The Not-About-Michael-Jackson Editorial
by Paul McGoldrick

I met Michael Jackson (suitable screams of hysteria?) in the BBC’s Dickenson Road Studios at Rusholme in Manchester (a converted church acquired from Mancunian Films, and the BBC’s first TV production studio outside London). This was just after the Jackson Brothers became the Jackson 5, probably in late 1967(?). Michael was a cute little tyke, although there were, even then, family problems which I don’t want to discuss here.

Now I have done what every seedy cable channel presenter has done – reduced the degrees of my separation from the Jacksons to zero – although I can thankfully say, no, this Editorial is not about Michael Jackson despite everything on television this past week seeming to have been, ad nauseam. What I want to point to is the fact that the technology infrastructure we have built out seems to be unable to cope with major news events,\ such as his demise. When the news first broke on TMZ, the search engines that handle news (basically Google and the new Microsoft Bing) were heavily overloaded. Google thought that its servers were under attack while Bing had the story totally buried even though name searches were coming in by the thousands.

Bing is certainly not yet the tuned vehicle that Google has become over the years. Type in “McGoldrick” in the news section of both sites. Google comes up (at the moment) with a lead story about a nephew of mine – David McGoldrick – whose Southampton Football Club contract has just been bought for over £1 million by Nottingham Forest Football Club, while Bing comes up with a BBC news story only indirectly referring to said solid-gold-feet striker.

We have heard in past days about cell phone service being totally disrupted during major events such as the recent fires in the Santa Barbara foothills (not a threat I miss anymore), as if the service providers only engineer for some arbitrary average numbers of calls. A few years ago, living rather further up US-101 in the Bay area (we have also lived literally right on US-101 in Oregon, and said highway is still only a few miles away, across the strait!) I saw an accident happen right in front of me when a car ran up the back of a logging truck. It had to have been fatal. I got a busy signal calling 911…

That wasn’t the problem with some subscribers of Jitterbug, who complained that they could not dial 911 when they used their Samsung phones outside their normal service area. (Although, presumably, they were in the service area of another network’s technology?) 160,000 phones sold between March 2008 and May 2009 are subject to voluntary recall for a software upgrade. The recall in May 2009 is presumably why Jitterbug’s mind-blowingly-annoying TV advertising – directed at seniors and others who just want simple phone service – has now been usurped by another blast of annoying advertising for the so-called replacement white and graphite Jitterbug J phones.

The GreatCall company founder and Chairman, Arlene Harris, was reported as saying that they are not yet profitable and the San Diego company would need additional financing. Not for even more TV advertising, please!