-- Joe Germuska
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
-- Joe Germuska
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
The Movie I Watched Last Night LXX
Amelie
Jean-Marie Jeunet adds some elements of Luc Besson's cinematography in this magic realism-inspired romantic comedy. What a beautiful, beautiful movie. Basically the story of a young woman who's overly sheltered as a young girl because her parents externalized their neuroses on her, Amelie follows her physical and emotional blossoming after she leaves home to work as a waitress in a bigger city. Her child-like glee and love of life is inspirational, and her unrealistic -- although in the end successful -- approach to finding a lover is a joy to watch unfold. So many elements work well in this film: the social microcosm at the restaurant, the role photomats play, the fact that her boyfriend-to-be works in a porn shop, the produce clerk. And Jeunet's visuals communicate Amelie's innocent bliss and fine attention to detail extremely well. A pleasantly dark and comic approach to the love story. Excellently done, and well worth watching if you're late to this film like me.
The Matrix Reloaded
I finally caved last weekend and made my way to the Boston Common Loews to catch this movie before it left the theaters. While it's not as awe-inspiring or inspirational as the first Matrix movie -- an unrealistic expectation, as far as I'm concerned -- the movie is good at what it does. Damn good. The Wachowski brothers up the ante in terms of special effects with a couple of key scenes -- the ghost twins and the many Agent Smiths -- and, otherwise, the movie is just as impressive visually as the first one. Additionally, the widescreen shots of Zion and other environmental locations are quite nice, even if the Wachowskis risk falling into the Terminator trap if they continue to dwell on the robot war and probe sequences. The threat of the Matrix feels relatively hollow because -- outside of the Architect -- there's little sense or personality behind it. Storywise, the movie is just as rich philsophically as the first one, but the back and forth between exposition and action staggers. The first Matrix was a much more coherent movie. That said, the commentary on choice is welcome, and the Wachowskis explain more about the Matrix world and the myth of the One, which moves the movie ahead nicely. I felt like the Cornell West character wasn't worth all the attention -- much less including; any actor would've done fine. And I felt like the ending could've been less of a cliff hanger. Nonetheless, see this in a theater if you haven't already. It's meant to be seen on the big screen, not on TV.
Jean-Marie Jeunet adds some elements of Luc Besson's cinematography in this magic realism-inspired romantic comedy. What a beautiful, beautiful movie. Basically the story of a young woman who's overly sheltered as a young girl because her parents externalized their neuroses on her, Amelie follows her physical and emotional blossoming after she leaves home to work as a waitress in a bigger city. Her child-like glee and love of life is inspirational, and her unrealistic -- although in the end successful -- approach to finding a lover is a joy to watch unfold. So many elements work well in this film: the social microcosm at the restaurant, the role photomats play, the fact that her boyfriend-to-be works in a porn shop, the produce clerk. And Jeunet's visuals communicate Amelie's innocent bliss and fine attention to detail extremely well. A pleasantly dark and comic approach to the love story. Excellently done, and well worth watching if you're late to this film like me.
The Matrix Reloaded
I finally caved last weekend and made my way to the Boston Common Loews to catch this movie before it left the theaters. While it's not as awe-inspiring or inspirational as the first Matrix movie -- an unrealistic expectation, as far as I'm concerned -- the movie is good at what it does. Damn good. The Wachowski brothers up the ante in terms of special effects with a couple of key scenes -- the ghost twins and the many Agent Smiths -- and, otherwise, the movie is just as impressive visually as the first one. Additionally, the widescreen shots of Zion and other environmental locations are quite nice, even if the Wachowskis risk falling into the Terminator trap if they continue to dwell on the robot war and probe sequences. The threat of the Matrix feels relatively hollow because -- outside of the Architect -- there's little sense or personality behind it. Storywise, the movie is just as rich philsophically as the first one, but the back and forth between exposition and action staggers. The first Matrix was a much more coherent movie. That said, the commentary on choice is welcome, and the Wachowskis explain more about the Matrix world and the myth of the One, which moves the movie ahead nicely. I felt like the Cornell West character wasn't worth all the attention -- much less including; any actor would've done fine. And I felt like the ending could've been less of a cliff hanger. Nonetheless, see this in a theater if you haven't already. It's meant to be seen on the big screen, not on TV.
Corollary: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Look, ma, I'm on MSNBC!
Just goes to show that if you publish original writing in your blog, do something no one else is doing -- or in a more useful way -- and otherwise not follow pack journalism a la Blogdex, Daypop, and Popdex, people will sit up and take notice. Less quoting and linking, more writing. Original content, not just commentary. This is my recipe for Media Diet.
Disclaimer: I (heart) Blogdex, Daypop, and Popdex. My point is that if everyone is already blogging about something, maybe you don't need to. Do the new.
Just goes to show that if you publish original writing in your blog, do something no one else is doing -- or in a more useful way -- and otherwise not follow pack journalism a la Blogdex, Daypop, and Popdex, people will sit up and take notice. Less quoting and linking, more writing. Original content, not just commentary. This is my recipe for Media Diet.
Disclaimer: I (heart) Blogdex, Daypop, and Popdex. My point is that if everyone is already blogging about something, maybe you don't need to. Do the new.
Event-O-Dex LXII
Thursday, June 19: Handstand Command showcase featuring the Pee Wee Fist, the In Out, Asian Babe Alert, and the Mary Reillys gets merry at the Choppin' Block in Boston.
Monday, June 16, 2003
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
-- Maura Johnston
-- Jeff Buddle
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
-- Shannon Okey
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
Just thought I'd toss in my faves:
MacAddict
Vice
Playboy (It's super lame as far as porn goes, but the interviews are great.)
Vanity Fair
Print
Wired
-- Nate Rock
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
-- Nate Rock
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XX
Usually, when I order pizza for delivery, I order from one of the local pizzerias in Cambridge. But Friday night, for some reason, I had a serious jones for Domino's. Several things contributed to this jones, including a coupon in an advertising circular received in the day's mail, two Domino's commercials on the television, and memories of how good a slice of Domino's pizza tasted one late night at Paddy Burke's. So I dialed the number in the advertising circular.
Even though that Domino's is located on the Cambridge side of Broadway, they didn't deliver to my address. They gave me another Domino's number. I dialed it, and they didn't deliver to my address, either. They referred me to a third Domino's number. I dialed it, and -- thank heavens -- they delivered to my address. So I placed my order: a large cheese pizza and breadsticks. "The coupon is for cinnasticks," the person at Domino's said. "Actually, it says breadsticks or cinnasticks. I'd like breadsticks." "OK, 45 minutes."
After 45 minutes, Domino's calls to check on my address. The driver can't find where I live. I describe how the numbers don't quite run sequentially on my block, and Domino's employee affirms that the pizza is on its way. 30 more minutes pass, and I decide that after more than an hour, I should call them. I do, asking the status of my pizza, and the guy says that the driver rang my doorbell and no one answered. I said that the driver did not ring my doorbell -- and that I've been sitting in my living room since placing the order. Since the pizzeria called to verify my address, no one has called or run my doorbell. The Domino's employee affirms that the pizza is on its way.
Finally, the pizza arrives. The driver is a little sheepish when I thank him for finally delivering the pizza, but that's little consolation. The pizza is no longer hot and isn't very good. Needless to say, I shouldn't have ordered Domino's in the first place, but I certainly won't be ordering it again any time soon. The experience reminded me while I rarely eat or shop at chain businesses -- ubiquity doesn't mean quality -- as well as an experience I had in high school.
When I was in high school, I would occasionally book rock bands for school functions. One time, for a Students Against Drunk Driving lock in, I hired the Gomers to play. We couldn't meet most of the rider they requested -- which even included beer! -- but we did say we'd pay them and provide dinner. They wanted pizza, and the SADD advisor said he'd call Domino's. Dave said that we couldn't order Domino's because they supported anti-abortion rights activists.
That is mostly an urban legend -- Domino's itself does not support anti-abortion rights activists, although its founder has and many people boycott the business for that reason. I may not approve of Domino's founder's political and spiritual beliefs, but that's not why I'm not going to order or eat Domino's pizza again.
I'm not going to order or eat Domino's pizza again because their customer service is lousy and their pizza isn't very good.
Even though that Domino's is located on the Cambridge side of Broadway, they didn't deliver to my address. They gave me another Domino's number. I dialed it, and they didn't deliver to my address, either. They referred me to a third Domino's number. I dialed it, and -- thank heavens -- they delivered to my address. So I placed my order: a large cheese pizza and breadsticks. "The coupon is for cinnasticks," the person at Domino's said. "Actually, it says breadsticks or cinnasticks. I'd like breadsticks." "OK, 45 minutes."
After 45 minutes, Domino's calls to check on my address. The driver can't find where I live. I describe how the numbers don't quite run sequentially on my block, and Domino's employee affirms that the pizza is on its way. 30 more minutes pass, and I decide that after more than an hour, I should call them. I do, asking the status of my pizza, and the guy says that the driver rang my doorbell and no one answered. I said that the driver did not ring my doorbell -- and that I've been sitting in my living room since placing the order. Since the pizzeria called to verify my address, no one has called or run my doorbell. The Domino's employee affirms that the pizza is on its way.
Finally, the pizza arrives. The driver is a little sheepish when I thank him for finally delivering the pizza, but that's little consolation. The pizza is no longer hot and isn't very good. Needless to say, I shouldn't have ordered Domino's in the first place, but I certainly won't be ordering it again any time soon. The experience reminded me while I rarely eat or shop at chain businesses -- ubiquity doesn't mean quality -- as well as an experience I had in high school.
When I was in high school, I would occasionally book rock bands for school functions. One time, for a Students Against Drunk Driving lock in, I hired the Gomers to play. We couldn't meet most of the rider they requested -- which even included beer! -- but we did say we'd pay them and provide dinner. They wanted pizza, and the SADD advisor said he'd call Domino's. Dave said that we couldn't order Domino's because they supported anti-abortion rights activists.
That is mostly an urban legend -- Domino's itself does not support anti-abortion rights activists, although its founder has and many people boycott the business for that reason. I may not approve of Domino's founder's political and spiritual beliefs, but that's not why I'm not going to order or eat Domino's pizza again.
I'm not going to order or eat Domino's pizza again because their customer service is lousy and their pizza isn't very good.
Hiking History V
While walking to a friend's cookout in Quincy yesterday afternoon, I saw a granite marker near the Wollaston T stop on the Red Line. Turns out the that first Howard Johnson's ever was located in Quincy -- at the location of the marker on the edge of the T station's parking lot.
The marker reads:
Howard Johnson's -- or HoJo's, as my dad called it when I was a kid -- started out as a drug store and ice cream shop that branched out along the Massachusetts shore before expanding into roadside restaurants and eventually hotels. HoJo's even operated a vending machine business that sold branded pop, gum, and other items. At its peak, there were 1,000 locations, many of which will soon be gone. In 1985, Mariott bought Howard Johnson's and converted many of the restaurants into Roy Rogers.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Howard Johnson's was its architecture, which combined the traditional New England colonial home with a bright orange roof to serve as a "beacon" for travelers.
Why is the T stop called Wollaston? In 1625, Captain Wollaston, among the area's first European settlers, cleared some land in what is now Quincy. Quincy was once part of Braintree but split from that city in 1792. Wollaston is considered a "section" of Quincy, which was named after John Quincy, a relative of Edmund Quincy, who has a colorful history.
Fascinating stuff for a Sunday afternoon!
The marker reads:
Site of the first Howard Johnson's store opened by Howard D. Johnson on September 3, 1925. This commemorative marker was erected by Howard Johnson's through the courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the city of Quincy on January 11, 1972.
Howard Johnson's -- or HoJo's, as my dad called it when I was a kid -- started out as a drug store and ice cream shop that branched out along the Massachusetts shore before expanding into roadside restaurants and eventually hotels. HoJo's even operated a vending machine business that sold branded pop, gum, and other items. At its peak, there were 1,000 locations, many of which will soon be gone. In 1985, Mariott bought Howard Johnson's and converted many of the restaurants into Roy Rogers.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Howard Johnson's was its architecture, which combined the traditional New England colonial home with a bright orange roof to serve as a "beacon" for travelers.
Why is the T stop called Wollaston? In 1625, Captain Wollaston, among the area's first European settlers, cleared some land in what is now Quincy. Quincy was once part of Braintree but split from that city in 1792. Wollaston is considered a "section" of Quincy, which was named after John Quincy, a relative of Edmund Quincy, who has a colorful history.
Fascinating stuff for a Sunday afternoon!
Friday, June 13, 2003
Ravaging Radio X
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
In no particular order:
The Week (actually, this is my No. 1)
Entertainment Weekly
Fast Company (legit... not sucking up; that's how I got hooked to Media Diet.)
Mojo
Wizard
-- Mike Lally
***
Utne Reader
Smithsonian
ID
Natural Home
Fast Company (of course!)
Poets & Writers
-- Lynne Parson Mikhaeil
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
-- Mike Lally
-- Lynne Parson Mikhaeil
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
Rock Shows of Note LXVI
I am such a silly boy. After RealTime and two Anchormen shows at the end of last week -- one followed by a house party, even -- I've been sick as a dog this week. Stuffy head, runny nose, nagging cough. The whole shebang. I barely made it through the first day of the Weblog Business Strategies conference, and I'm just now starting to feel better. So one would think I've been taking it easy, right? Not really.
Take last night as an example. After leaving work and spending some time at home catching up on mail and magazines, I got the itch to go out around 9:30 p.m. when I should have been heading to bed. There was a Handstand Command showcase at the Choppin' Block, and I didn't want to miss Big Digits' first show with Mac Swell and TD performing together. So I left the house, hit the T, and made my way to Brigham Circle. I got to the club around 10:15 -- just after Big Digits' set ended. My whole motivation for going out was gone! I was super bummed, but everyone who was there tells me that they were great. Next time, gents.
Plunge into Death followed with their usual brand of goth drama hop, even though Jef seemed a little low energy. Dave did his best to keep the crowd amped, and his hair is just crazy these days. Mad flopping. Mac got his dance on in front of the duo and joined them for a couple of songs at the end of the set.
I took a break outside with some friends for much of Cathy Cathodic's set. I've seen her perform several times before, and if you like your hip hop somewhat enlightened and empowering, I'm sure you'll like Cathy's rhymes. But I made a point to be back inside for Travers' performance. He was shooting video at the closing party for Hi-Fi Records on Sunday, and I wanted to see how much of it was incorporated into whatever he was going to do.
And, oh, what he did. Three video projectors. A blank white backdrop ringing the stage. Several costume changes. I'm not sure how to describe his performance, but it involved video segments, some sketch comedy bits, several recurring characters, dancing, singing, and, oh, so much more. My favorite part was probably when he was performing with the fake band, the three other band members -- played by him -- projected on the walls around him, playing instruments, dancing, winking, and otherwise contributing to the performance. Parts reminded me slightly of Ze Frank. The menacing drummer hunched over the kit was a nice touch.
There were so many elements to his performance, so many transitions. It's well worth putting on again, if Travers is of the mind to do so. After his set ended, I lingered outside to get some air and started thinking about catching a cab home. I was pretty sure most of my friends had gone, but stepping inside to use the restroom before hailing a taxi, there was Jef and Dave! I was so lucky to catch a ride home with them, making it back to Magazine Street by, well, 3 a.m. or so to make a grilled cheese sandwich and finally collapse on the bed.
Needless to say, I was not up bright and early this morning. I did not wash the dishes last night. I did not do laundry. I did not take out the trash and recycling. I did not cut up the browning bananas to put them in the freezer to make smoothies. I did not get some much-needed rest to help heal and get over this cold. But even though I missed Big Digits, I did go to a Rock Show of Note.
One where most, if not all of the bands, used remote controls.
Take last night as an example. After leaving work and spending some time at home catching up on mail and magazines, I got the itch to go out around 9:30 p.m. when I should have been heading to bed. There was a Handstand Command showcase at the Choppin' Block, and I didn't want to miss Big Digits' first show with Mac Swell and TD performing together. So I left the house, hit the T, and made my way to Brigham Circle. I got to the club around 10:15 -- just after Big Digits' set ended. My whole motivation for going out was gone! I was super bummed, but everyone who was there tells me that they were great. Next time, gents.
Plunge into Death followed with their usual brand of goth drama hop, even though Jef seemed a little low energy. Dave did his best to keep the crowd amped, and his hair is just crazy these days. Mad flopping. Mac got his dance on in front of the duo and joined them for a couple of songs at the end of the set.
I took a break outside with some friends for much of Cathy Cathodic's set. I've seen her perform several times before, and if you like your hip hop somewhat enlightened and empowering, I'm sure you'll like Cathy's rhymes. But I made a point to be back inside for Travers' performance. He was shooting video at the closing party for Hi-Fi Records on Sunday, and I wanted to see how much of it was incorporated into whatever he was going to do.
And, oh, what he did. Three video projectors. A blank white backdrop ringing the stage. Several costume changes. I'm not sure how to describe his performance, but it involved video segments, some sketch comedy bits, several recurring characters, dancing, singing, and, oh, so much more. My favorite part was probably when he was performing with the fake band, the three other band members -- played by him -- projected on the walls around him, playing instruments, dancing, winking, and otherwise contributing to the performance. Parts reminded me slightly of Ze Frank. The menacing drummer hunched over the kit was a nice touch.
There were so many elements to his performance, so many transitions. It's well worth putting on again, if Travers is of the mind to do so. After his set ended, I lingered outside to get some air and started thinking about catching a cab home. I was pretty sure most of my friends had gone, but stepping inside to use the restroom before hailing a taxi, there was Jef and Dave! I was so lucky to catch a ride home with them, making it back to Magazine Street by, well, 3 a.m. or so to make a grilled cheese sandwich and finally collapse on the bed.
Needless to say, I was not up bright and early this morning. I did not wash the dishes last night. I did not do laundry. I did not take out the trash and recycling. I did not cut up the browning bananas to put them in the freezer to make smoothies. I did not get some much-needed rest to help heal and get over this cold. But even though I missed Big Digits, I did go to a Rock Show of Note.
One where most, if not all of the bands, used remote controls.
From the In Box: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
I've enjoyed your notes from various conferences very much. Thanks and keep up the good work! I hope you won't mind a few suggestions about making your conference coverage easier to read. I had a bit of trouble navigating, both just now for this Weblog Business Strategies conference and earlier with the GEL conference. I usually end up reading the conference notes soon after the conference ends, not real-time. I assume I'm not the only one who does so.
(1) Make it easier to find and track the conference postings. A page with links to all the conference entries would make it much easier to navigate. They're hard to find when they slip off the front page into the archives, and I also have trouble remembering which entries I've already read. I read entries in short bursts, sometimes out of order, and even if I'm reading them all in order I sometimes lose track as I'm scrolling the huge long pages. Unfortunately, Google doesn't work to find entries to this week's conference because it hasn't indexed the newest archive pages yet. I assume you can do this through MT categories instead.
(2) Your archive navigation would be easier if you (1) added the date to your post timestamps so one doesn't have to scroll back through many entries and thousands of words to find the date, (2) added a link to the archives up on top of your main page, not at the very bottom, and (3) changed the archive.html to reverse chronological order. I had the hardest time finding that link to your archives at the very bottom of your page when I was looking up the GEL conference, and then once I got there, I went to the 2001 archive by mistake.
You could add both links to the conference category page and the archive page up on the right sidebar by your review links.
Anyway, I hope you don't mind the suggestions. I realize the problem is always finding the spare time. I thought I'd send this off since you were doing such a great job transcribing these conferences. The transcripts are a great resource and a lot of people point to you, and I wanted to give you a heads up that some people may have trouble finding what they came to read. -- John Troyer
Keeping Track offers a nice index of my confblog reports.
(1) Make it easier to find and track the conference postings. A page with links to all the conference entries would make it much easier to navigate. They're hard to find when they slip off the front page into the archives, and I also have trouble remembering which entries I've already read. I read entries in short bursts, sometimes out of order, and even if I'm reading them all in order I sometimes lose track as I'm scrolling the huge long pages. Unfortunately, Google doesn't work to find entries to this week's conference because it hasn't indexed the newest archive pages yet. I assume you can do this through MT categories instead.
(2) Your archive navigation would be easier if you (1) added the date to your post timestamps so one doesn't have to scroll back through many entries and thousands of words to find the date, (2) added a link to the archives up on top of your main page, not at the very bottom, and (3) changed the archive.html to reverse chronological order. I had the hardest time finding that link to your archives at the very bottom of your page when I was looking up the GEL conference, and then once I got there, I went to the 2001 archive by mistake.
You could add both links to the conference category page and the archive page up on the right sidebar by your review links.
Anyway, I hope you don't mind the suggestions. I realize the problem is always finding the spare time. I thought I'd send this off since you were doing such a great job transcribing these conferences. The transcripts are a great resource and a lot of people point to you, and I wanted to give you a heads up that some people may have trouble finding what they came to read. -- John Troyer
Keeping Track offers a nice index of my confblog reports.
Corollary: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Rebecca Lieb, executive editor of the interactive marketing channel for Jupitermedia's Internet.com, recaps the recent Weblog Business Strategies conference today.
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Clothes Whore VIII
Thanks to Nate Rock of Crap Log, Media Dieticians can now outfit themselves in the official Media Diet uniform. Show your independent media pride by donning the Media Diet-approved attire of thoughtful grassroots media makers everywhere. Or don't. But are you sure you should go out dressed like that? With Media Diet, the mantle is the message. Be proud, be loud, wear the shroud. OK, I think it's time to go home.
From the In Box: Magazine Me XXXV
I'd have to say:
Utne Reader
Newtype USA
Macworld
The Atlantic
-- Gregory Blake
What're yours? Let me know.
-- Gregory Blake
What're yours? Let me know.
Music to My Ears XXXVII
A five-pack of new record reviews!
Anberlin "Blueprints for the Black Market"
A hard rock-inspired alt.rock five piece, Anberlin propels a peppy approach to its music on this record. With a bizarrely dramatic Danny Elfman-like vocal delivery in sections of the opening track, "Ready Fuels," the Orlando, Florida-based band adds an almost Push Kings-esque doot-doot-doo-doo-doo sing-along bridge in "Foreign Languages." While I appreciate the band's power pop tendencies, the record's production values and the group's occasionally lackluster alt.rock leanings -- per the press sheet's comparisons to the Foo Fighters and Superdrag -- make this release whinily white bread. I'm sure the hard-rock heartthrob hoi polloi in middle America might find Anberlin's anthemic assumptions palatable -- especially given the CD insert's pinup-worthy photography and the band's too-true cover of the Cure's "Love Song" -- but I fear that there's not too much to their music. The drawn-out classic rock chorus in "Change the World (Lost Ones)" isn't overly convincing, and "Cold War Transmissions" brings in a bit of boringly radio-friendly blather. This consistency continues for the bulk of "Blueprints," and for the most part, the record rarely resonates with this reviewer. That said, "The Undeveloped Story" contains some promising progressions, and "Autobahn" and "We Dreamt in Heist" return to the Push Kings reminders. Regardless, Anberlin doesn't sustain the interesting sections or sequences enough to hold my attention. When the band's not too ashamed to revel in its unabashed power pop playfulness, Anberlin aspires to a goal worth attaining. But its hard rock approach to alt.rock falls flat, and it's really only the second half of the CD that shows any steady sensibility. I'm not sure I'll return to this for repeat listens. Tooth & Nail, P.O. Box 12698, Seattle, WA 98111.
Armor for Sleep "Dream to Make Believe"
I think I need to seek out more punk and no-wave records to review, because it seems Media Diet is starting to secure service by the more sleepy Sunday sad boy sing-along emo and melodic hardcore labels. Not that I don't appreciate receiving the records or enjoy listening to them, but so much of this style of music sounds the same to me and doesn't always demand repeated listens. Having toured with musical groups such as Thursday and Piebald, the four piece Armor for Sleep is cozily comfortable in the earnestly aggressive yet slightly prone to shoe gazing school of indie rock. "Being Your Walls," the fourth track, is the first song that really caught my attention, with a subtly cyclical and off-kilter song structure. Maybe it's the interwooven chorus or justifiably jagged guitar stabs. Maybe it's the little bit of hesitant herky jerk as the song builds to the end. The segue to "My Town"'s start and stop opening and its simple synth section maintains my interest, and this number encourages me to temper my initial dismissal and doubt somewhat. Not a bad song! "The Wanderers Guild" is a slight step backwards, but the record's rise to the occasion returns, and Armor for Sleep is redeemed by the increasingly intense "Front and Front Steps," an impressive slice-of-life snapshot. This is by far the best song I've heard on this. Whild the CD's closing four songs return to the band's more mellow meanderings, the lyrical content of "Raindrops" and "Kind of Perfect" beg some attention and analysis. The former adequately addresses how certain people in our lives can overwhelm, fill, and feed us. These are perhaps the hardest relationships to lose -- and the most frustrating unrequited loves. As satisfying as it can be to be submersed in and washed over by someone -- as sufficient as that unshared swelling can seem -- it almost always brings the corollary danger of drowning, self-dismissal, and self-denial. The penultimate piece, "Kind of Perfect," also hit me hard. Sometimes you just want someone in your life, to share your space, to settle in silently and soak up the collective experience of being together. In the next room. Silent on the other end of the phone line. Drifting off to dream. Singer and songwriter Ben Jorgensen captures the tension of passive and persistent presence and heartfelt hope, as well as the loss inherent in that longing. All in all, this record doesn't always share its strength in terms of song structure, but substantially, its content brooks no compromise. And to Jorgensen's emo credit, the last song "Slip Like Space" is an impressively intent statement of moving on and leaving behind, as bittersweet as that process and progress may be. Worth checking out. Equal Vision, P.O. Box 14, Hudson, NY 12534.
Fall Out Boy "Take This to Your Grave"
I am such a sucker for this sound. Ecstatically enthusiastic and melodically meaningful! I don't know if I'm prone to prefer pop punk or if I just like energy and intensity with my thoughtfully tuneful and hook-laden sing-along songs. But it's getting so, as interchangeable as some of these bands can be, I almost don't care, I'm such a big fan of the genre. Don't get me wrong, I'm not so far gone that I appreciate or even begin to understand the output and popularity of Blink-182, Sum-41, and their punk-by-the-numbers commercially complicit comrades. But a band like Fall Out Boy, being quite a different animal, is right up my alley. Coming from a monied suburb of Chicago, the band combines the maybe mopey but still hopeful emotionalism of bands like the Smoking Popes with the northern Californian clash and catchiness of the early Lookout roster, as well as some of the melodic grit and grin of the much-missed Underdog Records scene. After several blissfully beatific pop-punk numbers "Saturday" adds some disappointingly screamo backups just before some frightfully delightful falsetto. I wonder whether the band really thought that worked well -- or if both are indications that they don't take themselves too seriously. I like to think the latter, as the next track, "Homesick at Space Camp," is cheekily geeky at several levels. Fall Out Boy combines sugar-sweet songwriting with enough regional place dropping and existentially emotional energy that the end result almost evokes an equation. Plug this record into a computer, and I'm sure you'll come close to a recipe for radio play. Fueled by Ramen, P.O. Box 12563, Gainesville, FL 32604.
Shai Hulud "That Within Blood Ill-Tempered"
Now this is more like it! Unlike emo-leaning bands that adopt some semblance of screamo to elicit an edge, the four piece Shai Hulud avoids such aspirational adaptation and maintains a masculine melodicism amidst its acerbic aggression. Passionate to a point (as in pointed stick, not possibility or promise), this is heavy hardcore that still holds harmony as a value and a virtue. From the very first song, the verbosely titled "Scornful of the Motives and Virtue of Others," Shai Hulud erupts with mirthfully moshing metal and high-minded hardcore. The screamo, shouted vocals don't stick out as silly but instead solidifies Shai Hulud's seriousness. The second piece, "Let Us at Last Praise the Colonizers of Dreams," adds an amusing sing-along chorus that surprised me. Even in the thick of metal-tinged hardcore, Shai Hulud still manages to shout along in harmony. Brilliant! Turning to the lyric sheet, Shai Hulud impresses me with the depth and breadth of its inspirations and influences. Without coming across as cartoonily literary, the band draws on the work of Frank Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien, composing almost operatic metal concept album-level lyrics while chalenging Johnny-come-lately bandwagon also rans. Truth be told, the album's design screams fantasy metal, but instead, Shai Hulud sheds light on what smart metal or intelligent hardcore might be. The band is aggressive without being assholes. Melodic without being mellow. Clever without being cloying. There is no inconsistency in terms of intensity song to song, and as far as this batch of reviews goes, Shai Hulud's new record is the most consistent, complex, and crucial record I've recently received. Given the band's brand of metallic hardcore and shouted singing, it's somewhat of a challenge to differentiate songs from one another, but the entire record holds together, the overall sound is impressively massive, and the words are worth watching. Even the end notes and thank you list highlights the band's heart, honor, and humor. Think Backstabbers Inc. with the sense of humor and politics of Propagandhi. Or Dillinger Four collaborating with Napalm Death. This is an excellent record that proves aggressive rock doesn't need to be cartoony or overly corrosive. Revelation Records, P.O. Box 5232, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.
Silverstein "When Broken Is Easily Fixed"
After a surprisingly screamo opening to the first song, "Smashed into Pieces," this south Ontario, Canada, five piece falls into a pleasantly aggressive melodic style that combines hardcore and emo. While the strained screamo parts tend to interrupt the effectively assertive melodic basis of the band's songwriting, the overall effect works surprisingly well. I just wish vocalist Shane Told could carry an angry, aggro line without resorting to all-out shouting. In fact, even in the second song, "Red Light Pledge," the guttural interruptions undermine what is otherwise a forceful emotional song. The band shows a sensitive side further with the introduction of strings under a plaintive spoke-word presentation. Do bands feel a need to break down into illegibility in order to claim hardcore credibility? The band adds a subtle nod to heavy metal fret work with the guitar work under the chorus to "Giving Up" -- a nice variation that's not too over the top until another screamo section. Not to continue the song by song, but in general, were Silverstein to find another mode of distraught or slightly distorted vocal delivery, their songs would really shine. Don't shy from your more sensitive side regardless of your metal and hardcore influences. As a side note, Victory's press sheet makes a point to mention that the band took its name from children's book author -- and countercultural freak -- Shel Silverstein. It's an interesting bit of trivia, but the influence doesn't carry across on the CD itself. Silverstein possesses neither the writer's innocent bliss a la Where the Sidewalk Ends nor his more adult-oriented hippie hullaballoo such as "Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball," opting instead for forcefully forlorn songs about love and loss. Regardless, Silverstein does provide a promising brand of emotional hardcore that wins at its most melodic and only suffers slightly when the band lapses into lazy yelling. "The Weak and the Wounded" stands out as a piece with potential, and if the band considered a more herky-jerky angular approach to its song structure, it might not need the back-and-forth screamo to maintain its energy and direction. A closing tip of the Media Diet hat to Martin Wittfooth, whose artwork adds a lot to the overall packaging. Victory Records, 346 N. Justine St. #504, Chicago, IL 60607.
Anberlin "Blueprints for the Black Market"
A hard rock-inspired alt.rock five piece, Anberlin propels a peppy approach to its music on this record. With a bizarrely dramatic Danny Elfman-like vocal delivery in sections of the opening track, "Ready Fuels," the Orlando, Florida-based band adds an almost Push Kings-esque doot-doot-doo-doo-doo sing-along bridge in "Foreign Languages." While I appreciate the band's power pop tendencies, the record's production values and the group's occasionally lackluster alt.rock leanings -- per the press sheet's comparisons to the Foo Fighters and Superdrag -- make this release whinily white bread. I'm sure the hard-rock heartthrob hoi polloi in middle America might find Anberlin's anthemic assumptions palatable -- especially given the CD insert's pinup-worthy photography and the band's too-true cover of the Cure's "Love Song" -- but I fear that there's not too much to their music. The drawn-out classic rock chorus in "Change the World (Lost Ones)" isn't overly convincing, and "Cold War Transmissions" brings in a bit of boringly radio-friendly blather. This consistency continues for the bulk of "Blueprints," and for the most part, the record rarely resonates with this reviewer. That said, "The Undeveloped Story" contains some promising progressions, and "Autobahn" and "We Dreamt in Heist" return to the Push Kings reminders. Regardless, Anberlin doesn't sustain the interesting sections or sequences enough to hold my attention. When the band's not too ashamed to revel in its unabashed power pop playfulness, Anberlin aspires to a goal worth attaining. But its hard rock approach to alt.rock falls flat, and it's really only the second half of the CD that shows any steady sensibility. I'm not sure I'll return to this for repeat listens. Tooth & Nail, P.O. Box 12698, Seattle, WA 98111.
Armor for Sleep "Dream to Make Believe"
I think I need to seek out more punk and no-wave records to review, because it seems Media Diet is starting to secure service by the more sleepy Sunday sad boy sing-along emo and melodic hardcore labels. Not that I don't appreciate receiving the records or enjoy listening to them, but so much of this style of music sounds the same to me and doesn't always demand repeated listens. Having toured with musical groups such as Thursday and Piebald, the four piece Armor for Sleep is cozily comfortable in the earnestly aggressive yet slightly prone to shoe gazing school of indie rock. "Being Your Walls," the fourth track, is the first song that really caught my attention, with a subtly cyclical and off-kilter song structure. Maybe it's the interwooven chorus or justifiably jagged guitar stabs. Maybe it's the little bit of hesitant herky jerk as the song builds to the end. The segue to "My Town"'s start and stop opening and its simple synth section maintains my interest, and this number encourages me to temper my initial dismissal and doubt somewhat. Not a bad song! "The Wanderers Guild" is a slight step backwards, but the record's rise to the occasion returns, and Armor for Sleep is redeemed by the increasingly intense "Front and Front Steps," an impressive slice-of-life snapshot. This is by far the best song I've heard on this. Whild the CD's closing four songs return to the band's more mellow meanderings, the lyrical content of "Raindrops" and "Kind of Perfect" beg some attention and analysis. The former adequately addresses how certain people in our lives can overwhelm, fill, and feed us. These are perhaps the hardest relationships to lose -- and the most frustrating unrequited loves. As satisfying as it can be to be submersed in and washed over by someone -- as sufficient as that unshared swelling can seem -- it almost always brings the corollary danger of drowning, self-dismissal, and self-denial. The penultimate piece, "Kind of Perfect," also hit me hard. Sometimes you just want someone in your life, to share your space, to settle in silently and soak up the collective experience of being together. In the next room. Silent on the other end of the phone line. Drifting off to dream. Singer and songwriter Ben Jorgensen captures the tension of passive and persistent presence and heartfelt hope, as well as the loss inherent in that longing. All in all, this record doesn't always share its strength in terms of song structure, but substantially, its content brooks no compromise. And to Jorgensen's emo credit, the last song "Slip Like Space" is an impressively intent statement of moving on and leaving behind, as bittersweet as that process and progress may be. Worth checking out. Equal Vision, P.O. Box 14, Hudson, NY 12534.
Fall Out Boy "Take This to Your Grave"
I am such a sucker for this sound. Ecstatically enthusiastic and melodically meaningful! I don't know if I'm prone to prefer pop punk or if I just like energy and intensity with my thoughtfully tuneful and hook-laden sing-along songs. But it's getting so, as interchangeable as some of these bands can be, I almost don't care, I'm such a big fan of the genre. Don't get me wrong, I'm not so far gone that I appreciate or even begin to understand the output and popularity of Blink-182, Sum-41, and their punk-by-the-numbers commercially complicit comrades. But a band like Fall Out Boy, being quite a different animal, is right up my alley. Coming from a monied suburb of Chicago, the band combines the maybe mopey but still hopeful emotionalism of bands like the Smoking Popes with the northern Californian clash and catchiness of the early Lookout roster, as well as some of the melodic grit and grin of the much-missed Underdog Records scene. After several blissfully beatific pop-punk numbers "Saturday" adds some disappointingly screamo backups just before some frightfully delightful falsetto. I wonder whether the band really thought that worked well -- or if both are indications that they don't take themselves too seriously. I like to think the latter, as the next track, "Homesick at Space Camp," is cheekily geeky at several levels. Fall Out Boy combines sugar-sweet songwriting with enough regional place dropping and existentially emotional energy that the end result almost evokes an equation. Plug this record into a computer, and I'm sure you'll come close to a recipe for radio play. Fueled by Ramen, P.O. Box 12563, Gainesville, FL 32604.
Shai Hulud "That Within Blood Ill-Tempered"
Now this is more like it! Unlike emo-leaning bands that adopt some semblance of screamo to elicit an edge, the four piece Shai Hulud avoids such aspirational adaptation and maintains a masculine melodicism amidst its acerbic aggression. Passionate to a point (as in pointed stick, not possibility or promise), this is heavy hardcore that still holds harmony as a value and a virtue. From the very first song, the verbosely titled "Scornful of the Motives and Virtue of Others," Shai Hulud erupts with mirthfully moshing metal and high-minded hardcore. The screamo, shouted vocals don't stick out as silly but instead solidifies Shai Hulud's seriousness. The second piece, "Let Us at Last Praise the Colonizers of Dreams," adds an amusing sing-along chorus that surprised me. Even in the thick of metal-tinged hardcore, Shai Hulud still manages to shout along in harmony. Brilliant! Turning to the lyric sheet, Shai Hulud impresses me with the depth and breadth of its inspirations and influences. Without coming across as cartoonily literary, the band draws on the work of Frank Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien, composing almost operatic metal concept album-level lyrics while chalenging Johnny-come-lately bandwagon also rans. Truth be told, the album's design screams fantasy metal, but instead, Shai Hulud sheds light on what smart metal or intelligent hardcore might be. The band is aggressive without being assholes. Melodic without being mellow. Clever without being cloying. There is no inconsistency in terms of intensity song to song, and as far as this batch of reviews goes, Shai Hulud's new record is the most consistent, complex, and crucial record I've recently received. Given the band's brand of metallic hardcore and shouted singing, it's somewhat of a challenge to differentiate songs from one another, but the entire record holds together, the overall sound is impressively massive, and the words are worth watching. Even the end notes and thank you list highlights the band's heart, honor, and humor. Think Backstabbers Inc. with the sense of humor and politics of Propagandhi. Or Dillinger Four collaborating with Napalm Death. This is an excellent record that proves aggressive rock doesn't need to be cartoony or overly corrosive. Revelation Records, P.O. Box 5232, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.
Silverstein "When Broken Is Easily Fixed"
After a surprisingly screamo opening to the first song, "Smashed into Pieces," this south Ontario, Canada, five piece falls into a pleasantly aggressive melodic style that combines hardcore and emo. While the strained screamo parts tend to interrupt the effectively assertive melodic basis of the band's songwriting, the overall effect works surprisingly well. I just wish vocalist Shane Told could carry an angry, aggro line without resorting to all-out shouting. In fact, even in the second song, "Red Light Pledge," the guttural interruptions undermine what is otherwise a forceful emotional song. The band shows a sensitive side further with the introduction of strings under a plaintive spoke-word presentation. Do bands feel a need to break down into illegibility in order to claim hardcore credibility? The band adds a subtle nod to heavy metal fret work with the guitar work under the chorus to "Giving Up" -- a nice variation that's not too over the top until another screamo section. Not to continue the song by song, but in general, were Silverstein to find another mode of distraught or slightly distorted vocal delivery, their songs would really shine. Don't shy from your more sensitive side regardless of your metal and hardcore influences. As a side note, Victory's press sheet makes a point to mention that the band took its name from children's book author -- and countercultural freak -- Shel Silverstein. It's an interesting bit of trivia, but the influence doesn't carry across on the CD itself. Silverstein possesses neither the writer's innocent bliss a la Where the Sidewalk Ends nor his more adult-oriented hippie hullaballoo such as "Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball," opting instead for forcefully forlorn songs about love and loss. Regardless, Silverstein does provide a promising brand of emotional hardcore that wins at its most melodic and only suffers slightly when the band lapses into lazy yelling. "The Weak and the Wounded" stands out as a piece with potential, and if the band considered a more herky-jerky angular approach to its song structure, it might not need the back-and-forth screamo to maintain its energy and direction. A closing tip of the Media Diet hat to Martin Wittfooth, whose artwork adds a lot to the overall packaging. Victory Records, 346 N. Justine St. #504, Chicago, IL 60607.
Digesting the Daily XV
Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.
Chicago Poet Is a Music Scene Staple
Bard got his start traveling with Guided By Voices and now introduces bands at clubs all over the city
(May 21, 2003)
An Alternative to Corporate Insensitivity
NU alumna, Evanston resident Marci Koblenz founds nonprofit organization for Companies That Care
(May 22, 2003)
The Best Medicine
All joking aside, Laff-In, a senior citizen comedy troupe, uses humor to build relationships, heal painful pasts
(May 23, 2003)
If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.
Chicago Poet Is a Music Scene Staple
Bard got his start traveling with Guided By Voices and now introduces bands at clubs all over the city
(May 21, 2003)
An Alternative to Corporate Insensitivity
NU alumna, Evanston resident Marci Koblenz founds nonprofit organization for Companies That Care
(May 22, 2003)
The Best Medicine
All joking aside, Laff-In, a senior citizen comedy troupe, uses humor to build relationships, heal painful pasts
(May 23, 2003)
If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.
Corollary: Magazine Me XXXV
Since October 2002, Folio magazine has been running a column called "A Great One Remembered" that recalls long-lost magazines. To date they've looked at
Mobster Times
Avant Garde
7 Days
Look
Saturday Review
Southern Magazine
Casket and Sunnyside
Scanlan's Monthly
True
It's one of my favorite parts of the magazine.
It's one of my favorite parts of the magazine.
NetWork VII
PowerMingle, a second-string online network for business people, has introduce a new service: TravelMatch.
Personally, I think I'd rather just search for folks in the places I'm going to go to -- instead of having random matches made based on short-term same time-same place proximity -- but it's an intriguing idea. This can be used to find locals, but it can also be used to connect with other business travelers who happen to be in the same location you are.
Next time you travel to another city, Powermingle's TravelMatch service will introduce you to other professionals who live there or who are passing through at the same time as you.
Personally, I think I'd rather just search for folks in the places I'm going to go to -- instead of having random matches made based on short-term same time-same place proximity -- but it's an intriguing idea. This can be used to find locals, but it can also be used to connect with other business travelers who happen to be in the same location you are.
Hiking History IV
It's rare that a Web site makes me want to pack a bag, hop on a plane or train, and actually go somewhere to explore the site, well, on site. But Bridges and Tunnels of Allegheny County and Pittsburgh, PA and Built St. Louis inspire me to do just that. The sites don't have all of the elements of what I've been thinking about as mapblogging, but they're close.
Bridges and Tunnels lets you sort the resources by location and use, and includes a good amount of engineering and construction terminology and information. Built St. Louis is "dedicated to the historic architecture" of that city, featuring crumbling landmarks, revitalized structures, lost buildings, and architectural anachronisms. The site also offers neighborhood-based tours of various structures, such as those on the north side, bringing us even closer to mapblogging.
Hiptop in hand, hit the streets!
Thanks to Metafilter.
Bridges and Tunnels lets you sort the resources by location and use, and includes a good amount of engineering and construction terminology and information. Built St. Louis is "dedicated to the historic architecture" of that city, featuring crumbling landmarks, revitalized structures, lost buildings, and architectural anachronisms. The site also offers neighborhood-based tours of various structures, such as those on the north side, bringing us even closer to mapblogging.
Hiptop in hand, hit the streets!
Thanks to Metafilter.
Magazine Me XXXV
The Chicago Tribune published today a collectively written list of what they consider the 50 best magazines. I was somewhat saddened that one of my favorite magazines -- Fast Company, natch -- didn't make the cut, but it was nice to see some lesser knowns such as Mojo, Reason, Dwell, Metropolis, and Trains get their due.
Jessa Crispin comments on the roundup, as does The Minor Fall, the Major Lift. Both responses beg the question: What's on your list of favorite magazines? Rather than decry other folks' best-of lists, make your own.
In fact, let's do just that. I'll noodle some on my favorite mags, but, hey, Media Dieticians, what are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
Thanks to I Want Media.
Jessa Crispin comments on the roundup, as does The Minor Fall, the Major Lift. Both responses beg the question: What's on your list of favorite magazines? Rather than decry other folks' best-of lists, make your own.
In fact, let's do just that. I'll noodle some on my favorite mags, but, hey, Media Dieticians, what are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
Thanks to I Want Media.
Corollary: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
I'm quoted in a piece by Mark Glaser in Online Journalism Review today.
