BuzzMachine

Shark ahead

Shark ahead

: There's already a business conference on podcasting.

The real John Roberts

The real John Roberts

: Rex Hammock has all the dirt.

Blogging smoke

Blogging smoke

: Jim Treacher, one of my favorite interacters hereabouts, is manning a blog for the movie Blowing Smoke, said blog created by another fave, Jackie Danicki.

Carnival of the walkers

Carnival of the walkers

: As you may know, I'm working with good folks at About.com on such things as blogs and one of the enthusiastic, blog-smart guides there, Wendy Bumgardner, has just started a Carnival of the walkers.

The challenge, of course, is that there aren't a lot of blogs devoted just to walking. But we all do it. And I know there are good stories about good vacation walks with good photos and Flickr sagas memorializing these walks.

So do me a favor: Post about your favorite walks and walk photos and walk stuff (cameras, whatever) and send the links to Wendy: walking.guide@about.com.

I'm inspired by going on gorgeous strolls at Skytop last week and now that I'm back in miserably muggy Gotham, I want to smell the fresh air of freedom again. Beside, walking is the perfect topic for bloggers, isn't it: Left-right-left-right....

Gawker 1, Page 6 0

Gawker 1, Page 6 0

: Yesterday, Page 6 popped a vein over Gawker's snarking. Today, Jessica Coen gives Page 6 some advice:

Thesaurus.com is my top bookmark, and I suggest you make it the same on your browser. Then you needn't use words like "snarky" over and over again. Say I'm contemptous, irritable, cranky, cocky, insolent, sneering. Call me a dimwitted bitch, for all I care. Just don't use "snark" twice in the same item.

[via Blogebrity]

Made for the distributed world

Made for the distributed world

: I just came across Dinnerbuzz (catching up on my RSS after vacation; saw it via You're It). Though the execution is iffy at best, the concept is close to what I'm talking about in creating new information services for the distributed world. Here's the deal:

When you post a review of a restaurant on your own blog, you tag it and Dinnerbuzz picks up the link and aggregates it with other links to posts about that restaurant, other posts with those tags, and other posts in those cities. So when it comes time to eat, you can come in and find what locals are saying about a restaurant or you can search for "outdoor" "Mexican" joints in "New York." Further, you'll be able to get RSS feeds so you can get an alert whenever someone writes about a great new vindaloo in your neighborhood.

In old-centralized-marketplace-think, you'd try to get all those people to write restaurant reviews on your big-media site. And the question is: Why the hell should they? What do they get out of it? And in the old world, you tried to get people to read the reviews on your site when they knew there were reviews on tons of other sites out there as well and it's a pain to find them all.

In new-decentralized-distributed-think, you recognize that people will write about what they want to write about where they want to write about it and if you're smart, you'll find ways to take advantage of all that great information and aggregate it and and aggregate audience around it, sending traffic out to all those writers on the edge because readers know they can come to you find find it all.

To make this work, you need to get people to tag their posts and you need a critical mass of them so that people can start to agree (e.g., "byob" instead of "dry") on the right tags as happens on Flickr and Del.icio.us. But people will do that if they see that people are finding what they right because they tag and also if they start using the service themselves to find restaurants and so, in this gift economy, they realize that you need to give to get.

The example I've often used about how tags will work best in a distributed world is jobs: You tag your resume anywhere on the internet and a specialized successor to Google (who may, indeed, use Google's API to get raw data) finds jobs and matches them with job seekers without forcing anyone to pick one centralized marketplace or another. I've also said this will work in hyperlocal: I don't want to write an entire blog about my town, but I would tag the occasional post to be aggregated into a community of them -- because I'd want to read that collection myself.

This is a model for the future of media. There is tons of great stuff to be had out there; it's impossible to find and keep up with it all; search won't do the trick; tags and feeds will help. The key is not to collect the content and traffic -- the old, centralized media way -- but instead to collect enough information about that good stuff to help people find it when they want and to help support the people who create it all.

: OOPS: Well, it appears I was projecting what I wanted Dinnerbuzz to be. I misread one description of it. As I see the service now, I have to go there to add tags to it with a link to my post.

It would be better if I could just put the tags on my post (Technorati tags) or on Del.icio.us (with a for:dinnerbuzz tag) or simply add the posts and ping them and that would travel to Dinnerbuzz automatically. Those would be the better, more distributed ways to accomplish this.

I also find it terribly frustrating that I can't find the way to get from a Dinnerbuzz listing to the actual posts!

Or I'm wrong again....

Well, at least in my imagination, I see potential here....

More snark

More snark

: Dave Winer on professional reporters: "They take longer to get it wronger."

Live by the snark, die by the snark

Live by the snark, die by the snark

: Somebody stuck a sharp stick up somebody's rear.

Unknown outside the dork-infested waters of the Blogosphere, her name is Jessica Coen, and she's the co-editor of Gawker.com, where she regurgitates newspaper and magazine stories and slathers them in supposedly witty sarcasm. Every time we bump into Coen, 25, who likes to accessorize with a stuffed dog poking out of her handbag, she smiles and showers us with sycophantic praise. But her every mention of PAGE SIX on her Web site is snide and snarky. Word to Coen: Next time you see us at a party, keep walking. Or slithering. You can't be a boot-licker and a back-stabber at the same time.

What a Goofy idea

What a Goofy idea

: Here's the dumbest idea for a podcast I've heard yet: Listen to Disney extolling the wonders of Disneyworld. What's next: The Ron Popiel knife podcast? The hold-music podcast? The subway announcements podcast? The annoying car alarm podcast? The Dell excuses in a foreign accent podcast? The Rush Limbaugh podcast?

A birthday in the family

A birthday in the family

: My son's blog just turned 1. There I also just learned that Digg has redesigned and it looks good and now even I can understand it.

Neither Blog Son nor Blog Daddy will be posting much today. We're going golfing with PopPop (who'd be Blog GrandPa, if he blogged). And yes, in my case, golf is a comical adventure of lost balls, muffled curses, murdered grass, creative arithmetic, and knobby knees. There will be no photos.

Snoblog

Snoblog

: As an emailer said, Sarah Boxer is at it again. The NY Times culture writer assigned to the internet -- lucky us -- now takes it upon herself to formulate a strange Marxist (or is it Maoist?) analysis of We'reNotAfraid.com, the wonderful weblog of Photoshopped images of solidarity, stiff-upper-lippedness, and defiance to terrorists.

The site displays a range of defiant postures. Some people hold up their middle fingers, presumably for the terrorists to see. Some people posted pictures of American soldiers, presumably for Londoners and Americans to see.

But more and more, there's a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure. Yesterday there were lots of pictures posted of smiling families at the beach and of people showing off their cars and vans. A picture from Italy shows a white sports car and comes with the caption: "Afraid? Why should we be afraid?"

A few days ago, We're Not Afraid might have been a comfort. Today, there's a hint of "What, me worry?" from Mad magazine days, but without the humor or the sarcasm. We're Not Afraid, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they're not afraid of the have-nots.

What's the most charitable word I can give to that: Sophomoric? Yes, that's it.

And so what if we do want to flaunt our prosperity in defiance of those who would kill us for it? We should damn well flaunt exactly what the terrorists hate and fear most: freedom, sex, commerce, speech, women's rights, openness, success, prosperity, tolerance. I proposed (in a suggestion the NY Times editorialists today would have really hated -- see the post below about the 9/11 memorial) that we should use the now-disputed space at the World Trade Center to build not an International Freedom Center but instead a mall and a theater that shows R-rated movies. Now I say we should have Donald Trump send in a picture of himself wearing a "We're Not Afraid" button. And pictures of women and Jews, too.

