Author: Philip

Categories
Distribution Random Thought

What is the future of advertising?

I hate advertising. I guess, if I’m completely honest, I hate irrelevant advertising like most people. Trouble is, I’ve yet to experience relevant advertising! I also don’t believe that advertising has affected my decision making process at any time. Last time we purchased a car I’d never seen a Kia advertisement: we had rented a Kia and it turned out a friend of a relative worked at a Kia dealership and could get us a decent deal.

I go out of my way to avoid advertising. In our last residence “TV” came off a PVR and ads were universally skipped. These days with TV coming from the Internet there are no ads in the downloads. The few times I’ve watched Hulu, the irrelevance of the ads was distractingly annoying.

The only sane way to surf the Internet is with ad blocking! I was recently categorizing the entries in my research database that involved loading pages directly in DEVONthink Pro, which claims to have ad blocking but nowhere near as good as the plug-in I use for Safari. After an hour or so it felt like my eyes were bleeding from the garish, flashing, irritating ads all over the place. It was a shocking realization of just how unappealing browsing without ad blocking was.

I am surprised, then, that the entire “new media” business seems predicated entirely on advertising support! (How many times do new business have to repeat the mistake of modeling themselves on their immediate predecessor – we know from history that the final model will never look like the preceding one.) This is within the context of at least one survey from Yankelovich Research that show 70% of Americans would pay to view content without advertising and go out of their way to avoid brands that “overly market their products and services”! Who wouldn’t after being barraged by up to 5,000 advertising messages a day!

But if there was no advertising how would we find out about products we wanted to buy – things that would be useful for our business. To which I would answer, the same way I do now: reading and research. Particularly searching on the Internet. Dave Winer nailed it:

The Internet is a wonderful commercial environment. It has trained me to expect the impossible from real-world retail. When I last visited Fry’s I wished I could hide all the items on the shelf that don’t match my search criteria.

Frys is intimidating and it has no search engine (in the store) making the online version much more satisfactory. In that same posting, one of his commentators – Hartsock – puts it this way:

“I look forward to the day when I can search like this: “pants waist:38in inseam:32in cargo” and find a listing of cargo pants that fit me and places I can go and buy them.”

In other words the information is being pulled by the customer when the customer is ready to buy. Not pushed at the customer thousands of times when they’re not ready to buy, which simply annoys and intrudes. As Dave puts it:

However this is not advertising! It is commercial information. The former is in our way, the latter is what we seek.

Advertising was useful in reaching mass markets with relative homogeneity – America in the 50’s when TV was new – but now there are few mass markets, tanking advertising spending and little advertising relevance. Now it’s time to realize that people seek commercial information that’s relevant, on their schedule and pace, not something pushed at them intrusively.

That’s exactly the same changes we’re seeing in media consumption: people want their programs, on their schedule on their device of choice. Advertising made sense for appointment television, but that’s dead!

In terms of our businesses perhaps it’s time to realize that being findable in search engine by having an active web presence is much more valuable than a big advertising budget.

Categories
General

60 Free Vector Graphics for Digital Art Pros

Just thought I’d pass this on in case anyone can use it.

There’s plenty of free vector art out there, but most of it shouldn’t be seen in public, let alone on your latest digital art masterpiece. Here are 60 completely free vector graphics that even the professionals use. They really should cost money, but we’re not complaining!

Check them out here.

Categories
Assisted Editing

Additional First Cuts documentation

Logging

More logging is good up to a point. I learned that you don’t overload story keywords as the same clips keep coming up in many edits, often not so successfully. So my advice now would be to keep the story keywords for each clip to the minimum that really describe the clip’s value to the story.  Initially I tended to load on any possible story keyword I could think of but as we got First Cuts closer to finished, and with the ability to selectively add as many story keywords as you want, I can really make the decisions of what I want to include on a much more fine-grained basis that way.

That multiple select also means I don’t have to be overly anal about always using the same keyword. It’s obvious when I’m building an edit that “Austria” and “Austrian” will probably both be included together or excluded together. Ditto “McDonald School” and “McDonald College” both refer to the same place – where my subject was “discovered”. In my examples there are many inconsistencies among story keywords.

