Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Without the Expressed Written Consent of Major League Baseball

Broadcasting. Free range opinions. Message in a bottle. Imagine a trucker on his CB just yammering on and on and on to anyone tuned in on frequency channel 27. Now we've got the internet. In a space with no geometry the opinions and ideas flow like water on a flat surface. Be careful! Someone could slip on that puddle. Put up an orange rubber cone for crying out loud.

I did feel obliged to post an introductory message. A prologue or a mission statement you could say, if you wanted to point out the lameness of it... Or even if not. My partner in this endeavor did much better to just dish up something arbitrarily awesome and tell you, "Chew on this, invisible monkeys. I'll feed you more later."

But if I'm insisting on writing something for you I should at least try to make it interesting, if not insightful. I hereby pledge to you that I will do this... Try, that is.

So, therefore, back to Blogs. They're all the rage these days and I'm obviously really late to the party. Everyone's kicking back and spouting off. Folks have always had great ideas. They have them all the time. But they're not necessarily big enough ideas to get up, literally, on a soap box in the middle of the town square and just start hollering at the passers-by. Well that no longer matters. Now if you have an idea there's no excuse not to immediately present it in full access of the public. It's practically an obligation.

Because the thing about the internet, is that it's public and it ain't... Like I said, no geometry. If you want to know what some dude thought about Alien3 right now just turn to your left and clickity-click there it is, instantly. If you don't? Then it never existed; it's not right there. The score of the Dodgers game is there instead.

Humanity's opinions are now being poured into one giant bargain bin that we can each sift through at our leisure. Find a gem in there! -buried in a bunch of bullshit. But still, there's plenty of shoppers looking for bullshit too, and their needs must be met one way or another.

So here we all are now, you, me and everybody except the millions (billions? I honestly don't know... Research is going to the top of the priority list!) of folks who aren't surfing the net. All strolling around the general store of the internet... Usually in the middle of the night. We came here because we needed something, but there's so much other JUNK here that we've never seen before.

TV, DVD, CD, and well... Books, magazines, and newspapers too! They deliver you ideas but they cost and the ideas in them may be lovely but they're never quite the right size, shape, or color that you were looking for. Of course not. They didn't make it just for you after all. They have their market to consider. Admit it. You don't always want a steak dinner. You don't always want a decent hamburger, even. Sometimes you just want some cheetos. Well imagine no one sold cheetos because you're the only one in the zip-code who likes 'em. All the junk that you like (which is a completely different product line than the junk those other bozos like) was never in demand enough to be put on the supermarket shelves. Well there actually was demand but it was so tiny that the junk would have to be extreeeeemely cheap to justify it's production and distribution.

Now it is. Thanks to the internet, ideas are cheaper than every before in human history. ROCK BOTTOM PRICES! Hell, we're practically giving the stuff away.

In fact we are. Free ideas on our blogs. Here's my thoughts on stuff. You didn't ask for it, but hey, I'm not a traveling salesman knocking on your door or a tele-marketer calling you during dinner. Naw, I'm just a humble corner-store proprietor sticking my ideas up on the shelves and manning the counter. Stroll around, look at what we've got. See anything you like? Your satisfaction is important to us so your feedback is important!

You are here, after all, in the middle of the night and in your bathrobe. Maybe you needed that pint of rocky-road, but it's melting while you're standing there in your slippers checking out the shelf-full of our ideas. You'll stop in at the store next door too, on your way home. Take what you want, leave the rest, tell your friends, and of course...

Thank you! Come again!

No comments: