Dave Winer edition.
What he said:
“[T]here’s no point, imho, in responding to people who disagree with things they say I believe but I don’t. If you can’t quote me correctly, don’t expect a response.”
What he meant:
There’s no point in trying to engage me in a discussion, because I will either ignore you if I think you are somehow beneath me or I will engage in self-exegesis to redefine my position.
Tags: blogging, citizen media
DirecTV launches another satellite. Too bad it’s not for more national HD programming. I am starting to like DirecTV less than the cable companies.
Here are lots of old Apple II games online. (via John Dvorak)
Kevin Burton announces Tailrank 2.0.
Digital Photography School has some Halloween photography tips.
Gizmodo has a chart of what the earth would look like over time if all humans vanished.
Mark Evans doesn’t get the virtual world phenomena. I think Second Life is cool, but like everything else at the crossroads of business and the web, people keep trying to make it more than it is. A Reuters office and dedicated reporter in Second Life? Sounds like a momentum play at some new readers to me. I’ll be curious to see if it’s still there in a year.
Warner is right about the latest Walmart/Edelman fiasco. I called it on Sunday and, other than Tony Hung, no one responded (including Steve Rubel, even though I was one of the few not to get on the bash wagon). Why? Because Steve not knowing anything about it wasn’t as juicy as some great conspiracy.
Back in the day, I played a lot of basketball. In fact I remember this one reverse move I put on my lifelong buddy Tommy (who, unlike me, played basketball in college) at some court in Ocean Drive circa 1980. He called it a “made miss,” but it was sweet. If I had a video of that shot, I’d move back to SC just to taunt him with it. The fact that he owned me on the court for the rest of my life would conveniently be omitted.
There is a hoops phrase called a self-check. It means that a player is so bad that you don’t need to guard him. He keeps himself in check by dribbling the ball off his knees or throwing up bricks against the bottom of the rim.
There are a lot of self-checks running around the blogosphere too. Unlike in basketball, however, there is no rim to block their pitiful attempt at a layup, and there is no referee to call traveling as they stumble into a face plant. It’s up to the collective refereeism of the blogosphere to call a foul.
One textbook example of a self-check in the blogosphere is Andrew Keen. Here’s a guy whose tired act is telling his readers until he is blue in the blood that they need journalistic lamas to help them understand the world around them. It’s not that blogs are different than traditional media. It’s not even that blogs are not as reliable as traditional media. It’s that our entire culture is about to be swept away by the horrifying egalitarianism represented by such evil forces as blogs, wikis, social networks and digital media.
The horror.
What makes Andrew an obvious self-check is not merely the fact that he is one of the people who, under his world view, should play the lama part. After all, he’s written a book– on paper. And he’s really smart- just read anything he’s written and he’ll tell you. The rest of us, well let’s just say that we are silly little dunces doing our little equality dance while the world crumbles before our folly.
It’s not merely the blatancy of his position talking and the sweet irony that is his blog that get lost in the flood of big words, dire proclamations and extreme statements.
It’s mainly the fact that he actually makes some good points along the way- points that are completely lost on his audience thanks to unbridled arrogance and condescension. Part of being smart is knowing how to communicate your message to people who don’t agree with you. To persuade, you must first connect.
Andrew makes no effort to connect. Which tells me that he is writing for himself and, perhaps, a few self-important eggheads who already share his views on how stupid everyone else is. When someone is talking solely for themselves or their devotees, there is neither the intent nor the desire to enlighten or persuade. There is only the desire to be heard.
That is a textbook definition of a self-check on any court in which communication is the goal.
I did a new podcast Friday night.
I played some great songs by 5 Chinese Brothers, Asylum Street Spankers, the Bodeans, Blaze Foley, Traffic, Utopia and others. I also played the most beautiful instumental song I have ever heard. The finale was a blues jam by Taj Mahal.
No tech talk, but I did make some book and video recommendations.
Tony Hung on another Walmart, Edelman, sponsored blogging mashup. Here’s his follow-up. I don’t know what if anything Steve knew about all of this, but I can tell you from experience in working at a large organization that (a) he may have known nothing about it, (b) he likely had zero ability to control what senior management at his company did or didn’t do, and (c) no one should try to make him accountable just because he works there, because unless it was his idea, he is not.
Matt Craven on growing a blog. He’s spot on when he says the key is to write a lot. Some other bloggers will reciprocate when you link to them, other won’t. My advice: stop trying to embrace the ones who don’t and pay more attention to the ones that do. Bonus link: Google Blogoscoped on good blog writing style.
Hugh has captured the essence of blogging when you aren’t trying to make a living off of it. Blogging is so much more fun when you aren’t sitting around hoping for a link from Scoble or Doc or Hugh or Kent.
I don’t like Google Reader either. And I find the sharing feature (discussed here by Richard Querin) to be too dilutive of the blog and feed reading experience for me. If you see a link you like, just link to it. The 30 seconds it takes to link to it in a real post serves as a de facto filter to make sure people are sharing interesting content.
Charles Cooper on why he still loves Star Trek. Me too.
Here’s how to carve an amazing jack-o-lantern.
Rick Mahn on the move to online applications and the home network.
Dwight Silverman on the Sony Reader. This is the first post I have ever read that makes me the least bit interested in an e-book reader. The company that puts one in a book-looking form will be the one that gets my money. I read the DiVinci Code on a Tablet PC and it was OK, but I haven’t read a book that way since.
Extreme positions are scary to me, because there is no willingness to see the other side of the argument. I am big on animal rights, but PETA is making all animal rights people look like idiots. I’m going to go find a cockroach…and eat it.
