Blogging

Haven’t heard from riverbend since October. Anybody know if she’s okay?

I thought of her after I read this.

I’ve now passed 20,000 shots on Flickr. When doing that few things please me more than finding out that one of them now illustrates its subject on Wikipedia. (Where I remain a stub, by the way. I don’t mind. Wikipedia entries about living folks are too often wrong.)

Here’s another. I know there are more, but not how to find them.

But that’s not the point, which is that the primary source of media now is each other. We’re rebuilding everything back up from Layer Zero. That’s us.

While stading in Harvard Square yesterday, taking pictures of NSTAR workers fixing whatever it was that caused the underground fire there last Friday, a guy on a bike comes up and says, “YouTube. Just look up Harvard Square fire. Some great footage.”

He didn’t say, “Tune in Channel 4 at 6pm.”

Here are the results.

I hope that answers Chris Pirillo’s question.

Unrelated…

A few minutes ago I transfered all the photos I took yesterday while biking, driving and walking around Cambridge. Got a lot of great ones, including shots of the work at Harvard Square, Spring on The Yard, sunset on railroad tracks, friends at a restaurant, family doing fun stuff…

Then I put the SD card back in the camera and re-formatted it.

Then I discovered I had failed to transfer the pictures.

I’m still bummed.

And that doesn’t even cover yesterday’s other screw-ups.

In the midst of which the doctor told me I still have chest pain because my lung isn’t done healing and I should give it more exercise.

Anyway, enjoy the footage. The longest. The best.

Bill Moyers on Rev. Wright (via Dave):

Well, there were stories at their times about Fallwell, Robertson and McCain & Hagee. They weren’t as big as Obama and Wright, but they were still stories.

Indeed, we need honest conversation sabout race. I thought Barack Obama’s speech on the subject right after the Wright mess first broke was an excellent opener for lots of conversations, many of which are still going on.

We need honest conversations about gender too. A couple days ago my wife caught an interview on NPR with a voter in North Carolina who regretted that the choice among democratic presidential candidates had come down to a black man and a woman — and that he’d prefer the former over the latter. Of course, that was just one voter, but still: what does that say? Other things being equal, is sexism a bigger handicap to a female candidate than race is to a black candidate? Before I heard that, I hadn’t considered the possibility. Nor the possibility that voters in the U.S. might be less favoring of women candidates than voters in Israel, the U.K., Germany and India, all of which have elected women as heads of state. Something more to think and talk about, if we can possibly get past the personalities at hand.

The Wright-Obama story, however, isn’t just about race. It’s about stories. It’s about the reason we need to “beware the terrible simplifiers”. Because simplification is what journalists do.

Even the best reporters don’t just communicate facts. They organize those facts into stories. That’s what they’re assigned to write, or to show on TV, or report on the radio, and that’s what they do. And they do it because stories are by nature interesting. They are, I believe, the base format of human interest. Here’s how I described that format in an earlier post:

In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger asks, Where are Obama’s Friends? The story, in Henninger’s words: “supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry”. (He doesn’t mention Bill Moyers, who certainly qualifies now.)

We need to remember that all stories are simplifications. Sometimes they are terrible, and sometimes not. But still, they always veer toward the simple, because that’s what’s most interesting.

Back on December 11, 2005 — long before there were blogs, but not long after I learned to write in HTML — I posted Microsoft + Netscape: Why the Press Needs to Snap Out of its War-Coverage Trance. (It was one of the many articles I failed to sell to a magazine, but still managed to post on the Web.) The bottom lines:

Actually, it’s typical journalism. More than a dozen years later, it’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Connie Bensen: As a Community Manager the Cluetrain Manifesto provides the foundation for my philosophies & underlines the relevance of my work…

Stephen Carl Brooks: I like to think that the war is not lost to turn marketing into an honourable profession if we can use the technology now available to us to return to the time when you knew your butcher, baker and sausage-maker by their first names, and they knew you and your preferences.

Papers are endangered. But I’m not sure the same is true about the collection, editing and printing of news. Or of journalism at its best (as well as its worst, which will always abound).

Marc (Andreessen, not Canter — from down here it’s so easy to confuse these tall guys) has started a serial posting on the subject of newspapers. It led me to revisit my advice for newspapers, which I first offered in ten-point form a little over a year ago.

