The 65-count indictment charges Bruce Bond with forgery, attempted grand larceny, identity theft and other charges that allege he worked the scheme over the past 15 months with accomplices in Nigeria and Europe.  The former afternoon drive-time talker for WNNK radio in Harrisburg was arrested at his apartment on Wall Street on May 20. Bond’s lawyer, Patrick Megaro, said his client “is absolutely not the ring leader. He is merely a cog in the wheel.”

I never had a problem with Bruce.  I know opinions on him always polarized one way or the other, but for the 15 minutes in my entire life that I actually talked to him, he seemed all right (although he did steal my liner cards one night when I was filling in for Mike, but that’s forgivable because my improv was far better).

For the record, I think Wink had a good thing going when he was on the air — AC by day, the four-hour all-talk Late Afternoon Show to break the flow, and Hot AC by night.  An all-talk show on a Top 40 station, and he actually made it work.

Oh well.  Times change, I guess.

Clocking in at $.30 per track less than iTunes’ DRM-free MP3s and about the same as Amazon’s offerings, this isn’t a bad deal.  Could it be that the music industry is finally starting to realize that when we buy it, it should be ours?

Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

And it goes on and on.  Newspapers have been in a slump for decades, but only recently have begun to feel real pressure due to unprecedented competition.  And to be fair, they’re getting what they deserve:  When you flat-out refuse to compete with your competitors — the “faster, better, stronger, harder” push of online publication — capitalism dictates that your customers will walk away.

In response to free-falling numbers, newspapers are trimming their pages.  Cutting back on content.  Cutting staff.  Inserting more ads.  Instead of making their product more appealing, they’re making less product to sell.  That may be a good response when demand is high and you’re the only supply in town, but newspapers simply don’t have that kind of monopoly anymore.  As they cut back on supply, other sources — from Digg to Fark to blogHarrisburg.com — are rushing in to fill the void.  Fewer people find newspapers relevant, fewer people purchase newspapers, more subscribers let their subscriptions lapse, and the cycle continues.  And this isn’t even beginning to touch on the whole social news movement.

I have nothing against our local paper.  For all the merciless beating it takes, I like the Patriot.  They’ve been a good read for the decade since I first became a ‘burger.  But, like so many other hometown papers across the nation, they chose to do nothing in response to “this whole Internet fad”.  Sure, they slapped together a poorly-designed website and use it to dispense stories that were already published in this morning’s edition (or, on occasion, publish two-sentence teasers of stories to be published tomorrow).  But did they actually do anything?

Take a look at what we’re doing over at blogHarrisburg.  Look at the liveblogging going on from Jersey Mike.  Check out the Harrisburg / blogging forums.  Scope out the Harrisburg Wiki.  Look at the other contributors, from Beyond Second to Harrisburg Nightlife to Linglestown Gazette to Slow Food Harrisburg to everyone else listed on bH.  We’ve all got a passion for our local community, and we’re all doing something about it.  Some of us provide news coverage to areas and events too small for the Patriot to pick up.  Others provide insight to topics simply not covered locally, period.  Still others generate exposure for amateur artists.  The list goes on.

All of us doing it for free.  All of us doing it for the love of the game.  All of us welcoming commentary, be it contradictory or complimentary.  All of us doing it without the burden of advertiser conflicts.

And we want your views.

We’ve got a Harrisburg bloggers meetup coming up in April.  The exact date will be posted shortly, but expect it to be a Sunday afternoon.  It’s going to be open to all Central PA bloggers — anyone who lives in or consistently writes about the region will be welcome to attend.  We’re especially eager to hear from people who have news and opinion to share about their neighborhood, band, small business ventures, sports team, civic group, acting troupe, or other community topic.

There’s going to be a lot going on with blogHarrisburg in 2008.  Come be a part of it.

There’s really nothing more I can say to highlight how ridiculous this is.  However, in a rare moment of insight and humor, a PennLive commenter put it best: 

“Wow! Good thing they didn’t advertise a crispy duckling, huh?”

It’s always funny when non-technologically-inclined people try things like this.  I’ve seen more than one instance of such “hacking” (and I’m using that word loosely) where the perpetrator was ultimately shocked and amazed to find out exactly what an IP address was, that their ISP could be compelled to provide information with a subpoena, and that they were now facing criminal charges for their actions.

In my five years of running floor9, I’ve had more than my share of hack attempts.  The only ones that could be remotely considered successful were large-scale DDoS attacks aimed at taking out my hosting provider, and those were only minor inconveniences at best.  All the others were laughable failures.  And it looks like that’s exactly what happened to Roxbury.  It appears that he had a backup of everything and is in the process of re-uploading them now.  An annoyance, true.  But the footage — and the message — remains.