BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

November 18, 2003

The wolf covering the chicken's trial
: Slate hires disgraced bubble-blowing analyst Henry Blodget to cover Martha Stewart's trial.
OK, there's the punchline. Now they have to give you months of the joke. [via Paid Content]porno video snoop doog

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Social fundraising
: Lots of money is pouring into social networking software lately.
I remain unconvinced.
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If Friendster is a new way to get laid, fine. I get that. Same as Match.com. I recently met a woman at an event who was smart and charming and very attractive and she had a boyfriend with an unusual background (nothing kinky, but just odd enough to make me ask, as polite conversation, how the heck she met him). She leaned over to my ear and whispered, "Match.com." I've known coworkers who met and married from Match. Stigma dead. So I get that.
But I've joined Ryze and LinkedIn and the brand new Tribe.net and I've not made a single connection worth anything and have only faced a daunting user interface with little tangible payoff.
Other people have joined these networks and become drowned in connections. As Anil Dash said at the Always-On breakfast, he needs a network of his networks. We've seen posts about people committing Friendster suicide.
The cost of entry is high: You need to spam your own friends. The effort is high. The payoff unclear.
Maybe I'm just old (and married) and that's why I don't grok this. But I'm not thinking that this is going to take over the modern world the way that VCs apparently think, judging by their current funding.
The problem is that these networks are essentially artifical: You have to go out of your way.
At the Online News confab, two former colleagues many years and worlds apart me for -- who also knew each other -- Elizabeth Osder and Howard Finberg -- said that what we really need is a service that collects and calculates and categorizes existing connections: Take our resumes and find the overlaps and connections. In a sense, that's what blogs do: They capture the connections organically, as they happen; you don't have to work to create them. It's the difference between Web personalization (work) and TiVo personalization (automation).
I do believe there's something here; we want to see and act on our connections. As I said at Always On's breakfast, we need something at my day job that cuts between the low commitment of a forum and the high commitment of MeetUp. But the trick will be capturing those connections naturally.
I'm waiting -- eager -- to be convinced my instinct is wrong.porno video snoop doog

: Ross Mayfield has more.porno video snoop doog

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A game of ~~telephone~~ blog
: Allison Kaplan notes how media works today:

1. Jeff Jarvis sees an item in the Daily Telegraph on the new BBC Middle East ombudsman and posts it on his blog, BuzzMachine.
2. Steven Weiss, one of the bloggers on Protocols, sees the item and posts it on his blog.
3. I see it on Protocols and post it on my blog.
4. Gil Shterzer sees it on my blog. He realizes that it hasn't hit the Israeli media yet -- guess their London correspondents are asleep on the job. He E-mails Ynet, the web site of Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and gives them a heads-up.
Ynet runs the item as one of their top stories. (Hebrew link)
So the story travelled from the British press to an American non-Jew's blog to an American Jew's blog, to an American-Israeli's blog, to an Israeli's blog, to the Hebrew press.

And media is better for it. New sources, new links.
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Dear George
: The Guardian asks 60 people what they want to say to Bush. Among the results:

: Harold Pinter: I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
: Frederick Forsyth: You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.
It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.
Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
: Salam Pax: I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service. We are a bit disappointed. So would you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your act together and stop telling people you have Iraq all figured out when you are giving us the trial-and-error approach?
: Julie Burchill: George,
Great job, keep it up!

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Pure pundit poop
: Leave it to Eric Alterman to insult bloggers in a Mark Glaser roundtable:

I think the jury is still out on what effect blogging will have on journalism. The original bloggers who made a difference journalistically were journalists....
There are a few exceptions, there are a few people who are amateur bloggers who are so good at it that journalists have to keep up with what they do. There are a tiny number of them, and I don't know how they do it financially, I don't know what the model is.... I don't know how people who do it for fun do it. My blog is a part of my professional job, but I could never justify the time I devote to it if I weren't getting paid. Maybe for people who don't have families.
So the question is, is the model with the voluntary blogger who actually creates great journalistic value on his blog sustainable? I think it's too early to tell.

