the pod bay door

:: Speaking of some of my previously mentioned friends, Derryl is close to having a collection of his short stories published in book form, and about time, too!

Tony offers a heartfelt story about a Catholic nun, who was also one of his clients. Despite struggling through a terminal illness and lack of support from her order, she had the strength, conviction and compassion to continue her ministry with the poor, and it had an lasting and positive effect on my good friend.

:: Edmonton is getting four new radio stations, including a modern rock station that promises to play actual NEW modern rock music from the 21st century, thus giving us an alternative from the other completely interchangeable, bland, dull, lifeless, classic rock stations in the city right now. Absolutely amazing and satisfying that we will be able to choose to listen to a station that plays and supports new music, indie artists, and the like. I hope they are successful.

:: My first web site saw the light of day in 1995, and I added a counter to it in January, 1996. I became aware of blogs in 1999 or 2000, at which time I made mention of them on my both my library page and search engine page. I attended Peter Scott’s presentation on blogging in Oct, 2001, and thought about starting one at that time. Blogging was still in its infancy, and foreign to most people at that time.

Geoff, meanwhile, had started his first blog in 2002, at the time known as The Anonymous Librarian (if memory serves); however, he forgot to renew the domain name, and it was snared by some, well, let’s just call them non-librarian types, so he revamped and started again with The Blog Driver’s Waltz. In May 2002, unbeknownst to me, my belly-dancing songstress librarian pal in Florida, Darcy, began darcysworld. In July 2002, I began The Pod Bay Door, using Blogger as the software package. I wondered if any other friends would start blogging as well. It didn’t take long to find out.

Shortly after PBD appeared, Derryl jumped in with Cold Ground, and Jena was right behind with naked bootleg. Claire snuck in there somewhere with There Be Giants Here, Kim offered Bibcognito, and Keith followed with Bloggo – The Non Blog, a site that has had at least “10,937,458,548 visitors since May 1974.” Kenton started blogging around that time, and Mike was next, with Toys and Cookies, although he has been quiet since last fall.

In 2003, Robert returned to writing with I’m Not Boring You, Am I?, also the title of his fanzine from the 70s-90s period. My fanzines, fwiw, were called Odds ‘n’ Ends (1969), and Winding Numbers (1975-78, or something…); look around my site, you may notice a reference to one of them. My cool SLA pal, Cindi, started her blog, Chronicles of Bean in 2003 as well, Bean being the pet name of her unborn child (at the time), now known as the beautiful Bethany.

OK, so now what’s up? Well, my Winnipeg pals are blogging. Please let me introduce Steve and Tony: Steve, aka Stephen R George, aka Valerie Stevens, aka Jack Ellis, is one of the many friends I met while participating in sf fandom in the 1970s in Winnipeg, publishing zines and attending sf conventions. One of Steve’s zines was Gleet Glort, thus the name of his web site, glort.com, and his blog, glort Web log. Steve is also a horror author, which is why he has a few pseudonyms. Tony and I met in 1971 while attending St Paul’s College at the U of Manitoba. One of our first connections was when he tried to assure me that Horse With No Name wasn’t sung by Neil Young, while I, like the cocksure moron I was, insisted otherwise, and would have none of it. I’m sure he thought I was a complete idiot, so much so that we’ve been friends ever since. Tony’s new weblog is called Sea of Flowers. Both blogs are worth checking, you won’t be disappointed. BTW, adding our mutual friend Mike Nichols to the equation (no, not THAT Mike Nichols), and you get Bike With Mike.

Lordy. These people are my friends. It’s a blog family!

:: Spammers, knowing no moral code or caring about anyone or anything, continue to astound and confuse. On my work-related blog, we keep receiving spam comments, which means I need to continually run Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. The next version of Moveable Type will deal with this problem, hopefully in a permanent way.

Regardless, here is an example of the kind of bad, broken English that accompanies most of these spam comments:

Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of honey dampness, lowered my insert spam product here. In truth, much as the owners of cats depended these unstressed folk, they hopped them more.

