Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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January 31, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
For those reading Get Real... you should definitely take a look at my new blog, /Message, for the most frequent and up to date of my writing.
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January 10, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Michael Kinsley writes a funny, but dead-on piece about the dumb process of making newspapers and delivering them to our doors, and why people are opting out:
[from Black and White and Dead All Over
by Michael Kinsley]
And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.
[...]
But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo" or "Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?
Aggregation of many, many individual voices a la Google or Yahoo does become the new force to be reckoned with as the old school media titles have lost their luster. Even though Google and Yahoo don't have an editorial policy, per se, they are delivering the info soup that people are slurping up on the web, and are probably the replacement of the old stuff, in the long term.
In the near term, the newspapers continue to decline, losing money, readers, and perhaps their reason for existence. As someone pointed out recently, why do we have this strange combination of junk called a newspaper? Horoscopes, ads, classifieds, legal postings, politics, sports, bridge, and comics? Who wants all that junk? Not me.
One of the powers of the Web is this ability: to select the stuff you want, and drop the rest.
The younger generation have turned away from newsprint, to TV, and now the web. Older folks will continue to expect the dumb 3 pounds of newprint to hit their driveway every morning, until the end of time, but I bet that somewhere in the very near term that will become unaffordable, and will seem as quaint as the milkman leaving the cream for your breakfast on the front step.
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January 09, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ken makes some good points in this post about avoiding blog burnout:
[from TECHNOSIGHT » 7 Ways to Avoid Blogging Burnout]
6. Schedule some time off
Yes, there is a real world outside of the blogosphere! Go enjoy nature, check out a movie, visit a museum, be inspired by some architecture, or take in a play, concert, or sporting event. Get involved in your community or spend some much needed time with family and friends.
I think I'll go take a walk...
But Ken's post misses a couple of things I rely on, not necessarily with burnout in mind, but just to make blogging fresh:
- Build a network of people who send you stuff they stumble upon -- new eyes see the world differently.
- Wander around -- don't just read the same people all the time, or rely on the same sources.
- Read your old stuff, and rehash it -- many folks looking at your blog today didn't read something you wrote 3 months ago. Dig it up, and extend the theme.
- Write an post about blog burnout -- haha!
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January 05, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Nobleizer of Clogger is on a one man tirade against the Nokia N90 blogger marketing campaign. He has berated Andy Abramson, Loic Le Meur, and me, among others, for our complicity in a campaign that to him is threatening Western civilization. An ex-journalist who writes in a curmudgeonly fashion about the evils inherent in the anti-journalism that we bloggers practice, Nobleizer recently got in a snit in some comments her at Get Real (see I'm Very Worried, and The Part That YOU Are Missing), where he asserts, among other things, that "no blogger has credibility." He also disapproves of my contention that journalistic impartiality is a myth. Now he is suggesting that I am crazy:
[from clogger | blogging the corporate bloggers: Tools down?]
Take that normally awesome Stowe Boyd at Get Real (it's true - who can wear a beret and still look cool and not be awesome?) - he seems to have lost his mind in the comments to this post. And the folks over at Nokia seem to be continually and blissfully unaware of the mechanism that normally presides over the product review process and protects consumers for willful and unbridled chequebook journalism. And Loic? He doesn't get it at all, but then he's busy filming himself ski down hills on his freebie Nokia phone.
Actually, it is a cap worn backwards, not a beret.
Nobelizer -- who blogs only in this nom-de-blog, so I don't know his actually identity -- is a professed ex-journo whose loathing of the new world order in social media drips from every pore. First of all, of course bloggers have credibility -- that's what comes of solid blogging: people respect your perspective, and are influenced by your writing. I am sure there is a constituency for every point of view on the web, even Nobleizer's... although a Technorati rank of 132 thousand is not the greatest endorsement that it is a large constituency. Second of all, I have consistently and openly professed my belief for years that journalistic impartiality is a myth, and I believe that an increasingly large number of knowledgeable media-savvy adults would agree.
That does not means that all elements of journalism are evil, or unsuitable for the new world. It just means that some of the premises of journalism are based on faith rather than scientific truth. And it also means that some of the conclusions of journalistic reasoning will be incorrect, such as the idea that aspiring to being unbiased leads to better reportage. Baloney. The basis of all knowledge is our beliefs about what is true and what is false, and our connection to the world is formed by our self-identification with such knowledge.
I believe that gonzo is a better way to approach writing because it is authentic, based in self awareness, and is not filtered through the mumbo jumbo of religiousity that underlies old school journalism.
Anyway, we will just have to let the people decide. They have lost faith with the self-annointed priesthood of writers preaching the sanctity of organized journalism. People are opting out of those publications, and finding more meaning in the rantings of wildeyed lunatics from the blogger fringe. So if that is madness, then I am crazy. But don't call it a beret.
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January 02, 2006
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I stumbled across a link to a post of mine, from a site called osviews.com. I clicked through from Technorati, and here's what it looks like:
But the whole piece is lifted from Get Real. The problem is that it's not really attributed to me. There is a link, sort of randomly assigned to one phrase in the piece, that links back to my post, but that's it. So it looks like they wrote the story. And they seem to do that to all the stuff posted there. That sucks.
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December 29, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Alaskan Airlines Flight 536's decompression and subsequent emergency landing has been all over the news, mostly courtesy of Blogebrity's Jeremy Hermanns' pictures from his Treo. In general, this would be a small citizen journalism piece, except that it seems that Alaska Airlines' employees have been posting unflattering comments about Jeremy at his blog.
[from Alaskan Airlines Employees Calling Flight 536 Passenger a Pussy? - Consumerist
Here’s where we come in: Jeremy’s blog has been slammed with comments, some of which appear to be from Alaskan Airlines [Alaska Airlines] employees themselves. While we encourage the Alaskan Airlines [Alaska Airlines] employees to get all PR 2.0 and transparent and stuff, we really don’t think employees should tell a customer who nearly fell out of their airplane at thirty thousand feet that he’s a “pussy.”
