever U.S. tour last spring to protest the invasion of Iraq.

Our only hope is to strengthen our creative economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the ones we're losing. That will require taking on the Washington lobbyists who put the fix in for established industries at the expense of emerging ones. Millions of new jobs in the wireless networking field, for instance, could be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled by TV networks and the military, could be freed up. When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate talk about that?
[...]
The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and to start paying attention to economic policies that might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to the rest of the country, to convince at least some of its many regions that policies which operate to the interests of the creative class are in their interests as well.

I'm punting this over to my bretheren and sisteren at Ideaflow and Moore's Loore, let's see what happens...

CNET's reporting on a largely boring CES took an interesting turn in the coverage of a panel that included 8 US congressmen who seem to have realized that Big Content's continued attacks on their customers isnt' just stupid, it's also not what they intended when passing DMCA.

Debate was more unified on intellectual property issues, with lawmakers saying that while Congress will continue to support strong copyright protection, media industries need to come up with their own solutions to file-swapping and other issues.

Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., joined others in criticizing the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for suing alleged music swappers, calling the RIAA's legal tactics heavy-handed and against the intent of U.S. copyright laws, including the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

"The fundamental problem with the approach of the RIAA took is that it was based on legislation that created special property rights," Sununu said. "Suddenly, you had a private entity that's able to issue subpoenas, which is unprecedented."

"That's not what the DMCA was intended to do," he said. "We can't be writing legislation that gives holders of certain types of intellectual property special rights...We can't carve out special legislation to give special powers to certain types of content."

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said it's up to content creators to come up with business models that accommodate modern technology and attitudes. "I don't agree you're going to get teenagers and young people to believe they're doing something immoral" in file swapping, he said. "The industry has to decide on a different model."

Lawmakers also spoke in support of moratoriums on taxing the Internet, with Sen. George Allen, R-Va., saying lawmakers need to be vigilant against efforts by state and local authorities to grab a chunk of broadband service fees.

Sununu said those same force are hungry to take a bite out of the emerging market for Internet-based telephone service. "I think the most important policy issue we'll be dealing with over the next few months is voice over IP," he said. Sununu said Congress' job is "to try to protect it from taxation, to define it as an information service, so the technology can grow."

[by way of BoingBoing]

While poking about the digidesign site, I stumbled on an older version of ProTools that is free for the downloading! ProTools FREE is based on the older 5.0 version of ProTools, but still supports 8 audio tracks and 48 MIDI tracks. It only works on Mac OS 9 and Windows 98/Me, but the price is certainly right.

Apple's MacWorld keynotes weren't all that exciting... A bigger flat screen iMac, a smallerslightly cheaper iPod ($150 more than the rumored sub $100), and a tighter integration of .MAC with additional services and fees ($99/year).

The coolest demo from MacWorld was for GarageBand, the newest part of the generally imprived iLife '04, a home recording studio that includes the following features:

• 64 track mixer


• 50 instruments


• 1000 audio loops


• USB/Midi instrument interfaces for live controllers


• 200 effects (reverd, delays, etc)


• Vintage applifier models for guiltar players

It's no ProTools, but for $49 it's a damned nice amateur sound editing system.

At the top of Daypop today is an article from yesterday's USA Today on blogs. This is one of the best, unbiased looks at blogs I've seen in major media. Neither dismissive, nor ignorant and thoughtful about both the strengths and weaknesses of blogs as a medium of amateur journalism. Good sound-bites abound:

Veterans of the political scene admit they're having some trouble adjusting. "When I first got up here, I thought blogging was an Irish dance," says Tricia Enright, a longtime Capitol Hill press secretary who earlier this year became communications director for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. She quickly became a blog believer. Dean, whom bloggers like to cite as Exhibit A of the impact of the medium, runs a blog, hosts other blogs, raises money on blogs and gets ideas from blogs.

As Jay Rosen, a blogger and the chairman of New York University's journalism department, puts it, "Readers are becoming writers."

