People of Earth! – aov takes to the radio

Home sick yesterday, the big boss man passed on a call from CBC Radio. The good Mitch Courmier, keeper of charlottetown.cbc.ca was doing a story on Human Portals (blogs) for the local morning show.

Mitch and I had a great chat about the state of web logs. He was inspired by Human Portals, the Brill’s Content article about Matt Haughey from MetaFilter.

Kevin O’Brien, Peter Rukavina, and Don from IslandEdition (R.I.P.) all got props. The definite highlight for me was that the story Mitch choose as an example from aov was that of my father, the city councilor, cleaning up the garbage on the streets with his wife and son. Too humble to tell anyone about it, but his big mouth son gets the story across the whole province. Happy Father’s Day, dad. 😉

Listen to CBC Radio’s Human Portals (RealAudio).

 

15 thoughts on “People of Earth! – aov takes to the radio

  1. Listened to the interview. Couple of things.

    1. Island Edition is not now, nor was it ever, a blog/human portal

    2. About the only name worse than “human portal” is “blog” so I am trying to think of a better name. The best I have come up with so far is: “website”

  2. No, No.. You mean “web destination”…

    I want to see some convergence… Let’s get a human “vortal” started… But keep your pants on.

  3. There are Dutchmen in my house and my mother is telling them about euthanasia.

    What does it all mean?

    I smell salmon.

  4. So how did that deal with the dutchman, the lobster and the discussion on euthanasia work out?

  5. Without getting too high flautin’, I thought the most interesting thing was how piece deconstructed itself.

    It was essentially a fluff piece about “a new thing” on the internet. But Wayne kept trying to make it a hard news piece.

    The trouble was, with all due respect, Wayne didn’t really understand what he was commenting on–as the blog=portal=newssite thing demonstrated.

    When, near the end of the segment, he gave listeners the caveat about how subjective these “news sites” could be it , implying how objective the CBC was, it was a total Ken Brockman moment.

    He successfully demonstrated the genesis of this trend, which is: the lie of objective POV, that news comes in all varieties, we want our various newes from a variety people we come to trust, from people who know what they’re talking about.

    And that the current system of generic news service doesn’t cut it… or cuts it badly.

  6. Well said, Dave.

    Sure, it was a light piece, but I though it would have been a good introduction for the general audience.

    Mitch and I had a good chat before the two nerdly clips you heard. He had a good understanding of the medium and had clearly spent some time on all of the sites he mentioned.

    As for the term Human Portals, Mitch didn’t make that up. It comes from a cover story in Brill’s Content a few months ago. I thought the article was quite well done and I’d recommend reading it. It is intended for an audience who wouldn’t know what a ‘blog’ is, but still did a good job of covering the topic.

    With Matt Haughey on the cover of Brill’s Content and Joshua Davis on the cover of Shift, I expect to see Mike Lecky on the cover of Saturday Night one of these days.

  7. nope, i agree. mitch knows what he’s talking about. i just wish wayne had a producer that could have fed him more interesting questions.

  8. Nifty! Hadn’t heard about this Island Morning piece (mainly cuz I’m not on the Island anymore).

    Re: Kirby’s Island Edition assertion… He’s right. Obviously, IE is/was not a blog.

    However, I think it is personality-based, which is why people talk about it when talking about blogs.

    Don
    in N.B.

  9. I can’t bear to install Real Player on my computer. She is virgin and I will protect her… I can’t let my box be raped by Real Networks. Any way that clip can be sliced, diced and mp3ed? Use mp3PRO and I would even download it on a dialup. 😉

  10. The only way you’ll see lecky on the cover of Saturday Night is if you happen to find him sleeping on a pile of old magazines.

  11. Way to make a stand Jevon. Always hold off installing realplayer until its an absolute necessity – it will rape and pillage your system, in ways you don’t even find out about until a month later and WMP stops working.

    That said, their streaming is pretty good – but so is WM.

  12. Here’s my $0.02…

    If I may be so pathetic as to rebut part of the piece here… Mitch said, when commenting on my ranting, that, ‘Kevin really believes in freedom of speech’ or words to that effect.

    Flip that 180 degrees and you’ve got it nearly right. What I said (I’ll try to be brief) is that “we” don’t believe in freedom of speech. We as a nation (people, whatever) are willing to die for something we call freedom of speech (have done) but we really don’t believe in it. When people exercise their free speech they are very often struck down by others using their freedoms – John Joe Sark, Leo Broderick, and Mary Boyd come to mind.

    What I told Mitch is that I don’t believe in it any more than anyone else, that the Train is my best effort at a litmus test for true belief in free speech. The experiment has not yet completely failed but it hasn’t turned blue either.

    For those of you who haven’t spent a brain-flop on it, the Train *is* satire; in and of itself. Perhaps I’m just not very good at satire but I am surprised at how many people (not the blog community) think it is “my opinion” and not “an extract from my opinion” designed to push a particular button (some of it would push my buttons if I had not written it).

    And one more thing, I check my sources ~at least~ as well as CBC does!

    Yer right Mr. Moses, Ken Brockman does sum it up rather well. (Poor Wayne, he really is a rare talent but the “corp” seems to flow easily in his veins when he falls asleep in the middle of a piece.)

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