Perhaps, Eric, these are simply people who care. What a concept, caring.
What a snotty attitude: Only the pros and a "tiny" number of others can do this. What crap. The whole thing is a bit hard to take but, as always, Alterman takes the cake. porno video snoop doog

: Reader Howard Aylward forwards this: Alterman discovers that Castro's not nice.porno video snoop doog

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The fewer the merrier?
: Aaron Bailey quotes the increasingly clueless John Dvorak thusly:

"...This trend is solid. A look at Columbia Journalism Review's recent listing of traditional-media blogs shows everyone getting into the act: ABC News, FOX, National Review, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. The blogging boosters, meanwhile, are rooting like high-school cheerleaders over this development. To them, it's some sort of affirmation. In fact, it's a death sentence. The onerous Big Media incursion marks the beginning of the end for blogging. Can you spell co-opted?"
— John C. Dvorak , "Co-opting the Future," Dec 9th issue of PC Magazine

What a load of pundit poop.
By that logic, the fewer people who blog, the better. By that same logic, if you're the only person in the world with a fax machine, it's really valuable. Welcome to the networked world, Dvorak. But he's still sleeping in a silicon Brigadoon.
No, the big boys will not coopt blogging. They will add to it. They bring two things: (1) more content to which to link and (2) more links to citizens' blogs bringing more traffic and audience. Of course, not all big-media blogs will link but they will soon learn that then it's not a blog, it's a tree that falls in the forest with nobody paying attention. Links create the conversation. And as I've been saying a lot lately (and I'll soon make this into a T-shirt):
News is a conversation.porno video snoop doog

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If their teeth are bad, imagine the other end...
: Bloggerheads knows how to get George Bush, oh boy:

If you hear of a visit to your part of town or happen to see George W Bush, bare your arse in his general direction. Don't be afraid to wiggle it about a bit and maybe even spread your cheeks; this is a political statement you're making and you don't want to do things by halves, now do you?

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: Or for the truly radical, we have the Bare your bush to Bush campaign.porno video snoop doog

: I was just going to advise that Howard Stern has announced that the fashion is now to shave that part of the anatomy. And, well, those fashionable Brits beat me to it:

We call for women to join us in our protest by:
1. Shaving their bushes and sending the trimmings to the Queen. Put them in an envelope with a note saying, "We've got rid of our bush, you get rid of yours!”

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: And then there's this from Resist Bush:

Resist Bush is also co-ordinating a mass sit-down protest as part of the Tea Party on the 19th. This will be open to everyone to join. We stress that this action is a call for NON-VIOLENT action i.e. 'action which does not harm or degrade any human being'.

Except, of course, Bush himself.
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: And then over at the Chasing Bush weblog, they want to impersonate Secret Service personnel, advising protestors to wear a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, dark sunglasses, and earphone.
Oh yes, and don't forget to cut your scraggly hair, remove your tattoos, and bathe.porno video snoop doog

: Oh, and I suppose this is that wry British ~~humor~~ humour we keep hearing about: Space Hijackers puts up a "Bush: Wanted Dead or Alive" poster.
We really appreciate that at the time that our media is reliving the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
We're in stitches over here.
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: Indymedia reports on a 65-year-old woman (they call her a little old lady -- how unPC; I'm shocked!) who climbed up a fence at the palace with an American flag and got arrested. Atop a bunch of links to stories, Indymedia says: "talk about on the ball, the media loved it."
Well, yes, they did -- it lead the BBC report over here this morning -- and I'd call that poor news judgment. One woman -- one lone little old lady, to use Indy's descripton -- does one silly thing and that's the most important news in the whole frigging world?
If you're the BBC, it is.
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The future in two dimensions
: Two interesting posts on the present and future of warfare. First, Smart Mobs points to a Pakistani article on how swarming -- using mobile connectivity to bring together separate forces -- will be a major tool of terrorism. Then John Robb tells us that he's working on a book on next-generation terrorism (we have so much to look forward to, eh?) and then he tells us the story of a series of 1932 essays on armoured warfare. No one paid attention to them at the time ... except a German officer, who used it as the basis for the blitzkrieg on France.
And on an entirely different dimension, that leads Robb to an entirely different thought that's relevant to this world of ours:

So, it really doesn't matter how many readers you have, it is who reads your work.

