[Fmpro] A near death experience

[Mark McKee]

I've been away due to a Staph/MRSA infection.  It appears that I'm among the lucky 10% who survive, thanks to a my great primary care physician, who was recently voted the top internist here in Albuquerque, by his fellow doctors.  Without him, the hospital would have certainly killed me.  Apparently the practice of washing your hands, has no place in modern American medicine.

I am saddened to find that Les is gone.  He always had a great talent for shining the light on the cockroaches, and so, in tribute to Les, I'd like to weigh in on the recent decision regarding royalties for online performances.  Anyone who thinks this will be good for ASCAP members is naive at best.  Consider these non music analogies and note that each "somehow" in quotes is my little tribute to Les:

Diebold can build an ATM that tracks your bank accounts as well as the bank accounts of millions of your fellow citizens, and all their transactions, yet "somehow", they can't make a voting machine that only has to track votes.

Those ATMs save the banks untold millions in labor fees, yet "somehow" they find a way to pop you for each transaction, and if you believe that you are getting any free ATM service, well, you are mistaken.

In 1995 or 1996, the US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, which allowed the phone companies to charge you $5 a month for, say, call-waiting, which costs the phone company one penny a month.   They got the go-ahead to gouge you, and in return, they would use the windfall to lay fiber optic cable across America, and thereby provide "internet 2" speed to every home for about $15 a month.  Well, we've been paying these outrageous rates for about 12 years now, and in America, we still have crappy bandwidth, (Americans believe that DSL and Cable are actually high speed), because the phone companies "somehow" diverted the money to the shareholders, upper management, and the board members.  They haven't laid a foot of cable.

I agree that one should invest in fingerprinting technology.  It may turn out that you can become your own PRO in the new age.  Here's hoping the PROs go the same way as the record industry.  They certainly deserve it.

I for one, will never join ASCAP.  I think the whole paradigm, like the great Hank Mancini, is dead.

And in one last nod to Les, I'd like to share with you all, a simple trick for getting your web site to the top of the dirty, payola ridden search engines.  It's called the META TAG.  

1. Simply go to your favorite search engine
2. Enter the search parameter that you would like your site to come up under, ex: film, music, Les, etc.
3. When the search is displayed pick any of the top 3 results, and go to their site.
4. Reveal their HTML code, copy their META TAG, and paste into your own site.

In a couple of days you'll find that your site is near the top of the search, and you didn't have to pay huge dollars to someone for doing what I just described!

There's your freaking free market! Fight the Power!

Long Live Les!

Mark McKee
Multimedia Development Specialist
Course Development Group
New Media & Extended Learning
The University of New Mexico
505-277-0691

"We are a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced."
Frank Zappa - American Composer

"Now the majors are what they used to think I was: history."
Dolly Parton - American Role Model