Tag Archives: internet

MSM Blog Networks Aren’t All That Bad

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I hate the term “MSM” (Mainstream Media) that we bloggers use to describe older media and news organizations, but sometimes you need to acquiesce.

Lots of folks thought that members of traditional media couldn’t ‘do blogging’ for various reasons. They were wrong. Take a look around and you will find some of the best blogs are being produced in places once thought unlikely.

Wired Magazine’s Wired Blogs have some of the most interesting technology/geek focused blogs you could subscribe to.

For politics there are those hosted at The Atlantic.

And, at least in Philly, local newspapers have fully embraced them at Philly.com (The Inquirer and Daily News), philadelphia weekly, and Philadelphia City Paper.

Shoot, even local TV News shows have gotten in the act at NBC 10 and Fox 29.

From The Donnas to Rick Rubin

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I wish more in the newspaper industry would pay attention to their canary in the coal mine – the music industry.

Rolling Stone: “The Record Industry’s Decline”:

…Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.

The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it’s too late. “The record business is over,” says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. “The labels have wonderful assets — they just can’t make any money off them.” One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: “Here we have a business that’s dying. There won’t be any major labels pretty soon.”

…More record executives now seem to understand that their problems are structural: The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry’s profit center. “We have to collectively understand that times have changed,” says Lyor Cohen, CEO of Warner Music Group USA. In June, Warner announced a deal with the Web site Lala.com that will allow consumers to stream much of its catalog for free, in hopes that they will then pay for downloads. It’s the latest of recent major-label moves that would have been unthinkable a few years back…

Newsome.Org: “The Lost Rituals of Music”:

I suspect Fred misses the good old days when listening to music was the thing, itself. As opposed to something you do while you’re doing something else. These days everything is compressed. Time. Music. Fun. Back in the day, we’d put Frampton Comes Alive on the turntable, sit back and just enjoy the sound. Same with the Allman’s At Fillmore East, and the best one of all- Europe ’72. We’d read the album covers and the liner notes. We never felt hurried, like we should be doing something else.

Our record collections were tangible. We could browse through them like books. The joy of picking out a record, taking it out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable was a ritual to our passion.

And a huge kick in the head is the news that Rick Rubin is now a co-President at Columbia Records.

NYTimes: “The Music Man”:

“That’s the magic of the business,” he said. “It’s all doom and gloom, but then you go to a Gossip show or hear Neil in the studio and you remember that too many people make and love music for it to ever die. It will never be over. The music will outlast us all.”

Rick Rubin has been a force in music that has influenced me for the last twenty years. He’s now producing Metallica’s latest and hopefully will return them to greatness. Can any one ‘save’ the music industry? No. But it can be re-invented. And Rubin can play a major role.

As Dave Rogers puts it for Paul Potts, that opera singer that Rubin was gushing about, “the love of the art preceded the opportunity to exploit it, commercially” – that’s something Rubin has always understood. His pursuit of Hip-Hop, Metal, or Roots Rock (the Black Crowes) acts before they were mainstream always made him stand out. His search for the pure soul of an artist, whether it be Neil Diamond or Johnny Cash, exemplifies it.

Rick Rubin being Co-President of Columbia does mark me as old however. He and the music he’s promoted, are no longer on the fringes of the mainstream, and now he’s part of the machine.

Lets hope it gets interesting.

Now on to other matters…

tonypierce.com: “do you know why i know life isnt fair”:

cuz even the donnas had to form their own label. dropped by atlantic after “fall behind me” only made a few suits rich, the donnas are doing their own thing now, shunning their donna c, donna s., schtict and now using their real names, the donnas rocked the world famous viper room last night for their album release party of Bitchin’, which drops today.

Bottom line: The Donnas rock.

Play Like A Girl: “Clean sweeping arpeggios for guitar”:

Oh dear. Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to master a challenging new technique. Our fast-paced culture of instant gratification leads many people to expect to totally kick ass at new skills within an extremely short time. If they can’t manage, they think they either don’t have the “talent” for it or that they must be doing something horribly wrong.

