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| Wednesday, June 11, 2003 |
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Flogrolling 
| | Also had a great time sharing a cab and a 757 between Boston and L.A. with Denise. Matt met both of us at the same time last night. Her blog rocks too. |
Over and off
| | I fly soon. See ya back on the Left Coast. |
Close enough for Top 40
| | That headline is an old radio expression from back in the day when the biggest stations in town were very much like the biggest newspapers: large and serious operations that served as authoritative sources of detailed news and information, in addition to top-drawer local and national programming. |
| | When Top 40 music radio came along in the 1950s, it was as much a rebel movement as the rock & roll music and culture it supported. |
| | Except for a few large exceptions (more about those in a moment), Top 40 stations had secondary signals. There were bigger local signals (all from Serious Stations) than those of KQV in Pittsburg, WMEX in Boston, KRLA in Los Angeles, KYA in San Francisco, WXYZ in Detroit, WEAM in Washington, WCAO in Baltimore, WIBG in Philadelphia, WINS in New York, WKIX in Raleigh, WQXI in Atlanta, KLIF in Dallas. (I'm amazed I remember all these lost relics. God, I'm old.) |
| | Two large exceptions, WABC in New York and WLS in Chicago, were owned and operated by ABC at a time when that network still carried the second-banana taint of having been NBC's secondary "Blue" network, which NBC was forced by the FCC to sell off in the 1940s. (A far cry from today, when the FCC serves more to enable than to restrict the ownership of broadcast properties by companies that overpower competitors.) |
| | Big-Time radio stations, called MOR (or Middle of the Road) by the industry, were Serious Operations. There was a sense of high importance to them -- akin to big regional newspapers. Professional standards were very high. |
| | Top 40 had high standards too, but with tight budgets and small staffs and facilities they often had to cut corners. "Close enough for Top 40" was what a disc jockey might hear from the program director after he produced a good-enough ad for a client when there were more pressing demands for the production studio. |
| | Anyway, the "close enough for Top 40" line comes to mind when I think about blogging. Doing what I'm doing now feels like doing Top 40 radio to me. It's not "professional" in the older sense of the word, although it involves a degree of invention and skill. Most important, mistakes are okay. Being real (in the unprofessional sense of the word) is okay. And moving on to the next thing often matters more than Getting It Right. |
| | The phrase also comes to mind when I read the latest Big Media take on blogging, The Wild World of "Open-Source Media", in Business Week. It's okay for what it is, and it covers enough the bases. |
| | Finally, the phrase seems a sensible way to sum up Jupitermedia's ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies Conference & Expo, just concluded. It wasn't a Big Time conference, but it was a culture-changer. Blog is Rock, in many ways. And the show had a lot of Rock & Roll to it. It was also very well done for the first of its kind. |
| | It brought a lot of terrific people together, which is a huge plus. It ran well, without many hitches. And they provided free wi-fi Net access (and kept it going), which is much appreciated. So: kudos to the Jupiter folks for pulling it off. |
| | I have a lot of thoughts for Next Time, but I'll save them for later. |
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