Sometimes I get nagging thoughts. Okay. A lot of the time I get nagging thoughts. Perhaps a more sane person would abandon them. But me. I write them down in “diaries.” So here goes.
As with all nagging thoughts, the thing that makes them nag me is that they come from multiple directions and collide in the center in my brain like a train wreck. Then they are a mess that needs to be sorted out one way or another. This particular nagging thought came from a few directs. And has collided like this.
There was Connecticut Man’s diary about supporting blogger media projects. And there was the lecture I saw on Book TV by John Perkins (Confessions of An Economic Hitman), which was mentioned on the front page by SusanHu. The sum of these ideas that collided from these directions was that we (being people who see the need to change the world from its current corporate capitalistic path toward human destruction) need to share our own ideas with one another and amplify them, because the corporate MSM is obviously never going to do so on any large scale.
Then there were these innocuous ideas and events. I saw my nephews iPod over the holidays and realized that these gadgets were cool (and also IBM compatible). I bought one. I learned about things called podcasts — wonder of wonder — an entire radio network of that is available to us in a relatively inexpensive and not overly corporatized way. So the sum of these colliding ideas — I can set up a radio station right where I’m sitting now, for like almost no money (very little). I’m a radio broadcaster waiting to happen.
And then there were these thoughts, that I’ve garnered from the book selling trail. Broadcast media reaches a ton of people. It is an incredibly powerful format. And fun. And while I’ve learned the extent to which it is completely dominated by large corporate interests, I’ve become enchanted with its charms.
So all these ideas mashed into my head this weekend. It was Connecticut’s diary that set off the chain reaction, leading to the collision of thoughts, and my current nagging idea: I want to start a liberal/blog radio podcast.
But as with all my half-baked schemes, the internal criticisms started to pour down. Reasons for not even thinking this should be a good idea:
Reasons This is Stupid Idea
Lack of time to do project justice.
Potential life changes in near future which will force a return to the corporate economy (and thus require a silencing of this voice of dissent).
High probability that the podcast would “suck,” due to operator talent deficiency (OTP — check the medical diagnosis).
No real audience — who cares, anyway?
So here’s me. With a nagging idea. Wondering whether to jettison it, and wait for the next nagging idea to trouble my small brain. But if this nagging idea is to take flower, here’s what I’m thinking so far:
Plan
Set up a 30 minute weekly podcast. Produce it on Saturday nights, so that people tuning in for Sunday news coverage can access a new episode each week. Show will concentrate on what happened in the progressive blogosphere in the previous week, particularly those stories where the MSM is misleading or absent. Kind of like an alternative to watching Meet the Press.
Spread word around the blogosphere, about the podcast. Hope that a percentage of those tens of thousands of Kossacks have received an iPod as a recent gift. Or hope they will listen on their PC.
Show to suck during the early days. Getting to know the technology, etc. But will eventually build into a high-quality program with theme music, background noise, guest bloggers via telephone. Perhaps recurring segments like: News, Blog entertainment, Blog gossip, etc.
Expansion possibilities: Show would naturally progress toward a daily news show (like a counter-balance to broadcast network news). But I’ll never have time to man that. So show would have to be hosted by other bloggers. Perhaps volunteers for one day a week, working under the same franchise.
All right. That is it. I’ve purged for the day. I’m hoping for enough negative comments on this, so that you talk me out of this silly waste of time. I don’t really want to spend every Saturday night for the rest of my life doing a “broadcast.” It is a silly, silly idea. And then there would be the daily note taking from blogs. And the e-mails to manage. How’s a guy gonna watch his nephew wrestle this year if he’s gotta do all this crap. And what about the second novel. Never gonna get done. And the possibility of a real job in future. That would nuke it. Somebody stop me. Or I’ll jump.