Jarvis asks, "When will they ever learn, when will they everrrrr learn?"
Yet another opportunity for a corporation to get it right, but instead? They fumble it. Even imagining for the sake of fairness that these are loose cannons acting on their own, the company should step forward about the incident, and if anything, praise Jeremy. But what did I find in their press room this morning?
[from Alaska Airlines press room]
Headlines
Alaska Airlines Is First Carrier To Use RNP Precision Approach Technology At Reagan National Airport
12/20/2005 2:13 p.m.(PT)
Alaska Airlines announced today it is the first U.S. air carrier to use RNP precision approach technology to land aircraft at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C.
Alaska Airlines Signs Long-Term Contract With Athena Bottled Water, Extends Support For Women's Cancer Research
12/19/2005 12:49 p.m.(PT)
Alaska Airlines today named Athena® bottled water, a product whose profits directly benefit women's cancer research, the airline's official bottled water. As part of a new contract with Athena Partners®, Alaska will serve Athena bottled water onboard its flights and in its airport Board Room lounges through October 2006.
Alaska Airlines Resumes Flights To Cancun Following Hurricane Wilma
12/15/2005 11:49 a.m.(PT)
Alaska Airlines today resumed regularly scheduled air service to Cancun International Airport. The airline temporarily suspended its daily nonstop flight between Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and Cancun on Oct. 19 following Hurricane Wilma.
Alaska Airlines And Horizon Air Introduce New Online Shopping Tool, Announce Non-Web Ticketing Fee
12/14/2005 3:55 p.m.(PT)
In recent presentations on blogging, I have included a slide that states: "Corporate Blogging: Oxymoron?" Basically, the unmediated form of give-and-take of blogging just doesn't gibe with the command-and-control mindset of most corporations. As a result, corporations often get blogging wrong when the do it, and they often respond badly when confronted with outside blogs that point out that they, the corporation's management, do not have control of their messages and positioning anymore.
Today, Jeremy and the rest of the blogosphere are defining what may become the public perception of Alaska Airlines for years to come, and the airlines management is not -- at least not yet -- participating in this discussion. Dumb, and perhaps deadly.
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December 21, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Dan Gillmor, one of the good guys, is starting a non-profit Center for Citizen Media, in cooperation with the Berkman Center and the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism:
[from Coming Soon: Center for Citizen Media | Bayosphere]
Why do this? We need a thriving media and journalism ecosystem. We need what big institutions do so well, but we also need the bottom-up -- or, more accurately, edge-in -- knowledge and ideas of what I've called the "former audience" that has become a vital part of the system. I'm also anxious to see that it's done honorably and in a way that helps foster a truly informed citizenry. I think I can help.
This is a nonpartisan initative. I aim to help anyone, regardless of political views, who has a constructive project and who is interested in expanding the reach of citizen media in an principled way.
Sounds great, although I have reservations about "Citizen Journalism" which sounds like it is limited to policy and politics. I favor "Artisan Journalism" which still indicates that these are individual, as opposed to institutional journalists, but carries more of a creative flair and is not limited to the politics beat.
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December 14, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Michael O'Connor Clark is at the Syndicate conference this week, and notes that Time Inc is laying about with a sharp blade:
[from I Love Me, vol. I]
[...] Time Inc. has put out news that they're laying off some of their most senior, long-serving publishing executives.
Included in the end-of-year axe job are Jack Haire, EVP in charge of corporate advertising sales, Richard Atkinson, former EVP of the news and information group, and Eileen Naughton, president of Time magazine.
The New York Times weighs in, noting that on one hand Time Warner is resisting Steve Case and Carl Icahn's recommnedations about rethinking the media giant reformulated into a set of more focused companies, and on the other is faced with an elevator shaft in its shrinking revenues and readership:
[from Time Inc. Lays Off 105, Including Top Executives - New York Times]
"This new alignment is the result of a very thoughtful and thorough process to de-layer our management structure, speed decision-making, simplify communications and reduce costs," Ms. Moore said. [chairwoman and chief executive of Time Inc.]
Many of Time Inc.'s top publications have suffered losses of advertising pages in the last year. Fortune magazine and Sports Illustrated each lost about 20 percent of their ad pages from November 2004 to November 2005.
The round of cuts at Time Inc. comes amid intense year-end cost reviews among the business units of the parent company, Time Warner. The Warner Brothers film and television operation has reduced staff by roughly 300 in recent weeks in what company executives have described as a realignment of the business as it positions itself for new digital business models and responds to a slowdown in growth of DVD sales.
Layoffs last week at Warner's WB television network also came in the wake of the disappointing debut of several new shows and a repositioning of the network for older viewers.
But the Time Inc. move is especially jarring because of the position it has held as the journalistic core of Time Warner, which today is skewed far more heavily toward providing entertainment products than information.
In recent days, Carl C. Icahn, the dissident investor, and Stephen M. Case, the former Time Warner chairman, have called for Time Warner to break itself up as a way to increase its languishing stock price. They have questioned Time Inc.'s role in an increasingly digital media world and wondered how much it has in common with its sibling divisions.
Case wrote a reasoned argument for the spin-out of AOL this week in the New York Times (see Steve Case on It's Time To Take It Apart ), and considering how fast Time is falling, the timing of such a course of action -- if indeed Parsons can come to his senses in time -- become more critical.
I have wondered for some time how media brands like Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated will fare in the world of Media 2.0, but its obvious that the media moguls guiding these creaking, antique media machines refuse to snap into reality. They have to stop printing the stupid paper mags, and get with what is happening in social media -- if it isn't already too late.
Time could try to do something really innovative, but instead these dinosaurs will, ineveitably, beat a slow retreat from their former dominant position, denying meanwhile that anything structural has taken place. They shuffle the deckchairs, find some new old media types to line up for the next round of cuts -- oh yes, they are coming -- but they never, never, never actually try a radical alternative. Excepting, of course, the AOL purchase of Weblogsinc -- shouldn't that have been Time Inc.? Are they planning to simply ride the long tail to extinction, until their only readership are octogenarian luddites?