Names and locations do have to match. Variations will be considered to be different people. We use the name to fill in lower third titles and to avoid jump cuts. Likewise location needs to match. Again it’s used to avoid jump cuts. Fortunately, FCP makes it easy to be consistent with these fields. After entering a name, for example, you can right-click (control click) into any other name field and pick the existing entries from the list. For Name and Location this makes entering the metadata very fast, and very accurate. It’s not like you have to type them twice.

The same trick works with entering Event and Theme log notes but I’ll come back to that.

How many clips are necessary?

The challenge is that First Cuts doesn’t do so well with small numbers of clips. You’d probably want to give it at least 20 A-roll or A+ and a similar number of b-roll options to start seeing how it can generate multiple different editions quickly and interactively. With small numbers of clips the results tend to all end up very similar – pushing duration can force variation though.

With small numbers of clips, you might get the optimal results by doing a quick A-roll (aka ‘radio’) cut and using Finisher to complete the job.

What should I do with the clips from which I made thought sized subclips for A-roll? Should they be deleted or can they be left without description?

My recommendation would be to move source or master clips to their own Bin or Bins within a single “masters” bin. Then when you export the XML file select all Bins *except* that master bin of masters. That will leave them out of consideration by First Cuts, because First Cuts doesn’t ever get them.

Tip: If you’re cutting a master clip down to though-sized subclips, enter as much metadata as you can – name, location, maybe event or theme – to the master clip first. Then the subclips will all inherit the common log notes and only need their individual variations entered.

Same for B-roll. If I leave the master clips in the bins will First Cuts use them?

If clips are included in the XML export then First Cuts will attempt to use them.  Excluding Bin or Bins from the export to XML would be my current recommended practice. It’s a fairly simple matter to select all in the Browser, then Command click (that’s the Apple key) on the Bins you want to exclude. Then Export XML. FCP will only export what was selected.

Is there a minimum length of A-roll needed?

As a consequence of this question being asked, First Cuts was changed. There is no minimum duration required for any story keyword. However, if there is insufficient A-roll First Cuts will do what it can with it, but it won’t necessarily be useful. Experiment.

Is there a minimum proportion required of B-roll to A-roll?

No there is no minimal proportion of B-roll to A-roll. You can send no b-roll and it will still do the best possible job on an A-roll edit.

In fact one of the benefits I’ve noticed with First Cuts is that it makes it really clear where there’s no b-roll coverage on a subject, because First Cuts will place as much b-roll as possible (within certain guidelines so people get face time) That’s another benefit that’s hard to put into a user guide or marketing pitch, but it’s really useful.

Events or Themes confuse me. In the manual you refer to story arc which implies that they are in part about position in time within the development of plot. But I am unclear if changing the numbering of the events has an impact on the sequences generated by FC. It seems that order is affected by the choices made in the Story Keywords Selected panel.

There are many things that affect the way the story evolves in First Cuts. Story keywords are important in determining what will be included in the edit, but the actual sequencing within the story arc is affected by a Events or Themes and some other minor factors. Truth is, the Serendipity algorithm at the heart of First Cuts is now so complex that neither Greg nor I totally understand exactly how results evolve. Greg can trace a particular example and determine the decision making process behind why a particular clip is included, but to trace out how a particular edit evolved would probably take days. Both Story Keywords and Events and Themes interact to determine the story arc of a particular edit.

But I do understand your confusion on Events or Themes. It was another of those concepts that evolved over development. Originally only Events it was supposed to be a way to bring together clips around a particular events within the documentary. The project I used during development is the story of a young singer (dancer, actor) from Sydney called Tim Draxl. The documentary covers his early career and into his first CD and performance deals, before he got movie roles.  So, my Events and Themes look like this (there are 20 in total, I haven’t included all)

010 Growing Up and Family

020 Master Class

035 Tim the person

040 Beginning Career

055 Tim’s Talent at Cabaret

100 Tim’s Future

060 Recording in LA

075 Performing and Audiences

065 Developing Career

and so on.  The numbers give chronology to the overall story arc and a way to group or associate ideas as material is logged.

