It’s the control over the distribution of the writing.

Scott Rosenberg, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads, has more today on the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

The audio from the meetup can be heard via Andrew Keen’s AfterTV podcast (thanks to Sabine for the heads up via a Comment). It is a little over an hour’s worth of mostly interesting conversation, and if you doubt that Steve Gillmor has the best handle on the blogosphere, one listen will erase any doubt. He is one smart, to the point dude. My Gillmor Gang envy keeps on growing.

Anyway, Scott is responding to a post by long-time blogger Rebecca Blood in response to Scott’s initial report from the Berkeley meetup.

Rebecca’s Take

Rebecca’s point is that traditional publishing is about printing books and articles they can sell, which has little to do with finding the most well written material:

When publishers evaluate a book proposal, they don’t ask if the work is true or original or insightful or well-written. First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don’t think they can, they pass. If they believe there is a market and that they can effectively market the work, they buy it.

Scott’s Take

Scott mostly agrees with Rebecca, but draws a distinction between the business side of publishing and the editorial side:

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want.

My Take

First of all, as someone who has written a ton of newspaper and trade journal articles, my experience has been that most editors are looking for something interesting to publish, period. Perhaps this isn’t the case at the New York Times and its ilk, but most publications are hungry for stuff to publish. Whether they will admit that or not is another story, but it’s true.

Initially, there is a process that is at least somewhat designed to locate (a) something well written that (b) fits the focus of the publication.

Veteran writers know the focus of the publications they write for and can generally hit the nail on the head focus-wise on the first try. If you’re an unknown, the bar is higher and the writing must be more compelling to pass muster. If you are a recognized name or authority, the bar gets lowered a little. Perhaps a little ironic, perhaps not. But true.

I’m no John Markoff (and far, far from it), but when I write an article, I have little to no doubt I can get it published by one publication or another. More times than not, it’s the first one I offer it to.

The first couple of articles are sort of tough, but after you’ve been doing it a while, you realize it’s just not that hard to get publications to use your stuff.

Granted, I am not writing to make a living (it’s more of a marketing thing for me), but I have been doing it for a long time and I have to believe my experience mirrors that of many others.

But It’s Not About the Writing

My bottom line on all of this, however, is that everyone has it a little wrong. We’ve been talking about the right things, but not from the correct angle.

Old media is not in crisis because we are writing our blogs. Old media is in crisis because of a two step process is taking away its stranglehold on the distribution of writing. The easy analogy is the record labels and the way they grasp at the catless bag in the face of new distribution channels for music that bypass the labels. Like traditional newspapers, the record labels are in the twilight of their relevance.

So back to the newspapers.

First eBay and Craigslist take away a chunk of the beloved classified ads and that long-standing revenue stream.

Now bloggers (which include not only morons like us, but also geniuses like Andrew Keen) are chipping away at the content distribution model. There is a lessening of the need for a middleman to direct content to us. We can produce, publish, find, read and reply to it ourselves.

And this trend is in its infancy. It will continue and, if the traditional newspapers don’t adapt, it will make them economically infeasible. That’s part of the basis of my 8 Steps to Save the Merc post.

So it’s not about the writing, and it’s not about the quality of the writing. It’s about the loss of control of the distribution of the writing.

If there was any hope that Andrew Keen was only kidding a few weeks ago when he laid this nugget on us:

If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’,

such hope was crushed by Keen’s statements at the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

Christopher Carfi posts a report from that gathering that makes it clear that Keen is still preaching that blogging allows idiots too much of the soapbox that should be reserved for the old media elite.

If I’d been there and managed not to hurl all over my laptop, I would have raised my hand and asked him two questions:

(a) Who decides who is elite? Is merely a press pass from a newspaper evidence of elite status or is there more to it?

(b) Are you one of the elite? If so, who anointed you such? And if not, aren’t you adding to the problem by having a blog?