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December 13, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a strange convergence, Mark Cuban has been linked to three of the 91 Ideas of 2005 that were featured in Sunday's New York Times Magazine:
[from Who needs an entirely satisfying explanation ?? :) by Mark Cuban]
[...] I was just as shocked as the New York Times Magazine to find myself the originator of, or involved with 3 of their 91 ideas for 2005.
Or as they put it
”For instance, we do not yet have an entirely satisfying explanation for how Mark Cuban, the outspoken Internet mogul and N.B.A. owner, came to be connected with three of the year’s most notable ideas (”Collapsing the Distribution Window,” ”Scientific Free-Throw Distraction” and ”Splogs”). That was just one surprising discovery we made in the course of assembling the issue”
Collapsing the Distribution window -- which in the entertainment world as Universal Release -- is perhaps the most notable of these three, basically throwing out the traditional delay between the release of a movie into domestic theatres and the subsequent release on DVD, VHS, and internationally. As the Times' Clay Risen wrote,
With box-office revenue slumping and DVD sales skyrocketing, it's not surprising that moviemakers are looking for ways to collapse the period of time it takes for a film to make its way from the multiplex to home video - in industry-speak, the "distribution window." The universal-release strategy has a lot of appeal for moviemakers: in addition to taking better advantage of the red-hot home-video sector, it's also more cost-effective - instead of requiring separate marketing efforts for theater and video releases, universal release requires just one. Plus, the strategy undercuts film pirates, who sometimes offer knockoff DVD's of films before they even hit the big screen.
Of course, the middlemen who have enjoyed a temporal protectionism -- the moviehouse owners -- are howling. Honestly, in a fully timeshifted world it would take a very rare movie to get me to go to the movies. I could save all those $7.50 ticket fees and buy a bigger screen instead. And I bet that many others would make the same analysis.
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December 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a recent New York Times column, Joseph Nocera ponders the rise of time-shifted media a la iPod, and shrugs. But then, he discusses this phenomenon with James Chanos, the hedge fund manager -- the guy that bet that Enron would collapse, and was proven monumentally right:
[from A La Carte? Nah, Hand Me The Remote]
For months now, Mr. Chanos, a well-known hedge fund manager who specializes in short selling -- that is, betting against companies -- has been articulating an investment theory that he calls, rather poetically, the The Twilight Of The Gatekeepers. The Internet he believes, is going to erode the value of -- if not destroy completely -- virtually all the companies that serve as intermediaries between the big content providers like Disney and your and me.
Chanos' theory suggests that Comcast, Blockbuster, and others that act as middle men in the media bazaar are dodos. And Apple's introduction of the Video iPod is a turning point, perhaps the inflection point where this die off becomes inescapable. Time to sell them short.
As Mr. Chanos sees it, the iPod deal is the next wrinkle in the assault on cable. "The important thing isn't the device," he told me recently. "It's the fact that iTunes is a software program that allows you to download video content." Which means that, in time, we'll download all our television programs, via the Internet, through some piece of software. Perhaps we'll have a box on our TV that looks like a cable box that resembles a cable box but is actually a wireless modem made by Cisco.
Or more sensibly, a wifi connector that pulls stored or streaming media from a PC. This is dead on, I think, although Nocera argues that the intermediaries -- like local cable companies -- will fight this tooth and claw. Let them. His arguments never dig very deeply into the reasons that individuals might want this revolution to happen, like time shifting, removing ads, and so on. He only mentions the fact that people will have to pay more for a la carte as opposed to bundled cable service. Gee. But in the unbundled world I have access to limitless channels, not the 500 Comcast offers. And if I don't watch, I don't pay anything.
And his final argument that this way to experience video is complicated compared to sitting down and watching TV is just dumb. The iPod/iTunes experience is amazingly simple and intuitive, and what we are going to see coming out in this battle for the living room will likely involve the best user interface designs in the world, as opposed to the bad, bad, bad stuff that monopolistic cable companies develop. Have you seen the Comcast email client, for example?
And, in the final analysis he goes on to suggest that the whole scenario is too far out:
Will there eventually be broadly available video-on-demand? Of course. Will people use media devices to watch news clips or NBA highlights -- or even "Desperate Housewives?" Undoubtedly. But does it mean that television as we know it is coming to an end? Not likely.
Once again, don't look to an aging member of the mainstream media to look in the crystal ball and foretell a revolution. Portable media players like the iPod did not exist a decade ago, and that, along with the Internet, has completely remade the music industry. Portable video players, including cell phones, connected to the Internet, will rewire the entire television/movie marketplace, and in a shorter time this time around.
So I am betting with Chanos, at least philosphically, if not with coin, and Nocera I relegate to the list of shortsighted mavens who fail to see the evidence before their eyes, or at the least, fail to come to the final conclusion.
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December 09, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I agree with Heather Green at Businessweek's Blogwatching that Steve Rubel's highlighting the single quote from the Jonathan Landman memo on blogging is unfair, if his intention was to make them look unclueful, as I said yesterday:
[from New York Times Is Getting Clueful About Blogging, Sort Of]
And, despite sounding relatively clueful, his statement -- "The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology." -- is likely to be taken out of context, and misconstrued as yet-another-mainstream-media guy who just doesn't get it.
But, they still don't buy all the way in.
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December 08, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor, Jonathan Landman, recently sent out a memo to the staff about blogging (as reported by LA Observed), and some of it suggests real insight into what's going on:
[from CyberJournalist.net - New York Times memo on blogging]
But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr’s. It’s full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.
It’s worth spending a little time thinking about blogs, and about ourselves. Blogs make some newspaper people nuts; they’re partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we’re dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned “authority.”
It’s a pretty dopey argument. Indeed, some blogs are lousy. So are some newspapers. Some blogs reject journalism. Some practice it.
The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology. It allows people to compile thoughts, connect with others and interact quickly with readers. People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power.
