As Wikileaks continues to feed media outlets with thousands of classified US diplomatic cables, how serious is the threat by WikiLeaks to other media outlets? And how is WikiLeaks shaping the media industry? Is it the beginning of a new media form?
Showing posts with label new media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new media. Show all posts
Sunday, January 2, 2011
WikiLeaks and the Craft of Journalism
As Wikileaks continues to feed media outlets with thousands of classified US diplomatic cables, how serious is the threat by WikiLeaks to other media outlets? And how is WikiLeaks shaping the media industry? Is it the beginning of a new media form?
Sunday, November 8, 2009
I Want Media Interview with Tina Brown/Excerpts
Source: http://www.iwantmedia.com/people/people82.html
Click here
The following are some fascinating excerpts of an I Want Media interview with famous editrix Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, Talk, and Vanity Fair who now heads up the popular online news aggregator, The Daily Beast.
Q: What have you learned in The Daily Beast's first year online?
Tina Brown: I've loved adjusting to and working at the Web's incessant pace. It's easy to iterate online - to test out new ideas, listen to feedback from the audience, keep what works and reject what doesn't. It is a very nimble process. I've also learned that there was, and still is, a real hunger for smart content aggregation or "curation" as I have come to think of it.
Q: The Huffington Post appears to keep growing, launching local editions. Do you see it potentially replacing newspapers?
Brown: No. I still believe strongly that there is a market for print, but we will continue to see interesting hyper-local models evolve. At any level, I believe there needs to continue to be investment in print journalism -- notably investigative units.
Q: Do you still read newspapers in print?
Brown: I love print. I'm married to a newspaper editor, and we still consume a lot of magazines and newspapers. Every morning after I have noodled around with The Daily Beast's headlines and lineup I go out to breakfast at the diner on the corner with Harry and we go through the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Daily News, the Financial Times, the Washington Post; all of them. I'm still a junkie.
Q: Do you miss working in magazines?
Brown: I'm very happy right now. I love the fast pace, the ability to keep innovating, the sense that there is a vibrant, growing, responsive audience out there. It is a sorry time in magazines, none of the talented people I know who work for them feel it’s a great time right now.
Q: Is the Internet-led transformation of the media world a good thing?
Brown: It is largely a good thing, but not without its growing pains. I see this very much as a transitional phase we are in. It's painful if you are caught on the wrong side of it, but there is no doubt in my mind that when this volcanic realignment in media has finally shaken out in the next three years we will see a golden age of journalism and video.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Spotlight Interview Redux: Elizabeth Spiers
This interview was first posted on January 25, 2009.
Elizabeth Spiers, Writer/Editor/Blogger, Entrepreneur
Elizabeth Spiers, writer, editor, blogger, was a publishing phenomenon before the age of 30, already on the cutting edge of online journalism.
She was the founding editor of the infamous New York-centric media gossip site, Gawker.com (Dec. 2002-Sept. 2003); founder and publisher of Dead Horse Media, LLC (Jan. 2006-April 2007), which publishes Dealbreaker.com, AboveTheLaw.com and Fashionista.com, editor-in-chief of Mediabistro.com (Nov. 2004-Nov. 2005), a contributing writer/editor at New York Magazine (Sept. 2003-Nov. 2004), and one of the net’s most well-known bloggers, if not its Queen of Snark.
Based in New York City, Spiers, 32, has been described as acerbic, intelligent, supremely hip, and an “agoraphobic Dorothy Parker,” and she now writes a column for Fast Company and Fortune, has appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, the New York Observer, and New York Post, and spoken at various media and technology conferences. She has also been a guest commentator on CNN, Fox News, CBS Marketwatch, MSNBC and VH1, and is the author of the forthcoming novel, “And They All Die in the End,” to be published by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group.
For more details on Spiers, please visit her site at:
http://www.elizabethspiers.com
Click here
The following is my exclusive interview with Ms. Spiers:
Mike: When did you know that you wanted to become a writer?
Spiers: I never wanted to become a writer per se. It was just something that I did and enjoyed. Every job I've ever had has rewarded me in some way for being a good writer—even when I was working in finance (as a strategist and equity analyst). I fell backwards into doing it full-time by writing for my own enjoyment on a blog.
Mike: Which writers and books have influenced you the most?
Spiers: I read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment when I was 11 and too young to really understand the brilliance of the book, but it's the first thing I remember that really provoked me. I grew up in an evangelical Christian home and perhaps as a result, was very interested in specific ethical and moral questions at a young age. After a strict diet of anemic Christian bookstore fiction—Janette Oke, anyone?—Dostoyevsky was a nice slap in the face. I aspire to write something that has the same effect on other people as that book had on me.