The worst of Boxer's analysis is that it feeds right into the why-they-hate-us culture: It's as if she's offended on behalf of the terrorists for showing them what we have and they do not: freedom. Well, damn it, we are successful and that is what they hate most and so we should brutishly flaunt it.

Further, to hide the essence of our culture and our era -- our ability to be prosperous and leisurely -- is some strange signal of defeat. Should we hide our westerness, our modernity, our openness, our success, and our freedom as, say Jews had to hide their Jewishness in '30s Germany? If we do, then it's time to get out the burkas, ladies.

But, of course, that's absurd.

This is the same Boxer I complained about when she wrote about Iraqi bloggers (which led to this exchange [and see my parenthetical full disclosure in the post below]).

Quacks like a blogger...

Quacks like a blogger....

: Romenesko insists he's not a blogger. But he sure sounds like one in this post as he points to a San Fran Chron story complaining about Wired magazine sending "'scary letters' to readers who refuse to renew." And then he adds:

(Business 2.0 pulled that with me, too; I never agreed to an automatic renewal plan, although the mag's rep claimed I did.)

Sounds just like me complaining about Dell. Well, with less volume (in both senses of the word). But note that a blog is personal and that is a personal moment. And that's fine. Come to the light, Romensko, come to the light.

Search me

Search me

: Jason Calacanis prays for Yahoo or Google to launch blog search. Yahoo appears answers his prayers via angel Steve Rubel. [Via Steve Baker.

Marching against terrorism

Marching against terrorism

: Here's a nascent effort to organize a march against terrorism and terrorists in London. I found it via this London blogger, whom I found via this London blogger, whom I found via Technorati's London bombing page. Wish I could join them.

New news

New news : Fred Wilson says "this [my post below about witnesses to news reporting it on their blogs] is what its all about and why CNN with its 24x7 news channel is hopelessly out of date."

Not if CNN et al are smart enough to take advantage of the millions of new reporters who can keep them on top of the news.

: Ironically, I was supposed to have lunch yesterday with the president of such a news network to talk about just this. But, of course, we had to cancel because of the big news. But we did reschedule.

: I also think this is ironic: The blog segment on MSNBC, which I was to do last night, was preempted by the London news. But, of course, there was news -- at least Londoners' stories about that news -- on the blogs.

: As I also noted yesterday, it is now reflex for the BBC and the venerable Times of London to solicit stories from the public and to publish them. Of course, they didn't have to ask. All they had to do was go reading their local bloggers.

: I'm also struck by the new definition of news. As I wandered through the London blogs listed by subway station, I found, again and again, bloggers using their new tool just to tell their family and friends, "I'm fine." That is the news that matters most, isn't it?

: ALSO: I found Technorati -- its search and its tags -- useful in finding London bombing news and reaction yesterday. They put together a special page aggregating the tags.

: Joe's Dartblog as a montage of front pages.

Later

Later

: More bomb links as the evening goes on.....

: Here is a very good roundup of London blogs and moblogs from the Wall Street Journal (free link).

: Tony Blair gives an eloquent statement, of course. It is about values.

It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours. I think we all know what they are trying to do - they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cower us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do, and they should not, and they must not, succeed.

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm. We will show, by our spirit and dignity, and by our quiet but true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs. The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people, and we will not be terrorised.

I would like once again to express my sympathy and my sorrow to those families who will be grieving, so unexpectedly and tragically, tonight. This is a very sad day for the British people, but we will hold true to the British way of life.

: A friend points to the most emailed stories on Al Jazeera right now:

• Bush falls off bike again
• Dozens killed in London serial blasts
• Car bombs kill many in Iraq
• Study shows hookah health risks
• Will US keep letting Israel sell arms?

Dozens killed by terrorist bombs ranks No. 2. [Hat tip to Tom Coscarelli]

: UPDATE: Sam Richardson emails that I'm being unfair (well, Tom is) with the Al Jazeera snipe. He sends a list of NY Times emailed articles and the bombing comes out much lower there. The reason, he argues reasonably, is that big stories are the least likely to be emailed since everyone knows them (or because there are so many versions, perhaps).

: ProjectNothing has lots of links.

: See Tim Porter on his unread newspapers.

News everywhere

News everywhere

: We have now reached the point where we could be assured that when a big news event happened, witnesses would be online with accounts of it in a matter of minutes. News was never like that. But now, that's the way it is.

Here is a moblog photo from the London subway after the attack, uploaded vy Adam Stacey here (via the Guardian newsblog).

: The BBC picks up the picture here along with another moblog picture and some truly frightening photos of a decapitated bus.

Instanet

Instanet

: Austin Bay creates video in the war zone and Glenn Reynolds produces it. We should start thinking of all this as a network.

How Kos is like a Suburu bumpersticker

How Kos is like a Subaru bumpersticker

: In the spirit of peace, love, and kindness, Kos likens the American right to al Qaeda and shows how the American left has no loonies of its own. Just a few of his deft notes:

Self-image
Al Qaida/Taliban: Belief in their own infallibility
American Taliban: Belief in their own infallibility
Liberals: Willingness to consider other viewpoints...

Free Speech
Al Qaida/Taliban: Anyone who disagrees with us is an infidel and must be silenced
American Taliban: Anyone who disagrees with us is a traitor and must be silenced
Liberals: Anyone who disagrees with us is in for a spirited discussion

Well, unless you disagree with Kos or Ollie....

: Not wanting to be accused of subtlety or restraint, here's more.

Beware the blogs!

Beware the blogs!

: Now it's the Washington Post's turn to write a silly, paranoid, and ignorant story smashing blogs. Telling a story about someone who speculated on a blog that someone was running for a seat in Virginia politics -- someone who said he tried to listen in on a conversation on a politician's front yard -- the Post moans:

"It's creepy. That somebody would spread rumors on Jim Moran's seat, that's not all that surprising. The fact that somebody is keeping tabs on who we have over to dinner, that's more problematic," she said. "The whole thing about being anonymous is that there's no accountability. They can literally post anything."

Such is the new and emerging realm of Internet blogs. Since the 2005 Virginia election cycle kicked off, the number of blogs talking about Virginia politics has swelled to at least 20. Many are run anonymously, allowing people to express their views freely -- and giving them an easy way to spread rumors and half-truths.

Oh, I'll be there are a helluva lot more than 20 of them. Run for the hills!

Really Simple Sales

Really Simple Sales

: The NY Times discovers advertisers discovering RSS. The is no doubt that RSS -- whether people know what the initials mean or even know they're using it -- will become a major transport of content. But I've said before that it needs to deliver user stats via cookies before it really takes off (and before publishers will be willing to deliver full content and not just links on it).

Variety, spice, and all that

Variety, spice, and all that

: I should add to the points below that I'm looking to try out Word Press not out of any problems with Movable Type. In due course, I want to try various of the tools; I started on Blogger and moved to MT (but did not upgrade to the latest version because it was likely beyond my own IQ) and now want to try WP. There are lots of great tools enabling this new medium and I don't mean to slight any of them. Besides, my son is my webmaster and he says he'll support WP. Gotta do what the boss says.

Conversation stoppers

Conversation stoppers

: Continuing the theme of technological dependence and addiction... Since I have given tough love to Technorati over time for not being able to constantly update its counts, I should in the spirit of equal opportunity lament PubSub these days: I haven't seen updated links there in days. Wazzup? I depend on these services to find out what people are saying. When they don't work, it's like losing my cell phone.