Some skills just take time to develop. And beware: there are plenty of guitarists out there who will lie about grossly underestimate the amount of time and effort they need to master a given technique, just so they will appear more “talented.” This is total bovine excrement. So cut yourself some slack, realize that any skill takes time to develop, and don’t compare your own progress with other people’s.

From my favorite musician’s blog.

“Global naming leads to global network effects.”

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First, a reminder about what makes the Web, the Web….

W3C.org: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One: 2. Identification:

In order to communicate internally, a community agrees (to a reasonable extent) on a set of terms and their meanings. One goal of the Web, since its inception, has been to build a global community in which any party can share information with any other party. To achieve this goal, the Web makes use of a single global identification system: the URI. URIs are a cornerstone of Web architecture, providing identification that is common across the Web. The global scope of URIs promotes large-scale “network effects”: the value of an identifier increases the more it is used consistently (for example, the more it is used in hypertext links (§4.4)).

Principle: Global Identifiers

Global naming leads to global network effects.

This principle dates back at least as far as Douglas Engelbart’s seminal work on open hypertext systems; see section Every Object Addressable in [Eng90].

What are the global – public – URI’s of Facebook? What are they in regards to any social network for that matter?

This is an important train of thought to consider when debating how Facebook and other social networks influence our relationship with Google, and the entire Web.

Facebook’s growth devalues Google’s utility – it devalues the public Web – at least how it is described in “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and the Web’s own architecture document.

This is why Scoble can’t be more wrong when he says “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years” because Facebook and other social networks are going to not only affect how we use Google – but will eliminate the utility of the Mahalo’s and TechMeme’s of the world – because they too rely on a robust and growing *public* URI ecosystem.

Dare: Why Google Should be Scared of Facebook:

What Jason and Jeff are inadvertantly pointing out is that once you join Facebook, you immediately start getting less value out of Google’s search engine. This is a problem that Google cannot let continue indefinitely if they plan to stay relevant as the Web’s #1 search engine.

What is also interesting is that thanks to efforts of Google employees like Mark Lucovsky, I can use Google search from within Facebook but without divine intervention I can’t get Facebook content from Google’s search engine. If I was an exec at Google, I’d worry a lot more about the growing trend of users creating Web content where it cannot be accessed by Google than all the “me too” efforts coming out of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!.

The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?

None of this invalidates Scott Karp’s riff on Scoble’s main point – there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms.

My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me.

There’s nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!’s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What’s New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.

People have been way too hung up on Digg’s voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants.

People forget Slashdot outright. As they do Metafilter.

So it still comes down to trust – What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?

And just how do we share that with each other?

Yahoo! and Google Move to Squeeze Newspapers Further

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Yahoo! has relaunched it’s local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.

Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.

They still haven’t gone as far as I expect them to one day do – integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.

On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.

Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.

Here’s a thing that’s been disturbing me about Facebook and Social Networking services…

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Tim Berners-Lee, as quoted by Jon Udell in a piece that greatly influenced me back in the day, called the web “a shared information space through which people and machines could communicate.” . The original piece in which Tim Berners-Lee said that is still up for all to read, titled “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future”. I found the piece by typing the quote in Google. Give it a try.

As we share our knowledge, collectively with one another, across blogs, message forums, email lists, and any other services that permit indexing, and reinforce that knowledge via hyperlinking, we are, collectively, building a space that benefits humanity.

It is this collective space that helped me learn what I needed to learn to build a career.

And all this happens, not because of altruistic reasons, but because the architecture of the Web empowers, via the hyperlink, a certain form of communication and collaboration.

The conversations that occur on Facebook, and on most social networking services, happen in the public-private.

In places not indexed by Google, not indexed by Yahoo!, yet are public to selected communities that have access and privilege to them. Gated communities. Islands.