Mike: How did your writing career develop into what it is today?
Spiers: By accident. I've been paid professionally for a wide range of skills, but invariably the writing work stood out the most and was in higher demand. I'd like to think that it's because my precious prose is so perfect that employers found it irresistible, but it may have just been that I was mediocre at everything else.
Mike: What was your first real professional writing gig?
Spiers: I went to college at Duke and got paid to write annual reports and essays for programs there, and while I was working in finance, half my income came from writing business plans for companies. While doing the latter, (Gawker Media founder) Nick Denton hired me to write Gawker, which is also a writing gig of sorts. So I guess I've been paid to write in one fashion or another since college.
Mike: What's your biggest career break?
Spiers: The one that most profoundly affected where I am right now was my first job out of school. I was hired as a marketing director for a dot com, during the dot com boom. If I hadn't gotten that job, I would have probably stayed in North Carolina, where I went to college and my life would be much, much different now. Secondly, Gawker. It certainly opened the initial doors to most of what I've done journalistically, and they were doors I wouldn't have tried to open myself. Had a couple of editors not contacted me out of the blue when I was writing Gawker, I'm not sure it would have occurred to me that writing full-time would be a viable career.
Mike: How long have you been interested in gossip? And what makes good gossip and good gossip writing?
Spiers: I was never interested in gossip personally. (I assume you mean celebrity gossip.) Gawker was like any other publication—it has an audience and it's designed to cover a specific range of topics. Gossip just happened to be one of them, so I learned what I could about the topic area. Like anything else, it's good when the story is compelling.
These days, the word “gossip” tends to mean a certain style of reporting rather than the traditional definition, which is something that's rumor or hearsay. Even at Gawker, the writers make phone calls and try to verify items. The gossip characterization generally means news in juicy little bits—items that make people gossip, rather than actual gossip itself.
Mike: What's the key to writing a great blog?
Spiers: I assume you mean writing a great blog that people will read. There's a formula, but it's often not what people want to hear.
The Formula: Be topical. (Choose a specific subject area or niche.) Post often. (I mean 12-20 times a day, not 2 or 3.) And provide people with something they can't get elsewhere, either in the form of useful information or entertainment. It almost always works, but most people do not want to (and will not) make that kind of effort.
Mike: How can writers make decent money writing online or writing blogs?
Spiers: Write for decently paying online outlets—commercial blogs or online magazines. You can always start your own blog, make it a big hit and charge for advertising, but if you have no interest in being an entrepreneur (or business in general), that's a giant mistake.
If being an entrepreneur does sound appealing to you, you have to follow The Formula (see above), which most writers don't actually want to do. Most writers want to have a well-trafficked, visible blog, but they want to be able to write a post about whatever they feel like writing, whenever they feel like it. That doesn't work unless you already have a name people recognize, and even then, not usually.
And if you already have a name people recognize, you probably don't need to make money writing a blog.
Mike: Would you recommend young journalists starting out as bloggers?
Spiers: It depends what you want to do in journalism long-term. If you want to do commentary, absolutely, because that's the only way you're going to get in. Otherwise, it's a very “pay your dues” kind of thing, where you have to be a reporter for 40 years. But if you're a good writer, you can go straight into it if your work is good and getting read.
Mike: Can blogging be a good business?
Spiers: I think it's a good business if you do it correctly. I also think that blogs could be used for testing editorial concepts. For print, broadcast, anything.
Generally, if you want to use it to get a professional writing gig, I’d say develop a distinct voice and write about specific topics instead of doing a broad whatever-catches-my-interest blog. As an editor, I’m more inclined to use freelancers if they have some sort of niche expertise/knowledge or they have a voice that’s memorable.
Mike: Where do you think media is going? Are newspapers a dying institution? Will bloggers rule the news world?
Spiers: The first question is really too complicated to answer here. Print newspapers backed entirely by print classifieds are dying, but newspapers in general aren't. And to answer the third question, no. Most bloggers write personal diaries. Very few break news. (Those that do will have some influence, but let's not write off the New York Times just yet.)
Mike: You've been very successful at launching Web sites. What are the keys to doing this? How can one go about starting a hot site?
Spiers: Same answer. The Formula.
Mike: Could you talk about how you came up with Gawker, Fashionista, Dead Horse, Dealbreaker, etc? And why did they work?
