connecting*the*dots

The Troublemaker has posted a memo from City Manager Mitch Johnson to City employees.

Johnson makes a clear case for what the situation was prior to hiring RMA, why he hired RMA and where the current follow-up (SBI) investigation stands. Johnson also makes it crystal clear that David Wray chose to resign instead of squaring the findings of the RMA report against his own word to Johnson, elected officials and the public.

As for the current SBI investigation, who knows if it’s focused on James Hinson or any other number of officers within the department. I have no skin in that game, except that if anything sticks, I hope it’s to less officers than many and that the infractions are minor in nature.

Historically, the GPD has a sullied reputation, but I’d much rather be able to trust my current police department than not.

Who wouldn’t?

Now that I’ve read the RMA report and have this update from the City Manager, I’m comfortable waiting for the outcome of the investigation.

Give it three months folks. The rumor mill in town is beyond annoying, approaching ridiculous. We’ll all have a chance to throw our arms up in disbelief once the details of this final investigation comes to light.

(brilliance uploaded by xylonets)

Remember, indeed.

John Smith and I met last Friday afternoon, as I worked out of The Press (Wine Cafe) across the street from my home/office. We rapped about driving in NYC, women, music… dude was just real and at times, a riot.

I think I caught him in the above photo thinking about whether or not he could retain his manhood while drinking beer from a frosty glass. That entire conversation killed me, because as he vociferously defended the mechanics of the bottle and the presentation of “guy” it projected, he had a slice of lime swirling around in his beer bottle.

Heh.

Meeting cool locals like John isn’t the only new thing happening across the street. The spot has quickly become both my office of choice for calls & non-design intensive work (the WiFi connection is really strong) and my default lunch spot (Turkey Panini, chips and a coke, gracias). And while I wasn’t quite digging the music much before, the vibe has begun to shift a bit.

First of all, the live shows — what I’ve caught at least — have been damn good.

They had a solo, acoustic act a few weeks ago; the guy moved smoothly from Stevie Wonder to Mark Cohn to Neil Young and sounded amazing. Last week, I stumbled in on the Thursday night show and people were cuttin’ up the rug by the sofas. And this past Thursday, I swear the senior member of the jazz quartet couldn’t have been any older than 24… and their improv was as sick as their flow was tight.

Greensboro talent representing.

My only real complaint of the day to day experience — the CD rotation — has changed a bit as well. I just don’t know if Mike and Aaron know about it.

I’ve been slipping the staff mixed CD’s with jazz, hip-hop and electronica, shifting the vibe a bit from the afternoon elevator jazz we’ve had to endure this past month. The vibe is definitely still jazzy, but there’s now some freshness to the mix. I’m hoping that down the road, the guys invest in some form of a jukebox solution, something that customers can influence at no cost.

Until then, it’s all good.

(originally uploaded by wmchu)

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.

Noam Chomsky once explained the driving force behind the war machine as one that won’t begin to slow down until corporate America realizes that the majority of its customers are against a particular conflict. For when advertisers adjust to the collective vibe of the people (in order to sell product), the message is brought home to politicians in ways they must take seriously in a state-capitalism system.

I can’t remember where I read that — probably in Understanding Power — but it reminded me of his synopsis of the Vietnam Syndrome:

[…]

The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930s they arose again and were put down. In the 1960s there was another wave of dissidence. There was a name for that. It was called by the specialized class “the crisis of democracy.” Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.

Here we come back to these two conceptions of democracy. By the dictionary definition, that’s an advance in democracy. By the prevailing conception that’s a problem, a crisis that has to be overcome. The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience and passivity that is their proper state. We therefore have to do something to overcome the crisis. Efforts were made to achieve that. It hasn’t worked. The crisis of democracy is still alive and well, fortunately, but not very effective in changing policy. But it is effective in changing opinion, contrary to what a lot of people believe.

Great efforts were made after the 1960s to try to reverse and overcome this malady. It was called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The Vietnam Syndrome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures.

It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it the other day, rather proudly, to “instill in people respect for the martial virtues.” That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So that’s the Vietnam Syndrome. It’s necessary to overcome that one.

[…]

Enter into the conversation: The Dixie Chicks.

These three woman made plain what they felt was true in the run up to war in Iraq and now — three and a half years into this unjust war — their message is shared by a majority of Americans (65% want out of Iraq and more than 60% disapprove President Bush’s job).

So if you buy into the analysis that it’s necessary for a state-capitalism system to overcome such “sickly inhibitions about using violence” in order to flex all foreign policy options, then the actions of one of the last defenses in the current corporate line — the über-conglomerate NBC Universal — shouldn’t surprise you.

Even though CBS moved forward with an ad buy, NBC has steeled up and decided to not run ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary entitled, Shut Up and Sing. Here’s part of their rationale (with my emphasis):

[…]

While the Weinstein Co. had shown NBC its ads, it had not inquired about buying commercial time, he said. Generally, when an ad is rejected, prospective advertisers return and work with the network on ways to make it acceptable — as was done with the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11,� he said.

But NBC heard nothing more from makers of “Shut Up & Sing� until portions of what NBC executives thought were confidential business correspondence showed up in a news release, he said.

“There was no attempt to come back and have a conversation,� Wurtzel said. “There are times when some advertisers get more publicity for having their ad rejected.�

[…]

NBC’s positioning for making the trailer more acceptable is akin to the central theme of a documentary called Shut Up & Sing. Are they really surprised that they walked away and went to the press?

10 years ago, such a tactical play by NBC could’ve crippled an independent film’s message due to lack of exposure, but not now, not in the information age. NBC can stick to their “standards” and play all the games they want, because as Chomsky so eloquently analyzed, the people are on it.

Decide for yourself if the trailer is unacceptable.

UPDATE: Lawrence Lessig talks about a previous media denial encounter with NBC that fell into the same “not very flattering to the president� category.

(via Baron over at TwangNation)

(originally uploaded by ’stpiduko’)

Just as we were getting used to how folksonomies can help us find relational information, ‘dem darn kids take it to the next level.

Long gone are the days when protesting corporate bullshit was limited to groups of people gathering on the street outside of a main office. Nowadays, you can protest by simply dropping a single word into the workings of the retail experience itself.

Check out what DefectiveByDesign is doing:

How passé is crafting a product review now that you can group multiple sucky products that share a common sucky trait with a few key strokes? Why tag your frustrations on your blog, when you can hit the fuckers where it hurts the most — in the virtual aisles and checkout lines themselves?

Excuse me while I head over to Amazon to spread my love of hating DRM.

UPDATE: Tag-daddy, Thomas Vander Wal, makes a profound statement on my flickr comment thread.

(via BoingBoing)