We’ll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won’t float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can’t. (To quote Carr: “If the Carpetbagger delved into plot or relative quality – they didn’t turn me loose for my refined cinematic taste � flying monkeys would come out of the ceiling here at headquarters and behead him.”) We’ll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we’ll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That’s life in the big city.
We will use blogs to convey information, sometimes in conventional ways, sometimes not-so. Our notions of journalistic responsibility are perfectly compatible with spirited fun. Do we put David Carr online to be witless? Um, no. Actually, we think he’s pretty witty in the newspaper.
Blogging does impose obligations. Blogs have to be updated frequently. They have to be carefully tended. There are costs; David Carr and Damon Darlin will be spending time they could be using to write newspaper articles. Their bosses have decided that’s an advantageous tradeoff. I agree.
So he, and the NYT editors, by extension, are getting wise to the blog phenomenon. They are trying to use the elements of blogging that appeal to them -- like high involvement with sophisticated readers, and the ease with which you can reference other things in the web -- but they are rejecting certain notions that have become pillars of the blogosphere. It's the New York Times, and they aren't going to walk away from the whole editor/reporter mumbo jumbo, and the myth of objectivity and all that.
And, despite sounding relatively clueful, his statement -- "The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology." -- is likely to be taken out of context, and misconstrued as yet-another-mainstream-media guy who just doesn't get it.
In fairness, I think he gets a lot of it, but in the final analysis, I think he falls short of getting it all. He is still framing the discussion, implicitly, as mass publishing news and opinion to relatively passive readers. He believes that 90% or more of the value in the relationship is being created by the New York Times, and as a result, he is not really concerned with the opportunity for the actively-engaged reader to create any serious amount of value. He is missing the social media part: it's merely a publishing tool to him.
So these guys will be "blogging" but they won't be joining the blogosphere, at least not officially. We'll see what actually happens, when specific individuals are in the mix, day in and day out. We'll see.
[Pointer from Steve Rubel]
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December 06, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Well, he was not really lost, just toiling like a madman over at Skype Journal, but he did stop blogging at Unbound Spiral. Sounds like the Stuart of old is reemerging, out of the fever dream that Skype seems to have been for so many in the ecosystem that grew around it.
[from Unbound Spiral]
I've recently felt pressure in some quarters to act more like a journalist. My answer is I'm not a journalist and never intended to be. It's not that I don't like interviews and following up on facts. It's just those aspects can become very time consuming. I'm much more interested in creating applications and solutions for tomorrow today.
Welcome back, pal. What you have outlined in this paragraph is the defining tension in my life these days. I work at staying abreast with new, developing social technologies and work hard at writing about where it is all going, or should be going. On one hand, that makes me look like a journalist, but I am not, really. And on the other hand, I have not succumbed to the siren call of going to build one of those fascinating applications that I fiddle with so much. I like the frontier, but I don't want to plow it. I don't even enjoy leading the wagon trains across the prairie very much: consulting to end users of these technologies can be really annoying. So I guess I will have to keep scouting around, mapmaking, surveying the territory, and scribbling these messages from the edge.
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November 30, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Check out the the successor to the "Podcasting on Windows" series thaat we've been doing for a few months, called "Behind The Scenes: The World Of Podcasting". The first show is just Greg Narain and me chatting about the new approach, and a short video of me fiddling with my video gear, and explaining how I use it: Sony Ericsson S710a cell phone, and Sony DCSR-HC42 Camcorder.
Behind The Scenes is produced by Corante, and sponsored by GoToMeeting.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jarvis is trying to clarify what Craig Newmark hinted at recently, in a presentation in London and then, here. It looks like he is an investor in the news startup that Jarvis mentioned in May:
[from BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis]
: I will act as editor in chief of a new news start-up founded by Upendra Shardanand (ex Firefly, Microsoft Passport, AOL, and Time Warner) and a sterling team. More than a year ago, when Upendra first described his idea to me, I lurched at it. I was so determined to work on this that I gave up plans to start my own blog company. The start-up remains in stealth mode -- this is the first public mention of it -- but you'll hear more about it soon. (And we are, of course, hiring engineers.)
I love this new world! A news startup is... of course... hiring engineers, not editors!
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November 18, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was supposed to attend the kick-off for Open Source Media (OSM)-- the relaunch/rebranding of PJ Media -- this week in NYC, but events conspired against that. But they managed the launch (and a swanky party at the W) without me, it seems, and flew into storm of controversy.
First of all, it seems like the name Open Source Media belongs to some other group:
[from Open Source Media group met with harsh criticism | News.blog | CNET News.com by Jennifer Guevin]
But for all the work OSM is putting toward supporting the blogging movement, the group hasn't exactly won over the hearts of the blogging community. Of course, anytime a "best of" list of bloggers gets put together, there are bound to be complaints about who got in and who was left out. OSM's list of invitees is no exception. And OSM has some added trouble related to its new name. The group is now involved in a trademark dispute over the name "Open Source Media," which is already owned by a non-profit production company. In short, most of the complaints surrounding OSM's launch come down to a question of how much respect the group actually has for independent Web publishers and what they stand for.
I think the 'non-profit production company' is OurMedia, so I will ask JD Lasica what's up on that front.
Second of all, I looked at the new OSM portal, and it's sort of silly. The 70 blogs in the network are listed on a page a few levels down, but mostly it seems like they are posting news from the newswires, and not even aggregating the blogs there. I looked at Little Green Footballs -- one of the blogs in the network -- and there's no indication of that blog's involvement in the network there. Strange.
I guess there'll be more to follow, but now it just seems a yawnfest. Of course, as a competitor, I am strongly biased.
[Update: JD Lasica emailed to clarify:
Hi Stowe! Nope, it's not Ourmedia. It's Chris Lydon's Open Source
Radio/Open Source Media program. Brendan Greeley has the skinny here. ]
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November 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
More proof that people are turning away from industrial mainstream media:
[from The Globe and Mail: U.S. newspaper circulation falls]
Here are the average weekday circulation figures for the 20 biggest U.S. newspapers for the six-month period ended Sept. 30, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period.