I meant to write an entire post agreeing with Seth Godin’s excellent take on museums and marketing, but I never got around to it. Museums are losing the mindshare of our kids because they feel too much like school and not enough like fun. I say amen to this:
I can’t remember the last time a museum visit made my cry, made me sad or made me angry (except at the fact that they don’t try hard enough).
Nick Carr and Dave Winer are arguing about something having to do with bloggers, Iraq and murdered journalists.
I think blogs are important ways to distribute certain kinds of information, but they are not even close to being a substitute for traditional media for certain news topics. People have a distrust of old, established media when it comes to political topics- do you really think people are going to embrace a bunch of online diaries by people they don’t know as a reliable substitute for the Washington Post and CNN? Of course not. It’s farcical to suggest they will.
I think the idea that blogs, as important to a few of us as they are, will replace traditional journalism is straight out of Monty Python.
“Go away or I shall blog about you a second time.”
I also think it’s ironic that Dave is taking the role as the champion of citizen media. One of the oft-cited benefits of citizen media is the interactive nature of blogging. Dave rarely engages people outside of his inner circle, which makes him more like the old media he is trying to replace than the new media he claims to embrace.
The other fact that seems to be overlooked here is that people who risk their lives going to Iraq to write news are generally getting paid for it. There is an assumption by some of the blogging evangelists that making a living is less important that spouting off about the latest Google acquisition. It is a whole lot harder to make a living blogging that some people want to admit.
Which means that most of us who blog don’t do it as a living. As Nick points out, it’s one thing to toss up a post or two about Iraq from the comfort of our living rooms, but it’s another ball of wax to risk your life in the name of a blog post. I wish more people read my blog too, but I’m not quite ready to risk my life to make it happen.
Blogging as a content management platform may, in fact, be the future of news distribution, but it won’t be guys like Dave, or Nick, or me writing the content. It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now- they’ll simply be doing it in a different, more immediate way.
Ben Metcalfe has a thorough analysis of Deutch-gate. I have no personal knowledge about this situation and have never read Barry’s blog, but it seems to me this is just another case of using value generated by customers to make a buck in true Web 2.0 fashion. Do all the Google hating YouTube users have similar grounds to complain?
David Krug has a series on the disappearance of David Krug. If this is true, this is an amazing and frightening story.
Wolfgang’s Vault has acquired Tower Records’ Tower.Com domain. If you like classic rock, you simply have to listen to Vault Radio.
Mashable on the distribution of spyware via social networks. This is another reason why I do not like these social network sites. The main reason, of course, is that but for the desire of developers to centralize our content so they can make money off of it, the blogosphere would be the only social network needed.
Robert Gale links to video clips of the best of Homer Simpson. Funny stuff.
Wally Bangs found a very cool album shootout on YouTube.
In a lawsuit that should be required reading for bloggers, a Florida jury has awarded $11.3M in damages to a woman who says she was defamed on an internet message board.
Legal scholars say this verdict could have an impact on bloggers. From the Washington Times article linked above:
“This case sends a signal that if you were going to write blog entries, that you need to, like any other journalist, be aware of what you write,” said Michael J. Songer, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a partner at D.C. law firm Crowell & Moring LLP. “It could have a chilling effect when people have to sit down and worry about losing their house.”
There is at least some potential good news for bloggers. According to experts, there is a distinction between content written by a blogger and content posted by readers in comments.
Robert O’Neil, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, said in the article linked above that while newspapers are liable for all published content, bloggers and Web site operators are liable for only their own content and not that of those who post comments.
There are circumstances that mitigate against the implications of this case for bloggers, such as the fact that the defendant, who had been driven from her home by Hurricane Katrina, didn’t appear in court to defend herself. Nevertheless, this is a relevant factor to consider as the distinction between bloggers and traditional journalists continues to blur.
I just started watching the Firefly season one and only DVDs. This is a great show- one of many great shows that seem to get cancelled too soon.
It’s odd, since Firefly is a science fiction show, but it reminds me more than a little of Deadwood. The music is very similar. The titles are similar, and the cinematography is similar. There are horses in both opening credits.
David Boyd is the cinematographer for both.
I highly recommend Firefly. It’s available via Amazon and Netflix.
Nick Carr has a fantastic post today on the tension between bloggers and traditional print media. He discusses in great detail some of problems and perspectives that make it difficult for bloggers and traditional journalists to appreciate and trust each other.
Read his post, and think about what he is saying. Regardless of which side of the illusory fence you think you’re on, no one can deny the truth of this:
When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility.
To do otherwise is to claim a position of superiority that is ludicrous on its face. Blogs have many advantages over traditional print media. Let’s not obfuscate them with illusions of grandeur.
If we, as bloggers, want to be taken seriously, then we have to act seriously. We cannot ignore the standards that “evolved over the years in order to temper the freedoms that could lead, and sometimes did lead, to the abuse of the public trust” just because we have the freedom to post whatever we want whenever we want.
As the traditional press moves online (I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years), it will bring those standards along. At that point, the issue becomes not hard copy verses on-screen, or even now verses tomorrow morning. It becomes reliable and self-governed verses unreliable and chaotic.
With freedom comes responsibility, and with progress come challenges.
Some way, somehow, bloggers need to develop a code of ethics that legitimizes blogging as a reliable, and conflict free, information medium.
Once that happens, the real-time and distributed nature of blogging will turn what is now perceived by many as a disadvantage into a tremendous advantage.
I hope this happens sooner rather than later.
Tags: blogging, blogs, citizen journalism
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