For a long time now I’ve been hearing people predicting the death of traditional media (you know: television, radio, books and newspapers). “Old Media is dead! Long live New Media!”

This is 50% crap, but it’s also 50% true. And since I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about this lately, let me see if I can break it down for outsiders in terms that are a little easier to understand and have some actual logic behind them.

The real magic of “new media” has nothing to do with the people. It is quite simply all about the delivery mechanism.

An Academic Explanation Using Simple Economics

In any industry, the cost of goods produced are ultimately borne by the buyers of the finished product. So, for example, if the price of steel goes up, the price of automobiles goes up as well.

But imagine a situation where a radical new material is developed that costs 1/100th the price of steel, but which is actually stronger, can be made in an ordinary kitchen, and can be used to build cars just as well!
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Less than two weeks ago, an absolutely brutal beating was caught on video in New York when two men decided to give a gay man “a beat down”.

Daniel Rodriguez (21) and Daniel Aleman (26) pummeled Jack Price who ended up in a coma after the incident with a fractured jaw, ribs and a lacerated spleen. Why did they do it? Well, Jack “came on to them” obviously! Duh. I mean, clearly that deserves having the crap kicked out of you, right?

I mean, like Rodriguez’s friend’s tattoo says, “[Thou] shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22″. Of course, as Jesse Galef points out:

Leviticus also forbids tattooing. In the very next chapter.

“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28″

Well, I’m a big fan of selectively following the bible too. By doing so, I can pretty much do anything I want and claim divine guidance for it. It’s awesome, you should look into it too.
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The fires in LA are seriously out of control. If you have any doubt, here is a very impressive time-lapse video that Brandon Riza shot, with his Canon 5D Mark II I might add.

First of all, the fires are very scary, and I feel bad for the folks in California right now. I hope none of you guys are being affected, but I’m sure a few of you are, so my heart goes out to you. Secondly, it goes to prove how little control we have over our environment. After thousands of years, and with all the technology we possess, mankind still lacks the ability to put out a forest fire.

Sad.
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	hthth RT @johnpoz: Los Angeles Fires Raging Uncontrollably: http://onemansblog.com/LAFire
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	terehoff RT: @johnpoz: Los Angeles Fires Raging Uncontrollably - http://onemansblog.com/LAFire Hat tip to @kk for the video link.
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	johnpoz Los Angeles Fires Raging Uncontrollably - http://onemansblog.com/LAFire Hat tip to @kk for the video link.
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So, for those of you who don’t know it, the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter has been completely down for over two and a half hours so far today due to a Denial of Service attack.

Now, Twitter goes down pretty regularly. It’s difficult to scale up this rapidly for any business. But this is the first time that I can remember it being down for so long in a single block, especially in a critical part of the day. And it’s not just that they are serving up their standard “over capacity” message. The entire Web site has vanished!

I think the interesting thing about this is that it should emphasize how vulnerable we all are to relying on a single communication network with our contacts. It demonstrates why having multiple social systems is a good thing. If Twitter is down, one should be able to hop on FaceBook and stay in touch.

Ok. This might not be all that super secret, but I guarantee its going to pass a lot of people by this evening…

OH! Before I get started here, I hope that everyone is following Elie Khoury on Twitter and go and show him the LOVE! For God’s sake, he and Jad Younan (who we can’t get to use Twitter or anything else) have been working for like 48 hours straight to make this a reality for the rest of us!

Now, I’m happy to announce that the long awaited Woopra desktop client version 1.3 is complete, and about to be pushed out to all Woopra users. But before that happens, we need you to go over the final build one… last… time.

So, we’re going to use my little blog here as our super secret gathering ground for the Woopra Special Forces Testing Team tonight!

Please grab one or more of the appropriate links below and start testing everything out. Leave comments below for anything you find that appears to be broken or otherwise non-functional. If you come up with a feature request we’ll take note of it, but that will have to wait till a later version. We just want to make sure that 1.3 isn’t breaking anything.
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Just a few weeks ago my beloved dog Sandy came to the end of a long and debilitating struggle with kidney failure. My wife and I did everything we could to prolong her life and make her happy and comfortable, but none of us can cheat death, and eventually it was upon us.

One of the most difficult decisions of my life came when I was forced to choose to euthanize my faithful companion of more than a decade. It was compounded by a feeling of guilt – not that I had acted too soon, but that perhaps I had waited too long out of grief and a sense of personal loss. I remember wishing for days that she could tell me if it was worth living, or if she merely wished she could die.

When we finally had our vet come to the house and put her to rest it was a traumatic experience for the family, yet the death was so quite, fast and peaceful that not only did it remove any feeling of lingering doubt that we had done the right thing, but it made me consider my own mortality and caused me to realize that ultimately I would rather be able to go like this, than be imprisoned in a body stricken with ailments, waiting for death to take me.

Well, this is the situation that Sir Edward Downes, and his wife of 54 years, Lady Joan, found themselves in. And luckily for them, they were able to make the decision to leave this world on their own terms. I only wish that we had the freedom to choose for our selves here in the USA.
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For those of you who have been long frustrated by the fact that you can’t have a reasonable freakin FaceBook username, and instead have to have something like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1529863541, well the times they are a changin’!

Tomorrow you are going to be able to choose your own username for your shortened FaceBook URL. So, you could get http://www.facebook.com/SexyBeast for example (that’s probably already been pre-assigned to me. Sorry.). But you are going to have to compete with millions of other people who are trying to do the same thing! So you better get there quick, and pray to the gods of everything technical that the FaceBook servers can handle the onslaught! (I’m betting they WON’T.)