Er, what?

:: I volunteer again tonight at one of the Juno-fest venues, The Power Plant, which happens to be two buildings over from the library in which I work on campus. It promises to be rather uneventful. I’m one of the two media contacts assigned to that venue, and as of this writing, no media have booked any time with any of the acts there tonight. I will be there from 8:00 pm – 2:30 am or so, which is really 3:30 am, as DST starts tonight.

:: Has anyone noticed that searches on Google seem to be taking longer than usual, of late?

:: Alan Kellogg is one of my favorite local newspaper columnists (and a kind soul – he agreed to return with two Steely Dan t-shirts for me, when he saw them play at Roseland in NYC last September. You see, I had neglected to buy the shirts when I saw The Dan in concert at The Gorge in August, a few weeks earlier. But I digress…) Alan’s April 1st column analyzed the Federal Court ruling on downloading music in Canada. (Warning: the column will remain online for just one week, as the Edmonton Journal maintains a seven-day archive only. Very frustrating and annoying.) The point that hit home for me the hardest, however, wasn’t about the impact this ruling will have on the music industry, whose sales were heading downhill before Napster came into existence three years ago. Rather, it was Alan’s straightforward take on record stores:

“Many mall record stores are simply terrible, with limited stock and clueless staff“.

That was my emphasis on clueless staff, not Alan’s. I might add that the clueless staff are not restricted to mall record stores, either. Long before downloading caught on, I began noticing, probably in the mid-90s (slightly post-grunge) that service in A&B Sound and other Canadian chain stores was riding the down escalator – staff, when they weren’t busy comparing piercings and tattoos, could barely be bothered helping me find a record that wasn’t in the best seller racks. Such interactions usually ended with blank stares and shoulder shrugs.

“Do you have the new Oysterband album?” “Blue Oyster Cult?” “No, sorry, Oysterband?” “Prairie Oyster?” “Er, no, Oysterband, from the UK, played the folk festival in Edmonton 2 or 3 times?” Watching the staff member “helping” me, the expected shoulder shrugs would follow at that moment, and I might as well have been staring into the eyes of a chicken. Recently, a friend shared with me this story: A&B called him to tell him a CD he’d ordered had arrived. When he went to pick it up, they told him it wasn’t there. Welcome to Customer Service, 2004.

The music industry is in really, really bad shape right now. It has not come to grips with downloading, nor with the fact that is has been overpricing music for years while simultaneously releasing questionable product. Whoinhell wants to keep paying unreasonable prices for crappy music? The industry’s insistence on blaming downloading as the major reason for poor sales isn’t holding up under scholarly scrutiny: a study released this week by researchers at Harvard and U North Carolina indicates that file swapping and downloading has had little impact on the slide in CD sales over the past while:

“We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales,” the study’s authors wrote. “While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing.”

My own buying patterns have slowed down. Yes, I’ve downloaded some songs, but after an initial flurry in 2001-02, very little in the past 12 months or so. In fact, most of what I’ve downloaded is old material, some “out of print”, so to speak, and a lot of which I own already on vinyl, and want to either hear on my computer, or burn to CD for listening in the car. But another reason I cite for the change is the poor service offered by the chain stores like A&B. Add to that their own dwindling inventories because of declining sales. It’s a bad scene, and I have no solution for the mess it’s in.

April 2 update: Alan’s column in today’s Journal features an interview with Denise Donlon, CEO of Sony Music of Canada. Of note is the following:

“Upon leaving her old job as vice-president at MuchMusic, she declared her first priority at Sony was to aggressively promote new Canadian music.

‘It’s taken longer than I had hoped, because since the day I walked in the door it feels like we were dealing with these other pressing issues. But there are hugely talented artists everywhere you look, for every taste, smart people with a point of view. It’s exciting’.”

