BuzzMachine

What goes around…
: So 43 percent of stockholders voted against the most hated man in Hollywood, Michael Eisner.

HEH. And HEH again.

Blogging gay marriages
: Oregon is jumping on the (ever-more-crowded) gay marriage bandwagon and so OregonLive.com (one of my day-job colleagues) is blogging the nupitals with photos of the happy couples. Enjoy.

Was it something we said?
: Last year, Jupiter held a weblogs-as-business conference. This year, so far as I could find out at the SES show, they’re not.

What echo chamber?
: To anybody who thinks that weblogs are all about people writing for people who agree with them and people reading those with whom they agree…

Read my comments

Read them on Stern or Bush or Gibson or….

There’s plenty of disagreement and dissent and discussion. There’s no echo.

Cloudy Channel
: Two more Stern-related notes for the day:

: Clear Channel has hired Michael Savage, last seen wishing people to get AIDS and die on MSNBC. I’d actually have no problem with that — free speech for all — except it sure is odd that one shock jock is OK and others are not.

: Stern also played clips from the new Jason Seagrove show in which they took live phone calls — without a delay — and in one call after another, two of the seven dirty words were used. So why is he still on the air? What happened to zero tolerance? Where’s the FCC fine?

Stern is merely Clear Channel’s sacrifical lamb to Congress — or political offering to Bush.

: MORE: Jeff Sharlet, of the wonderful new NYU religion blog The Revealer (which — like others — I have neglected to get into my blogroll and for that, father, I am eternally sorry and beg your forgiveness) writes in the comments below about Clear Channel:

Stern is a sacrificial lamb. I interviewed John Hogan, JC Watts (a member of CC’s board of directors) and a regional VP for a story about the company in Harper’s. All were emphatic that they let the “market” decide, that decency was something people could vote on with their radio dials. Now it appears they don’t even have the courage of this spineless conviction. But why should they? They are businessmen through and through, as they are fond of boasting; their move against Stern is simply an acknowledgement that in their view of the free market some consumers (the Christian right, at the moment) are more equal than others.

Gadget wars!
: Actually, that’s a sensationalistic and false headline, but I enjoyed it.

You’ve probably noticed some musical chairs (or perhaps, relevant to the topic, I should say MP3 chairs) in the gadget blog world (can we get more inside baseball than this?).

Pete Rojas, late of Gizmodo, has left to create Engadget in the weblog empirette of Jason Calacanis. Rumor has it there were promises of equity and Amazonian maids.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo creator Nick Denton returns from a sun-baked holiday in Brazil (hobnobbing with Bjork — no joke — and probably a few Amazonians as well) and replaces Rojas with game guru Joel Johnson and guest bloggers of note, starting with Brendan Koerner (an unhappy looking chap… but then, Pete’s no Jim Carey himself), a contributing editor to Wired and columnist for the Village Voice and Slate (which is Nick’s way of saying, I’ll see your bet and raise you).

Calacanis is tripping over himself to say that this wasn’t about his erstwhile feud/pissing match with Denton and I think that’s true. If Jason just wanted to start a gadget blog, he could have gone and found a dozen candidates to do it (it’s not as hard as, say, finding just the right voice for a Gawker); I think this was a melding of mutual interests.

In the meantime, Nick is finding and grooming talent and they will sometimes move on; that’s what happens in the editorial world. But he created the format of Gizmodo so it can continue easily; it’s a brand.

And many flowers bloom.

: UPDATE: Sippey says what he’d do if he ran Gizmodo — focusing more on the gadget user than the gadget (or as I’d put it: on the lifestyle). A fascinating discussion ensues, bringing in Denton.

Generation C
: The very good Trendwatching newsletter (which keeps getting caught in my spam filter like a dolphin in the tuna net) continues the cultural meme of the culture creating its own content. The other day, I talked about consumers not just consuming anymore. Yesterday, Pew said that 44 percent of online users create content. Now Trendwatching gives it a name:

The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the tsunami of consumer generated ‘content’ that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.

The two main drivers fuelling this trend? (1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We’re all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out. (2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using — of course — their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.

Examples: Not just weblogs but also phone-camera users napping up a storm; Canon selling professional-quality equipment to nonpros; HP et al selling the wonders of digital photography; make-your own music tools (they don’t even mention Garageband).

So maybe instead of consumers, we’re all creators. We create content. We create capital. We create demand.

Fact-checking their ass
: Tim Blair puts a notch in his mouse. He has successfully fact-checked the Chicago Tribune, discovering a reporter made up a name and now the paper admits it. Blair’s suspicions here. The ‘bune’s response to Blair here. The ‘bune’s correction here.