Their audience tends to be an elite crowd of political junkies who have almost non-stop access to a computer and large amounts of time to surf the Internet for breaking news. In short: political consultants and journalists.

That's what makes political bloggers so powerful, says Jeff Jarvis, an executive with Advance.net, the online branch of Newhouse newspapers and the blogger behind Buzzmachine.com. "It's influencing influencers."

"To read this stuff is to drink politics from a fire hose. There's so much of it that it's hard to process," says Terry Holt, spokesman for President Bush's campaign. But he adds, "There isn't any doubt that it has given voters a real way to participate."

"People are no longer simply consumers of political news. They're publishers of their own," says Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

But the biggest raves come from bloggers who have found a voice they never had before. Tom Bevan, a former advertising executive, turned to full-time blogging after a Web site he helped found, RealClearPolitics.com, took off. Bevan, 34, has no experience in politics or journalism. But he says he knows from the feedback that "a lot of influential opinion-makers" are benefiting from his views.

"That's one of the fantastic things about the blogosphere and the Internet," Bevan says. "If you have something to say that's interesting, you will eventually be heard."

The IGF is always full of really outstanding work by individuals or small development houses that don't have any relationship with big game publishers. I'm sure I'll be digging through these in the next few weeks and fully expect to find some eye-opening work. The first one that caught my eye was Billiard Boxing from Shizzmoo, who did the amazingly addictive KungFu Chess a year or so ago.

Let me know what you think about any of the entrants:

Soldiers are being given two-week breaks at short notice to return home to their families. But the military only flies them as far as three U.S. airports, and the troops or their families have to foot the bill for expensive last-minute tickets to get the rest of the way home. With so many military families struggling to make ends meet, such tickets are often an impossible expense.

Thanks to a website set up by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), Americans can now donate their frequent flier miles to soldiers who need them to get home at Heromiles.org More than 300 Millions frequent flier miles have been donated so far. Wow!

[by way of moveon.org who is tracking the donations of their members here]

Brother Blankenhorn suggested that I post this email on The Amateur Hour though has much more to do with his "World of Always On" than amateur content creation. That said:

Dana talked some about how putting a WiFi transciever in every car creates a very interesting mesh network. in his latest A Clue to Internet Commerce newsletter.

I did some similar product strategy work in this direction while at BellSouth (little of which BellSouth did anything with as the recession came along and caused them to retrench in their utility/monopolist mindset), which is simply full of possibilities.

We posited the creation of a mobile mesh network which would start with trucks (antennas and WiFi under the windblockers on the tops of trucks) and B2B apps and later move to cars and consumer applications. A whole batch of interesting things happen in that model including off the top of my head:

• If every door frame of every trailer is a RFID scanner, then every truck is a real time inventory system. Every truck knows it's current location, direction and speed (GPS). Every truck broadcasts it's current inventory (encrypted) to every truck it passes (mesh network + distributed database).


• Every time a truck refuels, it's current database is uploaded at the truck stop (we proposed a patent on an optical waveguide in the fuel nozzle to allow high-bandwidth burst upload/download) and from their into a centralized datastore for pickup by everyone involved (shipper, buyer and carrier).


• Weigh stations become data centers as do loading docs.


• A fleet of trucks and transfer points designed for breaking down and repacking inventory can completely replace warehouses for some types of products. Imagine a UPS driver loading his local truck from a UPS transfer point, picking up pre-printed boxes as the UPS transfer system breaks down and repacks pallet content from an idling semi.


• Now that we have broadband at the pump, we can download movies and music into consumers' cars through the same waveguide. And of course we'll sell those at point of purchase without ever going inside. "Kids driving you crazy? Would you like to rent "finding nemo" for $6".


• Automotive diagnostics can be broadcast and/or uploaded as well. A gas pump could not only sell you a needed oil change but potentially warn you that you will be in violation of your warrantee terms if you don't do it now.


• Email could be uploaded across the mesh network and delivered though voice synthesis in the stereo.