From the In Box: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
I was interested in your mention of the real-time note taking at conferences. Two thoughts: One is that you should get paid for this -- by the conference if by no one else. The second is that legal recorders can probably do this as well for anyone who is interested -- they take basically real-time notes of trial proceedings. -- Owen Linderholm
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Postlude: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
I'm not going to do too much in the way of sensemaking in the aftermath of the Weblog Business Strategies conference because I don't want to take the time to reread all of my reports, identify consistent threads, or make conclusions. But I do have some post-conference extemporizing to do.
For the most part, I'm struck by the parallels between the current conversation about blogs and discussions about the state of zinemaking in the mid-'90s. When the mainstream media latched onto zine culture in 1994 and 1995, many of the same questions people are asking about blogs came up in the grassroots print media community. What's a zine? Is it "zine" or "'zine"? (I was one person who thought that the apostrophe wasn't necessary and overly relegated zines to second-class status in relation to magazines. Silly me.) Are zinemakers journalists? Will zines overtake or create a valid media space parallel to magazines?
We didn't answer those questions about zines, and I'm not sure we'll ever answer them about blogs. You see, zines have carried on. The mainstream attention faded, and zines fell back into their quaint little underground. That's not a bad thing. And in many ways, blogs are the new zines. Or e-zines. The parallels are there. While I think blogs have a better chance of walking hand in hand with other widespread forms of Web publishing, communication, and culture, I am bored to tears by questions like "What's a blog?" and "Are bloggers journalists?" (I'm also slightly amused by folks who insist on calling them Weblogs instead of blogs. Tool preference aside, blogs are native to the Web. So why say "Web"? 'Course, I also argued against the term "e-zine," so there we go.)
The subtle difference between Jason Shellen's question -- "Does anyone want us to tell you what a blog is?" -- and Dave Winer's refinement -- "Does anyone care what a blog is?" -- is an important distinction but, in the end, is somewhat moot. Defining and categorizing often leads to restriction and gradual atrophy. In the zine world 10 years ago, we had discussions about reviewzines, perzines, e-zines, megazines, metazines and the like. If you have ads in your zine, have you sold out? Who cares? Blogs already have increasingly limiting strictures imposed on them -- their linear, reverse chronological order, for two -- and I think it's less important to ask what a blog is than it is to ask what you do with your blog.
That said, I think that there's one important difference between the current state of blogging and the 1994-stylee state of zinemaking. In the zine scene, we saw a handful of "A-list" zinemakers emerge as more professional writers and editors -- and published book authors -- because of their self-publishing. Seth Friedman, Chip Rowe, Pagan Kennedy, and others got book deals because of their zines. Zinemakers got mersh journalism jobs because of the skills they honed in grassroots media work. However, while we saw a lot of mainstream media attention paid to zines -- "Isn't that cute? The kids are making little magazines!" -- we did not see professional journalists dipping their toes into the zine world. The talent flow was one way.
In blogging, the talent flow is two way, and I think some people feel threatened by that. Just like the zinemakers of a decade ago, some bloggers may be able to better themselves professionally because of their blogging. In addition, mainstream journalists and other professionals see value in participating in the blogosphere themselves. In the zine scene, we saw a lot of wannabe, second-wave zinemakers who started wading in the DIY waters because of mainstream media coverage, but we did not see the professionals wetting their toes. We groused about the "less pure" zines that were made by folks who started self-publishing because they wanted to do a zine -- rather than because they had something important they needed to say -- just as that topic comes up in the blogosphere (and in online communities and in...).
But we didn't have to contend with mainstream media makers and business people playing in our sandbox. Here, we have the opportunity to be what Carl Steadman calls microstars. Just as folks do in indie rock, minicomics, and other creative subcultures. And I think some of us feel threatened by big-name media makers and business people elbowing their way into our comfortable little commune. Likewise, we bristle because, as "pioneers," we feel that they're co-opting what we do -- or doing something that's less pure, idealistic, or whatever. That's because there are business opportunities in blogs. There aren't in zines.
Tony Perkins is not the anti-Christ. Regardless of whether he's using the term "blog" correctly -- when AlwaysOn launched, everything was a blog: articles, comments, discussion forum posts -- what he's doing is laudable and has promise. It's even bringing increased attention to our "more pure" blogging. I'm not sure whether folks get uppity because he is commercializing an aspect of blogging... or because reporters call him for blog-related interviews instead of our A-list microstars... but in the end, while AlwaysOn is not in and of itself a blog, part of AlwaysOn is a blog. And I think Perkins would be wise to up the ante on that front. (Clue: Give every AlwaysOn member their own personal, dedicated blog. Cull the best and brightest entries and give them front-page play. Take a page from Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds playbook. Clue two: Give participants ownership of what they write. Only that way will you attract the bloggers and members you really want.)
Debate is healthy. But let's not let it lead to inaction. Or factionalization. I think mainstream media and business attention is a good thing for blogging, bloggers, and blogs. I think it's good that Perkins is trying to wrap his head around it. (Although we had him at a bit of a disadvantage yesterday, and I don't think he needed to submit to Winer so quickly.) Instead of niching blogs as something that need to be created by an individual, not edited, and not commercial, lets look at ways blogging can fit into other aspects of Web publishing and Net-based communication. Because it can.
Zines couldn't.
For the most part, I'm struck by the parallels between the current conversation about blogs and discussions about the state of zinemaking in the mid-'90s. When the mainstream media latched onto zine culture in 1994 and 1995, many of the same questions people are asking about blogs came up in the grassroots print media community. What's a zine? Is it "zine" or "'zine"? (I was one person who thought that the apostrophe wasn't necessary and overly relegated zines to second-class status in relation to magazines. Silly me.) Are zinemakers journalists? Will zines overtake or create a valid media space parallel to magazines?
We didn't answer those questions about zines, and I'm not sure we'll ever answer them about blogs. You see, zines have carried on. The mainstream attention faded, and zines fell back into their quaint little underground. That's not a bad thing. And in many ways, blogs are the new zines. Or e-zines. The parallels are there. While I think blogs have a better chance of walking hand in hand with other widespread forms of Web publishing, communication, and culture, I am bored to tears by questions like "What's a blog?" and "Are bloggers journalists?" (I'm also slightly amused by folks who insist on calling them Weblogs instead of blogs. Tool preference aside, blogs are native to the Web. So why say "Web"? 'Course, I also argued against the term "e-zine," so there we go.)
The subtle difference between Jason Shellen's question -- "Does anyone want us to tell you what a blog is?" -- and Dave Winer's refinement -- "Does anyone care what a blog is?" -- is an important distinction but, in the end, is somewhat moot. Defining and categorizing often leads to restriction and gradual atrophy. In the zine world 10 years ago, we had discussions about reviewzines, perzines, e-zines, megazines, metazines and the like. If you have ads in your zine, have you sold out? Who cares? Blogs already have increasingly limiting strictures imposed on them -- their linear, reverse chronological order, for two -- and I think it's less important to ask what a blog is than it is to ask what you do with your blog.
That said, I think that there's one important difference between the current state of blogging and the 1994-stylee state of zinemaking. In the zine scene, we saw a handful of "A-list" zinemakers emerge as more professional writers and editors -- and published book authors -- because of their self-publishing. Seth Friedman, Chip Rowe, Pagan Kennedy, and others got book deals because of their zines. Zinemakers got mersh journalism jobs because of the skills they honed in grassroots media work. However, while we saw a lot of mainstream media attention paid to zines -- "Isn't that cute? The kids are making little magazines!" -- we did not see professional journalists dipping their toes into the zine world. The talent flow was one way.
In blogging, the talent flow is two way, and I think some people feel threatened by that. Just like the zinemakers of a decade ago, some bloggers may be able to better themselves professionally because of their blogging. In addition, mainstream journalists and other professionals see value in participating in the blogosphere themselves. In the zine scene, we saw a lot of wannabe, second-wave zinemakers who started wading in the DIY waters because of mainstream media coverage, but we did not see the professionals wetting their toes. We groused about the "less pure" zines that were made by folks who started self-publishing because they wanted to do a zine -- rather than because they had something important they needed to say -- just as that topic comes up in the blogosphere (and in online communities and in...).
But we didn't have to contend with mainstream media makers and business people playing in our sandbox. Here, we have the opportunity to be what Carl Steadman calls microstars. Just as folks do in indie rock, minicomics, and other creative subcultures. And I think some of us feel threatened by big-name media makers and business people elbowing their way into our comfortable little commune. Likewise, we bristle because, as "pioneers," we feel that they're co-opting what we do -- or doing something that's less pure, idealistic, or whatever. That's because there are business opportunities in blogs. There aren't in zines.
Tony Perkins is not the anti-Christ. Regardless of whether he's using the term "blog" correctly -- when AlwaysOn launched, everything was a blog: articles, comments, discussion forum posts -- what he's doing is laudable and has promise. It's even bringing increased attention to our "more pure" blogging. I'm not sure whether folks get uppity because he is commercializing an aspect of blogging... or because reporters call him for blog-related interviews instead of our A-list microstars... but in the end, while AlwaysOn is not in and of itself a blog, part of AlwaysOn is a blog. And I think Perkins would be wise to up the ante on that front. (Clue: Give every AlwaysOn member their own personal, dedicated blog. Cull the best and brightest entries and give them front-page play. Take a page from Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds playbook. Clue two: Give participants ownership of what they write. Only that way will you attract the bloggers and members you really want.)
Debate is healthy. But let's not let it lead to inaction. Or factionalization. I think mainstream media and business attention is a good thing for blogging, bloggers, and blogs. I think it's good that Perkins is trying to wrap his head around it. (Although we had him at a bit of a disadvantage yesterday, and I don't think he needed to submit to Winer so quickly.) Instead of niching blogs as something that need to be created by an individual, not edited, and not commercial, lets look at ways blogging can fit into other aspects of Web publishing and Net-based communication. Because it can.
Zines couldn't.
From the In Box: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Saw your blog on the Jupiter blogging conference and I was blown away. I was there covering it for Econtent Magazine and took copious notes for two days when all I needed to do was go to your blog. Who knew?
What I want to know is how you were able to capture the exact content word for word? What did you use for a tool?
I take notes and record all my interviews. My goal has always been to tape and than translate the transcription into text and avoid the notes backup which interferes with my ability to listen and to carry on a coherent train of thought during the interview. Unfortunately, I've never been able to find decent speech recognition software to achieve this goal. They all require training, which I can do for myself but not for every different interview subject.
You seem to have found a way to capture the text verbatim. I know of no one who can type with this type of accuracy so I'm assuming you have a tool to capture and translate text on the fly. If you do, I would be grateful if you would share your toolset with me. -- Ron Miller
I wish I could help! It's just that I type really, really fast. So fast, in fact, that I'm able to capture near-verbatim, real-time transcripts of conference sessions and talks. I call this confblogging, and my approach -- the almost-full transcription method -- resulted from some confblogging I did at South by Southwest earlier this year. I didn't want to compete with Cory Doctorow's more impressionistic, outline-oriented approach to note taking, and I decided to err on the side of more rather than less. People seem to appreciate it.
Anil Dash mentioned something interesting at the Weblog Business Strategies conference. There were a lot of people blogging the event, and in addition to people commenting on the conference as the days went on, folks such as Denise Howell and Donna Wentworth were also capturing relatively complete records of the proceedings. Anil said that for the most part, Denise and I were neck to neck in the earlier portions of presentations and panels -- and that as talks progressed, it was intriguing to see where our attentions waxed and waned. I haven't compared our reports, but for a more complete picture of what went down, you might want to read Media Diet, Denise, and Donna in parallel. My guess is that together, we produced an almost-verbatim record of the event.
While I have no idea how fast I type, even, I'm quite enamored by the idea of confblogging. It creates a valuable archive of speeches and conversations that would be lost otherwise, and it seems to provide a valuable service to people who couldn't make it to a conference. I received several emails from people who were following the event from afar solely by refreshing their page view of Media Diet. That's pretty darn cool. And it's a nice bit of egoboo for this B-list blogger.
Media Dieticians might also be interested in my confblog of Fast Company's recent RealTime gathering.
What I want to know is how you were able to capture the exact content word for word? What did you use for a tool?
I take notes and record all my interviews. My goal has always been to tape and than translate the transcription into text and avoid the notes backup which interferes with my ability to listen and to carry on a coherent train of thought during the interview. Unfortunately, I've never been able to find decent speech recognition software to achieve this goal. They all require training, which I can do for myself but not for every different interview subject.
You seem to have found a way to capture the text verbatim. I know of no one who can type with this type of accuracy so I'm assuming you have a tool to capture and translate text on the fly. If you do, I would be grateful if you would share your toolset with me. -- Ron Miller
I wish I could help! It's just that I type really, really fast. So fast, in fact, that I'm able to capture near-verbatim, real-time transcripts of conference sessions and talks. I call this confblogging, and my approach -- the almost-full transcription method -- resulted from some confblogging I did at South by Southwest earlier this year. I didn't want to compete with Cory Doctorow's more impressionistic, outline-oriented approach to note taking, and I decided to err on the side of more rather than less. People seem to appreciate it.
Anil Dash mentioned something interesting at the Weblog Business Strategies conference. There were a lot of people blogging the event, and in addition to people commenting on the conference as the days went on, folks such as Denise Howell and Donna Wentworth were also capturing relatively complete records of the proceedings. Anil said that for the most part, Denise and I were neck to neck in the earlier portions of presentations and panels -- and that as talks progressed, it was intriguing to see where our attentions waxed and waned. I haven't compared our reports, but for a more complete picture of what went down, you might want to read Media Diet, Denise, and Donna in parallel. My guess is that together, we produced an almost-verbatim record of the event.
While I have no idea how fast I type, even, I'm quite enamored by the idea of confblogging. It creates a valuable archive of speeches and conversations that would be lost otherwise, and it seems to provide a valuable service to people who couldn't make it to a conference. I received several emails from people who were following the event from afar solely by refreshing their page view of Media Diet. That's pretty darn cool. And it's a nice bit of egoboo for this B-list blogger.
Media Dieticians might also be interested in my confblog of Fast Company's recent RealTime gathering.
The Best of the Web IV
The winners of the 2003 Webby Awards have been announced. Full disclosure: I was a nominating judge for the community category. You can read a transcript of Howard Rheingold's speech online, as well as all of the winners' acceptance speeches. Congratulations and kudos to all involved!
Event-O-Dex LXI
Thursday, June 12: Handstand Command showcase featuring Big Digits, Plunge into Death, Cathy Cathodic, and Travers gets its dance on at the Choppin' Block in Boston.
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XVII
Christopher Lydon: Live Blogging
I've been in journalism since college. I worked through the '70s working for the New York Times covering politics. In the '80s I worked in public television. And in the '90s I worked on the smartest radio show called the Connection, What I want to talk about today is how to use blogs to create a new kind of conversation. I also want you to think of me as a low-tech Dave Winer. I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy. He's tremendously distressed about it. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm not a technologist. I'm a citizen. And I speak with a lot of misgivings about where we're at and how we talk to each other.
I talked to Dave about the perfect caller. First she called herself Crystal from Cambridge. Then it was Rose from Roslindale. Finally she settled on Amber from Boston. We always knew she was the same person and she took on all of our most powerful guests. I told our staff I wanted to find her. She made an enormous mark. Dave said that's the ideal blogger. I said that's the ideal caller. My mission in our new radio Internet blog incarnation is to give the Ambers of the world not just a place to vent but to speak her mind. She found on our program a place she could be as big as she was.
How do we decide on a blog live conversation with the human voice? I think that's desperately missing in Blogville. The vox humana is an extreme value add in this world. This world needs them in much greater volume, in a much more integrated space, and much more together.
Two general observations. One, I've been in media too damn long. I served for 10 years at the New York Times. This moment, the downfall of Howard Raines and Gerald Boyd is one of the tipping points of my life. Broadly, it's part of the failure of legitimacy and authority in this country. I don't worship the New York Times, but it is the best newspaper in this country. I think it's in total jeopardy. Like a lot of these defining moments and great events, we have no idea what the consequences will be, but it tells us where we've been. The collapse of the New York Times thing is the result of 15 years of electronic media gathering steam. If you were a martian coming to the United States and someone said have you got a problem in your media today, I would say hell yes!
Is it the fact that someone's calling in high? No. Is it unchecked editing? No. Is it affirmative action? No. We just had a war that was started without discussion and during which everything they told us was wrong. That to my mind is a genuine media crisis. We were not talking about what we were doing. This country doesn’t know shit about the world. The British knew about the world, Yet we're implicated way way way beyond our knowledge. To me, Jaysn Blair is a tiny little individual around which we've decided to thrash out the fact that we don’t believe what we hear any more.
There's also a problem around the New York Times, and that's the encroachment of electronic media. It was things like Jim Romenesko's media gossip Poynter page that kept the issue alive. It partook of a fundamental discovery we've all made that this is not the best way to share information about the world. When we can connect with a blogger in Iraq. When we can interact with someone in Chad or learn about what's really going on in Kashmere, we have many better ways than the New York Times to learn about the world. The New York Times doesn't want us to know this.
My dream pre-blog was to create a radio show where you had very few people. In Boston, every Pakistani is emailing home. Everyone from all over the place is in touch with what’s really happening all around the world. Get them involved in a radio show in which they bring in what they learn on the Web and broadcast it out on the radio as well as on the Web. It's a probing conversation about what's going on. What if we had blogger intelligence making its own New York Times every day? We could put together a two-hour radio show tomorrow that's just as interesting and just as relevant as the New York Times. The New York Times does not have a culture of candor. It never did. Another problem is this whole deregulation thing. I can't believe the brass of the FCC. They're basically saying that they're stacking the deck. This is a tipping point. We are being induced to shake off the phony authority of the old media. I wrote for the New York Times for 10 years and I misquoted people. I'm sorry about thatt. I've been misquoted in the New York Times. For people to be shocked by this now is a little amusing.
Lest you think I'm just a total Winer head or have totally fallen into Blog City, there are a lot of things I don't feel at home about yet. It's too techy for me. There's too much quoting and not enough writing. It's a little high-sticking, hip-shooting, knee-jerk stuff. There's also a lot of right-wing ideological response. They haven't even read what I wrote. I'm envious of the tech stuff. I wish I could understand it better. I go to Winer's thing every week, and I feel like a martian. I don't even know what RSS stands for.
The good thing about the blog world is that it's tremendously democratic. To Tony's credit, a blog and a superblog is totally differently. An ant, that's a blog. An ant colony, that's a superblog. It's wildly open to development. How do we aggregate that talent, that diversity of views, that energy, without sitting on it. How do we liberate it but also share it? We're in the process of designing in a university setting a radio program that would draw on blog smarts. How should we define ourselves? What's the subject of the conversation? What time of day would get the bloggers' attention? Will the techies listen when the poets are talking? Will the poets listen when the techies are talking?
The Connection was about everything. That was its glory. We did books. We did music. People called. It was a program of absolutely unrestricted range of subject. It had high enthusiasm. It had what I came to understand was an Emersonian dimension. 150 years later, we've still got the din of mourners and polemicists in our world.
How do you make it purely international? I want our new program to do something about the awful alienation in this country. We are now a global culture. SARS, poverty, medicine, security, the habitat, the Internet, everything we find interesting relates to every place right now. But the Bush administration is trying to get everybody in the world back behind the police line. We need to treat everyone as though we're part of the same mind, same species, same desires. Let's operate in a one world dimension.
Christopher Lydon is a radio host for WGBH and public radio international. He is the host of "The Whole Wide World," a wide-ranging radio conversation decoding the globalization of power, culture, and identity.
I've been in journalism since college. I worked through the '70s working for the New York Times covering politics. In the '80s I worked in public television. And in the '90s I worked on the smartest radio show called the Connection, What I want to talk about today is how to use blogs to create a new kind of conversation. I also want you to think of me as a low-tech Dave Winer. I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy. He's tremendously distressed about it. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm not a technologist. I'm a citizen. And I speak with a lot of misgivings about where we're at and how we talk to each other.
I talked to Dave about the perfect caller. First she called herself Crystal from Cambridge. Then it was Rose from Roslindale. Finally she settled on Amber from Boston. We always knew she was the same person and she took on all of our most powerful guests. I told our staff I wanted to find her. She made an enormous mark. Dave said that's the ideal blogger. I said that's the ideal caller. My mission in our new radio Internet blog incarnation is to give the Ambers of the world not just a place to vent but to speak her mind. She found on our program a place she could be as big as she was.
How do we decide on a blog live conversation with the human voice? I think that's desperately missing in Blogville. The vox humana is an extreme value add in this world. This world needs them in much greater volume, in a much more integrated space, and much more together.
Two general observations. One, I've been in media too damn long. I served for 10 years at the New York Times. This moment, the downfall of Howard Raines and Gerald Boyd is one of the tipping points of my life. Broadly, it's part of the failure of legitimacy and authority in this country. I don't worship the New York Times, but it is the best newspaper in this country. I think it's in total jeopardy. Like a lot of these defining moments and great events, we have no idea what the consequences will be, but it tells us where we've been. The collapse of the New York Times thing is the result of 15 years of electronic media gathering steam. If you were a martian coming to the United States and someone said have you got a problem in your media today, I would say hell yes!
Is it the fact that someone's calling in high? No. Is it unchecked editing? No. Is it affirmative action? No. We just had a war that was started without discussion and during which everything they told us was wrong. That to my mind is a genuine media crisis. We were not talking about what we were doing. This country doesn’t know shit about the world. The British knew about the world, Yet we're implicated way way way beyond our knowledge. To me, Jaysn Blair is a tiny little individual around which we've decided to thrash out the fact that we don’t believe what we hear any more.
There's also a problem around the New York Times, and that's the encroachment of electronic media. It was things like Jim Romenesko's media gossip Poynter page that kept the issue alive. It partook of a fundamental discovery we've all made that this is not the best way to share information about the world. When we can connect with a blogger in Iraq. When we can interact with someone in Chad or learn about what's really going on in Kashmere, we have many better ways than the New York Times to learn about the world. The New York Times doesn't want us to know this.
My dream pre-blog was to create a radio show where you had very few people. In Boston, every Pakistani is emailing home. Everyone from all over the place is in touch with what’s really happening all around the world. Get them involved in a radio show in which they bring in what they learn on the Web and broadcast it out on the radio as well as on the Web. It's a probing conversation about what's going on. What if we had blogger intelligence making its own New York Times every day? We could put together a two-hour radio show tomorrow that's just as interesting and just as relevant as the New York Times. The New York Times does not have a culture of candor. It never did. Another problem is this whole deregulation thing. I can't believe the brass of the FCC. They're basically saying that they're stacking the deck. This is a tipping point. We are being induced to shake off the phony authority of the old media. I wrote for the New York Times for 10 years and I misquoted people. I'm sorry about thatt. I've been misquoted in the New York Times. For people to be shocked by this now is a little amusing.
Lest you think I'm just a total Winer head or have totally fallen into Blog City, there are a lot of things I don't feel at home about yet. It's too techy for me. There's too much quoting and not enough writing. It's a little high-sticking, hip-shooting, knee-jerk stuff. There's also a lot of right-wing ideological response. They haven't even read what I wrote. I'm envious of the tech stuff. I wish I could understand it better. I go to Winer's thing every week, and I feel like a martian. I don't even know what RSS stands for.
The good thing about the blog world is that it's tremendously democratic. To Tony's credit, a blog and a superblog is totally differently. An ant, that's a blog. An ant colony, that's a superblog. It's wildly open to development. How do we aggregate that talent, that diversity of views, that energy, without sitting on it. How do we liberate it but also share it? We're in the process of designing in a university setting a radio program that would draw on blog smarts. How should we define ourselves? What's the subject of the conversation? What time of day would get the bloggers' attention? Will the techies listen when the poets are talking? Will the poets listen when the techies are talking?
The Connection was about everything. That was its glory. We did books. We did music. People called. It was a program of absolutely unrestricted range of subject. It had high enthusiasm. It had what I came to understand was an Emersonian dimension. 150 years later, we've still got the din of mourners and polemicists in our world.
How do you make it purely international? I want our new program to do something about the awful alienation in this country. We are now a global culture. SARS, poverty, medicine, security, the habitat, the Internet, everything we find interesting relates to every place right now. But the Bush administration is trying to get everybody in the world back behind the police line. We need to treat everyone as though we're part of the same mind, same species, same desires. Let's operate in a one world dimension.
From the In Box: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Just wanted to let you know that I was checking out your site, and I appreciated your coverage of the blog conference. -- Jason McCabe Calacanis
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XVI
Ireland, Perry, Regan, Roell, Seitz, and Windley: Using Weblogs in Large IT Organizations
Philip Windley: I got into Weblogging when I was CIO for the state of Utah. I'm no longer in a large IT organization, but that's where I got my start.
Paul Perry: I'm at Verizon currently in IT but working to deploy a WiFi network in Manhattan. I was looking for the intersection between IT and community. I knew I needed to leverage the rest of the IT community in order to get a summary every day. I started to use Traction software to see the community of people who would inform me of what’s going on.
Rock Regan: I'm the CIO for the state of Connecticut. I'm relatively new to blogging and got started through Phil. A month ago we had 1200 employees. June 1 we had 900 employees. We're going through a lot of budget churn and people churn, and I'm looking for ways to capture knowledge. We support 65 agencies in the state. I became pretty excited as I talked to Phil, and I've been looking around internally within the organization. How can we capture information, foster good ideas, act on those ideas, and drive out solutions and cost.
Tim Ireland: I came into blogs from a search engine optimization and marketing perspective but quickly realized they can do much more. I just got my first British MP on a blog, and I hope to get some more.
Martin Roell: For most Americans it's difficult to pronounce my name. That's fine. I was talking to Halley Suitt last evening. She saw my name tag and it didn't match my email. She thought I was someone quite different, and it was quite fun. I run a German language blog about e-business strategy. That's what I did until two months ago when Weblogs started to become popular in Europe. So I started doing some research. I can tell you a little about how companies see Weblogs in Europe
Bill Seitz: Within the internal enterprise process, the core unit is the team. And these new tools should be used to maintain a team voice and a shared vision of what you're trying to accomplish. An individual voice is dispersive to that process. And a top-down knowledge management approach stifles that team communication,. The tools have to be what the team is going to use. It's all about the process of generating insights. That generates more context and changes the context. Using a Wiki-based framework is better than a blogging approach, but that's not crucial. All these things increase transparency, and that raises some problems. What is perceived as a crisis is often the end of an illusion. Weblogs can accelerate that process.
Windley: You have used blogs in your organization. What were your goals? What were your tools? When I was CIO of Utah, I bought 100 licenses to Radio and offered them for use. Maybe 10-15 are till actively blogging.
Perry: I knew that a lot of emails were going around about what was going on in the industry. Sometimes I was in those threads. Sometimes I was not. The problem with cc lists is that you have to decide if the email is spam or if you've hit the right audience. I needed to find a way in which I would be fully informed but I didn't have to decide who to inform. Another problem with email is that it's gone. I didn't want to have to go into everyone's email to see what had been read or not. I also needed the right technical people to highlight what I thought was important and what they thought I needed to see. I looked at a number of tools, and Traction seemed to do what I needed to do. I needed to fit it into the workflow. Everyone lives out of their email in box. You can host server side, but you can notify people. When they're notified it's a digest. I started to seed it, and I knew from previous email threads who was always active. There's always a core, chatting. I sat them down and showed them how to use the tool. I also made sure I had upper management involved.
Regan: I'm the guy who makes the decision what we can and what we can't buy. But I don't want to shove anything down anyone's throat. One of the biggest challenges I had was with our middle management. Knowledge is power. We're making a lot of decisions with folks who don't really make those decisions. I don't just want our heads down, I want to look to the horizon. I was looking for ways we could start looking at things we have to discuss. We started looking at it in the process we call our architecture review boards. We've got probably 90 people using a blog to discuss the architecture of our organization. I have a liaison who deals with the 65 agencies, not just technical agencies but the business folks. It really started in my office. I'm not going to claim that I'm good yet, but I'm certainly open to ideas. How can we use this? How can this make your job better? For me, it's a critical function that's going to be instrumental in our survival. A 22% staff reduction in the last two months. We've got to do things differently. Change is good. One of the mantras we get in government is that I'm all for progress as long as there's no change. That's not going to cut it.
Ireland: Bloggerheads is just me. But I would like to touch on the political issue. MPs are more apt to publish because they can say whatever the hell they like. It's important that people see what they have to say. They're too busy to scratch themselves, really. And it's hard to take government documents and make sense of them. But if you're able to access them through your elected representative, you can bring the process to life. We need a hell of lot more doing it for it to work.
Roell: You said you would use Weblogs in project management. Have you already tried that?
Regan: It's the way we're aggregating some of the topics people post. We're doing it in a crude way, but we're learning as we go.
Windley: People are posting personal blogs, but then you're moving them to functional aggregations?
Regan: Yes.
Windley: Blogs have a certain culture to them. Blogs require -- more than inspire, they require a culture of candor. They require a culture of abundance. There's also a little bit of risk-taking involved. I'd like to ask the panel to comment on cultural issues.
Seitz: There's two big dimensions. Shock and awe for some people. One is the transparency and candor aspect. That can raise sore points with people. It also can force some feedback to things. People identify themselves as victims and slaves to their environments. Blogs empower them to have a voice, but it also gives them responsibility. The other issue is sort of the hierarchical issue of information flowing around bosses. What happens when a very senior person discovers something on the intranet and it's bad news. How do they react to it. Who do they involve? Senior managers need to be aware of the leverage that they carry. What could seem to be an informal conversation could have a lot of impact. Managers should maybe not react to what they read. Don't just jump in and start doing everything yourself when you discover a problem.
Ireland: The only reason to run it as an intranet rather than something more public is to encourage free speech.
Seitz: Part of that indicates that things are organized poorly. Flame wars are symptoms of a deeper organizational problem.
Ireland: There could even be a wonderful idea down in production.
Roell: Do you think the management blogs will stifle other blogs? Everyone will read a CEO's blog. If a CEO points to someone, do you think that that imbalance brings a danger?
Ireland: Real talent will rise to the top. Companies have reached a size where they're depending on someone and may never even meet that person. If problems are solved in a public way it can only help the corporate memory. The advantages far outweigh any fear of the dangers of the current hierarchy.
Windley: Can any of you point to experiences -- either good or bad -- in terms of blogs and the culture of the organization.
Perry: Even very technical people who were aware of blogs didn't want to post at all until they saw other people post. I created a private space for them to post in their own private journal. As soon as they were ready to open it up to the project, they could. It was important to post and make mistakes. You need to offer a ramp that is shielded and private. I don't see any additional candor. The organization size is very large. Verizon IT is 10,000 people. It's not like we can all share and have enough interaction person to person. With an organization that large, you are open to some misunderstandings if you don't offer more context first. We might establish trust over a call. That trust network develops as it always has.
Seitz: Having an environment in which ideas can be related to each other can be helpful in terms of managing upward. Things that get packaged in small units right next to each other can be useful. It can help people fill in the blanks. A little bit of formality allows that to happen. When everything happens through email and instant messaging, everything just flows past.
Regan: We're beginning to see some great discussion among people who don't communicate well together. We've had some discussions recently to make some differences in core technologies that will allow groups that don't communicate well know what the other groups are doing. You've got to open up the opportunity for people to know what's going on in those different functional areas.
Windley: Let's talk about knowledge management. How important is that to you? Are you using any other knowledge management tools beyond Weblogs?
Perry: I could never buy, understand, or know what knowledge management was. But I needed to hook people up. For me, knowledge management is the ability to go back in and find the best summary you can. Another aspect of knowledge management is tagging a story with a category. At minimum, it's easy to sort projects.
Roell: Are you using a centralized taxonomy to categorize posts?
Perry: You have to start with a taxonomy which I just put in there. If it's harder to create a project, people just start a category. With our tool you can just start a new term.
Ireland: Another aspect is accessibility. A lot of times a report is sent out and no one reads the damn thing. If the report is written in a voice, it might reach more of the people it needs to go to -- and people it wasn't even intended for.
Perry: Distributing across the group so it's in the repository and can be summarized -- that becomes knowledge.
Tim Ireland is founder of Bloggerheads, Paul Perry is a director for Verizon Communications, Rock Regan works as CIO for the state of Connecticut's department of information technology, Martin Röell is an independent e-business consultant, Bill Seitz runs Wikilogs.com, and Phillip J. Windley is former CIO of Utah and founder of the Windley Group. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
Philip Windley: I got into Weblogging when I was CIO for the state of Utah. I'm no longer in a large IT organization, but that's where I got my start.
Paul Perry: I'm at Verizon currently in IT but working to deploy a WiFi network in Manhattan. I was looking for the intersection between IT and community. I knew I needed to leverage the rest of the IT community in order to get a summary every day. I started to use Traction software to see the community of people who would inform me of what’s going on.
Rock Regan: I'm the CIO for the state of Connecticut. I'm relatively new to blogging and got started through Phil. A month ago we had 1200 employees. June 1 we had 900 employees. We're going through a lot of budget churn and people churn, and I'm looking for ways to capture knowledge. We support 65 agencies in the state. I became pretty excited as I talked to Phil, and I've been looking around internally within the organization. How can we capture information, foster good ideas, act on those ideas, and drive out solutions and cost.
Tim Ireland: I came into blogs from a search engine optimization and marketing perspective but quickly realized they can do much more. I just got my first British MP on a blog, and I hope to get some more.
Martin Roell: For most Americans it's difficult to pronounce my name. That's fine. I was talking to Halley Suitt last evening. She saw my name tag and it didn't match my email. She thought I was someone quite different, and it was quite fun. I run a German language blog about e-business strategy. That's what I did until two months ago when Weblogs started to become popular in Europe. So I started doing some research. I can tell you a little about how companies see Weblogs in Europe
Bill Seitz: Within the internal enterprise process, the core unit is the team. And these new tools should be used to maintain a team voice and a shared vision of what you're trying to accomplish. An individual voice is dispersive to that process. And a top-down knowledge management approach stifles that team communication,. The tools have to be what the team is going to use. It's all about the process of generating insights. That generates more context and changes the context. Using a Wiki-based framework is better than a blogging approach, but that's not crucial. All these things increase transparency, and that raises some problems. What is perceived as a crisis is often the end of an illusion. Weblogs can accelerate that process.
Windley: You have used blogs in your organization. What were your goals? What were your tools? When I was CIO of Utah, I bought 100 licenses to Radio and offered them for use. Maybe 10-15 are till actively blogging.
Perry: I knew that a lot of emails were going around about what was going on in the industry. Sometimes I was in those threads. Sometimes I was not. The problem with cc lists is that you have to decide if the email is spam or if you've hit the right audience. I needed to find a way in which I would be fully informed but I didn't have to decide who to inform. Another problem with email is that it's gone. I didn't want to have to go into everyone's email to see what had been read or not. I also needed the right technical people to highlight what I thought was important and what they thought I needed to see. I looked at a number of tools, and Traction seemed to do what I needed to do. I needed to fit it into the workflow. Everyone lives out of their email in box. You can host server side, but you can notify people. When they're notified it's a digest. I started to seed it, and I knew from previous email threads who was always active. There's always a core, chatting. I sat them down and showed them how to use the tool. I also made sure I had upper management involved.
Regan: I'm the guy who makes the decision what we can and what we can't buy. But I don't want to shove anything down anyone's throat. One of the biggest challenges I had was with our middle management. Knowledge is power. We're making a lot of decisions with folks who don't really make those decisions. I don't just want our heads down, I want to look to the horizon. I was looking for ways we could start looking at things we have to discuss. We started looking at it in the process we call our architecture review boards. We've got probably 90 people using a blog to discuss the architecture of our organization. I have a liaison who deals with the 65 agencies, not just technical agencies but the business folks. It really started in my office. I'm not going to claim that I'm good yet, but I'm certainly open to ideas. How can we use this? How can this make your job better? For me, it's a critical function that's going to be instrumental in our survival. A 22% staff reduction in the last two months. We've got to do things differently. Change is good. One of the mantras we get in government is that I'm all for progress as long as there's no change. That's not going to cut it.
Ireland: Bloggerheads is just me. But I would like to touch on the political issue. MPs are more apt to publish because they can say whatever the hell they like. It's important that people see what they have to say. They're too busy to scratch themselves, really. And it's hard to take government documents and make sense of them. But if you're able to access them through your elected representative, you can bring the process to life. We need a hell of lot more doing it for it to work.
Roell: You said you would use Weblogs in project management. Have you already tried that?
Regan: It's the way we're aggregating some of the topics people post. We're doing it in a crude way, but we're learning as we go.
Windley: People are posting personal blogs, but then you're moving them to functional aggregations?
Regan: Yes.
Windley: Blogs have a certain culture to them. Blogs require -- more than inspire, they require a culture of candor. They require a culture of abundance. There's also a little bit of risk-taking involved. I'd like to ask the panel to comment on cultural issues.
Seitz: There's two big dimensions. Shock and awe for some people. One is the transparency and candor aspect. That can raise sore points with people. It also can force some feedback to things. People identify themselves as victims and slaves to their environments. Blogs empower them to have a voice, but it also gives them responsibility. The other issue is sort of the hierarchical issue of information flowing around bosses. What happens when a very senior person discovers something on the intranet and it's bad news. How do they react to it. Who do they involve? Senior managers need to be aware of the leverage that they carry. What could seem to be an informal conversation could have a lot of impact. Managers should maybe not react to what they read. Don't just jump in and start doing everything yourself when you discover a problem.
Ireland: The only reason to run it as an intranet rather than something more public is to encourage free speech.
Seitz: Part of that indicates that things are organized poorly. Flame wars are symptoms of a deeper organizational problem.
Ireland: There could even be a wonderful idea down in production.
Roell: Do you think the management blogs will stifle other blogs? Everyone will read a CEO's blog. If a CEO points to someone, do you think that that imbalance brings a danger?
Ireland: Real talent will rise to the top. Companies have reached a size where they're depending on someone and may never even meet that person. If problems are solved in a public way it can only help the corporate memory. The advantages far outweigh any fear of the dangers of the current hierarchy.
Windley: Can any of you point to experiences -- either good or bad -- in terms of blogs and the culture of the organization.
Perry: Even very technical people who were aware of blogs didn't want to post at all until they saw other people post. I created a private space for them to post in their own private journal. As soon as they were ready to open it up to the project, they could. It was important to post and make mistakes. You need to offer a ramp that is shielded and private. I don't see any additional candor. The organization size is very large. Verizon IT is 10,000 people. It's not like we can all share and have enough interaction person to person. With an organization that large, you are open to some misunderstandings if you don't offer more context first. We might establish trust over a call. That trust network develops as it always has.
Seitz: Having an environment in which ideas can be related to each other can be helpful in terms of managing upward. Things that get packaged in small units right next to each other can be useful. It can help people fill in the blanks. A little bit of formality allows that to happen. When everything happens through email and instant messaging, everything just flows past.
Regan: We're beginning to see some great discussion among people who don't communicate well together. We've had some discussions recently to make some differences in core technologies that will allow groups that don't communicate well know what the other groups are doing. You've got to open up the opportunity for people to know what's going on in those different functional areas.
Windley: Let's talk about knowledge management. How important is that to you? Are you using any other knowledge management tools beyond Weblogs?
Perry: I could never buy, understand, or know what knowledge management was. But I needed to hook people up. For me, knowledge management is the ability to go back in and find the best summary you can. Another aspect of knowledge management is tagging a story with a category. At minimum, it's easy to sort projects.
Roell: Are you using a centralized taxonomy to categorize posts?
Perry: You have to start with a taxonomy which I just put in there. If it's harder to create a project, people just start a category. With our tool you can just start a new term.
Ireland: Another aspect is accessibility. A lot of times a report is sent out and no one reads the damn thing. If the report is written in a voice, it might reach more of the people it needs to go to -- and people it wasn't even intended for.
Perry: Distributing across the group so it's in the repository and can be summarized -- that becomes knowledge.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XV
Tony Perkins: The Open Source Media Movement
Alright you guys, I'm wearing a loaned suit, so if you have a tie, let me know. It's a pleasure to be here. How many people have been on the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have written about the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have been contacted by my PR guy? Not enough. What I'm going to show you in a second is a summary of what I want to talk about.
The first thing I want to talk about is why I shouldn't be a keynote at this conference. Second of all, I want to talk about why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur. In addition to writing the book "The Internet Bubble," I got my own ass handed to me when the magazine I had founded ceased publication. I always want to talk about the opportunities of building participatory journalism as I call it into a great new media brand. It can be leveraged to do great things. Finally, I'm going to talk about the AlwaysOn Network from a business perspective. We've been blessed to go cash flow positive in the first month we launched the network, which was in February.
This is the first time I've used Keynote. It's the easiest PowerPoint I've ever used, which is pretty fun. Let me talk about the first point. In essence, I have been a casual observer of the blogging movement for three years or so thanks to guys like Dave Winer. I always feel like what guys like Dave are doing is a foreshadow of the future. As you may know, I'm not a blogger, per se. I come out of the journalism background. But what I am is a media entrepreneur. The first media brand I started was Upside. And then more recently Red Herring.
After I sold my book in 1999 and sold most of my stake in the company, I was itching to do something new. Entrepreneurs sense trends and try to build businesses around interesting things in the market. While I'm sort of a poser in this community, sort of like the wannabe punk rocker, I have never been so excited and I've never had so much fun in my professional career as I have with AlwaysOn. I want to share some of that excitement with you and solicit some feedback from you, the pioneers, so I can learn more.
Before I get into all that, I want to share with you why I think it's a great time to become an entrepreneur. I've come up with a fictitious representation of what it costs to start up a company. It doesn't consist of any real data, but it's a painting of where I think we are. It wasn't until the fourth issue of Red Herring that we even mentioned the Internet. We were then covering what was called the interactive highway, and interactive cable TV network that never came to be. It was too damn expensive. The good news was that there was always an information highway and that it was called the Internet.
You are the folks who created this new medium. It's at this really interesting time in history where it can be taken and harnessed. Why is it such a good time to be an entrepreneur? If you look at this chart, today there are close to 700 million people who are online. Whatever we did during the bubble, we educated 700 million people about something different. Funding the changing of people's behavior to do something different is a loss leader. That's why we lost so much money in the first stage of the Internet. But now we have a huge market. You had a very expensive proposition. Secondly, you had rough technology. You had a small population of people. AlwaysOn Network I built with a $150 piece of software. That same project back in 1996 would've cost a lot of money to get a lot of people involved.
Here we are today sitting on a huge market. Moore's Law has blessed us. RAM is very cheap. Salaries are very cheap. That's why we're at the bottom of the curve. Why does the curve go back up? Now is the time to establish the brand because of the whole concept of first-mover advantage. The second movers have the real advantage because they're starting their companies now. It's going to become more expensive because it'll become more expensive to build companies and challenge those brands.
These are my daughters. In recessionary times, pull out the family album. This story was part of the inspiration for starting my company. They're teenagers. The blonde is named Kristen. At the time she was a senior in high school in Menlo Park. The brunette is named Julie. At the time, she was a sophomore at Duke. Kristen's boyfriend is named Brandon. He'd started at Duke. I asked he if she'd talked to Julie and if Julie sees him around campus. She looked at me and said, "Dad, do you have instant messaging on your computer?" Mr. technology editor at Red Herring.
I found two studies. That generation is a completely distinguishable generation that's going to lead a lot of opportunity. Just like when I was a kid living around Silicon Valley during the birth of the personal computer era. The most interesting thing here is that 17% used instant messaging to break up with somebody. What other statistics get me excited? Most of the numbers associated with the Internet are going to double. The advent of wireless and its proliferation is going to be a huge driver.
On the business-to-business side, in order to become an always-on business, about 99% of the businesses have not equipped or designed their operations to work seamlessly and automatically on the Web. If I don't become like Dell, I am not competitive any longer. The statistics really support the case. B2B commerce: $3-6 trillion by 2005. Always-on companies will radically increase their productivity.
I'm basically an entrepreneur. I wrote a book. I so believe this editorial position that I started over a year ago based upon observing the great work of a lot of people in this world. My principles for media startups are that it's better to boot-strap than go to a board of directors meeting, build a community that advertisers care about, create multiple revenue streams, build a virtual team, trust your gut but listen to your readers, and building a media brand is black magic. For AlwaysOn, the target community is the exact advertising group we had at Red Herring.