1. USA Today, 2,296,335, down 0.59 per cent
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,083,660, down 1.10 per cent
3. The New York Times, 1,126,190, up 0.46 per cent
4. Los Angeles Times, 843,432, down 3.79 per cent
5. New York Daily News, 688,584, down 3.70 per cent
6. The Washington Post, 678,779, down 4.09 per cent
7. New York Post, 662,681, down 1.74 per cent
8. Chicago Tribune, 586,122, down 2.47 per cent
9. Houston Chronicle, 521,419, down 6.01 per cent (a)
10. The Boston Globe, 414,225, down 8.25 per cent
11. The Arizona Republic, 411,043, down 0.54 per cent (a)
12. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., 400,092, up 0.01 per cent
13. San Francisco Chronicle, 391,681, down 16.4 per cent (a)
14. Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 374,528, down 0.26 per cent
15. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 362,426, down 8.73 per cent
16. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 357,679, down 3.16 per cent
17. Detroit Free Press, 341,248, down 2.18 per cent
18. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, 339,055, down 4.46 per cent
19. The Oregonian, Portland, 333,515, down 1.24 per cent
20. The San Diego Union-Tribune, 314,279, down 6.24 per cent.
As print in general looks like it's headed for the Elephant Graveyard (magazine circ is flat, but newsstand sales are at an all-time low).
Might be interesting to go out to the next Syndicate conference, and listen to all the mainstream moguls puffing out their chests, talking about how they are going to conquer the online world with their household names and superstrong brands: "all we need is to get RSS working! And then we'll monetize all those eyeballs."
And where are all these people all going? Online.
[Pointer from Chris Anderson]
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October 16, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Over at Many-2-Many, danah boyd discusses what may be the central challenge to group blogs' continued existence: they are usually oriented toward a topical focus, like "public relations" or "social software." Some topics, like sex and politics, will never be played out, it seems, while others can be. Coupled with the human tendancy to shift focus, group blogs tend to fall apart.
But, as cousin danah points out, personal blogs are different:
[from Web 2.0 and Many-To-Many]
The thing about a personal blog is that it changes with you because you don’t feel so compelled to stick with a topic (much to the chagrin of some readers).
[...]
Herein lies the problem with all of this… Our lives have started to escape categories. And topical blogs are categories. Hmmm…
I think that the replacement for this is coming. Rather than create topical group blogs, people will simply coallesce around the same (or very similar) tags, which will define a topicspace, a tagspace. Today, we don't actually do much with those spaces: for example, all the posts tagged "PR" at Technorati don't amount to a real destination, like a group blog does, but is just a luanching pad for people to go elsewhere. However, if someone -- like Corante, perhaps -- were to aggregate the writings of people -- like the individual contributors to Many-2-Many, and let's say another leading 100 writers on things related to the huiman use of the Web -- tagspaces would emerge. "Web 2.0" would explode, for example. A company like Corante could direct some editorial digest on what the most interesting pieces are for any day, and that tagspace could become a real meeting point for people interested in the topic. Years later (perhaps) if the topic cools, readers and contributors would wander off, just like people looking for the cool new cafe, or the trendiest nightspot. The individuals would still be blogging, just touching on new topics. To some extent, that's why I shifted this back to a solo project: then I can touch on anything that interests me. I can grow in whatever direction, not hemmed in by the topic of the blog.
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October 12, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
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October 07, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I bumped into Seth Godin yesterday at the Web 2.0 conference. It was a great show for that... I bumped into a long list of great peopl, including Evelyn Rodriguez, Michael Powell, Craig Newmark, John Battelle (his show), Jason Calacanis (I gave him a cigar to celebrate his sale of Weblosginc to AOL), Jeff Clavier, Joshua Schachter, and others too random to mention, here.
Seth complimented me on the investigative deductions I wrote about last week, guessing about Squidoo, his new venture. He has released an ebook, today, that tells all:
[from SquidBlog]
“For a long time, the web has been about more. More links, more traffic, more hits, more choices. In the face of all that more, many sites (and most surfers) are not getting what they want. This free ebook, from bestselling author and Squidoo.com founder Seth Godin, proposes a different way of achieving your goals: less.”
The key idea is that individuals are experts on the topics that they care about, and Squidoo will allow anyone to create a specialized webpage in which this expertise can be served up to help others. He calls these lenses, which he suggests can be used to help others make sense of the world.
I was struck by the similarity with one of the sessions we are holding at the Symposium on Social Architecture next month at the Berkman Center, entitled "Is Social Software a Mirror or a Lens?"
The 'secretbeta' is still closed, but you can submit your name for consideration.
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October 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Corante's own Carl Zimmer notes at The Loom that he has received another accolade for his writing here and elsewhere:
[from Blogs: Another Sign of Semi-Respectability]
The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articles on stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about evolution that appeared during 2005 in Discover, The New York Times, and right here. I knew I might be taking a risk by including some posts from The Loom, but I was very proud of them. It's nice to see that blogs are taking seriously by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
It will take a few years, but I am willing to bet that all the finalists will be bloggers within five years time. Carl is just a man at the edge, like the rest of the Coranters.
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October 01, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I heard about the new C/Net beta with all sorts of new reliance on bloggish ideas and technology: see Media | News.blog | CNET News.com, for example.
It looks like a blog, and smells like a blog, so, yes, it is a blog. But it falls short of actually being interesting. On a week in media where many people where writing about the layoffs at the New York Times, the News.com Media mastermind was writing about Dot-com millionaire auctioning home on eBay and Kentucky town to get $100k to change name?.
And the writing is reportage, not blogging. But the experiment suggests where this grand experiment is heading: If C/Net can pay journalists to write blogs instead of writing more conventional journalism, wouldn't it be better to aggregate the writing of the best bloggers out there, instead of retread reporters? More to follow on that topic...
