Open Thread

I'm on the road to Florida to attend and speak at the Poynter Institute's Web + 10 gathering. Feel free to talk below, but please behave nicely.

Comments

[step back]

Journalism at all time low.

This morning, a number of TV newscasters proclaimed, "Turnout was greater than expected." They were talking about the Iraqi elections. But they were also mindlessly parroting government propaganda. What ever happened to the fundamental 5 W's?
Who?
What?
When?
What?
Why?
(How?)

Who was doing the "expecting"?
When did the unknown entity do it?
What was their "expectation"?
By how much did reality exceed the unknown expectations of the unknown entities?
Why should we care that there were these "expectations" and that they were exceeded?

TV journalism is at an all time low. Mindless parrots squawking to a brain dead audience. TV journalists have met my expectations. They are the bottom feeding pond s__ at the bottom of the muck.

[Jozef Imrich]

G. K. Chesterton preached about the fundamental 5Ws, but concluded that in practice: It is terrible to contemplete (sic) how few politicians are hanged.

Christian Berthelsen, Jim Herron Zamora and Todd Wallack of the San Francisco Chronicle used state campaign finance records to show that four political consultants have benefited from their association with state Sen. Don Perata: “they have collectively grossed $1.4 million from campaigns and political funds associated with Perata over the last 10 years” Influence, family and political favors

G. K. Chesterton was well aware of the fact that what the public actually finds out about the way the political sausages are made is just a tip of the iceberg. For every story that happen to see the light of the ink there seem to be many more that never surface from the deep, dark, political river.

I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.

Some trends never change ...

[Joe I.]

How about the news that Walmart will start selling the iPod shuffle in Spring after supplies are available from Apple. What does the Mac community feel about this?

My opinion is what ever you think of Walmart they might be the key to Apple expanding their market share. I predict the eMac and Mac Mini after initial demand drops are going into Walmart stores as well. Remember Walmart was the first to mass sell a Linux box.

I have a friend that worked at Apple up until last March and she said that churches are one of the biggest installed user base of Macs outside of creative markets because they are easier to use and maintain than Windows. I went to three here in Seattle to check that out and YES all three use Macs.

Any place that gets more Macs and products into the market is only a good thing.

[Paul]

The 5 W's are actualy quite magicly worth while to use.
But what happens after that!
So many times you get a numbing report but no-one else follows up on it, I forget what this is called (if anything) trashing a story.
It seems like a lot of stories just get swept under the rug.
Follow through follow through etc

[Joe I.]

I need to vent. I use the Mac but lately I've been really disappointed in Apple. First Pages, nice program but again like Dashboard will put small developers like Nisus (a mac word processor) out of business. Next the DRM restrictions on the iPod and iTunes. And finally, today, word that Apple actually restricts use of the DVD players in their machines far more than even the Hollywood copyright and licensing groups require of Apple.

Read this
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/01/apple_restricting_dv.html

Update to the above post by me....Walmart is now starting sales of the iPod Mini in select stores.