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November 15, 2003

Danger, danger
: Om Malik says that VCs are getting antsy in invest in blogs. That might sound sweet but beware: Blogs are essentially small and when big guys invest they expect big returns and when the returns aren't big then blogs will have cooties. Nick Denton has issued that warning.
Om does say that Technorati is rumored to be getting an investment and that would be good news because it could grow more services. And, like Blogger, it clearly needs to get its operational act together, for days go by without updates (and I keep getting ripped off on the Top 100 list, he said selfishly).

: UPDATE: A VC responds. Says Fred Wilson:

Well maybe we'll invest in some blogging stuff. Most likely it will be aggregation sites like Technorati and others. And tools for blogging like Six Apart and others. I doubt VCs will invest directly in blogs because most blogs are too niche for VC returns.
But i think the bigger impact for VCs will be in using blogging to talk about what they are interested in, get intelligence, network, etc. That's a big reason why i blog.

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After the confab
: As it turns out, there were two reasons to go to the Online News Association confab (which is two more than I'd anticipated).
The first was meeting Andrew Sullivan.
One of the three most common blog posts is, "I just met Joe Schmoe of schmoeme.com and, wow, he's just liked I thought he was going to be."
Well, Andrew Sullivan is not what I thought he'd be. Judging from the tenacity and intelligence of his blog, I'd expected someone too smart for safety, martini-dry, contankerous. Instead, he's gracious, open, generous, enthusiastic, easy-going.
As you can tell from the quilt of quotes stitched together from his keynote today, below, he did a wonderful job selling, but not overselling, weblogs to a skeptical/fearful/clueless bunch. He showed what a passionate and addictive activity this is. He spoke convincingly about why it matters and how it truly is revolutionary.
This medium is our movement.
And our movement could not have a better spokesman than Andrew Sullivan.

: There were a lot of smart people doing good work at this confab but I heard that same kind of enthusiasm and zeal out of just one other person, Rob Curley, head of Lawrence.com, a kick-ass site serving University of Kansas students. I made tons of notes about his good ideas and I'm even thinking of visiting Lawrence to learn more (it may be exhaustion speaking).
One great thing: He not only has citizens blog, he takes the content from those blogs and turns it into columns in a print publication created out of Lawrence.com. Now that is respecting citizens' media.

: Ken Sands of the Spokesman Review, who has done more to bring blogs into newsrooms than anyone, is obviously quite attached to Spokane and has no ambitions to move to Chicago -- or didn't like what he found there (the weather was a gray as a page of classifieds) -- for he started out blogging panel reminding everyone that Tribune President Jack Fuller urged the audience and industry to keep innovating, keep trying new things but then Fuller turned around and complained that blogs need to be edited for qualitiy control; like many there, he fears blogs. So here's the punchline: Sands said that Fuller "wouldn't know a blog if it bit him in the ass." He said that surely Fuller reads and likes Romenesko. It's a blog. So what's to fear?

: Speaking of Romenekso, it's too bad he didn't come. He lives and works nearby. Apparently, he doesn't like such gatherings.

: I'm not sure how the blogging panel went.
I'm sure I came off like a lunatic: fast-talking media revolutionary on speed. I think I scare people.
The most discouraging thing is that the turnout at this panel versus others was light. Even after hearing Sullivan's great sales pitch for weblogs, not many wanted to hear more. Not a great sign.

: I have other notes, but they're even more inside baseball. It's late. Half the weekend is shot. So good-night.

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En route back home... WBL... Remind me to tell you how gracious Sullivan is....

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Blogging Andrew Sullivan
: Andrew Sullivan is speaking to the Online News Association. I'm just putting up quotes now... Will clean up and comment later (I have to be on a panel next).... Talk about instant analysis....

: He is doing a superb job lecturing this audience on how to blog, explaining to them that they must consider themselves part of a community who will correct them and contribute to them.

: Best gag: "Will there be blogs that are purely fictional -- and I don't mean Eric Alterman?"

