Will Somebody Please Distribute This Film?

Disney is apparently blocking Miramax's ability to distribute Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11. First of all, I believe that Disney is well within its rights to do so. However, I do agree with Michael Moore that this shouldn't be happening in a free society.

When media conglomerates are allowed to own too many channels of distribution, its too easy for corporate interests to rule the roost. What you end up getting is de facto censorship because these conglomerates are unwilling to jeopardize their relationships with the government. So essentially, the corporations are acting as an extension of the government.

However, I wish that Michael Moore would stop acting as if he has a legal right to have his film distributed. He should do two things: 1) Try to cut a deal with another distributor, and 2) Attack the system that allows conglomerates to own too big a slice of the media pie.

NYC Bloggers Event - SOHO Apple Store

I went to the NYC Bloggers event last night down in SOHO. It was somewhat interesting, but it really felt like a mid-90s dot com masturbation-fest where many of the folks in the room were seeking validation of their peers rather than information on where the movement is headed. Still, there were some interesting nuggets...

First off the bat, where the hell was Rick Bruner? I would have put serious money on his being there, but I didn't see him the whole night.

The first panel of the night featured Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton. I gather that everyone in the crowd expected these two to go at it Jerry Springer style, but it never really happened. The two focused on business models for their respective companies and the relative advantages/disadvantages. Surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with Jason more than I agreed with Nick, which is weird considering I rarely agreed with anything that came out of Jason's mouth during his Silicon Alley Reporter days. I think Jason is on his way to a good start, with at least one advertiser subsidizing one of his blogs. What I'm concerned about is his company's ability to scale over time. He mentioned he expected to have several hundred blogs within a few years' time. I wonder how ad sales reps will be able to effectively sell advertising on a web property with such wide-ranging content. Also, I think I'd be pissed if I were to be working with him, considering he hasn't hired any ad sales reps yet.

Jeff Jarvis moderated this first panel. Next time, I'd like to see him as a featured speaker. After all, the guy has a ton of intelligent things to say about business models for blogging. It was kind of disappointing to see him in the role of referee for what most bloggers in attendence expected to be a Battle Royale of archrivals.

I liked the second panel, which featured Anil Dash and Meg Hourihan talking about blog management tools. I was pleasantly surprised that the two didn't "geek out." Instead, they brought up some very interesting points about how people use blogging tools, communications paradigms and such. Someone in the audience brought up an interesting question about Movable Type as a Content Management System (CMS) and why people who are interested in a full-featured CMS featuring a blog have to hack two or three software packages together. Honestly, I think this was probably the best comment/question of the night. Some people want their sites to not only host a blog, but other features commonly found in community sites. I love Movable Type, but this site could have easily been a PHP-Nuke site if it were possible to get full-featured blogging out of Nuke.

Unfortunately, I hated the third panel, which seemed like a joke in comparison to the first two. I think it was cool to have some of the more popular blogging personalities on a panel - and the panel certainly was entertaining - but I expected them to talk about something more substantive than how they're handling their new-found celebrity. Also, there seemed to be this overarching sense of suspicion with regard to whether or not a blogger can stay true to the spirit of blogging if they take advertising. There was a question or two about whether bloggers fear offending advertisers. It's a legit question, but I keep wondering whether the blogging movement is just another one of those things that comes out of the Internet that resists commercialization to the point of killing itself. All right, I'm biased, but why is there this fear out there that advertising will pollute everything it touches?

New Feature: Spam Subject Line of the Day

Hespos.com is proud to introduce a new feature - the Spam Subject Line of the Day. These days, I have about 8 e-mail boxes that are dumping into Outlook, and between all of these accounts, I get about 100 legit e-mails a day and 300-500 spams. Sure, there are hundreds of the usual "Buy C1@lis, V1@gra" and "Quit your job and make $5K/week on eBay" subject lines, but others are getting quite creative in illegally hawking their wares. Why let Cloudmark commit these works of art to my Deleted Items folder without any recognition whatsoever? When Spam subject lines go above and beyond, we will post them here.

Today's winner...

Subj:This guy told me I looked exactly like britney spears even her body and he couldn't believe I had a kid
Product: MILF Hunter, a porno site

Mr. Gloom and Doom

A few people who are close to me have mentioned that they've noticed a profound change in my mood and demeanor over the past few months. I'm walking around pissed off a lot, I appear depressed and I dwell on the negative. I can't argue with this.

At the same time, I can't imagine that a person who reads as much as I do about world affairs, follows major stories and offers up a bit of opinion on them would not be affected in some negative way about what's transpiring in the world. I'm seeing a huge trend toward lack of accountability, hypocrisy, corruption and lack of ethical thought in a lot of the things going on in the world. Can you blame me if I act a little depressed because of it?

Take the UN Oil for Food scandal, for instance. If what we've read so far is true, people we trust to do the right thing not only elevated their personal gain above their duty to do the right thing, but the people we trust to inform the public and elevate the issue to the public agenda are also either asleep at the wheel or have hidden motives for not doing what they should be doing right now.

Most of my friends haven't heard of the Oil for Food scandal. Most of what I tell them about allegations and facts that have emerged comes as a total surprise to them. You could argue that they're not reading the newspapers and whatnot, but you also have to admit that the mainstream news media have not given this the level of coverage it deserves. If the allegations are true, or even partly true, this could be the biggest financial scandal in the history of the world. And we're not talking about investors losing little Billy's college fund to crooked corporate executives here. We're talking about people's lives at stake because they weren't getting the food and medicine they were supposed to, while the people who were supposed to be safeguarding the money earmarked for this food and medicine were profiting personally by shirking their responsibilities.

Why does Enron dominate the news agenda and much wider-reaching scandal of a higher order of magnitude not warrant at least the same level of attention? Call me Mr. Gloom and Doom, but I think it's appropriate for me to be feeling a bit upset about this. And yes, it's going to continue to affect me until I see some changes that will bring about accountability and will affirm that we're not going to let this get swept under the rug.