Forgive me for not really being a member of the grassroots community. Some of my observations may seem basic to you. These are the entrepreneurial lightbulbs that went off. There's this trend toward reality TV. We're bored with scripted actors. We perversely like this idea of getting people together in an arena we create. The second thing is the open source movement. The thing that keeps Steve Ballmer up at night is Linux. What I see is applying that concept to the media world, what I call open-source media. We as media can get the guys that journalists would normally interview to post their thinking for the world to comment on. My average viewer stays on three and a half times longer than the viewer of RedHerring.com . The final thing is the Ebay-ization of media. That's what you all are about. You're giving people opportunities to add value to your site. And there's a way to monetize that.
The uniqueness of what you all do is great black magic. Part of our ethic at AlwaysOn is to be completely open. We allow people to post comments. We require that people be members so there are no anonymous comments. Based upon great feedback, members can now post original blog entries themselves. Members are transparent to each other. You can click on their name and email them. Members can also recommend links.
I talked about multiple sources of income. This is how we view the world. We have great sponsors. They're all in for six-month contracts. We're also in the business of creating events. We're holding a big event at Stanford, and we'll take that money to pay off the costs of building the site. In the next version, we'll have a premium paid membership. We're going to be reselling other information products and services. We're building a build-your-own classifieds service. And we're looking and other network opportunities to build other communities we can interrelate.
Why am I here? Most importantly, I wanted to get feedback and meet a lot of people. I want to engage developers. What are the real issues we should look out for? I want to look for new network opportunities. I'm really not a bad guy. I'm out there preaching the gospel of what you've done. I'm very cynical about the media business at large. But I know that because I'm this fancy guy, reporters who want to talk about blogging come to me. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got 10,000 members. There is no limit to what we could do with the AlwaysOn Network. We're going to be doing video journalism and radio segments. I don't, someone else is going do it, and it's going to be a lot more expensive.
Everyone sitting in this room is blessed. There are a lot of people who would like to sit in this room but can't be.
Clearly, we want to have a mechanism to power the classified ads so people can pay 5 cents, 10 cents. We fully intend to have a fully integrated e-commerce solution.
Good. Someone else here likes money. If you look at almost every magazine on the newsstand today, there's a network opportunity. There's the ability to allow the community to participate in a variety of ways The most expensive part of publishing a magazine is building your readership. But if you can get people to add comments and get Eric Schmidt to reply to their comment, you're going to gain a very loyal reader. It's about building a critical mass of people. Most people who want to participate in the New York Times just can't. What I think is really interesting is that there's a window of opportunity before these large media brands are going to let people participate.
What I'm borrowing from blogging is giving people the ability to participate.
I've read yours for a couple of years. I've never said AlwaysOn was a Weblog. It borrows elements from you. It encourages participation. We had 200 posts in our first four weeks and thousands of comments. That's borrowing on the tradition of what you guys created.
Why would you care whether I know what Webloggers do? Just teasing. I'm a media entrepreneur person. I look at the experience that you Webloggers have created as a very interesting attribute to throw into the overall media offering mix. There are numbers of bloggers who want to keep their blogs in a very intimate way. I understand how the process works. That's a great thing to do. Being entertained is fine. I have to work for a living. I'm not here to tell you all to be like me. I'm just saying here's what I've learned from you and mixed into a business I've been involved in for 15 years.
The whole church and state idea sort of breaks down under this sort of model in the respect that the journalistic standards are set by the members. Every morning I get up, go to the site, and remove the stuff that's not gaining traffic. I go with my members. I produced an issue of Red Herring with an interview with Michael Dell, and I'd have two people tell me they thought it was a good interview. I put an interview with Michael Dell on AlwaysOn that was marketing speak, and the members jumped on his ass. As an editor, you know what they like and what they don't.
That's what they're signing up for. They understand that that's the tradeoff here. At the same time, our members own their words. Michael Dell got creamed for talking in marketing speak. When I saw him next, he said that he'd learned a lot. I'm learning more as an editor about what really resonates with people.
Tony Perkins is creator and editor in chief of AlwaysOn. He is also the creator and editor in chief of the now-defunct VC magazine Red Herring, which he founded in 1993.
Alright you guys, I'm wearing a loaned suit, so if you have a tie, let me know. It's a pleasure to be here. How many people have been on the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have written about the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have been contacted by my PR guy? Not enough. What I'm going to show you in a second is a summary of what I want to talk about.
The first thing I want to talk about is why I shouldn't be a keynote at this conference. Second of all, I want to talk about why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur. In addition to writing the book "The Internet Bubble," I got my own ass handed to me when the magazine I had founded ceased publication. I always want to talk about the opportunities of building participatory journalism as I call it into a great new media brand. It can be leveraged to do great things. Finally, I'm going to talk about the AlwaysOn Network from a business perspective. We've been blessed to go cash flow positive in the first month we launched the network, which was in February.
This is the first time I've used Keynote. It's the easiest PowerPoint I've ever used, which is pretty fun. Let me talk about the first point. In essence, I have been a casual observer of the blogging movement for three years or so thanks to guys like Dave Winer. I always feel like what guys like Dave are doing is a foreshadow of the future. As you may know, I'm not a blogger, per se. I come out of the journalism background. But what I am is a media entrepreneur. The first media brand I started was Upside. And then more recently Red Herring.
After I sold my book in 1999 and sold most of my stake in the company, I was itching to do something new. Entrepreneurs sense trends and try to build businesses around interesting things in the market. While I'm sort of a poser in this community, sort of like the wannabe punk rocker, I have never been so excited and I've never had so much fun in my professional career as I have with AlwaysOn. I want to share some of that excitement with you and solicit some feedback from you, the pioneers, so I can learn more.
Before I get into all that, I want to share with you why I think it's a great time to become an entrepreneur. I've come up with a fictitious representation of what it costs to start up a company. It doesn't consist of any real data, but it's a painting of where I think we are. It wasn't until the fourth issue of Red Herring that we even mentioned the Internet. We were then covering what was called the interactive highway, and interactive cable TV network that never came to be. It was too damn expensive. The good news was that there was always an information highway and that it was called the Internet.
You are the folks who created this new medium. It's at this really interesting time in history where it can be taken and harnessed. Why is it such a good time to be an entrepreneur? If you look at this chart, today there are close to 700 million people who are online. Whatever we did during the bubble, we educated 700 million people about something different. Funding the changing of people's behavior to do something different is a loss leader. That's why we lost so much money in the first stage of the Internet. But now we have a huge market. You had a very expensive proposition. Secondly, you had rough technology. You had a small population of people. AlwaysOn Network I built with a $150 piece of software. That same project back in 1996 would've cost a lot of money to get a lot of people involved.
Here we are today sitting on a huge market. Moore's Law has blessed us. RAM is very cheap. Salaries are very cheap. That's why we're at the bottom of the curve. Why does the curve go back up? Now is the time to establish the brand because of the whole concept of first-mover advantage. The second movers have the real advantage because they're starting their companies now. It's going to become more expensive because it'll become more expensive to build companies and challenge those brands.
These are my daughters. In recessionary times, pull out the family album. This story was part of the inspiration for starting my company. They're teenagers. The blonde is named Kristen. At the time she was a senior in high school in Menlo Park. The brunette is named Julie. At the time, she was a sophomore at Duke. Kristen's boyfriend is named Brandon. He'd started at Duke. I asked he if she'd talked to Julie and if Julie sees him around campus. She looked at me and said, "Dad, do you have instant messaging on your computer?" Mr. technology editor at Red Herring.
I found two studies. That generation is a completely distinguishable generation that's going to lead a lot of opportunity. Just like when I was a kid living around Silicon Valley during the birth of the personal computer era. The most interesting thing here is that 17% used instant messaging to break up with somebody. What other statistics get me excited? Most of the numbers associated with the Internet are going to double. The advent of wireless and its proliferation is going to be a huge driver.
On the business-to-business side, in order to become an always-on business, about 99% of the businesses have not equipped or designed their operations to work seamlessly and automatically on the Web. If I don't become like Dell, I am not competitive any longer. The statistics really support the case. B2B commerce: $3-6 trillion by 2005. Always-on companies will radically increase their productivity.
I'm basically an entrepreneur. I wrote a book. I so believe this editorial position that I started over a year ago based upon observing the great work of a lot of people in this world. My principles for media startups are that it's better to boot-strap than go to a board of directors meeting, build a community that advertisers care about, create multiple revenue streams, build a virtual team, trust your gut but listen to your readers, and building a media brand is black magic. For AlwaysOn, the target community is the exact advertising group we had at Red Herring.
Forgive me for not really being a member of the grassroots community. Some of my observations may seem basic to you. These are the entrepreneurial lightbulbs that went off. There's this trend toward reality TV. We're bored with scripted actors. We perversely like this idea of getting people together in an arena we create. The second thing is the open source movement. The thing that keeps Steve Ballmer up at night is Linux. What I see is applying that concept to the media world, what I call open-source media. We as media can get the guys that journalists would normally interview to post their thinking for the world to comment on. My average viewer stays on three and a half times longer than the viewer of RedHerring.com . The final thing is the Ebay-ization of media. That's what you all are about. You're giving people opportunities to add value to your site. And there's a way to monetize that.
The uniqueness of what you all do is great black magic. Part of our ethic at AlwaysOn is to be completely open. We allow people to post comments. We require that people be members so there are no anonymous comments. Based upon great feedback, members can now post original blog entries themselves. Members are transparent to each other. You can click on their name and email them. Members can also recommend links.
I talked about multiple sources of income. This is how we view the world. We have great sponsors. They're all in for six-month contracts. We're also in the business of creating events. We're holding a big event at Stanford, and we'll take that money to pay off the costs of building the site. In the next version, we'll have a premium paid membership. We're going to be reselling other information products and services. We're building a build-your-own classifieds service. And we're looking and other network opportunities to build other communities we can interrelate.
Why am I here? Most importantly, I wanted to get feedback and meet a lot of people. I want to engage developers. What are the real issues we should look out for? I want to look for new network opportunities. I'm really not a bad guy. I'm out there preaching the gospel of what you've done. I'm very cynical about the media business at large. But I know that because I'm this fancy guy, reporters who want to talk about blogging come to me. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got 10,000 members. There is no limit to what we could do with the AlwaysOn Network. We're going to be doing video journalism and radio segments. I don't, someone else is going do it, and it's going to be a lot more expensive.
Question: If you wanted to learn more, you could've come yesterday and learned a lot more. You used the word "blessed." What do you mean by that?
Everyone sitting in this room is blessed. There are a lot of people who would like to sit in this room but can't be.
Question: You mentioned that you were going to offer pay-per-view for archived events. Have you looked at any micropayment schemes?
Clearly, we want to have a mechanism to power the classified ads so people can pay 5 cents, 10 cents. We fully intend to have a fully integrated e-commerce solution.
Question:You certainly look at the blogging world from the perspective of a businessman, Could you quanitify the size of the oppiortunity for us?
Good. Someone else here likes money. If you look at almost every magazine on the newsstand today, there's a network opportunity. There's the ability to allow the community to participate in a variety of ways The most expensive part of publishing a magazine is building your readership. But if you can get people to add comments and get Eric Schmidt to reply to their comment, you're going to gain a very loyal reader. It's about building a critical mass of people. Most people who want to participate in the New York Times just can't. What I think is really interesting is that there's a window of opportunity before these large media brands are going to let people participate.
David Winer: If you're successful at what you do, how will what you do resemble Weblogs? Won't it resemble Red Herring or Upside?
What I'm borrowing from blogging is giving people the ability to participate.
Winer: How will what you do be Weblogs? Do you know what Weblogs are?
I've read yours for a couple of years. I've never said AlwaysOn was a Weblog. It borrows elements from you. It encourages participation. We had 200 posts in our first four weeks and thousands of comments. That's borrowing on the tradition of what you guys created.
Jeff Jarvis: [I think -- HR] You say that your aim is to build a sustainable media brand. Is that what you think Webloggers are trying to do?
Why would you care whether I know what Webloggers do? Just teasing. I'm a media entrepreneur person. I look at the experience that you Webloggers have created as a very interesting attribute to throw into the overall media offering mix. There are numbers of bloggers who want to keep their blogs in a very intimate way. I understand how the process works. That's a great thing to do. Being entertained is fine. I have to work for a living. I'm not here to tell you all to be like me. I'm just saying here's what I've learned from you and mixed into a business I've been involved in for 15 years.
Halley Suitt: When you have Accenture and Sun and advertisers liking what you're doing and people posting to your site who don't like what they're doing, could you talk about the separation of church and state?
The whole church and state idea sort of breaks down under this sort of model in the respect that the journalistic standards are set by the members. Every morning I get up, go to the site, and remove the stuff that's not gaining traffic. I go with my members. I produced an issue of Red Herring with an interview with Michael Dell, and I'd have two people tell me they thought it was a good interview. I put an interview with Michael Dell on AlwaysOn that was marketing speak, and the members jumped on his ass. As an editor, you know what they like and what they don't.
Question: What happens if Sun signs up for a six-month commitment and there's a discussion in which people are criticizing Sun. Sun threatens to pull. What do you do?
That's what they're signing up for. They understand that that's the tradeoff here. At the same time, our members own their words. Michael Dell got creamed for talking in marketing speak. When I saw him next, he said that he'd learned a lot. I'm learning more as an editor about what really resonates with people.
Among the Literati XXXVIII
I have a silly little list in Zulkey today. The headline should, in fact, be "Notable Team Names in the Minute Man Dart League, the World's Largest Steel-Tip Dart League." There are no such things as steep-tip darts, says he of little dart knowledge with some confidence. My bad.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XIV
Hesseldahl, Howell, Palfrey, Reuben, Ringel, and Young: The Law of the Blog
Mark Young: We're going to take you on a forced march through some of the legal issues. At what point in time does the power of the written word go too far? And balanced against the increasing importance of this technology as a business tool. One person said corporations should be completely hands off until something stupid happens. They also said there was no difference between a business blog and a personal blog.
You're going to understand the tort landscape from Denise Howell. We also have with us John Palfrey from academia. He's teaching cyberlaw and the global economy in fall 2003. Addressing the various advertising and marketing legal issues, we have Maurice Ringel. We also have Catherine Reuben, who's an employment lawyer. Finally, we have Arik Hesseldahl, a senior editor at Forbes.com . He's a non-lawyer.
Denise Howell: Here we are, the lawyers, to bring down the thunderclouds on all the enthusiasm. That's not necessarily the case, although there are concerns and risks around maintaining any kind of Web presence. Those concerns and risks are heightened when you look at what we've been talking about the last couple of days. When you do any Web site, you immediately go beyond the realm of what you do day to day. You're a publisher, a broadcaster. Businesses one way or another are going to need to take control of this. If you're going to compete with blogging voices, best be one.
If there are risks that exist in Web sites that are static, it's easy to see how the risks increase when you add the elements of blogging. These risks can be managed. What are some of those risks? Once you have greater employee involvement, speedier updates, enhanced interaction, and visibility, you're exposed incremently to torts and liability that you'd be exposed to with Web site in general.
Some considerations come to mind. Defamation. Libel. It's not too difficult to avoid, and we've heard about journalists self-editing so what they're posting is accurate. Corporate disparagement is just the business forum of the defamation tort. There are also first amendment issues that are pending in the Supreme Court involving Nike. Protection of corporate speech is lessen. Misappropriation can occur in a number of ways. Privacy is another consideration. Employees within companies don't have much of a privacy interest.
You can see, too, how the risks shift around a little if the corporate site is just a few internal blogs. If it's an external site with other people contributing content, then you have to be more aware of the legal issues. It's a whole different can of worms.
The only corporate Weblog policy I've seen, and it's quite a fine one, is at Groove Networks. The company has spelled out in advance what its expectations are. The other link I have up is the policy statement from Macromedia. It also is interesting in terms of how they manage risks. The laws don't go away.
Young: A new media gives people the opportunity to test the limits of the law.
John Palfrey: I'm going to take a page out of Dave Winer's book. If you want to learn what's really going on, step in the shoes of a user. I'm going to talk from the perspective of someone who's working with a lot of others to get blogs going in a university setting.
About three or four months ago, we started a blog space. It was one of those throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. One of the keys to this thing is that anyone who graduated from Harvard can get a free email address for life. That means that we could get hundreds of thousands of alumni with blogs. That's analogous to a multinational corporation.
We've learned three things. One is to watch out about becoming an ISP. If you have any Web presence at all, you are probably under some measure oof the law, an ISP. Secondly, be ready for takeoff. Third, blogs are good for the Web -- and for you.
How should we think about ourselves as we provide Web services? Looking in the US law alone, I've found seven different names for what an ISP is and eight completely different definitions. There are 31 cases in which a court is trying to define what an ISP is. Much less get into international law. There are at least 40 different ways someone can consider you an ISP. My only answer to that is hire a lawyer. The law in the US is a complete mess in the Internet space.
Two, be ready for takeoff. We launched this initiative several months ago, and we already have hundreds of blogs. Donna Wentworth does a great blog called CopyFight. She's on the Berkman staff. Chris Lydon. As soon as you make it possible for people to do this stuff, you need to be ready to take off.
The last thing, blogs being good for the Web? I am convinced that it's a good thing. When does the written word go to far? Virtually never. The answer is to push more good speech out there.
In terms of intellectual property rights, my strong recommendation is to use a Creative Commons license any chance you can. Get CC licenses into the RSS feeds so they're baked in.
What should you do if you're thinking about launching a blog initiative? One, do it. Two, hire a lawyer. And three, be clear about your copyright.
Young: Speaking of copyright, one of John's colleagues puts you on notice that anything you send to him via email can and will be used against. I want to turn to Catherine now. Dave Winer expressed yesterday quite eloquently about the internal tension here. Employers shouldn't approve every blog post, but they need to be very careful about employees' blog posts.
Catherine Reuben: There are two things to consider here. The first is an employee learning something from a blog and making a hiring decision based on that. Also in that category is an employee badmouthing an employer. People say, what about free speech? The Constitution applies to actions of the state, not of a corporation. Third, an employer sees that an employee revealed some confidential information and takes action. There was a New Jersey case in which a company was able to force an ISP to reveal the name of an anonymous posting that included confidential information. There's the issue of employees blogging on company time. We all know about that. Then there's the case in which employers see value in what's being blogged.
Employee side: Don't do it on company time or equipment, That's obvious. Don't mention your employer. Don't just put something out there. Don't sign confidentiality agreement forms when you get hired. They're overbroad. Same with the intellectual property agreements. People are routinely asked to sign those agreements. What are the dos for employees? Look at the confidentiality agreement. Look at the Internet use policy. If your job is that of an analyst or someone who creates content, get independent counsel to know what you own. And finally, if you're an employee and you want to express yourself, there are some legal ways you can do that. There's protected concerted activity. Union organizers get far more protection. There may be legal ways to do this, but it's a fine line.
My tips for employers: dos and don'ts. Do have a confidentiality agreement. Have a policy in regards to use of computer equipment and employee Web sites and blogs. Talk to your intellectual property counsel to hone down who knows what. Don'ts for employers? If you know about an employee's blog, don't access it under false pretenses. Two, get counsel before you do anything involving a blog. There are state privacy laws. There are whistle blower protections. There's old-fashioned discrimination.
Those are my dos and don'ts. It's a very exciting area.
Young: Next up is Maurice Ringel.
Maurice Ringel: I'm a lawyer. Don't let that fool you. I had a career in advertising and marketing. I've been asked to speak on one premise today. Some blogs may be considered to be a form of advertising, and to the extent they are, they may be subject to local, state, federal, and international regulations. In addition, the ad's sponsor -- the advertiser, the ad agency, the ISP -- may be subject to regulation.
The laws and regulations that may apply can come from multiple sources. It's these bodies that may take an interest in whether blogs are advertising or not. Which bodies will take an interest in enforcing their regulations against bloggers.
The laws and regulations that can apply can invoke specific requirements for compliance. This is a laundry list. Mark alluded to comparative advertising claims. Contests and lotteries. Solicitations for charities. Pricing discounts. Warranties. Guarantees. Disclosures and the standards for making disclosures. Taxation. Customs. Prohibitions. Interest rates. Truth in lending disclosures. Earlier today there was a reference to comments made by public companies. What might be considered a prospectus or a forward-looking statement?
The bottom line is that if it's an ad, it really has to comply with regulations. If I were to start a blog, it would be subject to the Grand Judicial Court of Massachusetts. I'm bringing up issues. I don't know what all the answers are. One broad solution is to use disclaimers. If I were to put up a blog, I would disclaim that it was legal advice.
Arik Hesseldahl: Let me start by stating for the record that I am not now nor have I ever been a lawyer. In fact, as a journalist, every word that I've written for my employer has been read by a lawyer. Every so often I'll get a call from our lawyer about something. Usually it's pretty small. When you're a journalist, you find that you usually don't want to hear from lawyers. Externally, it'll ruin your day real quick. It's important to be close to the internal lawyers. And if you don't have one, make friends with one that you can call real quick. It's good to know who you can call.
Not being much of a blogger myself, I've written a little bit about it. And I'm reminded of the days in which the Internet was new. A lot of the wonderful things people are saying about blogs in 2003 are the things people said about the Web in 1993 and 1994. Big media, large companies including my own, don't quite get blogging. They're eyeing it and trying to figure it out. Right now, they're more of a mind to not have anything to do with it.
There are some important legal questions that need to be worked out. Where does the public persona as a media organization begin? Where does it end? My boss produces his own Web site. He enforces all the corporate policies, but he produces his own Web site on cricket. There's not a lot of interference between his cricket site and Forbes.com. But does that mean that I can write my own personal technology column on a blog? There's a policy in place that says you don't write extra versions of articles for other publications. What goes on in the office stays in the office. Editing is not for public view.
Journalism might be the first draft of history, but that doesn't mean that blogging should be the director's cut of journalism. That also doesn't mean that blogging can't be the first draft of journalism. As a reporter, the legal issues I face apply to the blogging community. If you're going to run with the wolves and challenge the wolves, you're going to have to think about libel, slander, and fair use. I spend a lot of time looking at the Associated Press Stylebook and the legal section. At Forbes, we have a rigorous fact checking policy for the magazine, but not so much at the Web site, where we don't have as much time. Those are the legal faces that I face.
Arik Hesseldahl is a senior editor for Forbes.com, Denise M. Howell is counsel for Reed Smith Crosby Heafey LLP, John Palfrey is executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Catherine E. Reuben is a partner in Robinson & Cole LLP,
Maurice J. Ringel is founder and president of Ringel Law Group, and Mark E. Young is communications counsel for PARTNERS+simons. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
Mark Young: We're going to take you on a forced march through some of the legal issues. At what point in time does the power of the written word go too far? And balanced against the increasing importance of this technology as a business tool. One person said corporations should be completely hands off until something stupid happens. They also said there was no difference between a business blog and a personal blog.
You're going to understand the tort landscape from Denise Howell. We also have with us John Palfrey from academia. He's teaching cyberlaw and the global economy in fall 2003. Addressing the various advertising and marketing legal issues, we have Maurice Ringel. We also have Catherine Reuben, who's an employment lawyer. Finally, we have Arik Hesseldahl, a senior editor at Forbes.com . He's a non-lawyer.
Denise Howell: Here we are, the lawyers, to bring down the thunderclouds on all the enthusiasm. That's not necessarily the case, although there are concerns and risks around maintaining any kind of Web presence. Those concerns and risks are heightened when you look at what we've been talking about the last couple of days. When you do any Web site, you immediately go beyond the realm of what you do day to day. You're a publisher, a broadcaster. Businesses one way or another are going to need to take control of this. If you're going to compete with blogging voices, best be one.
If there are risks that exist in Web sites that are static, it's easy to see how the risks increase when you add the elements of blogging. These risks can be managed. What are some of those risks? Once you have greater employee involvement, speedier updates, enhanced interaction, and visibility, you're exposed incremently to torts and liability that you'd be exposed to with Web site in general.
Some considerations come to mind. Defamation. Libel. It's not too difficult to avoid, and we've heard about journalists self-editing so what they're posting is accurate. Corporate disparagement is just the business forum of the defamation tort. There are also first amendment issues that are pending in the Supreme Court involving Nike. Protection of corporate speech is lessen. Misappropriation can occur in a number of ways. Privacy is another consideration. Employees within companies don't have much of a privacy interest.
You can see, too, how the risks shift around a little if the corporate site is just a few internal blogs. If it's an external site with other people contributing content, then you have to be more aware of the legal issues. It's a whole different can of worms.
The only corporate Weblog policy I've seen, and it's quite a fine one, is at Groove Networks. The company has spelled out in advance what its expectations are. The other link I have up is the policy statement from Macromedia. It also is interesting in terms of how they manage risks. The laws don't go away.
Young: A new media gives people the opportunity to test the limits of the law.
John Palfrey: I'm going to take a page out of Dave Winer's book. If you want to learn what's really going on, step in the shoes of a user. I'm going to talk from the perspective of someone who's working with a lot of others to get blogs going in a university setting.
About three or four months ago, we started a blog space. It was one of those throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. One of the keys to this thing is that anyone who graduated from Harvard can get a free email address for life. That means that we could get hundreds of thousands of alumni with blogs. That's analogous to a multinational corporation.
We've learned three things. One is to watch out about becoming an ISP. If you have any Web presence at all, you are probably under some measure oof the law, an ISP. Secondly, be ready for takeoff. Third, blogs are good for the Web -- and for you.
How should we think about ourselves as we provide Web services? Looking in the US law alone, I've found seven different names for what an ISP is and eight completely different definitions. There are 31 cases in which a court is trying to define what an ISP is. Much less get into international law. There are at least 40 different ways someone can consider you an ISP. My only answer to that is hire a lawyer. The law in the US is a complete mess in the Internet space.
Two, be ready for takeoff. We launched this initiative several months ago, and we already have hundreds of blogs. Donna Wentworth does a great blog called CopyFight. She's on the Berkman staff. Chris Lydon. As soon as you make it possible for people to do this stuff, you need to be ready to take off.
The last thing, blogs being good for the Web? I am convinced that it's a good thing. When does the written word go to far? Virtually never. The answer is to push more good speech out there.
In terms of intellectual property rights, my strong recommendation is to use a Creative Commons license any chance you can. Get CC licenses into the RSS feeds so they're baked in.
What should you do if you're thinking about launching a blog initiative? One, do it. Two, hire a lawyer. And three, be clear about your copyright.
Young: Speaking of copyright, one of John's colleagues puts you on notice that anything you send to him via email can and will be used against. I want to turn to Catherine now. Dave Winer expressed yesterday quite eloquently about the internal tension here. Employers shouldn't approve every blog post, but they need to be very careful about employees' blog posts.
Catherine Reuben: There are two things to consider here. The first is an employee learning something from a blog and making a hiring decision based on that. Also in that category is an employee badmouthing an employer. People say, what about free speech? The Constitution applies to actions of the state, not of a corporation. Third, an employer sees that an employee revealed some confidential information and takes action. There was a New Jersey case in which a company was able to force an ISP to reveal the name of an anonymous posting that included confidential information. There's the issue of employees blogging on company time. We all know about that. Then there's the case in which employers see value in what's being blogged.
Employee side: Don't do it on company time or equipment, That's obvious. Don't mention your employer. Don't just put something out there. Don't sign confidentiality agreement forms when you get hired. They're overbroad. Same with the intellectual property agreements. People are routinely asked to sign those agreements. What are the dos for employees? Look at the confidentiality agreement. Look at the Internet use policy. If your job is that of an analyst or someone who creates content, get independent counsel to know what you own. And finally, if you're an employee and you want to express yourself, there are some legal ways you can do that. There's protected concerted activity. Union organizers get far more protection. There may be legal ways to do this, but it's a fine line.
My tips for employers: dos and don'ts. Do have a confidentiality agreement. Have a policy in regards to use of computer equipment and employee Web sites and blogs. Talk to your intellectual property counsel to hone down who knows what. Don'ts for employers? If you know about an employee's blog, don't access it under false pretenses. Two, get counsel before you do anything involving a blog. There are state privacy laws. There are whistle blower protections. There's old-fashioned discrimination.
Those are my dos and don'ts. It's a very exciting area.
Young: Next up is Maurice Ringel.
Maurice Ringel: I'm a lawyer. Don't let that fool you. I had a career in advertising and marketing. I've been asked to speak on one premise today. Some blogs may be considered to be a form of advertising, and to the extent they are, they may be subject to local, state, federal, and international regulations. In addition, the ad's sponsor -- the advertiser, the ad agency, the ISP -- may be subject to regulation.
The laws and regulations that may apply can come from multiple sources. It's these bodies that may take an interest in whether blogs are advertising or not. Which bodies will take an interest in enforcing their regulations against bloggers.
The laws and regulations that can apply can invoke specific requirements for compliance. This is a laundry list. Mark alluded to comparative advertising claims. Contests and lotteries. Solicitations for charities. Pricing discounts. Warranties. Guarantees. Disclosures and the standards for making disclosures. Taxation. Customs. Prohibitions. Interest rates. Truth in lending disclosures. Earlier today there was a reference to comments made by public companies. What might be considered a prospectus or a forward-looking statement?
The bottom line is that if it's an ad, it really has to comply with regulations. If I were to start a blog, it would be subject to the Grand Judicial Court of Massachusetts. I'm bringing up issues. I don't know what all the answers are. One broad solution is to use disclaimers. If I were to put up a blog, I would disclaim that it was legal advice.
Arik Hesseldahl: Let me start by stating for the record that I am not now nor have I ever been a lawyer. In fact, as a journalist, every word that I've written for my employer has been read by a lawyer. Every so often I'll get a call from our lawyer about something. Usually it's pretty small. When you're a journalist, you find that you usually don't want to hear from lawyers. Externally, it'll ruin your day real quick. It's important to be close to the internal lawyers. And if you don't have one, make friends with one that you can call real quick. It's good to know who you can call.
Not being much of a blogger myself, I've written a little bit about it. And I'm reminded of the days in which the Internet was new. A lot of the wonderful things people are saying about blogs in 2003 are the things people said about the Web in 1993 and 1994. Big media, large companies including my own, don't quite get blogging. They're eyeing it and trying to figure it out. Right now, they're more of a mind to not have anything to do with it.
There are some important legal questions that need to be worked out. Where does the public persona as a media organization begin? Where does it end? My boss produces his own Web site. He enforces all the corporate policies, but he produces his own Web site on cricket. There's not a lot of interference between his cricket site and Forbes.com. But does that mean that I can write my own personal technology column on a blog? There's a policy in place that says you don't write extra versions of articles for other publications. What goes on in the office stays in the office. Editing is not for public view.
Journalism might be the first draft of history, but that doesn't mean that blogging should be the director's cut of journalism. That also doesn't mean that blogging can't be the first draft of journalism. As a reporter, the legal issues I face apply to the blogging community. If you're going to run with the wolves and challenge the wolves, you're going to have to think about libel, slander, and fair use. I spend a lot of time looking at the Associated Press Stylebook and the legal section. At Forbes, we have a rigorous fact checking policy for the magazine, but not so much at the Web site, where we don't have as much time. Those are the legal faces that I face.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XIII
Ali, Crosbie, Jarvis, Shnaider, and Spiers: Weblogs -- New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms?
David Shnaider: I think that I'm like the donkey on Animal Farm, who says we live a very long time; have you ever seen a dead donkey? What effects are Weblogs having on traditional media? We got into this a little bit last night when we talked about is a blogger a journalist? No one can tell me that what's happening here in terms of people reporting isn't journalism. I, for one, am fed up with bad, fuzzy writing that leaves out information I want to know. I'm sick of egos. I'm absolutely fed up with people opining on subjects that they know nothing about. That is why I am no longer going to watch the 10 o'clock news on my local Fox affiliate, because that's what you get.
A piece came out 35 years ago called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" written by Hunter Thompson. People then said this isn't representative journalism. But if you read it today, it's representative of a blog. Then there was a newsletter editor in Washington named I.M. Stone. No one would have said that he wasn't a journalist. With that background we're going to talk a little bit about what Weblogs mean to traditional media.
Are they just a passing fad? Are they a new model? Are we looking at a new market for creating content? Like Doc Searls, I bristle at calling it content, but that's what we're going to look at. First we'll hear from Jeff Jarvis, who represents Big Media. But he's also very smart and he was out ahead in terms of Weblogs. Does anyone else in the whole Newhouse publishing empire get it? Do they even need to? Next we'll hear from Elizabeth Spiers, who in just a few months has created a must-read publication in New York media. As much as we can decry traditional media, who can't feel a little pride to be covered by mainstream media? Then we'll hear from Rafat Ali, who's created what I regard as an essential daily experience for people in this business, more so than some of the traditional vertical publications. Do you represent the leading edge of a movement that could threaten the empire? Then we'll hear from Vin Crosbie, who's an extremely well-read consultant and commentator. Is there really a business here?
Jeff Jarvis: I'm a journalist. Don't shoot me. I'm a newspaper guy, a magazine guy, I've been in TV, but I've been online for nine years. I work for a guy who really understands it, and we look at the Internet as a new media. The Internet is the first medium owned by the audience. It's not us and them, It's all us. For us, it all started with forums. In wrestling season, high school wrestling, one topic, one market, you can get 25,000 page views a day. We value that. That's a third of my traffic. It's the audience reporting news. The audience gives scores of the little league teams, stuff we can't afford to cover.
Blogs to me represent the highest form of audience content. A Weblog is not like a forum. A forum is like Saturday night at the bar. A blog is crap in your neighbor's yard. You own it. It's your yard. Through linking, the cream rises to the top. Are Weblogs making a difference? I'm going to do just one thing, Iran. Here was somebody who was arrested and thrown into an Iranian prison for doing something we do every day casually on our couches. Weblogs could make a difference in Iraq. They're making a difference there. They're making a difference here.
Elizabeth is making a difference here. She's being quoted in the New York Post. What makes Weblogs better? Speed. What I write tonight is meant to be read tomorrow. The variety. Thanks to the Internet, the fact that we can go anywhere in the world to get what we want is new. The voices. They're wonderful to hear. The tools that we use. Technorati. Blogdex. These are tremendous tools that will get much much richer. Finally, interactivity. I love my comments. We've been involved in forums a long time, but in my comments, I've only had to kill one post.
But Weblogs are nothing magical. It's just a tool. They're cheap publishing tools with the widest distribution ever. Still, they do different things. If you look at Livejournal, it's a community. There's nanomedia like Gizmodo and Gawker. Advertising, and lastly, personal. People will post my photos, my movies, my shopping list. Then there's video. I'm Andy Rooney. Video adds a lot. If I were MSNBC, I'd be looking for the next stars online.
Who should give a damn from a business perspective? Have a business reason to blog. Don't blog just for the sake of blogging. You've got to have a business reason. Let's talk about us in big media and why we're doing Weblogs. My boss was into Weblogs, and he was on my butt. I couldn't even figure it out. Frankly, it was after Sept. 11 that I had something to say. I had a reason to blog. I learned a tremendous amount. I had to learn that first hand. That allowed me to become a coach to others in the company.
We've started a series of blogs within the company. Some are good. Some are not so good. But they're learning. During the war I did a blog about the war that we syndicated across all the sites. There's not a lot of money to be made. There's no money to be made for me. It's traffic. The reason we're doing it is because it's so darn cheap.
Marketers. Dr. Pepper didn't make a mistake by sending the drink to bloggers. The mistake was lying about it and keeping it secret. Bloggers have influence. And marketers should treat bloggers with the respect that you all have an audience. Treat them as you treat media. Starting your own cow Weblog is dumb. Trying to keep it secret is dumb. But if people who do Weblogs see your movie early, that is good. It will create buzz.
We see small businesses like restaurants using blogs. They can update their specials every day. Companies that sell expertise. Nanomedia I think will work. Gawker will be a big and important success. Big defined relatively. What's that other site that calls itself a Weblog? AlwaysOn. It's just a guy who couldn't afford paper. It's not a Weblog. It shows the lower ambition of media. Weblogs can become media properties. Is anyone here from AOL or Yahoo? That's a mistake. Consumers are interested in Weblogs. They'll start to do that.
Elizabeth Spiers: I'm the editor of Gawker. Editor's a bit of a misnomer as I write everything and edit little. My publisher Nick Denton is editing Gawker today and tomorrow. You should email him and tell him how much worse it is when I'm not doing it.
Gawker has gotten quite a bit of response from media. I talk a lot about media, and it being a narcissistic industry, when you talk about media, they tend to listen. The first example is [a major New York daily with a popular gossip column]. Gawker is kind of a gossip site. I read the local gossip rags and do a digest. I started to realize that the [paper] would have nine items up and five would be items I'd put in Gawker the day before. I met several of the [gossip columnists] a few days ago and teased them, and one said, "Yeah, it makes my job so much easier."
The second example is [a somewhat snooty New York-based newspaper published on non-white paper that has a sizable media focus]. I've had four or five reporters come up to me and say that they want to do an article on Gawker, but their editor won't let them. The resistance is that they're afraid of you. The big guys are sitting up and taking notice. A lot of them are pretty smart about it and figuring out how to co-opt what we're doing. A lot of them just want in on the joke. I have editors sending me gossip about each other. I think that's really funny.
I had a little experience with Tony Perkins. I don't get a lot of press releases, but I've read few press releases that 30 seconds later I didn't wish I had those 30 seconds back. The exception is that the editor of Stuff got fired, and he wrote a press release saying that he'd been promoted. He's a prankster. I excerpted that. When Tony Perkins launched AlwaysOn, he hired a PR firm to pitch blogs, positioning AlwaysOn as this grassroots phenomenon. I thought that was funny. If it's such a grassroots thing, why hire a PR firm? Do it the blog way and publish content that's worth reading. If you can't do that, your blog is probably not going to be worth reading anyway.
Another anecdote. The [aforementioned tabloid newspaper] guys. We don't get censored. I have a filthy mouth. I say fuck. The [gossip column] guys said that they can't say fuck. They can't even quote it.
Rafat Ali: My name is Michael Moore. I want to thank the Academy for this award. I have 100% of bloggers in solidarity when I say this: AlwaysOn sucks.
I run a site called PaidContent.org. This is my one-year anniversary or whatever. I started at Silicon Alley Reporter, and I just started throwing stuff I couldn't use onto the site. The site is about digital media and how to do things beyond advertising. I'm a journalist, so I started to break stories. That got bigger and bigger. Then I started getting emails from vendors about whether I wanted to put an ad on it. I didn't because I was a full-time journalist and I didn't want my boss to call me on it.
Since November, this is my job. I blog for a living. It's been going well. As an adjunct to the site, I have an email newsletter. They're extremely complimentary. As a trade media, it's an important thing. Trade people may not be so technologically savvy to always go to your Web site. That's the main site. I live off it, basically.
Then I launched MobileContent two weeks ago. And two days ago I launched DigitalMusic. I have other sites, but I'm too scared to launch them. I need to hire someone. I'm dead.
My whole theory is that trade Weblogs are going to replace trade Web sites. As an expert in the field, you break news, have commentary, and offer original content. How many of you have ever read an official publication on wireless media? How many read blogs on wireless? Point proven. MarketingFix is better at attracting media coverage than AdWeek and AdAge. SmallTimes is a trade site on nanotech. They just started SmallTechAdvantage, which is kind of a blog intelligence service.
Why would trade Web sites work? Relevance and timeliness. Leanness of operations. Saturation o fcoverage. You just have to link to it. Saturate the market as much as you can. In branding terms, there's what they call a flanking strategy. Weblogs can do that effectively. When you combine Weblogs and original stories, you have a killer app.
The non-obvious advantage is that the profit motive for a formal operation is too high. Journalists have always been underpaid and underfed. All I want is enough to live. For me to have some sort of a Weblog trade thing is not that profit funded. Trade Weblogs also have the whole open source ethic. After awhile, if you're a journalist, people start asking you if you want to consult. I don't because you get into issues I don't want to get into. Understand what you're not: a consultant.
Vin Crosbie: I get paid to tell publishers things that would get me fired if I were an employee, particularly about their business models. Lately, they're asking me about blogs. They're really scared or dismissive of blogs right now. It's really, really pervasive. They don't think this is journalism. I have to remind them what business they're in. There were people like Henry David Thoreau, Lewis & Clarke, James Boswell, and Charles Darwin who kept journals and published the stuff. If these guys had blogs back then, you can bet your ass that they'd be online.
Basically, there's a natural human nature to keep a journal. It's also part of the basic human nature to publish journals. Nowadays people are publishing them online. This isn't something that's going to go away. People will use the cheapest and easiest technology to do it.
If you think about whether this is journalism, what is journalism? Keeping a journal., That's what it is. There are more people keeping blogs than there are professional journalists who get paid. There's no conflict between what bloggers do and what journalists do as long as you're honest and accurate about it. Sure, there are going to be bloggers who are opinionated and untruthful. But then we've got Jayson Blair.
Can media organizations use blogs? Dan Gillmore keeps a blog. The Guardian's blog is a blog. Some people will say that the Drudge Report is a blog. He says, "Don't call me a blogger." I don't think he's a blogger, but he's gotten great play and publicity by putting his voice out there.
Can a blog be edited? Yeah, it can be. Large media companies are probably going to edit stuff to make sure it's not libelous. But it's primarily edited for proofreading. I don't know any journalists who do blogs have anything yanked.
My advice is not to assign them. These things should be done spontaneously and enthusiastically. Can you imagine Maureen Dowd doing a blog on politics? It's a great thing to do. You're providing a service to your readers. And as Rafat mentioned, they should also be doing this as a defensive measure. I know people who don't read Editor & Publisher's Web site because they're reading Rafat's blog. If they don't do this, who's going to look at their own stuff?
The question of whether there's a profit in it comes down to whether the publication is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. In business-to-business, you could come up with a paid blog. I don't like the paid model, but it could be done. In business-to-consumer, it's more difficult to do. They're not making much money on the Web site any way. It has to do with the Web as an advertising medium, not with blogs.
Media will start using blogs when they understand blogs. They should do it not for profitability but because it's a strategic necessity and a service to their readers. The smart media companies have already begun.
Rafat Ali is editor and publisher of PaidContent.org, Vin Crosbie is managing partner of Digital Deliverance, Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director of Advance.net, David Shnaider is former president of ZDNet and founder of Prodigy, and Elizabeth Spiers is editor of Gawker.com. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
David Shnaider: I think that I'm like the donkey on Animal Farm, who says we live a very long time; have you ever seen a dead donkey? What effects are Weblogs having on traditional media? We got into this a little bit last night when we talked about is a blogger a journalist? No one can tell me that what's happening here in terms of people reporting isn't journalism. I, for one, am fed up with bad, fuzzy writing that leaves out information I want to know. I'm sick of egos. I'm absolutely fed up with people opining on subjects that they know nothing about. That is why I am no longer going to watch the 10 o'clock news on my local Fox affiliate, because that's what you get.
A piece came out 35 years ago called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" written by Hunter Thompson. People then said this isn't representative journalism. But if you read it today, it's representative of a blog. Then there was a newsletter editor in Washington named I.M. Stone. No one would have said that he wasn't a journalist. With that background we're going to talk a little bit about what Weblogs mean to traditional media.
Are they just a passing fad? Are they a new model? Are we looking at a new market for creating content? Like Doc Searls, I bristle at calling it content, but that's what we're going to look at. First we'll hear from Jeff Jarvis, who represents Big Media. But he's also very smart and he was out ahead in terms of Weblogs. Does anyone else in the whole Newhouse publishing empire get it? Do they even need to? Next we'll hear from Elizabeth Spiers, who in just a few months has created a must-read publication in New York media. As much as we can decry traditional media, who can't feel a little pride to be covered by mainstream media? Then we'll hear from Rafat Ali, who's created what I regard as an essential daily experience for people in this business, more so than some of the traditional vertical publications. Do you represent the leading edge of a movement that could threaten the empire? Then we'll hear from Vin Crosbie, who's an extremely well-read consultant and commentator. Is there really a business here?
Jeff Jarvis: I'm a journalist. Don't shoot me. I'm a newspaper guy, a magazine guy, I've been in TV, but I've been online for nine years. I work for a guy who really understands it, and we look at the Internet as a new media. The Internet is the first medium owned by the audience. It's not us and them, It's all us. For us, it all started with forums. In wrestling season, high school wrestling, one topic, one market, you can get 25,000 page views a day. We value that. That's a third of my traffic. It's the audience reporting news. The audience gives scores of the little league teams, stuff we can't afford to cover.
Blogs to me represent the highest form of audience content. A Weblog is not like a forum. A forum is like Saturday night at the bar. A blog is crap in your neighbor's yard. You own it. It's your yard. Through linking, the cream rises to the top. Are Weblogs making a difference? I'm going to do just one thing, Iran. Here was somebody who was arrested and thrown into an Iranian prison for doing something we do every day casually on our couches. Weblogs could make a difference in Iraq. They're making a difference there. They're making a difference here.