Broken type

Broken type

: This weekend's burp in Movable Type installations -- which came because of a conflict in an update of the Control Panel that controls many web servers -- reveals an odd vulnerability of citizens' media. No medium before could be so handicapped by a single bug or glitch (or virus or spam attack). Of course, in blogs, we're used to it; Blogger used to go down all the time and with it half the Blogosphere then . But what's oddly unnerving in this case is that an external change could have such an impact. Then again, because this is a community, people shared symptoms and then solutions with dispatch.

Slippery devil

Slippery devil

: David Carr in today's NY Times on podcasting (full disclosure: he quotes me with a full disclosure):

For the time being, podcasting is a cipher, a technology that seems to further threaten established media's stranglehold on public consciousness, but offers little opportunity in the way of a real actual business. Big media are aggressively attempting to get their arms around the next big thing. But it remains elusive, a medium that is viral and uncontrollable by nature, and that does not threaten to become a business any time soon.

MagMan

MagMan

: To evade the long arm of the FEC, Bill Hobbs is, as you probably know, closing his blog and opening instead an online magazine. I congratulated him in is comments with these observations:

Well, as a magazine publisher, you now get:
- A table at Michael's.
- An expense account.
- A clothing allowance.
- A car service.
- An assistant who will go get you Starbucks coffee whenever you ring your bell.
- A minimally but expensively designed office with a view.
- A large ego.
- A reputation not as big as your ego thinks it is.
- The opportunity to go to too damned many conferences in Florida.
- A new hostility to those things called blogs.
Enjoy.

Just what the world needs: drunken bloggers

Just what the world needs: tipsy bloggers

: Hugh McLeod, marketing genius, has convinced a wine maker to create a brand image via bloggers: We're smart, we're tasteful, we drink.

As Groucho used to say...

As Groucho used to say...

: There has been a rousing discussion on the Media Bloggers Association's listserv about whether the MBA should have a code of ethics and standards and such. Well, actually, the discussion started with what kind of code it should be to get a committee going on the task. I entered the word "whether" into the discussion.

I said I didn't think we should have a code, echoing what I'd said in reaction to Bayosphere's pledge here and here. I believe codes are for institutions that have lost their humanity while blogs are human and trust here is measured every day by everyone with whom we interact. And I don't want to see blogs turn into institutions and closed societies. I also agree with Fred Wilson that lists of the Top N this or Top N that are silly in a medium where the meat's in the middle, where everyone determines their own Top N lists and where the top for everybody becomes merely a least common denominator. (I will confess to coveting Technoratijuice but rationalize faw egotism in that case because that it's about links rather than lists and it enables the conversation; this is also why I enjoyed blogebrity skewering the lists and those on them by creating one with no rationale except random ego tweaking; and this is why I didn't link to another Top list that just came out).

I also want to say that I wasn't crazy about the discussion occurring on a listserv rather than on the open web. Ditto some great discussions that have occurred out of a few Harvard confabs. Listservs (let alone ones from Harvard...) are closed conversations themselves and I think we get the wisdom of the crowds (and the lack thereof in isolated cases) when discussions are held in public.

Well, today Corante's Dana Blankenhorn took the MBA discussion public with a bang -- a bang on my head.

I figure a group like the MBA could at least enforce simple rules by creating valuable member benefits and kicking out those who refuse to conform, following some objective process.

But that’s not how it’s going down, mainly due to one person, Jeff Jarvis (right).

Jarvis wants no standards, and certainly no policing. Might as well disband the committee.

“Why pledge to be honest? Only if you're assumed to be dishonest.
Used car salesmen should take the pledge. My blog friends do not need to.”

No objective measures of ethics, thus anything goes. Want to lie, misrepresent, ignore facts, engage in personal destruction for the sheer fun-raising hell of it? Heck, there’s no such thing as truth. We define what’s truth based on who yells the loudest.

Well, pardon my language but bullshit. There’s a fine line between libertarian and anarchist, and Jeff Jarvis just crossed it.

And on... and on... Go read the rest there.

Since this is in public, where it should be, I'll quote (obnoxiously) from my own emails that said why I think we need to look at the world differently. (I'll leave it to others to quote their on views on their own blogs.)

It may be contrarian of me, but I will argue that we should not adopt a code of ethics and standards. That is for institutions to declare because they lose touch with their publics. Weblogs are, in the end, people and, as in our everyday lives, we exhibit our ethics and standards without swearing to codes.

I have my pesonal code of ethics. You have yours. They probably all boil down to this: Be honest. But we shouldn't have to pledge to be honest; that should be assumed. Or to put it another way: If you have to pledge to be honest, then you have a problem.

I do not think we should mimic the trade groups of media; we are something new and different and need to explore new ways....

This is also about educating the world -- particularly the world of big media -- about weblogs: that a parody NYTimes correction site from Bob Cox is news/commentary/journalism just as is an interview on Pressthink just as is an editing of the best of big media on Winds of Change... and that the voice of one citizen speaking -- which is what a weblog is -- is just as valuable in the public discourse as the voice of the guy who owns the printing press. In the end, it is up to the person on the other end of conversation, formerly known as the reader, to judge the credibility and ethics of any of us: Trust is in the eye of the beholder. It always has been, only journalists forgot that as they thought they could control this aspect of the relationship with the public as they controlled others: They wrote codes of ethics and decided what's ethical and what's trustworthy. Or they thought they did. I hope we can start to show how we have a new relationship with our publics....

[In response to an email about how bloggers and journalists do different things:] I disagree that "the rules and expectations are different for each." We are all bloggers and there is not blanket rule about what a blogger -- or a journalist -- is and isn't and I wouldn't like to see one. Bloggers do journalism. Journalists do blogging. To make a sharp line is to start excluding people and their activities and voices. That is antithetical to blogging, in my view....

This is also about educating the world -- particularly the world of big media -- about weblogs: that a parody NYTimes correction site from Bob Cox is news/commentary/journalism just as is an interview on Pressthink just as is an editing of the best of big media on Winds of Change... and that the voice of one citizen speaking -- which is what a weblog is -- is just as valuable in the public discourse as the voice of the guy who owns the printing press. In the end, it is up to the person on the other end of conversation, formerly known as the reader, to judge the credibility and ethics of any of us: Trust is in the eye of the beholder. It always has been, only journalists forgot that as they thought they could control this aspect of the relationship with the public as they controlled others: They wrote codes of ethics and decided what's ethical and what's trustworthy. Or they thought they did. I hope we can start to show how we have a new relationship with our publics.

This is about more than a bit of high-school hallway snarking (though, as one unnamed member said in email to me: at least high school had girls!). This is about more than what this organization should be about. It's about what blogging is.

I have to constantly kick myself to stop thinking of blogging in big-media terms, to stop judging it by the top of the power law and in silly lists, to stop assuming that bloggers want to do what media does, to stop thinking that blogging has to be media, to stop thinking of blogs as publications and remember that they are people.

I keep trying to hear Doc Searls and David Weinberger in my ear as they insist that this isn't a medium and it's not content. It's new.

I don't want to see blogging turn into just another old media institution. But I don't think it can. It is that new.

So perhaps I'm the odd one out. Scratch the perhaps. I am an odd one out, but just one of many. That's why I blog.

As I said in an earlier post on all this, perhaps the real lesson for me is that I'm not a joiner: Let those who want to start their societies start them and I should stay out of the way and drift from this conversation to that one, the social nomad.

Is the blogosphere a society of joiners or a vast plain of nomads? That's the real question, isn't it?

The pity in not joining would be that there is strength in numbers when it comes to support, education, defense, lobbying, selling and, besides, blog confabs are a lot of fun. So I still ask: Do we need codes and standards to have that?

Guten tag

Guten tag

: Sean Bonner's Metblogs just added one of my favorite cities: Berlin.

