mythicaldude

Big Media = Bad Media

Ted Turner has a beef with big media.

Here's just a taste of what he has to say in this fascinating essay:

In the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are their own bosses. They are independent thinkers. They know they can't compete by imitating the big guys--they have to innovate, so they're less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. They are quicker to seize on new technologies and new product ideas. They steal market share from the big companies, spurring them to adopt new approaches. This process promotes competition, which leads to higher product and service quality, more jobs, and greater wealth. It's called capitalism.

Right on.

OK, just one more small taste from Ted:

This is a fight about freedom--the freedom of independent entrepreneurs to start and run a media business, and the freedom of citizens to get news, information, and entertainment from a wide variety of sources, at least some of which are truly independent and not run by people facing the pressure of quarterly earnings reports. No one should underestimate the danger. Big media companies want to eliminate all ownership limits. With the removal of these limits, immense media power will pass into the hands of a very few corporations and individuals.

One link from Sarah

Last night I was talking to my friend Dan about my interest in the world of blogs and social media. He asked me who was reading my blog and how I was building my readership. Good questions, indeed.

Through Technorati I discovered that there is at least one link from someone else's blog to mine. Actually its to my old blog at Blogger. I think I'll write to Sarah to thank her, include a link back to her blog and then see what happens. Wouldn't it be funny if we were the only people reading each other's blog?

Actually, many of my freinds tell me that they periodically check-in to see what I'm up to and what I might be ranting and raving about, but they don't have blogs of their own. Oh well.

Inspired

I'm kind of tired because I stayed up late last night. I was inspired. Still am. Very excited about this new space (blogging and social networks) that expanded so rapidly while I was gone.

I gave myself the day off from the tedium of sifting through online job-listings and delivering my spiel to headhunters, so I could continue to work on this blog and research companies I might like to work for, a form of job-hunting to be sure. Tomorrow I'll be back to the sifting, shuck'n and jivin'. I'll know it when I see it... or when it finds me.

I was able to move all my content from my blog at BlogSpot to this one, no problemo. Well, very minor non-abrasive problemos, mostly of the self-inflicted "user-headspace-error" variety.

Its an experiment!

No, I'm not a mad scientist. OK, I'm not a scientist... this much is certain.

Just a word about what's going on here in my bloggy world. I am a man of many blogs, but I have made the big decision that for the time being (at least for the next 80 days) I'm gonna be a one-blog man and use this TypePad site as my only blog. Yipppeeee!

What happens after 80 days you ask? My FREE trial expires and I will either stick with it or move the content to a new domain and use Movable Type.

So, sorry for any confusion, frustration or utter contempt, but hey.. that's life. Its all one big experiment. We all arrived without user manuals and there is no rule-book in this game. What the hey, right?

importin' exportin' man

Wheeee... we're moving to TypePad. I think.

Yup.. it worked, more or less!

My old website

I tore it apart and knocked it down. I'm currently in the process of stomping the shit out of it. We shall see what resurfaces and what fades away...

You know I stopped exercising awhile back... things were getting out of hand:

More Photo Blogs

Here's another good list of photoblogs from Photoblogs.org.

Might just do a photo a day at fotolog.net.

I was also admiring some of Mark Hemmings photos this morning.

Some beautiful flowers from India to brighten your day.

Hey, who knew that "Son of Sam", convicted murderer Jeffery Berkowitz has his own blog?

And on an unrelated note, my buddy Bob-O was hanging out with New York's famous Concert Joe at Bonaroo last week.

Wow, Yahoo just increased my mailbox storage to 2 gigs in order to compete with Google's g-mail.

You know I got a new computer last week. Its pretty awesome!

Philotography

I'm an amateur photographer, but I'd like to become a pro and I've been giving some intensely serious thought to it.

How do I get started? What will I need to do, exactly?

I have a camera, but it isn't professional quality, so I need a new one. And some other stuff too.

Of course, my real value is my eye and sense of appreciation for what makes a good photograph. I don't know what art is, but I know what I like! (Nick Nolte says that in some movie, I forget which) Suffice it to say that I think I have what it takes to succeed.

I have a huge stock of photographs, mostly at lower resolutions, from my recent travels and from the few years before I began traveling. Can I use this stock as the basis for a professional portfolio? Can I start some small income streams by selling this stuff through stock photo houses and by publishing my various image collections in the form of postcards, notecards, greeting cards, posters, calendars, coffe-table books, gallery exhibits, etc?

Despite the goldmine I'm already sitting on (hah!), it'll be what I do now and in the future that will matter most.

What sort of work should I go after? Do I have to specialize? Should I enroll in some courses somewhere?

Its a lot to consider. Kind of overwhelming, but kind of exciting and much more appealing than going back to the kind of jobs I've had in the past.

So I'm sitting here thinking and researching and sorting and sifting through my pile of photographs.

Boy, there sure are a lot of photography magazines out there.

Uh-oh... there are a LOT of photographers out there too!

So much to consider. So much competition. So many risks. So much fun!

Why did I call it philotography? Cuz I was a Philosophy major and I try to get at the truth of the matter whenever I can. Combining philosophy with photography, for me... is philotography, but its not REALLY a word.

I like the list of items the dictionary comes up with as suggestions for philotography ...

1. phonography
2. phonographic
3. phonographies
4. phonographs
5. forethoughtfully
6. phonographer
7. phyllotaxies
8. full-timer
9. flatirons
10. phyllotaxis

Don't you think that pornographer should be on the list as well?

Feeling a little blue today

Yet another blog I am trying, testing and toying with.

There's always my photo blog.

And then just a few more I guess...

Mythicaldude's LiveJournal

Mythicaldude on Motime

Mythicaldude at Blogcity

And then there's the one you're reading... this one right here!

Photo Blogs are Cool

Here are some of the photo blogs I've been checking out:

Satan's Laundry

Peculiar Planet

Negative Space

Hunkabutta

Infrangible

Eye Control

Lightning Field

More to come soon...

And by the way... have you EVER seen a punked-out pig? I ran into one in Nepal of all places:

Cringely had something interesting to say about blogs today.

And Dave Winer almost always does.

Hello World

Hello. I'm the mythical dude.