mediageek

Month: February 2008

  • John Anderson on Freak Radio Santa Cruz: the State of Media in 2008

    My pal John Anderson recently joined Skidmark Bob on Santa Cruz’s long running unlicensed station to dish about many of the topics he writes about at DIYMedia.net and discusses with me on the radioshow. Topics include Pirate Radio, FM Radio, on-air Television, Net Neutrality (or lack their of), translator FM stations and the very bleak…

  • The O.P.s — Original Pirates — Full Power and Micropower

    As long as there have been transmitters, there’s been broadcasters who aren’t interested in appealing to a higher authority for the right to use them. As for nearly as long, there’s been some federal agency hunting them down. But not nearly successfully enough to quash unlicensed broadcasting altogether. To whit, this 1934 Modern Mechanix article…

  • The PBS You Have Vs. the PBS You Wish You Had

    On the radioshow two weeks ago I talked with my pal and public broadcasting alumnus Bill Poorman about some of his issues with that enterprise. Our actual conversation ran over an hour, so I had to leave out some of Bill’s comments about public TV, which were more critical than radio. But his comments rang…

  • When Underground Culture Was Hard(er) To Find

    Filmmaker Danny Plotnick’s “Out of Print” is an absolutely brilliant and simple but effective short film about the somewhat lost pleasures of hunting down underground media, from cult films and bands, to underground literature and zines. By his own description, it’s “an ode to the counterculture of the 80s and 90s when unearthing quality culture…

  • BitTorrent’s Plan for the Future Includes Open Source File Sharing, According to CTO

    Back in November I posted about BitTorrent’s President Ashwin Navin’s appearance at Streaming Media West, hoping he’d address the Comcast blocking question. Being the semi-dedicated blogger I am, I never followed up, aside from a brief news item on the Nov. 18 radioshow. The answer Navin gave at SM West was that he wasn’t too…

  • Reasonable Truth Management and Waiting for Godot Neutrality

    “Reasonable.” That’s a tough word when you think about it. We all like to think we know what is reasonable and what is unreasonable. But where’s the line? When they put that word in policies and laws, it’s usually stand in for: We can’t or don’t want to specify specific limits here, even though we…

  • Where Ya Been?

    This little ol’ blog celebrates its eighth birthday this month, which is pretty damn old for a blog, you must admit. But I sit here feeling blog-daddy guilt at how neglected it’s become, yet again. Posting is sporadic, and I’ve let the design go to hell (due to some weird WordPress bug that got fixed,…