-- Joe Germuska
What are your favorite magazines? Let me know.
Showing newest 36 of 118 posts from May 2003. Show older posts
Showing newest 36 of 118 posts from May 2003. Show older posts
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.
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