Radical Georgia Moderate

We had our Halloween birthday fun last night, so we’re staying in tonight. If you are too, you should call in to our first-ever live Skypecast, which starts at 9:30.

This wasn’t planned, so I fully expect it to be a total disaster and that not very many people will show up. The good news about that is you’ll probably be “passed the mic” in Skype lingo almost immediately after joining in. We want to do live interaction shows in the future, and are testing this out to see how we like it.

What do you need? Just an installed copy of Skype, which is free. Then visit the Skypecast’s URL at 9:30 or so and you should see a “Join Now” link. If all goes well, clicking that should get you in.

I’m on AIM at evilwilly1.

Update: So much for that:

Guess we’ll have to try something else at a different date.

Update 2: We discuss the Skypecasting debacle and many other things here.

You can listen to the new GA Politics Podcast here. It’s drawing criticism from some corners of the blogosphere because it doesn’t talk about how everything is sunshine, flowers and puppies within DPG. Related reading material:

• Tondee’s Tavern: New GA Politics Podcast and My last word re: pod-cast dustup
• Blog for Democracy: From the mail bag and Well, well, well
• Drifting Through the Grift: I Am The God Of Hellfire!
• Atlanta Public Affairs: Latest Podcast Is Up and Flack Continues His “Attack”

For the record, I think the jury is still out on how the new leadership in DPG is doing. Unfortunately for the people who do the heavy lifting in these situations, the fruits of their labor sometimes don’t appear until after they’re gone, so it’s hard to objectively rate their performance in the moment.

I agree with the statement someone (I think Catherine) made in the podcast that there’s too much trying to get along and not enough kicking ass, based on what I’ve heard talking to people and my own impressions meeting with staff. And I agree based on everything I see that the Democrats’ bench is thin compared to the Republicans. Rose-colored shades don’t change that.

That said, I realize that working for a political party can be grueling, thankless work. I’m sure Joseph would be happy to have anyone on the show from the Party to discuss why something is or isn’t true. Leave a comment here or email me and I’ll put you in touch with him.

UPDATE 2007-10-31 1:05 p.m.: I’ve been adding new links as I find them. It beats writing a fresh post today.

My blogging energy this week has been spent preparing the next edition of the Georgia Carnival of Bloggers, which will go up tomorrow morning. In the meantime, all I’ve got for you is a screengrab from my Bloglines:

I think it’s funny that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution still uses this spelling of "headline" in their stubs.

If you’re looking for something else to do, check out this Atlanta Press Club podcast with CDC director Julie Gerberding.

From David Bowie, who gets it, about the state of the music industry, which doesn’t:

”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

That was in the New York Times.

Here’s something interesting from ConvergeSouth that didn’t take place in a session. Leonard Witt, a friend and Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, has posted an interview with Jason Calacanis. Calcanis founded Weblogs, Inc. (which he sold to AOL for $30 million) and is currently CEO of Mahalo. The interview is one of six that Witt will post soon about the future of journalism.

There are several noteworthy tidbits in the interview, but what I found most interesting was this statement:

If you’re going to make an online business work, it’s pretty hard to make it work if you’re getting less than 100,000 people to read it. Some of these local publications, maybe they get a couple of thousand people reading it a day, it’s hard to make a business out of that.

So, if you believe Calacanis, goodbye Neighbor Newspapers, Creative Loafing, The Sunday Paper, the Rockdale Citizen, the Gwinnett Daily Post, a couple of television and radio stations in every market, etc. etc. etc. Hello faceless conglomerate and a big fat vacuum of local information that would need to be filled by something practically for free since there’s apparently no business model.

I think that will be true for the outlets that don’t get very creative finding ways to make money outside the standard models. Let me throw a hypothetical out, and you tell me what you think.

