Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 115 of 176)

Internet based fan owned teams spread

September 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

In addition to myfootballclub and Save the Victory, there are a couple of other options out there if you want to get a piece of a soccer club.

Fan Power points to myBUFC and BuyaClub.co.uk. MyBUFC is trying to buy a low level club in England. The advantage is they only need 5,000 investors (instead of 50,000 at myfootballclub and at most 20,000 with Save the Victory. The level of entry is also lower at about $50 for their non-league club, compared to about $70 at myfootballcub and $100 Save the Victory.

BuyaClub seems to be an almost exact copy as myfootballclub, but they’re having a harder time getting people on board. Probably because they’re asking for the money up front.

Re; Paying for College with the Constitution

September 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Mr. England says:

Education is pointless without liberty. And liberty relies on the rule of law.

While he’s talking about college education, I easily saw the implication towards libraries. Since you can get a book at a book store, why have libraries or have schools?

So say the trustees of the Boston Public Library in 1852:

It will however be readily conceded that this falls far short of the aid and encouragement which would be afforded to the reading community, (in which we include all persons desirous of obtaining knowledge or an agreeable employment of their time from the perusal of books), by a well supplied public library. If we had no free schools, we should not be a community without education. Large numbers of children would be educated at private schools at the expense of parents able to afford it, and considerable numbers in narrow circumstances would, by the aid of the affluent and liberal, obtain the same advantages. We all feel however that such a state of things would be a poor substitute for our system of public schools, of which it is the best feature that it is a public provision for all; affording equal advantages to poor and rich; furnishing at the public expense an education so good, as to make it an object with all classes to send their children to the public schools.

Sounders blogging

September 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Some have the word that the Seattle is getting the next new MLS team for 2009.

Yipppee!

The strange note that our USL Sounders (currently playing for the league championship on Saturday) will take off 2008 makes me think their current owner will be involved, so you could say this is a promotion of the Sounders.

Over at Crosscut, Peter Miller reminds of why soccer is good:

There are no intermissions, no TV-commercial breaks. There are refs wagging a finger and players mocking an opponent, there are acts of cunning and of cruelty, there are no free throws nor flags, no coach is even allowed on the pitch. The hope is that the flow can be sustained and kept, that both sides try their most brilliant and improvised sense of possible and near impossible. It is as if motion itself shall unfold the better and reveal the very fact of which club can venture furthest into a complexity that has no rival nor peer, and in the end to score.

I’m going up to the Huskies game this Saturday, so I’m going to miss the Sounders, which is totally bumming me out. I’ll wear my ECS t-shirt under my Husky stuff though.

TVW is so cool, getting cooler

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I can’t find anyone that’s noted it, but TVW.org has undergone a radical redesign recently. I’ve had my issues with TVW in the past (here, here, here and here), but I have to say that I’m impressed with where they’re going.

Most of my past problems with TVW is that they didn’t make it easy to share what they were putting up on the internet. Its still not that easy, but I can see them going in that direction.

I had problems with the new website, so I emailed the help line on a Saturday. And, on that same Saturday their Director of Information Technology emailed me back. On a Saturday. That’s cool.

Emmet that new windows media 11 plug-in is tricky with Firefox. There are a few fixes for Firefox that should be applied and the browser should be re-started after the installation of the plug-in. one thing to also note: you have to have the regular version of windows media player 11 installed on your windows machine. Version 10 will cause the version 11 plug-in to fail. this should fix your issues.

We do use flash in a minimal fashion but because of the lengthy nature of our events, we are waiting until the mpeg4 codec is supported in flash player 9 (coming in fall) until we start a migration of our streaming servers to flash via mpeg4. So in short, soon. I hope this helps and there are many help items online about this issue.

Its also worth noting that TVW’s executive director Cindy Zehnder is going to be the governor’s chief of staff next week. In my whining about TVW, Ms. Zehnder was very responsive to my concerns and I was invited to a meeting up in Seattle that sought to brainstorm about the future direction of TVW. I wasn’t able to go, but being invited was very cool.

So, does this mean that Dave Ammons will be blogging?

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Dave Ammons (the king of Olympia based political reporters) wrote a strange column last week that sort of points to him blogging sometime in the near future. The only concrete thing I got out of the column is that he won’t be writing his weekly “Ammons on Politics” column every week, but rather “when events warrant an analytical touch.”

What got people thinking that he was blogging is the references he made to changes in the media world:

Today, political discourse is becoming more real-time, with instantaneous access to Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and a relentless 24-hour news cycle.

I just don’t get the logic of saying “yeah, technology has changed things, so I’m just going to scale back.” Isn’t recognizing that you can’t just write a weekly column and be relevant (surprising though how relevant his columns were given the medium) the first step to embracing the new media?