The Events and Themes can really be whatever you want. Events was originally intended to group content around the events that occurred during the documentary production. In Tim’s case “Recording in LA” was  a discrete event, as was “Cabaret Convention” “Sound of Music”. But as we went on in development I found I wanted to use the same mechanism to group other than events – what eventually became themes. Often the numbering is fairly arbitrary. Probably 00 to 99 is enough. I start with themes or events on the 10’s so that I have slots between if I decide (as I did) that I wanted to put the theme “Tim the person” between the Master Class and Beginning Career. It seemed to fit there. But I could just as easily renumber it to fit between Recording in LA and Developing Career by changing the number to 063, for example.

Keep the questions coming – they help us improve the documentation and/or the software.

Categories
General Item of Interest

Oh to be in Amsterdam for IBC & Supermeet

A lot of my friends and associates are getting their passports ready for IBC this year. Every year I think “maybe this year” but there’s always one thing or the other. One thing has been Visa renewals which have happened in August the last three times. Leaving the US without a valid visa would make the European trip a much longer one than the five days or so of IBC – Sep 12 to 16.

So, once again I’m not going, and this year it’s bad. This is the first IBC FCP Supermeet organized in part by my good friend Mike Horton. Imagine putting together a major even a couple of thousand miles from your home base, in a city with a foreign language, expensive currency and way cool coffee shops. (They probably wouldn’t help Mike keep organized though!). The agenda has been set for the September 14 meeting at the Culture Park Westergasfabriek, Gashouder. (I hope that’s an address – for all I know I could be insulting someone’s mother!)

And there’s a good lineup for the meeting – ok, obviously *I* won’t be there to wow the crowd with a demo of Assisted Editing, but we will be giving away a copy of First Cuts as a raffle prize.

Those that make it will get Paul Saccone, Director of Technical Marketing in Apple’s Applications Marketing group, will provide the latest news on Final Cut Studio. If you’re into Digital Cinema Technology QuVIS will debut their offering there. Adobe’s Simon Hayhurst and Jason Levine will show how Adobe Production Premium’s suite of applications can compliment the Final Cut Pro workflow. (BTW, smart marketing by Adobe – people will have the CS3, and before the end of the month it appears CS4, and be tempted by what Adobe adds to the Final Cut Studio) without taking it on directly.) There will also be opportunity to see how the Infinity camera integrates with Final Cut Studio.

If you want to see the work of your peers, Darius Fisher will show clips from “Fields of Fuel” – the documentary that won the Audience award at Sundance 2008. Darius will also show how Final Cut Studio was used to make this complex and important documentary work. “Traitor” has only just been released Aug 27th (same as First Cuts/Finisher) and has an incredible pedigree behind it: written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, edited by award winning film editor, Billy Fox and it stars Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Once again, the role of Final Cut Studio will be discussed by Billy Fox and (if available) Jeffrey Nacmanoff.

The final show and tell will be Miguel de Olaso – a Director of Photography from Spain – about using the Red camera with Final Cut Pro. Not to forget that the ever-smart Rich Young – editor of Macvideo.tv and founder of the UK FCP User Group – will share his “Top Ten FCP Tips and
Tricks”, which would make the trip worthwhile.

In addition to the above agenda there will be twenty vendors from all around Europe showing off their wares. Many of these companies will not be on the show floor at IBC. The SuperMeet will be the only place you will see them. There will be food and cash bars and rounding out the evening will be a
raffle with prizes totaling into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Doors will open at 5PM (17:00) and the show will begin at 7PM. (19:00) Tickets are on sale online only for Euro 10.00 each and this event is expected to sell out. Historically every SuperMeet for the past seven years has sold out.

Complete details, including daily updates on the agenda as well as a link to where to buy tickets can be found on the lafcpug web site.

Maybe I’ll make IBC 2009

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Interesting Technology

Assisted Editing – the beginning

I originally wrote this to a friend over the weekend and I thought that, with a bit of an edit, it might be interesting to some others.

Last week we released two new pieces of software through my long-time company, Intelligent Assistance, Inc: First Cuts and Finisher. Collectively we call the category “Assisted Editing” because they, well, assist the editor and going with Assistant Editor was getting confusing.

What I think makes this so exciting is that it’s the first real innovation in editing since Non-Linear Editing was popularized with the release of Avid’s Media Composer version 1, 19 years ago. 19 years is a long time in the computer business. Non-Linear Editing has certainly developed since that first release of Media Composer. Then 160 x 120 16 gray images were the “state of the art” while now we effortlessly manipulate High Definition (and beyond) images in our systems. But, despite this development, the way NLE systems work today is much the same as they did 20 years ago.