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Tim Porter channels the conversation at yesterday's Museum of Television and Radio meeting on blogging as media in his A New York State of Mind, and led me to -- once again -- realize that no one gets what is happening in media today like Jay Rosen (although Tim is close):
Jay Rosen: The production model of doing the news - still operative in most news organizations - worked but it is an "intellectual disaster." Two years ago I wrote:
"To produce newspapers in this manner requires efficient, repetitive action - papers are scripted in advance, before the news happens; reporters are told how long to write, before they cover the stories; photographers are given dimensions of an illustration, before they take the pictures. This way of working discourages innovation and encourages rote behavior. At a time when journalists are better educated than ever before, it is ironic how many of them still work on the factory floor." [Read: Shutting Down the News Factory.]
Another pointer provided by Tim led to Terry Heaton's blog, where another Jay Rosen quote struck me:
[from Terry Heaton's Pomo blog]
Jay Rosen said something terribly important that (imo) went over the heads of most people in the room. He said the nature of authority is changing in our culture, and that this directly impacts all media. He used the example of a person who goes to the doctor and gets a prescription for an ailment. The doctor explains how the medication will work. The patient then proceeds to the drugstore and receives the medicine, along with (perhaps) an explanation from the pharmacist about how the medicine will work. But then the patient goes home and gets on the internet to research the thoughts of others who've used the medicine to discover what THEY think about how it works, and this impacts the doctor's authority. The doctor is still the doctor, but gone is the automatic acceptance of his or her words as gospel. This is new in our world, and I couldn't agree more. It's the major challenge of all institutional authority, and it's one of the truly fascinating things about a culture drifting into postmodernism.
This is perhaps the best thumbnail characterization of the impact of social media on society I have read. People are looking for authoritative perspectives on issues of importance to them, and the large, established institutions -- like the medical system, capital M media, governments, and so on -- have become suspect. We look to ourselves, through the Internet, our third space, to find the answers to our questions. Individuals, through first person perspective, command authority in such a context, not large organizations. It is the organizations, and their chronic failures of trust, that have led people to look elsewhere. As a result, the trappings of old style authority -- association with a national newspaper or media network, government agency, or other professional associations -- does not confer trust or credibility as it once did: on the contraray, it may arouse distrust and even contempt. In the postmodern era, it is the individual, true voice that is trusted, and that trust is the result of hard won respect arising from a long period of open public discourse. The best bloggers exemplify this trend, like Jay, for example.
Tim made a seemingly offhand observation, that really underscores the subtext of the meeting:
There are a lot of scarily smart people in the world thinking about how use technology to keep journalism intact as a business.
Even as wholesale changes sweep through mainstream media -- like the fall of "production journalism" -- entrenched players will try to retain as much as they can of the trappings and legacy of journalism. Even if media becomes completely reformulated by the impact of the Internet and social media, they will try to retain as much control as possible, even in a world where the context of authority and legitimacy have been completely upended.
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September 28, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Things are hotting up in the podosphere, although Staci@PaidContentbegs for Wired and others to please, please stop using the term 'podosphere' . I hope they don't stop, though, because I have the domain name 'podosphere.com' and we have some plans for that.
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September 27, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a deeply throught through piece, Tim Porter confronts the future of print journalism, based on recent announcements of reductions, and declares that newspapers as we know them are done. Is there a soft landing? It looks like no. Tim suggests that newspapers have to redefine themselves, but not just by thinning everything down:
[from First Draft by Tim Porter: Building the Journalism of the Future, Intentionally]
Newspapers need to abandon the dangerous position that because they have fewer journalists they will do less of everything - resulting in thin, watery journalism across the board. Instead, they must do more of less - jettisoning some types of coverage, eliminating duplication of effort with the wires (do you need your own writer at Wimbledon, your own movie critics in regional markets?) and developing depth and expertise in a narrower range of topics chosen intentionally to connect with the local community.
Tim suggests that the localization path may be the inevitable one for newspapers. He goes on, however, to makes other statements, like "we must create journalism we can sell." His final suggestion is that journalism must evolve into "intentional" as opposed to passive jourhnalism, which can be interpreted as becoming more activitist, more involved, less objective and passive.
Too much crime? Speak out against it, don't just report it. Think cronyism in government in government is bad? Expose it, and drive those that profit from it from office.
Sounds like intentional journalism is more like gonzo, participatory, artisan journalism: ie, blogging.
Tim is right, what survices of traditional journalism -- and the platform on which it has been presented, newspapers -- will be very, very different. What remains will be some newspaperish DNA that will find its way into some part of the future social media genome. But so much of the broadcast attitude and elitist "we know better than you" principles of conventional journalism will have to be dropped, even to have a few snippets of old journalism threaded into the future genetics of journalism.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Seth Goldstein launchesd a five part series on media futures by adopting a metaphor for social medai: cellular automata. These are the game-of-life simulations that complexity theorists have used to represent the emergent order that arises from seemingly systems involving the interaction of independently operating agents, who may in fact have very simple rules to guide their behavior. The most important rules turn out to be how the agents moderate their actions based on their perceptions of what those around them are doing. As Seth points out, this interaction is through a medium -- the cellular matrix in these simulations -- and this leads to astonishingly rich effects. In the real world, he suggests we are seeing similar effects:
This would seem to be the essence of social media (props to my wife and guide Tina Sharkey for coining this years ago and registering the domain) and social computing, two memes that seem to be growing in influence. When individual decisions such as applying certain tags to pages or photos achieve a broad social consensus, then it as if these tags begin to self replicate which is the essence of automatic behavior.
The confluence of social media and social computing, which I been calling social architecture (as in the social architecture of web 2.0), is what I consider the critical meme of our day. I look forward to see where Seth plans to take this metaphorical exploration. And I was totally unaware of Tina Sharkey and her role as the coiner of "social media" -- I'd like to find the reference if anyone has one.
[Update: The mad linker points out that this piece is from March, and that Seth has completed the series... so, I intend to read them and write a longer post, then.]
