meta-roj

it’s always noteworthy when we have first-hand material to share on controversial subjects – first-hand stories from the ground where bombs are falling makes war a little less abstract and video-game-like. twice, in the past few days, we’ve had important messages sitting here at the meta-roj blog addressed by the persons that they refer to. william cooper came forward with a comment on june 10th, and today, carlo oddo apparently added his two cents to a post on the sons of 97 radio. it’s taken quite a long time (150+ days), but better late than never, i suppose. maybe it’s the tail end of the honesty outbreak?

of course, it’s impossible to verify that these are actually the people they claim to be, but for the sake of argument, we can let that slide for now….

something that john foxworthy points out in a follow-up comment, is that this reads like a prepared statement – in fact, it looks like the same statement that rolling stone got when they ran with the story.

in any case, carlo oddo didn’t pick up the whole collection of 97 radio material available here – he hasn’t (at least not from that ip this week) read the original post (with it’s 70-ish collection of comments), nor did he read the bit about it breaking into the tv news over here, so it’s hard to give the guy credit for really engaging the subject in the space provided.

if you’re here looking for information on 97 radio, carlo oddo, talent 2k, cigmusic, alternativespin, rapvibe or any of the other potential faces of this operation, you can read carlo’s response in the comments here.

i think it’s important and valuable to make the platform available for rebuttal [different story]. the 97 radio story here at the meta-roj blog has turned into a huge [relative to this dark corner of the net, anyway] phenomenon. by april the story had generated over 1200 “direct hits” from people looking for information on the subject. today, that score is up to over 2800. (i’m defining “direct hits” as reading the individual-entry page – it’s impossible to get an accurate count, because the same material appears on the front page of the blog for a while, and in the music business archive, so at least this many people saw the material. i also don’t know how many of them bothered to read everything.

we broke this story at the meta-roj blog on january 11, 2004.

[queries with less than 5 total aren’t presented here]

something worth noting is that the queries a few months ago were mostly for the names and players in the story. since then the words “scam” and “fraud” have creeped into the vocabulary more and more. this suggests something to me.

it’s a good thing to bring attention to the people that would take advantage of others – and i’m happy to provide that platform – but i’m also very concerned with the positive things that people do, so i thought i’d draw your attention there while i had you here.

i should also apologize – i haven’t really followed up on the cig music/alternative spin/rapvibe post. i suppose i should try to do that someday.