Certainly, there has always been places out of reach of search engines (and there will always be a need for some), but until the last few years, the call from the digerati was to surface these databases of knowledge to the public, behind whatever proprietary walls that may have kept them out of reach. Whether they be newspaper archives, or email lists.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot celebrate when it comes to social networking services. I’m a participant in more than a few, to be sure.

But if they come to define the Web, as they are to some in the media, then I fear we are taking a great step backward.

Law of Data Smog 13: “Cyberspace is Republican.”

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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”!

Community/Social Media/Social Software Must Reads This Week

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fortuitous: Matthew Haughey: Some Community Tips for 2007 – Seven tips on how to run a successful community

Dare Obasanjo: “Social” is More Important Than “Software” in Social Software

InformationWeek: Cory Doctorow: How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

Derek Powazek: The Real Story of JPG Magazine (Metafilter thread)

Mathew Ingram: Community is the hard part

Jeff Jarvis: Smartest media quote of the year

NYTimes: Clive Thompson: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog

Blog Law: 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

Jeneane Sessum rocks – Why Journalism Matters

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We become part of the stories we discuss on our blogs. We mold, change, and affect the public’s perception of the people, places and events we talk about, via Google’s lasting, aggregating lens.

More and more evidence points to Jeneane Sessum being unfairly connected to the matters I posted about yesterday and her good name has been drug through the mud. That mud leaving trails all over Google.

As Jeneane says:

There are layers and layers of important issues that intelligent people can tackle and use to make meaning out of this. I hope that effort moves forward.

Me too.

So while folks are discussing the code of conduct suggestions over at Tim O’Reilly’s, I’d like to remind folks of The Citizen News Network and Center for Citizen Media project – Principles of Citizen Journalism, and think about that first principal – Accuracy – before passing on information that isn’t proven again.

As Scott Karp says, this entire episode illustrates “Why Journalism Matters”:

I have been watching in silent horror for days as this drama has unfolded – horror not only at Kathy Sierra’s traumatization, but over the total unrestrained free-for-all in the blogosphere. This is a case study in hearsay, innuendo, rumor, defamation, libel, jumping to conclusions and every other negative consequence of unrestrained publishing that the principles of journalism are intended to prevent, and notwithstanding some notable failures, generally do prevent when applied with some seriousness of purpose.

I read dozens of blog posts on this incident, and I still had NO CLUE who might or might not be guilty of what. Each new post I read tangled the web further, layering misinformation on top of disinformation. There was precious little “WHAT do I know” and a whole lot of “WHO do I know and how do I feel about them.”

Then I read this article by a JOURNALIST at the San Francisco Chronicle. I can’t say for sure whether all of the fact here are straight, but this is the only place I came across that actually attempted to ascertain through a coherent process what the facts might be or to lay out a coherent sequence of events. AND, you’ll notice that the only names of those (alleged) to be directly involved in the incident that the article mentions are Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra, both of whom the journalist interviewed and quoted. In the blogosphere, naming names was all about shoot first and ask questions latter.

Update: Anyone can commit acts of journalism. With this story, the fact is, few of us actually did. And the consequences are no good for anyone.

Update: There should be a “Clay Shirky rule” for social software discussion threads…

First person to make a connection to a Clay Shirky piece gets props or insults or something like that….

I bring this up because so much of this series of events recalls an old Clay Shirky piece worth revisiting: “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:

…We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn’t point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I’m a spammer, I’m going to mail things out to a million people, but they’re not going to be talking to one another, and I’m not going to be talking to them — spam is email, but it isn’t social. If I’m mailing you, and you’re mailing me back, we’re having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn’t necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I’m Glenn Reynolds, and I’m publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that’s really broadcast. It’s interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it’s a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that’s social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can’t substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.

Now, there’s a large body of literature saying “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.” Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

Well worth reading if you never have, or re-reading if you did a long time ago.