Elizabeth is making a difference here. She's being quoted in the New York Post. What makes Weblogs better? Speed. What I write tonight is meant to be read tomorrow. The variety. Thanks to the Internet, the fact that we can go anywhere in the world to get what we want is new. The voices. They're wonderful to hear. The tools that we use. Technorati. Blogdex. These are tremendous tools that will get much much richer. Finally, interactivity. I love my comments. We've been involved in forums a long time, but in my comments, I've only had to kill one post.
But Weblogs are nothing magical. It's just a tool. They're cheap publishing tools with the widest distribution ever. Still, they do different things. If you look at Livejournal, it's a community. There's nanomedia like Gizmodo and Gawker. Advertising, and lastly, personal. People will post my photos, my movies, my shopping list. Then there's video. I'm Andy Rooney. Video adds a lot. If I were MSNBC, I'd be looking for the next stars online.
Who should give a damn from a business perspective? Have a business reason to blog. Don't blog just for the sake of blogging. You've got to have a business reason. Let's talk about us in big media and why we're doing Weblogs. My boss was into Weblogs, and he was on my butt. I couldn't even figure it out. Frankly, it was after Sept. 11 that I had something to say. I had a reason to blog. I learned a tremendous amount. I had to learn that first hand. That allowed me to become a coach to others in the company.
We've started a series of blogs within the company. Some are good. Some are not so good. But they're learning. During the war I did a blog about the war that we syndicated across all the sites. There's not a lot of money to be made. There's no money to be made for me. It's traffic. The reason we're doing it is because it's so darn cheap.
Marketers. Dr. Pepper didn't make a mistake by sending the drink to bloggers. The mistake was lying about it and keeping it secret. Bloggers have influence. And marketers should treat bloggers with the respect that you all have an audience. Treat them as you treat media. Starting your own cow Weblog is dumb. Trying to keep it secret is dumb. But if people who do Weblogs see your movie early, that is good. It will create buzz.
We see small businesses like restaurants using blogs. They can update their specials every day. Companies that sell expertise. Nanomedia I think will work. Gawker will be a big and important success. Big defined relatively. What's that other site that calls itself a Weblog? AlwaysOn. It's just a guy who couldn't afford paper. It's not a Weblog. It shows the lower ambition of media. Weblogs can become media properties. Is anyone here from AOL or Yahoo? That's a mistake. Consumers are interested in Weblogs. They'll start to do that.
Elizabeth Spiers: I'm the editor of Gawker. Editor's a bit of a misnomer as I write everything and edit little. My publisher Nick Denton is editing Gawker today and tomorrow. You should email him and tell him how much worse it is when I'm not doing it.
Gawker has gotten quite a bit of response from media. I talk a lot about media, and it being a narcissistic industry, when you talk about media, they tend to listen. The first example is [a major New York daily with a popular gossip column]. Gawker is kind of a gossip site. I read the local gossip rags and do a digest. I started to realize that the [paper] would have nine items up and five would be items I'd put in Gawker the day before. I met several of the [gossip columnists] a few days ago and teased them, and one said, "Yeah, it makes my job so much easier."
The second example is [a somewhat snooty New York-based newspaper published on non-white paper that has a sizable media focus]. I've had four or five reporters come up to me and say that they want to do an article on Gawker, but their editor won't let them. The resistance is that they're afraid of you. The big guys are sitting up and taking notice. A lot of them are pretty smart about it and figuring out how to co-opt what we're doing. A lot of them just want in on the joke. I have editors sending me gossip about each other. I think that's really funny.
I had a little experience with Tony Perkins. I don't get a lot of press releases, but I've read few press releases that 30 seconds later I didn't wish I had those 30 seconds back. The exception is that the editor of Stuff got fired, and he wrote a press release saying that he'd been promoted. He's a prankster. I excerpted that. When Tony Perkins launched AlwaysOn, he hired a PR firm to pitch blogs, positioning AlwaysOn as this grassroots phenomenon. I thought that was funny. If it's such a grassroots thing, why hire a PR firm? Do it the blog way and publish content that's worth reading. If you can't do that, your blog is probably not going to be worth reading anyway.
Another anecdote. The [aforementioned tabloid newspaper] guys. We don't get censored. I have a filthy mouth. I say fuck. The [gossip column] guys said that they can't say fuck. They can't even quote it.
Rafat Ali: My name is Michael Moore. I want to thank the Academy for this award. I have 100% of bloggers in solidarity when I say this: AlwaysOn sucks.
I run a site called PaidContent.org. This is my one-year anniversary or whatever. I started at Silicon Alley Reporter, and I just started throwing stuff I couldn't use onto the site. The site is about digital media and how to do things beyond advertising. I'm a journalist, so I started to break stories. That got bigger and bigger. Then I started getting emails from vendors about whether I wanted to put an ad on it. I didn't because I was a full-time journalist and I didn't want my boss to call me on it.
Since November, this is my job. I blog for a living. It's been going well. As an adjunct to the site, I have an email newsletter. They're extremely complimentary. As a trade media, it's an important thing. Trade people may not be so technologically savvy to always go to your Web site. That's the main site. I live off it, basically.
Then I launched MobileContent two weeks ago. And two days ago I launched DigitalMusic. I have other sites, but I'm too scared to launch them. I need to hire someone. I'm dead.
My whole theory is that trade Weblogs are going to replace trade Web sites. As an expert in the field, you break news, have commentary, and offer original content. How many of you have ever read an official publication on wireless media? How many read blogs on wireless? Point proven. MarketingFix is better at attracting media coverage than AdWeek and AdAge. SmallTimes is a trade site on nanotech. They just started SmallTechAdvantage, which is kind of a blog intelligence service.
Why would trade Web sites work? Relevance and timeliness. Leanness of operations. Saturation o fcoverage. You just have to link to it. Saturate the market as much as you can. In branding terms, there's what they call a flanking strategy. Weblogs can do that effectively. When you combine Weblogs and original stories, you have a killer app.
The non-obvious advantage is that the profit motive for a formal operation is too high. Journalists have always been underpaid and underfed. All I want is enough to live. For me to have some sort of a Weblog trade thing is not that profit funded. Trade Weblogs also have the whole open source ethic. After awhile, if you're a journalist, people start asking you if you want to consult. I don't because you get into issues I don't want to get into. Understand what you're not: a consultant.
Vin Crosbie: I get paid to tell publishers things that would get me fired if I were an employee, particularly about their business models. Lately, they're asking me about blogs. They're really scared or dismissive of blogs right now. It's really, really pervasive. They don't think this is journalism. I have to remind them what business they're in. There were people like Henry David Thoreau, Lewis & Clarke, James Boswell, and Charles Darwin who kept journals and published the stuff. If these guys had blogs back then, you can bet your ass that they'd be online.
Basically, there's a natural human nature to keep a journal. It's also part of the basic human nature to publish journals. Nowadays people are publishing them online. This isn't something that's going to go away. People will use the cheapest and easiest technology to do it.
If you think about whether this is journalism, what is journalism? Keeping a journal., That's what it is. There are more people keeping blogs than there are professional journalists who get paid. There's no conflict between what bloggers do and what journalists do as long as you're honest and accurate about it. Sure, there are going to be bloggers who are opinionated and untruthful. But then we've got Jayson Blair.
Can media organizations use blogs? Dan Gillmore keeps a blog. The Guardian's blog is a blog. Some people will say that the Drudge Report is a blog. He says, "Don't call me a blogger." I don't think he's a blogger, but he's gotten great play and publicity by putting his voice out there.
Can a blog be edited? Yeah, it can be. Large media companies are probably going to edit stuff to make sure it's not libelous. But it's primarily edited for proofreading. I don't know any journalists who do blogs have anything yanked.
My advice is not to assign them. These things should be done spontaneously and enthusiastically. Can you imagine Maureen Dowd doing a blog on politics? It's a great thing to do. You're providing a service to your readers. And as Rafat mentioned, they should also be doing this as a defensive measure. I know people who don't read Editor & Publisher's Web site because they're reading Rafat's blog. If they don't do this, who's going to look at their own stuff?
The question of whether there's a profit in it comes down to whether the publication is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. In business-to-business, you could come up with a paid blog. I don't like the paid model, but it could be done. In business-to-consumer, it's more difficult to do. They're not making much money on the Web site any way. It has to do with the Web as an advertising medium, not with blogs.
Media will start using blogs when they understand blogs. They should do it not for profitability but because it's a strategic necessity and a service to their readers. The smart media companies have already begun.
Mixed Drinks and Mingling VI
Members of Boston Blogs gathered with Weblog Business Strategies 2003 participants last night for a low-key gathering at Caveau, part of Marche Movenpick in the Pru. While the food seemed slightly expensive -- $20 for tortellini, rotini, and tomato sauce; a piece of bread; chicken soup; and a Sam Adams -- the group was large and lively -- and I met some interesting people from Boston and other parts of the country.
The people who were there:
Anil Dash
Elin
Adam Gaffin
Jesper
Kushal Dave
Johannes Ernst
Gabriel Jeferey
Scott Johnson
Adina Levin
Lorissa
Michael
Joseph Reagle
Rock Regan
Heath Row
François Schiettecatte
Bill Seitz
Shannon
Sooz
Steve
Joe Todan
Phil Windley
Thanks to everyone who came out!
The people who were there:
Thanks to everyone who came out!
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XII
Jason Shellen: Where Weblogs Matter
We've already heard about the why and the what, so maybe I'm being cheeky by asking where. We think about blogs in several ways at Blogger and Google. We think about writing, reading, and connecting. Blogs connect individuals into groups. They build bridges between content.
There was a lot of talk yesterday about what is a blog. We think about what is a blog post? It's an atomic form of self-expression. It's the most granular we get in the blogging world. Every blogger has an audience in mind. Sometimes it's an audience of one. Sometimes it's a personal journal. But we've found that most blogs have an attended audience. It's assumed that they'll be read.
We've got these camera phones that can post to a blog now. This is just a quick hack so you can post to your blog from your cell phone. It's called moblogging by some people. Mobile blogging. People will be able to blog video. Audio as well. We've got a service called audioblog where you can post MP3 files. All of these are blog posts.
That gets us to the second item: reading. Blogs are meant to be read. They're shared, passed around, linked. Writers get to know much of their audience pretty well. The most avid blog readers have clamored for other ways to access this information. If I want to read all of the blogs in this room, am I going to go to a Web site? I need to access this another way. You probably have one of these. It's a news aggregator. Feeds have sprung up.
Matthew Berk is right that a lot of these are in an email-like format. It's no happenstance that they're called newsreaders, but we're reading blogs. It's very email-like. It's newsy. It hearkens back to newsgroup postings. BlogThis lets you post directly from the newsreader. The reading and the writing are very connected.
The technology is moving toward to connecting blogs. You can listen to blogs in your car. There's something called Read It to Me that converts a feed to MP3 audio and synchs it up from iTunes. It sounds a little bit like Rosie from the Jetsons right now. All of this is very early stage technology, even the phone cameras. The composition of a blog post is changing and evolving. Fotoblogs are definitely coming to the forefront. People want to upload photos and comment on them. But it's a very old concept. How can I get galleries online? What constitutes a blog post?
How do people connect with relevant blog content? If you can't find it it might as well not be there. Where Weblogs are located and linked is an important part of the experience. People do part of this through blogrolls to show what's relevant. Blogstreet is another example. You enter your URL and it tells you who your neighbors are -- what blogs are similar to you.
It's the links in and the links out that are key. Today, people find blogs primarily through Google, I would argue. As an aside, just for the record, from the center of the room, Google's not removing blogs. What blogs are great at are being fresh, relevant, and recently updated. You can't really blame the media for being fresh and relevant. Any content like that Google would like. The tools in this space are very good at that: push-button publishing. We are at Google now. It would be silly of us not to take advantage of some of their technology.
We're here to explore blogs for business. People read blogs for many reasons. There are a growing number of people who are keeping track of a certain space like finance or bonds. They have some sort of vertical that they're writing in. Where can business intersect with blogs? As a tool for collaboration in teams. To follow what's happening in your industry. Blogs lend a human voice to business. It's nice to hear individuals talk rather than entities. I hate it when entities talk. It's hollow.
Blogs have been around for a long time. Especially in Internet years. But I believe that the proliferation of the form that we recognize as blogs, the tool providers sprung up in 1999. Blogging is a long-standing community. It has standards, a code of ethics, and a dedicated membership. There's a big sense of community. I'm a reader of this. I'm connected to this site.
Here's the big fear. The big fear in the blogging community is that big business is going to come in, mow down the farm, and put up a Wal-Mart. As Joni Mitchell said, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The blogging community is going to watch everything you do very carefully. There is a community, and there is a bit of apprehension.
I'm going to pick on Kathleen's blog and look at some examples. I believe this is linked off the Jupiter events page. Kathleen set up this blog. There's a lot of good stuff up here. There's a lot of data. There's lots of good things happening. To nit pick, there's a section that says "one blogger pointed out." Maybe she has a good reason not to link to that blogger. Maybe it was me! I want that link. Also, if you look at the timestamp, you want some sort of permalink so I can point people to that. Still, I would call that a good business blog because it follows most of the best practices.
Business blogs don't have much to do with blogging, really. They have a lot to do with your other content. You can't really link easily to flash. But Jakob Nielsen's working on how to better link deeply into flash. E-commerce systems are also difficult to link to because they have these big URLs. It might as well not be if you can't find it.
Who's using blogs in business today? Macromedia is using all sorts of tools. Groove Networks' Ray Ozzie keeps a blog, which I find fascinating. They're working on a group collaboration tool, and they're using blogs. MSNBC is doing something called Blog Central. Who's using blogs internally? It's hard to tell. Traction might have a good number on that. What we've installed before is an install at Cisco way back in 1999. We did an install, and then we never really heard about it again. It's behind the firewall. There's no way for me to know what's going on. We did a trial install at Sun. They're using it in their customer center. And last summer we worked with Stanford University on a trial program for students and faculty.
Let me show another good business blog. As people mentioned yesterday, it's experts sharing knowledge in a business blog. In sales, the common goal is to become the perceived expert. It's hard to argue that you don't know anything about the VC space if you've been keeping a blog for five years. This is VentureBlog. Right now the places where there's an expert space is marketing, Web design. It's taken a leap into the financial world. There are law blogs. We'll start to see this seep into other areas. In a few years, we'll see things like the 1967 Shelby Cobra blog. It'd be nice to see people not tied to the Internet professionally in some way. Mechanics. That'd be nice to see. But it's not just big business. HTML newsletters are hard to copy and paste into my blog, but something like LooseTooth.com will easily spread throughout the blogosphere.
What are we doing about this? How is Blogger doing this? How is Google doing this? The first thing we said is that we need an internal version of that blog that we've been keeping since 1999. We did a version of Blogger for Google. We were pretty clever about the name, and it's behind the firewall. It's called Blogger in Google, BIG. The Shellen Conspiracy is a popular blog. Ev Does Stuff is another popular one. This is all behind the firewall. On Blogger.com we keep a blog called What's New. But BIG is internal.
It's been interesting to see what becomes popular. The Internet becomes more popular. The Internet lets you link deeply to information you haven't seen for years. You can keep a loose association with groups you find interesting just to keep up with what they're doing. People emerge as blogging enthusiasts within their groups. There's an engineer who's doing a blog on search quality.
What's also interesting are cultural blogs within the company. We've got a blog called customer love notes, emails from users to customer support. "Google saved my dog." That sort of thing makes it to Google Love Notes. We've got a list of interesting search strings. Why aren't they public? Sometimes they're private. There's a consent thing we can talk about.
We don't have a product yet. But now that we're at Google, we know that a great blogging tool and a great search tool can make a great intranet.
Jason Shellen is associate program manager for Blogger. He works with the Google technology team to drive and manage enhancements and new features for the Blogger service. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:
We've already heard about the why and the what, so maybe I'm being cheeky by asking where. We think about blogs in several ways at Blogger and Google. We think about writing, reading, and connecting. Blogs connect individuals into groups. They build bridges between content.
There was a lot of talk yesterday about what is a blog. We think about what is a blog post? It's an atomic form of self-expression. It's the most granular we get in the blogging world. Every blogger has an audience in mind. Sometimes it's an audience of one. Sometimes it's a personal journal. But we've found that most blogs have an attended audience. It's assumed that they'll be read.
We've got these camera phones that can post to a blog now. This is just a quick hack so you can post to your blog from your cell phone. It's called moblogging by some people. Mobile blogging. People will be able to blog video. Audio as well. We've got a service called audioblog where you can post MP3 files. All of these are blog posts.
That gets us to the second item: reading. Blogs are meant to be read. They're shared, passed around, linked. Writers get to know much of their audience pretty well. The most avid blog readers have clamored for other ways to access this information. If I want to read all of the blogs in this room, am I going to go to a Web site? I need to access this another way. You probably have one of these. It's a news aggregator. Feeds have sprung up.
Matthew Berk is right that a lot of these are in an email-like format. It's no happenstance that they're called newsreaders, but we're reading blogs. It's very email-like. It's newsy. It hearkens back to newsgroup postings. BlogThis lets you post directly from the newsreader. The reading and the writing are very connected.
The technology is moving toward to connecting blogs. You can listen to blogs in your car. There's something called Read It to Me that converts a feed to MP3 audio and synchs it up from iTunes. It sounds a little bit like Rosie from the Jetsons right now. All of this is very early stage technology, even the phone cameras. The composition of a blog post is changing and evolving. Fotoblogs are definitely coming to the forefront. People want to upload photos and comment on them. But it's a very old concept. How can I get galleries online? What constitutes a blog post?
How do people connect with relevant blog content? If you can't find it it might as well not be there. Where Weblogs are located and linked is an important part of the experience. People do part of this through blogrolls to show what's relevant. Blogstreet is another example. You enter your URL and it tells you who your neighbors are -- what blogs are similar to you.
It's the links in and the links out that are key. Today, people find blogs primarily through Google, I would argue. As an aside, just for the record, from the center of the room, Google's not removing blogs. What blogs are great at are being fresh, relevant, and recently updated. You can't really blame the media for being fresh and relevant. Any content like that Google would like. The tools in this space are very good at that: push-button publishing. We are at Google now. It would be silly of us not to take advantage of some of their technology.
We're here to explore blogs for business. People read blogs for many reasons. There are a growing number of people who are keeping track of a certain space like finance or bonds. They have some sort of vertical that they're writing in. Where can business intersect with blogs? As a tool for collaboration in teams. To follow what's happening in your industry. Blogs lend a human voice to business. It's nice to hear individuals talk rather than entities. I hate it when entities talk. It's hollow.
Blogs have been around for a long time. Especially in Internet years. But I believe that the proliferation of the form that we recognize as blogs, the tool providers sprung up in 1999. Blogging is a long-standing community. It has standards, a code of ethics, and a dedicated membership. There's a big sense of community. I'm a reader of this. I'm connected to this site.
Here's the big fear. The big fear in the blogging community is that big business is going to come in, mow down the farm, and put up a Wal-Mart. As Joni Mitchell said, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The blogging community is going to watch everything you do very carefully. There is a community, and there is a bit of apprehension.
I'm going to pick on Kathleen's blog and look at some examples. I believe this is linked off the Jupiter events page. Kathleen set up this blog. There's a lot of good stuff up here. There's a lot of data. There's lots of good things happening. To nit pick, there's a section that says "one blogger pointed out." Maybe she has a good reason not to link to that blogger. Maybe it was me! I want that link. Also, if you look at the timestamp, you want some sort of permalink so I can point people to that. Still, I would call that a good business blog because it follows most of the best practices.
Business blogs don't have much to do with blogging, really. They have a lot to do with your other content. You can't really link easily to flash. But Jakob Nielsen's working on how to better link deeply into flash. E-commerce systems are also difficult to link to because they have these big URLs. It might as well not be if you can't find it.
Who's using blogs in business today? Macromedia is using all sorts of tools. Groove Networks' Ray Ozzie keeps a blog, which I find fascinating. They're working on a group collaboration tool, and they're using blogs. MSNBC is doing something called Blog Central. Who's using blogs internally? It's hard to tell. Traction might have a good number on that. What we've installed before is an install at Cisco way back in 1999. We did an install, and then we never really heard about it again. It's behind the firewall. There's no way for me to know what's going on. We did a trial install at Sun. They're using it in their customer center. And last summer we worked with Stanford University on a trial program for students and faculty.
Let me show another good business blog. As people mentioned yesterday, it's experts sharing knowledge in a business blog. In sales, the common goal is to become the perceived expert. It's hard to argue that you don't know anything about the VC space if you've been keeping a blog for five years. This is VentureBlog. Right now the places where there's an expert space is marketing, Web design. It's taken a leap into the financial world. There are law blogs. We'll start to see this seep into other areas. In a few years, we'll see things like the 1967 Shelby Cobra blog. It'd be nice to see people not tied to the Internet professionally in some way. Mechanics. That'd be nice to see. But it's not just big business. HTML newsletters are hard to copy and paste into my blog, but something like LooseTooth.com will easily spread throughout the blogosphere.
What are we doing about this? How is Blogger doing this? How is Google doing this? The first thing we said is that we need an internal version of that blog that we've been keeping since 1999. We did a version of Blogger for Google. We were pretty clever about the name, and it's behind the firewall. It's called Blogger in Google, BIG. The Shellen Conspiracy is a popular blog. Ev Does Stuff is another popular one. This is all behind the firewall. On Blogger.com we keep a blog called What's New. But BIG is internal.
It's been interesting to see what becomes popular. The Internet becomes more popular. The Internet lets you link deeply to information you haven't seen for years. You can keep a loose association with groups you find interesting just to keep up with what they're doing. People emerge as blogging enthusiasts within their groups. There's an engineer who's doing a blog on search quality.
What's also interesting are cultural blogs within the company. We've got a blog called customer love notes, emails from users to customer support. "Google saved my dog." That sort of thing makes it to Google Love Notes. We've got a list of interesting search strings. Why aren't they public? Sometimes they're private. There's a consent thing we can talk about.
We don't have a product yet. But now that we're at Google, we know that a great blogging tool and a great search tool can make a great intranet.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XI
Matthew Berk: Digital Self-Fashioning
Yesterday I had the post-snack crowd, and this morning I have the post-sleep crowd. Today I'm going to try to take you through some thinking I've been doing. If it seems rough, it's because it's thinking. This is a roughly open forum and experimental, so we'll give it a try.
What the heck is content? That's a question I always ask. These are pretty big questions: How do people represent themselves online? What is the nature of content? How do communities arise out of connected content? "Community" is an idea we borrow from the off-line context. I've stolen the term "self-fashioning," and I'll tell you from where in a minute.
Community is a borrowed metaphor. We meet face to face. We form groups. Online, it looks sort of different. I want to optimize for the medium. I took a press call for movie sites, and it was a really odd press call. I said, this is all about ticket sales, right? And they said, no, they don't care about ticket sales. It's all about paid content. Maybe personals are the same way. You can form a two-person community and then take it offline. Personals sites are communities of many that pair down to two in the end. Those are paid content sites as well.
What I cover at Jupiter is content management, so that's my lens. I don't want to focus on people meeting people. I've dug through the academic literature, and there are two ways people can represent themselves online. One is anthropomorphic. Bodies are transported and reconstituted in the virtual world. The second metaphor is the network as a virtual place. The network is an extension of place. Community transforms online, and it's an extension of place. That opens up the opportunity for people to form so-called communities.
These two things are crossed with two other axis. They're kind of political. There's freedom of the self, freedom from the physical, freedom from the constraints of the self. Then there's alienation of the self, people who reconstitute themselves online. The more you use it as a mediator, the more you rely on it. Literally this room, 80% of the people are mediating this experience. Usually I cling to the podium and hide behind it. Looking out into the audience, it's kind of nice to cling to the laptop.
I mentioned that I stole these concepts about self-fashioning. More or less I got them from Michel Foucault. He calls them technologies of the self. And he thought about ways in which in social situations, people are produced by collections of documents. Today the evidence that we leave behind is much richer than what we might have left behind 50 years ago. I also ripped off self-fashioning from Stephen Greenblatt, who does work on the Renaissance. He says that we defined what it means to be a person. Hamlet is a man who fashions himself out of a very peculiar cloth, but a lot of people argue that Hamlet is one of the first self-fashioned men. The state and the church and all of the social institutions all contribute to develop that self. It's kind of a reciprocal formation of what it means to be a person.
I wanted to take this and import it online. If the online self is content, what is content? Our technology has gotten very good at storing and moving date. We don't believe that's content. When we wax poetic, we say that content is the human-legible destiny of data and information resources. It becomes content when it becomes legible to a person. Most of the time when we look at content management systems, they forget that content is meaningful to people and they abstract it to data. There's lots of talk about structured content and unstructured content. All content has structure, whether that structure is internal to that content or external. The other thing to fold this third thing back on the firrst is that content has some sort of action potential. It can enrich or cement ties between people and perhaps put them at risk.
There's a lot of rhetoric out in the field about managing content just because it's content. If it's not meaningful to you, why would you want to manage it? I call these rules, but they're very loose because I'm still thinking about it. On the Internet, people constitute themselves as assemblies of content. On AOL, everyone has a screen name. Those have become very rich profiles. On the network, a person is content. No. 2, content is intrinsically structured. The greater the depth of structure, the greater the nature of interrelatedness and the greater the action potential. This action potential is derived from the richness and structure of the content. No. 3, content is always plural. People always have more than one profile, more than one screen name. They also have multiple Web sites. Eventually, people will have multiple blogs.
Now I want to come back and think about community. For me, online you have a content management application that takes advantage of the fact that people are representing themselves in a certain way. Look at the power of something like Classmates.com. They are applications where people go to share content.
We finally come back to blogs. Blogs are a new technology of the self. They are a new way for people to create themselves in content. I like blogs because they're very pure. This purity takes two form. There ain't no markup. Or the markup comes last. What matters is that you're producing entries. You're in the act of producing text of some kind. Let's think about the activity. This is self-expression.
When you think about Web sites, I'm still trying to figure out why people blog instead of making Web sites. Blogs have conventions, but they have few metaphors. They don't have any metaphorical hangovers. There's also a great tension between people expressing themselves online and communities. Technorati is now keyword searchable. There will be links between blogs. Blogs aren't anything without references to other blogs. Underneath it all, you have a standard for syndication. Your content is now portable, transposable. This tool is by definition networked.
Matthew Berk is a senior analyst for Jupiter Research. He focuses on infrastructure and operations, which includes coverage of content management and site technologies and operations. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:
Yesterday I had the post-snack crowd, and this morning I have the post-sleep crowd. Today I'm going to try to take you through some thinking I've been doing. If it seems rough, it's because it's thinking. This is a roughly open forum and experimental, so we'll give it a try.
What the heck is content? That's a question I always ask. These are pretty big questions: How do people represent themselves online? What is the nature of content? How do communities arise out of connected content? "Community" is an idea we borrow from the off-line context. I've stolen the term "self-fashioning," and I'll tell you from where in a minute.
Community is a borrowed metaphor. We meet face to face. We form groups. Online, it looks sort of different. I want to optimize for the medium. I took a press call for movie sites, and it was a really odd press call. I said, this is all about ticket sales, right? And they said, no, they don't care about ticket sales. It's all about paid content. Maybe personals are the same way. You can form a two-person community and then take it offline. Personals sites are communities of many that pair down to two in the end. Those are paid content sites as well.
What I cover at Jupiter is content management, so that's my lens. I don't want to focus on people meeting people. I've dug through the academic literature, and there are two ways people can represent themselves online. One is anthropomorphic. Bodies are transported and reconstituted in the virtual world. The second metaphor is the network as a virtual place. The network is an extension of place. Community transforms online, and it's an extension of place. That opens up the opportunity for people to form so-called communities.
These two things are crossed with two other axis. They're kind of political. There's freedom of the self, freedom from the physical, freedom from the constraints of the self. Then there's alienation of the self, people who reconstitute themselves online. The more you use it as a mediator, the more you rely on it. Literally this room, 80% of the people are mediating this experience. Usually I cling to the podium and hide behind it. Looking out into the audience, it's kind of nice to cling to the laptop.
I mentioned that I stole these concepts about self-fashioning. More or less I got them from Michel Foucault. He calls them technologies of the self. And he thought about ways in which in social situations, people are produced by collections of documents. Today the evidence that we leave behind is much richer than what we might have left behind 50 years ago. I also ripped off self-fashioning from Stephen Greenblatt, who does work on the Renaissance. He says that we defined what it means to be a person. Hamlet is a man who fashions himself out of a very peculiar cloth, but a lot of people argue that Hamlet is one of the first self-fashioned men. The state and the church and all of the social institutions all contribute to develop that self. It's kind of a reciprocal formation of what it means to be a person.
I wanted to take this and import it online. If the online self is content, what is content? Our technology has gotten very good at storing and moving date. We don't believe that's content. When we wax poetic, we say that content is the human-legible destiny of data and information resources. It becomes content when it becomes legible to a person. Most of the time when we look at content management systems, they forget that content is meaningful to people and they abstract it to data. There's lots of talk about structured content and unstructured content. All content has structure, whether that structure is internal to that content or external. The other thing to fold this third thing back on the firrst is that content has some sort of action potential. It can enrich or cement ties between people and perhaps put them at risk.
There's a lot of rhetoric out in the field about managing content just because it's content. If it's not meaningful to you, why would you want to manage it? I call these rules, but they're very loose because I'm still thinking about it. On the Internet, people constitute themselves as assemblies of content. On AOL, everyone has a screen name. Those have become very rich profiles. On the network, a person is content. No. 2, content is intrinsically structured. The greater the depth of structure, the greater the nature of interrelatedness and the greater the action potential. This action potential is derived from the richness and structure of the content. No. 3, content is always plural. People always have more than one profile, more than one screen name. They also have multiple Web sites. Eventually, people will have multiple blogs.
Now I want to come back and think about community. For me, online you have a content management application that takes advantage of the fact that people are representing themselves in a certain way. Look at the power of something like Classmates.com. They are applications where people go to share content.
We finally come back to blogs. Blogs are a new technology of the self. They are a new way for people to create themselves in content. I like blogs because they're very pure. This purity takes two form. There ain't no markup. Or the markup comes last. What matters is that you're producing entries. You're in the act of producing text of some kind. Let's think about the activity. This is self-expression.
When you think about Web sites, I'm still trying to figure out why people blog instead of making Web sites. Blogs have conventions, but they have few metaphors. They don't have any metaphorical hangovers. There's also a great tension between people expressing themselves online and communities. Technorati is now keyword searchable. There will be links between blogs. Blogs aren't anything without references to other blogs. Underneath it all, you have a standard for syndication. Your content is now portable, transposable. This tool is by definition networked.
Monday, June 09, 2003
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 X
Bricklin, Dash, Frankston, Gartenberg, Robb, Searls, and Shellen: Blogging Technologies And Platforms -- Today And Tomorrow
Doc Searls: It already feels like the end of the day. Long day. We'll try to lighten it up a little bit. The topic is blogging tools today and tomorrow, and I'm going to try to focus on the latter. I'm going to give each of these gentlemen the opportunity to explain not what they're doing in life, but where they're going. What are the technologies they're adopting? What are the issues they see? What are the potholes in the road?
Jason Shellen: A little bit of what Blogger is doing is playing catch up, honestly. We had a very small team for very many years. The space that we were in we felt like we were building a tool for Web designers. It quickly spun out of that community into a more mainstream audience. They're no longer all designers any more. That means that our tool changes. It's probably more akin to Geocities. That means that we need to change. We're undergoing a code revision that we're rolling out right now, and we really see that as the platform for the future. What's nice now is when we see something that would be great to tie into the community, we can put it together in a week. We're also at Google. We can use the resources there and bounce ideas off of really interesting folks. A core area of our focus for the future is definitely the community side. Blogger used to be the core for people to find new blogs. That didn't scale well. Now we have access to as many servers as we can eat. We're definitely looking at the way that people find blogs. The way that people write blogs. I think Tim was saying that the tools were fading into the background, not that blogging was fading into the background.
Bob Frankston: I want to distinguish between two opposing issues. One is improving the blog by some definition. Those are all mechanisms that make blogs better by some measure. But we don't know what that measure should be. We need to be open to looking at blogging in a much more general sense. There was a period in which the Web was confused with the Home Shopping Channel. I use Blogger for one site. For another, I built my own tools. The advantage of using Blogger is that I get a lot of advantages from Blogger such as the RSS feed. We need to encourage both trends but be aware of conflicts. We need users, but we need to encourage people to be developers.
Dan Bricklin: The tools we had at Trellix showed that blogging was important, but blogging is part of your Web site. You've got to integrate the tool together, the look together. I see something about blog tools. If you look at Tripod and Geocities, there are millions of sites made using those, more than blogs. The blog tools automate a lot of the tedium. Just like spreadsheets like Visicalc. That's what Blogger, Manila, and Radio did. They tool tedious housekeeping. Then 1-2-3 came along. It didn't just give you automation. It gave you better output and better stuff. Then we get to Excel. We're not there yet. The guys at Lotus couldn't imagine what Excel would be.
One important thing is media forms. I believe in photos and stuff like that. Multimedia is important in many aspects. When we think about communicating, not everyone can write well. Not everyone can photograph. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Anil Dash: Our today is Moveable Type, a tool that is very powerful, has a lot of great features, but is a pain in the ass to get started. Our immediate future is TypePad, which makes it easier for people to make Weblogs. We think that the anatomy of a Weblog has been decided. They've emerged over the last few years. Permalinks came out not long ago. And the tools haven't kept up with this. As a direction, the goal is going to be working backwards from the format to what people are doing with it.
Michael Gartenberg: I'm not a tool vendor. And there's something I haven't heard. At Jupiter we talk a lot about digital ubiquity. We carry multiple devices. People don't want one device. Our research indicates that the magic is number. And in some cases three devices. The challenge here is not only the tools on the PC side. We've got to take images, content, etc., to cell phones, PDAs, and other devices.
John Robb: We're about to come out with version 9.1, which Manila rides on. It includes RSS, email to Weblog. It's much smoother and very, very slick. If you've looked inside Manila, you'll know that it has a huge set of features. You can tweak almost anything. Our goal is to keep up with the interface. Soon, Radio will be able to synch with multiple desktops. The other thing is that I've been looking at P2P systems that you can hook up with Weblogs, a system that would augment your ability to upload large files. A link would go up, point to the file on your desktop, and other people using Radio could access the file. There is room for the desktop client.
People talk about having Weblogs everywhere. My time is too valuable to have my Weblog in multiple places. I'd rather have one Weblog that I can publish to multiple places.
Shellen: What we're saying isn't that you'd have multiple blogs. The concept of blogs living in different places doesn't mean that you have different data stores.
Dash: You have a cloud presence that embraces your entire identity online. It's broadened out to passive things that you're doing. People are using pedometers that hook up with Bluetooth to your computer.
Shellen: This fellow back there has Qblogger [???], which is a very interesting example of a personal data store.
Dash: We talked in another context about recording all your audio -- everything you've heard all day. Then I can decide what I want to share on my blog. Or with Jason.
Frankston: That's an interesting social experiment. People are going to get very good at creating synthetic personalities.
Dash: People already are!
Searls: I think we're going off in another direction. It's interesting that you can create a different persona, but if you try to use that persona in the real world, you can have trouble. It brings up issues about identity.
Dash: If everything about you is in your blog, is it a blog? I think so. It's not about the publishing tool. It's a social contract.
Searls: To me, controlling access to your blog is a tertiary thing.
Bricklin: In the business world, knowing who can read your blog is going to be a big thing.
Dash: Access control is a big part of it.
Searls: That's easier for me to understand than social contract.
Dash: We're trying to differentiate from Geocities. A permalink is a promise.
Shellen: My permalinks are much nicer to me.
Gartenberg: That doesn't change the very nature. Nothing gets more stale than a day-old Dunkin' Donut than a Weblog that doesn't get updated. It's not about social contract. It's about what you're trying to communicate. A business Weblog will have different goals than a personal Weblog. And they may be the same.
Searls: Let me take this down to a very mundane level. And it'll touch on problems that I have with your tools. John, is Radio Outliner going to come out soon? I want to hit a keyboard command and place a link.
Robb: It's not an immediate thing.
Searls: Blogger, I've helped start maybe 15 blogs, and permalinks don't work right out of the gate.
Shellen: That's a feature.
Searls: A feature?
Shellen: Maybe first blogs aren't all that good. It was a problem with our old template, and we're rolling out the new version now. But I can't say that yours will roll out Thursday.
Searls: I have an ideal being a fotoblogger as well as a text blogger. What I would like to do is take a lot of pictures, put them on my computer, and serve them up. Does blogging have the leverage to make that dream happen?
Frankston: That reminds me of the fact that one of the first things I did was write a server app in javascript that allows me to publish photos.
Searls: Do movies in your home make that happen?
Bricklin: It's not blogging that's going to make it happen, it's digital cameras that are going to make it happen.
Dash: The tools are not keeping up with the way they're being used right now.
Dan Bricklin is CTO of Interland Inc., Anil Dash is the new vice president of business development for Six Apart, Bob Frankston is an independent consultant, Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for Jupiter Research, John Robb is president and COO for Userland Software, Doc Searls is senior editor of the Linux Journal, and Jason Shellen is an associate program manager for Blogger. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
Doc Searls: It already feels like the end of the day. Long day. We'll try to lighten it up a little bit. The topic is blogging tools today and tomorrow, and I'm going to try to focus on the latter. I'm going to give each of these gentlemen the opportunity to explain not what they're doing in life, but where they're going. What are the technologies they're adopting? What are the issues they see? What are the potholes in the road?
Jason Shellen: A little bit of what Blogger is doing is playing catch up, honestly. We had a very small team for very many years. The space that we were in we felt like we were building a tool for Web designers. It quickly spun out of that community into a more mainstream audience. They're no longer all designers any more. That means that our tool changes. It's probably more akin to Geocities. That means that we need to change. We're undergoing a code revision that we're rolling out right now, and we really see that as the platform for the future. What's nice now is when we see something that would be great to tie into the community, we can put it together in a week. We're also at Google. We can use the resources there and bounce ideas off of really interesting folks. A core area of our focus for the future is definitely the community side. Blogger used to be the core for people to find new blogs. That didn't scale well. Now we have access to as many servers as we can eat. We're definitely looking at the way that people find blogs. The way that people write blogs. I think Tim was saying that the tools were fading into the background, not that blogging was fading into the background.
Bob Frankston: I want to distinguish between two opposing issues. One is improving the blog by some definition. Those are all mechanisms that make blogs better by some measure. But we don't know what that measure should be. We need to be open to looking at blogging in a much more general sense. There was a period in which the Web was confused with the Home Shopping Channel. I use Blogger for one site. For another, I built my own tools. The advantage of using Blogger is that I get a lot of advantages from Blogger such as the RSS feed. We need to encourage both trends but be aware of conflicts. We need users, but we need to encourage people to be developers.
Dan Bricklin: The tools we had at Trellix showed that blogging was important, but blogging is part of your Web site. You've got to integrate the tool together, the look together. I see something about blog tools. If you look at Tripod and Geocities, there are millions of sites made using those, more than blogs. The blog tools automate a lot of the tedium. Just like spreadsheets like Visicalc. That's what Blogger, Manila, and Radio did. They tool tedious housekeeping. Then 1-2-3 came along. It didn't just give you automation. It gave you better output and better stuff. Then we get to Excel. We're not there yet. The guys at Lotus couldn't imagine what Excel would be.
One important thing is media forms. I believe in photos and stuff like that. Multimedia is important in many aspects. When we think about communicating, not everyone can write well. Not everyone can photograph. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Anil Dash: Our today is Moveable Type, a tool that is very powerful, has a lot of great features, but is a pain in the ass to get started. Our immediate future is TypePad, which makes it easier for people to make Weblogs. We think that the anatomy of a Weblog has been decided. They've emerged over the last few years. Permalinks came out not long ago. And the tools haven't kept up with this. As a direction, the goal is going to be working backwards from the format to what people are doing with it.
Michael Gartenberg: I'm not a tool vendor. And there's something I haven't heard. At Jupiter we talk a lot about digital ubiquity. We carry multiple devices. People don't want one device. Our research indicates that the magic is number. And in some cases three devices. The challenge here is not only the tools on the PC side. We've got to take images, content, etc., to cell phones, PDAs, and other devices.
John Robb: We're about to come out with version 9.1, which Manila rides on. It includes RSS, email to Weblog. It's much smoother and very, very slick. If you've looked inside Manila, you'll know that it has a huge set of features. You can tweak almost anything. Our goal is to keep up with the interface. Soon, Radio will be able to synch with multiple desktops. The other thing is that I've been looking at P2P systems that you can hook up with Weblogs, a system that would augment your ability to upload large files. A link would go up, point to the file on your desktop, and other people using Radio could access the file. There is room for the desktop client.
People talk about having Weblogs everywhere. My time is too valuable to have my Weblog in multiple places. I'd rather have one Weblog that I can publish to multiple places.
Shellen: What we're saying isn't that you'd have multiple blogs. The concept of blogs living in different places doesn't mean that you have different data stores.
Dash: You have a cloud presence that embraces your entire identity online. It's broadened out to passive things that you're doing. People are using pedometers that hook up with Bluetooth to your computer.
Shellen: This fellow back there has Qblogger [???], which is a very interesting example of a personal data store.
Dash: We talked in another context about recording all your audio -- everything you've heard all day. Then I can decide what I want to share on my blog. Or with Jason.
Frankston: That's an interesting social experiment. People are going to get very good at creating synthetic personalities.
Dash: People already are!
Searls: I think we're going off in another direction. It's interesting that you can create a different persona, but if you try to use that persona in the real world, you can have trouble. It brings up issues about identity.
Dash: If everything about you is in your blog, is it a blog? I think so. It's not about the publishing tool. It's a social contract.
Searls: To me, controlling access to your blog is a tertiary thing.
Bricklin: In the business world, knowing who can read your blog is going to be a big thing.
Dash: Access control is a big part of it.
Searls: That's easier for me to understand than social contract.
Dash: We're trying to differentiate from Geocities. A permalink is a promise.
Shellen: My permalinks are much nicer to me.
Gartenberg: That doesn't change the very nature. Nothing gets more stale than a day-old Dunkin' Donut than a Weblog that doesn't get updated. It's not about social contract. It's about what you're trying to communicate. A business Weblog will have different goals than a personal Weblog. And they may be the same.
Searls: Let me take this down to a very mundane level. And it'll touch on problems that I have with your tools. John, is Radio Outliner going to come out soon? I want to hit a keyboard command and place a link.
Robb: It's not an immediate thing.
Dave Winer: Doc, I can build that for you.
Searls: Blogger, I've helped start maybe 15 blogs, and permalinks don't work right out of the gate.
Shellen: That's a feature.
Searls: A feature?
Shellen: Maybe first blogs aren't all that good. It was a problem with our old template, and we're rolling out the new version now. But I can't say that yours will roll out Thursday.
Searls: I have an ideal being a fotoblogger as well as a text blogger. What I would like to do is take a lot of pictures, put them on my computer, and serve them up. Does blogging have the leverage to make that dream happen?
Frankston: That reminds me of the fact that one of the first things I did was write a server app in javascript that allows me to publish photos.
Searls: Do movies in your home make that happen?
Bricklin: It's not blogging that's going to make it happen, it's digital cameras that are going to make it happen.
Dash: The tools are not keeping up with the way they're being used right now.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 IX
Amundsen, Appnel, Berk, French, Robb, Stow, and Weinroth: Blogs and/as Content Management
Matthew Berk: We have the after-snack crowd here. I hope your blood sugar hasn't bottomed out. Content management is a pretty huge part of what I cover. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about search technology and stuff like that.
Tim Appnel: I've been an IT consultant for 12 years. The last year I've been a freelancer. Before that I spent over five years working for a company called Agency.com. While there I did a lot of advising on content management, portals, and things of that nature. One of the last projects I did there was a corporate Web site. That was 18 months ago and was my first taste of Weblogs. I can tell you about what makes a corporate Weblog fail. Here's your walking case study right here. I also keep an O'Reilly Weblog where I occasionally write an article time to time.
Mike Amundsen: I'm president of a company called EraServer.Net. We do a content management service called EraBlog.
