Around The Blogosphere 9 April 07

Tags: Imus, Mozilla

Michelle Malkin on Imus & Al: "A pox on both of these losers. Ugh" [When race-baiting blowhards collide]. Raoul Vega has some thoughts on Confederate Heritage Month.

Vanity Fair takes an in-depth look at the climate crisis. VF profiles Leonardo DiCaprio, who says: "It’s clear humans have had a devastating impact on our planet’s ecological web of life."

7 Beginner Blogger Blunders and How To Avoid Them. If this is the best they can come up with, it’s time for me to take up needlepoint. Weblogging’s about showing up regularly with solid original content.

Earlier today Mozilla made the first release candidate for Thunderbird 2.0 available for download. While this still isn’t a final release, the new version is thus far bug free, stable and considerably faster than the previous betas.

Here in the Capital Region, WRPI made front page news on this morning's Times-Union in a re-hash of a story out back in the Fall. I revisited the story today and fellow-blogger Ed Dague made this interesting point:

...WRPI was playing hard rock on FM and was alone in doing it. WFLY was a classical music station and WGFM at 99.5 mostly repeated WGY’s programming. The program director for both radio stations was a guy named Don Brown. He called me into his office one day in the early 70’s to tell me a secret. G.E. Broadcasting had been studying the local market and had found a large segment of area listeners missing. It had to be WRPI playing rock and ignored by radio ratings, Brown believed, and the secret was that WGFM was going to play hard rock on FM. WRPI broke that ground for the whole market.

What Ed didn't tell you: non-rated stations in the market (to this day) take a bigger bite out of the audience than you might realize. Siena's WVCR so threatened a commercial hip-hop station that the school was persuaded to abandon the hip-hop format. (Which always puzzled me. A solid Catholic college pushing music that glorifies violence and degrades women... But, wait a minute... did you know the average listener to Albany hip-hop radio is a mid-20's single mother with one child? That's the truth!)