It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

Since this spring, Celis Pale Bock has been available on draft at selected fine establishments around town, such as The Gingerman. Tonight, while visiting Central Market, I saw it in bottles on a store shelf for the very first time. To that, I say: woo hoo!

For those just coming into the story, Celis Brewing Company was a small craft brewery in the Austin area that made a number of Belgian styled beers. Their beers were distinctive, which meant folks tended to either love them or hate them. I, actually, was not a fan of their stuff, except for the Pale Bock, which I went nuts over.

Let's back up, because you need to know about the relation between bock beer and Austin. Bock beer is a pungent almost skunky brew that's been a local favorite. I couldn't stand the stuff when I first moved to town, but after a while it grew on me.

Shiner Bock used to be the local benchmark, but their recipe got pretty bad over the years, leaving a gaping void in the bock universe. Then Celis popped up, started brewing their own bock, and all was right with the world again.

Every good story needs a villain, and the villain in this one is Miller Brewing Company. They bought the Celis brewery, only to abandon it a few years later. I guess they didn't know what to do with a beer that didn't have rice in it.

But the story has a happy ending. The Michigan Brewing Company acquired the Celis recipes. They started with the white (ehhh....not a wheat beer fan) and the bock soon followed. It's still a bit hard to find, but it's out there and that makes me happy.

Link: BuyMusic.com selling songs to Windows customers. (LA Times via sunspot.net)

A new downloadable music service has appeared on the net. Their motto is Get Loaded, but for Linux users it might as well be Get Lost.

The new Buymusic.com service is terribly proud of their consumer-unfriendly proprietary technology. In their breathless press release, their CEO bleats, "The new buzz phrase is no longer MP3 players, but 'digital music players' or DMPs, and refer to any device that is compliant with BuyMusic.com's format and DRM technology." Seems to me the only buzz around here is from the crack he's smoking.

DRM stands for "digital rights management," which means preventing you from doing what you wish to do with the music you've acquired. They will allow you to use the music in a Microsoft-approved fashion and only with Microsoft-approved products. Otherwise, tough luck.

As if to rub salt into the wound, users of non-proprietary operating systems are redirected to a web page that tells you, "In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com's offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher."

This means, of course, I will continue performing illegal music downloads on peer-to-peer networks. This is not my preferred solution. I find the music selection on peer-to-peer networks to be quite limited outside the mainstream genres, the audio quality often poor, and the download reliability very quirky.

I want to give the record labels my money, if they'd only try to sell me something I wanted.

Link: Blogging it with Xlent.

David E. Hollingsworth left a comment in another thread pointing out that the local monopoly daily newspaper has started up a blog. There is only one posting there, but already things are looking pretty bleak.

Let me count the ways.

1. No recognition that there even exists a blogging scene in Austin. In fact, Austin is blessed with multiple vibrant scenes. I'm thinking: Austin Bloggers, Austin Journal Writers, the bizarrely arbitrary Koax list, the Live Journal alternate reality. That's a few that come to mind. Yeah, Statesman, here's a big fat sloppy thank you for discovering weblogging and introducing it to Austin. Jeesh, now I know how the Indians must have felt when Columbus "discovered" America.
2. For their example of weblogs, they trot out a small list of the old hoary warblogs we all know and ignore. You probably can guess the list even without visiting the article.
3. No permalinks. Sorry Chuckles, that's not a weblog. It's just a periodically updated web page.
4. And the clincher: no comments. This is so very wrong. Man, talk about dead tree media not getting it. Journalist blogs can have comments, you know.

Guys, this is not a blog. This isn't even a bad doppelganger of a blog. It's like, "Woo hoo! We discovered the Interweb!"

Nonetheless, there is hope. All blogs suck, at first. The problems I listed can be fixed. The question is, are the authors of the Statesman's blog willing to change and adapt to what works and what people want? I suspect that may be one of the greatest difficulties of business blogs. Have the authors been empowered to make the changes necessary for the blog to work and thrive?

As fun as it is to slag the Statesman, I'd prefer to see this work. In the aforementioned thread, I was expressing my frustration with the paper's local news coverage. This blog could be a solution to that problem. For instance, let the Business/Tech section remain the Chamber of Commerce mouthpiece that it is, and use the blog to cover some of the interesting developments that matter to the local community.

So let's all welcome our local monopoly daily newspaper to the (cringe) blogosphere. And let's pray they never post an article that actually uses the term "blogosphere".

I noticed at the GTOPS press conference that our local monopoly newspaper didn't bother sending anybody to cover the event, even though this was the only media event by the City today.

I often get frustrated about the really cool hometown technology stuff that our local daily newspaper fails to cover. I made a snide comment to somebody that we should have printed the GTOPS press release on letterhead from Austin Ventures (motto: Official Financier of the Austin Technology Bubble). Then the newspaper would have been sure to run it. But I was only kidding!

I've been keeping an eye on the paper, watching to see if they'd at least run a mention from the press release. I was checking this afternoon and almost choked on my lunch when I saw no GTOPS news, but sure enough they ran yet another Austin Ventures story. What is this world coming to when my most bitter, cynical rantings come true?

So, here's what I'm thinking: it's clear that the local paper's technology coverage has, is and will evermore suck. The Statesman hasn't even gotten around to doing their "Blogging is the Next Big Thing!!!" article, and most every paper has done that one by now. (An archives search returns only two mentions of the word blogger, one about that CNN dude and another from SXSW.)

So, let's start a pool. When do you think the Statesman will discovering blogging and run their "next big thing" article? I'll put a buck on September or October of this year. I've got a hunch the buzz around (Presidential candidate) Howard Dean is going to spur them into finally doing it.