There are some political reporters in Ammons’ circle that are blogging and doing a very good job of it. Postman on Politics is pretty much the gold standard of Olympia based political reporter blogs, but Eye on Olympia is older and in some ways cooler. Yeah, and there’s Strange Bedfellows too, I guess.

If Dave is looking for some examples of AP reporters blogging, there are some bad ones and what seem to be a couple of pretty good examples.

Thurston Democrats don’t follow the pre-ordained “sides” on school board races

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I missed the endorsement meeting this last Monday at the Thurston County Democrats, and I’m really regretting it. Wow, endorsing Craig Ottavelli over Matthew Green, that’s a huge one. Matthew (I did his website, btw) is a long time Thurston County Dem and a former city council member. Craig’s a nice guy, and probably deserves and endorsement, but I wonder why the group backed off doing a dual endorsement.

The really surprising part is the endorsements for the school board. The last couple of days I’ve written about the rift in the current school board showing up in the races this year (here and here). The county Democrats endorsed one candidate from the majority camp and one candidate from the minority camp.

Jeff Nejedly’s endorsement (from the minority camp) doesn’t surprise me. He’s made an effort with the organization. He’s been showing up to meetings since the spring, has had a presence at the Burger Booth and has essentially done the things that canidates to do make good with us. Frank Wilson sounds like a good guy, but he just wasn’t there.

On the other hand, not endorsing Lucy Gentry Meltzer probably has to do with something else. I’ve heard her described as a “one issue candidate,” meaning she’s approaching the race with an axe to grind. I’ve heard that we try to stay away from those kind of candidates. The one issue is arts funding, if you’re interested, but I really have no idea if this was directly related to her not being endorsed. I wasn’t a the meeting.

Read all of our endorsements here.

Kenny Pearce does the best preview of the Top Two Primary case in the Supreme Court

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

People are noting everywhere (here and here) that the Supreme Court is going to hear arguments next week in the case of the Top Two Primary.

But Kenny Pearce, that “The Evangelical libertarian philosopher” formally of the Palouse and currently of Philadelphia, has the best breakdown.

Read the entire thing here (its long), but here’s a good part of his analysis:

A man with very ugly teeth publicly endorses Listerine. He does this with no malice; perhaps he is trying to argue that his bad teeth are not his fault. The man goes so far as to buy television ads in support of Listerine (featuring himself, bad teeth and all). This has a devastating effect on Listerine’s brand image. What recourse does Listerine have? If the man does not make false representations implicitly or explicitly, and is not intentionally attempting to damage Listerine’s brand image, he can’t be charged with slander, or false advertising. It also doesn’t seem that he is infringing Listerine’s trademark, since he isn’t using it to refer to a different product in the same field, and that is the primary use trademarks are intended to protect against. It seems that the only recourse Listerine has is to (1) ask him to stop (he is not obligated to comply) and (2) issue statements to the effect that his results are not typical, possibly buying their own television advertisements at great expense. Certainly neither Listerine’s free speech rights, nor its associational rights are violated (or even “burdened,” whatever that’s supposed to mean – libertarians reject this category; rights are either violated or they are not).

I love this paragraph because it echoes essentially what I understand to be one of the major points of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Parties that try to control their label through top down hierarchy and lawsuits are doomed to fail. People know what a Democrat is either because they know they are one or they know someone else who claims to be one. That personal claim of allegiance (I’m a Democrat because I’m for grassroots government) if far more important than a party by-law or platform.

From the 95 Theses:

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

You Don’t Own Your Brand — Your Customer Does
You don’t own your brand

Why soccer will end up working in the United States

September 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The most read page on ANY American newspaper website is about soccer:

Incredibly, one of you reading this post will be the 1,000,000th page view on this blog so far in 2007. Figuring that we had 70,000 or so when June began, it shows just how big this blog has gotten and I must thank everyone who has visited, read and commented on posts – especially Arsenal and Liverpool fans. You’ve made this blog about football (soccer), the most popular page at an American newspaper website for the past three months and it continues to grow every day.

While folks like Jay Mohr and other sports writes will take cheap shots at soccer, it grows under the surface.

Re: Nafziger opens up

September 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Ok, this is obviously what Rich Nafziger was talking about.

If you’re into that kind of thing, the comments are one-sided against the Nafziger split on this whole thing:

If Nafziger really said what the Olympian reported, he has no business being on the board. Being a board member means you make REAL decisions and take action, not that you are a rubber stamp for the superintendent. Nafizger wants to just go along and watch, not to lead. Why is he interested in holding public office?

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