MLB Doesn't Get It

Once, on a university campus I was offered a free Pepsi t-shirt. My response at the time was 'if you want me to be a walking billboard for your product I think you should pay me for it, not just give me the billboard for free and act like you're doing me a favor.' I was reminded of this incident when I read about "MLBlogs" Major League Baseball would like for you to blog on their site. Here's the deal:

They want you to blog (generate publicity and advertising for their prouduct)

but

They want YOU to pay THEM to do it (49.95 US a year or 4.95 US a month)

and

according to their terms of use they then own whatever you write. Oh, and they can also remove your content if they deem it inapropriate.

So, in a step beyond Pepsi's offer, they want you to do advertising for them, they retain the right to edit your ads, they want you to pay them for the privilege of doing ads for them and then they own the rights to the ad copy you generate. What's truly astonishing is they've had takers on this offer. MLB doesn't come close to getting it, fortunately for them (and their bankrolls) neither apparently do some of their fans.

CKUT Gets It

CKUT, the Montreal radio station for McGill University, that was recently threatened with the loss of their funding so far, has the award for getting it the most.

CKUT Podcasts all of their shows, They stream all of their shows. You can even go into the archives and create your own feed or stream by telling it what days and times you want and how you'd like it delivered (stream, mp3 etc.) They do not have blogs, which is fine as it really doesn't really fit with their website and they don't have the name of the show attached to the RSS feed, just CKUT podcasts but other than that they understand the direction of media better than any of Canada's national broadcasters.

A huge kudos to whoever made the call to do this.

I won't, for the time being anyway, be including CKDU's podcasts in the feeds at publicbroadcasting.ca, because, since every hour of radio is podcast, without the name of the show attached, CKDU would swamp the feeds, but I will link to them alot.

By the way, CKDU is also in the middle of a funding drive and they are a long, long way from their goal - so if you've got the cash, kindly consider showing them some love. The content you want, when you want it, how you want it ... is that really so much to ask for?

Free Agency Looms

Casual work with the CBC is drying up rapidly, for the season at least, and the project I've been working on for the Canadian Media Guild is coming to an end. That means good news and bad news: The good news is that I'll likely be blogging more and spending more time working on publicbroadcasting.ca . The bad news, obviously, is that I'm back in the free agent pool. So, if anyone has any ideas, upcoming projects etc., I'm all ears.