Bill French: If you don't know me, you're lucky because I really tend to stir the pot quite a bit at the conferences I attend. I come from a relatively old school of computing. Everything I learned about conversation I learned from Doc Searls. About a year ago I left a company called StarBase. My former CEO is right here, and he's the only CEO I know who encourages Weblogs. I partnered with a guy and decided we'd look at content management in a slightly different light and look at knowledge management with XML standards. We realized we were really onto something that made a lot of sense. We put the services out on the street and realized that people wanted to blog with our technology because it really looked at objects in a different way. You can think of them as virtual blogs. I am now self-unemployed.
John Robb: I'm president and COO of Userland Software. I joined Userland when I saw the concept of blogging three years ago. I thought it was a great way of sharing knowledge within organizations. It didn't have the stumbling blocks that a lot of knowledge management had. Userland sells primarily to organizations, corporations like Dupont, Nokia, Intel, and Apple, as well as universities such as CalTech and Harvard. Lots and lots of small businesses, nonprofits, government organizations. Working with all these customers, I have a pretty good perspective of what works and what doesn't. The topic of this discussion today is interesting. Within bigger organizations I don't really see anyone buying content management systems any more. In smaller organizations, if you have a blogging tool that is a content management system -- and most aren't -- you can save money and have a complete system.
Bill Stow: StarBase was my third company, and I've worked mostly in team software. In my last six months before StarBase was sold to Borland, I spent a lot of time with customers. There was a kind of product that everyone talked about, a tool that allowed for communication across the entire corporation across departments. Blogging is the foundation of that communication. I started a new company called Tsunamin. In order to this, we'll see blogging transform itself into multiple forms of communication and multiple views of information. Teams become really great when people have voice in their teams. Content management tends to repress voice. It can't be that kind of a repressive large package.
Adam Weinroth: I run a little Web site down in Austin, Texas, called Easyjournal. I'm kind of the new kid on the block. I started the company last year and came out with a product that I basically built myself. We have about 65,000 users, and we're kind of playing catch up in terms of business strategy. In the spring of 2001, I decided to travel through western and central Europe solo for four months before entering business school in Austin. Nothing really let me share my experiences with family and friends back hone,. I developed my own content management system and used it to manage my personal Web site. It became quite popular among the people who knew about it, and we're trying to deal with that popularity so it doesn't implode. Blogging is essentially content management, personal content management. What do these tools offer in terms of alternative to the other large systems that are out there?
Berk: I have to act daft. What is content management? On the one hand, blogging seems as a subspecies of content management. But when you look at it really hard, it seems to pose all of the essentials.
Robb: Weblog software is built on content management. It's an application. It's Web publishing for the rest of us. When you look at what you can do with Vignette versus a Weblog system, you may be conflating the issue. Maybe you should say what can you do with a low-cost content management system? Weblogging is an app that's pretty well defined. The feature well is pretty deep. There's a community.
Berk: Blogging is a vertical application that's generally content management?
Robb: What you'll find is that it's a truly horizontal application that can be used in many instances. There's lots of different ways people are using the tool. But if someone builds something on Word, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a straight one-to-one relationship.
Berk: Bill, would you consider knowledge management as part of that core set of services?
French: When I look at this space, our company decided to take a step back. We took a step so far back we fell off the dock. What is the goal of content management? We're trying to help people make better decisions at a great velocity. We are trying to create the capacity to act. That's what people do with blogs. And it's what people do with content in a very abstract way. When you think about content management, you think about deployment, rigid rules, approval. Those don't make content management very high velocity or high capacity to act. There's a third element: the ability to derive an insight. Content is information. There is no way to escape that fact. But the one thing that blogs bring to the world is the ability to bring people an increased awareness. When I think of CMS or the term blog, I get particularly aggravated when people attempt to pigeonhole it. That essentially puts a straitjacket on your thinking. You're taking your brain and putting it in a vice. Most of the blogging tools have the capacity for the concept of reuse. At the end of the day it's information.
Berk: There are conventions. Blogs have a relatively rigid set of conventions. Web sites have fewer conventions.
Stow: I fully agree with Bill that we need to abstract our perception of the blog. We started with our product at StarBase, StarTeam. Many large organizations require control and process. Even though we might not like the idea that we're going to be controlled and repressed, this is what corporations look for in their software. If you take what Bill's talking about high velocity and try to transform it into content management, you'll destroy what blogs are all about today. You've got to see this new thing. It's going to have to appear in new forms. If we can find ways of reusing and reforming this wonderful notion, we'll see new forms of communication.
Amundsen: We're not talking about something that's very important here. And that's putting words like blogs and content management together. These are conversations we've had before. One of the things I notice quite a bit is that we do this goofy acronym thing. We had HTML. Now we have RSS and other meta markup and meta tagging of information. Instead of people authoring information and marking it up about where it should go, we have people marking up information about where it comes from, what category it's in. Annotation. From the content point of view, content is no longer as stuck as it used to be. Content management may be a silly notion in a few years. Maybe it becomes content capture, search, reformatting. We're all going to be thinking wow isn’t this amazing that this content can be displayed on my PDA, my phone, my laptop in ways that make content management systems almost superfluous. Content management may be a quaint thing. Instead of empowering users, we're empowering authors.
Berk: This industry has taken an eight-year hiatus. We're obsessed with markup. We're obsessed with design. Adam, you seem much more on the consumer side. Is it true that on the consumer side, use is dependent on content per se rather than layout?
Weinroth: It's hard to make sense of what my users are saying because there are so many of them. On the one hand, I've seen a lot of praise on Easyjournal not paying a lot of fuss on whiz-bang design. At the same time, some people want to design a very professional Web presence. I'm very visually oriented. Content is also impressive.
Berk: We're seeing a switch away from that, but it's kind of a slow and painful switch. HTML isn't the great enabler. It's probably http or XML.
Weinroth: One thing that I have seen is that people are concerned about the visuals, but not the design language or vocabulary. They care about the bells and whistles. They want a funny-looking cursor. They don't really care what the Web site looks like.
Appnel: I generally agree with what people are saying. What I'm hearing is a bit of an overlap between the notion of blogging and content management systems versus the actual tools themselves. In my consulting, I've been using a blogging tool as a low-cost content-management tool. It's like talking about a handsaw versus a chainsaw versus a jigsaw. It's the same tool done different. The clients I've been working with are small to medium companies that don't have small budgets. They can't afford a Microsoft content management system. And they've got a staff of three people. Blogging tools are Web native tools. The content management systems that I've worked with are more geared to enterprise usage and large media bases. They don't know what they have there. The Interwovens handle that well. The blogging tools are better at linking.
Amundsen: Are you saying that what we're talking about in terms of content management is really document management?
Appnel: The line blurred long ago. The blogging tools have stayed pretty pure in what is a Web native format.
Berk: What are your thoughts that content management is going to disappear in five years and that the place it's going to go is to the user level?
Appnel: I think it's the blogging tools that are going to fade into the background.
Robb: I disagree with that. The Weblog community is a certain class of communication. It's like email. When you see one, you know what it is. This is an application that has staying power. It's extremely hard to create an interface that's pleasing to the reader as well as the publisher. The feature set keeps getting deeper and deeper. You don't hit people with the deep features right away. But they're there.
Weinroth: I don't see Weblogs fading into the background at all. The key role that they're playing right now is that they're filling in the glaring gap at the end of the content management spectrum. Blogging is totally becoming an amazing answer right now. One of the reasons they work so well for small organizations and nonprofits is that blogs by nature are grassroots. It's a natural fit for small businesses and local businesses.
Berk: This is more the view of the blog as a very specific application with a broad niche use. Why have those people not looked to page-building tools. Why have they turned to blogs?
Weinroth: Those are lame.
Berk: I totally agree. If it's all about publishing, you could've done that 10 years ago with Geocities.
Weinroth: One big difference with a total solution off the site is that those sites have mistakenly tried too hard to integrate the design functionality with the publishing functionality. Some people just want to publish.
Amundsen: It's not about being on the Web. It's about content. Content is king. And we're seeing content elevated above design.
French: I want to comment briefly on the idea of the future of content and content management. Blog use is one use case of content. It's just a way to purpose content. It's extremely free. It sets you free as a writer. But there are other use cases we need to think about. A Web page product brochure. Group blogs. If that's going to happen you better be certain that the application can support the integration of seven blogs. We have people asking us for integration with XP -- from a blog. And you know those digital sticky notes? Those can be integrated with a blog. Think about the platform when you think about what's over th hill. What's over the hill? A federation of services, not an application. You want a system that is so agile that it looks like a chameleon in a bowl of skittles. I stole that from Dennis Miller.
Robb: It's interface. You can't train people on a chameleon in a bowl of skittles. It needs to be recognizable. Interface provides staying power.
Appnel: I didn't mean that the very purpose of this conference was going to go away in five year. I don't want anyone to blog that Appnel claims blogs are dead.
Weinroth: Interface is the reason why blogs are going to continue being the powerful force they are. Interface is huge. Ease of use. How long does it take for you to train your staff to use Vignette versus, say, Blogger? Another thing is cost. Just think about the barrier of entry. There are also switching costs. When you look at the economics, the role blogs can play is being undervalued.
Mike Amundsen is president of EraServer.Net, Timothy Appnel is an independent writer, Matthew Berk is a senior analyst for Jupiter Research, Bill French is co-founder of MyST Technology Partners, John Robb is president and COO of Userland Software, William Stow is president of Tsunamin Corporation, and Adam Weinroth is founder of Easyjournal. Here is a rought transcript of their discussion:
Matthew Berk: We have the after-snack crowd here. I hope your blood sugar hasn't bottomed out. Content management is a pretty huge part of what I cover. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about search technology and stuff like that.
Tim Appnel: I've been an IT consultant for 12 years. The last year I've been a freelancer. Before that I spent over five years working for a company called Agency.com. While there I did a lot of advising on content management, portals, and things of that nature. One of the last projects I did there was a corporate Web site. That was 18 months ago and was my first taste of Weblogs. I can tell you about what makes a corporate Weblog fail. Here's your walking case study right here. I also keep an O'Reilly Weblog where I occasionally write an article time to time.
Mike Amundsen: I'm president of a company called EraServer.Net. We do a content management service called EraBlog.
Bill French: If you don't know me, you're lucky because I really tend to stir the pot quite a bit at the conferences I attend. I come from a relatively old school of computing. Everything I learned about conversation I learned from Doc Searls. About a year ago I left a company called StarBase. My former CEO is right here, and he's the only CEO I know who encourages Weblogs. I partnered with a guy and decided we'd look at content management in a slightly different light and look at knowledge management with XML standards. We realized we were really onto something that made a lot of sense. We put the services out on the street and realized that people wanted to blog with our technology because it really looked at objects in a different way. You can think of them as virtual blogs. I am now self-unemployed.
John Robb: I'm president and COO of Userland Software. I joined Userland when I saw the concept of blogging three years ago. I thought it was a great way of sharing knowledge within organizations. It didn't have the stumbling blocks that a lot of knowledge management had. Userland sells primarily to organizations, corporations like Dupont, Nokia, Intel, and Apple, as well as universities such as CalTech and Harvard. Lots and lots of small businesses, nonprofits, government organizations. Working with all these customers, I have a pretty good perspective of what works and what doesn't. The topic of this discussion today is interesting. Within bigger organizations I don't really see anyone buying content management systems any more. In smaller organizations, if you have a blogging tool that is a content management system -- and most aren't -- you can save money and have a complete system.
Bill Stow: StarBase was my third company, and I've worked mostly in team software. In my last six months before StarBase was sold to Borland, I spent a lot of time with customers. There was a kind of product that everyone talked about, a tool that allowed for communication across the entire corporation across departments. Blogging is the foundation of that communication. I started a new company called Tsunamin. In order to this, we'll see blogging transform itself into multiple forms of communication and multiple views of information. Teams become really great when people have voice in their teams. Content management tends to repress voice. It can't be that kind of a repressive large package.
Adam Weinroth: I run a little Web site down in Austin, Texas, called Easyjournal. I'm kind of the new kid on the block. I started the company last year and came out with a product that I basically built myself. We have about 65,000 users, and we're kind of playing catch up in terms of business strategy. In the spring of 2001, I decided to travel through western and central Europe solo for four months before entering business school in Austin. Nothing really let me share my experiences with family and friends back hone,. I developed my own content management system and used it to manage my personal Web site. It became quite popular among the people who knew about it, and we're trying to deal with that popularity so it doesn't implode. Blogging is essentially content management, personal content management. What do these tools offer in terms of alternative to the other large systems that are out there?
Berk: I have to act daft. What is content management? On the one hand, blogging seems as a subspecies of content management. But when you look at it really hard, it seems to pose all of the essentials.
Robb: Weblog software is built on content management. It's an application. It's Web publishing for the rest of us. When you look at what you can do with Vignette versus a Weblog system, you may be conflating the issue. Maybe you should say what can you do with a low-cost content management system? Weblogging is an app that's pretty well defined. The feature well is pretty deep. There's a community.
Berk: Blogging is a vertical application that's generally content management?
Robb: What you'll find is that it's a truly horizontal application that can be used in many instances. There's lots of different ways people are using the tool. But if someone builds something on Word, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a straight one-to-one relationship.
Berk: Bill, would you consider knowledge management as part of that core set of services?
French: When I look at this space, our company decided to take a step back. We took a step so far back we fell off the dock. What is the goal of content management? We're trying to help people make better decisions at a great velocity. We are trying to create the capacity to act. That's what people do with blogs. And it's what people do with content in a very abstract way. When you think about content management, you think about deployment, rigid rules, approval. Those don't make content management very high velocity or high capacity to act. There's a third element: the ability to derive an insight. Content is information. There is no way to escape that fact. But the one thing that blogs bring to the world is the ability to bring people an increased awareness. When I think of CMS or the term blog, I get particularly aggravated when people attempt to pigeonhole it. That essentially puts a straitjacket on your thinking. You're taking your brain and putting it in a vice. Most of the blogging tools have the capacity for the concept of reuse. At the end of the day it's information.
Berk: There are conventions. Blogs have a relatively rigid set of conventions. Web sites have fewer conventions.
Stow: I fully agree with Bill that we need to abstract our perception of the blog. We started with our product at StarBase, StarTeam. Many large organizations require control and process. Even though we might not like the idea that we're going to be controlled and repressed, this is what corporations look for in their software. If you take what Bill's talking about high velocity and try to transform it into content management, you'll destroy what blogs are all about today. You've got to see this new thing. It's going to have to appear in new forms. If we can find ways of reusing and reforming this wonderful notion, we'll see new forms of communication.
Amundsen: We're not talking about something that's very important here. And that's putting words like blogs and content management together. These are conversations we've had before. One of the things I notice quite a bit is that we do this goofy acronym thing. We had HTML. Now we have RSS and other meta markup and meta tagging of information. Instead of people authoring information and marking it up about where it should go, we have people marking up information about where it comes from, what category it's in. Annotation. From the content point of view, content is no longer as stuck as it used to be. Content management may be a silly notion in a few years. Maybe it becomes content capture, search, reformatting. We're all going to be thinking wow isn’t this amazing that this content can be displayed on my PDA, my phone, my laptop in ways that make content management systems almost superfluous. Content management may be a quaint thing. Instead of empowering users, we're empowering authors.
Berk: This industry has taken an eight-year hiatus. We're obsessed with markup. We're obsessed with design. Adam, you seem much more on the consumer side. Is it true that on the consumer side, use is dependent on content per se rather than layout?
Weinroth: It's hard to make sense of what my users are saying because there are so many of them. On the one hand, I've seen a lot of praise on Easyjournal not paying a lot of fuss on whiz-bang design. At the same time, some people want to design a very professional Web presence. I'm very visually oriented. Content is also impressive.
Berk: We're seeing a switch away from that, but it's kind of a slow and painful switch. HTML isn't the great enabler. It's probably http or XML.
Weinroth: One thing that I have seen is that people are concerned about the visuals, but not the design language or vocabulary. They care about the bells and whistles. They want a funny-looking cursor. They don't really care what the Web site looks like.
Appnel: I generally agree with what people are saying. What I'm hearing is a bit of an overlap between the notion of blogging and content management systems versus the actual tools themselves. In my consulting, I've been using a blogging tool as a low-cost content-management tool. It's like talking about a handsaw versus a chainsaw versus a jigsaw. It's the same tool done different. The clients I've been working with are small to medium companies that don't have small budgets. They can't afford a Microsoft content management system. And they've got a staff of three people. Blogging tools are Web native tools. The content management systems that I've worked with are more geared to enterprise usage and large media bases. They don't know what they have there. The Interwovens handle that well. The blogging tools are better at linking.
Amundsen: Are you saying that what we're talking about in terms of content management is really document management?
Appnel: The line blurred long ago. The blogging tools have stayed pretty pure in what is a Web native format.
Berk: What are your thoughts that content management is going to disappear in five years and that the place it's going to go is to the user level?
Appnel: I think it's the blogging tools that are going to fade into the background.
Robb: I disagree with that. The Weblog community is a certain class of communication. It's like email. When you see one, you know what it is. This is an application that has staying power. It's extremely hard to create an interface that's pleasing to the reader as well as the publisher. The feature set keeps getting deeper and deeper. You don't hit people with the deep features right away. But they're there.
Weinroth: I don't see Weblogs fading into the background at all. The key role that they're playing right now is that they're filling in the glaring gap at the end of the content management spectrum. Blogging is totally becoming an amazing answer right now. One of the reasons they work so well for small organizations and nonprofits is that blogs by nature are grassroots. It's a natural fit for small businesses and local businesses.
Berk: This is more the view of the blog as a very specific application with a broad niche use. Why have those people not looked to page-building tools. Why have they turned to blogs?
Weinroth: Those are lame.
Berk: I totally agree. If it's all about publishing, you could've done that 10 years ago with Geocities.
Weinroth: One big difference with a total solution off the site is that those sites have mistakenly tried too hard to integrate the design functionality with the publishing functionality. Some people just want to publish.
Amundsen: It's not about being on the Web. It's about content. Content is king. And we're seeing content elevated above design.
French: I want to comment briefly on the idea of the future of content and content management. Blog use is one use case of content. It's just a way to purpose content. It's extremely free. It sets you free as a writer. But there are other use cases we need to think about. A Web page product brochure. Group blogs. If that's going to happen you better be certain that the application can support the integration of seven blogs. We have people asking us for integration with XP -- from a blog. And you know those digital sticky notes? Those can be integrated with a blog. Think about the platform when you think about what's over th hill. What's over the hill? A federation of services, not an application. You want a system that is so agile that it looks like a chameleon in a bowl of skittles. I stole that from Dennis Miller.
Robb: It's interface. You can't train people on a chameleon in a bowl of skittles. It needs to be recognizable. Interface provides staying power.
Appnel: I didn't mean that the very purpose of this conference was going to go away in five year. I don't want anyone to blog that Appnel claims blogs are dead.
Weinroth: Interface is the reason why blogs are going to continue being the powerful force they are. Interface is huge. Ease of use. How long does it take for you to train your staff to use Vignette versus, say, Blogger? Another thing is cost. Just think about the barrier of entry. There are also switching costs. When you look at the economics, the role blogs can play is being undervalued.
Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XIV
Jennifer and Brian Brannon, singer for JFA, gave birth to a baby six weeks ago. Congratulations to the proud new skate-rock parents!
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 VIII
Chambers, Lawlor, Lloyd, Suitt, and White: Strategies and Tips for Business Blogging Success
John Lawlor: I started off as a photographer. I made infomercials for Fortune 500 companies. I ran an email marketing company. And for the last year, I've been promoting blogs as a marketing tool. I'd like to thank Google for buying Blogger, as interest is rising, and blogs are being taken seriously as a business tool. I look at blogging with a much broader brush than many of the people who've been on previous panels. Blogging is at the intersection of technological innovation and public acceptance of online communication. We're at a position where the expectations of what technology is able to do is in line with what people actually need to do. But when you talk to a Fortune 500 company about blogging, most of them don't what it is. And frankly, they don’t care. They don’t care about blogging. They don’t care about voice. They want to make money.
Blogging has to be used reponsibly. Companies realize they can't abuse it. Blogging is really an opportunity. But there are five questions you need to ask. Who should blog? Who is our target reader? What are you blogging about? What are the benefits that we expect? What is important to my business? What needs to be restricted? Where is this blog going to appear? When will you find the time? When will we see the results? Why are we doing this? Why do we need this? These are the questions you need to ask before you can have a successful strategy for blogs.
Chris Chambers: I feel like a fish out of water to a degree. I was an active duty Army major until nine days ago, and here I am at a business conference. Two years ago the US Army decided to create a video game to reconnect with the youth of America. It's not a first-person shooter. It's a first-person perspective action game. We do run as a business, but we give the product away for free.
I went to Afghanistan for Operation: Enduring Freedom. Before I left, someone suggested that I do a Weblog while I was there. It seemed like a great fit for the project. Being part of the development team but being an active member of the Army, it seemed like a great way to directly connect a real experience with what is depicted in our game.
It's been a great experience. We polished ours up quite a bit. When I look at Dr. Weinberger's definition of a Weblog, I don't think mine fits at all other than they're in reverse chronology. This is a picture of the Web site that supports the community of players in our game. My goal in all this was really to highlight soldiers, real people with real experiences and many experiences.
Greg Lloyd: I came into the Weblogging area through an early focus on systems that help teams of people deal with developing creative solutions for non-repeating situations. There are many conversations that happen within organizations. And each of those conversations are an application for Weblogging technology.
I'd like to step back and give you two dimensions. One is that a Weblog can be a conversation within a particular group or between one individual and the rest of the world. The second dimension is the audience of the Weblog. I'm going to classify the audience in three separate chunks. An audience can be internal. Conversations within a company, let's assume, in general are public. But they're still going to be grouped into distinct spaces. Some conversations are going to be privileged and private. But most are visible to everyone in the company. Some conversations are explicitly public. Third is a domain that's what I call the partnership domain. It's a conversation that crosses the firewall but deals with it in a selectively private way. Both the personal and group and aspects are important. And the ability to provide public and private spaces is crucial for businesses to buy into Weblogs.
Halley Suitt: My name is Halley Suitt, and my blog is Halley's Comment, I'm here to blame David Weinberger for getting me into this. About a year and a half ago, David Weinberger and I were talking. I had sent him and email, and he said that's it. You need to stop this. You need to do a blog. We had the What's a blog? conversation. Someone described Halley's Comment as a sexy, saucy, spicy Weblog. But at the time, my dad was ill, and I wrote for six months about his spiral into death. That was the place I started.
I was writing about things that were important to me. I was not employed. On the day my dad died, I was talking to AKMA about all things deep and dark. And the day after, I wrote a piece called "The first thing my dad will realize when he wakes up this morning is that he's dead." My dad was fascinating. I was also getting divorced, and I thought a lot about my ex-husband. For sure, I am a very personal Weblog.
At the same time, I worked at Harvard Business School Publishing putting on conferences and events. Through that affiliation, I was asked to write a fictional case study for the Harvard Business Review about a fictional blogger who'd been blogging secrets about the company. There are grounds for firing the employee. There are also grounds for maybe promoting that person to the head of marketing.
I just got a job at Yaga.com, and one of the things we're looking at is how to help bloggers monetize their blogs. It's a good match between what I do and what I want to do.
Don White: I'm an independent marketing consultant. My company is Mentor Marketing, and Mentor Marketing is basically myself. My experience prior to the entrepreneurial phase of my career is that I worked as brand manager for consumer good companies. For the last 14 years I worked in an advertising agency in strategic planning. What I've been doing for the last two or three years is working with companies to develop marketing strategies. And blogs have emerged as a key tactical way to leverage those strategies.
We have a brand manager here from Microsoft. I don't know if they can confirm or deny my view of the world. But the more important characteristics of their personalities is that their risk averse, change averse, and uncertainty averse. A fixed price is much better than a low price. If any of you are presenting the prospect of blogging to one of them, you need to walk in their shoes and consider risk from their perspective.
In one project, we're taking the tools of blogging and applying it to a specific need. Most approach a blog as being a self-expression publishing vehicle with a journalistic agenda. My approach was more of an expert point of view than a personal point of view. We're trying to meet the needs of a real estate brokerage business. In real estate, the first step a consumer takes is going to the Web for information. It's a huge market with lots of competition. And this small broker needed to stand out.
The tools of blogging to create a real estate site were very useful. We were creating a number of sites drawing on the expertise of the employees of the firm. We were able to create 14 of these sites that helped establish the small firm as the community real estate firm. And all of this was done for less money than it would've cost to do a single Web site one or two years ago. And we've done it in a way so it can be managed by one or two people with very little time.
Lawlor: If Halley were blogging the way she does inside a company, it would probably be frowned on. Chris' situation has its own issues about security. Id like to address managing and controlling and not having negative things go out to the marketplace.
Chambers: It was extremely self-managed. If the concern is what goes out, the way to get around that is to find a trusted agent who will self-express but will self-express in a corporate way. The Army is a pretty risk-averse organization in terms of its public image. I can't think of any other blogs that came out of the Army. Well, there was one, but it got canned pretty early. If you have an agent that's bought into the principles of the org, even if there's no control, there's going to be a consistent message. There were times when I self-edited. And because our purpose was purely strategic, they weren't overly personal.
Suitt: Can I jump in? You have a really cool Weblog. There's a lot there, and I was there with you, plating with it. It has a lot of tone. Blogs can help create customer intimacy. You have different customers than I do, but against all odds, it does just what a good Weblog should do. It created a customer intimacy. Obviously, my writing and ideas about intimacy take on a different meaning.
Lawlor: Why didn't you blog the next war? The Afghanistan blog had a natural end. How do you not provide for the audience the next thing?
Chambers: We wanted to continue with this because it really is a good way to connect with people -- and not just youth. There is a disconnect between the military and the rest of the population today. We wanted to continue, but there were some problems. When we were in Iraq, we looked really hard t find a blogger, but everyone was pretty busy. In Afghanistan, there was a little more time. It was a mature theater. There was infrastructure.
What we have done is continue the blogging with our development team. Kids like to talk to developers of the games. And we're hoping to drop some bloggers into the next hot spot, assuming that there's interesting things going on.
Lloyd: Set some reasonable expectations about what's appropriate. And give people more than one place or more than one space to express themselves. Someone who's an engineer might be more forthright talking to other engineers than they would be talking to a broader audience. Give people more than one option and some norms and examples about what is appropriate.
Lawlor: Let's talk a little bit about search engines. Blogs are attracting search engine results, provided they're done right.
Suitt: I notice I don't have Favorites any more. I simply use Google to find things. My browser crashed and whatever Favorites I had were gone. We just use search engines in a different way now. I'm No. 1 in Google. And Sir Edmond Halley, who's my namesake, is down there. He's dead. He can't blog. When you get into this conversation about how dare the Weblogs rise to the surface of the cream in search results. That's second-class citizenry, and I don't buy that.
I recently had a referrer log for Halle Berry Porn. They had the name Halle. I had once bought and eaten a berry-berry bagel. And a long time ago, I'd written about porn. Search engines can find things that aren't even closely related.
Major Chris Chambers is a deputy director for America's Army, John Lawlor is a business blog consultant for Blogs4Business.com, Greg Lloyd is president and co-founder of Traction Software, Halley Suitt blogs at Halley's Comment, and Don White is director of communications for Piedmont Preferred Properties. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
John Lawlor: I started off as a photographer. I made infomercials for Fortune 500 companies. I ran an email marketing company. And for the last year, I've been promoting blogs as a marketing tool. I'd like to thank Google for buying Blogger, as interest is rising, and blogs are being taken seriously as a business tool. I look at blogging with a much broader brush than many of the people who've been on previous panels. Blogging is at the intersection of technological innovation and public acceptance of online communication. We're at a position where the expectations of what technology is able to do is in line with what people actually need to do. But when you talk to a Fortune 500 company about blogging, most of them don't what it is. And frankly, they don’t care. They don’t care about blogging. They don’t care about voice. They want to make money.
Blogging has to be used reponsibly. Companies realize they can't abuse it. Blogging is really an opportunity. But there are five questions you need to ask. Who should blog? Who is our target reader? What are you blogging about? What are the benefits that we expect? What is important to my business? What needs to be restricted? Where is this blog going to appear? When will you find the time? When will we see the results? Why are we doing this? Why do we need this? These are the questions you need to ask before you can have a successful strategy for blogs.
Chris Chambers: I feel like a fish out of water to a degree. I was an active duty Army major until nine days ago, and here I am at a business conference. Two years ago the US Army decided to create a video game to reconnect with the youth of America. It's not a first-person shooter. It's a first-person perspective action game. We do run as a business, but we give the product away for free.
I went to Afghanistan for Operation: Enduring Freedom. Before I left, someone suggested that I do a Weblog while I was there. It seemed like a great fit for the project. Being part of the development team but being an active member of the Army, it seemed like a great way to directly connect a real experience with what is depicted in our game.
It's been a great experience. We polished ours up quite a bit. When I look at Dr. Weinberger's definition of a Weblog, I don't think mine fits at all other than they're in reverse chronology. This is a picture of the Web site that supports the community of players in our game. My goal in all this was really to highlight soldiers, real people with real experiences and many experiences.
Greg Lloyd: I came into the Weblogging area through an early focus on systems that help teams of people deal with developing creative solutions for non-repeating situations. There are many conversations that happen within organizations. And each of those conversations are an application for Weblogging technology.
I'd like to step back and give you two dimensions. One is that a Weblog can be a conversation within a particular group or between one individual and the rest of the world. The second dimension is the audience of the Weblog. I'm going to classify the audience in three separate chunks. An audience can be internal. Conversations within a company, let's assume, in general are public. But they're still going to be grouped into distinct spaces. Some conversations are going to be privileged and private. But most are visible to everyone in the company. Some conversations are explicitly public. Third is a domain that's what I call the partnership domain. It's a conversation that crosses the firewall but deals with it in a selectively private way. Both the personal and group and aspects are important. And the ability to provide public and private spaces is crucial for businesses to buy into Weblogs.
Halley Suitt: My name is Halley Suitt, and my blog is Halley's Comment, I'm here to blame David Weinberger for getting me into this. About a year and a half ago, David Weinberger and I were talking. I had sent him and email, and he said that's it. You need to stop this. You need to do a blog. We had the What's a blog? conversation. Someone described Halley's Comment as a sexy, saucy, spicy Weblog. But at the time, my dad was ill, and I wrote for six months about his spiral into death. That was the place I started.
I was writing about things that were important to me. I was not employed. On the day my dad died, I was talking to AKMA about all things deep and dark. And the day after, I wrote a piece called "The first thing my dad will realize when he wakes up this morning is that he's dead." My dad was fascinating. I was also getting divorced, and I thought a lot about my ex-husband. For sure, I am a very personal Weblog.
At the same time, I worked at Harvard Business School Publishing putting on conferences and events. Through that affiliation, I was asked to write a fictional case study for the Harvard Business Review about a fictional blogger who'd been blogging secrets about the company. There are grounds for firing the employee. There are also grounds for maybe promoting that person to the head of marketing.
I just got a job at Yaga.com, and one of the things we're looking at is how to help bloggers monetize their blogs. It's a good match between what I do and what I want to do.
Don White: I'm an independent marketing consultant. My company is Mentor Marketing, and Mentor Marketing is basically myself. My experience prior to the entrepreneurial phase of my career is that I worked as brand manager for consumer good companies. For the last 14 years I worked in an advertising agency in strategic planning. What I've been doing for the last two or three years is working with companies to develop marketing strategies. And blogs have emerged as a key tactical way to leverage those strategies.
We have a brand manager here from Microsoft. I don't know if they can confirm or deny my view of the world. But the more important characteristics of their personalities is that their risk averse, change averse, and uncertainty averse. A fixed price is much better than a low price. If any of you are presenting the prospect of blogging to one of them, you need to walk in their shoes and consider risk from their perspective.
In one project, we're taking the tools of blogging and applying it to a specific need. Most approach a blog as being a self-expression publishing vehicle with a journalistic agenda. My approach was more of an expert point of view than a personal point of view. We're trying to meet the needs of a real estate brokerage business. In real estate, the first step a consumer takes is going to the Web for information. It's a huge market with lots of competition. And this small broker needed to stand out.
The tools of blogging to create a real estate site were very useful. We were creating a number of sites drawing on the expertise of the employees of the firm. We were able to create 14 of these sites that helped establish the small firm as the community real estate firm. And all of this was done for less money than it would've cost to do a single Web site one or two years ago. And we've done it in a way so it can be managed by one or two people with very little time.
Lawlor: If Halley were blogging the way she does inside a company, it would probably be frowned on. Chris' situation has its own issues about security. Id like to address managing and controlling and not having negative things go out to the marketplace.
Chambers: It was extremely self-managed. If the concern is what goes out, the way to get around that is to find a trusted agent who will self-express but will self-express in a corporate way. The Army is a pretty risk-averse organization in terms of its public image. I can't think of any other blogs that came out of the Army. Well, there was one, but it got canned pretty early. If you have an agent that's bought into the principles of the org, even if there's no control, there's going to be a consistent message. There were times when I self-edited. And because our purpose was purely strategic, they weren't overly personal.
Suitt: Can I jump in? You have a really cool Weblog. There's a lot there, and I was there with you, plating with it. It has a lot of tone. Blogs can help create customer intimacy. You have different customers than I do, but against all odds, it does just what a good Weblog should do. It created a customer intimacy. Obviously, my writing and ideas about intimacy take on a different meaning.
Lawlor: Why didn't you blog the next war? The Afghanistan blog had a natural end. How do you not provide for the audience the next thing?
Chambers: We wanted to continue with this because it really is a good way to connect with people -- and not just youth. There is a disconnect between the military and the rest of the population today. We wanted to continue, but there were some problems. When we were in Iraq, we looked really hard t find a blogger, but everyone was pretty busy. In Afghanistan, there was a little more time. It was a mature theater. There was infrastructure.
What we have done is continue the blogging with our development team. Kids like to talk to developers of the games. And we're hoping to drop some bloggers into the next hot spot, assuming that there's interesting things going on.
Lloyd: Set some reasonable expectations about what's appropriate. And give people more than one place or more than one space to express themselves. Someone who's an engineer might be more forthright talking to other engineers than they would be talking to a broader audience. Give people more than one option and some norms and examples about what is appropriate.
Lawlor: Let's talk a little bit about search engines. Blogs are attracting search engine results, provided they're done right.
Suitt: I notice I don't have Favorites any more. I simply use Google to find things. My browser crashed and whatever Favorites I had were gone. We just use search engines in a different way now. I'm No. 1 in Google. And Sir Edmond Halley, who's my namesake, is down there. He's dead. He can't blog. When you get into this conversation about how dare the Weblogs rise to the surface of the cream in search results. That's second-class citizenry, and I don't buy that.
I recently had a referrer log for Halle Berry Porn. They had the name Halle. I had once bought and eaten a berry-berry bagel. And a long time ago, I'd written about porn. Search engines can find things that aren't even closely related.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 VII
David Weinberger: Why Weblogs Matter
If you noticed that in the program I'm listed as Dr. David Weinberger, it's there for one reason and one reason alone: a persistent marketing effort by Doc Searls.
Why do blogs matter? It does matter. Blogging has excited the Internet community, the Web community, the journalism community, and the political community in ways we haven't seen since the Internet itself. It's one of the reason we have so many conversations about Weblogs. They are important.
When someone mentions the bubble, you know that they've missed the very purpose of the Internet. The big scary bubble thing that went away was the right bubble thing to go away. People who talk about the bubble think about the Net as a market space. Other people think of it as an information space. But the bubble is going to keep getting bigger and bigger. That bubble went away. Good. I'm glad it went away. But the Net didn't go away. And the Web didn't go away.
Somewhere between 20 billion and 500 billion pages have been created. What's driving it? Something like the fact that the Net is a conversation space. It's not just markets that are conversations. And in many ways it’s a place with some persistence. That temporal dimension of persistence is crucial.
I am going to address the question: What is a Weblog. But only to get past it, OK? Look out and see what they have in common. They tend to be daily. They tend to be a paragraph, a couple of paragraphs. They are often in reverse chronological order. But also, they're terribly about links. Lots and lots of links.
Links are interesting because they point people out of the Weblog. Stop reading me. I want you to go away. Links are part of the architecture of the Web, but they're also little gestures of helplessness. You can drop one of these and still have a Weblog. You can drop three and still have a Weblog.
So I want to address the topic of voice. There are some blogs that adopt the corporate voice. Some adWpt the voices of dead people. I'm perfectly happy calling them weblogs. But the best blogs are those full of voice.
A dirty little secret about Dave and Doc is that they hand code their pages and upload them using FTP. They're still blogs. So it's not the technology. If not technology, then lets look at it is as rhetoric, as a social phenomenon, and as something more.
As rhetoric, I think it's important that many Weblogs are written badly. When reading a Weblog, you assume that you're reading a first draft. You know that it wasn't carefully edited, not much spell checked. You have the sense, wrongly, that it's closer to the person who wrote. Second of all, by reading what you assume to be a first draft, Weblog readers tend to be forgiving. You have to forgive the broken link. You have to forgive the bad spelling. You have to forgive the fact that the second paragraph should really be the lead. Social forgiveness is not a bad characteristic.
Beyond the rhetoric, Weblogs are a lot different than Usenet because Weblogs have a place. I can look up everything you've ever written in Usenet using Google, but that's different than going to a permanent, persistent place on the Net where I'm talking about myself. What you're doing is creating a social self. For the first time we have a place that has some permanence for this Web self, a proxy for yourself. When Jimmy said when he meets people he feels like he knows them because he's read their Weblogs forever, of course he does.
What about the notion of authenticity, a topic that keeps popping up? It's vexing and annoying. We have an M&M view of the self that says there's an inner core and an outer shell. We have a whole set of virtues that are connected to the relationship between the outer and the inner. That's worked pretty well for thousands of years, but it doesn't work very well on the Web. If the Web is your outer self, where is the inner self? The model falls apart. The relationship between you and your Web self is more akin to an author and one of her characters. It's written. Of course it's inauthentic and constructed. We are writing ourselves into existence.
What kind of selves do Weblogs favor? It favors good writers. I pushes for self-exposure. The third thing is that is seems to favor the unemployed. The timing of the recession is the best thing that could have happened to Weblogs. Thank you, Mr. Bush.
I want to talk about journalism in terms of the relationship between the inner truth and the outer truth. Lots of people are talking about journalism and blogging. No, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about blogging and truth. Objectivity claims to be the world as it is. In journalism, you're interviewing multiple people. You're vetting multiple claims. It provides a kind of a baseline for the community. The weakness is that journalists are human. They can't be objective. They have opinions.
Same thing for subjectivity. The claim is that it will show it our world as it is. The strengths are that it acknowledges that there is an observer there. That the observer is rooted in a culture. And that you get more of an experience. The weaknesses are that it's scattershot, raw, and individualistic.
It seems to me that blogs for the first time allows multisubjectivity. This gives subjectivity some of the heft that objectivity supposedly has. Now we have a way that we can actually read all of these things. We have a blogosphere. There are more blogs than a human could ever read, but we can find them. Now we can read stuff from all over the world. Multisubjectivity gives a term to one of the reasons so many of us are so thrilled by Weblogs. It's amazing that we can do this. Objectivity and newspapers tend to lose some of their regalness.
What's not to like about this? If everyone has their own voice, you get rumors, gossip, lies, and misinformation. That's an assault on knowledge. Business has mistaken itself for a fort because they've been able to control their environment by selectively releasing information. Knowledge has been their weapon. The edifice just isn't working any more. Weblogs are a way that cannot be stopped providing insight punching some holes in the wall. You can pretend that it's not going to happen, but it's going to happen.
Another group of people who are not thrilled about this assault on knowledge are people who have identified themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge. An exception would be Dan Gillmor, a journalist who deeply understands what's going on. In Athens, it used to be that knowledge used to be a way to discern who was worth listening to. The city was run by people talking. Can we look at what someone is saying and determine whether they're worth believing or worth listening to? It was fully concrete stuff.
Over the course of the next 1,000 years, the quest became one for certainty. That's what knowledge became. It became so anorexic as to be uninteresting. Knowledge grew out of the body and became a purely rational thing that had no human context or relationship to the body any more.
Now I want to talk about what knowledge is on the Web. About 18 months ago, my wife and I were looking for a washer and drier. We came down to a Kenmore and a Whirlpool. We go to Kenmore's site, and what do you see there: Nothing worth looking at. It's certainly not a great way to find out whether a washer will fit into the hole I just cut into my counter -- which you can actually do after eight clicks in.
We actually didn't go to Kenmore's Web site. We googled for Kenmore, Whirlpool, and discussion. I found a guy who said he could dry a queen-sized mattress cover. I am now totally sure that Kenmore is great at drying queen-sized mattress covers because Jim said so. Had I gone to the Kenmore site, I wouldn't have believed them because I'm being marketed to. And I wouldn't have known that the done buzzer was really loud. This is knowledge you can only get from human experience. You go to the next page down, and you find Karen, who has a question. She's answered by a guy named Rinso. Now here is a physicist of lint!
Moveable Type wasn't recognizing my login. I went to the discussion forums. I explained how hosed I am. And in a couple of hours I was pointed to information about what had happened. This is what knowledge sounds like on the Web. We're really, really happy with it. We're happy to have this uncertain, improbable, extremely helpful stuff available to us.
Weblogs are just simple little publishing tools. Why is this turning the world upside down? Why are people so excited about it? It doesn't make sense. It does make sense in the context of a deeply alienated world. We believe that knowledge is certainty while every day we encounter knowledge that isn't certain. That is extremely alienating. Or, maybe we're really in the Matrix. Maybe you're not really real. That's alienated. That means that you're not kissing your spouse in the evening. You're kissing your experience of your wife.
Ray Kurzweil says that by 2029 we'll hit the crossover and be able to download our brain. For an instant, we thought that consciousness is entirely disembodied. That's an insane, alienated idea. The belief that we have to go into work every day and talk like somebody else is insane and alienated.
If you want to know about forgiveness as a topic, you could look it up in a book. Or you could look it up in a blog like AKMA. You could learn more about forgiveness by reading that blog thread than you could by reading the most objective source. It's more human. It's more embodied. As imperfect and messy as it is.
Weblogs exist in a new place. That place is the Web. We've never had a second public space that's consistent with the first public space. Public spaces are important to us because we're social animals. We've never had anything like that before. And now we do.
David Weinberger is author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto." He is a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and is a columnist for KMWorld, internet.com, and Darwin Magazine. He is also a blogger. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:
If you noticed that in the program I'm listed as Dr. David Weinberger, it's there for one reason and one reason alone: a persistent marketing effort by Doc Searls.
Why do blogs matter? It does matter. Blogging has excited the Internet community, the Web community, the journalism community, and the political community in ways we haven't seen since the Internet itself. It's one of the reason we have so many conversations about Weblogs. They are important.
When someone mentions the bubble, you know that they've missed the very purpose of the Internet. The big scary bubble thing that went away was the right bubble thing to go away. People who talk about the bubble think about the Net as a market space. Other people think of it as an information space. But the bubble is going to keep getting bigger and bigger. That bubble went away. Good. I'm glad it went away. But the Net didn't go away. And the Web didn't go away.
Somewhere between 20 billion and 500 billion pages have been created. What's driving it? Something like the fact that the Net is a conversation space. It's not just markets that are conversations. And in many ways it’s a place with some persistence. That temporal dimension of persistence is crucial.
I am going to address the question: What is a Weblog. But only to get past it, OK? Look out and see what they have in common. They tend to be daily. They tend to be a paragraph, a couple of paragraphs. They are often in reverse chronological order. But also, they're terribly about links. Lots and lots of links.
Links are interesting because they point people out of the Weblog. Stop reading me. I want you to go away. Links are part of the architecture of the Web, but they're also little gestures of helplessness. You can drop one of these and still have a Weblog. You can drop three and still have a Weblog.
So I want to address the topic of voice. There are some blogs that adopt the corporate voice. Some adWpt the voices of dead people. I'm perfectly happy calling them weblogs. But the best blogs are those full of voice.
A dirty little secret about Dave and Doc is that they hand code their pages and upload them using FTP. They're still blogs. So it's not the technology. If not technology, then lets look at it is as rhetoric, as a social phenomenon, and as something more.
As rhetoric, I think it's important that many Weblogs are written badly. When reading a Weblog, you assume that you're reading a first draft. You know that it wasn't carefully edited, not much spell checked. You have the sense, wrongly, that it's closer to the person who wrote. Second of all, by reading what you assume to be a first draft, Weblog readers tend to be forgiving. You have to forgive the broken link. You have to forgive the bad spelling. You have to forgive the fact that the second paragraph should really be the lead. Social forgiveness is not a bad characteristic.