It’s gratifying to see many papers following advice in numbers 1 through 6…

But still coming up short on the last three:

So I just went to the other Marc’s site, and whoa! Dig the title of his latest post: How to build the mesh - #4: the Live Web. Way(s) to go!

Here’s where I wrote about The Live Web in 2005. Marc does a nice job of bringing the whole thing up to date. In that piece I give credit to my son Allen for coming up with the term in the first place, back in 2003 as I recall.

Hope it finally catches on.

And a hat tip to Chip Hoagland for getting me started on this.

When a blog comment to an ancient post comes into moderation and it has no relevance to that post, and the English is awful, I’m figuring it’s a splog (spam blog) comment. So I kill it.

The latest one killed went, question: How many guys ( MARRIED) feel that all they do is for not? eg… work around the house/ work for a living eg… bring home the bacon. / try to do all they can with their kids and then some. If you feel the same way i do tell my wife. That’s in response to this post from last September.

What would have happened if I had approved it? Well, in the past at least one of them turned my server into a spam slave. Or something. I just remember that the server was compromised and unscrewing it took a lot of work. The compromise came in through an old Wordpress install that hadn’t been updated. One blog was killed outright and another still isn’t back.

More about the risks here. Sad that the Web has turned into a city where everybody has to bolt their doors, but … it is.

Used to be I could tell splog bait on sight. Of the thirteen blog comments in moderation a few minutes ago, ten were comments from splog sites specializing in sex, poker or some lawsuit-intensive disease.

Usually they say something like “nice post”, which works for anywhere. Sometimes they say “facebook is the best”, the source presumably being some Facebook-based scam — or so I’m guessing, because I don’t bother to check. Here’s one from somebody’s whose first name is “Join” that says “I love this. Thanks to sharing”. It’s from this site. It looks real enough, but again, I don’t have time to check. Short posts like this usually come from sploggers, so I either kill them as spam or “defer until later”, after which I kill them anyway. It seems cruel, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Now here’s one from somebody named Martin with an aol.com address. He says “Hello Doc! When we take it to the broader sense, it says obviously right. Though too small, but comprehensive and nice post.” That’s in response to this post here. It’s almost sensible, but … not quite right. The commenter gives this site as its URL. It looks like another digg-like thing. But when I look it up on Google, it doesn’t have much of a profile. When I see how many other pages link to it, only one result comes up. But is it a splog, or a brand new site that just doesn’t have much participation yet? This post suggests the latter. But does that mean it’s still not a scam?

I’m a generous guy, but I’m also busy. I don’t have time to waste trying to figure this crap out.

But I guess that’s the idea, huh?

Stuff white people like.

See this. Then this.

I’m not sure what the second one is. Did “admin” rip off Simon Collister’s original post by posting it again? Was it for commercial reasons? Does it violate Simon’s Creative Commons 2.5 license?

The site of the reposting, Lalalia, is a “Virtual City”, described as An open system project, based on volunteers, to build a “virtual real democracy” based on the permanent votes of the “Lalaians” (the citizens of the virtual city Lalaia).

Is Simon part of that? If so, I guess it’s cool, being cross-posted. if not…

I don’t know. Can’t tell. Doesn’t smell right to me. But then, my nose is old and my blogging teeth are long.

Whatever. Seems strange to me. Is it?

Geoff Livingston writes,

Well, that certainly wasn’t my intention. Probably not Shel’s, either.

Thinking it over, seems to me that blogging has for the most part become flogging, but that trying to rebadge the former as the latter is a job for Sysiphus (about whom Camus says some interesting stuff here).

A while back Dave Winer said he would quit blogging one of these days. At the time I thought that would be a bad idea, but lately I’ve come to sympathize with it, in part for the reason Seth Finkelstein gives here. Blogging today ain’t what it was when Dave started it, and when I followed in his footsteps. The kind of writing we both try to do — what I once called “making and changing minds” (including our own) — is an ever more narrowing slice of the whole, even if the amount of it is still going up.

So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won’t be called blogging.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, headlines the New York Times. “They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop”, it begins. It’s about blogging for bucks. Marc Orchant and Russell Shaw, both of whom died recently, and Om Malik, who recently survived a heart attack, serve as instructive examples of “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment”.

Mike Arrington “says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen…This is not sustainable’.”

The piece goes on:

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Since this system does not feature the ‘chinese wall’ between editorial and advertising that has long been a fixture of principled mainstream journalism — or rather because writing, publishing and advertising are much more intimately mashed up in this new system than it was in the old one — I suggest a distinction here: one between blogging and flogging.