Living in the past

Living in the past

: Marshall Loeb just wrote a blog-belittling column at Marketwatch. I have some personal history on this with Marshall, who's a very nice guy, and so let me start there. We worked together years ago at Time Inc.

Didn't hear from Marshall for years upon years. But a few weeks ago, he found himself on a panel about blogging at some press association or another and so he called me to find out what this blogging this is all about. He said he didn't know a thing. I filled him in as best I could in 20 minutes as I dashed from meeting to meeting in New York. Apparently, I was bad salesman now Marsh delivers his blog broadside, a bit late to the party:

Blogging can be both a cost-effective and time-efficient way of connecting with people, providing many benefits that can enrich your life.

Some of the benefits are:

* Creating a family network of blogs to keep yourselves updated on the goings-on of your far-away relatives.
* Turning blogs into scrapbooks where you can upload and post digital photos. This saves you the cost of getting film processed, and sharing your blog with others is free.
* Encouraging your young children to create a blog that keeps track of their daily activities and chores. Also, your new college-bound kids can keep blogs so that you won't feel like they're so far away.

So those are the benefits of blogs: quaint personal, family gimmicks. But dangers lurk there.

But not everything is perfect, and here are some warnings about blogs:

* Don't trust everything you read in blogs. While more and more news organizations and companies are creating blogs of their own, many blogs are filled with false information.
* Never keep a blog in which you trash the company you work for or your boss. Also, never put your company's sensitive or inside information in your blog. There have already been cases in which people have been fired for blogging about their employers. It might be tempting to use a blog to vent your work-related frustrations, but it could come back to haunt you.
* Don't give out too much personal information in your blog. Even using your real name, rather than a pseudonym, puts you at risk. We live in an age of identity theft and you don't want to unwittingly give thieves a road map to your personal records or financial information.

Well, thanks. Next, can you tell us how to get rid of that dangnabbed flashing 12 on our VCRs?

Marshall was, by the way, the executive at Time Inc. who first rejected my proposal for Entertainment Weekly -- six years before it ended up launching. As the head of magazine development, he parrotted the words of Henry Grunwald, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., saying that such a magazine about the full range of entertainment could not possibly succeed because people who watch TV do not read. Ahem.

Googlewood

Googlewood

: Google put up its new video service but I'm not on it. As soon as they announced they were taking submissions weeks ago, I put up a vlog just to see how it worked. Now Google's video service and player are up but I can't find it. No idea why: Not up to Google's high standards ("Love ya, babe, but your dialogue needs some work")... pissed off Google... need a new agent. Doing the latest new ego search, it did find two videos that mentioned me... but those videos, from PBS, are not available, only searchable. Drat. And I was so ready for my close-up.

***cialis***

***cialis***

: I had to put "cialis" in my comment-spam filter to stay ahead of the swine. But, of course, this is stopping people from putting up legitimate words. I should fix that. But I'm kind of enjoying the discovery. First, they couldn't say "socialism" and thought I was trying to turn that into a dirty word. Now it's "specialist." Can we ask the makers of performance-enhancing drugs to please come up with names whose order of letters does not appear elsewhere in the English language?

A pixel is worth...

A pixel is worth...

: A pretty blogroll.

Blogging pays

Blogging pays

: Romenesko makes $152,163. And yes, it is a blog, albeit a self-loathing blog. [via Reynolds]

By the way

By the way

: I'm enjoying the Blogebrity blog, which isn't a hoax, just a blog. I'm not saying that get get more links and stay on the A list. Really, I'm not. Trust me.

BlogPulse need caffeine?

BlogPulse need caffeine?

: Matt Galloway wonders wazzup with BlogPulse. I suggest we ask them. I shot them an email.

: UPDATE: See Blogpulse's Pete Blackshaw's response in the comments.

Lost in translation

Lost in translation

: Yesterday, I did my blogboy dance for a bunch of French print and wire-service editors on an IFRA tour (ironic, when Loic -- whose reputation they all knew -- could tell them more on their homefront than I could). Anyway, I asked how many of them read blogs; most but not all. I asked how many of their journalists read blogs. They all put their thumbs and forefingers a millimeter apart. Un petit peu

Vs. the U.S. in ClickZ:

Journalists mostly used blogs for finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43 percent) and finding sources (36 percent). And 33 percent said they used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. Still, despite their reliance on blogs for reporting, only 1 percent of journalists found blogs credible, the study found.

Snotty, those reporters.

Tim Porter talks to some smart journalists who use blogs.

Covering Hoder covering the election in Iran

Covering Hoder covering the election in Iran

: The LA Times writes today about Hossein Derakhshan, "the godfather of the Iranian blogosphere," returning from exile to cover the election in his homeland. Hoder has left Tehran for London but his coverage continues.

Network blog wars

Network blog wars

: Brian Williams blogs the news meeting and makes rundown decisions transparent... beating CBS News to the transparent blogging punch.

It's not a medium, it's a focus group

It's not a medium, it's a focus group

: The Wall Street Journal (free link) sums up companies who are monitoring blogs to get the pulse of the market.

I pledge not to pledge

I pledge not to pledge

: Yesterday, I suggested that Dan Gillmor should have wikied his pledge and Sean Bonner has done it. Dan has some links.

Thinking about it last night, I liked the idea of a pledge even less but thought I should explain that more.

A pledge assumes ill will and mistrust, requiring that we promise we won't do something bad. If we're decent and you trust us, we shouldn't have to do that. I don't have to take a pledge not to torture little puppies for you to trust that I won't do it. I shouldn't have to pledge to be honest to be honest.

The whole point of this new medium is that it is human and not institutional. In a human relationship, apart from wedding vows and oaths in court, we don't take pledges. When you meet a neighbor, you don't feel the need to say, I pledge not to dump my garbage in your backyard. The compact of civility and trust is assumed until it is broken. That's the way I think this new medium operates. A blog is a person. Buzzmachine is me. You either like and trust me or don't (and there are plenty who don't; just read the comments). Or to put it another way: Like me, like my blog; dislike my blog, dislike me. I keep coming back to the conclusion of my blog chat with NY Times exec editor Bill Keller: Though blogs can do journalism and do media they are still essentially human. Journalism is institutional, impersonal, and dispassionate; blogs are human, personal, and passionate. Institutions takes pledges because they have become separated from the people they serve and they need to. Humans -- bloggers -- shouldn't need to. Doesn't mean you have to trust a blogger. But saying "trust me" doesn't mean anybody should trust you more.

At the end of the day, I don't want to see blogs turn into an institution, or try to, for then they wouldn't be blogs anymore. They are human and operate on a personal and social scale and it's a mistake to see them through institutional eyes. When I sat at an Annenberg confab on journalism a few weeks ago, I flashed on the frightening notion that in 50 years, there could be such confabs among bloggers fretting over trust, ethics, professional standards, educational needs, government relationships.... But then I snapped out of it. I was looking at blog through institutional eyes. No, blogs are just people speaking.

Taking the pledge?

Taking the pledge

: Dan Gillmor asks contributors to his Bayosphere to take a pledge. I respect Dan more than anyone I know in journalism. I know what he's aiming for, to establish a paragon of citizen journalism, and I respect that as well.

But I don't know about taking his pledge.

Anybody can nitpick any such pledge or code of ethics. In fact, that's what I say the public should do in this case. Dan suggests discussing the pledge in a forum. Better yet, Dan, why not put your pledge up as a wiki and see what the people think it should be? Let your public create it. The days of the guys with the power and the presses and the initials -- ASNE, APME, NAA, etc. -- setting the standards are over. Now the public sets the standards, right? Well, they always did set the standards but we didn't listen.