Beyond the rhetoric, Weblogs are a lot different than Usenet because Weblogs have a place. I can look up everything you've ever written in Usenet using Google, but that's different than going to a permanent, persistent place on the Net where I'm talking about myself. What you're doing is creating a social self. For the first time we have a place that has some permanence for this Web self, a proxy for yourself. When Jimmy said when he meets people he feels like he knows them because he's read their Weblogs forever, of course he does.
What about the notion of authenticity, a topic that keeps popping up? It's vexing and annoying. We have an M&M view of the self that says there's an inner core and an outer shell. We have a whole set of virtues that are connected to the relationship between the outer and the inner. That's worked pretty well for thousands of years, but it doesn't work very well on the Web. If the Web is your outer self, where is the inner self? The model falls apart. The relationship between you and your Web self is more akin to an author and one of her characters. It's written. Of course it's inauthentic and constructed. We are writing ourselves into existence.
What kind of selves do Weblogs favor? It favors good writers. I pushes for self-exposure. The third thing is that is seems to favor the unemployed. The timing of the recession is the best thing that could have happened to Weblogs. Thank you, Mr. Bush.
I want to talk about journalism in terms of the relationship between the inner truth and the outer truth. Lots of people are talking about journalism and blogging. No, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about blogging and truth. Objectivity claims to be the world as it is. In journalism, you're interviewing multiple people. You're vetting multiple claims. It provides a kind of a baseline for the community. The weakness is that journalists are human. They can't be objective. They have opinions.
Same thing for subjectivity. The claim is that it will show it our world as it is. The strengths are that it acknowledges that there is an observer there. That the observer is rooted in a culture. And that you get more of an experience. The weaknesses are that it's scattershot, raw, and individualistic.
It seems to me that blogs for the first time allows multisubjectivity. This gives subjectivity some of the heft that objectivity supposedly has. Now we have a way that we can actually read all of these things. We have a blogosphere. There are more blogs than a human could ever read, but we can find them. Now we can read stuff from all over the world. Multisubjectivity gives a term to one of the reasons so many of us are so thrilled by Weblogs. It's amazing that we can do this. Objectivity and newspapers tend to lose some of their regalness.
What's not to like about this? If everyone has their own voice, you get rumors, gossip, lies, and misinformation. That's an assault on knowledge. Business has mistaken itself for a fort because they've been able to control their environment by selectively releasing information. Knowledge has been their weapon. The edifice just isn't working any more. Weblogs are a way that cannot be stopped providing insight punching some holes in the wall. You can pretend that it's not going to happen, but it's going to happen.
Another group of people who are not thrilled about this assault on knowledge are people who have identified themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge. An exception would be Dan Gillmor, a journalist who deeply understands what's going on. In Athens, it used to be that knowledge used to be a way to discern who was worth listening to. The city was run by people talking. Can we look at what someone is saying and determine whether they're worth believing or worth listening to? It was fully concrete stuff.
Over the course of the next 1,000 years, the quest became one for certainty. That's what knowledge became. It became so anorexic as to be uninteresting. Knowledge grew out of the body and became a purely rational thing that had no human context or relationship to the body any more.
Now I want to talk about what knowledge is on the Web. About 18 months ago, my wife and I were looking for a washer and drier. We came down to a Kenmore and a Whirlpool. We go to Kenmore's site, and what do you see there: Nothing worth looking at. It's certainly not a great way to find out whether a washer will fit into the hole I just cut into my counter -- which you can actually do after eight clicks in.
We actually didn't go to Kenmore's Web site. We googled for Kenmore, Whirlpool, and discussion. I found a guy who said he could dry a queen-sized mattress cover. I am now totally sure that Kenmore is great at drying queen-sized mattress covers because Jim said so. Had I gone to the Kenmore site, I wouldn't have believed them because I'm being marketed to. And I wouldn't have known that the done buzzer was really loud. This is knowledge you can only get from human experience. You go to the next page down, and you find Karen, who has a question. She's answered by a guy named Rinso. Now here is a physicist of lint!
Moveable Type wasn't recognizing my login. I went to the discussion forums. I explained how hosed I am. And in a couple of hours I was pointed to information about what had happened. This is what knowledge sounds like on the Web. We're really, really happy with it. We're happy to have this uncertain, improbable, extremely helpful stuff available to us.
Weblogs are just simple little publishing tools. Why is this turning the world upside down? Why are people so excited about it? It doesn't make sense. It does make sense in the context of a deeply alienated world. We believe that knowledge is certainty while every day we encounter knowledge that isn't certain. That is extremely alienating. Or, maybe we're really in the Matrix. Maybe you're not really real. That's alienated. That means that you're not kissing your spouse in the evening. You're kissing your experience of your wife.
Ray Kurzweil says that by 2029 we'll hit the crossover and be able to download our brain. For an instant, we thought that consciousness is entirely disembodied. That's an insane, alienated idea. The belief that we have to go into work every day and talk like somebody else is insane and alienated.
If you want to know about forgiveness as a topic, you could look it up in a book. Or you could look it up in a blog like AKMA. You could learn more about forgiveness by reading that blog thread than you could by reading the most objective source. It's more human. It's more embodied. As imperfect and messy as it is.
Weblogs exist in a new place. That place is the Web. We've never had a second public space that's consistent with the first public space. Public spaces are important to us because we're social animals. We've never had anything like that before. And now we do.
Interlude: Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Usually, I am the most active -- or complete -- confblogger at conferences. Not here. Thanks to WiFi, plenty of folks are online as we speak, so to speak. Joi Ito and Jason Shellen -- whom I haven't seen since October 2001 -- have posted lists of confbloggers. There's an IRC channel for back-channel conversation. And I have a horrible head cold. Every breath borders on sneeze.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 VI
Butler, Guterman, Levin, and Stone: Managing A Business Blog
Jimmy Guterman: Guys, you're welcome to talk, but if you're going to do it, you're welcome to do it outside of this room. Before I start I want to talk about reconnecting. I've seen a number of people who I haven't laid eyes on for six, seven, or eight years. We might not have active email or phone relationships, but I read their Weblogs every day. And when I see them, I feel really close to them. The intensity surprised me. We're here to talk about business blogs, but it's important to keep in mind the personal side. You can use blogs for promotion, to influence thinking inside and outside the organization. Something we might see in the coming months is internal processes that others can get involved in. We're going to steer clear of theory and focus on the nuts and bolts of getting a blog going. Marketing has a way of ruining Net media.
Jason, one of the blogs you have at BostonWorks is an HR blog that you open up to HR professionals. How did you get that started, how did you decide who would participate, and how did you get it going?
Jason Butler: Online, we have a couple of very strong competitors -- Monster and Yahoo. We have to concentrate on what we're really good at. One is the local. If it's west of Worcester I don't care. The second thing is editorial content. I don't know if Monster won a Pulitzer this year, but the Boston Globe did. Coming out of the business newsroom, we get eight stories a week looking at the job market. What we wanted to do was focus primarily on HR. It started in January, and it's called HR Blog. It's a collaborative Weblog, and there are three people working on it. We scour the Web for resources that will be of use to our clients. We're going to be doing more to attract practitioners. I can talk about HR. I care about it very deeply, but the people who are practicing it every day are better able to talk about it.
Guterman: Adina, could you talk a little bit about the difference between a blog and a wiki?
Adina Levin: There've been some interesting debates and a discussion about this. From a technical perspective, there's not much difference. A blog is more identified with a voice or a team of a group of people. A wiki is better for collaborative authoring. That tends to blur an individual voice into the group consensus. What does the group agree on?
Guterman: Biz, you've talked a lot about the difference between a blog voice and a corporate voice.
Biz Stone: I don't know if I've talked much about a blog voice vs. a corporate voice, but it's important to develop a blog voice. A lot of people get really excited about blogs and they decide that they're going to do a blog about movies. Then they realize that nobody really cares about what they say about movies. They care about what they say about something else, like usability. You've got to find your niche. In a corporate setting, that can be more difficult. Instead of a logo, you can have a person back there. Everyone says, how do we start up a blog? It's easy. Just start a blog. It doesn't even need to be about your business.
Levin: We're in the business of serving groups who need to communicate. People at work are saying things to each other all the time. But they're drowning in email. Either the information is going to too many people -- or it doesn't get to enough people. What we see our customers doing is harnessing the communication people are already doing and making that communication more effective.
Guterman: Anyone here who's started a blog is that they can find out that what the blog turns out to be about is completely different than what it started out as. That's fine for personal blogs. As a business, you don't really have that flexibility. Or do you?
Levin: You do and you don't. Sometimes a business meeting at the behest of people at the meeting can diverge. We already have a lot of cultural constructs for deciding what conversation is relevant in a business. It's a matter of applying those constructs to this medium.
Stone: If you have a few people in your company doing blogs, let them find their voice as well as it continues to relate to your company.
Levin: Blogs are conversations. It might end up as relevant even if it's not relevant in the way it started out.
Butler: We have pretty broad guidelines. Working in the newspaper world, it's kind of like working on a beat. It has to be somewhat related to the topic. We are what we advertise. We're information about this particular topic.
Stone: At Wellesley, I'm supposed to be redesigning their alumni site and rebuilding their alumni community. Because I'm interested in blogs, I'm trying to get students and professors interested in blogs. We've already got 200 students using LiveJournal. Then we had a company approach us saying they're working on a tool that will help bringing blogs to schools. One professor has his students keeping paper journals all year. But they're just for him to read at the end of the year. He wants other students and teachers to comment on their work.
Guterman: There are existing means of communication. In corporate environments, a blog doesn't come out of nowhere. How do you integrate a blog into an existing communications strategy without screwing things up?
Stone: Some people take to it. Some people don't. If you told 10 people to go start up a blog, two people would emerge as blogging superstars. It takes a certain personality to want to do it. Some people can't take the feedback on their work.
Butler: Most of our blogs are external, but internally we've found something interesting. Some of our more technically savvy sales people will read the blog every day and use an article or a resource as an excuse to contact a sales lead.
Levin: We're also seeing that with clients. People working with a product communicating with the sales people. It's not so much integrating with the outbound marketing but integrating it with the email communication that people do every day.
Levin: I get some traffic on my personal site from government agencies, and that makes me a little nervous.
Stone: In my referral logs I've seen things like referral blocked by this service.
Guterman: Firewalls are very smart. Working with one client, we did a combination of password protected, not public, and a really mundane domain name so if you came across it, you'd really have to be looking for it. Let's assume that you've got your blog up and running. How do you get people contributing?
Stone: A few weeks ago, I got this girl blogging at Wellesley. And if we're not blogging, we're talking about blogging. We didn't want to be shut down. We went up to this one girl who was totally against blogs and said, if you have a blog, we'd write about you in our blogs, too. On the first day, a couple of people linked to it because it was kind of funny, and she had 100 visitors. You're huge! Enthusiasm will work well.
Levin: Peer pressure works, too. When a behavior is positive and is modeled, it gets picked up. There's the somebody jump ahead strategy. In a context in which you're actually trying to catalyze change within the organization, think about who are the key people with this desire. Be the leader or identify the leaders and work with the leaders. Identify the conversation that already exists. Identify the process that already exists. And introduce blogging to what already exists.
Guterman: One of the things that's beautiful and infuriating about personal Web sites is the lack of anything between the writer and the reader. With a corporate blog,
Butler: I work for a journalism company, so we take our editorial content very serious. Lying is a fire-able offense. We have some guidelines. Most of what we do isn't time sensitive. And we cache, so we don't publish directly. We use Blogger Pro, and I get an email every time someone posts. So I check whether they're crazy.
Stone: It helps to have some sort of role models, too.
Guterman: Something else I'd like to talk about is measuring success.
Butler: The biggest measure of success is whether someone wants to buy a full-page color ad in the Sunday newspaper. It's a way to get more reach out to market than we wouldn't otherwise have. Traffic is important. The RSS feed is also a way to measure people. On the HR side, we get maybe 200-250 unique people a day.
Levin: If you have a marketing blog, the number of viewed articles, how many people are viewing your news feed are relevant metrics. Inside an organization, the Technorati approach is going to be interesting. There are going to be citation metrics. What articles and pages are cited most frequently? What people are cited most frequently?
Stone: That's the coolest part. The way people can pull together what's the most popular page, what's the most commented post.
Jason Butler is senior product development manager for BostonWorks.com. Jimmy Guterman is president of the Vineyard Group. Adina Levin is vice president of products for Socialtext. Biz Stone is author of the best-selling book, "Blogging." Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
Jimmy Guterman: Guys, you're welcome to talk, but if you're going to do it, you're welcome to do it outside of this room. Before I start I want to talk about reconnecting. I've seen a number of people who I haven't laid eyes on for six, seven, or eight years. We might not have active email or phone relationships, but I read their Weblogs every day. And when I see them, I feel really close to them. The intensity surprised me. We're here to talk about business blogs, but it's important to keep in mind the personal side. You can use blogs for promotion, to influence thinking inside and outside the organization. Something we might see in the coming months is internal processes that others can get involved in. We're going to steer clear of theory and focus on the nuts and bolts of getting a blog going. Marketing has a way of ruining Net media.
Jason, one of the blogs you have at BostonWorks is an HR blog that you open up to HR professionals. How did you get that started, how did you decide who would participate, and how did you get it going?
Jason Butler: Online, we have a couple of very strong competitors -- Monster and Yahoo. We have to concentrate on what we're really good at. One is the local. If it's west of Worcester I don't care. The second thing is editorial content. I don't know if Monster won a Pulitzer this year, but the Boston Globe did. Coming out of the business newsroom, we get eight stories a week looking at the job market. What we wanted to do was focus primarily on HR. It started in January, and it's called HR Blog. It's a collaborative Weblog, and there are three people working on it. We scour the Web for resources that will be of use to our clients. We're going to be doing more to attract practitioners. I can talk about HR. I care about it very deeply, but the people who are practicing it every day are better able to talk about it.
Guterman: Adina, could you talk a little bit about the difference between a blog and a wiki?
Adina Levin: There've been some interesting debates and a discussion about this. From a technical perspective, there's not much difference. A blog is more identified with a voice or a team of a group of people. A wiki is better for collaborative authoring. That tends to blur an individual voice into the group consensus. What does the group agree on?
Guterman: Biz, you've talked a lot about the difference between a blog voice and a corporate voice.
Biz Stone: I don't know if I've talked much about a blog voice vs. a corporate voice, but it's important to develop a blog voice. A lot of people get really excited about blogs and they decide that they're going to do a blog about movies. Then they realize that nobody really cares about what they say about movies. They care about what they say about something else, like usability. You've got to find your niche. In a corporate setting, that can be more difficult. Instead of a logo, you can have a person back there. Everyone says, how do we start up a blog? It's easy. Just start a blog. It doesn't even need to be about your business.
Levin: We're in the business of serving groups who need to communicate. People at work are saying things to each other all the time. But they're drowning in email. Either the information is going to too many people -- or it doesn't get to enough people. What we see our customers doing is harnessing the communication people are already doing and making that communication more effective.
Guterman: Anyone here who's started a blog is that they can find out that what the blog turns out to be about is completely different than what it started out as. That's fine for personal blogs. As a business, you don't really have that flexibility. Or do you?
Levin: You do and you don't. Sometimes a business meeting at the behest of people at the meeting can diverge. We already have a lot of cultural constructs for deciding what conversation is relevant in a business. It's a matter of applying those constructs to this medium.
Stone: If you have a few people in your company doing blogs, let them find their voice as well as it continues to relate to your company.
Levin: Blogs are conversations. It might end up as relevant even if it's not relevant in the way it started out.
Butler: We have pretty broad guidelines. Working in the newspaper world, it's kind of like working on a beat. It has to be somewhat related to the topic. We are what we advertise. We're information about this particular topic.
Stone: At Wellesley, I'm supposed to be redesigning their alumni site and rebuilding their alumni community. Because I'm interested in blogs, I'm trying to get students and professors interested in blogs. We've already got 200 students using LiveJournal. Then we had a company approach us saying they're working on a tool that will help bringing blogs to schools. One professor has his students keeping paper journals all year. But they're just for him to read at the end of the year. He wants other students and teachers to comment on their work.
Guterman: There are existing means of communication. In corporate environments, a blog doesn't come out of nowhere. How do you integrate a blog into an existing communications strategy without screwing things up?
Stone: Some people take to it. Some people don't. If you told 10 people to go start up a blog, two people would emerge as blogging superstars. It takes a certain personality to want to do it. Some people can't take the feedback on their work.
Butler: Most of our blogs are external, but internally we've found something interesting. Some of our more technically savvy sales people will read the blog every day and use an article or a resource as an excuse to contact a sales lead.
Levin: We're also seeing that with clients. People working with a product communicating with the sales people. It's not so much integrating with the outbound marketing but integrating it with the email communication that people do every day.
Dan Bricklin: If we link to a competitor's Web site, they get the referrer and know we're looking. How do you deal with the observer effect? And how do you deal with wikis giving your information away?
Levin: I get some traffic on my personal site from government agencies, and that makes me a little nervous.
Stone: In my referral logs I've seen things like referral blocked by this service.
Guterman: Firewalls are very smart. Working with one client, we did a combination of password protected, not public, and a really mundane domain name so if you came across it, you'd really have to be looking for it. Let's assume that you've got your blog up and running. How do you get people contributing?
Stone: A few weeks ago, I got this girl blogging at Wellesley. And if we're not blogging, we're talking about blogging. We didn't want to be shut down. We went up to this one girl who was totally against blogs and said, if you have a blog, we'd write about you in our blogs, too. On the first day, a couple of people linked to it because it was kind of funny, and she had 100 visitors. You're huge! Enthusiasm will work well.
Question: Just because you're not talking to people doesn't mean that they're not talking about you.
Levin: Peer pressure works, too. When a behavior is positive and is modeled, it gets picked up. There's the somebody jump ahead strategy. In a context in which you're actually trying to catalyze change within the organization, think about who are the key people with this desire. Be the leader or identify the leaders and work with the leaders. Identify the conversation that already exists. Identify the process that already exists. And introduce blogging to what already exists.
Guterman: One of the things that's beautiful and infuriating about personal Web sites is the lack of anything between the writer and the reader. With a corporate blog,
Butler: I work for a journalism company, so we take our editorial content very serious. Lying is a fire-able offense. We have some guidelines. Most of what we do isn't time sensitive. And we cache, so we don't publish directly. We use Blogger Pro, and I get an email every time someone posts. So I check whether they're crazy.
Stone: It helps to have some sort of role models, too.
Guterman: Something else I'd like to talk about is measuring success.
Butler: The biggest measure of success is whether someone wants to buy a full-page color ad in the Sunday newspaper. It's a way to get more reach out to market than we wouldn't otherwise have. Traffic is important. The RSS feed is also a way to measure people. On the HR side, we get maybe 200-250 unique people a day.
Levin: If you have a marketing blog, the number of viewed articles, how many people are viewing your news feed are relevant metrics. Inside an organization, the Technorati approach is going to be interesting. There are going to be citation metrics. What articles and pages are cited most frequently? What people are cited most frequently?
Stone: That's the coolest part. The way people can pull together what's the most popular page, what's the most commented post.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 V
Bruner, Clarke, Goodwin, Goza, Mooney, and Warner: Are Weblogs A Threat Or Opportunity For Enterprises?
Kathleen Goodwin: This panel is going to shed some perspectives on the threats Weblogs may pose.
Carin Warner: I run a full-service marketing company. I've seen a lot of corporate information and education. Weblogs are one of the most interesting forms to come our way.
Michael O'Connor Clarke: I work for one of the world's largest ad agencies. I am in effect extinct. I had a mail.com forwarding account that was supposed to be free for life, and then they started charging me. That means that I'm technically dead. I'm also a blogger.
Rick Bruner: I've been blogging for a little over a year. MarketingFix.com is a collaborative Weblog on Internet marketing.
Jeff Mooney: Our company provides data and software to the PR industry, and we just started including bloggers in our database.
Beth Goza: I'm really nervous. I'll try to belong here. I started my blog last summer when I attended Gnomedex. I had to take it down for a little while. I didn't have to. I chose to. I took it down because I was on the cover of the Register. I'm here because I'm a blogger.
Goodwin: I'd like to keep this open, so if we ask a question and don't get deep into it, don't be shy. Beth, how do you really see your personal and professional blogs fit into your work as the marketing mix?
Goza: The only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy. I started my blog as a person. Invariably, it may become marketing as a default because as Doc and Dave say, marketing is a conversation. One of the things that blogs can do for any company is remove the layers between you and customers. One of the things I find interesting is when I read about Microsoft in the media, the perception is somewhat negative. One of the things I've discovered is that when I meet someone in person, they have something very positive to say. Weblogs personalize these large organizations.
Goodwin: Do you get your customers marketing to other customers?
Goza: I don't know. Anecdotally, I write about some cool things I've been doing with my tablet and then someone goes and gets a tablet, it's not like that was marketing.
Warner: That hearkens back to what someone said earlier about what to do with a CEO reluctant to blog. The answer is that you don't. Find someone who's passionate. If we want to be true to what I envision a blog to be, it's about somebody who's an evangelist, who's passionate, who wants the world to hear their story. They should be cultivated in a way that's controversial or else they won't be interesting.
Goodwin: How do you find those evangelists?
Bruner: Before we go too far down that road, I don't think we've really discussed what a blog is. To me, it comes down to the simplicity of the self-publishing platform. What you do with that is different. So far what we've heard is that to be a blog you need to be rantian, screedian. Personality is important to a Weblog, but by definition, I don't think it needs to be job one. There is a lot of value in aggregating and pointing to information without all the analysis.
Clarke: If you don't have personality, you don't have a blog. Is there anyone here who doesn't have any certainty about what a blog is? And does anyone even care?
Goodwin: There are varying degrees of what blogs are, but the platform for self-publishing is crucial. Good reading and good readership doesn't mean that a blogger needs to be controversial. They're compelling.
Warner: It doesn't belong in the PR section of a Web site. That doesn't provide any service. It shouldn't be positioned as part of a contrived press kit.
Bruner: I'm not saying that's the only use for it. They have different uses in different parts of the company. I'm still a quasi-journalist and -analysts, and I get news alerts all the time. I'd rather go somewhere else to learn about a company.
Goza: I think of blogs as the anti-pop up. It's pull rather than push. People won't read your blog if there isn't energy, expertise, personality. That's what sustains blogs. The readers find value. Companies have forgotten how to pull people to learn more about them,
Clarke: Let's say you set up a corporate blog and you use it to point to articles of interest. The act of pointing to articles of interest proves that there's personality there. You're going to give not votes to something else. As a PR person, the media is not my audience. Hopefully you can be a vehicle to help me get to the audience of my clients. If you fundamentally believe that what your company does is good and right, then get the hell out of the way. Let people set up blogs on your corporate servers.
Mooney: Say you have your corporate blog. It's very well written. How do you measure whether it's successful? Is it readership? Traffic?
Warner: A better question might be do you want to measure it? Who's reading what and what they're most interested in would be very relevant. But it's more than analytic. How is it helping your brand voice and your brand identity in the marketplace? If it's always going to be undercutting what the corporation is saying, then you're in trouble.
Goza: One of our VP's, Eric Rudder, just started blogging. My blog is a personal blog. But Eric Rudder's blog is completely transparent: he works for Microsoft, and this is what he's working on. That's a big scare for PR and legal. People just love to sue us. You wouldn't have been able to hold Eric back. Other groups at Microsoft are, like, OK, how do we do this?
Clarke: I'd point them to your CEO.
Warner: It's much the same as news commentary right now. It's their thought. It's what they want to say. You can have the same role of the blogger to provide commentary.
Goza: The fear is how that content will be used by others.
Warner: It's the same as commentary.
Goodwin: What kind of messages do you consider the right type of messages to be sent?
Warner: It depends on the corporation. As a marketer, I'd say what's missing from the brand identity. If they only knew these three things, would that make a difference? What's behind all the corporate meanderings?
Clarke: That seems like the wrong question. What are the right things for newspapers to write about? Get out of the way. Let people blog what they choose to blog. People have some overlapping shared interests. If you're running your corporation well and have dialogue within your corporation, let that conversation spill over to the outside world.
Goza: I worry about the term guerrilla marketing getting associated with blogging. Do you all remember the whole Dr. Pepper fiasco? Dr. Pepper seeded a lot of product to bloggers and said write about it, but don't let anyone know we sent it to you. I don't want there to be any sense of impropriety. That will be the downfall of blogging. Blogging needs to understand the power of community.
Goodwin: How do you know when topics have passed and it's time to move on? How do you keep engagement going?
Goza: You have to be a member of the community. You have to blog out and blog in. You'll know when a topic has run its course because no one else is talking about it ieither.
Clarke: Just be engaged. If you have people in your organization who are engaged, chances are they're already blogging. The Net is littered with Blogspot blogs that are past their time. The meme of the week,.
Warner: That's the beauty of it. It's OK for blogs to die.
Goodwin: What use does blogging have in research?
Warner: Find out how your customers are using your products, services, or technologies. Use them as your best ambassador to the world.
Bruner: You mean in a blog context?
Clarke: Ebay has a way of highlighting its most active users. AOL has done that for years. Marketing departments have shied from communicating with their customers for years. See if you can get into a dialogue.
Goodwin: In my company, we're encouraging people to have an ongoing blog as a conversation with the most engaged customers and prospects. We come at it with a certain thought process, but the community continues to build and influence us.
Goza: Look at the tools like the RSS feeds and the trackbacks. Look at who's looking at you. Companies who are afraid of communicating with their customers should know that I put my email address on my blog. Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome sent out a question from me -- "What do you think of Windows?" -- to his list, which has, like, a million readers. How many emails do you think I got? Maybe 30. I was really scared to do that, but now that I have, it's a non-issue. Once you open the door, you can't go back. Are you committed to the fact that you might show up in the Register as having the worst blog in the world?
Goodwin: That's a commitment you don't realize until you experience it. As a marketer, when I think about blogging, I think about engaging my key customers in verticals as a focus group.
Clarke: Technorati is one of the most important things in the blogging world. That's a great way of tracking the aura of dialogues that are happening.
Bruner: On the whole subject of feedback from readers and community, I'd like to offer some caution. It can be difficult to get feedback and response to your blog. You see a lot of comments boxes with zero comments.
Goza: I disagree with that. For the last four years, my job has been the squishiest job at Microsoft. They ask for some hard numbers, and I say, I don't have any. But just the fact that we're in a conversation is important. The only ROI that you have from doing a blog is that there's one person reading it.
Warner: One of the most important things is that in today's environment, every company wants to connect with the customer. You don't know if you're getting to them, You don't know if they're responding. The possibilities of blogs are tremendous. You can not only reach out and touch a customer but learn that they like being touched.
Goodwin: When I look at research, it's qualitative, not quantitative. Before we go to questions, I have another question: How do you approach journalists who do blogs?
Mooney: We just started including blogs in our database of accredited journalists, and I got a lot of emails screaming at me what is an accredited journalist. So we approached the journalists and asked if they'd be open to clients pitching their blog. They were extremely open to it. In some cases, you don't care if it's a journalist or not. If someone's influential, it's important not to pretend you're part of their community. Be honest. Don't send press releases. You want to build a relationship. Know what someone writes about. What they think is funny. What they might put a link to.
Clarke: I was less than entirely flattering about what MediaMap did. This guy jumped in and said, hey, we're just testing the water. Thank you for your feedback. I really hope that blogs and blogging rings the final death knell of the art of the pitch. It's such a broken form of communication. Blogging brings in more human voice to the conversation.
Warner: Michael, shame on you. Pitch means to inform. We're in the new form. Don't put us all in the same category, please.
Bruner: Yeah, you do have to approach blogs in a different way. But on the other hand, there are lots of blogs that point to press releases. Gizmodo was flown out to Redmond, Washington, on Microsoft's dime.
Goza: I flew them out! That was me!
Bruner: Dr. Pepper shot themselves in the foot. Keep in mind that a lot of people at this conference are bloggers rather than marketers. There's just a handful of corporate blogs in the world right now. What the future is is yet to be seen.
Clarke: There will be clueful blogs and there will be clueless blogs.
Bruner: The ones that suck won't be read.
Goza: I invited Gizmodo out to Redmond because they're influential. The first time I did this was three years ago. You need to treat these people with more respect.
Warner: I don't think they're holier than thou. They should be open, I would think, to receiving information. The reason why the pitch gets a bad name is because they're usually blanket pitches. Everything has to be very personalized.
Bruner: There's a need in a lot of organizations to more efficiently publish information.
Goodwin: Meeting Beth as a representative of Microsoft was a breath of fresh air. I hope to do a similar thing with my company for people in customer support. They will reflect on the company good and bad.
Administrivia: I met with Goza during the 2001 CoF Roadshow.
Rick E. Bruner is president of Executive Summary Consulting Inc. Michael O'Connor Clarke is senior vice president of Weber Shandwick in Canada. Kathleen Goodwin is conference chairperson and CEO of iMakeNews. Beth Goza is community lead on the Windows client team for Microsoft Corporation. Jeff Mooney is director of content product management and educational services for MediaMap. Carin Warner is president of Warner Communications. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:
Kathleen Goodwin: This panel is going to shed some perspectives on the threats Weblogs may pose.
Carin Warner: I run a full-service marketing company. I've seen a lot of corporate information and education. Weblogs are one of the most interesting forms to come our way.
Michael O'Connor Clarke: I work for one of the world's largest ad agencies. I am in effect extinct. I had a mail.com forwarding account that was supposed to be free for life, and then they started charging me. That means that I'm technically dead. I'm also a blogger.
Rick Bruner: I've been blogging for a little over a year. MarketingFix.com is a collaborative Weblog on Internet marketing.
Jeff Mooney: Our company provides data and software to the PR industry, and we just started including bloggers in our database.
Beth Goza: I'm really nervous. I'll try to belong here. I started my blog last summer when I attended Gnomedex. I had to take it down for a little while. I didn't have to. I chose to. I took it down because I was on the cover of the Register. I'm here because I'm a blogger.
Goodwin: I'd like to keep this open, so if we ask a question and don't get deep into it, don't be shy. Beth, how do you really see your personal and professional blogs fit into your work as the marketing mix?
Goza: The only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy. I started my blog as a person. Invariably, it may become marketing as a default because as Doc and Dave say, marketing is a conversation. One of the things that blogs can do for any company is remove the layers between you and customers. One of the things I find interesting is when I read about Microsoft in the media, the perception is somewhat negative. One of the things I've discovered is that when I meet someone in person, they have something very positive to say. Weblogs personalize these large organizations.
Goodwin: Do you get your customers marketing to other customers?
Goza: I don't know. Anecdotally, I write about some cool things I've been doing with my tablet and then someone goes and gets a tablet, it's not like that was marketing.
Warner: That hearkens back to what someone said earlier about what to do with a CEO reluctant to blog. The answer is that you don't. Find someone who's passionate. If we want to be true to what I envision a blog to be, it's about somebody who's an evangelist, who's passionate, who wants the world to hear their story. They should be cultivated in a way that's controversial or else they won't be interesting.
Goodwin: How do you find those evangelists?
Bruner: Before we go too far down that road, I don't think we've really discussed what a blog is. To me, it comes down to the simplicity of the self-publishing platform. What you do with that is different. So far what we've heard is that to be a blog you need to be rantian, screedian. Personality is important to a Weblog, but by definition, I don't think it needs to be job one. There is a lot of value in aggregating and pointing to information without all the analysis.
Clarke: If you don't have personality, you don't have a blog. Is there anyone here who doesn't have any certainty about what a blog is? And does anyone even care?
Goodwin: There are varying degrees of what blogs are, but the platform for self-publishing is crucial. Good reading and good readership doesn't mean that a blogger needs to be controversial. They're compelling.
Question: It's not just personality. It's expertise.
Warner: It doesn't belong in the PR section of a Web site. That doesn't provide any service. It shouldn't be positioned as part of a contrived press kit.
Bruner: I'm not saying that's the only use for it. They have different uses in different parts of the company. I'm still a quasi-journalist and -analysts, and I get news alerts all the time. I'd rather go somewhere else to learn about a company.
Goza: I think of blogs as the anti-pop up. It's pull rather than push. People won't read your blog if there isn't energy, expertise, personality. That's what sustains blogs. The readers find value. Companies have forgotten how to pull people to learn more about them,
Clarke: Let's say you set up a corporate blog and you use it to point to articles of interest. The act of pointing to articles of interest proves that there's personality there. You're going to give not votes to something else. As a PR person, the media is not my audience. Hopefully you can be a vehicle to help me get to the audience of my clients. If you fundamentally believe that what your company does is good and right, then get the hell out of the way. Let people set up blogs on your corporate servers.
Mooney: Say you have your corporate blog. It's very well written. How do you measure whether it's successful? Is it readership? Traffic?
Warner: A better question might be do you want to measure it? Who's reading what and what they're most interested in would be very relevant. But it's more than analytic. How is it helping your brand voice and your brand identity in the marketplace? If it's always going to be undercutting what the corporation is saying, then you're in trouble.
Jason Shellen: A CEO's job primarily is to communicate strategy internally and externally. The opposition won't come from the CEO. It'll come from the PR department or someone else VP level who's scared of information.
Goza: One of our VP's, Eric Rudder, just started blogging. My blog is a personal blog. But Eric Rudder's blog is completely transparent: he works for Microsoft, and this is what he's working on. That's a big scare for PR and legal. People just love to sue us. You wouldn't have been able to hold Eric back. Other groups at Microsoft are, like, OK, how do we do this?
Clarke: I'd point them to your CEO.
Warner: It's much the same as news commentary right now. It's their thought. It's what they want to say. You can have the same role of the blogger to provide commentary.
Goza: The fear is how that content will be used by others.
Warner: It's the same as commentary.
Goodwin: What kind of messages do you consider the right type of messages to be sent?
Warner: It depends on the corporation. As a marketer, I'd say what's missing from the brand identity. If they only knew these three things, would that make a difference? What's behind all the corporate meanderings?
Clarke: That seems like the wrong question. What are the right things for newspapers to write about? Get out of the way. Let people blog what they choose to blog. People have some overlapping shared interests. If you're running your corporation well and have dialogue within your corporation, let that conversation spill over to the outside world.
Goza: I worry about the term guerrilla marketing getting associated with blogging. Do you all remember the whole Dr. Pepper fiasco? Dr. Pepper seeded a lot of product to bloggers and said write about it, but don't let anyone know we sent it to you. I don't want there to be any sense of impropriety. That will be the downfall of blogging. Blogging needs to understand the power of community.
Question: I'm the guy who ran the boycott of the Dr. Pepper campaign. It really got up my nose. If you want to analyze return on investment, all you need to do is watch it for three or four days. Google to see what people are saying. Hopefully they're only nice things. If your company is blogging, it'll show up in Google, and for general search results, you'll come up higher.
Goodwin: How do you know when topics have passed and it's time to move on? How do you keep engagement going?
Goza: You have to be a member of the community. You have to blog out and blog in. You'll know when a topic has run its course because no one else is talking about it ieither.
Clarke: Just be engaged. If you have people in your organization who are engaged, chances are they're already blogging. The Net is littered with Blogspot blogs that are past their time. The meme of the week,.
Warner: That's the beauty of it. It's OK for blogs to die.
Dan Bricklin: I hear a lot about PR and marketing, but blogs are conversation. Look at development. Blogs can be useful in development because your customers know more than you do. Talk about those other areas.
Goodwin: What use does blogging have in research?
Warner: Find out how your customers are using your products, services, or technologies. Use them as your best ambassador to the world.
Bruner: You mean in a blog context?
Clarke: Ebay has a way of highlighting its most active users. AOL has done that for years. Marketing departments have shied from communicating with their customers for years. See if you can get into a dialogue.
Goodwin: In my company, we're encouraging people to have an ongoing blog as a conversation with the most engaged customers and prospects. We come at it with a certain thought process, but the community continues to build and influence us.
Goza: Look at the tools like the RSS feeds and the trackbacks. Look at who's looking at you. Companies who are afraid of communicating with their customers should know that I put my email address on my blog. Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome sent out a question from me -- "What do you think of Windows?" -- to his list, which has, like, a million readers. How many emails do you think I got? Maybe 30. I was really scared to do that, but now that I have, it's a non-issue. Once you open the door, you can't go back. Are you committed to the fact that you might show up in the Register as having the worst blog in the world?
Goodwin: That's a commitment you don't realize until you experience it. As a marketer, when I think about blogging, I think about engaging my key customers in verticals as a focus group.
Clarke: Technorati is one of the most important things in the blogging world. That's a great way of tracking the aura of dialogues that are happening.
Bruner: On the whole subject of feedback from readers and community, I'd like to offer some caution. It can be difficult to get feedback and response to your blog. You see a lot of comments boxes with zero comments.
Goza: I disagree with that. For the last four years, my job has been the squishiest job at Microsoft. They ask for some hard numbers, and I say, I don't have any. But just the fact that we're in a conversation is important. The only ROI that you have from doing a blog is that there's one person reading it.
Warner: One of the most important things is that in today's environment, every company wants to connect with the customer. You don't know if you're getting to them, You don't know if they're responding. The possibilities of blogs are tremendous. You can not only reach out and touch a customer but learn that they like being touched.
Goodwin: When I look at research, it's qualitative, not quantitative. Before we go to questions, I have another question: How do you approach journalists who do blogs?
Mooney: We just started including blogs in our database of accredited journalists, and I got a lot of emails screaming at me what is an accredited journalist. So we approached the journalists and asked if they'd be open to clients pitching their blog. They were extremely open to it. In some cases, you don't care if it's a journalist or not. If someone's influential, it's important not to pretend you're part of their community. Be honest. Don't send press releases. You want to build a relationship. Know what someone writes about. What they think is funny. What they might put a link to.
Clarke: I was less than entirely flattering about what MediaMap did. This guy jumped in and said, hey, we're just testing the water. Thank you for your feedback. I really hope that blogs and blogging rings the final death knell of the art of the pitch. It's such a broken form of communication. Blogging brings in more human voice to the conversation.
Warner: Michael, shame on you. Pitch means to inform. We're in the new form. Don't put us all in the same category, please.
Bruner: Yeah, you do have to approach blogs in a different way. But on the other hand, there are lots of blogs that point to press releases. Gizmodo was flown out to Redmond, Washington, on Microsoft's dime.
Goza: I flew them out! That was me!
Bruner: Dr. Pepper shot themselves in the foot. Keep in mind that a lot of people at this conference are bloggers rather than marketers. There's just a handful of corporate blogs in the world right now. What the future is is yet to be seen.
Clarke: There will be clueful blogs and there will be clueless blogs.
Bruner: The ones that suck won't be read.
Goza: I invited Gizmodo out to Redmond because they're influential. The first time I did this was three years ago. You need to treat these people with more respect.
Warner: I don't think they're holier than thou. They should be open, I would think, to receiving information. The reason why the pitch gets a bad name is because they're usually blanket pitches. Everything has to be very personalized.
Jason Shellen: "Pitch" sounds like something I don't want to be done to me. I don't want someone to educate me. I want to learn. You have to get out of that mindset.
Bruner: There's a need in a lot of organizations to more efficiently publish information.
Goodwin: Meeting Beth as a representative of Microsoft was a breath of fresh air. I hope to do a similar thing with my company for people in customer support. They will reflect on the company good and bad.
Administrivia: I met with Goza during the 2001 CoF Roadshow.
Corollary: Weblog Business Strategies 2003 II
Roell has also set up a TopicExchange channel for confbloggers to use on site.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 IV
David Winer: What Are Weblogs?
I've believed in Weblogs for quite some time. I want to tell you the story about how I got involved in this. Every year is the year in which Weblogs are new for some group of people. This conference is showing that Weblogs are about to happen in business. The first group of people to adopt PC technology were programmers. Then librarians and lawyers. After that you get business, and it gets really big.
We've seen that happen again with desktop publishing and the Macintosh. And we've seen it happen with the Web, although that was subsumed because of the hype around it. I did my first Weblog in connection with a project I did at Wired in 1994. We did a project called 24 Hours of Democracy. We wanted to show our political leaders that the Web could be used for something very positive. We invited anybody to write an article for us about how the Web being a free environment would be a good thing to do. We had a good amount of people participating: 50-60 people.
I put up a Web site for this. It was kind of an internal Web site, but it wasn't protected by password. I posted links to everything that was going online in reverse chronological order. Mike's presentation was great, but I would argue whether a Weblog even needs to be open to the world. If you've got a group of 50-60 people who are working together on a project -- think of it this way. Do you have a person in your work group who keeps up a steady stream of emails about articles you should read? That's a blogger.
What's the difference between a blogger and a reporter? My opinion is that there is no difference. The relationship between Weblogging and journalism is a contentious issue in the blog world today. Is journalism really that high a calling? Is it really that rare that you can't be a journalist and still be an ordinary person? Go ahead and put your cheesecake recipes in your blog. They might help me understand more about who's talking. It may reveal some truth about you that someone else might explain to you. Weirder things have happened.
Is the Weblog part of business? If I were starting a business today, I would make the business a Weblog. Then you've got a competitive edge over everybody else. I see the Cluetrain Manifesto and Weblogs as being flip sides of the same coin. Go ahead and be yourself. Your customers can see through your BS anyway. The weird thing about it is that in the old world, the monoculture world, you had these huge conglomerates where they wanted everything to centralize and get big. On the one hand, you want companies, presumably, to tell you the truth. On the other hand, sometimes people want companies to lie to them.
When I was in software development, I wrote an article that said, "We make shitty software." It was true. You want to be up front about your biases and conflicts of interests. Another thing about integrity is that you don't say anything you know not to be true. This isn't unique to Weblogs. Personal Web sites haven't gone away. Weblogs are the personal Web sites of 2003.
Now we sort of understand how the software should work. We have a backlog of features that haven't made it out to the users. The developers have an idea of what comes next. The question is, how are they going to be used in different situations? This was in 1994. Zoom forward to 2003.
We had an experience at Harvard earlier this year. The RIAA has gone from being people you'd like to help to people you'd like to do something else to. They decided to go after individuals, five students on five college campuses. One was at Harvard. They wrote the dean of the college and said here is a student who's supplying illegal MP3's. The dean decided to remove the content and punish the student. We covered that in the Weblog. It was in the Crimson.
A college student without Internet access for a year is not a college student. He in effect suspended the student for a year. So we wrote an article. And we know that the administration watches the Web site. If we use the logo in a way they don't like, they let us know. We published the article, and they didn't say anything. I thought, wow, we're doing something universities should do. This is how Weblogs should be used in the business world.
So many of the press reports about blogs cast it as us against them. By the end of the article, they conclude that bloggers won't replace them. That violates their Rule No. 1: Objectivity. Of course they have a vested interest in not being replaced. They want to keep their jobs. I don't wake up every morning saying, "I want to replace a traditional reporter."
The New York Times has a much bigger problem than Jayson Blair, and they're in denial. I have never read an article in the New York Times about an area in which I have expertise and said, "Those guys really covered the story right." We could talk about this all day, but let's not.
Every Thursday night, we do something like this at the Berkman Center in Cambridge. We discuss things of interest in the blogging world. So: Employees with Weblogs. I have the reputation of being balls out, let's do everything. But I'm not. Like Michael said, you've got to be careful. Userland was probably the first software company in the world in which employees were required to have a Weblog. Our philosophy was: If you don't like Weblogs, don't work here. With programmers, that can be difficult. We had an employee who was constantly posting things that I felt as CEO of the company weren't team spirited.
A Weblog is a fairly prosaic thing. Don’t get religious about it. Don't think of it as a calling. It's just like the photocopy machine, the fax machine, or the telephone. The same issues of trust apply. You have to be able to trust the people you work for. And they have to be able to trust you. Every technology is unique, but with this one, the same rules basically apply.
Even in a company that wants to do business as usual, their PR function should have a Weblog. I would like to see a change in attitude on the customers' side and the company's side. The customer tolerates truth. OK, I just heard something bad about this company, but that doesn't mean that everything is all screwed up and I can't work with them. Given the difficulties that they're having, that's when they might want to be transparent.
Did we come up with a set of ground rules for employee blogging? Yes, we did. Repeating something that they had been warned about means that you have to fire them. Disclosing the company's secrets, product plans, people's salaries -- what you consider private information -- is just common sense. If you've got the one person on the team who's a natural born blogger -- the NBB -- and there's one in a group that you're connected to, tie them together as an aggregator and then you've really got something. Now every member of five organizations can keep up on the news of the others. You can actually do that today.