I brought that up on The Gang on Friday and got as nowhere as I did when I put up the post at the last link. So far it has no comments at all.

Still, I think distinctions matter. There is a difference in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other.

Two additional points.

One is about chilling out. Blogging doesn’t need to be a race. Really.

The other is about scoops. They’re overrated. Winning in too many cases is a badge of self-satisfaction one pins on oneself. I submit that’s true even if Memeorandum or Digg pins it on you first. In the larger scheme of things, even if the larger scheme is making money, it doesn’t matter as much as it might seem at the time.

What really matters is … Well, you decide.

Take it from somebody who lost at least one whole blog entirely from the consequences not upgrading WordPress: Upgrading your installation or patch is essential. So read this from Ian Kallen.

Also what he added by IM yesterday:

I added the last link.

Had a long and deep conversation with Ryan Janssen last week, which he blogged here. I think it’s the first time that somebody has taken a biographical angle on understanding where I’m coming from on various topics, and it’s been interesting to continue the conversation with Ryan trough several copy edits on personal historical items.

What’s made it especially interesting is that Ryan really works at understanding what he’s interested in. Lately he’s been diving deep into user-centric identity systems (Intro, parts 1, 2 and 3): Open ID, identity cards (parts 1, 2), XRI/XDI, iNames (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), each from a “tomorrow’s internet” angle. He’s not at it to get his opinion out there, or to advance his personal “brand”. He really wants to engage and learn.

My favorite of Steven Covey’s Seven habits of highly effective people is number 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. Come to think of it, Ryan is practicing all of them. To me what he’s doing with identity — publicly scaffolding his own understanding of a subject, as part of a collective barn-raising — is blogging at its best.

Tonight here at Harvard, Lisa Stone, founder of BlogHer, is speaking on What Women Want: How Candidates and Companies Hurt and Help Themselves with Women Today. Can’t wait. In fact, I’ll be introducing her. It’s put on by the Berkman Center as part of the Berkman @ 10 series.

Hope some of ya’ll can make it. It’s timely and important, and (unrelated to either of those qualities) I may be blogging a bit of it here as well.

(For those who don’t get the headline, it’s a play off the title of this movie.)

Some lines form her talk…

In respect to the presidential political campaigns, Blogher members are saying “Don’t just put up a site… come talk to us.” The unwillingness of all three major campaigns to engage in dialog with Blogher’s rather huge constituency is a theme of Lisa’s talk.

Listening to some of the successes of Blogher, I’m impressed. Lisa was just asked a tough question by a pro journalist about employees with benefits, and Lisa said Blogher has 23 of them, in addition to editors paid to blog, and revenue sharing with contributors… That’s in addition to 11 million “uniques” per month.

Advice for startups, from Caterina Fake: people first, terms second, valuation third.

Steve Gillmor has a new blog, with NewsGang, at eWeek.

Not sure I linked to his last post at the last blog, but I’m doing it now. We’re talking about it on NewsGang, even as we blog.

Not content to just make the future, sometimes Dave also predicts it. Congrats to the big guy for winning $2k with his forecast.

JP Rangaswami points me to The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, by Frank Rose, in Wired. It features a large interactive (I guess flash) graphic that places even the icky stuff (such as spam blogs, or splogs) inside the ’system. I haven’t looked too much at it because I get annoyed by its interactivity. (What’s wrong with one big graphic file I can scroll around?) Still, interesting. When I have time to look at the whole thing with more patience than I have now, I might have more to say about it.

Meanwhile Wired’s Chris Anderson writes,

All good stuff; but missing, or put in different terms, is the because effect — making money because of something rather than with it. I make zero money with blogging. (No advertising. Love that.) But I make more than zero because of blogging. Not enough to make me rich, but enough to make me valuable. And far more than I would make with advertising alone.

And the value I create isn’t just for me. I see what I do here as a positive contribution to the world: open prose that’s like open code: simply useful. Or, in other terms, NEA: something Nobody owns, Everybody can use and Anybody can improve.

At its best, anyway. Some of what I write, I’m sure, is useless. But most of the time I’m at least trying to do something helpful. I think all the best bloggers, like the best programmers, the best builders, the best Wikipedia contributors, all try to do that. Whether they sell it or not.

