The Mandelbear's Musings

To NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and other commercial broadcasters around the world I say, figure out another way to make money. The airwaves, the Internet airwaves at least, belong to us.

It wasn't the opening ceremonies at the Olympics that was thrilling but rather reading the accounts of the grass roots collaborative efforts of people around the world doing an end run around the commercial sites who claimed to own the rights to broadcast the event by sharing, often over YouTube, videos of the Games.

People were not content to watch a sanitized, tape delayed version of a major global event and when YouTube owners Google played the subservient pawn in NBC's commercial endeavors we witnessed new videos pop up just as fast as they could shut down the old. And when that didn’t work users were sharing links across Twitter and other collaborative sites.

The New York Times quoted Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as saying "we have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake here, so that means we're not public television, for better or worse."

Well it is going to be worse.

...that the story about the student who was visited by the Feds after requesting a copy of Mao's little red book on interlibrary loan turns out to have been a hoax. Some people, including Gary McGath, spotted inconsistancies right away.

On the other hand, it's sad and appalling that we live in a country, and under a government, where it was easy to believe that it wasn't a hoax.