Okay, it has been a bit of time since weblogs inc was snatched up by AOL, turning Jason Calcannis into the mover and shaker he always dreamed of, but as more and more traditional publications seek ways to incorporate blogs, let's look at the rarely viewed dark side (even more amusing because I'm blogging about it!)
Four Problems with Blogs
Quality Let's be honest here: What blog delivers good, fact-checked correct-spelling-grammar-proper completed-thoughts every day the way a newspaper or magazine does?
Consistency Friend of mine is a food maniac. One day she was having a crappy day, and she went to a favorite blog to read about produce, or sauteeing, or other cheering topics. That was the day the blogger had to put her cat to sleep.
Blogs are reflections of the whole person, no matter how focused they are on a single topic. I remember getting a sad comment on this blog saying "I liked this blog better when it was about design." and I thought, dude, I'm sick of design.
Constancy How many times have you read on someone's blog "sorry I haven't' posted for awhile"... .
Passivity While occasionally some blogs have featured "guest bloggers" a blog is almost always me talking to you. Or a closed group talking to you.
So I'll take half a second to define "problem" because none of these things are problems when you accept that a blog is the public diary of a single person to friends, family, colleagues or even fellow travelers. But these are problems if you are an advertiser, and if it's a problem for an advertiser, it's a problem for any blogger who wants to go pro.
Quality: what does it do to your brand to be seen next to profanity, or radical positions?
Consistancy: how can you guarentee relevence when you don't know when a blogger is suddenly going to go apesh*t over a president's policy change?
Constancy: it's just too big a hassle to chase blogs with small audiences, especially if they are going to burn out regularly.
Passivity: Switching costs are nothing when the audience isn't involved.
Right now we're seeing a few "pro" bloggers who are changing the nature of blogs by adding editors and keeping things consistent. But are these really blogs anymore, or simply the equivalent of a newspaper column with a shorter word count?
User-generated content is an anathema to most quality advertisers (take a tour thorough Myspace to see who is comfortable with advertising on user-generated content.... and don't forget not to click on "Your PC is infected!") One has to wonder how Federated Media and its ilk will be addressing this issue.
Without advertiser or other revenue, blogs remain in the hobbiest state, unable to hire editors, fact checkers, or even assure time to keep publishing regularly. Readers must continually hop from blog to blog as one ascends and another descends.
Right now there is a race to address these issues. Some entrapreneurs are trying to agregate then use the crowd behavior to rate, others are focusing on adding quality controls in order to be advertiser friendly, and the bloggers themselves are working on experiments from tipjars to sponsorships. The ordinary voice is too interesting and too real to ignore, but how to sustain it, grow it and provide for it is a mystery so far.
"YouTube has been thriving with Comedy Central content -- probably the most widespread TV brand on the site-- so this will be the most noticeable content removal to date. "
As far as I can tell from the stories, Comedy Central has wisely left the YouTube phenomenon alone. I suspect it was not them who asked for it to be taken down. The mysterious "third parties" who asked for the material to be removed... could that be Google's legal department?
In any case, I was at a Baychi the other day watching a panel discuss emergent architecture (panel included the completely clueless, the out-of-date, the deeply misinformed and the single one who had a clue... I'll leave it unnamed, so all four can pretend they are the fourth.) A discussion arose about why YouTube succeeded when its rivals, some with "better" designs did so well. Many panelists waved their hands and said, if we knew we'd be rich. But listening to the audience, which happily included YouTube designers, I think I got a small suspicious of what can help.
DARE TO BE DUMB
Conventional wisdom, conventional best practices lead to conventional solutions. When I worked on Shockwave/Atomfilms so long ago with Carbon IQ, choosing a media player was important (we believed). Having content live on the site in order to build traffic and increase impressions was important. But YouTube stripped away all those worries, made it not only easy to upload and view, but also increased their traffic by not worrying about traffic. Think about how many sites tell you to copy an image to your hard drive, and upload it (are you listening, Amazon?). YouTube brazenly gave away the benefit (traffic) and took the downside (bandwidth cost) to their very great success. Looking at it now, it seems so obvious. But at the time, it took a leap of perspective, a new framing of the problem to achieve.
Flickr enjoyed another such leap. Any user testing you do in the photos space will inform you that "private" should be the default. Yet they defied this point of view (while still allowing users to keep images private as they wished) and built up something no photosite has seen up to now: a community.
In art school we used to say "Understand the rules in order to break them." We've taken the first part to heart; time to consider the second.
So now Comedy Central, who had been enjoying breaking the rules has suffered a loss of an easy promotional device. Who is the fool, the one who gives away content, or the one who doesn't?
"He is transparent, thus will be able to observe easily your sins."
Who says machines don't have a sense of humor?
Once upon a time, publishing (especially newspapers) had a really nifty model. They could serve the public interest and bring useful, educating and entertaining content to the general public by funding it with a simple combination of subscriptions, classifieds and advertising. They even got to the point where they felt comfortable not only giving the public what they wanted, but what the public needed.
Then, slowly for some (but very suddenly for publishers who boasts 150+ year runs) the money wandered off. The classifieds went to places like Craig's list, Match.com and Hotjobs. The web made readers feel that paying for content was unnecessary. Advertisers were already being seduced by TV's rich and sexy messaging.
Knight-Ridder moved to San Jose, in hopes of scenting which way the wind would blow from next; New York Times took a page from Innovator's Dilemma and spun out a digital company to take advantage of the new medium. But still they struggle to hold their place. Kids today just don't like blackened fingers...