: "Whenever I wonder why I have not written a book lately [because he is blogging instead].... I say this happens once in a lifetime: You don't stumble across a new medium every day."

: "I think of blogging as the first genuine innovation that came out of the Internet itself."

: What sets apart weblogs, he says, is economics: He talks about the economics of thoughtful journalism: The New Republic has never made money and loses more. The Nation doesn't make money.
"And then I experienced blogging as an alterantive. It staggers me to realize that last week, AndrewSullivan.com... is now reaching more people online than the magazine I used to edit, which is still losing... hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's a big deal... We haven't just made the economics of journalism cheaper.... We haven't just lowered the barriers to entry to journalism, we've completely revolutionized it."

: "The overhead is minimal and the reach is almost infinite."

: Journalists have longed for this day, he says -- a world without editors. He told about having to rewrite a piece for the London Times -- and now he can put his original online.

: "I think it's going to get more revolutionary. We're going to see self-publishing of books... and taking power away from editors and publishers and media magnates."

: In the news media now, he says, the public "knows there is a man behind the curtain."

: He says that the trend toward anonymity is dying. Tina Brown killed it a bit when she said that no one cared what The New Yorker says; they know there's an individual there. Blogs extend that individual identity.

: "People trust [blogs]. Not because they are authorities but because they are subjected to scrutiny day in and day out and people decide whether they like them or not."

: Andrew waxes wonderfully on the ability and necessity of bloggers being able to change their minds, being transparent and honest; that is the essence of their (read: our) appeal.

: "They introduce back into the public discourse provisional thinking." We can change our minds. We can miss things. Others can have better ideas. "It recognizes the fallibility of the human mind and opens up to the wisdom of the communal mind." That's a whole new media dynamic, he says. Columnists and magazines have to wait to correct so they work to get it right now. Blogs, he says, don't make that commitment... "Let's continue that conversation onwards."

: "It's a much more modest mode of discourse... That modesty strikes a chord with people."

: "It's very, very modern. It's postmodern.... It's a combination of trends in modern thought and trends in technology."

: "Interactive... this is not a monologue, it's not even a dialogue, it is a conversation."
Amen! I'll say it again: News is a conversation.

" I'm just the recipient of a collective brain. I'm just a portal for the thoughts of other minds." He says he spends 40 percent of his blogging time reading email from contributors to that conversation.

: "It's more transparent than anything in journalism before." He says that when you make an error, there is no shame in that. "In mainstream journalism," he adds, "you have to climb down from your pedestal to correct an error and then climb back up again."

: He says a blog must be read long-term. "It accumulates a voice... traditions... in-jokes... its own vocabulary."

: He says he invented a t-shirt slogan: "Go ahead, fisk my blog." Three people in the audience got it.

: "I feel like an old brick wall covered with ivy and I can't cut it off... I used to take the weekends off but they wont' let you."

: If he were to start a new magazine, he'd find five of the smartest bloggers and put them on a web site "and tell them to go at it."

: "The ultimate and most successful news blog in the business is Drudgereport."
Andrew said he goes to Miami once a year for what he calls a "summit." He says he studies Drudge because "it is by far the most successful blog in history.... He's incredibly powerful."

: Unlike talk radio, he says, weblogs try to talk to people who disagree with us.

: Talking about the ability to use blogs to challenge authority and using Iran as an example, he says: "I'd much rather live in a country where the most we have to worry about is Howell Raines rather than live under the thumb of Saddam Hussein."

: Asked a good question about whether writing a blog affects his style and ability to write other things, Sullivan says yes. "It's like the cuckoo in the nest. It crowds out other genres... I'm supposed to be writing this book and I can't seem to get started."

: Should blogging be taught in journalism schools? "Absolutely... That's one sure way to kill it off."

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The kids' rooms are on Concourse B
: If you haven't seen the pix of John Travolta's new airport/home, go look.

