A few things I found interesting this morning. First, Doc weighs in on his propensity to listening to satellite radio and his preference of Sirius over XM. But more important is his overview of a Times article than reviews radio options which ironically doesn't even mention AM and FM — the old stalwarts.
[…] The truth is, licensed over-the-air broadcasting, which Michael Powell and the FCC made such a big deal about “saving” with their relaxation of ownership rules in June, is slowly dying in the “marketplace” where users continue to have approximately zero influence on receiver design decisions. The radio manufacturers gave up on AM a long time ago. There's almost no way to get a good AM radio anymore, even if you want one […] So today, unless you get a high-end FM-only tuner, the FM section of your new home entertainment system can't compete on performance specs with a good analog tuner or receiver built twenty-five years ago. Back in those days, the audio stores and salons went out of their way to get good signals into the units on display. Today you're lucky if there's an antenna hooked up at all […] But back then FM radio was still a living, vital medium. Now it's just a vending machine for ClearChannel.
My past ranting and opinions on Clear Channel's contribution to radio can be found here, here and here.
On blogging, Halley points to Scoble's reply to Jim Blizzard's ubiquitous question 'Why Do you Blog?'
What I found interesting in Scoble's answer was number two in his ordered list:
[…] 2) If I put them on my blog, I know that Google will be able to help me find them later on.
This is probably an overlooked benefit of Google and blogging. Today after reading Doc's post on Radio, I jumped to Google and quickly found my three posts I wrote about Clear Channel from month's ago. This saved me perhaps an hour of time trying to dig up old material, find permalinks and embed into my post.
Secondly, i liked Scoble's number nine; number nine; number nine:
[…] 9) I enjoy learning about conversational marketing. I really do believe that blogging will someday be a “new PR arm” of most major corporations. By blogging every day, I can learn a set of “best practices” that I can teach to others at Microsoft and at other corporations.
I've been long discussing the use of Weblogs in corporate America — especially in the marketing communications department. It's only a matter of time.