Spiers: Gawker was Nick Denton's idea, although he envisioned it more as an insider-y city guide. I wanted it to be like the late great SPY magazine and we ended up with an inferior hybrid of the two, but one that worked.
RE: the Dead Horse sites—Dealbreaker was just a matter of doing Gawker for Wall Street, and I was more personally interested in Wall Street than celebrities, as indicated by my work history pre-Gawker. AboveTheLaw seemed like a good companion to Dealbreaker and there was an excellent writer available for it. Fashionista is just a great ad category, to be frank, and there was room for something a little more light and entertaining in that space.
They worked because we used the secret recipe, stated above—The Formula.
Mike: Could you talk about your fiction writing and the differences you experience writing fiction and nonfiction? Do you find one harder than the other?
Spiers: I find them very different. Once I have the reporting done, I can mechanically put together a non-fiction piece pretty quickly because narrative journalism has many standard conventions and once you become accustomed to them, it's just a matter of fine-tuning. The same is true with writing opinion columns. (Thesis, evidence, counter-evidence, couterargument against counterevidence, conclusion.) Fiction has standard conventions as well, but they're much more flexible. As a result, I write fiction much slower because there are more possibilities for any specific story. Right now, novel-length fiction seems more challenging, but that's mostly because I have less experience with it.
Mike: What are your most interesting writing stories (preferably ones that teach a lesson)?
Spiers: I'm afraid I don't have any. Most of the “interesting” happens in the writing itself and not in the process of writing.
Mike: What are your work habits? How often do you write? What time of day? What rituals do you have? Do you have a favorite place to write?
Spiers: I'm not consistent. I binge write. I do end up writing something every day just by default—for work, or because something amuses me—but it's not a ritual. Right now I'm writing at the kitchen table a lot (which is not very comfortable) because a guitar instruction school moved in next to the office space I rent and I can't bear to hear the first 20 bars of "Smoke on the Water" anymore. I've also been traveling a bit lately, so I've gotten used to writing in hotel rooms and on planes. When pressed, I can usually write anywhere at any time.
Mike: What's an average workday for you?
Spiers: There is no average workday. When I was running Dead Horse, that took up most of the average workday and writing got done late at night and on the weekends. Now I don't really have a schedule, so I tend to plan around deadlines.
Mike: What five best pieces of advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to make it?
Spiers: I only have two, and you've almost certainly heard them before.
Read constantly. There's no better way to internalize the conventions that make for good writing than to read a lot of it. Write regularly, regardless of whether anyone's paying you to do it, or will in the future.
Beyond that, success is really specific to what sort of writing you want to do.
Mike: What great resource sites would you recommend to aspiring writers?
Spiers: I don’t read sites about writing very much, but I enjoy literary sites. My friends Maud Newton (maudnewton.com) and Sarah Weinman (sarahweinman.com) both have great sites. I also like Mark Sarvas's The Elegant Variation (www.elegvar.com), Arts & Letters Daily and the Guardian's book blog. For news about publishing, I go to mediabistro’s Galleycat, Dwight Garner's "Paper Cuts" blog at the New York Times or Michael Cader's Publishers Lunch.
Mike: How did your Wall Street experience help you in the writing world?
Spiers: I'm not sure it did in any direct way, except that I can write knowledgably about business; financial statements don't intimidate me. That said, I think doing other things and having different bodies of experience is usually healthy for writers. Variety and depth of experience is healthy in general.
Mike: What have been the keys to your success?
Spiers: I think adaptability is important in any job. I'm probably best known for a certain type of criticism in a tone similar to the one I used at Gawker, but I'm a versatile writer and that's the reason why I've been able to make a living putting words down on paper. You don't write a business plan the same way you would write an opinion column for Fast Company or a book for Penguin. If you can do all three, it's easier to have stable writing career.
Mike: What are your goals for the future?
Spiers: What I'm doing now, only more so. I enjoy several different types of writing and I like being involved in entrepreneurial media projects. I feel lucky that I get to do both and hope to continue.
Elizabeth Spiers, Writer/Editor/Blogger, Entrepreneur
Elizabeth Spiers, writer, editor, blogger, was a publishing phenomenon before the age of 30, already on the cutting edge of online journalism.
She was the founding editor of the infamous New York-centric media gossip site, Gawker.com (Dec. 2002-Sept. 2003); founder and publisher of Dead Horse Media, LLC (Jan. 2006-April 2007), which publishes Dealbreaker.com, AboveTheLaw.com and Fashionista.com, editor-in-chief of Mediabistro.com (Nov. 2004-Nov. 2005), a contributing writer/editor at New York Magazine (Sept. 2003-Nov. 2004), and one of the net’s most well-known bloggers, if not its Queen of Snark.