The first thing I ask myself when someone tries to create a line of demarcation (elite, non-elite, etc.) is “who decides where the line goes” and “who decides who decides where the line goes.” Those two questions will help you cut through more bullshit than any other questions you could ask.

Scott Rosenberg has a report on the CyberSalon as well, which contains some past and present Keen quotes:

The purpose of our media and culture industries is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.

What is the value in sharing experiences? I grow weary of your scribblings.

Clearly this guy is either the most arrogant person to ever poke at a keyboard or he’s found an angle and is going to ride it as far as it will take him. I don’t know him, but he certainly seems to have come upon a recipe of arrogance, big fancy words and outlandish statements that gets him a lot of attention.

My grandmother used to tell me that arrogance was a distraction to mask insecurity, but she wasn’t part of the elite media, so what did she know.

Scott sums up the recent non-conversation very well:

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

In the interest of cooking the whole pancake, let me say that I agree with some of what Andrew says on his blog, particularly the Web 2.0 stuff. He has this need to make sure you know how smart he thinks he is, but once you filter out the extra noise, a lot of what he says is spot on. And, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, he can be very funny (as in his MySpace take).

But he’s completely off base on the whole elite media business.

Oddly enough, my hunch is that he knows it.

Stowe Boyd nails the whole noisy blogosphere thing. He says it perfectly. There’s nothing I can add so let me quote reverently one passage:

It has become the conventional wisdom to reel off those sorts of pronouncements in conference halls and hallways, and lament the loss of… what, exactly? A halcyon era when the front page of the regional paper and the news anchors on the three major channels fed us their take on the news? A simpler, more bucolic blogosphere a few years back when only a few hundred people were posting?

And his conclusion is even better.

Stowe’s post has my vote for post of the year so far. Go read it.

If there’s anything I understand less than all these conferences and unconferences and all the fuss over who gets to speak and who doesn’t, it’s the thinktank. I imagine it as a gathering of navel gazers, with a big dose of arrogance thrown in.

So all these brainiacs are sitting around thinking about the next mensa convention, when all of the sudden the silence is broken by a high pitched, nasal sound.

Brainiac One: “I’ve got it! Everyone else in the world who thinks that net neutrality is a good idea is wrong! Net neutrality is bad! Yeah, that’s it. Bad. Bad, I tell you!”

Brainiac Two: “Well, if everyone says it’s good and we say it’s good too, then what good is our thinktank?”

Brainiac Three: “Good point, Rothschild, we must do out part to eradicate net neutrality. Let’s all think about how we can do that.”

[hours and hours of tense silence]

Brainiac Two: “I have it! Let’s write a report that says net neutrality is stealing! Let’s throw some words in there like regulatory and infrastructure, and, if possible, a few latin phrases.”

Brainiac One: “Yes, if we publish said report, people will talk about it and they will bow down before our tiding.”

Janitor (who has a masters degree, but not mutliple PhD’s) [looks up from sweeping the floor]: “Yeah, and that there will also compy with that durned old Rule of the Reallies becaus’n some o’ dose idgits will thunk it’s wrong!”

Brainiac Three: “Harcourt, go take out the trash and let us smart guys do the thinking. Besides, we are above publicity. It would be beneath us to take an absurd position just for the attention we would get.”

Brainiac Four: “Fellows, I urge that we table this important discourse for an hour as our navels need a break.”

Deconstructing Dave

So Dave and Scoble (still on his Memeorandum hiatus) were talking. They agreed that the blogosphere has become as flammable as mailing lists and usenet newsgroups. I don’t really agree with that, but this isn’t a poll.

Dave says there are some topics that you can’t talk about without inciting a flame-war, and he does his best not to incite one by not mentioning what those topics are. At least not directly.

Then he says there aren’t many people doing the flaming, but that they control discourse because they control who gets to “speak at the conferences.”