Telco 2.0 visits the same subject with The Two-Sided Business Model.

Trendwatching has been into the Free Thing as well. Their detailed and interesting post on the matter is Free Love.

People ask why I don’t blog as much as I used to. One answer is that I write as much, but I just don’t do as much of it here. I’ve been blogging more at Linux Journal, in addition to writing for the magazine. (The March issue just arrived. In it are eight pieces of mine: five with a byline and three without.) I write much more in comments here than I did at the blog’s old site, mostly because the design here is a bit more comment-friendly. And there are other places I’m writing, such as the ProjectVRM blog (which we need to fix so that others can write there too… that’s a ball that’s still in my court). Another answer is that I’m on the phone a lot more. Not sure why that is, aside from the need to keep up with the ProjectVRM community (which is growing in several directions at once). But it’s hard to write and talk at the same time.

In any case, It’s All Good. It’s jut not all here. Not that it ever was, actually.

So now I’m home in Santa Barbara for the last full day before I’m back on the road (actually, in the air and various subways), first to London for this next week, and then back at my other home in Boston for at least two weeks that should be blessedly free of travel.

Meanwhile, here’s a linkpile, most of which I’ll insult by commenting on them insufficiently.

AOL leaves DC. From critical mass to criticized mess:

Sorry I’ll miss Clay Shirky’s visit to Berkman on Thursday and the FCC hearing (with all five commissioners) on Monday. Bad week to be gone, but good for much VRM stuff happening in the U.K.

Jay Deragon asks, Is `The Cluetrain leaving The Station? I’d say the clues have arrived, but are unevenly distributed. Carter F. Smith gets plenty, and asks, If traditional marketing won’t work in The Relationship Economy, what will?

By the way, I’ll be live with Jay on Where is my Customer? The Impact of Social Media on Selling, on Thursday.

Already available is this LinuxWorld podcast with Don Marti. In it I cast doubt on the default assumption that advertising is going to pay for everything. It ain’t.

2008 Web Trend Map.

Mary Hodder: I’ve never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Via this NYTimes piece.

Joe Andrieu: Figure it out for the individual user first, then find ways to use technology to scale efficient solutions. Averages need not be applied. Monolithic approaches to marketing and product development need not apply. Micro-focus at a mega scale.

Higgins 1.0 is out.

I got quoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick from a NewsGang ‘logue, saying Google is vulnerable in search. Others disagreed. Read the comments. The main thing I’d add is that Google needs competition. Search services that zig where Google zags. Not enough of that yet.

The best blogs are easily the equal of the best opinion columnists at the New York Times. - Jimmy Wales, a few minutes ago at Public Media 2008.

Later: Software patents are a really bad idea.

… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it?

Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:

This would be pure PR jive and nothing more if the release were restricted to the first paragraph. But when two high-level Google Execs, including its Chief Legal Officer, provide sales blurbs to just one side (so far) of a partisan political battlefield, expect Serious Questions to follow.

To help answer those questions, some context.

First, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, makes clear at least one strong trend in computing that is being led by Google (along with Amazon, Yahoo and others): Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. No, personal computing won’t go away, but much of what we need, from storage to applications and raw compute power, will be available (and increasingly relied upon) as utility services. As utilities, these are going to be as free from prejudice about usage as are electricity, gas, water and waste treatment. (That is, not totally free, but sensibly so.) Looking at what the GOP says it will do with Google utilities, I’d say that’s the case here.

Second, it’s important to study how utility providers such as Google engage with large customers (and whole countries) that some find objectionable. For a view on that, check out the recent talk by the dissident Chinese journalist Michael Anti at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman has a long and helpful write-up. So does David Weinberger. From the latter:

Somewhere in there (not sure it got on the podcast) Michael said that Google had great leverage through a single simple fact: most people working for the Chinese government use Gmail. Leverage isn’t always something that is actively used. In fact, in many (perhaps most) cases it doesn’t need to be brought up at all. It’s simply a fact that must be recognized.

Whether one likes or dislikes Google’s engagement with China, or the GOP, at least it’s engaged. For some things it may be in a better position to make a positive difference than if it were not engaged.

