There’s been plenty of bad ideas recently on how to save the newspaper industry: forcing Google to stop driving traffic to newspaper sites, for example. But here is an idea so insane as to tempt disbelief: an argument in favor of outlawing the paraphrasing or linking of articles without the expressed consent of the owner.

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.

I don’t intend to add to the cacophony of responses about the thoroughly sad life and death of Michael Jackson; instead to the cacophony over people’s reactions to the death. I’ve seen three major pillars of responses on the social media sites and blogs–expressions of sadness, jokes, and mockery/scolding of individuals expressing sadness over his death.

You know the basic argument; it’s made by your Reason Magazine-subscribing acquaintance whenever there’s a large public outpouring of grief over an event deemed unimportant by said bastion of reason and logic. And of course, it’s a bit ridiculous for your average person to experience sadness about a person-as-abstract-concept, a faraway figure of wealth and decadence. That doesn’t make the sorrow any less valid, however. And these responses don’t make a reasonable argument; instead, they’re merely the outbursts of trolls expressing their narcissism of minor differences. (more…)

Freelance writing mills are ubiquitous online: generally, they demand that you devote hours of your time building your reputation and profile on what is essentially an eBay for tedious, lifeless copywriting. The rewards are minor. While Dan Baum gripes on Twitter about being paid $90,000 a year to write for the New Yorker, writers on the other end of the pay scale are doing it for pennies—or worse—a percentage of potential AdSense revenue.

It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.

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The use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize Iranian protestors and broadcast news to the outside world is a testament to the potential for social media to break through a repressive regime’s media iron curtain. There is a wealth of real-time reporting, and aggregating of this information using social media tools online today.

Still, too much of the Stateside chatter online in the past 48 hours has treated the protests as an opportunity for social media cheerleading. Sites like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Gawker appear primarily interested in slapping the wrists of the American MSM while using the protests as a case study validating their pet talking points about the irrelevancy of old-school media, the world-changing potential of social media, and all the usual harangues. This is all spiced with a touch of vicarious protest pr0n from bloggers, Twitterers and the like, perhaps rueful that we don’t have a bloody riot of our own to gape at.

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My old band Mule Train did a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning”, a song about a lovelorn Willie managing a cross-country flight from LAX with a stiff plastic cup of vodka and spicy tomato juice. It’s a great song:

Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)

My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air:

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It really isn’t (only) a stereotype: the Australians love their country music, as evidenced by Australian radio, approximately 20% of which is populated by country stations. Just today, I heard Kenny Chesney, Dolly Parton doing “9-5″, and a truly abysmal modern-Nashville Dire Straits cover on Australian country radio. During the flight into Sydney, I couldn’t quite place why I was getting so many complements on my Hank Williams tattoo, forgetting the Aussie enthusiasm for American country.

I’ve yet to hear a homegrown country track, however; there seems to be a contemporary-Nashville-country-only policy dictating the playlists. Funny, since the alternative rock-skewing station seems to play a fair share of domestic hip-hop, albeit domestic hip-hop tracks featuring guest spots from Americans such as Pharaoh Monch.

One thing that the Australians appear to have a market on are surrealistically banal talk show topics. A few topics of discussion on today’s talk shows:

“What do you smell like?”

“What were your favorite candies and lollies growing up?”

“How do you feel about shopping? Do you love it or would you rather run burning spears through your eyes?”

Not that American talk radio topics are any less banal, but certainly less bizarre.

Bonus local colloquialism watch: for heavy drinking, “grogging on”, as in, “you should have thought about that before you grogged on all night.”

After three days in Sydney, we have made our way out to the rural Kangaroo Valley, and are staying for a few days at a farm house owned by my wife’s uncle. The sights are rather breathtaking, I can attest to as I stare out the window at a low-lying bed of fog over a pond. Climate and surroundings-wise, it’s not all that unlike Northern California, though this is the winter. The meteorologists on the radio are bemoaning the “cold” weather, which is approximately 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which causes us Chicagoans to laugh bitterly in the same way that I do when my mother calls from the depths of a California winter and talks about the frigid sub-70s temperatures she is enduring.

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“What is it,” I mused to myself, “about warm climates and white people playing in reggae bands,” as we listened to four sunburnt gents with Hawaiian shirts and beards amble through “Waiting in Vain” on the patio of a restaurant beneath the iconic Sydney Opera House. Breaking my vegetarian edge, I was scarfing down a proper British meal at the restaurant, a Shepherd’s Pie (all food should be topped with mashed potatoes) and grooving to the official soundtrack to white people sitting next to large bodies of water in the sun.

It’s winter in Australia, and in comparison to Chicago, winter here is characterized by a light breeze, an average of 68 degrees (F), and inevitable complaints that the weather is too cold. (more…)

Shockingly similar to America, in many ways, but with better animals. The basic layout of Sydney is reminiscent of Seattle, with the ferries (and furries?) and the waterways and the whatnots. Plenty of McDonald’s, Burger Kings (called Hungry Jack’s here; the rest of the branding is exactly the same), and Oprah-rific workout purveyor Curves. The street signs are identical, not sure if they were designed by the same street-sign branding committee as in the states, or if they bought leftovers from the U.S.  street-sign run at a severe discount. Strangers are rude and drive SUV’s on small winding roads like assholes. The world is truly flat, Thomas Friedman. (more…)