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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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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.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
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.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Monday, October 09, 2006
YouTube, RIP
Well, it was good fun while it lasted -- all those free music videos, the snippets of badly-taped kids' cartoons from the 70's, the everything-you-need-to-know-about-last-night's-television-in five-minutes montages. Now that Google has acquired YouTube for a staggering (and extremely swaggering) $1.6 billion, you'd better bet the videos with any potential for copyright protection -- anything from TV, Hollywood, record labels, anywhere in the world -- are going to get pulled down sharpish, as hungry copyright lawyers salivate over the size of Google's deep pockets.
What does that leave us with? Diet Coke and Mentos experiments, and shaky videos of your neighbor's cat skateboarding. Hardly the kind of quality entertainment you'd expect from a company streaming 100 million videos, and indeed it's hard to imagine Google could sustain that impressive (and oft-misunderstood) viewership figure with user-generated, non-copyright-busting video. (We're talking the quality of the lightsaber kid rather than the quality of the Star Wars mashups.)
As Mark Cuban has been saying repeatedly, anyone who buys YouTube is "an idiot." YouTube is so successful because of the complete freedom of its content, and its lack of significant cash reserves is the only thing keeping the lawyers at bay. “The minute that acquisition takes place," Cuban said of the Google rumor on Friday, "YouTube couldn’t be YouTube.”
Which makes me worry about Google. This kind of big-walleted bravado, this flavor-of-the-month acquisition, is more in the character of a stodgy old company like HP or Microsoft. It's the kind of thing a technology company does when it wants to appeal to Wall Street Journal readers rather than common sense. Sergey, Larry and Mr. Schmidt The Grown-Up had distinguished themselves until now by not playing that game, and like a medieval courtier I find myself blaming Evil Advisers -- some unseen room of besuited marketing types with the combined depth of a kids' paddling pool, each trying to outswagger the other by coming up with ever more noticeable ways for Google to blow its multibillion-dollar wad.
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