Among my nitpiks with this pledge:

He requires us to promise to "work in the community interest." What community? What interest? Who's to say what the community interest is? I can only guarantee that I will post in my interest; whether I post in the community's interest, the community will have to decide.

He requires that I be "fair: I'm always listening to and taking account of other viewpoints." No, there are some viewpoints I will not take into account and not listen to. I won't listen to trolls I've put on my ignore list. I won't listen to terrorist sympathizers. I know that's not what Dan and company are asking with this, but others would. This is the issue with such a pledge: It's open to such varying interpretation: Someone will say gotcha, you didn't listen to people who hate America. And I will say: Damned straight, I won't.

Most of the pledge is very mom-and-Apple pie: I will be open and transparent and correct errors and such. I can't argue with most of this.

But I would sum the pledge in two words:

Be honest.

Doesn't that pretty much cover it?

Still, I'm not sure I want to go signing any pledges. Signing a pledge doesn't make me more trustworthy or more accurate or more decent or more ethical. Either you trust me or you don't. That's up to you and it's based either on my abilities or your fairness. Pledges are not the measure of honesty. Codes are not the measure of ethics. Actions are.

I'm just not a pledge kind of guy. I'm not a joiner. Guess that's why I am a blogger.

Rah Rah

Rah Rah

: Well, the new AOL on the web can't be totally without redeeming value. It's there that I found a professional cheerleaders' blog.

And I shouldn't be surprised they'd find that for under the search box on the new page, they list most popular searches and no. 3 is "bikinis."

: The AOL public site is now up at aol.com. I'm aggressively underwhelmed. As someone said this morning (and I got permission to steal his line): "It's so 1998. It's so Excite."

: UPDATE: I am now told that I didn't link to the new-new public AOL.com. Click on the beta link on the left column. I remain underwhelmed; it's prettier but not revolutionary. But I'll play with it. I showed it to the same guy I showed it to this morning and he ruled, "It's so MSN."

The rumor is true: They are following Yahoo into having an RSS reader. This is a screenshot of the page.

Wiki cooties and the death of editorials

Wiki cooties and the death of editorials

: Well now the LA Times has given wikis cooties. The New York Times and other media outlets have covered the collapse of its wikitorial project and I've heard more than one old-media person say, well, I see LA tried wikis and it's dangerous.

But no. This is like hearing Kathie Lee Gifford try to rap and then, upon hearing the results, declaring hip hop dead.

The LA Times didn't understand what it was doing and made three criticial mistakes:

1. Collaboration vs. argument -- I said this from the start: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its very nature, fail. This is why I suggested having two wikis, instead -- one pro, one con and let the best wiki win -- and Jimbo Wales was starting to do that... but the trolls took over the forest first.

2. Care and feeding -- All communities need attention. The Times should have gone to Jimbo and, he said today, he would have had a few good Wikipedians watch over their foray. You don't build a town without cops. You don't build a community site -- a town online -- without a clean-up crew, either. He also would have explained how to use wikis, since he knows. But the paper thought they knew best and this leads to be biggest mistake:

3. Newspaper ego -- Here is the Times' worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I've sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper's. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

No, guys, the best use of a wiki would have been to have the public create wikis to share their knowledge and viewpoints with you. I don't know what the big issues are in LA, but here in New York, it might work better just to open the gates to watch people create pro and con wikis on the Olympics and a new Manhattan stadium and 10 ways to improve the schools....

But even that is an exhibition of media ego. For the truth is, if people wanted to do that, they could go to any number of places and do it on their own. They don't need newspapers to give them technology. And they certainly do not need newspapers to tell them what to talk about.

If newspapers would just listen -- and use this techology to do that -- they'd find that the people don't want to talk about what the editors talk about. And they certainly don't want to talk about the editors.

Let's take it up a notch:

What this really points toward is the death of the editorial page. Why the hell do we need editorials anymore? In their day, they were the voice -- the bully pulpit, as Rupert Murdoch says -- of one person: the publisher, the guy who had the ultimate conch, the printing press. We, the people, never said we gave a damn what he thought, but we had no choice but to listen. And so over the years, he convinced himself that we cared. What if we don't?

The truth is that an editorial is just another blog post written by one person witih one viewpoint. Here's a case where you can't argue that it makes a difference having a journalism degree and a newsroom. Editorialists and columnists get to read the same stuff we do and they put on their pants and opinions just the way we do. So why should they have rights to the mountaintop? Who died and made them Moses? Let the people speak.

Look at this vision for a newspaper of the future and how opinions work from the blogger at Reasons Unbeknownst:

A successful newspaper of the future is going to have a bigger op-ed section filled with the latest, highest ranked opinions found on Blogdex.net. Maybe the entire paper version of the paper goes op-ed. Why print real news if it’s just going to be outdated and lack animations and videos compared to the web? Internet aggregation on paper. Mmmm, just had a business idea.

Right.

And so, in the end, the newspaper becomes a wiki. And it's not wikis that have cooties. It's newspaper editorials.

: See also Ernie Miller:

Reporting that the wiki has been shut down is the easy part. Letting people know whether the experiment was otherwise successful is the hard part, and no one in the traditional press seems eager to confront it....

It is bad enough that many in the traditional media don't understand how wikis can succeed - they can be exceedingly useful and productive. It'll be worse if they don't understand how wikis can fail.

: AND: Let me be clear: I hope the LA Times gets back on the bike and rides again. I salute them for the effort; the heart is in the right place. But I would hate to see one misstep cancel the race ... for the LA Times and for other newspapers, all of whom need to learn how to listen.

: I didn't see the LA Time story today on my first search. They say they might restart it:

But managers of the newspaper's editorial and Internet operations, which have undergone a number of changes in recent months, said they might attempt to resurrect online editorials written collectively by readers.

"As long as we can hit a high standard and have no risk of vandalism, then it is worth having a try at it again," said Rob Barrett, general manager of Los Angeles Times Interactive....

Although marred by some profanity by contributors, the experiment got off to a fairly high-minded start, said Michael Newman, deputy editor of the editorial page, who proposed the wikitorial idea.

Voluntarily overseeing part of the discussion was Wikipedia founder Jim Wales, who soon encouraged "forking" the editorial into two pieces — one taking a pointed anti-war stance and the other arguing for the ongoing U.S. presence in Iraq.

After midnight Saturday, Newman said, he stopped monitoring the site for the night, and later the pornographic images began to pour in.

It appears that part of the problem is that an editor was monitoring the site and had to sleep. He needs help. At Advance, my last job, we put together a network of forum cops who responded to alerts from readers when something bad went up. Note two important elements: First, you have to give the readers the tools to report problems. Second, you have to make sure someone responds to the alarm. If you respond, this will work and the people will snitch for you; if you do not respond and they are calling a 911 line that never answers, then it will turn into -- as this did -- outtakes from Caligula.

: And here's Joe Gandelman's take.

I, reporter

I, reporter

: Amy Gahran says she's starting a site on citizen journalism called I, Reporter.

All this to kill a tree

All this to kill a tree

: David Weinberger tells you about the agonizing process of selling a book. Happy ending: It's sold (to Jay Rosen's editor, by the way). Can't wait to read it. So get writing, Weinberger.

Blog anything

Blog anything

: The irrepressible Marc Canter proposes a universal blog-this button at reblg.com. If I'm getting this right, he will create a routing system that will send any post's permalink to any blogging tool (and, I assume, the same could work for subscribing to any RSS feed via any RSS reader... something we need). Marc's email announcement:

With ReBlog.com end-users will be able to click on a ‘ReBlog’ button and send a piece of micro-content or microformat to their favorite tool for editing, annotating or just plain prettying up. End-users would specify what is their favorite tool at a simple web service or in a MIME handler that they downloaded and run on their own machine.

