rainstorm

raining in San Francisco; bike  riding in the rain and
added rainy entrance to the epoca website;

epocasf.com

 

Thoughts on New Hampshire

Watching c-span

McCain: a surreal speech by John McCain, the fossil. The cadence was robotic.   The content empty platitudes: what was he talking about. He got lost a few times. Then, to accentuate this 'back to the future' candidate, the campaign finished off with the '50's -- THE FIFTIES  hit by Bo Diddly, Johnny B. Goode. This was an entirely uninspiring speech. Cindy McCain looked very good in a red state dress with that stepford wife blond hair swept up: trophy wife.   But, hey, Gavin Newsom's got himself a telegenic trophy wife to take him on to the white house as well.

Romney: Mitt's speech was 'Washington's broken'. Set in front a set full of that handsome strapping family: all of them attractive. Which one is the Romney of the future.  But again, sixties music.. "boston you're my home.... " I get it, but, its the past, backwards looking.

 

Clinton: Hillary with a heart - emoting is effective! How she achieved underdog status is amazing. Absent on the podium is the old guard of Bill and Madeline Albright, et. al. Hill goes solo with a crowd of youthful supporters behind her: a page from the Obama playbook.  Smart call to action of hers to mention the website. Much better stage presence than Iowa. A nod to the youth. Effective. And the song - 'an american girl' best choice so far.  

Obama: His oratory and cadence is evocative, compelling and effective. The speeches are powerfu, seemingly heartfelt, and powerful. He hits all the right notes. Another really great speech. -- Steve

What is remakable this time around -- this election, is the genuine interest. People are paying attention this time.   Noticeably different than in 2000 or 2004. Something has shifted. People realize this time it's serious.

Publishing That’s All About Me - New York Times

morning w. the New York Times- makes me somewhat wistful for Squaw Valley, skiing KT; not thinking of technology but finding great skiable terrain. 

Quoted from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/business/media/07carr.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&pagewanted=print:

Publishing That’s All About Me - New York Times

January 7, 2008 The Media Equation

 

Publishing That’s All About Me

By DAVID CARR

Last Wednesday, I boarded an airplane, one of the last gated communities for major media. Up there — for the most part — there is no e-mail, no YouTube, no cellphone. Just me, my 11-year-old daughter in the bulkhead seat next to me and a stack of newspapers and magazines.

For 12 days, between a family Christmas in Minnesota and five days of visiting with friends in Lake Tahoe, I had been blessedly off the grid. A week into the trip, the BlackBerry was out of power and the cellphone was wet and sputtering from a skiing pratfall. In a mountain house above Truckee, Calif., I was far more riveted by the day’s snow conditions than the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, so I had no urge to run into town for a newspaper.

But by the middle of last week, the vacation was over and it was time to put away childish things like skis and index back into media culture — to find out why Barack Obama was surging, Benazir Bhutto was dead and Spears the younger was pregnant.

Sitting on the tarmac at San Francisco airport, I grazed the headlines in The San Francisco Chronicle and read a few sections of The New York Times, and then began flipping pages in the magazines I had neglected on the way out, all with the intention of regaining my footing in the news.

But a funny thing happened on the way back to Newark. When we reached cruising altitude, I popped open my computer to check on a few things and noticed the new photo icon on my desktop for the digital camera Santa had brought. It contained 1.35 gigabytes of photos and videos from Christmas and the skiing trip that had followed.

There was my daughter Maddie on Christmas Eve day making empanadas for the annual family hors d’oeuvres contest. A group shot of my mother-in-law’s birthday at Nye’s Polonaise Room on the day after Christmas. A video of my daughter Erin and me, preparing to ski KT-22 at Lake Tahoe, a storied, steep run, and portraits of the friends we stayed with and their three pound-rescued mutts.

Sound boring? Maybe to you. For me, time and the waiting magazines drifted away, replaced by the urgency and engagement of personal media. It was both riveting and a huge time suck, precisely because there was so much of it.

I was madly editing, wiping out photos where my comb-over was too punishing with a click of the mouse and putting slices of video into minimontages with an ease that would have taken a $20,000 video machine 10 years ago countless hours to complete. Instead of grocery bags of photos in the basement waiting to be memorialized in an album, I could create a publishable version of the Griswolds on skis by the time we touched down, ready for Flickr or Pickle.

And therein lies the rub, at least for people like me who make a living in mass media. Mainstream publishing is intended to assemble a tribe. In the instance of personal media, a tribe is already assembled and then surrounded with customized media. The guys across the aisle in Row 7 might have briefly been interested in the comic image of me doing a header into a mogul, but not a single other image on that hard drive. This was the ultimate in niche publishing.

“Some technologies and applications are age-specific, but narcissism is not one of them,” said Clay Shirky, a new-media professor at New York University and the author of a forthcoming book on social media called “Here Comes Everybody.” “The pleasures of the self reaches all demographics.”

When Mr. Shirky arrived for a scheduled chat over coffee, I was noodling on my laptop with some of the photographs. I resisted the urge to share.

“What you were doing is as much communication as content,” he said. “It used to be that communication came over the telephone and content came over the television, but those lines are not as clear as they once were. The ease of sharing, the low cost of storage and the simplicity of production means that this is a way for you to create content and communicate at the same time.”

Is it any wonder that last year had the fewest number of new magazine start-ups in 16 years, according to Samir Husni, a professor at the University of Mississippi who keeps track of such things? Or that publicly traded newspaper companies have lost $23 billion in value in the last four years, according to Alan D. Mutter, a former newsman and currently a managing partner at Tapit Partners?

By Thursday night, I was at the kitchen table, still culling the photos. The downside of being able to shoot and store all the photos you want at little or no cost is that you can shoot or store all the photos you want. (Experts are suggesting that the average number of times a photo is viewed is dropping from one toward zero very rapidly.) Still, my public, however small, however niche, was calling. Just a little more editing and then I would be ready to upload to a photo site.

And then, Wolf Blitzer of CNN reared into view on the kitchen television set. Behind him was a graphic indicating that Mr. Obama, a black first-term senator, was about to win a profound victory in the Iowa caucuses. (And what a graphic it was: the CNN set looks as if it doubles as an atom smasher.)

I tried multitasking for a while, but somewhere between Hillary Clinton’s brave concession speech with a former president at her side and Mr. Obama’s bracing call for a new kind of unity, I lost interest in the 12th picture of the steam coming off Lake Tahoe with the mountains in the background.

I grabbed an external hard drive and moved the pictures over to work on later. It is still down there in basement, next to the bags of photos waiting for incarceration in albums. History — a communal experience shared by all members of a culture — had come knocking. Personal, digital immortality will have to wait. Dang.

U.S. Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan

 

Today's Headlines: U.S. Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan

New Covert Push Within Pakistan
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
The presidential candidates rushed into a final weekend of compressed and often harsh campaigning as they presented new themes to New Hampshire voters.