Everything new has some risks. But that’s also where the fun comes in.
There's not going to be an answer for every reluctant CEO. That would be antithetical in the blog world. How can we give you a one size fits all thing? Maybe it doesn't fit the organization. Maybe not everyone should be blogging.
I don't really know about these issues. I've never run a public company. But what I have been able to personally tolerate is a moving target. On my Web site I have something called On This Date. And now, something that bothered me in 2002 might not affect me the same way. The world has gone nuts if you look at it from the 1996 perspective.
Maybe just starting a Weblog helps further democracy. It's worth thinking about being idealistic. Don't knock idealism. It actually has some practical applications.
You can also read Winer's crib sheet for the talk.
David Winer is the Berkman Fellow at Harvard University and former CEO of Userland Software. He started his blog Scripting News in April 1997. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:
I've believed in Weblogs for quite some time. I want to tell you the story about how I got involved in this. Every year is the year in which Weblogs are new for some group of people. This conference is showing that Weblogs are about to happen in business. The first group of people to adopt PC technology were programmers. Then librarians and lawyers. After that you get business, and it gets really big.
We've seen that happen again with desktop publishing and the Macintosh. And we've seen it happen with the Web, although that was subsumed because of the hype around it. I did my first Weblog in connection with a project I did at Wired in 1994. We did a project called 24 Hours of Democracy. We wanted to show our political leaders that the Web could be used for something very positive. We invited anybody to write an article for us about how the Web being a free environment would be a good thing to do. We had a good amount of people participating: 50-60 people.
I put up a Web site for this. It was kind of an internal Web site, but it wasn't protected by password. I posted links to everything that was going online in reverse chronological order. Mike's presentation was great, but I would argue whether a Weblog even needs to be open to the world. If you've got a group of 50-60 people who are working together on a project -- think of it this way. Do you have a person in your work group who keeps up a steady stream of emails about articles you should read? That's a blogger.
What's the difference between a blogger and a reporter? My opinion is that there is no difference. The relationship between Weblogging and journalism is a contentious issue in the blog world today. Is journalism really that high a calling? Is it really that rare that you can't be a journalist and still be an ordinary person? Go ahead and put your cheesecake recipes in your blog. They might help me understand more about who's talking. It may reveal some truth about you that someone else might explain to you. Weirder things have happened.
Is the Weblog part of business? If I were starting a business today, I would make the business a Weblog. Then you've got a competitive edge over everybody else. I see the Cluetrain Manifesto and Weblogs as being flip sides of the same coin. Go ahead and be yourself. Your customers can see through your BS anyway. The weird thing about it is that in the old world, the monoculture world, you had these huge conglomerates where they wanted everything to centralize and get big. On the one hand, you want companies, presumably, to tell you the truth. On the other hand, sometimes people want companies to lie to them.
When I was in software development, I wrote an article that said, "We make shitty software." It was true. You want to be up front about your biases and conflicts of interests. Another thing about integrity is that you don't say anything you know not to be true. This isn't unique to Weblogs. Personal Web sites haven't gone away. Weblogs are the personal Web sites of 2003.
Now we sort of understand how the software should work. We have a backlog of features that haven't made it out to the users. The developers have an idea of what comes next. The question is, how are they going to be used in different situations? This was in 1994. Zoom forward to 2003.
We had an experience at Harvard earlier this year. The RIAA has gone from being people you'd like to help to people you'd like to do something else to. They decided to go after individuals, five students on five college campuses. One was at Harvard. They wrote the dean of the college and said here is a student who's supplying illegal MP3's. The dean decided to remove the content and punish the student. We covered that in the Weblog. It was in the Crimson.
A college student without Internet access for a year is not a college student. He in effect suspended the student for a year. So we wrote an article. And we know that the administration watches the Web site. If we use the logo in a way they don't like, they let us know. We published the article, and they didn't say anything. I thought, wow, we're doing something universities should do. This is how Weblogs should be used in the business world.
At this point, someone stepped in with Q&A to challenge whether blogging was journalism. Discussion was lively, but the issue bores me to tears, so I took a break. Winer made an interesting point about the economics of mainstream media: The costs of running a large media organization are outstripping the organization's ability to gather and disseminate news while people's information needs are increasing.
So many of the press reports about blogs cast it as us against them. By the end of the article, they conclude that bloggers won't replace them. That violates their Rule No. 1: Objectivity. Of course they have a vested interest in not being replaced. They want to keep their jobs. I don't wake up every morning saying, "I want to replace a traditional reporter."
Question: We saw a breakdown in editing at the New York Times. Had Jayson Blair been blogging, he wouldn't have lasted a month.
The New York Times has a much bigger problem than Jayson Blair, and they're in denial. I have never read an article in the New York Times about an area in which I have expertise and said, "Those guys really covered the story right." We could talk about this all day, but let's not.
Every Thursday night, we do something like this at the Berkman Center in Cambridge. We discuss things of interest in the blogging world. So: Employees with Weblogs. I have the reputation of being balls out, let's do everything. But I'm not. Like Michael said, you've got to be careful. Userland was probably the first software company in the world in which employees were required to have a Weblog. Our philosophy was: If you don't like Weblogs, don't work here. With programmers, that can be difficult. We had an employee who was constantly posting things that I felt as CEO of the company weren't team spirited.
A Weblog is a fairly prosaic thing. Don’t get religious about it. Don't think of it as a calling. It's just like the photocopy machine, the fax machine, or the telephone. The same issues of trust apply. You have to be able to trust the people you work for. And they have to be able to trust you. Every technology is unique, but with this one, the same rules basically apply.
Halley Suitt: How much truth does a company really want to tell?
Even in a company that wants to do business as usual, their PR function should have a Weblog. I would like to see a change in attitude on the customers' side and the company's side. The customer tolerates truth. OK, I just heard something bad about this company, but that doesn't mean that everything is all screwed up and I can't work with them. Given the difficulties that they're having, that's when they might want to be transparent.
Did we come up with a set of ground rules for employee blogging? Yes, we did. Repeating something that they had been warned about means that you have to fire them. Disclosing the company's secrets, product plans, people's salaries -- what you consider private information -- is just common sense. If you've got the one person on the team who's a natural born blogger -- the NBB -- and there's one in a group that you're connected to, tie them together as an aggregator and then you've really got something. Now every member of five organizations can keep up on the news of the others. You can actually do that today.
Everything new has some risks. But that’s also where the fun comes in.
More Q&A discussion, including some commentary from Beth, who's gotten in trouble for cheating at Xbox -- and blogging about it -- because she works for Microsoft.
There's not going to be an answer for every reluctant CEO. That would be antithetical in the blog world. How can we give you a one size fits all thing? Maybe it doesn't fit the organization. Maybe not everyone should be blogging.
I don't really know about these issues. I've never run a public company. But what I have been able to personally tolerate is a moving target. On my Web site I have something called On This Date. And now, something that bothered me in 2002 might not affect me the same way. The world has gone nuts if you look at it from the 1996 perspective.
Maybe just starting a Weblog helps further democracy. It's worth thinking about being idealistic. Don't knock idealism. It actually has some practical applications.
You can also read Winer's crib sheet for the talk.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 III
Michael Gartenberg: Business Weblogs -- Blogging For Fun And Profit
This morning I'm going to talk to you a little about what weve done at Jupiter about using Web logs as a business tool. Jupiter was the first major research firm to embrace research analysts to create personal Weblogs. Unfortunately there's not a lot of raw data on Weblogs. But I did want to look at the trends in personal Web sites. People read Web sites created by others, but there's a decline in the creation of personal Web sites. Personal Web sites are not that interesting any more.
The Internet and the Web don't get mentioned in Wired magazine until issue 4. Personal Web sites are not very interesting, but Weblogs themselves are very different. Why Weblogs? Rapid communication, rapid feedback. You're able to get the message across and extend the brand to new audiences. That's what we wanted to do when we started Jupiter Weblogs. They started in November last year. I got some interesting reactions. Yes! We need Weblogs. What's a Weblog?
When we explained what the concept waS: analysts writing without any editing and publishing directly to the Web for access at no charge, people were saying, people pay for that. I said well, it's already being done. We can participate in it or we'll essentially become a dinosaur. Our CEO gave me the green light to go ahead and do it.
We went live Jan. 1. Last time I checked we're getting 4,000 hits a day on the various sites. Clients have renewed on the basis of the Weblogs. The third stage was last winter, when our CEO started his own Weblog.
What are the issues? What's the perception? There's a lack of ethos. Who's writing? Is it good info or bad info? Little value. What's the perceived value of something you're not paying for? Creates Web noise. If you do a Google search for an analyst's page, you'll find a link to their Weblog, not their research. Lastly, it's viewed as ego-driven publishing.
I countered saying that it's first-hand expertise. I can get a direct opinion in their own words. We want analysts to speak in their own voice in a business forum. You know what? Traditional publishing is ego-driven, as well. If you had a position or an opinion on the Microsoft antitrust case, you could write an op-ed piece and send it to the New York Times, but chances are they wouldn't publish it. Thirdly, it's an opportunity for direct contact to the audience. They serve different audiences, they serve different needs. One doesn't mean to subsume the other. Customer-centric communication. I can focus on what my client needs. I should be able to meet my clients needs in a manner that's timely and immediate. It's also truly a no-spin zone.
If I were giving advice to Dustin Hoffman's character in the Graduate, I don't think the word is "plastics" but "Weblogs." There's lots of hype, but that's OK. It's an easy way to get internal visibility. It's also a great way to get external visibility, but be careful: It's a great way to get fired. You've got to be a little bit focused in what you're doing.
Keep it modest at first. Go internal before you go external. You've got to find your voice first before you're ready to communicate. Ask permission, not forgiveness. You're putting yourself out in a public forum, you've got to be prepared to deal with the consequences. If you're a personal Weblogger and your company is not involved, putting a disclaimer at the bottom of the page is not going to save your job. You need to use the same common sense. There are certain things that one does not do.
Who should be blogging at your company? Anyone who's got something to say. You'd be surprised how many people have something to say but don't have the forum in which to say it. Two, blog early and blog often. No one's ever going to say your Weblog has too much information, you update too regularly, I can't keep up. Three, there are differences between corporate Weblogs and personal Weblogs. And keep the cheesecake recipes offline. It's not where the medium belongs.
What project timeline do we suggest? Beta internally. Commit a core group of bloggers. Love is a better master than duty. People have got to want to do this. Get at least a week's worth of material. Don't go live until you have maybe even more than that. Open it up for internal review, get some feedback, and blog some more. Repeat this three times and then go live to an external audience.
Weblogs are an extremely powerful form of communication. It is not something just for enthusiasts, but a powerful vehicle businesses can use. If you're looking at this from an enterprise perspective, now is the time to seize control because if you don't, you will cede control.
Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director of Jupiter Research. He helped launch Jupiter's PC and console games service, 80211 mobility service, and Jupiter's analyst Weblogs. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:
This morning I'm going to talk to you a little about what weve done at Jupiter about using Web logs as a business tool. Jupiter was the first major research firm to embrace research analysts to create personal Weblogs. Unfortunately there's not a lot of raw data on Weblogs. But I did want to look at the trends in personal Web sites. People read Web sites created by others, but there's a decline in the creation of personal Web sites. Personal Web sites are not that interesting any more.
The Internet and the Web don't get mentioned in Wired magazine until issue 4. Personal Web sites are not very interesting, but Weblogs themselves are very different. Why Weblogs? Rapid communication, rapid feedback. You're able to get the message across and extend the brand to new audiences. That's what we wanted to do when we started Jupiter Weblogs. They started in November last year. I got some interesting reactions. Yes! We need Weblogs. What's a Weblog?
When we explained what the concept waS: analysts writing without any editing and publishing directly to the Web for access at no charge, people were saying, people pay for that. I said well, it's already being done. We can participate in it or we'll essentially become a dinosaur. Our CEO gave me the green light to go ahead and do it.
We went live Jan. 1. Last time I checked we're getting 4,000 hits a day on the various sites. Clients have renewed on the basis of the Weblogs. The third stage was last winter, when our CEO started his own Weblog.
What are the issues? What's the perception? There's a lack of ethos. Who's writing? Is it good info or bad info? Little value. What's the perceived value of something you're not paying for? Creates Web noise. If you do a Google search for an analyst's page, you'll find a link to their Weblog, not their research. Lastly, it's viewed as ego-driven publishing.
I countered saying that it's first-hand expertise. I can get a direct opinion in their own words. We want analysts to speak in their own voice in a business forum. You know what? Traditional publishing is ego-driven, as well. If you had a position or an opinion on the Microsoft antitrust case, you could write an op-ed piece and send it to the New York Times, but chances are they wouldn't publish it. Thirdly, it's an opportunity for direct contact to the audience. They serve different audiences, they serve different needs. One doesn't mean to subsume the other. Customer-centric communication. I can focus on what my client needs. I should be able to meet my clients needs in a manner that's timely and immediate. It's also truly a no-spin zone.
If I were giving advice to Dustin Hoffman's character in the Graduate, I don't think the word is "plastics" but "Weblogs." There's lots of hype, but that's OK. It's an easy way to get internal visibility. It's also a great way to get external visibility, but be careful: It's a great way to get fired. You've got to be a little bit focused in what you're doing.
Keep it modest at first. Go internal before you go external. You've got to find your voice first before you're ready to communicate. Ask permission, not forgiveness. You're putting yourself out in a public forum, you've got to be prepared to deal with the consequences. If you're a personal Weblogger and your company is not involved, putting a disclaimer at the bottom of the page is not going to save your job. You need to use the same common sense. There are certain things that one does not do.
Who should be blogging at your company? Anyone who's got something to say. You'd be surprised how many people have something to say but don't have the forum in which to say it. Two, blog early and blog often. No one's ever going to say your Weblog has too much information, you update too regularly, I can't keep up. Three, there are differences between corporate Weblogs and personal Weblogs. And keep the cheesecake recipes offline. It's not where the medium belongs.
What project timeline do we suggest? Beta internally. Commit a core group of bloggers. Love is a better master than duty. People have got to want to do this. Get at least a week's worth of material. Don't go live until you have maybe even more than that. Open it up for internal review, get some feedback, and blog some more. Repeat this three times and then go live to an external audience.
Weblogs are an extremely powerful form of communication. It is not something just for enthusiasts, but a powerful vehicle businesses can use. If you're looking at this from an enterprise perspective, now is the time to seize control because if you don't, you will cede control.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003 II
Martin Roell has also beat me to the punch -- and in German, to boot.
Weblog Business Strategies 2003
Denise Howell has beat me to the punch, already posting near-transcripts of the first Weblog Business Strategies sessions this morning in her blog Bag and Baggage.
Friday, June 06, 2003
Rock Shows of Note LXV
Emily has a new digital camera, and she broke it in taking some snaps of the Anchormen and Handstand Command residency show last night at the Choppin' Block. Fun stuff!
Newsletters of Note X
The Tackett-Barbaria Design Group in Sacramento, California, has issued another edition of its summer reading list. The well-designed "Chapter One Page One" booklet highlights titles such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Paranoid's Pocket Guide, Mr. Nice, and If Chins Could Kill -- for a total of eight books. The company's staff also offers personal recommendations for more summer reading. One of the better promotional mailings I receive every year -- and this one received just 11 days before I blogged about the last one a year ago. Good timing!
Soundtrack: David S. Ware Quartet, "Freedom Suite"
Soundtrack: David S. Ware Quartet, "Freedom Suite"
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Event-O-Dex LX
In conjunction with the Jupiter Media and Clickz Weblog Business Strategies conference, which I'll be confblogging early next week, Boston Blogs' Shannon Okey has organized a social gathering Monday night.
At 7 p.m., Monday, June 9, join Boston-area bloggers at Caveau, part of Marche Movenpick in the Pru for some food, folks, and fun. Special guests include Anil Dash of Six Apart and Movable Type, Jason Shellen of Blogger and Google, and Doc Searls of Linux Journal.
At 7 p.m., Monday, June 9, join Boston-area bloggers at Caveau, part of Marche Movenpick in the Pru for some food, folks, and fun. Special guests include Anil Dash of Six Apart and Movable Type, Jason Shellen of Blogger and Google, and Doc Searls of Linux Journal.
Products I Love VIII
I haven't used this yet, but I just got it in the mail, and I'm almost as excited as I was when I got my Geko or Sidekick.
The Conair Instant Hot Lather Machine is a handy sink-side device with which you can heat cans of shaving cream to replicate the experience of a close shave at the barber shop. You just slide in a standard-sized can of shaving cream, plug it in, and a minute later, voila: a barber-shop shave.
I have to agree with Roland in Fishkill, New York: "Life is too short to not get up in the morning and look at shaving as anything but a pleasure." I cannot wait until tomorrow morning. Maybe this thing will replace my soap cup and brush!
The Conair Instant Hot Lather Machine is a handy sink-side device with which you can heat cans of shaving cream to replicate the experience of a close shave at the barber shop. You just slide in a standard-sized can of shaving cream, plug it in, and a minute later, voila: a barber-shop shave.
I have to agree with Roland in Fishkill, New York: "Life is too short to not get up in the morning and look at shaving as anything but a pleasure." I cannot wait until tomorrow morning. Maybe this thing will replace my soap cup and brush!
The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XIX
After my class -- a historic walk through the back side of Beacon Hill -- last night, I made my way to the Paris Creperie on Cambridge Street for dinner. The large, open, well-lighted restaurant has a full menu of meal and dessert crepes. I ordered the huevos rancheros crepe, and although it was mostly rice and not too strongly spiced, it was delicious. I'll be back.
Especially because of two things. One, Paris Creperie offers a club program in which you can get 10% off all purchases, 20% off orders made between 2-5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and for now at least, 20% off Monday and Tuesday if you bring your receipt back. Also, the creperie offers a mobile payment program through Mobile Lime -- which seems to be down at the moment. With a Mobile Lime membership, you can pay with your cell phone. At the checkout, you just dial Mobile Lime, enter your location number, hear your order total, and enter your PIN to pay. I wish their Web site was up -- seems sort of sketchy that it's not -- so I could learn more about this, but it seems you can prepay for Mobile Lime purchases or link your membership to a credit card. No charges are made to your cell phone.
When will the United States catch on to paying by cell phone? Seems sensible that these purchases could show up on my cell phone bill rather than be linked to a credit card. Googling for Mobile Lime doesn't bring up much, but if the Smart Mobs citation is correct, "Living Memory explores how emerging technologies provide the members of a community with the means to capture, share and explore their collective experience, thus creating a 'living memory'. Living Memory (LiMe) is an EC-i3 sponsored project developed by a consortium of partners led by Philips Design between 1997 and 2000." Is Mobile Lime related to this effort?
Especially because of two things. One, Paris Creperie offers a club program in which you can get 10% off all purchases, 20% off orders made between 2-5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and for now at least, 20% off Monday and Tuesday if you bring your receipt back. Also, the creperie offers a mobile payment program through Mobile Lime -- which seems to be down at the moment. With a Mobile Lime membership, you can pay with your cell phone. At the checkout, you just dial Mobile Lime, enter your location number, hear your order total, and enter your PIN to pay. I wish their Web site was up -- seems sort of sketchy that it's not -- so I could learn more about this, but it seems you can prepay for Mobile Lime purchases or link your membership to a credit card. No charges are made to your cell phone.
When will the United States catch on to paying by cell phone? Seems sensible that these purchases could show up on my cell phone bill rather than be linked to a credit card. Googling for Mobile Lime doesn't bring up much, but if the Smart Mobs citation is correct, "Living Memory explores how emerging technologies provide the members of a community with the means to capture, share and explore their collective experience, thus creating a 'living memory'. Living Memory (LiMe) is an EC-i3 sponsored project developed by a consortium of partners led by Philips Design between 1997 and 2000." Is Mobile Lime related to this effort?
Newsletters of Note IX
It's primarily a promotional tabloid for the National Gang Crime Research Center's Sixth International Gang Specialist Training Conference scheduled for August 13-15 in Chicago, but the Gang Specialist, is a fascinating read. With brief pieces on gang recruiting in the school environment, the "Christian gang specialist" (a Christian specialist on gangs or a specialist on Christian gangs?), the Insane Popes gang, and gang symbols, the eight-page paper also outlines the conference's agenda. The center also publishes the Journal of Gang Research, which, while expensive, appears to be an intriguing read -- moreso than this conference mailing. Back issues of the journal have included articles such as "Coming Out to Play: Reasons to Join and Participate in Asian Gangs," "Issues in Accessing and Studying Ethnic Youth Gangs," "The Implications of Social Psychological Theories of Group Dynamics for Gang Research," and "Fraud Masters: Studying an Illusory, Non-Violent Gang Specializing in Credit Card Crimes." The social network theorist in me is salivating.
Colloquy, the "voice of the loyalty marketing industry since 1990," is published by Frequency Marketing Inc. -- and is less interesting. Vol. 11, No. 2 includes articles on brand insulation; managing expectations; the coming rebound in the travel industry; and how companies such as Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, British Airways, and Air Canada are weathering the recession. The analysis of loyalty program trends in Spain is particularly interesting, but for the most part, there's not much to this 16-page newsletter.
Lastly, the Summer 2003 edition of GreenMoney Journal, a 24-page issue of a newsletter that's been in print since 1992. Guest edited by BJ Harris, publisher of the Harris Directory, this edition includes interviews with Nadav Malin, editor of Environmental Building News; John Schaeffer, president of Gaiam Real Goods and the Real Goods Solar Living Center; and Robyn Griggs Lawrence, editor in chief of Natural Home magazine. Articles on green building, global warming, and water conservation flesh out the newsletter, along with a calendar of events and a table looking at mutual fund performance.
Colloquy, the "voice of the loyalty marketing industry since 1990," is published by Frequency Marketing Inc. -- and is less interesting. Vol. 11, No. 2 includes articles on brand insulation; managing expectations; the coming rebound in the travel industry; and how companies such as Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, British Airways, and Air Canada are weathering the recession. The analysis of loyalty program trends in Spain is particularly interesting, but for the most part, there's not much to this 16-page newsletter.
Lastly, the Summer 2003 edition of GreenMoney Journal, a 24-page issue of a newsletter that's been in print since 1992. Guest edited by BJ Harris, publisher of the Harris Directory, this edition includes interviews with Nadav Malin, editor of Environmental Building News; John Schaeffer, president of Gaiam Real Goods and the Real Goods Solar Living Center; and Robyn Griggs Lawrence, editor in chief of Natural Home magazine. Articles on green building, global warming, and water conservation flesh out the newsletter, along with a calendar of events and a table looking at mutual fund performance.
Corollary: Conferences and Community VII
Simple Bits' Dan Cederholm has posted some nice photographs of where I just spent the last few days. With the overcast skies and drizzle in Boss Town, all I can say is: Mmm, Miami.
Conferences and Community VII
I'm back in Boston after several days in Miami for Fast Company's RealTime conference. You can read my confblog -- near-verbatim transcripts of the talks at the event published in real time -- on the Web.
From the In Box: NetWork VI
Not really that strange. Friendster counts out four layers, from what I can tell, and if you take an average of 10 friends across the network (which isn't unreasonable -- active members seem to collect many more than that), you get 10 friends of your own, 100 friends of theirs, 1000 of theirs, and 10,000 overall. So it's going to be in the five-figure range one way or another. As Friendster grows, your maximum network won't grow that much more, so it will be a smaller percentage.
By the way, newly issued member numbers are in the 360,000 range.
By comparison, my network on LinkedIn is just 2,500 people, but it includes Joi Ito, and I suspect that means that it includes perhaps as much as 75% of the entire LinkedIn member base. It's all a function of growth. -- Dan Hartung
Thanks, Dan! Today I am connected to 85,180 people in my Personal Network, through 37 friends. Adding a couple of new friends netted something like 20,000 new connections.
By the way, newly issued member numbers are in the 360,000 range.
By comparison, my network on LinkedIn is just 2,500 people, but it includes Joi Ito, and I suspect that means that it includes perhaps as much as 75% of the entire LinkedIn member base. It's all a function of growth. -- Dan Hartung
Thanks, Dan! Today I am connected to 85,180 people in my Personal Network, through 37 friends. Adding a couple of new friends netted something like 20,000 new connections.
Sunday, June 01, 2003
B-Movie Mayhem
The Church of St. Bernard de Clairvaux in North Miami Beach has banned most filming in the 12th century monastery and tightened its script approval restrictions after a Las Vegas-based director filmed a straight-to-DVD B-Movie entitled Dark Night of the Soul on the property. Featuring scenes featuring "opium-smoking zombies and bizarre sex scenes," the movie shares the story of four college students who come across a "freak skeleton philosopher and his zombie henchmen." The filmmakers rented the property for $1,000 to film for one night in 1998.
The monastery, which was constructed in 1141 in Sacramenia in the province of Segovia, Spain, was seized from the Cistercian Monks, sold, and converted into a grain storage facility and stable in the mid-1830s. William Randolph Hearst bought the building in 1925 and shipped it stone-by-stone to the United States. The stones sat in a New York warehouse until 1952 because Hearst couldn't afford to rebuild the monastery. After Hearst died, two entrepreneurs bought the stones and reconstructed the monastery as a tourist attraction.
The monastery, which was constructed in 1141 in Sacramenia in the province of Segovia, Spain, was seized from the Cistercian Monks, sold, and converted into a grain storage facility and stable in the mid-1830s. William Randolph Hearst bought the building in 1925 and shipped it stone-by-stone to the United States. The stones sat in a New York warehouse until 1952 because Hearst couldn't afford to rebuild the monastery. After Hearst died, two entrepreneurs bought the stones and reconstructed the monastery as a tourist attraction.
Big Brother Is Watching XIV
Beginning this fall, students in Akron, Ohio, will be fingerprinted in order to eat school lunch. Currently in use in only one other school district in Ohio, Garfield Heights, the plan will require students to scan their fingerprints on a biometric device as they make their way through the school lunch line.
While the $700,000 system's designers say that the original fingerprint scans will be destroyed -- and that students will be identified by a "template" that can't be used the way police use fingerprints -- parents and organizations such as the ACLU have voiced privacy concerns about the system. Students who do not want to be fingerprinted will be issued an ID card. Sounds like a lunch ticket to me. In my day, you bought a lunch ticket. School staff members punched it. And you ate lunch.
While the $700,000 system's designers say that the original fingerprint scans will be destroyed -- and that students will be identified by a "template" that can't be used the way police use fingerprints -- parents and organizations such as the ACLU have voiced privacy concerns about the system. Students who do not want to be fingerprinted will be issued an ID card. Sounds like a lunch ticket to me. In my day, you bought a lunch ticket. School staff members punched it. And you ate lunch.
Friday, May 30, 2003
'Tis the Season to Be... AWOL XIII
Tomorrow I head to Miami, Florida, for RealTime.
While I will most likely not be tending to Media Diet until next Wednesday, I will be confblogging the event, if all goes well.
You're welcome to keep up with the session transcripts throughout the course of the conference. Otherwise, Media Diet will be back up and running June 4 or so.
While I will most likely not be tending to Media Diet until next Wednesday, I will be confblogging the event, if all goes well.
You're welcome to keep up with the session transcripts throughout the course of the conference. Otherwise, Media Diet will be back up and running June 4 or so.
Event-O-Dex LIX
Thursday, June 5: The Anchormen take the stage with Spoilsport and Mittens at the Choppin' Block in Boston in Week One of the Handstand Command residency.
Friday, June 6: The Anchormen join the Shods, the Pills, the Brett Rosenberg Problem, Soltero, Francine, Mittens, Spoilsport, Fuzzy, the Mary Reillys, Steven J. Lawrence, the Count Me Outs, and others to bid fond farewell to Deb Klein's Hi-Fi Records at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain.
Friday, June 6: The Anchormen join the Shods, the Pills, the Brett Rosenberg Problem, Soltero, Francine, Mittens, Spoilsport, Fuzzy, the Mary Reillys, Steven J. Lawrence, the Count Me Outs, and others to bid fond farewell to Deb Klein's Hi-Fi Records at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain.
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Comics and Controversy V
Johnny and Edgar Winters sued DC Comics for portraying them as "villainous, gnarly half-worm, half-human creatures with green tentacles sprouting from their chests" in a 1995 comic series. A decision is due from the California Supreme Court any day now.
Previously, St. Louis Blues hockey player Tony Twist sued Todd McFarlane for a Spawn character named the same -- and had an early court win overturned. Not too many issues ago, Wizard magazine highlighted some awesome long-lost celebrity comic cameos featuring folks such as the Saturday Night Live cast and David Letterman. And you don't see Dean Haspiel and Ivan Brunetti suing Bob Fingerman for their cameos in his recent book.
But the interesting thing about the Winters case is that they didn't sue for libel -- they challenged the commercial use of their public images. Now, I wonder if the Winters brothers are considered public figures, in which case, pleas for parody are much stronger legally. And it's arguable that the Winters brothers should have a pretty thick skin to albino jokes already. Because, really, what's next, suing Michael Moorcock for Elric of Melnibone?
Previously, St. Louis Blues hockey player Tony Twist sued Todd McFarlane for a Spawn character named the same -- and had an early court win overturned. Not too many issues ago, Wizard magazine highlighted some awesome long-lost celebrity comic cameos featuring folks such as the Saturday Night Live cast and David Letterman. And you don't see Dean Haspiel and Ivan Brunetti suing Bob Fingerman for their cameos in his recent book.
But the interesting thing about the Winters case is that they didn't sue for libel -- they challenged the commercial use of their public images. Now, I wonder if the Winters brothers are considered public figures, in which case, pleas for parody are much stronger legally. And it's arguable that the Winters brothers should have a pretty thick skin to albino jokes already. Because, really, what's next, suing Michael Moorcock for Elric of Melnibone?
NetWork VI
This is too weird. An article I recently read says that Friendster currently claims more than 200,000 members. According to Friendster, I am currently connected to 64,142 people in my personal network. Even if Friendster only has 200,000 members, that means that I am connected to almost a third of its overall membership. That strikes me as slightly odd.
Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XIII
On this day in 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state admitted to the Union. I was born in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and still very much consider myself a Midwesterner, if not a Wisconsinite. Happy birthday, Wisconsin!
What the Hell? V
Back in August 2001, I wondered whether the American Journal of Print was a shameless knockoff of McSweeney's. In any event, the little magazine turned out to be quite good, it was edited and published by nice people, and -- unfortunately -- the just-released third issue will be its last. That's the bad news. The good news is that you can buy all three issues for a measly $20. Still, I wonder. Is the post-modern, post-ironic hiplit upswell on the wane?
Thanks to Zulkey.
Thanks to Zulkey.
Corollary: Business Media Reportage Goes Bust, Now Boom? X
More on Linda Sepp's leaving Fast Company.
Steal This, Booked
First a forklift operator in eastern England gets nailed for pilfering pages of the forthcoming Harry Potter novel. Now two printing plant workers in Wisconsin get caught sneaking advance copies of Business Week to investors wanting to glean trading tips before the magazines were distributed. Not that it's the same thing, but I think it's funny that a Fast Company bag we mailed to new subscribers as a premium rates a measly $1 on Ebay.
Thanks again to I Want Media.
Thanks again to I Want Media.
Books Going Bankrupt III
Running parallel to the situation Top Shelf was in last April, I just received the following missive via Warren Ellis' Bad Signal newsletter:
Needless to say, if Fantagraphics goes under, Bad Comics is that much closer to winning.
Fantagraphics Books Needs Your Help!
Buy Books! Keep Us Alive!
To Comics Lovers Throughout the World:
Fantagraphics Books has just celebrated its 27th year publishing many of the finest cartoonists from all over the world as well as our flagship publication, the magazine people love to hate, The Comics Journal. We are proud of our long-term commitment to comics as an art form and our dogged determination to push excellence down everybody's throats. This is all very well and good but it doesn't mean much in the face of brute economics -- and it's the wall of brute economics that we've just hit, hard.
Due to two major financial obstacles over the last two years, we're hard against it.
Our former and now bankrupt book trade distributor went out of business owing us over $70,000 -- which we will never see. (To add insult to injury, we learned that the owner is selling copies of our books that he should've returned on e-bay!) This unexpected shortfall necessitated taking out a couple loans which have now come due. In late 2001, our line was picked up by the W.W. NORTON COMPANY, who took over our bookstore distribution, and has done a magnificent job of providing us unprecedented access to the bookstore market. Inexperience with the book trade resulted in our erring on the side of overprinting our books too heavily throughout 2002, so that our anticipated profit is in fact sitting in our warehouse in the form of books. Loans must be paid in cash, not books. The only way to get out of this hole we've dug ourselves into is to sell those books. Which is where, we hope, you come in.
Over the last few weeks, we've worked to fix our in-house problems (which included, most painfully, laying off several fine and long-term employees). We have put in place a system of checks and balances by which we will watch our inventory growth scrupulously. But, we have a debt to pay down and wolves at the door. It's so severe that this month we envisaged shutting down our active publishing, seeking outside investors, or similarly odious measures. (Fantagraphics continues to be owned 100% by Messrs. Gary Groth and Kim Thompson. We'd like it to remain that way.)
If you've respected what Fantagraphics stands for and what we've done for the medium, if you've enjoyed our books, and if you want to insure that this proud tradition continues into this new and ominous century, we're asking you to help us now in our especial hour of need by buying some books. Put simply, we need to raise about $80,000 above our usual sales over the next month, and the only way to do that is to convert books into cash.
We've spent the last quarter century trying hard to produce the best comics the world has ever seen. You've rewarded us over the years with your loyal patronage, your moral support, your praise, your intelligent and honest feedback, all of which are more than we could ever have hoped for. We know we have tens of thousands of loyal readers: if even a fraction of you come forward and order two or three books that you've been meaning to buy, we'll be over this hump. We've published some some of the best books ever over the last year -Gene Deitch's (yes, that Gene Deitch!) THE CAT ON A HOT THIN GROOVE; B. KRIGSTEIN, Greg Sadowski's definitive biography of the pioneering artist from the '50s; the magnificent FRANK collection; and the third volume of the extraordinary KRAZY KAT series. Our publishing plans for 2003 include a huge coffee table book by Will Elder (WILL ELDER: MAD PLAYBOY OF ART); KRIGSTEIN COMICS, a 240 page follow-up collection of Krigstein's best comics from the '50s, and new collections and graphic novels by Gilbert Hernandez, Jason, Dave Cooper, Robert Crumb, A.B. Frost, Bill Griffith, Gary Panter...
We already sell books by mail, so, as clichéd as it sounds, we really do have operators standing by. You can view out catalogue online. You can order by calling our 800 number or on-line at our web site (all ordering information below.)
If this was a standard pitch, we'd offer you some extra incentive -- a discount or free books or knicknacks or whatnot. But, it's not. We're asking those of you who believe we've contributed something worthwhile and meaningful to help us continue to do so, that's all. We need the full retail value of our books. But we can offer something that won't cost us any money: anyone (individually or collectively) who buys $500 worth of books from us will get a personal phone call from Gary Groth thanking you for saving Fantagraphics' ass. Think how much fun this could be at a party!
via FAX: 206-524-2104
via mail: FANTAGRAPHICS , 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115
Secure Internet Orders: http://www.fantagraphics.com
phone: 206-524-6165 or 800-657-1100
Needless to say, if Fantagraphics goes under, Bad Comics is that much closer to winning.
Sites on the Side of the Road VIII
Just another reason why Mark Frauenfelder consistently ranks near the top of my Favorite People Whom I've Never Actually Met list.
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Weather Report XII
Well, the rain's finally hit Boston hard like a handslap. Large, sloppy drops splatter against my windows, and the thunder crackles like clapping. If this keeps up, the history walk I signed up to go on this evening will most likely be canceled. Sigh. Fingers crossed, Media Dieticians!
Magazine Me XXXIV
Ravaging Radio IX
My friend Maura Johnston will be hosting a radio show on WPRB, 103.3 FM in Princeton from 1-4 p.m. every Wednesday afternoon this summer. Media Dieticians can listen live online to help combat their post- or pre- (depending on which time zone you are in) lunchtime energy ebb.
Event-O-Dex LVIII
Sunday, June 8: The Dirtybird Revival at the Oni Gallery in Chinatown, a "show featuring an absurd number of accordions, horns, and a human beat boxer, culminating in a sweaty sing-a-long" featuring Dreamland Faces (AKA the Winston Yu Experience), the Milwaukee Horn Band, Adam Matta (vocal percussion), and the Dirtybird Fluffers.
Thanks to Media Dietician Sady Sullivan.
Thanks to Media Dietician Sady Sullivan.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Music to My Ears XXXVI
A friend of mine in Richmond, Virginia, recently saw the Blue Man Group on their Complex tour, and she was quite delighted by the opening band, Venus Hum, which also plays on the Group's "Complex" album, it seems. While I can't get the streams on their official site to play, the two tracks on their MP3.com page are quite nice. Kinda Siouxsie and the Banshees-y, kinda Depeche Mode-y, kinda dark, kinda goth, but with enough IDM-addled blip blop blork to get your twitch on. Thanks for the head's up, Elizabeth!
Corollary: Poll Position II
Word is that Victor Jacob Gossage has moved onto the finals for the Kansas City Idol competition. This Saturday, he and the other finalists will perform for a group of three judges who will then select the winner of KC Idol. Thanks for rocking the vote, Media Dieticians!
Dot.Politics
Finally, someone describes what Howard Dean is doing. Jon Lebkowsky's recent essay on nodal politics offers some solid insight on how community organizers, special interest groups, and political parties can better leverage the Net as an organizing tool.
The Movie I Watched Last Night LXIX
E-Dreams
Along the lines of Startup.com and the mockumentary Dot, this movie follows the rise and fall of a dotcom company. Tracking the formation, development, and dissolution of Kozmo.com, one of the more widely covered near-success stories of the Net Economy boom, the movie isn't as cliched or pointed as Dot -- and is substantially more interesting than Startup.com because the company covered is a known entity. I only used Kozmo once, to order a newly released Green Day CD while I was in a hotel in Brooklyn. I'd walked around the neighborhood looking for a record store, couldn't find one, and turned to the Web. Truth be told, I felt a little guilty and silly when the front desk called up saying a courier had arrived with a "package" -- the single CD -- for me, and I never used the service again. Given Kozmo's self-description as FedEx for the Internet -- I think it was more like Amazon for local delivery in an hour -- the concept had promise but several challenges, the largest of which was the low minimum orders customers placed. You cannot build a business on a movie rental, free ice cream, and 60-minute delivery. Some of the more telling moments of the document include the early interviews with the bicycle messengers hired by the company, Kozmo's first troubles meeting payroll, one founder's inability to not talk to the press -- highlighted by a close friendship with a former Industry Standard reporter and a PR problem with Doubleclick -- and the founders eventually stepping down. The ending is particularly ironic, as the documentarian accelerates to the company's folding and indicates where the founders have ended up. The two initial founders, believe it or not, went to business school -- at Harvard and MIT Sloan, no less. Perhaps they should have done so before trying to build Kozmo. Regardless, the rise and fall story is good, the documentary solid, and the overall tenor less depressing and desperate than other similar movies I've seen. More than a quaint snapshot of what once was -- but an indication of what might have been and what could be again.
Along the lines of Startup.com and the mockumentary Dot, this movie follows the rise and fall of a dotcom company. Tracking the formation, development, and dissolution of Kozmo.com, one of the more widely covered near-success stories of the Net Economy boom, the movie isn't as cliched or pointed as Dot -- and is substantially more interesting than Startup.com because the company covered is a known entity. I only used Kozmo once, to order a newly released Green Day CD while I was in a hotel in Brooklyn. I'd walked around the neighborhood looking for a record store, couldn't find one, and turned to the Web. Truth be told, I felt a little guilty and silly when the front desk called up saying a courier had arrived with a "package" -- the single CD -- for me, and I never used the service again. Given Kozmo's self-description as FedEx for the Internet -- I think it was more like Amazon for local delivery in an hour -- the concept had promise but several challenges, the largest of which was the low minimum orders customers placed. You cannot build a business on a movie rental, free ice cream, and 60-minute delivery. Some of the more telling moments of the document include the early interviews with the bicycle messengers hired by the company, Kozmo's first troubles meeting payroll, one founder's inability to not talk to the press -- highlighted by a close friendship with a former Industry Standard reporter and a PR problem with Doubleclick -- and the founders eventually stepping down. The ending is particularly ironic, as the documentarian accelerates to the company's folding and indicates where the founders have ended up. The two initial founders, believe it or not, went to business school -- at Harvard and MIT Sloan, no less. Perhaps they should have done so before trying to build Kozmo. Regardless, the rise and fall story is good, the documentary solid, and the overall tenor less depressing and desperate than other similar movies I've seen. More than a quaint snapshot of what once was -- but an indication of what might have been and what could be again.
Comics in the Classroom
Beginning June 9, Lauren Weinstein and Tom Hart are teaching a five-week workshop in cartooning to children in the Cypress Hills area of Brooklyn. Through their new StoryArk comics and cartoon workshops, Weinstein and Hart are working to bring comics into the classroom, highlight comics as a way to meet the needs of the multiple intelligences and learning styles of students, and -- to be totally honest -- make a better living through comic art. It looks like a promising project! The materials they offer for download include several minicomics aimed at readers between the ages of 5-10, as well as teenagers. A simple minicomic how to is also available. Good luck, you two! If any Media Dieticians have other examples of educational projects involving comics, please let me know.
Comics and Community XII
About a year ago, the Kansas City Comic Creators Network started meeting in a local coffee shop. Through the first week in June, the group's first exhibition, which features local and national artists, will be held at three galleries in the West Bottoms district of Kansas City. The group hopes that the exhibition will rival APE and SPX -- and that the event evolves into America's answer to Angoulême. Ninth Art's B Clay Moore reports.
Event-O-Dex LVII
Friday, May 30: Benefit for the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls at the Berwick Research Institute in Roxbury featuring performances by Spoilsport, Alicia Champion, the Silent Wheel, Shumai, Sprites (featuring members of Barcelona), Sallie, Amatul Hannan, Toni Amato, the Princesses of Porn with the Dukes of Dykedom, Mal from Queer Soup, Talia Kingsbury/Manuel Hung, and J*me. The event also includes a yard sale and auction items from Beth Driscoll (16-by-20 black-and-white photographs), Kimchee Records, Magic 12, Charlie Girl Anders, Ida and time Stereo Records (You Are My Sunshine/Flower and Ida CD's), Handstand Command, the Kitty Kill, Simple Machines, Villa Villa Kula, Cory Skult (zines), Paula Kelley, Rick Berlin (Orchetra Luna CD with cutting room floor tracks and T-shirts), the Princesses of Porn with the Dukes of Dykedom, Sara Seinberg (Auction Package: one-hour writing lesson or editing session, a jailhouse style tattoo, a photograph, and two tickets to K'Vetsh), as well as assorted items such as hot sauce, vintage clothes, housewares, and used CD's.
The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXVII
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.
For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.
Deadpool #38 (Marvel, March 2000). Writer: Christopher Priest. Artist: Paco Diaz. Location: On the Red Line between Central and Harvard squares.
For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.
Friday, May 23, 2003
Poll Position II
The younger brother of one of Inc magazine's staff writers is in the semifinals for Kansas City Idol. It's a regional competition in Kansas City based on American Idol, and the winner gets $1,000, studio time, and the opportunity to sing the national anthem at a major Kansas City sporting event.
You can help the cause by voting online for Victor Jacob Gossage. Make with the clicky click.
You can help the cause by voting online for Victor Jacob Gossage. Make with the clicky click.
See You in the Funny Pages XIII
Brian Merkel, the friend of a friend of mine, has been working on the technology side of the online comics project The Street for more than a year now. I haven't spent too much time with the series yet, but a recent email from a friend outlines some of the project's more interesting aspects.
I think I'm going to have to spend more time with this.
The Street is an online comic serial. Designed to progress through regular episodes, the navigation/story progression is what makes The Street unique to online comics and interactive storytelling. The reader is able to weave their way through the various story lines, experiencing them in any order they choose.
Expanding on the effectiveness of the comic medium.
Enhancing the traditional graphic novel by using the tools of interactivity is a primary goal of this project. We are able to convey multiple storylines while maintaining the strengths of the comic medium. “Every act committed to paper by the comic artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as The Reader…Closure in comics fosters an intimacy surpassed only by the written word.” – Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics.
Introducing non-linearity without abandoning a linear familiarity.
