The Weekend Classic Rock FM

70° - scattered clouds at 12 noon

Welcome to Saturday.

On the home agenda today is buying new bikes for my 12 and 9 year old, both who have seemed to quickly outgrow their old ones. Still think we're in the "big box store" bike purchase era instead of the $$ specialized bike retailer; the guys are still growing and they'll be outsizing whatever we buy today in short order...

Around the dial this weekend:

WAXQ/New York with a Bon Jovi weekend; tying in to an upcoming concert. Q104.3 also has a great interview with Ray Davies on their website (as do many Clear Channel classic rock stations). I think Ray's music in the past 3 years has never been better and is right up there with the best of the Kinks stuff from years ago.

WZLX/Boston and an Eagles weekend with ticket giveaways with as the band comes to town.

WGRF/Buffalo going into time-warp mode all weekend (great graphic!):

Another matter:

Dave Martin expresses it best. On what I refer to as the hysterical anti-HD radio bunch.

"A small and largely anonymous anti-HD Radio claque are engaged in a hobby of online ranting. The majority of these rants are no more than the noise of sockpuppetry (some possible astroturfing) being tyronic, invidious and inimical in nature. If you've not been exposed to these rants you're in luck."

This blog has certainly been the recipient of such rants with each and every mention of the letters "HD". I see the trolling - for anything HD-related - by the ranters in my site statistics.

I've stopped publishing the comments of the anonymous HD ranters. They contribute nothing new to the discussion at hand and drift off topic. I sense a "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude. I could be wrong.

The bottom line is that the technology is here. The investments have been made. Its time to find ways to monetize and make it work.

Dave further observes: "It's still way early in the game". Read Dave Martin here.

Just thinking: It only took FM 30 years to come of age in a less-cluttered technological environment.

If today's ability to blog had been available in the early 40s, I can only imagine the rants that would have been posted after W2XMN went on the air. And ranting turning to gloating when many of the early FM efforts went dark in the 50s.

More Sunday.