msb-0019 Jockeying for Position

Feedback come first so here goes:

There wasn't any...

So what am I doing about it? Enjoy! Relax... Gather my wits and some strength before it hits.

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I am going to Podcasters Across Borders at the end of June, Friday June 23rd and Saturday June 24th, to be exact, so there's bound to be some influences one way and/or the other.

I'm hoping to speak to some other 'small market' podcasters.

I'm also hoping to have a good time and geek away the week-end. :-)

Lee's coming with me to keep me on the straight and narrow, but I still intend to enjoy Uncle Seth and the rest of the shows.

I'm encouraged by the success and longetivity of the Otaku Generation podcast. Talk about a specialized interest podcast. They are still running. They are at episode #49 and show no sign of podfading (and those guys still make me laugh so ... I download the 'cast and laugh to myself on the PATH train during the morning commute.)

I am in a holding pattern as far as MS stuff goes so today, I get to DJ away.

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I've been reading "Polio An American Story" (ISBN: 0-19-515294-8) and I found out that polio actually affected 1 in 3,000. That's three times fewer people than MS.

But they happened to be mostly children and that scared the crap out of people. Well, infantile paralysis would. Also the progress of the disease is dramatically different.

Roosevelt got it, so much for the infantile part, and he brought something that other patients didn't.

I refer of course to money.

Money bought profile and when the rich got less rich during the depression of the thirties, he used his profile to tap into the general population with the "March of Dimes."

That raised more money, a dime at a time, than could ever have been raised at parties for the rich, a hundred dollars a plate at a time.

That also raised the consciousness of the general public and it launched lots of interest for the 'stake holders', the health care facilities, research facilities, doctors, nurses, and, most importantly, for the people afflicted by polio.

In those days the broadcasting industry was still nascent and newspaper space could be bought for cheap.

The consumer attention span could be focused, a page at a time, one minute at a time, on the disease.

And it worked! Salk and Sabin became bitter rivals and some of the research establishments engaged in some unscrupulous folderol, but Polio was eventually neutralized as a disease.

Now imagine what could be done with a pool or research subjects, read guiney pigs, almost three times the size.

Now the FDA is not going to allow the kind of medical torture that was engaged in back in the day and progress is slow and steady partly because of it, but its cumulative.

Mick Jager got it wrong. Its the song not the singer.

If, in the medical world, the equivalent to the RIAA and ASCAP/BMI and the rest of 'em were to enforce their vision of intellectual property and we were reduced to using a 'clean room' approach, as we are currently stuck with when trying to develop sofware, the state of medecine would be set back to the middle ages.

But the profiteers aren't in charge entirely so medecine builds on the discoveries of the past.