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And the linkwalls come tumbling down

January 28, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News, problems | 1 comment

Nice to learn via Virginia Postrel that ‘s archives are now open and linkable, liberated from incarceration behind the paywalls that were fashionable at major magazines until too many of their writers also became bloggers (or ), and the logic of openness began to prevail. (Or so my theory goes.) Note that the story at the third link is from the New York Times, which saw the same light a few months back.

Anyway, bravo. Now I’ll start subscribing to the print magazine again.

Woops! I just tried to subscribe, by clicking on the Subscribe link at The Atlantic site, went through a remarkably fast & easy process that featured opt-in (rather than opt-out) radio buttons for promotional stuff, hit the Send Order button and… bzzzt: went straight to Page Not Found. Not good.

Just tried it again with a different browser. Same result. 🙁

Hope they fix that soon.

Faustian bargaining

January 25, 2008 in Blogging, problems | 6 comments

Here’s a terrific post by Rex Hammock, explaining our common cause in a losing battle against the eggregious overuse of the word “content”.

Man blogs

January 23, 2008 in Art, Blogging | 1 comment

I like Remodeling for Geeks, subtitled code snippets for your house.

Bonus snip.

Today’s re-reading assignment

January 17, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, News | 5 comments

At Technobabble 2.0, Johnny Bentwood of Edelman posts White paper – distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media, with a link to the .pdf of the document. The paper “is not written as a fait accompli but rather as a contribution to the conversation”, Johnny says, adding, “I welcome your thoughts and comments”. I have both, but also a bus to catch.

Meanwhile, here’s a brief one that should help: Publish the document in .html as well as .pdf. HTML is much easier to open, to quote, to source and to link to. It’s native to the Web (rather than just to printing, as is the case with .pdf). Toward Edelman’s purposes, it is also more social and influential.

Via Hugh.

Remembering the Good Old Day

January 14, 2008 in Blogging, Past, Uncategorized | 6 comments

Tony wishes Moxie a Happy Birthday, recalling the July 12, 2002 party at which many L.A. bloggers, including yours truly, met. Here’s my own rundown on the event. Here are PatioPundit (Martin Devon)’s pix and commentary. Nice to see both his blog and his archives are still up. Perhaps not so nice to see he hasn’t posted since October. Nor has the party’s host, Brian Linse.

When I check the links, and names, from that party, it’s kinda sad to see some gone silent or gone altogether. Moxie and Tony are still going strong. So are Mickey Kaus, Matt Welch, Charles Johnson, Emmanuelle Richard, Bill Quick. But I’m not sure where Dawn Olsen went (that link now goes to a blog that I doubt is hers). Or Ann Salisbury. Warren Zevon, who was never a blogger but who attended the party while life was killing him, is dead.

Lot of offline talk lately about what’s happened to blogging. One friend sent an email I hope he puts up soon. Among other quotable lines is “most of the blogosphere has become a full-on commercial wankfest now”.

Not that it wasn’t then. But it was fun to hang out with a bunch of people, most of whose politics were vastly unlike my own — but whose writing was interesting and compelling and fresh and far more personal and open-ended than any op-ed page — and to believe we were beginning to make some kind of positive difference in the world. In retrospect, I don’t think any of us was making a dime on blogging at the time. For what that’s worth. If anything.

Bonus links… Competing Messages: Elections and Governance and Honesty. They both challenge. They both make you think. The Bill Hicks video on marketing in the latter is way too close to what too many of us — including yours truly in a former life — call home.

Improved listening

January 12, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, News, problems | Permalink

If you want to see how podcasting is better than radio (or a better form of radio), and why it’s more important than making money (because, among other things, you may make more money because of it than with it), then dig marketing, bananas and more, a podcast, hosted by Johnnie Moore. It’s a conversation among people who are looking beyond advertsing to whatever comes next. If anything.

You probably already know what I think — which is a lot like what Dave thinks. No surprise there, but worth repeating because it’s good to have others agree with you, even if there’s only one of them. Which there aren’t in this case. (Though there still aren’t enough, or Dave and I would stop highlighting the absurd belief that everything needs a business model — and that the only one worth considering, if you must, is advertising.)

One reason that podcasting beats radio (until we help radio catch up with podcasting by adding the same feature) is demonstrated by Johnnie’s post, which contains a pile of handy time-stamped show notes. (Didn’t Jon Udell come up with a way of making those time stamps into URLs? Wuzzit somebody else? Hmm.. Let’s ask hoosgot.)

Via Hugh.

The Snowden Effect

January 8, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas | 2 comments

About three years ago I wrote about what I called The Snowball Effect. It included this quotage:

  Tell ya what. I’m fifty-seven years old, and I’ve been pushing large rocks for short distances up a lot of hills, for a long time. Now, with blogging, I get to roll snowballs down hills. Some don’t go very far. But some get pretty big once they start rolling.
  See, each snowball grows as others link to the original idea, and add their own thoughts and ideas. By the time the snowball gets big enough to have some impact, it really isn’t my idea any more.
  Anyway, at this point in my life I’d rather roll snowballs than push rocks.

In Gouge out your eyes with a rusty synecdoche, Dave Snowden follows a snowball I hadn’t realized I had started rolling, here. Not sure I follow it all, yet. (Too busy now and writing this on the run.) But I’ll catch up later. Meanwhile, some fine writing (and snarking) to enjoy there.

Via Euan Semple.

Let’s call it a twiver

January 8, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism | 4 comments

I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.

What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one.

The latest addition to the portfolio of fun hacks on Twitter (which include Dave’s Twittergram) is Politweets, which Ted Shelton says “brings out the really intriguing aspect of Twitter — the ability to tap into the pulse of some very interesting distributed event (like an election) and see what is happening”.

I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.

Ev Williams did a nice job of explaining The Light Side in his talk at LeWeb3 last month. Here’s the video.

Twixtonomy

January 5, 2008 in Art, Blogging, problems | 2 comments

Paul Downey: I see two kinds of Twitterers emerging: Twits and Twerps.

Interesting read. Not sure if I’m either, both or neither.

Better than any obituary

January 5, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News, Places | Permalink

Required reading: Andy Olmstead’s posthumous post. Also here. Follow the other links too. In the (literal) end, there’s no better writing about what couldn’t be any worse.

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