Even though it’s been possible for years, most of today’s aggregators and tools do not support the notion of displaying a button to easily allow end-users to “Blog This” particular post or article. Sure some aggregators enable plug-ins to kludge this option, but in general most bloggers are forced to ‘cut’ the source of a post and ‘paste’ it into their favorite tool. With each tool or environment comes a different kludge or hack, with its own rules and gotchas to contend with....

ReBlg.org would enable end-users to register their favorite tool of choice so that wherever they traveled on the web, by simply clicking on the ‘ReBlg’ button – they could easily send that post to their favorite tool. If the end-user doesn’t want to rely upon our web service, then they can simply download a MIME handler to do that routing for them.

Something new

Something new

: Dave Winer is working on an OPML editor. Frankly, I'm not smart enough to figure out exactly what it is or what it means. But when Dave is digging in like this, you can bet there's a truffle to be found. His explanation:

So you can use the OPML Editor to open and edit subscription
lists for all the major feed readers and aggregators, tune them up, merge
them and split them, publish and share them. Finally, there's a rational way
to edit the subscription lists.

OPML has also become the standard format for the podcasting directories. All
the nodes in the community directory are edited in OPML, many of them by
hand. Now there's a tool that's designed for exactly this purpose.

The OPML Editor is good for all kinds of lists, directories, project
planning, designs. The tool can be used by professionals and managers,
doctors, professors, lawyers, accountants, writers -- basically anyone who
thinks for a living.

Another way of looking at it -- RSS is great for news, but not everything is
news, some things, like the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or the
elements of the periodic table, don't change. Or change slowly, like the
teams in major league baseball, or the top home run hitters. For information
like that, knowledge, representing the relationships between nuggets is
what's important, and that's where outliners like the OPML Editor, that's
now in beta, excel.

Wikitorial redux

Wikitorial redux

: The LA Times wikitorial says it is "closed" now and I see no way to get in to see the latest version or the history. No explanation: Just closed.

Hope I didn't help break it. I said that having both sides of an issue fight it out over the same text just wouldn't work in a wiki. Wikis are about collaboration; you may disagree with your fellows but the mutual goal is clear. A wikitorial is bound to turn into a tug-of-war.

So I suggested in a listserv discussion of it that there should be two wiki versions of the editorial: one for proponents of the editorial's stand, one for opponents; let them put their best stuff forward and may the best side win. It seemed to be that this would be like an Oxford debate, brought to software.

Wikigod Jimbo Wales replied in the listserv on Friday: "I changed it to this earlier today. I'm not sure the LA Times wants me setting policy for their site, but it is a wiki after all, and what was there made no sense."

I went today to see what was happening and find it closed. Drat.

: See Tim Windsor's link in the comments explaining what happened.

: See Chris Anderson's reassessment of the experiment.

Tag optimization

Tag optimization

: Today there is an industry devoted not just to search engines but also to search-engine optimization.

Jenny the librarian points to a post that makes me believe that tag optimization will be the next big thing in distribution and marketing of content: Googlejuice meets Del.icio.usjuice. Kevin Hale at Particletree writes in an article that extols the data virtues of RSS because it's free of spam and design and other distractions for search engines:

I don’t think Google really feels threatened (or has ever felt threatened) by portal strategy. I think what they’re afraid of is the rise of applications that seem to be tracking importance and trends better than search. In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like bloglines, newsgator, feedster and kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow. And it’s all being accomplished with RSS technology.

Google vs. Del.icio.us
Let me give a concrete example based on our experiences here at Particletree. When we launched this site, we knew that the tutorials and information we were gathering and creating were good—that they would be somewhat valuable to the web development community. The problem was that we didn’t want this useful, time-sensitive information to sit around for days (or even weeks) waiting to be picked up by search bots and then found by people accidentally or when they were desperate for a solution.

So I proposed that we turned to Del.icio.us to expand our readership. Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my Del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while Del.icio.us gave us over 700.

I think the reason Del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially “page rank.” They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.

Basically, tagging systems are wonderful breeding grounds for the principles contained in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. They do a great job of gathering Salesmen, Mavens and Connectors all in one place. Mavens stalk the new entries on the front page and certain tag pages to filter through the chaos and find the latest treasures. The RSS feeds act as a sort of technological bridge/pseudo-connector to get the information to the real Connectors and Salesman. From what I’ve noticed, a good idea can make it into del.icio.us/popular in about 5 days, a good Salesman/Connector/Maven like Dave Shea or Jeffrey Veen can get a good idea into del.icio.us/popular in less than two hours.

He also predicts that RSS AdSense will be Google's next pot o' gold.

Full circle

Full circle

: Steve Silver informs me that Entertainment Weekly now has a blog. Jeesh, for creating the mag, you'd think I could at least get on the blogroll....

A cause

A cause

: Tom Watson has been leading the cause for Mukhtaran Bibi, victim of a tribal council gang rape in Pakistan. He has all the background and the latest. The news that she is free to travel is misleading; she has no passport.

Blog biz

Blog biz

: Congrats to John Battelle for closing his first round of financing for blogco FM Publishing.

Bloggers at the bar

Bloggers at the bar

: Heather Green at Business Week says that if the Times/Time source case goes before the Supreme Court, it could affect bloggers because attorney Floyd Abrams, representing the reporters, said on TV recently:

I think a blogger ought to be protected also. It seems to me that the purpose of this privilege is to protect the people who play a function in American life. It's not to protect reporters as such. It's to protect people who gather information and disseminate it on a widespread basis to the public.

Journalists are citizens and citizens are journalists.

Iran

Iran

: Iran's "election" day is upon us and I'd like to point you to two blogs:

: Hoder continues to report from Tehran with his savvy perspective.

: And go read Blue Bird Escape. This is a blog by a remarkable young Iranian-American woman whom I first came across a few years ago, when she returned to Iran after moving to America. She returned to her homeland filled with hope and memories but discovered once she got there that she could not see the country the same way, once she knew freedom. Her blog told that with eloquent but unvarnished honesty. Today, on the eve of the election, she writes:

Iran was always a great country in my childhood eyes. I left Iran at the age of 11. It was not until I went back to Iran at 15 that I saw with my own eyes what Iran didn’t have. There was no democracy. Walking on the streets of Tehran brought back so many memories, but I couldn’t imagine myself walking those streets for the rest of my life. It was nothing compared to walking outside on a street in Virginia or anywhere else in the U.S. I felt guilty as I watched people because I knew I was free and they were not.
Another election has arrived for Iran and I am thinking…are they really going to get what they deserve? Are they really going to get their freedom, their democracy? What can I do for them? The only thing I can do, as I am sitting here, on my comfortable bed, reading a magazine on Hollywood gossip, while Iranian women are protesting for equal rights, is to vote....

Know your rights and responsibilities

Know your rights and responsibilities

: Bravo to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for creating a resource for bloggers on their legal rights and responsibilities. Long needed.

Input meets output

Input meets output

: Martin Tobias finds a neat little application that tracks the links people click on on your blog.

Sticki wiki

Sticki wiki

: Via Dan Gillmor at Bayosphere, I see that the LA Time is planning to start wikitorials -- wikified editorials that can be rewritten by readers, one of many interesting changes in the paper's opinion pages.

Sounds like a cool idea... but I think it goes up against the essential nature of wikis and probably won't work.

Wikipedia brags about its NPOV (neutral point of view) enforced by the wisdom of the crowd and the desire to get the facts right and maintain a valuable resource.

