Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

Emptied Bloglines account

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On Friday, in a moment of either clarity…or something else… I removed all of my subscriptions from Bloglines. I had grown frustrated with my habit of checking a few times an hour for updates. I’ve mentioned before that Memeorandum is like crack. Well Bloglines is like cigarettes.

One thing I immediately miss is keeping up with my friends across the web. I feel partially disconnected. But at the same time, I’ve found myself more focused.

This isn’t an anti-RSS screed. I’m thinking there is something about Bloglines that, for me, makes it too easy to distract myself from what’s important.

So, what comes next…. hmmmmm….

MySpace Launches IM

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Coming a day after news of AIM Pages comes word that MySpace launches “myspaceim”. AIM Pages better launch soon, and see some major participation.

Speaking of needing participation, Nick Carr recently pieced together the real new economy emerging from participatory media:

I fear that to view the attention economy as “more than just a subset of the financial economy” is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There’s no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.” In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp’s wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.

…Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It’s the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.

This was his reply to Scott Karp’s thought provoking take on the question : “what if no one will pay for content?”:

In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

Karp wonders who will get paid when the interMEDIAries are gone. It’s a good question. I think Nick Carr shared something close to an answer.

Amazing: Will AOL get its Mojo back?

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Normally I avoid the hype on such things, but this deserves some attention – AIM Pages coming launch signals a return to core competencies. AOL’s chatroom/profile/buddy discovery system was the first large scale ‘social networking’ app that normal folks used and loved. It changed the way we communicated (remember “You Got Mail?” folks?).

What’s so amazing about this you ask? Well it’s amazing it took AOL this long to leverage it’s AIM user base and get back in the game of connecting people.

Ask yourself how do you discover new online friends and how do they get on your buddy list. Think back to 1997 for a second. Remember how you did it back then? Think hard about it. Come back to the present day and watch a teenager use MySpace. Anything familiar?

MySpace is the the second generation (third most likely) of that system from way back when. That’s why some of the digerati dismiss or even hate it so much – it empowers normal folks to use the web for what they want to use it for – communicate and connect – and it looks messy.

If AOL gets their mojo back – and it is social networking that was AOL’s first true blue call to fame – then the space will get interesting. Yahoo!’s 360 is boring and kinda complicated sadly. Will AIM Pages be any different? We shall see.

Bye, bye Burningbird

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Shelley Powers is shutting down her primary blog Burningbird, but that doesn’t mean an end to her writing, or blogging necessarily. She joins a growing list of first and second generation bloggers who are moving on (or have said they are moving on). Her blog was one of the few whose comments I frequent regularly and where I’ve connected with some who I can see myself becoming friends with one day. Her passion, compassion, great writing, creating and participating in her environment that welcomed terrific online conversations, and her views that don’t toe the line enabled that. I’m looking forward to what she does next.

Thank you Shelley for Burningbird.

Maybe Doc’s Right?

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I have a line in one of my songs that laments that “I learned about life at the age of 3, had it all their on my TV screen” so I can attest what happens when you expose a kid to too much media too soon – that’s me as an early teen on the right btw.

But the web is far more empowering. Not like passive media at all. If MySpace was available when I was a teenager – I would have been all over it. I probably would have found new outlets for expression. I probably wouldn’t have felt so lonely.

But maybe I’m lucky it wasn’t?

The great many things I know I fucked up while learning to be a man, aren’t all over the web, to be findable and usable forever by those that want to do so.

I didn’t have responsible and knowing parenting that would have educated me to the consequences of living life so in the open with so many. And I haven’t grown so old as to forget that my teenage years were messy, confusing, and sometimes downright ugly. I’m happy to have lived them – I wouldn’t change them – they made me who I am – but thank the Lord it’s difficult to exploit them. They are difficult to exploit because because they weren’t public, cached, searchable and available for all to see in perpetuity.

Maybe my childhood is an example of an edge case. But I feel a responsibility to ask if is not.

