I believe this to be only the tip of the iceburg. The article mentioned how the number of people who have made this decision makes up less than 1% of people who subscribe to satellite and cable. I remember when newspaper executives were throwing out similar numbers back in the late 90′s. Which was about as reassuring as Kevin Bacon’s character in Animal House saying “Remain Calm, All is well!”.

Despite all the handwriting on the wall over the past couple years, Cable TV executives seem content to just let their companies get hit by the storm, rather than adjusting their business models. One thing is for sure. What they are doing now will not work for much longer. You may have noticed a lot of disputes coming up lately between tv networks and service providers. The most prominent of which, is when ABC 7 New York actually shut their channel down on Cablevision over a contract dispute, a night before the Oscars. A deal was settled right after the Oscars started. But the point is that tv networks are realizing that they have many other ways to reach their customers now.

The obvious difference between newspaper and TV is that it’s much easier to replicate words on the internet than video. Not to mention that intellectual property restrictions are much tighter on multimedia content than they are on newspaper copy. But eventually technology always catches up. And now it is doing so at a rate which should make TV service providers nervous. Hulu, Netflix, Itunes, Youtube, can all be broadcast on ipads now. Networks are allowing users to download their popular shows directly off their web sites. And people are finding ways to hook their devices into TVs, so they don’t even need to watch it on small screens anymore.

As these trends continue, Cable TV companies will be getting squeezed and their years of contentment (and perhaps the worst customer service practices of just about any industry) will come back to haunt them. People accustomed to waiting hours for a cable guy to keep an appointment, will have no problem give their tv service providers the finger in favor of something over which they have more control.

If there is a smart way for cable/satellite companies to embrace the internet, then it would certainly be up to people smarter than myself to decide that. I would guess that Service providers may start offering more on-demand options for movies and shows and to improve their very clunky DVR systems. But most importantly, they need to start repairing their severely damaged relationships they have with their customers. They’ll need to consider lowering their rates and offering their customers more flexibility. How about letting people customize their own cable channel lineup? They’ll need to give customers more reasons to stay loyal in the face of having many other options. As the web gives customers more control than they have every had, overly bloated media companies are losing their once powerful monopolies. We have started to see some modest turnarounds for newspapers, and that is because they own content/intellectual property that still has some value. Cable/Satellite companies really provide  no original content and don’t have much to fall back on when the hammer strikes down on them. And that hammer will come down. It is only a matter of time.

I’ll be following this story closely.

@unclejuicyjoe On my mobile I use Tweetie or Tweetdeck. On my laptop I just use twitter.com. And I won on black a couple times in reply to unclejuicyjoe #

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if you are on WordPress, then you should be using akismet which is a software made by Automattic (the creators of wordpress). That is the best wordpress plugin you can have to stop spam. other plugins and software include: Bad Behavior (use at your own risk, can be very buggy) and Spam Karma, and of course captchas. But these spammers are trying to make a living too, and they are figuring out new ways to get around our defenses. One of the latest trends I have seen are spam messages that seem complimentary to your blog, but actually contain links spam sites that could put malicious spyware in your readers’ computer. They stroke your ego to try and make sure you don’t delete their comments. So keep an eye out for comments that are a little too nice. Here are a couple examples;
“so impressive and beautiful thank you for preparing a site admin.”
“I wish to continue your success permanent”

Mouse over the the author’s name and you’ll most like see a shady-looking url that probably sells Viagara.
Be sure to mark them as ‘spam’ so that your akismet spam filter will recognize these types of messages more quickly in the future.

Not all complementary posts are going to be malicious, but if you have a wordpress blog, this is definitely something you need to watch out for.

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When I moved to Westchester I didn’t know anybody, so I joined a local social group called the Westchester 20-somethings. We had a weekly dinner and drinks meeting at local White Plains restaurants and bars, with a group of people I had never met before. That same group of people are now some of the closest friends that I have and we see each other on a regular basis. Now you can find meetup groups for anything from local singles look for love, to people who like to watch movies, and those who want to share witchcraft techniques. There literally is something for everybody.

Meetup’s footprint now extends all over the country and beyond and has all kinds of groups for people of all ages and backgrounds. So if you are looking to network, make friends or just meet people with the same interests, I’d encourage you to surf on over the meetup.com and give it a try.

Zeoli did a fantastic job walking through the WordPress installation process. He explained the basics of themes, Search Engine Optimization and plugins. The audience was very active in asking a lot of questions. I’m an assistant organizer of the group and would like to think that my experience overseeing a cluster of WordPress Powered blogs is a big help to people who want to understand WordPress better. I chimed in and relayed a lot of good information that the audience seemed to appreciate

Our second Meetup will be held on Tuesday February 16th, also at the Journal News office in White Plains. The agenda is not set in stone yet. Members have said they want to learn more about SEO, Theming, Permalinks and Hierarchy, and just a general discussion around blogging with WordPress and the various opportunities blogging presents. So our plan is to take one of those general topics, and delve much deeper into it for our February meetup. In March, I’m planning on making a presentation on how bloggers can build traffic through link building, and engaging the audience.

if you are interested in attending, please join our meetup group. It is a great opportunity to learn about blogging and WordPress from professionals who are in the field.

Here is a link to Tony’s powerpoint slides from the meeting.

Their plan is to count how many times a user reads their articles and start charging them once they exceed a certain threshold (the threshold has yet to be determined). Sounds a bit counter intuitive doesn’t it? Why punish your most loyal readers? The reason for this is to stay relevant with search engines. Closing everything off from the massive crowd of freeloaders (err … i mean users) would alienate the casual web surfer as well as piss off search engines. They assume that their most diehard loyal fans will not mind paying for their content. That theory will be put to the test quickly.

This raises a lot of questions. How many articles do you let users read before you pull the plug? What type of technology will they use to enforce this? Even inexperienced users know how to clear their cookies these days. So how do you identify unique users with a good accuracy rate? Using IP addresses? Those can easily be manipulated. Maybe there will be some kind of free registration before you hit the paywall (seems like that would defeat the purpose of a “metered” plan). There just seems to be so many ways around this plan. Hordes of people will put articles on message boards, web sites, and in the comment sections of free blogs, while the NY Times legal department tries to hunt them down with copyright suites. The NY Times wants the best of both worlds where they can have a paywall, but still give away a lot for free. That is a very tricky balance to strike.

Another big question is whether or not the Times can make enough money through online subscriptions to offset potentially massive losses in online advertising revenue. It’s hard to imagine the Times traffic not taking a big dip once they put in a paywall. They simply won’t have the same volume of people viewing their articles, which will make them less attractive to advertisers. On the other hand, some advertisers may like the fact that they have a core set of loyal users and will have a very solid handle on their demographics (I assume the paywall registration process will ask people a lot of questions about age, income etc.).

The one thing that is for certain is that many eyes will be on this project to see if this plan can save the struggling newspaper industry. Only time will tell.