As for Yahoo, Michael said that the company had completely lost face in China. Never mind that, as this TechCrunch post puts it, Yahoo owns only 40% of Yahoo China. And that Yahoo may have “been made a scapegoat for the flaws of US foreign policy”. The fact remains that Yahoo, according to the International Herald Tribune, “provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a Chinese journalist for leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site…”

There is no doubt that Google has been far more successful than Yahoo in dealing with China. Is it just because Google has a “don’t be evil” imperative and Yahoo does not? I don’t think so. Rather I think that Google has been smart and resourceful in ways that Yahoo has not. Specifically, Google has stayed true to its roots as a tech company with specific and easily understood guiding principles. Yahoo had those too, and for longer than Google. But Yahoo broke faith with those principles, and lost its integrity, when it decided to become an entertainment company and hired Terry Semel as its CEO. In doing so Yahoo ceased being a flagpole and instead became a flag — one that soon will be flying from somebody else’s pole.

Before I got pointed to this post by Steve Hodson, I hadn’t seen this post by Brian Solis, pointing to egos.alltop.com (”We’ve got egos covered”), which features my blog among others on the “egos” list. Alltop, a creation of Guy Kawasaki, describes its purpose this way:

In his headline Steve, who calls himself “a cranky old fart wandering the internet causing mayhem as he goes” (a self-characterization I can identify with, at least chronologically), calls Alltop’s egos page “yet another powder puff for the A-Listers”.

I’ve given up fighting the A-list label. But I’m glad to start fighting the egotist one. Even against a guy as I like and respect as much as I do Guy.

It’s a simple thing. I don’t blog for my ego, any more than I write emails or talk on the phone or do any of my daily work for the same reason. I blog to point at and comment on topics I think might be interesting, or that my readers might find interesting, and I’ve been doing pretty much exactly that, for roughly the same modest sum of readers (ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand a day), since 1999. There’s nothing sticky, commercial or especially self-serving about it — not even any advertising to distract or annoy the reader.

Writing about tech news is my day job. I do that mostly at Linux Journal. I don’t know any egotists over there, but they could use a little powdering just the same. The team there has worked hard over the last few months to make it a much better place to go for news and commentary on matters directly or peripherally related to the operating system that serves up most of what you see on the Web, plus a growing number of portable devices, movies, and much more.

So, Guy and Company: if you want to put my blog on one of your lists, I’m flattered. But if you insist on labeling me an ego, I’ll insist that you take me off.

Voices Without Votes, from Global Voices and Reuters. Very interesting stuff.

That headline is the one I was going to use at first when I wrote Journalism in a world of open code and open self-education, over in Linux Journal. It’s a thinky piece, but that’s what can happen when journalists hang out in a place like the Berkman Center, where we did a lot of thinking out loud about journalism yesterday.

For my part, I thought about stories, and their limitations as ways to freight facts. Also of their advantages for telling truth. As my old friend the priest Sean Olaoire once said, “Some truths are so deep that only stories can tell them”. Sean is one of the world’s best story-tellers. I’m not always sure about his facts, but I also know that’s not his business.

The business of journalism is also worth thinking about. Because telling stories is what we do, and moving facts from mind to mind isn’t the whole job there. There are other purposes. I visit at least one of those in that piece too.

Nice to learn via Virginia Postrel that The Atlantic’s archives are now open and linkable, liberated from incarceration behind the paywalls that were fashionable at major magazines until too many of their writers also became bloggers (or already were), and the logic of openness began to prevail. (Or so my theory goes.) Note that the story at the third link is from the New York Times, which saw the same light a few months back.

Anyway, bravo. Now I’ll start subscribing to the print magazine again.

Woops! I just tried to subscribe, by clicking on the Subscribe link at The Atlantic site, went through a remarkably fast & easy process that featured opt-in (rather than opt-out) radio buttons for promotional stuff, hit the Send Order button and… bzzzt: went straight to Page Not Found. Not good.

Just tried it again with a different browser. Same result.

Hope they fix that soon.

Here’s a terrific post by Rex Hammock, explaining our common cause in a losing battle against the eggregious overuse of the word “content”.

I like Remodeling for Geeks, subtitled code snippets for your house.

Bonus snip.

At Technobabble 2.0, Johnny Bentwood of Edelman posts White paper - distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media, with a link to the .pdf of the document. The paper “is not written as a fait accompli but rather as a contribution to the conversation”, Johnny says, adding, “I welcome your thoughts and comments”. I have both, but also a bus to catch.