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Other ONA blogs
: Staci Kramer is guest-blogging the Online News conference on Paid Content. Mary Hodder put up her Day One notes here. If I find any others blogging it, I'll link them here.
: UPDATES: See also Poynter's Convergence blog.
: And here's the group blog from the confab. Andrew Sullivan left a post here.

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Brits on Bush
: British Politics explains why the Brits are supposedly up in arms about Bush's visit:

The first thing to tell our American readers is that we are just as prejudiced about you as the French, though slightly less ideologically. In our minds, you are either movie stars, or fatso’s gorging hamburgers and fries. There is no middle ground. Sure, we might occasionally bump into a slim American, but they are watched with a kindly interest, as one would gaze at a laboratory hamster, to see whether they will start scoffing burgers or taking leads in west end musicals. There is no other foreseeable outcome.
This binary approach to the US citizen explains why Elvis is still the most popular American in British history. He was both a movie star and a burger-gurgler. He encapsulated all our beliefs about America in one XXL sized rhinestone jumpsuit....
President Clinton was welcomed with open arms. Here was a man who fit our stereotypes of the nice American. He was clever, but brash and definitely a burger guzzler. ... On top of all of this, he very generously opened his private life to the delectation of the Tabloids just when we’d got a bit bored of Charles and Diana.
President Bush had a tough act to follow and suffers from a few disadvantages of his own. First, he appears to be a Christian of the televangelist school. Nothing dismays an Englishman more than an openly declared love of God....
Secondly, Mr Bush seems to very much enjoy bombing people and making with the wrath and the vengeance. This offends our sense of fair play.
A clarification here, the vaunted sense of British fair play means fair play just for the British. When ruling the world, we were entirely justified in sending gun ships up Chinese rivers to support the opium trade and would have very miffed if some Yankee upstart had been going around shouting “no blood for dope” at Disraeli. Burger-scoffing surrender baboons in the war against yellowism, John Bull would have said. Jingoism? We invented it....

Read it all. [via Au Currant]

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Interactivity
: I left the interactivity panel (below) before it ended, so I didn't stand up to snark.
As I thought about it, what bugs me is that all this fancy Flash to try to show off and supposedly involve readers only involves them in the stories, not in the action. That is to say, so a thousand people come in and play a sim-Sim game to fix some problem but it ends there.
In weblogs, people have their say and try to influence people in power. So what they have to say does not end there.
Interactivity isn't about pushing buttons.
It is about interacting with power.

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Gawker spreads
: I picked up a copy of the Chicago Reader and what to my wondering eyes should appear on the front page but a plug for New York's Gawker. Can't find the story online but here's the lead (for which one needs a blog scorecard):

In late October, on the New York uberblog Gawker, a young writer named Jessa Crispin became the latest target of Dale Peck's famously vicous verbal abuse. Peck, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile, is perhaps best kown for his starring role in an ongoing lit-world debate over harsh reviews, or "snark," which many say began when he kicked off his June 2002 New Republic review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil with the fighting words "Rick Moody is hte worst writer of his generation." He'd never heard of Crispin before Choire Sicha, his interviewer (and roommate), told him during an IM interview that she'd trashed Peck's oeuvre and called him a "twat" to boot. But he was ready with a comeback. "i can see that someone who appears to be ditch-dirty stupid as jessa crispin wouldn't get what i'm doing," he typed, and then, several paragraphs later, "i think that people like jessa crisp-tits dislike my books precisely because they like books by industry favorites -- they've had their tastes co-opted as it were."

Crispin's site is bookslut and it's a Reader story because she lives in Chicago now. The story also plugs New York's own lit blogger Maud Newton as well as Washington's Ana Marie Cox, the Antic Muse.

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Run!
: Most people foolish enough to run relish doing it in nature. When I'm out of town, I love running in the early morning on empty downtown streets. In Boston, I ran along the Charles but preferred running by the boutiques of Back Bay. This morning, I ran up and down North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. But the best has to be the run along Unter den Linden and under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

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Online News Association blog panel
: The organizers asked panelists to have leave-behinds for their audiences. I'm leaving behind a URL to my notes here.

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