June 27, 2006
Normally we would not stalk Rush Limbaugh for his politics, except his addiction problem, an entirely different kind from ours. Since he was in the news yesterday, we thought to Google him to get the latest scoop.
Google search, “Rush Limbaugh detained, Florida” only yielded results of his last brush with the law in April when he was charged with “doctor shopping,” ie, deceiving two or more doctors to write simultaneous scripts for painkillers. Neither MSN nor Ask.com returned anything apropos of yesterday’s news.
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Regular readers of this blog will know we’re addicts to MySpace, so we might as well make the most of it.
In the July issue of Wired, just in time for News Corp’s golfklatsch in sunny Pebble Beach in California, Murdoch has claimed His Space.
Platforms have long been the key to digital power, and the Internet only extends their scope and grip. eBay built one for retail transactions. Google’s organizes information. MySpace is a platform that gives ordinary people a place on the Net to interact with one another.
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We were just about to call it a day when this came our way. Given our preoccupation for anything that has the desirable combination of internet, media and, well, any word in the vocabulary of shrinks, we were immediately hooked and psychoanalyzed our good self. And we believe you should do too.
Here is our question of the week: Are you “compulsively attached” to your electronic doodads?
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In our continued fascination with blogs, and to a lesser degree, books, we read with interest IWantMedia’s interview with Chris Anderson, EIC of Wired Magazine, and author of “The Long Tail“, to be published by Hyperion next month.
If an entry on Wikipedia confers a certain cachet, it is that the long tail has entered our collective consciousness. Anderson coined the term in 2004 as a measure to describe “how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to millions of niches,” esp. in the context of e-commerce, as the long tail is embedded in the business models of Amazon and Netflix.
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In an embarrasing blow to Yahoo!, which manages Fifa’s official World Cup site, Nielsen//NetRatings reported that the BBC’s online coverage of the World Cup has taken a 58 per cent share of the traffic going to sports websites during the tournament, five times as many visitors as Fifa’s official site. The survey includes visitors from outside the UK, thought to account for one-third of the total.
The figures, said Alex Burmaster of Nielsen//NetRatings at the FT, “show what a massive boost the World Cup gives to the online space.” However, BBC’s success will likely draw more criticism over its massive digital media budget.
Sunny spells brought out our musical spirit, Latin music, to be exact. The FT took note that while all other genres of music suffered sales declines last year, shipments of Latin music CDs to retailers jumped 13 per cent, third consecutive annual sales gain, according to figures from the Recording Industry Association of America.
On the one side, the downward spiral of music business in the US, said Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, which owns half of Sony BMG, is because music has become fragmented as a result of the consolidation of the radio industry. Urban music, or Hip Hop, which has dominated the US market for some years, typically travels less well to other countries.
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Last night CNN picked up this video clip, a Comcast Technician Sleeping on my Couch, at YouTube, which, at last count, had been viewed over 390,000 times.
Incidentally, we had to deal with RCN yesterday. Previously we had tried a few times calling but backed off because of the almost impossible long hold. Our email inquiries had not been answered after a week, despite a website claim of response time of 2 business days. So we decided to call again. After waiting for over 40 minutes, a rep came along. She was, ahem, not sleeping on the job, rather gleefully sadistic, or may have been overdosed on SSRIs. It was such a horribly exhausting experience that we thought should make it to the hall of fame for how to irritate customers and lose their accounts.
We don’t need CNN to advise us how to deal with difficult reps or handle sucky services (record the phone conversation or better yet, make a video and show it on YouTube), but as wistful as it sounds, there was a time when customer service actually meant something.