What Media Composer did, was to make the “cost” (time, effort, expense) of an edit much more affordable. With linear editing bays, making small changes to, or alternate versions, of a program was difficult (read expensive). Non-linear dropped the cost of a change, revision or alternate edit dramatically. Assisted Editing achieves similar dramatic cost reductions by allowing the computer (and specifically our software) to do some of the work of the editor.

Back at NAB in April we announced “The Assistant Editor” for long form documentary editing. After three months of beta testing we have now released that application as “First Cuts”. First Cuts (for Final Cut Pro right now but we’re exploring other platforms) take the log notes made by a documentary editor (or their assistant) and turns them into very, very fast first cuts. This allows editors and producers to explore the stories that are available in the material, and to juxtapose different versions while they seek inspiration and direction.

First Cuts take the log notes that long-form documentary editors have traditionally made (and their workflow) and makes them much more useful. The logged clips are exported from FCP as XML and opened in First Cuts, where the editor chooses opening title and lower third template (Motion templates preferred), the duration and story keywords that will be used for this edit. Within seconds it creates an edit with beginning, middle and end to the story arc, with opening title placeholder and fully finished Lower Third titles used appropriately to identify speakers on camera. The edit will also have b-roll used appropriately and the audio on the b-roll is lowered in volume and faded in and out. It’s an edit a producer or finance person can watch without being distracted by jump cuts or lack of visual interest from the absent b-roll. You can see the process in a quick five minute tour at the First Cuts home page.

First Cuts is primarily focused on long form documentary editors because they have the discipline to enter log notes (if they don’t they will have a very hard time of it) and because they need to explore a lot of material. The payback is significant. Fortunately there are a lot of documentary editors working with Final Cut Pro.

We discovered that one way of working with First Cuts would be to find a cut that was close to what was desired, and then the skilled editor would add the polish, trim and emotion that a first cut lacks. In doing that we discovered that blowing away the b-roll and titles was the cleanest workflow. Since that removes a lot of the time saving, we decided to make a product that restores that finishing effort. Hence, Finisher.

Finisher takes a project with an edited a-roll sequence (aka “radio edit”) and adds Lower Third titles and b-roll as above. This is the perfect bookend product to First Cuts.

But we worked out that we could do a lot more with Finisher for those who don’t want/need to enter a lot of log notes. Finisher will work with any of the log notes that are provided for First Cuts, but does not require them. In fact Finisher can randomly choose b-roll to place in a Sequence. Location of b-roll can be forced with Sequence Markers, so obvious jump cuts are covered first. While it can run with random selection it will use b-roll search terms in the comment field of those Sequence Markers and search for matching b-roll if available.

You can see some examples of Finisher’s work, including a guided tour that shows a couple of different ways it can work, at the Finisher home page. Particularly interesting is the final example – ‘Ode to the Beach’ – because that is a simple audio recording, some b-roll pulled out of my stock collection from Final Cut Server, and Finisher adds b-roll to the cut (with Sequence Markers) randomly. The result – for almost zero effort – is quite acceptable and may even be useful in some situations.

Not too shabby for a version 1 product.

Categories
Assisted Editing

First Cuts and Finisher released tonight

At the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group this evening we announced the availability of two products: First Cuts for FCP and Finisher for FCP.

The Assistant Editor product demonstrated at NAB 2008 was renamed “First Cuts for FCP” to better reflect its main function. “Finisher for FCP” was shown publicly for the first time tonight, and came about from conversations with users in the beta program for The Assistant Editor. It’s a tool that does the same finishing work that was done by The Assistant Editor: finding b-roll, lowering the b-roll volume, building and placing lower third titles, fade-in and fade-out of lower thirds… There’s more details about Finisher for FCP at its product page: http://www.theassistanteditor.com/Finisher/.

Since Finisher would be incredibly useful for editors doing many changes to a sequence produced by First Cuts, we’ve included the Finisher product in First Cuts. And, for the first three weeks after launch, we’re offering discounted pricing on both these new products!

Categories
Distribution

How big an audience is needed?

I was reading this post at Video Insider and something struck me as really, really wrong with the numbers. Not that the math was wrong, just the return from the audience seems incredibly bad.

