Month: May 2006

No on-demand for Brian Williams:

NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams told B&C that he saw a “profound danger” in the impact of “portability and on-demand” technologies and the power they give viewers to insulate themselves from important information.

His reasoning? “Our [journalist’s] job is part civics lesson,” he said. “Much of the news around the world, and the nation for that matter, is bad. Filtering it out of your day does not advance the public good, and it hardly makes us better and more informed citizens of a complicated world.”

Well yes. If you’re using on-demand and portability technologies to filter out bad news and ignore the complexities of the world…

Wait. Isn’t that what media outlets like NBC Nightly News do already?

The value in portability and on-demand technologies is that they will also make more stories, more options, more of the world’s complexities, available. Williams isn’t wrong that there’s the potential for abuse — or maybe, rather, non-use — but it’s a little naive to think of corporate media outlets as stalwart defenders of civic virtue.

The following popped up under my daily news feeds:

Note from the feedmaster: Alton Brown got his web site redesigned some weeks ago, and there’s no blog section on it, nor mention of any such blog forthcoming. So, no more RSS, because there’s no longer anything for there to be an RSS of. Bye, Alton! — sburke@cpan.org

Which isn’t really surprising, I guess. Brown (he of Good Eats) updated the weblog pretty infrequently, and it’s seen virtually no updates since his ill-fated “what’s in your refrigerator?” contest. (Brown posted a photograph of his own refrigerator’s contents and then asked readers to send in the same. Almost immediately, though, he shut down the contest. Apparently, instead of innocous snapshots of celery and mayo and milk, he received images so disturbing and sick they shook his very faith in humanity.)

The weblog’s gone, but there is mention of an upcoming podcast…

The universe just doesn’t want me to own a copy of Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks.

On Chris McLaren‘s suggestion, I decided to purchase a copy through Amazon.ca. Apparently there isn’t a book they don’t have up there in Canada.

My mistake may have been having it delivered to the office at work. Amazon says it was delivered on Saturday, and our office isn’t open on Saturdays. The package isn’t here, and so far the attempts to track it down have been unsuccessful.

I’m hoping it will turn up, because getting a refund or a new shipment from Amazon may prove difficult. (I’ve contacted customer service, so we’ll see.)

And of course, now I see that it is available at my local library through inter-library loan. Heck, I may not even end up liking this book.