Back on April 5th I wrote a small piece in response to the concern Doc Searls posted over media consumption and children, including the net. I pretty much agreed with him, but wondered aloud how he would handle it when his son ventures onto MySpace. He came by and replied in a comment:

Ya’ll missed some modifiers. I said,

“I think letting *small* children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their *most *formative years*…”

So I’m talking about young kids here: from 1 to 6 years old; or, to stretch it a bit, through age 9 or 10.

Thirteen year olds are another matter. I wasn’t talking about them, and I’ll gladly defer to the expertise of Danah and others on what MySpace and Xanga and Second Life and World of Warcraft might mean for them.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a 9-year-old kid who still believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and who loves to swim and play basketball and read books. From what I can tell so far, the stories and lessons he’s getting from those books, and from his Waldorf School (where none of his peers, for what it’s worth, watch much TV or use computers… yet), will help equip him to be a discerning and independent soul in the Connected World where he and his peers will spend plenty of time in their teenage years and beyond.

I definitely missed the modifiers. Read his post again. He did make a distinction between being a teenager and not.

Philly Future news and a lawsuit you should know about

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I’m happy to announce that my membership to the Media Bloggers Association, for Philly Future, was approved. See Philly Future for the details. Congrats to all the new members, which I see includes Seth 🙂

Also on Philly Future, we are helping spread word about Maine Web Report and the multi-million dollar federal lawsuit it has been hit with.

MBA will be helping defend Lance Dutson who blogs for Maine Web Report. Maine Web Report is a service very much in the spirit of Philly Future, and what Lance Dutson is dealing with is illustrative of the threats we face. Scratch that – the threats you face.

Whenever you speak truth to power you take a massive risk. A risk where those with more resources then you can crush you and your family thru the legal system. Newspapers have numerous measures of defense that enable them to do the work that they do, but bloggers, by and large, operate without a net (no pun intended). Make sure you read the EFF’s legal guide for bloggers if you have not done so.

“the more it starts to look like real life”

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Slate: Paul Boutin: A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace:

When trying to rope in the movie and TV studios, YouTube should point to MySpace, where A-listers like Eminem peddle their wares alongside unsigned bands and lip syncers. MySpace makes it easy for musicians, kids, and grandparents to post their own pages by removing the technical hurdles. I created a profile page in three minutes, complete with an auto-play jingle. I’d planned to upload an MP3 of a band I used to play in, until I found they already have their own MySpace page. Clicking “Add” instantly copied the song from their page onto mine. Another one-click tool imported my Gmail and Hotmail address books so I could mass-invite everyone to join me.

MySpace isn’t that much easier to use than Friendster, or than other shared-user-content sites like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks), or Digg (tech news). But it mixes multiple publishing models–blogs, photos, music, videos, friend networks–into one personal space. Most important, it doesn’t presume to know what your goals are. The site’s management ditched their early focus as a home for musicians when they realized Margaret Cho and my crazy friend Kenny wanted spaces of their own. Next, MySpace may let marketers set up profiles for brands. That’s a great idea–the same people who’ll bitch about Snickers having a page will add Wikipedia as their friend.

I think MySpace’s popularity has to do with its puppylike accessibility. A typical page looks like something a Web-enthralled high schooler might have put up in 1996, but with more pics and a soundtrack. I agree with design guru Jesse James Garrett, who says the site’s untrained layout sends a “we’re just like you” message to newcomers. That encourages them to experiment with content genres the site’s designers didn’t build into templates. If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn’t they presume they haven’t thought of everything? Apple’s iWeb publishing system is easy to use and way more attractive than MySpace, but we’d have gotten old waiting for Apple to invent a Lip Sync Video template.

The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate’s. Photos, news, and other people’s bookmarks just aren’t as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life (emphasis mine – Karl).

“Power Law of Participation”

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Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Power Law of Participation:

Most of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail examples have focused on models of consumption, not production, where intelligence is largely artificial. Amazonian algorythms guide users down the long tail from Britney Spears to Nobodys, made available without the constraints of shelf space. But the interesting question is will the tail wag? Can users discover their own power together to either discover something great, or even create it?

As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. Even when we Read, our patterns are picked up in referral logs (especially with expressly designed tools, like Measure Map), creating a feedback loop. But reading alone isn’t enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users.