Gillmor Gang: ZoomHouse

I use Feedly to work my way through each day’s stream of politics, tech, and media stories. Today, I am greeted with a picture of something called Feedly Cloud and the following message:

Scheduled Maintenance Feedly will be back in less than 30 minutes.

60 minutes later, it still says that. Feedly is built on RSS aggregation of my favorite news sources, things like the New York Times, Washington Post, Techcrunch, Protocol, Deadline, Techmeme, and writers like Om Malik and Benedict Evans. Notice that very few newsletter authors make this list, mostly because they push via email. I wonder if that is because vendors like Substack and Revue want to promote their subscription model, but if so that is shortsighted. It’s not about the subscription, it’s about the relationship.

I pay a monthly fee to Feedly, and I get a piece of the Web I can call my own. If I see something I want to find later, I put it in the read later “folder.” If I think I might want to refer to it in the newsletter, I push it to a Feedly board that I can import into Revue along the right side of the screen. If I want to push a story live to the Telegram stream, I drop it on a board where a series of bots posts it to a chain of locations ending with the @gillmorgang Twitter identity. If I click the Feedly icon, it’s now less than 90 minutes ’til Feedly won’t be back.

Luckily, Revue has a section in the right screen list called My Items, where I’ve added a link to a Rolling Stone story with the following title:

Hear How Beck Turned Paul McCartney’s ‘Find My Way’ Into a Funky Dance Number

Rolling Stone has gone to a partial firewall model with a subscribe button, but kindly leaves access to the Vevo promo video embedded on the Gillmor Gang newsletter link below. Someone on the YouTube page has posted part of the Rolling Stonewalled text Wikipedia-style in the comments section, copied below (Beck speaking:)

I remember hanging out with Paul and his wife Nancy several years ago and Nancy mentioned that she wanted to go out dancing before calling it a night. We ended up at some club in West Hollywood and I remember noticing that Paul and Nancy were TEARING IT UP – really enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the dance floor. Last year when he asked me to remix this track, I remembered that night and wanted to try to recapture that amazing spirit I felt while watching him on the dance floor…sort of my little tribute to Paul “in his groove.” When I then heard the falsetto vocal in Paul’s original track I wanted to lean further into something really loose and funky – I pulled out my Hofner (because of course) and put down a few bass lines…and everything came to life from there. The best part of the entire experience, though, came a week after I’d turned in the remix, when Paul called to tell me he’d been dancing in his kitchen to the track all week.

The track runs 4:56, so a few clicks later I’m probably down to 80 minutes to go.

Maybe this is a more serious problem, I begin to suspect. Is there a business model problem here? McCartney is getting paid. Beck is getting paid. Steely Dan is not getting paid for that wonderful chord, the one where the keyboard stretches out to the horizon and meets the rhythm track. I’m getting paid, too. Click it again, go ahead.

I went back to the original version of this song, a record called McCartney III which the artist has written, played all the instruments, and recorded track by track during the pandemic. It’s fun, reminiscent of the original McCartney I he released to break up the Beatles in 1970. But this reimagining with Beck I like a whole lot better. Paul may have been the cute one, but he always glowed in resonance with John Lennon. “It’s getting better all the time… Can’t get much worse.” Beck doesn’t have the Lennon mordant wit, but he brings a sardonic edge that works in this vaccinated time.

As Joe Biden joked in his press conference the other day about his predecessor, “Oh God, I miss him.” Not really. We’re reimagining how to get back to work from everywhere, and I bet the answer is a lot more like life + than hybrid. On this episode of the Gillmor Gang, Denis Pombriant uses Zoom’s Stop Video button to great effect to opt out of more Fungible talk, non or otherwise. Now you see him, now you don’t. But he can hear you. It’s Zoom’s new Instant Clubhouse effect. Clap on, clap off. Somehow I doubt we’re eager to give that up as a collaboration tool going forward. Clap back on.

Just then, Feedly came back to life.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 26, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

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