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September 26, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I got a pointer from Suw Charman about a Chinese-based company that intends to launch a barrage of blogs on various topics, with Chinese citizens pretending to be Americans. Basically, masquerading to get advertising revenue. The amazing part is the fact that the founders are openly blogging about the business plan, simply concealing the names of the blogs that they are running in stealth mode:
Steve Fontaire [from blogoriented
]
My problem with this venture is that we are exploiting a once pure medium and diluting the blogosphere with what are basically lies. To Jeff [Jeff Clark] this is a non-issue. He spent the last few years as a software engineer in China coordinating projects between american programmers and their outsourced counterparts. He trained the chinese programmers so well he was no longer needed and was offered a reduced salary or the door. To him this venture is his way to tap into a hot economic trend and avoid working for someone else his whole life. For me this is a way out of the cubicle. I’ve spent the last few years watching the clock as a financial analyst for a large credit card firm. Finding the best ways to maximize the number of clients that carry a balance was just too depressing for me. Blogs are intrinsically a blend of fact and artistry. Our product really won’t be that different.
Yes, it will be. But this sort of blog astroturfing -- artificial grassroots activities -- is bad in every way. Yes, the authors and handlers may make money, but they are faking their identities, which is morally fradulent. Readers of blogs do not in general expect that the identities of the authors are bogus: this is not fiction, after all.
I believe that as trade practices like this arise, the importance of real reputation will become ever more important, and participation in real blog networks like Corante will become the norm. Otherwise, people may believe you are astroturfing.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
The trickle-down effect of the new realities in the media world are being manifested as big job cuts in mainstream media, even major bulwarks of the old order like the New York Times:
[from 'Black Tuesday' Continues: NYT Co. Cutting 500 Jobs
The New York Times Co. announced a staggering staff reduction plan Tuesday that will likely mean some 500 job loses at the company's many properties, including an expected 45 newsroom positions at The New York Times newspaper and 35 at The Boston Globe.
In a memo to staffers, company chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson wrote: "We regret that we will see many of our colleagues leave the Company; it is a painful process for all of us. We have been tested many times in our 154-year history as we are being tested now." They promised this would not impact the quality of the paper's journalism.
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September 11, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Following a tip from JD Lasica, I took a long look at NowPublic.com, a very interesting experiment in social news gathering and dissemination.
The premise is pure swarm logic: individual contributors create news stories, and may hyperlocalize them down to the country, state, and city level, as well as adding any sort of tag that might be used to characterize them. Visitors can find leading stories through most recent or most popular views, or by searching by tags, keywords, or location. The use of tags is facilitated by the prominent provision of a tag cloud at the top of any view.
Registered users can additionally vote on new stories, increasing their popularity, and moving them to the top of the search results for key words, tags, and general popularity. In this way, the "front page" is laid out based on the collective social gestures of thousands of registered users. Note that in true blogospheric fashion, there are as many potential "front pages" as there are keywords and tags: a front page for every interest, passion, or obsession.
I signed to fool with the site, and discovered that I was user #4324, based on how my first story's url was structured. The user interface was simple, and I rapidly created the following piece, about an antiwar concert scheduled on my birthday, in DC:
I have already received 24 votes!
NowPublic provides a great level of control on the sharing of "footage" -- imagery of various sorts. I have not experimented with that element of the service, but I intend to do so.
NowPublic allows contributors to pull stories from other locations -- such as blogs -- via RSS. I set things up so that entries that I post at my personal blog, A Working Model, are now accessible for reposting at NowPublic. Here's the RSS feed selection interface:
And the resulting story, reposted from my blog:
For those not already blogging elsewhere, NowPublic provides free basic blogging, and supports RSS feeds from them. Oddly enough, blog posts are not automatically posted as stories, and importing through the RSS feeds doesn't work: NowPublic gives an error message when I try to import my NowPublic blog content as news stories (although I was able to import that feed into Feedigest, and to import the exported feed from Feeddigest). Also odd: none of the tag or rating architecture that supports news stories have been integrated in the blogging technology: there is no way that authors can tag their blog posts and readers cannot search via tag cloud, nor rate blog posts. A strange omission, perhaps intended to get folks to push their blog posts into the NowPublic news channel.
All in all, I am fascinated by what NowPublic represents, on many levels. As a student of citizen journalism, NowPublic represents a great example of the power that social architecture, well-implemented, can put into the hands of everyday people: the power to shape, channel, and make explicit the implicit dialogue that underlies news coverage. As someone tracking the adoption of social architecture, I believe that NowPublic demonstrates the key elements of all future, successful social media, in particular the primacy of emergent, bottom-up characterization by tags and the importance of aggregated social gestures -- in this case "votes". As the president of Corante, I have specific interest in the ways that social architecture principles -- like tag clouds and user ratings -- are likely to become a commonplace in the world of social media, and how quickly we at Corante should be adopting them for our own publishing.
I had a chance to speak briefly with Michael Tippett, the founder of NowPublic, and he stated that NowPublic is a work in progress, and that recent spikes in activity -- particularly around Katrina -- have accelerated plans to streamline and scale the implementation. His interest is twofold, I was glad to hear. First, to support the NowPublic website, as an interesting activity in and of itself, and as a showcase of the design elements of the NowPublic technology, and second, to license the technology to others seeking to apply it in similar ways.
I can't make a judgment on NowPublic's likely impact on conventional media, although I beleive that all media outlets will find themselves going through "social shock" in the next few years -- being redefined and reworked by social architecture. NowPublic's experiment suggests just how radical a change that may be.
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August 19, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
As the number of blogs and bloggers continues to double every three months, some paradoxical realities are beginning to show up. Like here, at Business Blog Summit, where I was puzzled to see that there is less and less maturity in the attendees: I don't mean that they are young, but that they are newbies. I mean, these folks don't know very much. And I am not knocking the conference folks. It's just simple numbers.
When you a show with an absolute number of attendees -- 200 or 250 attending -- and an additional 5 million blogs went live last quarter, and 10 million this quarter -- guess what? A lot more rank beginners are going to show up.
That also means that the time is right for advanced seminars and symposia to start, and that's where Corante will be pushing in the upcoming months. In an environment where six or seven of the folks speaking at this conference have "Business Blogging" books in press or in process, it is time for more specialization and depth. For example, I could see a conference dedicated just to the technical issues of blogging on Movable Type, or a one day Master Class on Blog Writing for non-newbies who want to dramatically improve the quality of their writing.
