Jason Bryant Blog

Steve Gillmor’s new gesture was posted a few days ago. I finally had the chance to watch it and as usual, it was filled with long meandering segments punctuated with great insight. Marc Benioff’s thoughts on the iPhone being a great iPod at the end of the show sum up my feelings exactly. I don’t really care about the iPhone, but give me that touchscreen interface on the iPod.

I’ve been posting to Twitter for a couple of months now, but only recently did I begin sending the notifications from the people I follow to my phone. After two weeks, I have to say I’m tired of it. So I have turned the notifications off. It became somewhat distracting and the novelty quickly wore off. I will check in with Twitter once in awhile, but only on the web. I will still post, because when you are busy, it’s nice to be able to post something quickly and not have to worry about writing a long blog entry.

This got me thinking about the limits of attention and how distracting the world has become. Long form entertainment like feature magazine pieces, books and novels have been pushed aside to some degree by this urge to instantly communicate. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing. I just finished “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini and was very moved by it. I will do a review on my Vox Blog next week. I have many more books on my shelf that are unread so I’m going to focus my attention on that, instead of the myriad of attention stealing Web 2.0 apps. I still love Twitter and technologies that allow us to connect, but in smaller doses.

I was also thinking about my last post dealing with the state of broadcast radio and refer you to a reply I left for a comment on the post. I give some suggestions for radio stations to stay relevant. I would like to add that the best thing about broadcast radio is it’s immediacy, it’s local and it’s free. Nothing can beat that. Also, change the style of the advertising. Make it more conversational, more real. Please don’t yell at me to buy your product. I don’t like to be yelled at. And one final thing radio stations could do to stay on the cutting edge, let your announcers blog and post stuff to your web site. Sure, give them clear corporate guidelines about what’s acceptable and what’s off limits, but let them blog about what’s going on. Station managers trust them to talk to thousands of people on the radio, why not trust them with a Blog?