A blog credo and a reason not to dismiss any author in this connected world.
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Content anywhere, anytime
: Om Malik is talking up fixed wireless broadband. Newsweek is hyping it. I'll leave it to wireless geeks to prognosticate about the technology.
I'll prognosticate about content.
I haven't seen anyone publicly exploring what content will be like when we can get anything anywhere anytime.
Forget phones. Forget PCs. Forget TVs. Forget iPods.
Once we have ubiquitous wi-fi over broad areas, we'll be able to get our own content -- music, files, photos, shopping lists, messages -- and outside content -- news, music, TV shows, movies, weblogs, search engines -- anywhere anytime. And that content can be customized to our location: The holy phone grail of finally telling me where the nearest Starbucks or McDonald's is becomes a mere matter of a click.
You've heard all that before.
But now imagine that we can consume news all day, in any spare moment, as we walk, as we drive: our news, what we're interested in, the news directed to us.
I do it now. On my dandy Treo 600, I find myself reading my blog comments as I walk down the street (and I damn near run into people). I read Instapundit (though it takes too long to download the whole darned blogroll). I read CNN (though it is clumsy -- I find that GoogleNews works well on the small screen!).
Douglas Rushkoff just wrote a column saying he doesn't want TV on his phone. Short-sighted, I think. He's still thinking in terms of phones and TVs. I'm thinking of a portable device not unlike my Treo (maybe a little bigger) that lets me watch the news when I want, read it when I want, hear it when I want, get entertained when I want, communicate when I want, publish when I want! He's right that we'll still use multiple devices; my phone will not replace my TV. But we will use a new mobile device that will be location-aware and locations will be content-aware and the nature of content will change.
News will be constant.
And waiting will no longer be quite an onerous. When I wait for my plane, I can catch up or communicate. When I am stuck in traffic, I can listen to my news. When I sit on the couch at home, I publish to the world. I'm doing this now with my Treo. I'll simply be doing more faster better anywhere anytime when connectivity is constant.
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Question power
: The amazing Jackie of Au Currant is meeting with Karl Rove tonight. Send her questions now. porno video snoop doog

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Jonestown, 25 years later
: Twenty-five years ago today, more than 900 people were led to their deaths by an insane preacher named Jim Jones, who also ordered an attack that killed a congressman and a friend of mine, a photographer on the San Francisco Examiner named Greg Robinson. I was the Sunday news editor of the paper then; I edited the stories by reporter Tim Reiterman that led to that fact-finding trip to Guyana and the senseless tragedy that followed.
Jonestown has become the subject of Kool-Aid (though it was an off-brand) jokes and that's understandable.
But on this day, leave the jokes behind and remember the horror of that day: Hundreds of innocent, decent people, even children, lured into a sick cult where they were induced to leave everything behind to follow their leader's paranoia even into death.
I have so many memories of that time: The phone call that came into the city desk, to a colleague named Fran Dauth, who took the news of the attack... The horrible news about Greg, the fear about Tim, who was injured.... Taking dictation of the story of the first scenes from the camp, of the bloated bodies rotting in the sun, from my boss (then and later), Jim Willse... 35 straight hours of writing and reporting... Greg's funeral in L.A....
And nine days later, my friends Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated in San Francisco's City Hall.... Supervisor Diane Feinstein took charge of the city on the steps of City Hall that day... And months later, Supervisor Dan White got off easy thanks to his "Twinkie defense" and thousands of gays in San Francisco rioted....
So much changed then. I lost a helluva lot of innocence as a young adult and as a reporter, having to face so much sorrow and ugliness and evil and make it just part of work. San Francisco and California lost innocence as well. I think the California dream took a turn for the worse just then; the city and the state had to bear too much pain and too many questions.
I feared then that people would forget Jonestown, for who would want to remember?
But there are still important lessons to hold onto, about the ability of one man to lead people to evil; about the lure and tyranny of cults -- religious or political; about those who corrupt God; about the need to survive. It is vital that we remember the danger of one person -- minister, ayatollah, or ideologue -- controlling people, the danger of one belief controlling a life.
Here's a story about one woman whose life was changed forever by Jonestown and here a site she helped create to make sure the memory does not die. Here's a story about the survivors remembering.
I sometimes feel as if I've lived at the edges of too much tragedy, a cursed Zelig: near Jonestown, near Moscone-Milk, near AIDS, and then near the World Trade Center. It's enough to make a sane person want to run and hide. But no, the sane person remembers. porno video snoop doog

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