Well here's my post about social media and the media in general. Before I into it, I need to say something. I bought my mom a netbook to replace the Dell she has now. I forgot how backwards Windows is especially when you first start a computer. In Acer and/r Microsoft’s usual bang-up job, as the computer was going through it’s initial startup, a file was corrupted and I had the restore the entire computer form scratch......I DIDN’T EVEN GET THE THING STARTED!!!!! So after that, I got it up and running, got it online, got “peggle” for my mom, and all is well. But besides, that, How can you work with suck a savage OS like Windows? How can you put up with all the spyware that is installed “for your convenience” by various vendors that do nothing but slow the computer down? When I got my Macs, I turned it on, filled a couple blanks, and in less than 8 minutes I had everything up and running. I”m not being a diva or whatever you people will say, it’s a simple fact: Mac OS X runs better, and does more for the computer experience, than what a Windows OS can do. One good thing is that it was Windows XP, not Vista on the netbook, I can handle that.

One other side note. I’m impressed how cheap thumb drives have gotten. I picked up a 16 gig one dirt cheap, and can see a lot of potential as to what to do with it.

Ok, now onto what I was going to talk about. i was listening to one of Leo Laporte’s many netcasts, and he brought up a story about how journalism grad courses still have a hight level of applications to get into. he brought up a good point in that what they teach in them is for a past era and for a media that is dying. The new media is like what I do: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and everything but print media and traditional media. Look around the country and you’ll see that newspapers are dying left and right. Although many are. I will say that the small town papers will survive due to the local news they can do that a website like AP or Reuters can’t. maybe in some major markets like the New York or Los Angeles the newspaper will survive, but with so many outlets now to get news, they may be an endangered species.

I went to college to get into the media business. Granted I didn’t go to the RIGHT school to get into the biz, but I was also trying to get into it where the big shift was just started. Back when I started to get in, Video/audio editing equipment was expensive and complex. Now modern computers are potential radio/TV studios, and with the advent of broadband-despite the shitty speeds this country has compared to other parts of the world-you can have your own TV show and broadcast it to the world in minutes and inexpensively. This is all well and good to a point, but beyond that point all the noise made by people just turns into just noise where you just are overwhelmed with it. That’s when you try to get through it all to get the “good” media, it’s distorted by the crap out there.

I don’t take this blog seriously. I’m not trying to break news or inform you readers of anything. I just sit here and write what’s on my mind and shockingly people read this. I don’t make any money off of it, nor do I really have a need to. Unfortunately there are those people who do the same as me, but try to make themselves into the next media sensation, which makes those who are legitimately trying to be a blogger/news source look like a bunch of assholes. And as I have said in the past, in this country there are rubes and marks that will believe whatever they read/hear/see, and that sadly makes the crap media people have a sense of power. Then when there is enough crap, this wall of white noise is there to confuse and overwhelm the common person. Granted I prefer this a little more than the old school way-where there were a small group of people who control what information gets out there where the motto is, as Bill Hicks once said about the media and government, “Here you go America, you are free to do as we tell you.” There has to be a happy medium for this, but it can kind of go along with you try to restrict it and that would violate the first amendment. I guess this is a “feast or famine” thing.

Old media is trying to fight back and try to make a buck, which further complicates the issue. Especially when they are trying to protect and stop the new types of media using the antiquated copyright laws, which shockingly is working if you look at all the DRM on media you buy, all the conditions you have when using sites like the network websites, Hulu.com and Itunes, and just the stupid things to prevent piracy that cost them more to implement than the actual piracy. It’s a mess now, but over time it will clear itself up and those who can adapt and take advantage of the chaos will come out on top.

Ok I’m losing steam and what I thought would be an intelligent post here probably turned into garbage. I think I’ll stop trying to sound smart and leave it here