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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Like a Broken Record
So AOL, owned by the company that writes my paycheck, and its partners launched an expanded version of the MusicNet service. So what? They're still not getting it.
In this new service, you have to pay $18 a month before you can download music in any kind of serious quantity. And your downloads are not MP3s, no sir. You can't even begin to do what you want with them. MusicNet permits you to burn a whole ten of them onto a CD per month. Ten tunes for $18! What a technological innovation! Now imagine your local mall was stuffed with stores selling this kind of overpriced crap ... oh, wait. It is.
I've said it before. I've said it to MusicNet executives. I've said it to everyone I've interviewed in the whole damn industry. I'll say it again. People, there is a way you can combat illegal music downloads. It's very simple. Drop the stupid subscription model. You sell raw, untainted MP3s. You sell them for a dollar each. One buck, one tune. Because they're MP3s, we can burn as many as we want. And you host this service on thousands of speedy servers, so we can have near-instant downloads. The song-swap sites are only successful because there's no reasonable alternative; that doesn't mean we like downloading from them. Who would want to waste all that time on KaZaa if they could have a real thing for a pittance? No doubt you'd end up making more than $18 out of folks like me, who look only at the individual price of purchase and not the cumulative total. People! There's a fortune waiting to be made!
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