An audience of 15 million people (impressions) brings in the grand sum of $330,000! The top rates network show last week America’s Got Talent has an audience of under $12 million. Now I don’t know the budget of America’s Got Talent but it’s probably over $330,000.

The top rates hour-long production is apparently CSI Miami. Again I don’t know the income or production numbers, but typically the budget for “high production value drama” is usually $2-4 million an episode.

The difference is, of course, that we’re not looking at a 44 minute “hour long” production on the web. But even so, there’s something to be learnt from the numbers. That short video on the web is getting about $20 for every thousand people who are exposed to the ad. If we work on the long term average for hour long shows – about 65c per viewer – and convert it to CPM equivalent, we get a CPM for Primetime on CBS of about $650!! That’s approximately $5,322,200 in gross revenue (plus reruns, DVD distribution and foreign sales.)

Now Smallville manages to have high production values with a relatively small audience of just 1.736 million. Obviously that’s not costing as much to produce with estimated total revenue (let’s say a $500 CPM) of $868,000. Heck Jim Kramer’s show remains on air (on cable) with an audience of around 160,000. Even if the “CPM” held at $500 (unlikely), the total revenue for that show would be well under $80,000 per show.

On the other hand you have shows like The Guild rely on donations from their audience of around 30,000 to fund their (roughly) $250 an episode hard, physical, must-pay-out costs. (Cast and crew currently come for nothing.) No advertiser has been forthcoming.

Or consider Break a Leg, a high production value comedy produced with full crew in HD. With audiences on YouTube (2 million views as a partner), Blip.tv (500,000 views) and Metacafe (front page and a contest winer but only 100,000) the show grossed $2,500, or a CPM of $0.96 – 96 cents per thousand views.

Advertising works to fund video production on TV – networks and cable – with varying degrees of success, but it does not appear to work for web shows. Even Hulu, considered to be a success these days, is only getting CPM of $25 for the same content they’re getting $400-650 CPM on broadcast. I can understand why their emphasis not on Internet distribution!

Does this mean that the whole “democratization of distribution” is a over? That only big media will do at all well. It does if we are going to continue to put new wine into old wineskins. Advertising was absolutely the way to fund “free to air” television, which most people now pay for additionally with cable or satellite. But it is incredibly unpopular.

According to Yankelovich Research,

“Seven in ten Americans would pay money to block or skip advertising and marketing messages.
Almost six in ten consumers go ‘out of their way’ to avoid brands that overly market their products and services.”

Even if you find an audience…

In an online survey of 2,600 respondents, about 53.6 percent of online video viewers recall seeing in-stream – either pre-, mid-, or post-roll – ads attached to some form of web programming. That’s the good news. Not too surprisingly, more than three-quarters (78.4 percent) of respondents said in-stream ads are intrusive and fully one-half (50.4 percent) say these ads disrupt their use of the internet.

And from that same survey:

When it comes to streaming ads, half (50.7 percent) of the respondents said they stop watching an online video once they see an in-stream advertisement. Two-out-of-five (43.2 percent) do stay on to watch the rest of the online video. While only a small percentage – 15.3 percent – said they immediately leave the site once they encounter an in-stream ad, about half (49.7 percent) said the such ads’ presence alone makes them less likely to view other online videos.

The only good news for advertisers was that the 18-24 year olds surveyed didn’t mind the advertising…

Over one-half (57.6 percent) will watch an an online video ad and not become too annoyed to finish viewing. However, the report says younger viewers also have fairly low recall rates.

I’ve always wanted to either turn my audience away, and annoy them with ineffectual advertising. That sounds like a winner. Not.

If Break a Leg got only a single cent each for those 2.6 million views over nine episodes, they would have banked $26,000. At a more-reasonable 10c, that’s starting to cover expenses with $260,000 (about $29,000 an episode). If the audience were fans maybe more, maybe 25c an episode then the show would likely be profitable with $72,000 an episode. That’s a much bigger audience than Jim Kramer and higher production values!

With all the research at my disposal, I cannot find a single instance of where new media (podcasts, online, etc) is producing a good return for its producers from advertising. Like 70% of Americans I’d prefer to pay to get rid of advertising, assuming the cost to me (and return to the producers) is the same as it is now. We just need to get rid of the middle men – the network programmers – who are only interested in the advertisers, not the show, the producers or the audience.