Meanwhile, here’s a brief one that should help: Publish the document in .html as well as .pdf. HTML is much easier to open, to quote, to source and to link to. It’s native to the Web (rather than just to printing, as is the case with .pdf). Toward Edelman’s purposes, it is also more social and influential.

Via Hugh.

Tony wishes Moxie a Happy Birthday, recalling the July 12, 2002 party at which many L.A. bloggers, including yours truly, met. Here’s my own rundown on the event. Here are PatioPundit (Martin Devon)’s pix and commentary. Nice to see both his blog and his archives are still up. Perhaps not so nice to see he hasn’t posted since October. Nor has the party’s host, Brian Linse.

When I check the links, and names, from that party, it’s kinda sad to see some gone silent or gone altogether. Moxie and Tony are still going strong. So are Mickey Kaus, Matt Welch, Charles Johnson, Emmanuelle Richard, Bill Quick. But I’m not sure where Dawn Olsen went (that link now goes to a blog that I doubt is hers). Or Ann Salisbury. Warren Zevon, who was never a blogger but who attended the party while life was killing him, is dead.

Lot of offline talk lately about what’s happened to blogging. One friend sent an email I hope he puts up soon. Among other quotable lines is “most of the blogosphere has become a full-on commercial wankfest now”.

Not that it wasn’t then. But it was fun to hang out with a bunch of people, most of whose politics were vastly unlike my own — but whose writing was interesting and compelling and fresh and far more personal and open-ended than any op-ed page — and to believe we were beginning to make some kind of positive difference in the world. In retrospect, I don’t think any of us was making a dime on blogging at the time. For what that’s worth. If anything.

Bonus links… Competing Messages: Elections and Governance and Honesty. They both challenge. They both make you think. The Bill Hicks video on marketing in the latter is way too close to what too many of us — including yours truly in a former life — call home.

If you want to see how podcasting is better than radio (or a better form of radio), and why it’s more important than making money (because, among other things, you may make more money because of it than with it), then dig marketing, bananas and more, a podcast, hosted by Johnnie Moore. It’s a conversation among people who are looking beyond advertsing to whatever comes next. If anything.

You probably already know what I think — which is a lot like what Dave thinks. No surprise there, but worth repeating because it’s good to have others agree with you, even if there’s only one of them. Which there aren’t in this case. (Though there still aren’t enough, or Dave and I would stop highlighting the absurd belief that everything needs a business model — and that the only one worth considering, if you must, is advertising.)

One reason that podcasting beats radio (until we help radio catch up with podcasting by adding the same feature) is demonstrated by Johnnie’s post, which contains a pile of handy time-stamped show notes. (Didn’t Jon Udell come up with a way of making those time stamps into URLs? Wuzzit somebody else? Hmm.. Let’s ask hoosgot.)

Via Hugh.

About three years ago I wrote about what I called The Snowball Effect. It included this quotage:

In Gouge out your eyes with a rusty synecdoche, Dave Snowden follows a snowball I hadn’t realized I had started rolling, here. Not sure I follow it all, yet. (Too busy now and writing this on the run.) But I’ll catch up later. Meanwhile, some fine writing (and snarking) to enjoy there.

Via Euan Semple.

I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.

What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one.

The latest addition to the portfolio of fun hacks on Twitter (which include Dave’s Twittergram) is Politweets, which Ted Shelton says “brings out the really intriguing aspect of Twitter — the ability to tap into the pulse of some very interesting distributed event (like an election) and see what is happening”.

I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.

Ev Williams did a nice job of explaining The Light Side in his talk at LeWeb3 last month. Here’s the video.

Paul Downey: I see two kinds of Twitterers emerging: Twits and Twerps.

Interesting read. Not sure if I’m either, both or neither.

Required reading: Andy Olmstead’s posthumous post. Also here. Follow the other links too. In the (literal) end, there’s no better writing about what couldn’t be any worse.

David Ardia writes,

JD Lasica adds,

Some questions follow.

For example, will this help with existing or future shield laws?

Cliff Baldridge.

The self-described “Multi-Award Winning Super-Producer and Director” has just put out a press release that begins,

A few (among many) money grafs down is this pair:

As if this weren’t scammy (and spammy) enough, there’s THE OFFICIAL SANTABARBARAARTSTV.com YOUTUBE PARTNER CHANNEL itself. It contains this subtle message from Cliff:

Cliff seems to be a happy guy who enjoys what he’s doing, so … what the hell.

Via Edhat.