UPS started out as a package delivery company. As they grew, their logistics systems and the required expertise to run those systems grew in size and complexity to the point that they had more advanced knowledge of supply chains than possibly any company in the world short of Wal*Mart. Somebody over there realized they could sell this knowledge to other companies as a consulting service. The unassumingly-titled UPS Consulting Services is born. For $500 per hour, UPS comes in and evaluates your supply chain, finds what’s wrong, and tells you how to fix it.

While I’m sure UPS Consulting Services is only a small part of UPS’ business, I’d bet it’s a very profitable part. It seems there’s little or no overhead other than paying the consultant who evaluates the client’s company. Even if the consultant is drawing $250,000 per year, UPS would see more than $750,000 profit from each consultant working a 40-hour week over the course of a year.

Here’s the hypothetical: would there be a way for media companies, particularly small local media companies, to package their skills as a service independent from the news-gathering process?

The difference between UPS and many media companies may be the scarcity of available expertise. If you go outside UPS, there really aren’t very many companies with that level of knowledge about supply chains in the real world. Even less are offering that knowledge as a consulting service. That scarcity is what allows UPS to charge what they do.

Most of the potential services that a media company could offer that come to mind are media conceptualizing or production services, an arena that already has plenty of competition. So they’d have to offer something extraordinary on top of those services.

Take the founders of Rocketboom, for example. They have an audience of around 1,000,000, and yet still struggle with revenue from advertising alone. How do they make real money? One way is they produce internal videos for corporations like Nokia.

What they have that’s scarce is the ability to communicate with an Internet-savvy audience. That’s probably not a good model for a long-term business, but it’s working for them in the short term.

What do small local media companies have that’s scarce enough and in demand enough to charge a premium for? Anything? Bueller?

This is just a friendly reminder to submit a favorite post to the Georgia Blog Carnival, which will be held here this Friday. Email submissions to gamind@mail.com or submit them over the web here.

I’ll probably start putting it together tomorrow night, so get them in soon if you want them to be included! Thanks.

• At least things aren’t as bad for UT they are for Notre Dame, which has undergone perhaps the most horrific collapse in the program’s history. A 38-0 shellacking by USC doesn’t even register on the trauma scale this year.
• At least things aren’t as bad for UT as they are for Texas A&M, where the coach is about to be fired for losing a lot of games and for selling gambling secrets to boosters by way of a double-secret newsletter.
• At least things aren’t as bad for UT as they are for Nebraska, where the coach is a dead man walking after the AD that hired him was fired for the football program’s collapse. And after he (says a fired trainer) called interim AD, most super-duper Huskers coach of all time, statesman, and all-around grandfather figure Tom Osbourne “that crusty old fuck.” And alienated ex-players. And was blown out 36-14 yesterday by the atrocious Texas A&M team from the last bullet point.

No, this is just run-of-the-mill jumping the shark and losing the confidence of the fan base, not something particularly catastrophic by measure on this year’s scale.

Despite gross coaching incompetence in all major games but one, UT still has an outside chance at contending for the SEC East. But someone (ahem, Georgia) would have to beat Florida, and UT would have to beat South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky and Vandy. I’m tempted to say Florida can punch their card to rematch LSU in the SEC title game, but things have been strange this year. I’m done with predictions.

Cross-posted to my Rocky Top Talk diary

P.S. - I realize I never posted last week’s NCAA Picks scores here. I didn’t hear any complaints, so I’m going to assume if you cared you logged into Yahoo and looked at the score.

We rolled into Greensboro in time for the last ConvergeSouth session yesterday, then adjourned for a few hours before a 6 p.m. barbecue. More to follow later perhaps. I realize I haven’t been very good about covering these events in a journalistic or even a journaling sense lately, but you get what you pay for.

After the initiative’s rousing success with Atlanta’s most recent marketing slogan (”Every day is an opening day”), Brand Atlanta with its $4 million annual budget has come up with another gem: ‘City lights, Southern nights.’

Instead, how about “The City Too Busy to Cut a Deadweight Marketing Initiative from its Budget”?