A quick check of Sony Music of Canada’s site this morning reveals the following “Featured Artists”: Delta Goodrem (Australia), Incubus (USA), Jessica Simpson (USA), Switchfoot (USA), Lost Prophets (UK), Harry Connick Jr (USA), John Mayer (USA), and a little-known, obscure Canadian artist named Celine Dion. Under “New Releases”, we find: 1) Various – Oprah’s Pop Star Challenge 2004 Cast Album (USA), 2) Nas – Nas: 10 Year Anniversary Illmatic Platinum Series (USA), and 3) Shakira – Live & Off The Record (Columbia, South America.) Aggressively promoting new Canadian music??? As for Edmonton, we haven’t had a major artists in pop music emerge from this city for decades, and there is no excuse for this. I’ve played in bands and with individual artists in town since the mid-1980s – believe me, there is Major Talent in this city, but Big Music continues to ignore it. (PS: Remember, you have seven days to read the column here before it self-vaporizes!)

:: This is too cool. I’m a fan of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. On Eric Alterman’s blog, I saw a link to FootnoteTV, which is a site that provides analysis of a very select group of television shows, including TDS, SNL, West Wing, Law & Order, and a few more. FootnoteTV is part of Newsaic. The site is written and produced by Stephen Lee, a journalist/lawyer, whose intention is to focus on issues rather than breaking news:

“My ultimate goal here is to create a kind of Internet journalism that reaches out to modern audiences in new ways. Ultimately, I want to get people more involved in the news, especially younger people, the kind of people that newspapers and television keep losing. The answer is not more channels or simpler stories; it lies in new perspectives and tools. I expound more on this at length in the Site FAQ.”

So to return back to the beginning, fans of Jon Stewart can read Stephen Lee’s footnotes to each episode here, in which Lee provides background and information on the topics presented in each show. My question: where does he find the time and energy to maintain such a detailed site?

:: Air America Radio, the new alternative talk radio network, debuted this week in the USA in selected markets, including NYC, Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, and SF. On-air hosts include Al Franken, Janeane Garofolo, Randi Rhodes, and Chuck D of Public Enemy. Talk radio has been dominated by the Right for so long, one wonders why it took so long for the Left to finally wake up and provide an alternative.

For those outside the broadcast areas, and outside of the USA, a live connection using RealOne Player is available here.

:: I am volunteering for the Juno Awards this week, but not at the Big Event on Sunday night. Tomorrow from 1500-1900 hrs, I’ll be at City Hall, helping with an interactive electronic display. On Saturday night, I’m working 8:00 pm – 2:30 am (which means 3:30 am, because DST begins on Sunday morning at 2:00 am), at The Power Plant on campus, as a media contact. I should be significantly groggy for the rest of Sunday…

:: In what might be considered a landmark ruling in Canada, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein, a Federal Court judge, today “ruled against a motion which would have allowed the music industry to begin suing individuals who make music available online.” Of interest to me is his comparison of placing music files into a shared directory with the placement of a photocopier in a library surrounded by copyrighted material:

Von Finckenstein said that downloading a song or making files available in shared directories, like those on Kazaa, does not constitute copyright infringement under the current Canadian law.

“No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings,” he wrote in his 28-page ruling. “They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service.”

He compared the action to a photocopy machine in a library. “I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service,” he said.

The ruling means that the Canadian Recording Industry Association cannot file lawsuits in Canada against individuals who allow for the uploading of music files from their computers. von Finckenstein’s ruling reaffirms what the Copyright Board of Canada ruled in December 2003: downloading music in Canada is not illegal.

Meanwhile, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based in Europe, is filing lawsuits against 247 file-sharing individuals in Italy, Germany, Denmark and Canada.

The full, 34-page text of Finckenstein’s ruling is available here, in .pdf format. In essence, what is being said is this: downloading a song from the Internet for personal use does not constitute copyright infringment. If Big Music wants to solve the downloading issue, they may need to go about it a different way. And if you think all successful artists are fighting this, read Janis Ian’s two essays on the subject: The Internet Debacle – An Alternative View, and Fallout – A Followup to the Internet Debacle.