The Difference Between Consumers and Customers Part Three

I’ve always found the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor compelling.

Movie theaters, newspapers, television, radio, magazines are all cathedrals. The publishers place an artificial separation between them and the audience/consumers/eyeballs/gullets for their complete, discrete, highly-produced artifacts. One-size fitting all.

Weblogs, Wikis, Bulletin Boards are bazaars. Down in the dirt. Personal connections, relationships, conversations, building-blocks. Each new topic, event, person, site, the start of a new conversation. Custom, individual interactions.

This weekend I finally watched the Aviator on DVD. I’m sure this was fantastic in the theaters, on my non-HD, non-50″ television – the special effects were obvious and cheap looking. The story itself was good. Though, with the lack of Hughes biographical information and resources on the DVD, it felt like the end of a conversation. Not the start.

Things That Mean Nothing to Cooper

My mom has this great collection of 45s. I remember spending some fantastic afternoons as a kid spinning Joan Jett, the Beatles, and so many other classics.

This lazy Saturday afternoon, we had the 89.3 the Current on for Cooper and they played a song by the Pixies.

Jen to Cooper: “This was the first CD your mom bought. At the music store in the mall….Back when there were music stores….and malls.”

I’m sure that CD is in one of the many boxes of CDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes in the cloest. I know my first CD – They Might Be Giants – Flood is up there. I have a hard time imagining Cooper ever digging through those boxes – especially when he’s already got a playlist on my iPod.

Obviously, Cooper also doesn’t know anything about Sept. 11, 2001 or the Iraq War. I feel real good about that. Hopefully, those events will end up meaning the same to him as the Korean War does to me: it happened and it’s over.

3 July 2007 Update: We inherited an old early Little Tikes kitchen, circa 1980. With a wall-mounted rotary phone. I don’t know that Cooper’s ever acknowledged it as a phone. Though he’s already racking up the minutes on his green Parent’s flip phone.

Amazing Race 8 – Episode 8

Thought I’d kick off this post by sharing a more travel-related Amazing Race blog – The Pratical Nomad. Edward always has an interesting take on improving travel – or what the Amazing Race should have done. He goes in-depth.

Ok, onto to this week’s installment.

On one of our first cross-country road trips, Jen and I went through southern Utah. The rock formations make it one of the coolest parts of the country – and nearly makes up for Nebraska’s ‘Attack of the Killer Corn Husks’.

Detour: Ride Down or Drop Down?
This is actually tough. Sure, mountain biking through Mowab sounds like fun. The Amazing Race producers usually offer a task fairly location-appropriate and one that feels more like a stapled on hairpiece. That being said, where’s the rappelling gear?

A little googling uncovers that this ‘Bart’ isn’t The Bart. The original Bart the Bear died 5 years ago – even for a reality show, that’d be tasteless.

Roadblock: take a ski jump into a swimming pool.
I’m doing this one. No question.

This is a non-elimination round? No. Phil, please just put the Weaver’s out of their misery.

Current Standing of Garrick’s Favorites:

  • Lintz – #1 (about time!)

Tuesday’s Triple Play – Let’s Go Shopping

The day after Thanksgiving (or Halloween, or Arbor Day, or St. Patrick’s Day) marks the start of the holiday shopping season. This week’s Tuesday Triple Play is dedicated to the entertainment of retail.

Garrick on KARE 11s Podcasting Segment

If you missed it, here’s the KARE 11 – Podcasting, have opinion will share segment.

If you’re wondering about a new First Crack podcast – as you can expect, Cooper threw my recording schedule for a loop. Podcasting to resume after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Until then, peruse the archives and send over your suggestions for interesting conversations.

Hunting For a Non-HFCS BBQ Sauce

Today, Jen slow-cooked some pork loin and when it was fall-apart with a fork tender, we drained it, smothered it in BBQ sauce, and ignored it some more.

After ignoring it good and long, we forked it onto some sesame-topped buns, threw on a scoop of ‘slaw and called it dinner.

Yeah. Tasty goodness. Worth staying in for.

The only thing that could make it better is if the BBQ sauce didn’t have High Fructose Corn Syrup as the second ingredient. I’m pretty sure a sauce exists without HFCS in the ingredient list – let alone first or second. Unfortunately, SuperTarget didn’t have it on their shelves.

Anyone know where I could find it?

The Long Tail of Media Attention

Tonight at 10pm, rumor has it the podcasting segment recorded by Minneapolis NBC affiliate KARE 11 with me and many others within PodcastMN will air. As much as I’m always happy for an opportunity to spread the word on podcasting and PodcastMN.

I get much more excited about being picked up by other bloggers and websites for 2 reasons:

  1. I can link to them easily – meaning I can share them with you.
  2. They get picked up by search engines now and in the future – meaning things have a lifetime past their initial release.

Hugh, as always, is far more eloquent.

“Big Media offers a short-lived spike in blog traffic. High Google rankings offer a perpetual selling virus.” – Hugh MacLeod

Lawyers That Get Niche Publishing and Podcasting

Some of you may remember the 6-part series I did with Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb P.A. over at the First Crack Podcast. For your convenience, I’ve consolidated all the PKR&G podcast conversations including 2 bonus conversations that didn’t make the original series.

This week PKR&G came out with their annual lifestyle magazine, “Perfectly Legal”. It includes text versions of many of the conversations and – just in time for the holidays – many other recommendations from the firm. There’s also a nice article on how podcasting builds and extends personal relationships written by yours truly.

All the articles in the 32-page issue were written by the someone with a relationship to the firm, all the photos are of people in the firm, and the magazine itself gets sent out to those again – with relationships to the firm.

This isn’t millions of people. It’s the right people. The people that trust and respect PKR&G, the people that will recommend PKR&G to their friends.

You don’t pick a lawyer by scanning a directory, why would you do the same for a podcast?

eMac Fax Modem Killed My Phone Line

I had to send a couple faxes yesterday. Something I do so infrequently that I just use the OS X’s built-in faxing on these rare occasions.

The modem on my Powerbook hasn’t been working right for a while now – neither has the disc drive. I’m getting a real good idea of how much I need these features when they don’t work right (very little).

Anyway, I was using the fax machine in Jen’s eMac. It wouldn’t go through and it wouldn’t go through, and it wouldn’t go through.

This morning, the faxes still hadn’t gone through – plus the DSL was down and no dial tone on the line.

Two great guys from Qwest came out and took a look this afternoon.

Conclusion: the eMac fax modem freaked itself out, and didn’t hang up correctly on one of the attempts, taking the whole line down with it. DSL and all. Dang.