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August 08, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jason Calacanis proposes a new A-List -- the Blog 500 -- because a/ he is "sick of the Technorati 100" and b/ he "created what became an absurdly powerful 100 list with my last company, Silicon Alley Reporter, I’ve seen the controversy, venom, and power such lists can create. I’ve got some mixed feelings about them truth be told. These lists are really powerful at building an industry. They help define emerging spaces, and they get new players press, readers, and clients (i.e. advertisers). So, a good list is good, and a bad list is—well—bad. We have a bad list now and we need a good list. "
Hmmm. Sounds like Jason simply wants the benefits of being the media company with the most popular list.
He then goes on to list what's wrong with the Technorati 100, falling into a common error along the way:
4. It's [technorati ranking] based on the number of links for all time.
Well, I thought was the case until quite recently, but it is actually based on a relatively short window: a hit parade approach. As Adam Hertz put it in email recently, "Technorati bases its authority calculations on the number of current incoming links and sources, rather than the cumulative counts throughout history. So for example, if someone linked to you in the past, but the post containing that link has scrolled off the bottom of that person's blog, we don't count that link in the calculation of your authority." It's not even a specific number of days worth! They have the historical data, as I reported here, but they don't display it anywhere.
That also means that Jason's second bullet point about Technorati is also wrong. Technorati is constantly updating, based on recent links being created.
So it seems that what Jason wants is really what the Technorati 100 (or 500) is already. As someone commented to his post, he should just give the $10,000 he offered as an incentive directly to Technorati.
I personally want something completely different, as I outlined earlier today in my RankOut piece (see Mary Hodder on The Paris Index, And Why RankOut Would Be Better): a means where everyone can generate their own top 100 list, or a whole bunch of lists, depending on the topic, the community of interest, or the purpose for rank ordering blogs. And then Jason could define his own criteria for ordering, and his Blog 500 would be just one among thousands of blog lists.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Tim Oren attempts to clarify the break up of PJ Media (or is it Pajamas?) into two parts based on entrepreneurialism first principles:
[from Due Diligence: PJ Media: E Unum, Pluribus]
It's somewhat axiomatic that a startup gets one bet. That is, one product or service, to one market. There are a lot of reasons, ranging from management bandwidth to capital requirements of forming two sales forces to conflicting demands from different sets of customers. They were all relevant in this situation.
Marc and Roger can attest that I, my partners, and other business plan reviewers banged on them to cut the initial set of business propositions down to one bullet point, and focus on it. But there were two legitimate business opportunities inside the plan, each with potential support from investors and backing from part of the team. Roger is notably a content guy, Marc is a systems architect and manager. After some further input from the market (in the form of potential investors, advertisers, partners and a few bloggers), it was evident that a Solomonic solution was the best one in this case. There are now two entities that will each attempt to serve the blogging community and its own set of customers.
Ok, fine. But on the other hand, many startups do in fact manage a balancing act of chasing several sources of cash, especially in the media space. I guess there wasn't enough social glue to hold the thing together, and too many folks were fighting for the money, which (unstated in Tim's piece) is what the VCs gave the combined company.
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August 05, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Evelyn Rodriguez proves again why she is one of the strongest voices out there in her recap of Blogher:
We are volcanoes. All the maps change. There are new mountains.
It's taboo to talk informally, colloquially, conversationally, personally, deeply, humanely in the game called the professsional business world. Especially "not done" in public. Thank you, Jory, Koan, Ronni, and Heather for reminding me yet again of the importance of putting our selves forth as ourselves. Reminding me: I'm an advocate too. Me, I'm not compartmentalizing myself. I'm bringing forth my whole self to business. I'm not checking any part of me at the door. (Here's my coming out post.)
I can only aspire to doing it like Evelyn.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
The NY Times digs into the Technorati State Of The Blogosphere report, and can't help but see itself -- mainstream media -- as the biggest confirmation for the importance of the blogosphere. Self-congratulatory dummies.
[from Measuring the Blogosphere - New York Times]
Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day - a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere - that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole - doubles in size every five and a half months.
[...]
The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.
Hmmm. Alternatively, you could interpret the growing adoption of blogs by mainstream media as an attempt to parrot the form factor of social media -- without actually adopting all of its core, chewy goodness -- because people are defecting, in droves. All those folks blogging are, in general, reading blogs first. And the hours they are spending in a deeply social interaction with like-minded others through blogs is time not spent reading the Daily Blatz.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Get Real contributor Arieanna Foley was videoblogged by JD Lasica, speaking on the issue of the legal status (if any) of bloggers. I favor the term "artisan journalism" rather than citizen journalism, for exactly the reasons she touches upon: my writing is not necessarily a manifestation of my politics or citizenship. But it is very different than industrial journalism. [JD also describes his rig and workflow for videoblogging in this post.]
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August 04, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
B.L. Ochman wrings her hands about misquoted in Businessweek. She told a client at iFullfill to 'do something controversial' as a way to gain blog traffic, which Stephen Baker interpreted as "create a scandal." Stephen has corrected his story, and Ochman is unlikely to be harmed by this, but the exercise is almost self-defining. Ochman is likely getting big traffic from this "imbloglio" even if she never intended it that way.
Drawing a line -- making clear what your beliefs are, and what you stand for -- will often lead to public debate (like my battle with Marc Canter over the Marquiism issue, last winter). That may attract attention to a blog, at least to the degree that people care about the issue behind the controversy. But creating a controversy for the sake of becoming more well-known is shady. Even if the issue is important, the instigator is motivated purely by self-interest, and I have an almost mystical belief in the blogosphere's ability to sniff out such folks, and to ultimately reject them.
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July 27, 2005
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Tom Coates makes the case that blogging is changing the conference experience. "The whole weblogging culture has - in my opinion - pretty dramatically changed the conference dynamic. Now it's not good enough for someone to stand up and talk about the same thing that they've be |