[later…] Cliff, clearly a good-natured guy, posted a response here.

Nice to see this interview with Lisa Gates, one of our good friends back in Santa Barbara.

This story by Dennis Howlett, on how Twitter spread and processed news of the Bhutto assasination, casts light on the continuing birth of The Live Web.

We also saw it a couple months back with coverage of the California fires near San Diego.

And it’s still early. It’s important to remember that. Everything on the Web is still just a prototype.

To understand journalism, you need to know the nature of The Story. Every story has three elements: 1) a character, 2) a problem, and 3) movement toward resolution. The character could be a person, a cause, a ball club — doesn’t matter, as long as the reader (or the viewer, or the listener) can identify with it (or him, or her, or them). The problem is what keeps us reading forward, turning the pages, or staying tuned in. It’s what keeps things interesting. And the motion has to vector toward resolution, even if the conclusion is far off in the future.

Sports are pure story fodder. Teams and players are your characters, the games and the procession of opponents are the problem (and the problems within the problem), and there is always movement toward resolution. Even after resolution, new problems, often with new characters within the team’s own character, are being queue’d up.

There are lots of important developments, however, that do not conform to the story format, so they go unreported. One example is murder in places where sudden and senseless death is common. Such has been the case in Los Angeles for many decades. It was, after all, the very point of Chinatown.

Well, L.A. is no Chinatown for Jill Leovy, who has been blogging otherwise uncovered homicides around the city for most of the last year. Her blog is one of the LA Times’s, and it is itself the subject of Life After Death, a Times story about a reporter reporting stories that fail to fit in the Times’ own limited number of pages. Leovy’s own story is an interesting one…

… as are the stories she crafts and her blog hosts:

Stories are the basic format of human interest. The LA Times’ many blogs provide ways to surface more stories, in more ways, for more readers who might find some of those stories meaningful. Or effective, if a larger purpose is involved. Clearly The Homicide Report is far more than an accessory to the coroner’s office. Its own story is Leovy’s mission to expose and reduce the plague of death that continues to afflict her city:

As for the rest of the LA Times’ blogs, it’s getting harder to tell where the paper ends and the blogging begins — unless all you read is the paper and never go online, in which case you miss more and more of what the paper is becoming.

Supporting that observation are Tony Pierce’s take on his first day as blog editor at the paper, and departed assistant editorial page editor Matt Welch’s blast at an especially pontifical piece by Tim Rutten, the Times’ media columnist. Rutten (whom I’ve always liked, for what it’s worth) is moving on too, as he explains in this piece about turnover at the top of the Times’ parent company.

Companies are ways of organizing work and resources. They are also teams on missions to solve problems. How the ones we call ‘papers’ adapt to a world where more can be written online than off, and for more readers, is the top evolutionary challenge for the institution we call journalism, and therefore its most important story.

The principles of practice are the same. The enviornment is not. Nor are the opportunities, which are far more abundant, if less obviously remunerative. (Not all journalists can live alongside the advertising river. Nor should they.) Which means there will continue to be a struggle between missions like Leovy’s and the need for paychecks.

Sean Bonner is a Top 10 sexy geek, according to Violet Blue. Tantek is a runner-up. So is Zadi. Those are the three out of 20 listed that I know on a first name basis. Or at all.

No Tony? Not even when he says, my advice is, if people are dissing you at your workplace get out as fast as you can because there is a place for you somewhere else, and they might even give you an office and let you come in after 10am and not even blink. Sounds pretty sexy to me.

Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network? is the question Jeremiah Owyang raised yesterday on Twitter and in facebook. If you’re a facebook member, you can participate. I am a member, but I’d rather not. At least, not there.

All due respect (and I respect Jeremiah a great deal), I’d rather talk outside the facewall.

Forgive me for being an old fart, but today’s “social networks” look to me like yesterday’s online services. Remember AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and the rest? Facebook to me is just AOL done right. Or done over, better. But it’s still a walled garden. It’s still somebody’s private space. Me, I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.

So here’s what I think.

First, I’m not sure a “brand” can get social at all. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry in the first place, and will never escape that legacy, now matter how much lipstick we put on the branding iron.

