Tag Archives: blogging
Shelley Powers Interview at Blogher
As part of their Women In Tech series, Blogher’s Virginia DeBolt interviews Shelley Powers. It’s a terrific interview. Check it out.
Last Night’s NE Blogger Meetup
It went great, but there’s some lessons to be learned to manage and grow it into the success it deserves to be.
Migrating to Movable Type’s Standard Templates
I’ve been behind the curve in adding new features and functionality to this blog for a while, so I’m migrating paradox1x.org to a set of SixApart provided templates and rebuilding my look and feel. You can see it taking place here. This will include a change in link structure. To handle that, a query into Movable Type’s mt_entry table will provide me with the URL patterns to add to .htaccess for redirection.
Shelley Powers: “If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there’s the ditch”
What Shelley Powers describes in the below linked piece is the current economy that encourages folks like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears to do whatever it takes to get publicity.
David Shenk’s “Data Smog” put it like this “All high-stim roads lead to Times Square”.
That’s the Web. It is nothing if not high-stim.
Folks like Michael Arrington not only have embraced where that leads, but know how to make a profit from it.
Kevin Kelly, in a piece that cuts away at the hype, describes one possible business model for artists in in “1,000 True Fans”. But he never describes how you are going to find those fans. In an attention based economy, will it force artists to involve the kind of marketing that, in the words of Dave Rogers tries to “exploit love”?
Bb’s RealTech: Shelley Powers: Stop Creating and Get a Real Job:
According to people like Michael Arrington all recorded music should be given away for free, and artists make their only income from concerts. If they can’t make their living from concerts, or busking for tossed dimes in the subway, than they should consider music to be their hobby, and get a job digging ditches.
Of course, if we apply the Arrington model to the music industry, we should be able to download all the songs we want-as long as we’re willing to sit through an ad at the beginning and in the middle of every song. Isn’t that how Techcrunch makes money? Ads in the sidebar, taking time to download, hanging up the page. Ads at the bottom of the posts we have to scroll past to get to comments? And in between, loud, cacophonous noise?
It angers me how little value people in this online environment hold the act of creativity. Oh we point to Nine Inch Nails and Cory Doctorow as examples of people who give their work away for free but still make a living. Yet NIN levies an existing fame, selling platinum packages at several hundred a pop to make up for all the freebies, and Doctorow has BoingBoing as a nice cushion for the lean years. They bring “fame” to the mix, and according to the new online business models, you have to play the game, leverage the system if you really want to make a living from your work. We don’t value the work, we value the fame, yet fame doesn’t necessarily come from any act of true creativity.
All you have to do to generate fame nowadays is be controversial enough, say enough that’s outrageous, connect up with the right people in the beginning and then kick them aside when you’re on top to be successful. You don’t have to have artistic talent, create for the ages, or even create at all-just play the game. If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there’s the ditch.
The NYTimes gets into Blog Aggregation!
TechCrunch: NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme.
They are using a technique I had originally suggested while I worked at Philly.com to handle the enormous legal and quality concerns – use a third party aggregator service like Blogrunner.
Bravo to the NYTimes 🙂
Digby reveals herself
Whether you are interested in the social software/media as a toolset for activism and participatory politics, or reporting the news, or simply community, there is something for you in Digby’s speech at Take Back America 2007. Take the time and give a listen to her today:
Doc Searls and Dave Rogers Converse
I was happy to read about Dave Rogers’s and Doc Searls’s conversation on Dave’s blog the other day. Both write about subject matter I care about – various intersections of society and the web – and have opinions I respect, if not always agree with.
The back and forth between them is a great and rare example of how two people of very, very differing opinions can converse and connect across the Web.
So color me sad when I read Stowe Boyd’s response. Yes, Dave called him blowhard. But his denouncement of Dave was downright Cheney-like, putting words in his mouth and even calling Dave an “enemy of the future”.
I hope I never get such an elitist, my-view-is-the-only-correct-view way of looking at the Web or the world.
Happy 50th Dave!
A big (day late) happy birthday to Dave Rogers.
Dave, just a reminder for you, of how much you’ve been an influence on me from a long time ago. I’m happy to have made our acquaintance across this big wild woolly world wide web.
Law of Data Smog 13: “Cyberspace is Republican.”
I made a few important edits to my post yesterday. Added links that gave context. Removed a typo here and there. Did you notice?
Well that’s your fault you see. You’re not media literate.
You are expected to revisit my posts to see edits and updates. As a good host, I should indicate my edits in one fashion or another (which I didn’t do).
See Dan Farber: Media literacy in a media saturated world.
Very, very related if you want to see the societal shift this is part of: BusinessWeek: “I Want My Safety Net”.
We are shifting risk from institutions, the producers of things, to the consumers of things.
The expectation is that since we are all now producers, we must individually keep BS meters up and running at all times, otherwise, it’s our own damn fault if we get fooled by something.
While people point to blogs as the primary purveyors of this kind of thought, in actuality, it seems prevalent in all forms of media.
Scott Rosenberg: Amateur hour:
…saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is “better media literacy” is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is “better learning skills.”
He says this sarcastically but the redistribution of risk is a trend in everything from the food we give our dogs, to the education we give our children, from what we expect from our government (just re-look at Katrina), to the relationships we have with our neighbors.
The lesson – keep your guard up. You are on your own. Trust nothing and no one except yourself.
Good or bad? You decide.
The title of this post refers to a “law of data smog” in David Shenk’s terrific book, “Data Smog”. He was referring to the libertarian impulse that was prevalent in the late 90s Republican movement. He should have said “Cyberspace is Libertarian” and it would have been timeless.
Update:David Shenk posts a comment in this post’s thread that in the paperback version of “Data Smog” he put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be “Cyberspace is Libertarian” instead of “Cyberspace is Republican”!