An editorial is, of course, not neutral. And so what you'll likely find is a never-ending wikiwar: yes he did, no he didn't, he did, no he didn't, yes he did, no he didn't, nya, nya, nya...

Besides, I think this does what papers do too much: It tries to make the paper the center of the discussion. Turn around, guys, and look outside the newsroom and see what everybody else is saying.

: Here's editorial page editor Michael Kinsley on the changes, quoted in the NY Times:

"It may be a complete mess but it's going to be interesting to try," he said. "Wikitorials may be one of those things that within six months will be standard. It's the ultimate in reader participation."

Mr. Kinsley also started an experimental feature, "Thinking Out Loud," where readers, op-ed and editorial writers hash out tough issues like immigration and traffic. "We hope within a year that we will have a solid, consistent, intelligent and correct position on these two issues and it will result from a process that is not only transparent but readers will participate," Mr. Kinsley said.

: Ross Mayfield says that wikis work best not when the public is offered something baked but something unbaked.

: Ernie Miller is also dubious.

You know, the best, most open, most bloggy and webby way to do this might have been to post a note saying, "I'm thinking about doing this... what do you think?" And then the best minds online -- Ross and Ernie among them -- would have been happy to share their reaction and wisdom.

Defending their own

Defending their own

: The debut NY Times business column on blogs takes the opportunity to defend newspapers against blogs:

A reporter for The New York Times, she writes, "is just a blogger who happened to attend college; impress some bosses with his or her talent; get some training through experience - and possibly (though certainly not always) journalism school; and receive a podium for his or her pains."

Which is a little like saying a lawyer is just someone who likes to argue who happened to go to law school, pass the bar, and get a job at a law firm. There is little doubt that blogs are transforming the news media, mostly in positive ways. But what the "blogs will destroy the media business" argument misses is that there are fundamental economic reasons that it can never happen.

And just why is that?

It's not necessarily that blogs become a new force to challenge newspapers and bring them to their knees. It's that newspapers' business models -- the very thing the columnist thinks is their salvation, without explaining how -- are vulnerable. Sing along: plummeting classified revenue, falling retail ad revenue, declining audience, new competition. This creates a competitive void into which blogs and the internet can march... unless newspapers stop trying to keep them at bay, and instead finds the ways to embrace and take advantage of this great new source of news, information, and diverse viewpoints. See a new newsroom.

Helping Hoder

Helping Hoder

: As I mentioned below, Hossein Derakhshan is headed back to Iran, were he started the blog revolution, because he believes the election will cause the regime to behave and not jail and torture him. He's asking for our help: Donate to help pay for his trip and if he does get detained, Hoder has a list of our responsibilities.

My relationship with Hoder and the Iranian weblog society -- and following that, the Iraqi blogging scene and a new world opened up by this medium -- began the day before another Iranian blogger and friend of Hoder's, Sina Motallebi, was arrested in Tehran. Sina credits the attention bloggers brought to his case to his release. So take Hoder's request seriously.

Hoder promises to report and take videos and pictures... " if I can find a wi-fi hotspot in jail."

A long trip to the polls

A long trip to the polls

: Hossein Derakhshan is returning to Iran for the first time since he started the blog revolution there to witness the election. It's a brave move, considering the things that have been said about him in regime papers, but with the whole world watching, let's hope he is safe.

Tough love

Tough love

: I love Technorati like a brother. But my reaction to the new design is that I'd put less effort into design and more into performance.

The distributed newsroom

The distributed newsroom

: The Guardian has a good roundup of what it calls independent media hubs -- places where people can share and remix media. We used to call that a newsroom, only now it's freed of the room. See also the New Newsroom post below.

What is truth?

What is truth?

: Vin Crosbie quotes Slate's Jacob Weisberg at the Editor & Publisher echo chamber: "Newspaper editors publish a story once they think it is true. Bloggers publish a story to see if it is true." I don't think that's true. For the implication is that bloggers don't care about the truth. No, the real difference is that bloggers are more open to the notion that a story can be corrected and improved after it is published. But that doesn't make for such a neat quote.

Once a snob...

Once a snob...

: Kurt Andersen, the original snarkmeister, gets snotty about blogs.

As Mom used to say, 'I don't care who started it'

As Mom used to say, 'I don't care who started it'

: A little more than two weeks ago, I got to thinking that small is the new big and I started making notes for a post about that (yes, I sometimes actually do think before I type). And then I saw two great posts about bad, big companies and good, small ones by Seth Godin that backed up that notion. I linked to them and said I was working on a post called "small is the new big." Then, before you know it, there was Seth writing a post under that very headline. My fault for waiting too long to write mine. But I linked to his and wrote my small is big post. He wrote another post on the topic; I linked to that and found more legs in the notion here and here. . I linked to others who carried on the riff. And lots of others riffed as well. Yesterday, Fred Wilson said he doesn't know who started it. I say it doesn't much matter.

But I just got a most gracious email from Seth saying it's cool that we had the same thought the same way at the same time. He nicely joked that I could grab the book title.

I wrote back and said, great minds and all that: "If there's one lesson old-media guys learn in this new medium it's that we can no longer publish/broadcast/converse/share on our schedule, for somebody's sure to be ahead of us. But in the end, that's what so fun and wonderful about this medium, isn't it: We feel as if we're sharing brains. And that's better than hiding them."

And that is what is so nice about that moment in our very open medium: We were seeing the world the same way and sharing similar thoughts and didn't worry -- as we would have in the old media world -- about who was first or who "owned" the idea but only about adding to it.

Seth and I are finally having lunch next week. And that is the best part: Goood ideas make good friends.

Agree/disagree

Agree/disagree

: Gallup has put up a bunch of handy RSS feeds of polls. The only problem is that some of it goes to pay pages ($95/year). But it's good for pulse-checking. I also subscribe to Polling Report, which aggregates many results in ongoing topics.

Are you a thyroid patient?

Are you a thyroid patient?

: Mary Shoman, who writes the excellent thyroid guide at About.com (where, remember, I'm consulting: full disclosure) is looking for a thyroid patient in the New York area to appear on a big national TV show to talk about treatment. Go to her post to see the requirements. It so happens that I am a thyroid patient myself (having waved goodbye to half of mine... that's how I know Mary's site) but I don't meet any of those requirements, save for living in Jersey. Pass the word, please.

Aw, shucks

Aw, shucks

: Australian blogger Paul Edwards writes a post sure to warm the hearts of and get links from many a Yank blogger today: Thanks, America.

Bloguspat

Bloguspat

: I can't imagine anyone get mad at Chuck Olsen. But someone did in a rather spectacular overreaction. Auteurs, you know.

FM unwrapped

FM unwrapped

: John Battelle is finally taking the veil off the worst kept secret in blogdom and medialand: His FM blog ad network.

: Jason Calacanis live-blogged it.

After my own heart(burn)

After my own heart(burn)

: How could I have missed it? A blog devoted to burgers.

New-fangled ads

New-fangled ads

: Via John Battelle, a survey of advertisers says: "64% would advertise in blogs, 57% would place RSS ads." OK, easier said than sold. But still, don't think that blogs and RSS have ad cooties; they have ad heat and the real question is how to capture that and make it happen....

The Los Alamos whistleblower

The Los Alamos whistleblower

: The Los Alamos blog that has been dogging management there is covering the brutal beating of a fellow whistleblower.

Apple's enemies

Apple's enemies

: Ernie Miller asks when and whether Apple will sue CNet for revealing company secrets the way it sued some humble bloggers.

But I don't

But I don't

: Craig Newmark reacts to a nice New York Times feature on Craig's List and the observation that he is hubris-free with this plea: "I need you to tell me when I'm full of shit."

