I'm not saying television sportscasters are superfluous. I'm just saying some of them talk too much and say too little. So around here anyway, lots of people tend to mute their sets and watch the game while listening to the radio commentary of the same game. This is especialy true around here when the NFL gets going. The radio sportscasters on WBCN are terrific. People at the game tend to throw stuff, like snowballs, at the network booth crew widely believed to be in love with every team except the Patriots.

But last night there was a five to ten second delay between the Red Sox and Yankees baseball game in real time being broadcast over the radio and the near-real-time game being televised. Think about that. Thanks to the radio, I'd know the outcome of the next pitch before it was pitched.

Now I'm wondering, is this new? When did this happen. Is this being done to discourage us radio/tv combo types? Is it being done in case something happens in real time on television that would offend a nation? Is Janet Jackson in attendance? Are the television advertisers demanding this? That would make the most sense because no one un-mutes their TV to hear the ads. No body.

Please note that my posts this week have been way off the usual subject matter. That's because I think this part of August leading up to Labor Day is slower than even the time around Christmas and New Years. Even the email spammers seem to have gone off to the beach! Come September I hope to resume writing about the same old boring stuff, like the revolution in social media that is changing the world as we know it.

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This is a continuation of my rant of yesterday. Yesterday was a call for a national digital online primary season and an Internet-driven general election. Today is a call for a new party… not a third party, but a first party, a digital online party, and a party that has the Nation first and foremost in mind versus conservative values or progressive values. I would call it the Nationalist Party. It's chief constituent would be America.

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We write a lot here about how things have changed — and we often criticize the current incumbents for not getting it. Often, we think they don't because they don't want to. But lately, I’ve realized that sometimes they don't get it because they can't. Their mental models – the very synapses firing in their heads – are so conditioned by the current that the future looks like noise to them. What's going on is more than a foreign language…it's the equivalent of a new number system or life based on something other than carbon.

Many have been thinking very hard and with great insight about what the explosion of online blogs and podcasts means to society and the body politic. More often than not, however, these same individuals are incapable of getting past the fact that it's all "unedited." In their world, managing editors decide what's appropriate and necessary. They "have to" because the information model that forms her world view is one in which there are limitations: only so many hours of airtime, only so many channels, only so many pages of print. But in the new model, distribution is limitless.

The barrier to entry for even the most sophisticated multi-user publishing systems (like WordPress, which we use) is nearly zero. Anyone can (and millions do) go into the media business every single day.

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