The technical approach to navigation accommodates the users linear sense of experience while giving them the option to jump around between storylines and points in time. This gives new readers intuitive access to the story with the freedom to experiment with non-linearity. Not only will this boost engagement, but it also enhances the unique quality of the graphic novel medium mentioned above.
Decision Mode vs. Story Mode
We employ two basic points of view in this approach. These demos deal mostly with Story Mode while touching on its relation to Decision Mode. Story Mode, reflects the traditional graphic novel. In this view, the user is able to see the various Strings (see below) and their relation to each other. In Decision Mode the Strings drop away and the panel inhabits the majority of the screen. Decision mode occurs when two or more Strings cross and the user must decide which direction to follow.
Strings
Strings are storylines. The succession of panels viewable in Story Mode. Decision Mode occurs at the point where two or more strings split into separate strings. Strings also relate relative time, allowing us to easily show the succession of events without having to address actual time. Moving right or down through a string relates to progressing forward in time, and moving up and left relates to going backward in time.
I think I'm going to have to spend more time with this.
From the In Box: Hardcore Logo IV
Media Dietician Noah Pshaw emailed me the URL to the Kalsey Consulting Group's Button Maker. DIY, baby!
Hardcore Logo IV
Among the Literati XXXVII
Elizabeth Ellen's piece in Uber today is one of the best things they've published in a long time.
Guilting the Lilly
Remember the $100 million endowment that heiress Ruth Lilly gave to Poetry Magazine? Word is that National City Bank mishandled the Lilly trusts, the endowment may be a full third smaller than initially planned due to downturns in the stock market, and the Poetry Foundation of Chicago, which publishes Poetry, is suing suing the bank. With all of the hubbub over how the Foundation didn't know how it would handle the endowment -- and how the gift could change the face of poetry publishing as we know it -- couldn't they have just been happy with the amount they were getting? If $100 million freaks you out, maybe $66 million is more your speed.
Plugging the above two articles into Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator, I get the following two poetic takes on the situation:
Exactly.
Thanks to Moby Lives.
Plugging the above two articles into Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator, I get the following two poetic takes on the situation:
Poetic justice: Group sues bank unloaded most of
Eli Lilly stock,
about 286 up getting a
spokeswoman for the
Lilly had promised the other Views
Poetic
justice: Group sues bank
handling
the money to
split
a lot a direct and its
attorney did not selling for
a Marion County, Ind., probate Court
Officials with
the fund the
fund. By the
of the other Views Poetic justice:
Group received from Ruth Lilly, heiress
of the time the gift Chicago group. Americans for the
fund was created, a
spokeswoman for about $286
up getting a Marion
County, Ind.,
probate Court in Iraq Andrade Brown Falsani Greeley Higgins
Jackson Kupcinet Laney Martire Mitchell Neal Novak
Ontiveros Pickett Quick Takes Richards Roeper
Roeser Sneed Steinberg Steyn
Sweet Washington D.
***
Bank should IPD officers be reached for
use var prop10= var ns4 = document.
write ; } function newImage arg {
if ie4 || document.
write ; } } document.
write function newImage arg { return menuobj = innerHTML = which }
hidemenu ;
if !the price was spending some
of money, which
menuobj.document.
Exactly.
Thanks to Moby Lives.
Join the Comics Club IV
What's wrong with Free Comic Book Day? Plenty, says Michael David Sims in a recent Pop Matters column. I have never participated in Free Comic Book Day, and I've never read a comic book published specifically for Free Comic Book Day. Yet I couldn't agree with Sims much more. At base, Free Comic Book Day is a feel-good frivolity that may make retailers feel like they're doing something important for fans and the industry, but in the end does nothing to promote comic books to a wider, mainstream audience. Free Comic Book Day doesn't seem to have progressed beyond its efforts last year, and that's a shame.
The organizers of Free Comic Book Day need to stop approaching the idea of the event as its been enacted and look at it in a new light. If we want to get non-comics readers into comic book shops, we need to get comic books out of the comic books shops and onto the streets, into bookstores and libraries, and better promoted in connection with licensed movies, cartoons, and other media activities. Otherwise, we're just preaching to the choir. I think efforts like Read a Comic Book in Public Day and the Free-Range Comic Book Project are much more interesting, even if they're smaller and less organized.
Thanks to Bookslut.
The organizers of Free Comic Book Day need to stop approaching the idea of the event as its been enacted and look at it in a new light. If we want to get non-comics readers into comic book shops, we need to get comic books out of the comic books shops and onto the streets, into bookstores and libraries, and better promoted in connection with licensed movies, cartoons, and other media activities. Otherwise, we're just preaching to the choir. I think efforts like Read a Comic Book in Public Day and the Free-Range Comic Book Project are much more interesting, even if they're smaller and less organized.
Thanks to Bookslut.
Business Media Reportage Goes Bust, Now Boom? IX
Following the paths of other now-defunct magazines such as New Media, InternetWorld is morphing into an "electronic media franchise" that includes a weekly email newsletter and expanded Web services. Translation: It's folding.
Thanks to Fucked Company.
Thanks to Fucked Company.
Anchormen, Aweigh! XXIV
Tom left his guitar at home in JP last night, so the Anchormen couldn't practice. Instead, we repaired to the Model Cafe in Allston to hold a rare band meeting. We talked briefly about improving the band's bio sheet -- and where we want to send CD's for review (if you have suggestions of places you think would be Anchormen friendly, let me know). We also started discussing a mini-tour along the east coast this fall. Right now, it looks like we're going to try organizing a series of mini-tour swings through New York City, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, Providence, Northampton, and maybe as far afield as Raleigh/Chapel Hill and Richmond. If you have recommendations of places you think we should play or bands you think we should play with, again, let me know. We'll see how this comes together!
NetWork VI
A new version of Meetup launched yesterday, and it looks like Scott and the team have added a nice set of new features -- as well as a subscription service to access premium features. Improvements include community-created Meetup agendas and personal notebooks, the ability to upload profile photos, printable Meetup fliers, and other tools. A six-month subscription costs $19, and a full year runs $29. I just signed up for a year and will kick the tires some. Huh. In signing up for a CD-swap Meetup just now, I got a server error. There might be some kinks to iron out still. Regardless, this looks like a solid step in the right direction for Meetup!
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Corollary: Rock Shows of Note LXIV
Lest I fall into this trap, I hesitate to say too much about this, but here goes: I asked a girl for her phone number last night. Big whoop, I know, but I am rarely so brave. It was such an interesting, awkward, and hopeful experience. I still have the matchbook in my pocket, I'm a bit twitterpated, and I'm geeking out about the rhetoric of love and seduction.
Rock Shows of Note LXIV
This isn't going to be a proper show review, but I had a blast at the Somerville Arts Council's Kimchee Records benefit for the arts at Johnny D's in Somerville last night. A blast. I wasn't planning to go, but a conference call I'd scheduled earlier in the evening fell through, and I suddenly had the night open. Even though I stayed out way too late, the show was awesome. 27, Blake Hazard, Seana Carmody, the Pee Wee Fist, Torrez, Tiger Saw, Rosa Chance Well, and Heidi Saperstein all played solid, short sets. And lots of friends were in attendance. The Somerville Arts Council puts on a good show. Thanks to everyone involved!
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Blogging About Blogging LX
Microdoc News recently published a decent appraisal of the "dynamics of a blogosphere story." Tracking 45 stories over the last three months, the article takes a look at what one might call "collective journalism" or "distributed journalism," suggesting that individual blog posts and entries are not stories in and of themselves, but part of a larger, distributed story. Discussing how blogosphere stories get storied and develop, the piece gives somewhat short shrift to how such stories end. What is missing in this analysis -- and the larger blogging practice and process -- is a contextual sensemaking at the end of the cycle in which the atomic stories are drawn on to create and distribute a metastory outlining the overall discussion to date. As things stand, blogosphere stories don't necessarily end. They reach multiple ends, more often than not dissolving and drifting away as the trigger meme falls out of favor, out of the limelight, and off of the radar. That said, the writers' conclusion that "blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation" is worth paying attention to. How can we better connect and contextualize these collectively written stories?
Thanks to Daypop.
Thanks to Daypop.
NetWork V
Social networking software and Web services keep popping up like dandelions! Two new services take some of the best and worst features of existing tools such as Friendster, Ryze, Ecademy, and LinkedIn, indicating the range of approaches that can be taken to this sort of service -- and that the need for a unified way to bridge the disparate systems is increasingly important.
Huminity is a free software program for the PC that mimics TheBrain. Instead of using the tool's tree-structured interactive maps to organize files and documents, Huminity can be used to track connections between people in your social and professional networks. Based on the work of John Nash, it appears that you can enter your existing "contact tree" and connect it with a global database of other people's contacts and connections. The possibilities of the mutual introductions and connection request flow that are available in LinkedIn are interesting -- especially if this evolves to the point where it's easy to connect individual contact management databases in a distributed way. If people can network their iTunes libraries, why isn't Now Contact able to do the same thing?
Then there's Buddy Network, which I just signed up for. Somewhat like Friendster with a light Ecademy-like member news and blog aspect, I'm not totally sure whether another service like this is entirely necessary. Outside of wanting to be as widely accessible and active as possible, until I know more about who comprises the membership base -- and how they use the system -- I think I'll stick with Friendster and Ryze as my primary social network services.
Now, how can we better bridge these wide-ranging systems? Duncan Work has been working on a software tool called NetDeva for several years now, and it seems like the start of a fix. Basically, NetDeva is a near-open source profile management tool similar to Microsoft Passport (only more grassroots and personal) that can be used to maintain one profile for a multitude of online communities and -- I'm guessing -- social networking services. You control how much information is made available to other people based on how closely connected they are to you -- i.e. fewer degrees of separation can bring more personal information. Think about LinkedIn's request referral process, only automated based on your settings.
As more of these services develop, it'll become increasingly important to bridge them. At the same time, it'd be interesting to study how much their memberships overlap. Are the same people all working the different systems? Are certain systems attracting different kinds of people? How do the systems' designs affect how people use the systems? At some point, this disperse, disconnected approach to social networking software -- online and offline -- will make less and less sense. Rather than move toward one meta social network service, let's start to find ways to connect what exists -- and better differentiate their memberships and modes and motivations of interaction.
Huminity is a free software program for the PC that mimics TheBrain. Instead of using the tool's tree-structured interactive maps to organize files and documents, Huminity can be used to track connections between people in your social and professional networks. Based on the work of John Nash, it appears that you can enter your existing "contact tree" and connect it with a global database of other people's contacts and connections. The possibilities of the mutual introductions and connection request flow that are available in LinkedIn are interesting -- especially if this evolves to the point where it's easy to connect individual contact management databases in a distributed way. If people can network their iTunes libraries, why isn't Now Contact able to do the same thing?
Then there's Buddy Network, which I just signed up for. Somewhat like Friendster with a light Ecademy-like member news and blog aspect, I'm not totally sure whether another service like this is entirely necessary. Outside of wanting to be as widely accessible and active as possible, until I know more about who comprises the membership base -- and how they use the system -- I think I'll stick with Friendster and Ryze as my primary social network services.
Now, how can we better bridge these wide-ranging systems? Duncan Work has been working on a software tool called NetDeva for several years now, and it seems like the start of a fix. Basically, NetDeva is a near-open source profile management tool similar to Microsoft Passport (only more grassroots and personal) that can be used to maintain one profile for a multitude of online communities and -- I'm guessing -- social networking services. You control how much information is made available to other people based on how closely connected they are to you -- i.e. fewer degrees of separation can bring more personal information. Think about LinkedIn's request referral process, only automated based on your settings.
As more of these services develop, it'll become increasingly important to bridge them. At the same time, it'd be interesting to study how much their memberships overlap. Are the same people all working the different systems? Are certain systems attracting different kinds of people? How do the systems' designs affect how people use the systems? At some point, this disperse, disconnected approach to social networking software -- online and offline -- will make less and less sense. Rather than move toward one meta social network service, let's start to find ways to connect what exists -- and better differentiate their memberships and modes and motivations of interaction.
Corollary: Workaday World XXXI
Mystery solved! My mom sent the cushion. Not as a replacement couch cushion, but as a cushion for the floor or a large pillow. We had talked about throw pillows and other things that would help me better lounge on the Big Blue Couch on Church Corner, and this was her solution. How funny! When she was at the Crate & Barrel in Boston, my mom even asked the store clerk if signing the gift card Kenny wouldn't be confusing. He said no: "We do that all the time." Seems like an odd thing to do when there's no indication on or in the package who the gift is actually from. Shouldn't the gift card be signed by the sender? I sure think so. Anyway, mystery solved. I don't have to return the cushion, and I can stop worrying about Kenny's friends and hosts, much less the damage he's done to their couches.
The Movie I Watched Last Night LXVIII
Super Troopers
Well, it took me three sittings, but I finally made it through Super Troopers last night. Recommended to me by a friend in Austin, I wanted to make sure I paid attention to the whole thing, and I found that to be one of the biggest challenges I've faced in a long time. This movie is awful. One of the worst I've seen in a long time. Yet it does have its charm and moments of comedic clarity. The story of a Vermont state highway patrol office trying to combat being closed because of budget cuts -- and their rivalry with the local police department -- Super Troopers is in the end a delightfully anticlimactic "save the business" kind of movie. Save the school, save the golf course, why not save the police department? Outside of a couple of intertwining subplots -- including the Romeo and Juliet-like romance between two members of the rival departments and a catalytic drug smuggling conspiracy ("It's Afghanistanimation!") -- the movie is a string of loosely linked vignettes spotlighting arrests and their aftermath, pranks inside and between the two departments, and puerile humor. It's a silly film and totally a throw away. Watch this only if you have nothing else -- or better -- to do. And I mean nothing. Because I watched it three times so you don't have to.
Well, it took me three sittings, but I finally made it through Super Troopers last night. Recommended to me by a friend in Austin, I wanted to make sure I paid attention to the whole thing, and I found that to be one of the biggest challenges I've faced in a long time. This movie is awful. One of the worst I've seen in a long time. Yet it does have its charm and moments of comedic clarity. The story of a Vermont state highway patrol office trying to combat being closed because of budget cuts -- and their rivalry with the local police department -- Super Troopers is in the end a delightfully anticlimactic "save the business" kind of movie. Save the school, save the golf course, why not save the police department? Outside of a couple of intertwining subplots -- including the Romeo and Juliet-like romance between two members of the rival departments and a catalytic drug smuggling conspiracy ("It's Afghanistanimation!") -- the movie is a string of loosely linked vignettes spotlighting arrests and their aftermath, pranks inside and between the two departments, and puerile humor. It's a silly film and totally a throw away. Watch this only if you have nothing else -- or better -- to do. And I mean nothing. Because I watched it three times so you don't have to.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Mention Me! XLI
Thanks to the Journal of the International Informatics Institute and Bells and Whistles for the link love.
Books Worth a Look XIV
These are the books I read in April 2003.
Betty Boop's Sunday Best by Max Fleischer (Kitchen Sink, 1995)
Collecting the complete color comics from 1934-1936, this volume even includes the earliest strips featuring actress Helen Kane, the Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl. While Fleischer dropped the Kane conceit relatively quickly, the strip's Hollywood elements continued. Despite the Koko the Clown "Out of the Inkwell" anomaly, the storyline is relatively continuous, portraying page-long parables touching on fashion faux pas, affectionate appraisals, the foibles of fandom, liberated women, and challenging children. The recurring characters of the director, Aunt Tilly, Hunky, and Bubby contribute some consistency, but for the most part, the strip's cameo characters -- including Betty's many love interests, pretty boys all -- are relatively interchangeable. Bill Blackbeard's introductory essay adds some valuable cultural context to what might otherwise be mistaken as a one-joke wonder or Hollywood licensing deal, making the book a solid source of comic strip history.
Pages: 112. Days to read: 2. Rating: Good.
Cambridge by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1999)
While the more specific editions in Arcadia's Images of America series -- "The Great Boston Fire of 1872" is a fine example -- are quite good, thge more general volumes are somewhat shallow given their scope. This edition takes on the entire city of Cambridge, illuminating images of historic homes, churches and chapels, as well as some of Cambridge's neighborhoods -- including Harvard Square, Central Square, and Cambridgeport. Sammarco also covers some notable Cantabrigians, transportation trends, and the roles universities played in the town's development. While the book does include a lot of long-lost landmarks, if Arcadia can publish an entire book about Harvard football or the Jimmy Fund, why not one about Central Square or Cambridgeport itself?
Pages: 128. Days to read: 2. Rating: Fair.
Cathedral Child by Lea Hernandez (Cyberosia, 2003)
Originally to be published by the now-defunct and much-missed comics publisher Eclipse, later released as part of Image Comics' "no-line," and now reprinted in one volume by Somerville-based Cyberosia, Cathedral Child is a manga-styled missive that'd reputedly the first volume in a sequence called Texas Steampunk. While there are some steampunk elements present -- a sentient cathedral that communicates via pipe organ -- I found the comic to be slightly scattered. Part lifelong romance, part mystery, and part political powerplay, the story's ideas are important, but the sequence suffers from unclear characterization and too twisted a narrative thread. Hernandez's Author's Notes are helpful, but a comic shouldn't need footnotes to be forthright. That said, the vision is viable. It's the execution that could have been cleaner.
Pages: 112. Days to read: 1. Rating: Fair.
Chewing on Tinfoil by Joe Ollman (Insomniac Press, 2002)
Joe's artwork isn't really my cup of tea, but the writing represented by the nine pieces collected here is quite impressive. Blending personal, almost semi-autobiographical stories ("Death Wears Inexpensive Loafers" and "C.O.P.S.") with mythic fables ("God"), the range of storytelling is quite wide. "Giant Strawberry Funland" stands out with its tale of family, love, hate, and responsibility. "God" is a silly bit of spiritual selfishness. "Cake" is a wonderful office mate update of an urban legend probably based on fact. And two pieces -- "Like Something Akin to the Sistine Chapel, but with Cows..." and "Fire Sale" -- really impressed me with their character studies and slice-of-life snapshots. Joe's drawing grew on me as the book progressed, and I'm sure his style will continue to gel as his writing -- which is already quite good -- continues to grow in maturity and motivation.
Pages: 155. Days to read: 3. Rating: Fair.
Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002)
It's always interesting to read someone's work after you've met them and spent some time talking about other topics. Jim's novel is very much a reflection and projection of his personality and interests. The anarchist former managing editor of Adbusters crams a lot of political, cultural, and scientific concepts into this novel, which is a good companion read to the work of Cory Doctorow. Everyone in Silico isn't hard sf -- but that doesn't mean that it's soft or easy. Jim's ideas of homegrown genetic engineering, subcultural self-organization, street-level marketing, and the economics and experience of a digital afterlife are fascinating and forward thinking. Down to details such as the tattoo that, when scanned, dials an encrypted phone number, Everyone in Silico's dystopian future is deftly and effectively outlined as the multilayered plot unfolds.
Pages: 241. Days to read: 27. Rating: Excellent.
The Great Boston Fire of 1872 by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1997)
Part of the consistently impressive Images of America series, this volume documents the commercial evolution of downtown Boston, an evolution that was perhaps hastened by the blaze, as well as the events that contributed to the fire's severity. The photographs capture lost residential neighborhoods that are now dominated by the city's financial district, and many long-gone landmarks are preserved for posterity in its pages. Some of the most effective images include lithographs of the fire itself and photographs of the aftermath and damage. While the staged shots of businessmen posing in front of their former workplaces strike me as somewhat odd, there's enough unadulterated wrack and ruin that the sheer devastation is carried across. What would the city be like today if the fire hadn't happened? What if downtown's slate hadn't been scraped clean by flame?
Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.
The Maximortal by Rick Veitch (King Hell, 1996)
Originally published as a seven-issue series by Stephen Bissette's company Tundra, this postmodern take on mythic superheroes has been overlooked by many folks in lieu of story cycles auch as the Watchmen and Miracleman. Veitch's approach, while much darker and desperate, is well worth reading. Representing a Superman-like alien and a clueless and confused -- but caring -- Kent-like victims family, Veitch's origin story is more dire and dangerous. His inclusion of such historical and literary figures as Sherlock Holmes, Siegel and Shuster, Robert Oppenheimer, and Albert Einstein adds a layer of neo-fictional nuance but slightly confuses matters. In the end, it is the Carlos Castenada-inspired character El Guano who plays a role in the Maximortal's momentary taming. Veitch's Afterword further explodes the icon of Nietzsche's Superman. It's not quite Cavalier and Clay, but the Maximortal deserves further attention and analysis.
Pages: 190. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.
Overbite by Dave Cooper (Fantagraphics, 2003)
Ostensibly the sixth issue of Cooper's comic book Weasel, this beautifully produced coffee table book of "drawings and paintings of mostly pillowy girls" also served as the catalog for the Overbite show at Tin Man Alley in Philadelphia. Featuring an introduction by David Cross, the book collects more than 60 oil on canvas and multimedia pieces produced in 2002. The book is one of the most lovely comic-related art books I've ever seen, and Cooper's status as a fine artist as well as a cartoonist is ably secured. His concept of what is beautiful and erotic is extremely intriguing and clever, and the lush -- and luscious -- paintings comprising this volume are sweet eye candy indeed. Amazing yet slightly disturbing. Good girl art gone bad?
Pages: 48. Days to read: 1. Rating: Excellent.
Revolt of the Masscult by Chris Lehmann (Prickly Paradigm, 2003)
Similar to the Open Pamphlet Series, the Prickly Paradigm batch of booklets is a worthy group of lefty intellectual and political texts. This volume, written by deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World and contributor to the Baffler Lehmann, looks at the lapses of mass culture. Lehmann contends that mass culture is a construct that is inadequately captured by the pop culture palliatives. Analyzing and critiquing relatively recent activities of Jonathan Franzen, Oprah Winfrey, and David Eggers, Lehmann suggests that popular advocacy of masscult productions does more harm than good. But despite his namedropping of such sociologists and cultural critics as Dwight Macdonald, Edward Shils, and Herbert Gans, the slim book's almost 80 pages don't give Lehmann the room necessary to fully state his case -- as indicated by his doubtful dismissal of Henry Jenkins. Regardless, Lehmann's look at popcult promotion and partnerships is cause for consideration.
Pages: 79. Days to read: 7. Rating: Good.
Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby (Bay Books, 2003)
These 21 stories written by the associate fiction editor of 3rd Bed paint an amazingly pristine portrait of a world much like that envisioned by Ben Marcus. These lost histories of a fractured future flabbergasted by population control, food bans ("Joy of Eating" is a standout story.), sound-based weaponry, languishing and lamentable love, the use of air as a sound- and memory-recording medium (similar to Marcus' use of water, this idea is used to best effect in "Home Recordings."), family life, living phones, and other aspects of Derby's densely developed world. I am such a big fan of this new school of literary, postmodern sf. I don't know if Derby or Marcus consider themselves sf authors, but they're not too far afield from the new wave fabulists. Wonderful.
Pages: 196. Days to read: 4. Rating: Excellent.
Betty Boop's Sunday Best by Max Fleischer (Kitchen Sink, 1995)
Collecting the complete color comics from 1934-1936, this volume even includes the earliest strips featuring actress Helen Kane, the Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl. While Fleischer dropped the Kane conceit relatively quickly, the strip's Hollywood elements continued. Despite the Koko the Clown "Out of the Inkwell" anomaly, the storyline is relatively continuous, portraying page-long parables touching on fashion faux pas, affectionate appraisals, the foibles of fandom, liberated women, and challenging children. The recurring characters of the director, Aunt Tilly, Hunky, and Bubby contribute some consistency, but for the most part, the strip's cameo characters -- including Betty's many love interests, pretty boys all -- are relatively interchangeable. Bill Blackbeard's introductory essay adds some valuable cultural context to what might otherwise be mistaken as a one-joke wonder or Hollywood licensing deal, making the book a solid source of comic strip history.
Pages: 112. Days to read: 2. Rating: Good.
Cambridge by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1999)
While the more specific editions in Arcadia's Images of America series -- "The Great Boston Fire of 1872" is a fine example -- are quite good, thge more general volumes are somewhat shallow given their scope. This edition takes on the entire city of Cambridge, illuminating images of historic homes, churches and chapels, as well as some of Cambridge's neighborhoods -- including Harvard Square, Central Square, and Cambridgeport. Sammarco also covers some notable Cantabrigians, transportation trends, and the roles universities played in the town's development. While the book does include a lot of long-lost landmarks, if Arcadia can publish an entire book about Harvard football or the Jimmy Fund, why not one about Central Square or Cambridgeport itself?
Pages: 128. Days to read: 2. Rating: Fair.
Cathedral Child by Lea Hernandez (Cyberosia, 2003)
Originally to be published by the now-defunct and much-missed comics publisher Eclipse, later released as part of Image Comics' "no-line," and now reprinted in one volume by Somerville-based Cyberosia, Cathedral Child is a manga-styled missive that'd reputedly the first volume in a sequence called Texas Steampunk. While there are some steampunk elements present -- a sentient cathedral that communicates via pipe organ -- I found the comic to be slightly scattered. Part lifelong romance, part mystery, and part political powerplay, the story's ideas are important, but the sequence suffers from unclear characterization and too twisted a narrative thread. Hernandez's Author's Notes are helpful, but a comic shouldn't need footnotes to be forthright. That said, the vision is viable. It's the execution that could have been cleaner.
Pages: 112. Days to read: 1. Rating: Fair.
Chewing on Tinfoil by Joe Ollman (Insomniac Press, 2002)
Joe's artwork isn't really my cup of tea, but the writing represented by the nine pieces collected here is quite impressive. Blending personal, almost semi-autobiographical stories ("Death Wears Inexpensive Loafers" and "C.O.P.S.") with mythic fables ("God"), the range of storytelling is quite wide. "Giant Strawberry Funland" stands out with its tale of family, love, hate, and responsibility. "God" is a silly bit of spiritual selfishness. "Cake" is a wonderful office mate update of an urban legend probably based on fact. And two pieces -- "Like Something Akin to the Sistine Chapel, but with Cows..." and "Fire Sale" -- really impressed me with their character studies and slice-of-life snapshots. Joe's drawing grew on me as the book progressed, and I'm sure his style will continue to gel as his writing -- which is already quite good -- continues to grow in maturity and motivation.
Pages: 155. Days to read: 3. Rating: Fair.
Everyone in Silico by Jim Munroe (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002)
It's always interesting to read someone's work after you've met them and spent some time talking about other topics. Jim's novel is very much a reflection and projection of his personality and interests. The anarchist former managing editor of Adbusters crams a lot of political, cultural, and scientific concepts into this novel, which is a good companion read to the work of Cory Doctorow. Everyone in Silico isn't hard sf -- but that doesn't mean that it's soft or easy. Jim's ideas of homegrown genetic engineering, subcultural self-organization, street-level marketing, and the economics and experience of a digital afterlife are fascinating and forward thinking. Down to details such as the tattoo that, when scanned, dials an encrypted phone number, Everyone in Silico's dystopian future is deftly and effectively outlined as the multilayered plot unfolds.
Pages: 241. Days to read: 27. Rating: Excellent.
The Great Boston Fire of 1872 by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1997)
Part of the consistently impressive Images of America series, this volume documents the commercial evolution of downtown Boston, an evolution that was perhaps hastened by the blaze, as well as the events that contributed to the fire's severity. The photographs capture lost residential neighborhoods that are now dominated by the city's financial district, and many long-gone landmarks are preserved for posterity in its pages. Some of the most effective images include lithographs of the fire itself and photographs of the aftermath and damage. While the staged shots of businessmen posing in front of their former workplaces strike me as somewhat odd, there's enough unadulterated wrack and ruin that the sheer devastation is carried across. What would the city be like today if the fire hadn't happened? What if downtown's slate hadn't been scraped clean by flame?
Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.
The Maximortal by Rick Veitch (King Hell, 1996)
Originally published as a seven-issue series by Stephen Bissette's company Tundra, this postmodern take on mythic superheroes has been overlooked by many folks in lieu of story cycles auch as the Watchmen and Miracleman. Veitch's approach, while much darker and desperate, is well worth reading. Representing a Superman-like alien and a clueless and confused -- but caring -- Kent-like victims family, Veitch's origin story is more dire and dangerous. His inclusion of such historical and literary figures as Sherlock Holmes, Siegel and Shuster, Robert Oppenheimer, and Albert Einstein adds a layer of neo-fictional nuance but slightly confuses matters. In the end, it is the Carlos Castenada-inspired character El Guano who plays a role in the Maximortal's momentary taming. Veitch's Afterword further explodes the icon of Nietzsche's Superman. It's not quite Cavalier and Clay, but the Maximortal deserves further attention and analysis.
Pages: 190. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.
Overbite by Dave Cooper (Fantagraphics, 2003)
Ostensibly the sixth issue of Cooper's comic book Weasel, this beautifully produced coffee table book of "drawings and paintings of mostly pillowy girls" also served as the catalog for the Overbite show at Tin Man Alley in Philadelphia. Featuring an introduction by David Cross, the book collects more than 60 oil on canvas and multimedia pieces produced in 2002. The book is one of the most lovely comic-related art books I've ever seen, and Cooper's status as a fine artist as well as a cartoonist is ably secured. His concept of what is beautiful and erotic is extremely intriguing and clever, and the lush -- and luscious -- paintings comprising this volume are sweet eye candy indeed. Amazing yet slightly disturbing. Good girl art gone bad?
Pages: 48. Days to read: 1. Rating: Excellent.
Revolt of the Masscult by Chris Lehmann (Prickly Paradigm, 2003)
Similar to the Open Pamphlet Series, the Prickly Paradigm batch of booklets is a worthy group of lefty intellectual and political texts. This volume, written by deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World and contributor to the Baffler Lehmann, looks at the lapses of mass culture. Lehmann contends that mass culture is a construct that is inadequately captured by the pop culture palliatives. Analyzing and critiquing relatively recent activities of Jonathan Franzen, Oprah Winfrey, and David Eggers, Lehmann suggests that popular advocacy of masscult productions does more harm than good. But despite his namedropping of such sociologists and cultural critics as Dwight Macdonald, Edward Shils, and Herbert Gans, the slim book's almost 80 pages don't give Lehmann the room necessary to fully state his case -- as indicated by his doubtful dismissal of Henry Jenkins. Regardless, Lehmann's look at popcult promotion and partnerships is cause for consideration.
Pages: 79. Days to read: 7. Rating: Good.
Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby (Bay Books, 2003)
These 21 stories written by the associate fiction editor of 3rd Bed paint an amazingly pristine portrait of a world much like that envisioned by Ben Marcus. These lost histories of a fractured future flabbergasted by population control, food bans ("Joy of Eating" is a standout story.), sound-based weaponry, languishing and lamentable love, the use of air as a sound- and memory-recording medium (similar to Marcus' use of water, this idea is used to best effect in "Home Recordings."), family life, living phones, and other aspects of Derby's densely developed world. I am such a big fan of this new school of literary, postmodern sf. I don't know if Derby or Marcus consider themselves sf authors, but they're not too far afield from the new wave fabulists. Wonderful.
Pages: 196. Days to read: 4. Rating: Excellent.
Newspaper Capers
One of my small joys in life is misreading newspaper headlines. Over lunch just now, I misread an item in the Boston Globe as
It took me awhile to figure out what it really said, and I caught myself asking questions like "Can blind people even play handball?" and "Why do they call it an ensemble?" instead of just rereading the item.
Because I enjoy misreading so much, I poked around a little online to see what I could learn about it.
Cognitive psychologists at Boston University contend that "questions concerning the role of sentence context in the process of visual word recognition continue to be some of the most contentious in the field of cognitive psychology." There are multiple models of visual word recognition.
Studies of response times consider concepts such as frequency, letter confusability, and what is termed neighborhood size. Complete texts are less apt to be misread than lists of words. And something as specific as repetition blindness merits widespread research.
Fascinating! And here I thought it was just funny. Kinda like misheard lyrics.
Perkins School for the Blind's Handball Ensemble
It took me awhile to figure out what it really said, and I caught myself asking questions like "Can blind people even play handball?" and "Why do they call it an ensemble?" instead of just rereading the item.
Because I enjoy misreading so much, I poked around a little online to see what I could learn about it.
Cognitive psychologists at Boston University contend that "questions concerning the role of sentence context in the process of visual word recognition continue to be some of the most contentious in the field of cognitive psychology." There are multiple models of visual word recognition.
Studies of response times consider concepts such as frequency, letter confusability, and what is termed neighborhood size. Complete texts are less apt to be misread than lists of words. And something as specific as repetition blindness merits widespread research.
Fascinating! And here I thought it was just funny. Kinda like misheard lyrics.
Rest in Peace
Henry "Hank" Boucher, who lived across the street from me on Church Corner in Cambridge, passed away Sunday. There was a memorial flier taped to the lamp post on the corner this morning.
I never formally met Hank, but he was very much a part of my daily life in Cambridge. Friends with the minister of the First Baptist Church, Hank was often seen in one of three places: sitting on the Baptist church steps facing the flowering tree, leaning against the wall of the Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church on the opposite corner, or sitting in his car while it ran, parked on the side of Magazine Street. He ran his car daily, often going for short drives to keep it running. And if he was hanging out on the corner, he usually had a paper cup of coffee. Sometimes the minister of the Baptist church would join him.
I'd usually spot Hank while sitting in my kitchen window looking out on the street, but we never got beyond nodding neighbors when passing on the street.
I never really met Hank. I didn't know him at all. But his death saddens me. I'm going to miss him.
I never formally met Hank, but he was very much a part of my daily life in Cambridge. Friends with the minister of the First Baptist Church, Hank was often seen in one of three places: sitting on the Baptist church steps facing the flowering tree, leaning against the wall of the Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church on the opposite corner, or sitting in his car while it ran, parked on the side of Magazine Street. He ran his car daily, often going for short drives to keep it running. And if he was hanging out on the corner, he usually had a paper cup of coffee. Sometimes the minister of the Baptist church would join him.
I'd usually spot Hank while sitting in my kitchen window looking out on the street, but we never got beyond nodding neighbors when passing on the street.
I never really met Hank. I didn't know him at all. But his death saddens me. I'm going to miss him.
Monday, May 19, 2003
Mention Me! XL
Thanks to Marm0t and Gregory Blake for their comments on Friday's Anchormen show. And, yes, even though Gregory doesn't really mention the Anks, both of them were there. Who do you think they are? Jayson Blair?
[Added later] This made me smile:
That's OK, Andre Torrez. I don't remember meeting you either.
[Added later] This made me smile:
I regret that the only conversation I've had with Mr. Heath Row was while I was intoxicated at a party in Austin. We did talk a bit about punk rock shows, I think... it's too bad I remember very little of it.
That's OK, Andre Torrez. I don't remember meeting you either.
Corollary: Music to My Ears XXXV
Dr. Frank's made another new song available online: "Institutionalized Misogyny." He's also selling an eight-track CD of songs recorded in his bedroom: Eight Little Songs. "These CDs were originally intended to be sold only at shows," Dr. Frank says. "But there have been a lot of requests for mail order from people who couldn't make to the shows." Why, that describes me exactly. I missed both his New York City and Cambridge shows. Grr. He says my CD is in the mail.
Corollary: Anchormen, Aweigh! XXIII
The Stuff@Night writeup is also online. If only the Anks were so widely written about every time we played!
Corollary: Geocache Me If You Can II
After making my Fort Washington post earlier today, I was talking to a friend who also works in the Scotch & Sirloin building about how cool it'd be if there were a directory of all of the blue historical marker signs in Cambridge. Well, there is. And it features photographs of all of the markers. There's even a marker showing where Meig's Experimental Railway -- a monorail! -- was located. Another handy resource is the site's list of markers that have gone missing -- removed or vandalized. What a wonderful service!
The Cambridge Historical Commission also offers its own directory of historical markers. The commission's list is more wide ranging, including the granite tombstone markers put in in the late 1800s, the cast-iron markers installed in the '30s, the history stations erected in 1976, and the North Cambridge signs, which were slated for installation last year.
Now I have to collect them all! Sheesh.
The Cambridge Historical Commission also offers its own directory of historical markers. The commission's list is more wide ranging, including the granite tombstone markers put in in the late 1800s, the cast-iron markers installed in the '30s, the history stations erected in 1976, and the North Cambridge signs, which were slated for installation last year.
Now I have to collect them all! Sheesh.
Comics and Controversy III
The American Family Association is targeting the Make-a-Wish Foundation for receiving funds raised at the recent Pittsburgh Comicon. Because the convention featured models, including former Playboy Playmates who were fully clothed, along with the usual booths selling comics, games, and fantasy art, as well as Playboy back issues, the AFA contends that the Pittsburgh Comicon was a "porn convention" including "pornographic programs."
In the past, the AFA has boycotted Disney, called for decreased funding of the NEA, and vehemently opposed homosexuality. The AFA has also boycotted Kmart, "one of the largest distributors of pornography in America." More accomplishments mentioned in their 1994 annual report paint a pretty complete picture of where the organization stands.
What I'd like to see is where the AFA's funding comes from. Especially the money they used to publish their anti-pornography comic book.
Thanks to Bookslut.
In the past, the AFA has boycotted Disney, called for decreased funding of the NEA, and vehemently opposed homosexuality. The AFA has also boycotted Kmart, "one of the largest distributors of pornography in America." More accomplishments mentioned in their 1994 annual report paint a pretty complete picture of where the organization stands.
What I'd like to see is where the AFA's funding comes from. Especially the money they used to publish their anti-pornography comic book.
Thanks to Bookslut.
Geocache Me If You Can II
I found my first cache yesterday! What a neat thing. With the cache located in a part of town that I haven't spent too much time in, I enjoyed walking through the remnants of Cambridgeport's industrial section -- past a row of old cottages that once housed soap factory employees, I'm told -- and to a location that creatively combines Geocaching and local history.
The cache was located exactly where it was supposed to be, which makes me more confident in the accuracy of my Geko, and I wish the park actually had bench seating within the enclosure. I would have lingered longer to read Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution in the sun.
I don't know if the following is bad form in terms of sharing spoilers with non-Geocachers, but I'm really glad that my first successful cache was located where it was. Within eyeshot of the new Simmons Hall at MIT, which was just featured in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (written up by local literati Pagan Kennedy, no less!), the Fort Washington Historic District is the only surviving physical remnant of the Revolutionary War in Cambridge.
While it's appreciated that the city has preserved the site of Fort Washington, Cambridge could do much more with historical signage. Some sort of explanatory marker -- beyond the small plaques on the pillars near the main entrance gate to the park -- would be nice. Also, word is that the fort was just one of many fortified embankments that crossed cambridge, many ridging Dana Hill. More historical markers to look for!
The cache was located exactly where it was supposed to be, which makes me more confident in the accuracy of my Geko, and I wish the park actually had bench seating within the enclosure. I would have lingered longer to read Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution in the sun.
I don't know if the following is bad form in terms of sharing spoilers with non-Geocachers, but I'm really glad that my first successful cache was located where it was. Within eyeshot of the new Simmons Hall at MIT, which was just featured in this weekend's New York Times Magazine (written up by local literati Pagan Kennedy, no less!), the Fort Washington Historic District is the only surviving physical remnant of the Revolutionary War in Cambridge.
While it's appreciated that the city has preserved the site of Fort Washington, Cambridge could do much more with historical signage. Some sort of explanatory marker -- beyond the small plaques on the pillars near the main entrance gate to the park -- would be nice. Also, word is that the fort was just one of many fortified embankments that crossed cambridge, many ridging Dana Hill. More historical markers to look for!
Digesting the Daily XIV
Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.
Comix Revolution to offer free comics
Owner hopes participation in national Free Comic Book Day will draw new readers to Davis Street store
(May 1, 2003)
Full disclosure: I went to college with Comix Revolution's owner Jim Mortensen. Together, we founded and ran the Northwestern University Comic Book Interest Group (or something like that), a student club that hosted on-campus talks by Gary Carlson and Chris Ecker, Larry Marder, and Scott McCloud before we got frustrated that the other members only wanted to buy and sell back issues.
Errors, writers' lack of interest obvious in Daily and nyou
(May 2, 2003)
Former Daily nyou editor and Forum editor Pete Mortensen writes in to air dirty laundry and sour grapes about his time editing the nyou section -- and to set Dan Eder, the writer who penned the piece on Free Comic Book Day, straight on the event, comics, and global culture. Were it not for Mortensen's -- curious whether he's related to Jim! -- sour grapes, his corrections and commentary would be welcome and well-intended, but as it is, his letter comes across as a crying jag. All Mortensen needed was a trigger and a target to vent frustrations that have little to do with the particular story in question. Interesting that it's comic books that set him off. Straw. Back. You do the math?
Cats gone wild
It was like the start of a bad porn flick. An innocent young journalist wandered through the long hallways of the Omni Orrington Hotel in Evanston. The only noise? A cleaning cart creaking ever so slowly past the dim lights and empty rooms. At the end of the hall, the door to the "Playboy Suite" slid open. The reporter was being "interviewed" by a former Playmate and professional Playboy photographer. "Can I record this?" was about to take on a whole new meaning.
(May 8, 2003)
If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.
Comix Revolution to offer free comics
Owner hopes participation in national Free Comic Book Day will draw new readers to Davis Street store
(May 1, 2003)
Full disclosure: I went to college with Comix Revolution's owner Jim Mortensen. Together, we founded and ran the Northwestern University Comic Book Interest Group (or something like that), a student club that hosted on-campus talks by Gary Carlson and Chris Ecker, Larry Marder, and Scott McCloud before we got frustrated that the other members only wanted to buy and sell back issues.
Errors, writers' lack of interest obvious in Daily and nyou
(May 2, 2003)
Former Daily nyou editor and Forum editor Pete Mortensen writes in to air dirty laundry and sour grapes about his time editing the nyou section -- and to set Dan Eder, the writer who penned the piece on Free Comic Book Day, straight on the event, comics, and global culture. Were it not for Mortensen's -- curious whether he's related to Jim! -- sour grapes, his corrections and commentary would be welcome and well-intended, but as it is, his letter comes across as a crying jag. All Mortensen needed was a trigger and a target to vent frustrations that have little to do with the particular story in question. Interesting that it's comic books that set him off. Straw. Back. You do the math?
Cats gone wild
It was like the start of a bad porn flick. An innocent young journalist wandered through the long hallways of the Omni Orrington Hotel in Evanston. The only noise? A cleaning cart creaking ever so slowly past the dim lights and empty rooms. At the end of the hall, the door to the "Playboy Suite" slid open. The reporter was being "interviewed" by a former Playmate and professional Playboy photographer. "Can I record this?" was about to take on a whole new meaning.
(May 8, 2003)
If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.
Anchormen, Aweigh! XXIII
Thanks to everyone who came out to the Anchormen's CD release party and Handstand Command anniversary smell-ebration Friday night at the Milky Way! The other bands -- including the Operators, Asian Babe Alert, and the Reaganauts -- all played really well, and the crowd was awesome. How did the Anks do? Well, we made more money than we ever have before. We sold a lot of the new record. We drank a lot of beer. And we didn't really play that many songs in the end. Sorry for the short set. But isn't that the way it should be? Quality, not quantity. Less is more. (Except when it comes to the money and beer, natch.)
Thanks to our fellow Handstand Commandos. Thanks to BJ and the Milky Way. Thanks to the Phoenix, Globe, and Stuff@Night for the nice press. Thanks to Dan the '80s hardcore fan who came just to see the Reaganauts. Thanks to Tom and Steve for hosting the after party. And thank you for doing whatever it is that you do. Keep up the good work.
As if the new record and bang-up show isn't enough, we also recently redesigned our Web site. Check it out when you have half a mo.
Thanks to our fellow Handstand Commandos. Thanks to BJ and the Milky Way. Thanks to the Phoenix, Globe, and Stuff@Night for the nice press. Thanks to Dan the '80s hardcore fan who came just to see the Reaganauts. Thanks to Tom and Steve for hosting the after party. And thank you for doing whatever it is that you do. Keep up the good work.
As if the new record and bang-up show isn't enough, we also recently redesigned our Web site. Check it out when you have half a mo.
Music to My Ears XL
I just downloaded and installed iTunes 4 so I can access Apple's still new and much-lauded Music Store. It's a pretty amazing thing. Apple's credit card processing is temporarily unavailable, but as soon as I'm able to get my account sorted, I'm going to download Frank Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" for 99 cents. The song's been stuck in my head for the last week or so, and it's high time I actually listen to it.
The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXVI
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.
Dark Image #1 (Image/Malibu, March 1993). Writers: Brandon Choi, Sam Kieth, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Bill Messner-Loebs. Artists: Sam Kie