The platform is still slipping. Content creation, in particular, is in danger. Sites like Digg, blogs, metafilter and others make their name by pointing at other's work, and adding in the bias of choice (mock the right, jeer the left.) Will the web soon be a series of links pointing to links, half-baked ponderings and opinionated garbage like what you are enjoying now?
I'm surprised how often I see the word "versus" in email. Photoshop vs. illustrator, personas vs. ethnography, email address vs. username, and blogtools vs. CMS. When I was a freshman in art school, I learned a useful word: dichotomy. It was years later I learned phrase "false dichotomy" and I'm wondering how many people have yet to learn it. In particular, I'm thinking of those working in new media/participatory media/social media.
I keep reading how blogs will make traditional publishing irrelevant. I also read how traditional publishing already provides a reliability and consistency that will show blogs to be merely a fad; the geocities of our time. And just over a year ago (I know because my domain registration notice just came) I sat down with friend Lars and added the word false to that particular dichotomy by thinking up PublicSquare.
A dichotomy is defined as "a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities."
1. Almost everybody talks about blogs and big media (usually thinking about New York Times or Fox news, depending on who has annoyed you most recently). But publishing is currently taking the form of a continuum, from blogs to big media, with wikis, jotspot, writerly, writeboards, scoop and many others filling in the space between one maverick vomiting up ideas to a group refining raw facts into something palatable.
2. Mutually exclusive: Bloggers are adding editors, Om Malik for example, and newspapers are adding-- nay, forcing-- reporters to blog. Drupal has blog modules and articles modules and the difference is slight.
3. Contradictory. um. yeah. How contradictory are these two writing forms? When I was looking at them recently, they both depended on one thing for success: a person who can consistently write, and write well. Of course someone who writes every day, but only on their cat's antics and their hair challenges is an aspect of the blog, but is this person really making Arthur Schultzberger tremble in his shoes? A journalist and a (successful) blogger are much of a muchness, except one gets fact checked and edited.
Where revolution is truly happening in my opinion is in the birth of collaborative publishing tools that enable new behaviors in writing, often children of the wiki family. Where blogger and other blog platforms were simply (though certainly impactfully) ways to make writing significantly easier, and came form a long line of tools form the printing press to the electric typewriter to microsoft word. They are all technology to get technology out of the way.
But wikis, writerboard, slashdot and scoop are all trying to get groups to be smart together, to write together and they give birth to a new kind of writing *and* giving voice to one-hit-wonders of authorship.
More on this coming soon... .
Google Co-op - Custom Search Engine
thanks Peter!
Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube - New York Times
A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday.
Designers of all sorts, be they information architects or interaction designers, have a excessive amount of personal identity embedded in their profession. This makes it very hard for them to grow. I've talked about it before... I'm hoping this diagram might shed some light.
Career paths in design seem to fall into a pretty stable path for all the "makers of stuff" professions. You are a n00b, a raw bit of talent, and some company picks you up cheap and gets to teaching you. What they teach you isn't usually to revolutionary, but it provides a good foundation.
Now you get to be a Journeyman. Many young designers call me up asking what they should do next, because they are leaving their company. The answer is typically "go inhouse" to consultants and "go outhouse... er, join a consulting firm" if they are in house. There are things you can only learn by being one place or the other; even somewhere as diverse as Yahoo can't teach you consulting tricks, and no matter how many companies you think you've seen into you don't know them until you've walked a mile in their excel sheets.
So after awhile you get pretty high up the org, and you think, now what? Do I have to become a ... gasp... manager? If you are lucky the company might offer you two choices, manager or senior practitioner (master, in this chart). And now the cycle is complete, right? You can stay in your spot, or twitch back and forth between the two for the rest of your life, right?
Don't be afraid, little sufferer of ADD.... there is hope. Get the f*ck out of the boxes!
Designers get stuck because they are scared of losing their identity, and IA's are certainly among them. How many folks stood up at five minute madness and declared, "I am a IA, and these are my people!" Giving it up means loss of who you are, and who you love, right?
Well, the good news is it ain't so. Lou Rosenfeld, the publisher. Frank Ramirez, the children's book creator. Christina Wodtke, entrepreneur (hey, all of us are in publishing. Well, ya can take the girl out of IA, but...) all will be at the next summit, with our "peeps."
And that's the point. You are you. You know what you know. If I chucked it all tomorrow and became a food writer, well I would certainly organize my articles intelligently.
Don't fear growth. A sapling is a tree, as are old-growth redwoods, and they know it at their core.
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I fear B&A was taken down by some folks not skilled enough to get the CIA. It's a pretty lame site to hack, if you ask me, but I guess some people are bored enough to do anything. Anyhow, we are working to recover.
Drivers on cell phones are as bad as drunks
"We found that people are as impaired when they drive and talk on a cell phone as they are when they drive intoxicated at the legal blood-alcohol limit" of 0.08 percent, which is the minimum level that defines illegal drunken driving in most U.S. states, says study co-author Frank Drews, an assistant professor of psychology. "If legislators really want to address driver distraction, then they should consider outlawing cell phone use while driving."
You can pull over.
You can not answer (voicemail *will* get it)
You can not answer until you get a chance to pull over. Then you can call back.
No one is so important you have to risk your life or the lives of people around you to answer your phone.
Please pass this study on to everyone you know.