Second, the notion of “brands” either “building” or “joining” social networks strikes me as inherently promotional in either case, and therefore compromised as a “social” effort. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t join a social network any brand built, and I wouldn’t want any brand trying to join one I built. But that’s just me. Your socializing may vary. (And, by the way, if I wear a t-shirt with some company’s name on it, that doesn’t mean I belong to that company’s “network”. All it means for sure is that I’m wearing a t-shirt that was clean that morning. It might mean I like that company or organization. At most it means I have some kind of loyalty — although in the cases of sports teams and schools, the loyalty and sense of affiliation is not to a “brand”, unless you insist on looking at everything in commercial terms, one of which “brand” is. My main points here are that, a) there may be less to expressions of apparent loyalty than it may appear, and b) the social qualities of affection, affiliation or belonging mostly don’t derive from “branding” in the sense that Procter & Gamble began popularizing the term back in the 1930s.)

Third, I’m not sure social networks are “built” in any case. Seems to me they’re more organic than structural. Maybe I’m getting too academic here, but I don’t think so. Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. When I think about my social networks — and I have many — I don’t see them as things, or places. I see them as collections of people I know. The best collections of those for me aren’t on facebook or LinkedIn. They’re in my IM buddy list and my email address book. Even if I can extend those two lists into a “social graph” (a term that drives me up a wall), and somehow federate them into these mostly-commercial things we call “social networks” on the Web, I don’t see those “networks” as structures. I see them as people. Huge difference. Critical difference.

Fourth, the thing companies need to do most is stop being all “strategic” about how their people communicate. Stop running all speech through official orifices. Some businesses have highly regulated speech, to be sure. Pharmaceuticals come to mind. But most companies would benefit from having their employees talk about what they do. Yet there are still too many companies where employees can’t say a damn thing without clearing it somehow. And in too many companies employees give up because the company’s communications policy is modeled on a fort, complete with firewalls that would put the average dictatorship to shame. If a company wants to get social, they should let their employees talk. And trust them.

Bottom line: companies aren’t people. If you like talking about your work, and doing that helps your company, the “social network” mission is accomplished. Simple as that.

One last thing. I’m not saying facebook or LinkedIn are bad. They can be useful for many things, and their leaders deserve kudos for the successes they’ve earned. Still it creeps me out when people treat facebook as “The Web, only better”. It ain’t the Web and it ain’t better. It’s a new, interesting and widespread set of experiments, mostly in technology and business. I’m interested in seeing where it goes. But I’m not drinking the kool-aid.

Susan Kish took some outstanding notes from my talk at LeWeb3 last week. Bonus link: Tips for Conference Bloggers, by Bruno Guissani and Ethan Zuckerman.

Guardian: Twenty-eight people ask Hugh MacLeod to be their friend each day. What’s so special about him?

By some kind of glitch at the next-to last minute Dr. Weinberger got his excellent ass squeezed out of the LeWeb3 schedule, so we were all denied the opportunity to hear and see what I’m sure would have been a killer talk. Alas, we are still alive.

So, big regrets about that.

Meanwhile, kudos to Paolo Valdemarin for getting the outliner to work on my laptop. I had upgraded both the HD and the OS, and had permission issues. I much prefer blogging in the outliner, which I’ve been doing most of the time since 2000.

And the hallway talk continues, as we all wait for them to take down the wi-fi at some point.

Last night in Paris, then home. Can’t wait for both.

The folks from ninemillion.org are on stage now at LeWeb3. Great cause by, and for, some great people.

The shot above is one in a series shot last night walking from our hotel to the Louvre. It was cold and rainy, but Paris itself more than compensated for the discomforts, because Paris in the rain looks better than most cities in the sun. Such a great place. I forgot how much I missed coming here, which I used to do quite a bit, back in the mid-90s. A few bits of French even came back to me.

Anyway, I found a good connection here at LesWeb3 (where the wi-fi is otherwise bad), so I’ve been uploading shots. Here’s the whole series, which will keep growing.

Heading shortly to Logan for a pair of Lufthansa flights that will land me in Paris by dawn tomorrow there. (Still yesterday, here, which is still today… reminds me of the old Bob & Ray soap opera parody: Today is Yesterday Tomorrow.) The cause is LeWeb3., where I’ll speak on Wednesday and listen the rest of the time. See ya there, if not sooner.

[Later…] Arrived in Frankfurt. Actually the time given above referred to the first leg, just completed. The Paris flight out of here is at 0840. Meanwhile I’m paying 18¢/minute for “roaming” on T-Mobile’s network, for which I already pay $29/month. I learned on the last trip th