Video Skype

Video Skype

: I'm putting this here just so I can find it when I need it: There's a video plug-in for Skype, at last.

Join the iParty

Join the iParty

: The CBC is developing a show about bloggers using the voices of podcasters.

Half-baked

Half-baked

: Fred Wilson (second link today) talks about fully baked vs. half-baked blog posts. I prefer half-baked.

Fully baked is a lecture or a book or a show. It says, "I'm done. Eat what I tell you."

Half-baked is a conversation. It says, "Join in. Add some pepperoni before it's done, make it better, make it right for you. Enjoy."

Old media necessitated fully baked thought and expression: You had to "finish" it and get it "right" before you used precious paper, production, and distribution and you couldn't go back and do it over again; you couldn't rethink.

New media allows half-baked notions to be distributed and shared and improved upon and rethought.

At the end of the day, I believe, the half-baked approach will end up with better thought, thanks to the conversation.

Of course, quality is still a factor. A stupid notion, whether fully or half-baked, is still a stupid notion and no amount of remixing or baking can fix it. Bad sauce makes bad pizzas.

And, of course, as a writer myself, I don't mean to say that everything should be a committee product (in fact, what I like best about blogging is that there isn't an editor standing between me and you, my real editors). I don't want to read a novel written by committee. I've seen many a movie and TV show and magazine story wrecked by too much collaboration. Yes, the individual's voice and viewpoint and talent still has value and too many chefs can ruin the broth.

But what's interesting about this notion of fully v. half-baked is that it addresses an assumption behind all media, an essential snobbery that, by necessity, got cooked into old media: The limitations of old production and distribution -- the fact that someone owned the printing press and paid for the paper and would not allow anything to get onto that paper until it fit his definition of baked -- meant that we all thought something wasn't good or right until it was declared done by someone with the power to do so: The tyranny of the chef.

But when you think about it, that attitude reveals such hubris: believing that a thought can ever be done, that one author or one editor can know more than all their readers is so egotistical.

That is the essential attitude shift that must happen in media, especially news media: Discussion is often more intelligent than content. Paraphrasing Dan Gillmor, the audience knows more than the author.

Once we in big media stop acting as if we can fully bake anything, as if we know best, as if we are the only authorities, as if we're finished and the story is done when it's printed, then the public we serve should stop shooting at us when we screw up. If we provide valuable reporting and experience and resources but admit we're human and are not the final authority, if we join in the conversation that's already going on around us -- the remixing of our news, the baking of it -- then both we and the public we serve can learn the real value of collaboration.

In the end, itreally is just a simple attitude shift: It says that when we publish something, we know it's not fully baked; we expect it to be debated and challenged and remixed and improved; we welcome that.

Half-baked is better.

: Hey, commenters, don't get too literal about "half-baked," as if it means numbskulled. It's Fred's creative wording and I like it and it's not to say that one puts out numbskulled ideas. It says that any idea we put out is likely to be unfinished and the key is admitting that.

RSS for life

RSS for life

: From the comments below, the Misanthropyst has a fine suggestion for the killer RSS ap:

Wanna make a million dollars? Help supermarkets and local merchants provide rss feeds for items they are having specials and sales on. Ask your wife if she'd subscribe -- I bet the answer would be, "In a heartbeat."

Bad Google

Bad Google

: Jason finds a site that blocks Google's Web Accelerator and enumerates its evils. I didn't like it either.

Two kinds of content

Two kinds of content

: Fred Wilson says that blogging software is the future of websites. I agree but added this:

I think it's half the platform. The other is RSS. In the job I left yesterday, one of my undone projects was to convert the architecture of local news sites entirely to RSS: Everything is a feed. So a home page is a feed of latest and biggest stories. A town page is a feed of newspaper headlines, blog headlines, classified ads with the latest listings in the town, forum thread headlines, weather, and so on.

Looked at that way, there are two kinds of content in the world: reference (fed by wiki so it can be updated) and feed (rss, fed by blog software).

The former is lasting but needs to be updated; the latter -- news, conversation -- is timely and flows. Both need to be found.

So the next layer you need is how to get to the content. That has been navigation and taxonomy. It may -- emphasis on may -- shift to search and folksonomy. We'll see.

: Oh, and, of course, it's not just content. It's conversation. Links are, obviously, the other means of finding the stuff we want: linksonomy.

birdie told us

A birdie told us

: Henry Copeland has the scoop on Arianna Huffington and anonymous. sources.

A simple request

A simple request

: Hey, Washington Post, now that you own Slate, can you do something simple for me: Get Kaus an RSS feed. You can put the rest on RSS but, believe me, I know how hard it can be to get these things done. So a step at a time: Start with Mickey. These days, if it's not on RSS, I miss it.

Trust the remix, trust the remixers

Trust the remix, trust the remixers

: I find it ironic that Lawrence Lessig is fretting about people doing bad things in blogs. Lessig is the man who wants to free up content from the control of copyright so people can do with it what they want. Well, take the good with the bad. And -- most importantly -- if you have faith in the people, you should assume that we can tell the good from the bad. Says Lessig:

But the more I've talked about this with observers and friends, the more I think the real fear is not bloggers tempted by ad revenues. It is instead the emergence of the equivalent of tabloids in blog-space: commercial entities whose sole purpose is to generate ad revenue, who do that by being as ridiculous and extreme as possible.

The danger here is that the conflict has returned. Just as the British tabloids care little about the truth in their path to selling papers, commercial blog-loids care little about the truth in trying to attract eyeballs. And it is here that the cycle turn vicious: for the amateur space feeds the professional troll by careful and repeated efforts to show that claims made are false or outrageous. If you're paid by the click, who cares why people click.

Well, we already have Drudge and Sploid and they are tabloids and they try to make money. But if they -- or anyone -- lies all the time, people with good sense -- which is most of us, no? -- will figure it out and stay away and bloggers will not waste their time debunking the liars and advertisers will stay away, too. Have some faith in the people and in the market you want to free up, professor.

Edwards' vlog

Edwards' vlog

: John Edwards is going to start vlogging this week, with the help of the Rocketboom crew. Amanda Congden interviewed him for the first and from then on, anyone can send in a video question that he'll answer on video.

The world is a city desk and all the people merely correspondents

The world is a city desk and all the people merely correspondents

: Finally got some couch time and read Glenn Reynolds' good Wall Street Journal piece about how anyone can and will report.

Podcast open the doors

Podcast open the doors

: Ernie Miller asks a great question: Why isn't Congress podcasting itself? Every committee and debate should be available for us to hear.

I'll take it down a few levels and suggest that every town board and school board should be podcast. I've long wanted to see local services enable citizens to video these meetings because, ironically, the very reason I care most about what happens in them -- I have kids -- is the reason I can't attend them. But I'd watch them, I used to say.

Well, who needs to watch them? They just sit and drone. Listening would work well -- especially when podcasts can be searched and indexed.

We should all storm our town halls and demand podcasts (and then politely explain what podcasts and iPods and the internet are).

Vive les blogs

Vive les blogs

: Stephen Baker reports, thanks to Loic Le Meur, that blogs were a factor in the French non to the EU constitution.

: I"m listening to the BBC's Up All Night now, before going on, and they're talking about just this.

Hoder, Wired

Hoder, Wired

: Wired magazine's piece about our friend Hossein Derakhshan, by Jeff Howe, is now online.

How to share

How to share

: The BBC is offering discounts to freelancers for courses on how to do TV. The Beeb has been, perhaps, the most generous big-media operation -- with its expertise -- when it comes to training people how to do what they do. As has been reported previously, they are also looking at starting a journalism school.