NP: Scotland vs. Macedonia

Over at The Daily Dish, pinch-hitter Chris Bodener is talking about Howard Stern's potential move to his own, Internet-based channel.

The web is not only ideal for enabling unknown amateurs to burst on the scene without money or industry backing.

This is idealistic Internet cheerleading, and it's a bit of a bullshit argument. If you want to quibble, then yes, the Internet is "ideal" in the sense that every other channel for unknown amateurs is crap, but it's still not good. You still need filters to sort through it all, and many of those filters are more established "brands" and traditional media people that have reinvented themselves on the web -- like Jeff Jarvis, the guy Bodener is quoting, or Arianna Huffington. Digg might bring some complete unknown out of the woodwork every once in a great while, but then again, so does American Idol, and that's not seen as the savior of the music business.

Because it does come back to the music business, one of those bleeding edge industries when it comes to new technology and the Internet, along with porn and sci-fi. The blogosphere is in that phase the music business was in about 10 years ago, where everyone was enamored with the lowering of barriers to entry, without realizing the flood of crap it would allow. Now, there are some differences, in that the news/opinion business seems to have adopted some new media filters that never really took hold in music, but I really wish some of these guys would stop acting like none of this has happened before.