Choosing a name is supposed to be simple. Just go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and I guess as long as you are logged in you’ll be able to pick it. Right now it just shows a countdown timer, and I already had problems loading the page once, so I’m telling you the demand is going to be fierce.

Anyway, if you’re a loyal OMB reader drop your new FaceBook URL into the comments when you get it so I can go check you out! Oh, and friend me while you’re there if you haven’t already…

This morning I woke up to several emails from people who read Philbert’s, from Tier 1 Research, report that I was leaving LT. I must say, that was some sharp reporting! I have no idea how he found out about that so quickly. We didn’t really even announce it publicly yet. But he was very kind to me in his writeup (below) and I’m thankful for anything I was able to contribute while at Layered Tech.

Layered Tech chief marketing officer John Pozadzides departs

by Philbert Shih

Chief marketing officer John Pozadzides is leaving Layered Technologies to take the CEO position at iFusion Labs, owners of Woopra, a startup Web analytics and tracking platform. Woopra also happens to be a customer of Layered Tech’s private grid offering, buying a 100-server grid deployment for its ability to handle traffic fluctuations as it moved into a public launch (early in 2008).

Pozadzides came to Layered Tech in Q3 2007 as part of the new management team put in place by CEO Jack Finlayson that included some familiar faces from the older Savvis days. While he was not in the job for long, Pozadzides played a role in raising the company’s profile. Layered Tech had long been somewhat of a secret and that has quickly changed. Pozadzides can also be credited for helping position the company as a leader in virtualized and cloud-type infrastructure – an area that the company has made great strides in over the last few years. Through product development and the acquisition of FastServers, Layered Tech has quickly moved beyond dedicated hosting and built an identity as a total infrastructure solutions provider for the developer, reseller, SMB and mid-market enterprise space. Pozadzides deserves some of the credit for making that happen.

Pozadzides departs at a busy time, as another major initiative – implementation of the Astro automation platform – is well underway. The technology and platform have been built and the next step is to integrate the on-demand benefits into the overall marketing message. This will be high on the next marketing executive’s list of priorities. T1R sees Astro as a critical piece to Layered Tech’s potential success. If the messaging is right, Layered Tech will have a nice differentiator – a truly on-demand infrastructure provider with multiple hosting flavors – that will resonate in the marketplace.

Layered Tech founder, COO and president Todd Abrams will assume most of Pozadzides’ sales and marketing roles on an interim basis as the company searches for a successor.

Philbert got most of the facts correct, but I’ll just expand on of a few of the points a bit:
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According to an exiled member of the Iraqi Gay and Lesbian community, the Iraqi government (which is currently propped up by the US military) is about to begin a string of executions of 128 men who are guilty solely of the “crime” of homosexuality.

The tragedy is that I haven’t seen or heard anything about this unbelievable human rights violation from any of the mainstream media. And we must have hundreds of reporters in Iraq, so what the hell are they doing?

Lest we believe it’s a fabrication, CNN has previously reported and cited a UN study which clearly shows that the problem is well known:
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My father forwarded this message to me via e-mail from a friend of his (not sure of the origin). I’m not taking sides here, but I think it’s interesting enough that it deserves examination. Would love to hear opinions on this before I share my own.

Henry Markopolos (JP Edit: actually Harry Markopolous… but it’s OK), the man who waged a decade-long campaign to warn regulators about the operations of money manager Bernard Madoff, told a congressional panel yesterday that the Securities and Exchange Commission (a government agency with nearly 3,800 employees and a salary budget of $620 million taxpayer dollars) is incompetent and that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the securities industry’s own policing organization, is corrupt.

Markopolos said the SEC is “captive to the industry it regulates and is afraid to bring big cases against prominent individuals.” He also said that “the SEC was never capable of catching Mr. Madoff. He (Madoff) could have scammed up to $100 billion” if he chose.

The SEC “roars like a lion and bites like a flea” and “is busy protecting the big financial predators from investors,” Markopolis told the panel.

While the SEC is incompetent, the securities industry’s self-policing organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (with nearly 3,000 employees and an annual budget of $500 million dollars), is “very corrupt,” Markopolos testified.

In 2008 the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority levied fines against financial firms totaling $40 million. 2008 was the third straight annual decline in fines levied by the authority. The total was 73% below the $148.5 million in fines collected in 2005.

And who was heading the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority? None other than Mary Schapiro, who is now the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. She was nominated by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

So the head of a very corrupt authority is now the head of an incompetent authority. Nominated by an inexperienced President and confirmed by an inept Congress. Is it any wonder the economy is in trouble?

Thoughts?

This is a fascinating report from Megan Davies and Walden Siew of Reuter’s. Thanks to Jacques Snyman for sharing the link over on Facebook.

45 percent of world’s wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Private equity company Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis.

“Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,” Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. “This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime.”

So, if your 401k is suffering, well… join the club! The whole world is in this one together, and that means we all have to get together and work our way out if it.
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I first learned about this heart touching story over on The Australian. It seems that a group of fire fighters, who had been battling a massive raging inferno, responsible for killing at least 180 people, came upon a dehydrated and injured little Koala in a burned out area of the forest.

One of the firemen, Dave, got some water and approached the animal to try and care for it. Amazingly, she accepted his help, and he was able to give her 3 bottles of water. This story ends well, although as many as one million animals are suspected to have perished in the blaze.
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