Categories
Apple Interesting Technology

QuickTime X???

Boy, it’s dusty in here!! Been busy with lots of things, including just this week releasing The Hd Survival Handbook, but there was one thing from WWDC that caught my eye.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*

Now, I’m surprised at myself for even bothering to attempt to second guess Apple by hypothesizing wildly, but that doesn’t stop my friend James Gardiner so it won’t stop me!

There are few clues and most of my usual sources are cold. There’s the rub, anyone who has Snow Leopard is under NDA and won’t talk. Anyone who is talking is guessing – we should keep that in mind.

Tim Robertson hopes that “modern codec support” would include .AVI, which is funny because .AVI has not been developed since being abandoned by Microsoft in 1996 – 12 years ago, just after QuickTime was introduced! James Gardiner thinks it might be a Flash/Silverlight competitor. Who knows they could be right as we’re all guessing wildly.

In Apple’s world “Modern codec support” means H.264 in .mp4 wrappers, and just maybe H.264 in .mov wrappers but that’s depricated as they say. (You can still use it but it’s not the recommended method.) Apple have totally moved away from all the rich interactive features that attracted me to the technology in the first place. (Much of what was added to Flash 9, was available in QT3 but never pushed by Apple.)

Then there’s this on Apple’s Snow Leopard page

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone…

The media playback support on iPhone is very basic: H.264 video, AAC audio, MPEG-4 Simple Profile video, mp3 in .mp4 containers with limited support for .mov playback of those codecs. That’s it. A simplified form of media player with none of the older codecs not supported by MPEG-4. None of the wired sprite features, no VT objects or panoramas. A simple, lightweight media player that developers can draw on. (I should note that Flash Player and Adobe Media Player now support those exact same codecs.)

Looking also at what Apple have been doing with Javascript, and knowing there’s already limited Javascript support in QuickTime, my further guess is that QT X will be very open to Javascript, Apple’s new favorite browser language thanks to Sproutcore and the new Webkit Javascript engineSquirelfish. It’s interesting that Apple announced QuickTime X and the new Javascript engine for Safari in Snow Leopard in the same paragraph. Other features went into separate paragraphs.

So my guess is that QuickTime X is a newly optimized media player engine with hooks to good Javascript for interactive programming. Perhaps even to Ruby/Ruby on Rails since Apple’s also adopting that.

But who knows for sure? Only those who can’t tell.

Categories
General

On the Road

AT the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group on Thursday February 21
Details at the Boston FCP User Group website.

Saturday February 23rd in New York. Distribution Workshop.

Hope to see you there

Categories
Random Thought

We need a Fifth Estate

A story that came through my newsreader last week You Don’t Understand our Audience and summarized by Ars Technica resonated with some of my thinking around a book I’m working on.

The way the United States system was set up was an attempt by the Founding Fathers to avoid the perceived problems of the English and French political systems of the day. Congress balances the Executive Branch while the Executive Branch balances Congress. The Judiciary is there to ensure that Laws are Constitutional and that the actions of the President are Constitutional. The press – the so-called “Fourth Estate” – reports on, exposes flaws and generally keeps the rest honest.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Avoiding the political commentary on the first three “Estates” (Executive, Congress and Judiciary) it’s clear that the press and media have failed us completely. The linked article begins to explain why but one thing that’s not noted there is that “the press” has changed significantly since the days of the Founding Fathers. Then, there were hundreds of small, independent (and local) newspapers – not a very limited number of very powerful “media corporations”. The White House Press Corps are intimidated and will never call out the press secretary when they are clearly, obviously and provably lying; or where other lies can be easily proven by playing back a tape. But they don’t and they let the people down when they don’t. They know their job requires access to the press room and they too scared to do their job.

But they fail America because of their timidity. With so few media outlets obvious lies do not get exposed by timid “journalists”. We need a return to hundreds of independent voices uncovering lies and doing real journalism.

I hate to say it but it seems the blog-o-sphere is our last chance to save democracy and “keep the bastards honest” to quote Don Chip – a now-dead politician in Australia who led the third party trying to break the duopoly of political power that exists there (and in the US).