Ah, conferences. Camps, mashups, gatherings, happening, Techcrunches. We’re back on the “my nerd camp is better than your nerd camp thing,” with an ironic twist of Gatekeeping thrown in for good measure.

I have some questions about these conferences that I hope someone will answer for me.

Maybe these Conferences are…Different

But let me digress just a little. I typically give between 15-20 speeches a year. Not in Mike Arrington‘s back yard- I’ll never make it on that invitation list. Rather, I speak at conferences, seminars and conventions about boring things like real estate development and the music business. These events are attended by people in the business, but not really because they are the place to be seen or because they are more fun than a party at Mike’s place.

The truth is that people attend them primarily to meet the continuing education requirements mandated by their licensing state. Sure, there’s a lot of networking at some of the big ones, but most of the time getting required continuing education hours is the focus.

Of course, this guarantees an audience as people who would prefer to be elsewhere have to get so many hours of continuing education a year.

I speak at these events not because I think they’re more fun than Disneyland, but because sometimes people hear me speak and then hire me to do their legal work. It’s marketing, plain and simple.

The Cost of Being Seen

Which brings me back to the conferences Dave is talking about. Since he is talking about flaming in the context of the blogosphere, I assume these conferences are related at least in some material way to blogging and the blogosphere.

Who goes to these things? Do they pay lots of money to attend? Is it like a geek Oscar party where it not the party but the being invited that counts? Are there actual customers in attendance or only vendors and journalist types? Who are the customers of a conference about blogging? Isn’t it a little like preaching to the choir?

How many people attend these things? Is there a big group of people who travel from one to the next like some sort of Grateful Geek nation? Are there Daveheads? Is Dave a bigger celebrity than Ken? If they played checkers, who would win?

Do the people who attend these conferences have jobs? Is going to these conferences a part of their job? Do their companies pay for them to go to these conferences? Can I get a gig like that?

OK, so a lot of that is tongue in cheek.

But I don’t get the turf wars that seem to be ongoing over these conferences, camps, mashups, whatever the unnecessary synonym of the day is. What is the turf that someone is trying to protect? And why?

And One More Thing

And here’s another thing, what kind of conference lets somebody flame someone else from the podium without giving the recipient a chance to respond? I’ve never been to nerd camp but I have logged hundreds of hours behind the podium and I have never once witnessed anything like that- and if you think the egos at nerd camp are bigger than the ones at law or music camp, think again.

In fact, I have seen sponsors make time for someone who wasn’t on the agenda to present an opposing view point. How can we triangulate from a single data point?

Unless these conference are more cage match than college, anyone who lets people stand up and trash someone else just because they don’t get along isn’t doing a very good job of running a conference.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

I don’t understand about 80% of what Dave and Scoble were talking about that got distilled into Dave’s post, but I still agree with Dave that once the issue becomes one of personality instead of issues, the conversation has been irreparably tainted and it is time to find someone else to talk to.

I enjoy the conversational nature of the blogosphere, and I particularly enjoy hearing someone explain why I need to rethink my position about things. Otherwise it’s just one big echo chamber. But some people just can’t handle disagreement, and so anyone who disagrees must be stupid or evil. I just tune those folks out, which makes them even madder. Shake the scorpion a little and it will sting itself to death. And all that.

So Give Me the Goods

What am I missing about these conferences that gets everybody in a tither?

UPDATE: Christopher Carfi taught me most of what I have been able to gather about these conferences via this excellent post, which I came across just now. I still don’t really know what an unconference is. Is is like 7-Up?

Jim McGee talks about triangulation and the citizen media movement represented by the blogosphere.

I have always tended to believe the consistencies that arise among competing forces, particularly when those forces are non-cooperative with each other and have non-parallel goals. Jim talks about how a wide and diverse collection of viewpoints can help you navigate through the often noisy and conflicting blogosphere.

Jim’s post is thought provoking, and the article he wrote for the Enterprise Systems Journal (linked in his post) is as well.