Based in New York City, Spiers, 32, has been described as acerbic, intelligent, supremely hip, and an “agoraphobic Dorothy Parker,” and she now writes a column for Fast Company and Fortune, has appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, the New York Observer, and New York Post, and spoken at various media and technology conferences. She has also been a guest commentator on CNN, Fox News, CBS Marketwatch, MSNBC and VH1, and is the author of the forthcoming novel, “And They All Die in the End,” to be published by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group.
For more details on Spiers, please visit her site at:
http://www.elizabethspiers.com
Click here
The following is my exclusive interview with Ms. Spiers:
Mike: When did you know that you wanted to become a writer?
Spiers: I never wanted to become a writer per se. It was just something that I did and enjoyed. Every job I've ever had has rewarded me in some way for being a good writer—even when I was working in finance (as a strategist and equity analyst). I fell backwards into doing it full-time by writing for my own enjoyment on a blog.
Mike: Which writers and books have influenced you the most?
Spiers: I read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment when I was 11 and too young to really understand the brilliance of the book, but it's the first thing I remember that really provoked me. I grew up in an evangelical Christian home and perhaps as a result, was very interested in specific ethical and moral questions at a young age. After a strict diet of anemic Christian bookstore fiction—Janette Oke, anyone?—Dostoyevsky was a nice slap in the face. I aspire to write something that has the same effect on other people as that book had on me.
Mike: How did your writing career develop into what it is today?
Spiers: By accident. I've been paid professionally for a wide range of skills, but invariably the writing work stood out the most and was in higher demand. I'd like to think that it's because my precious prose is so perfect that employers found it irresistible, but it may have just been that I was mediocre at everything else.
Mike: What was your first real professional writing gig?
Spiers: I went to college at Duke and got paid to write annual reports and essays for programs there, and while I was working in finance, half my income came from writing business plans for companies. While doing the latter, (Gawker Media founder) Nick Denton hired me to write Gawker, which is also a writing gig of sorts. So I guess I've been paid to write in one fashion or another since college.
Mike: What's your biggest career break?
Spiers: The one that most profoundly affected where I am right now was my first job out of school. I was hired as a marketing director for a dot com, during the dot com boom. If I hadn't gotten that job, I would have probably stayed in North Carolina, where I went to college and my life would be much, much different now. Secondly, Gawker. It certainly opened the initial doors to most of what I've done journalistically, and they were doors I wouldn't have tried to open myself. Had a couple of editors not contacted me out of the blue when I was writing Gawker, I'm not sure it would have occurred to me that writing full-time would be a viable career.
Mike: How long have you been interested in gossip? And what makes good gossip and good gossip writing?
Spiers: I was never interested in gossip personally. (I assume you mean celebrity gossip.) Gawker was like any other publication—it has an audience and it's designed to cover a specific range of topics. Gossip just happened to be one of them, so I learned what I could about the topic area. Like anything else, it's good when the story is compelling.
These days, the word “gossip” tends to mean a certain style of reporting rather than the traditional definition, which is something that's rumor or hearsay. Even at Gawker, the writers make phone calls and try to verify items. The gossip characterization generally means news in juicy little bits—items that make people gossip, rather than actual gossip itself.
Mike: What's the key to writing a great blog?
Spiers: I assume you mean writing a great blog that people will read. There's a formula, but it's often not what people want to hear.
The Formula: Be topical. (Choose a specific subject area or niche.) Post often. (I mean 12-20 times a day, not 2 or 3.) And provide people with something they can't get elsewhere, either in the form of useful information or entertainment. It almost always works, but most people do not want to (and will not) make that kind of effort.
Mike: How can writers make decent money writing online or writing blogs?
Spiers: Write for decently paying online outlets—commercial blogs or online magazines. You can always start your own blog, make it a big hit and charge for advertising, but if you have no interest in being an entrepreneur (or business in general), that's a giant mistake.
If being an entrepreneur does sound appealing to you, you have to follow The Formula (see above), which most writers don't actually want to do. Most writers want to have a well-trafficked, visible blog, but they want to be able to write a post about whatever they feel like writing, whenever they feel like it. That doesn't work unless you already have a name people recognize, and even then, not usually.
And if you already have a name people recognize, you probably don't need to make money writing a blog.
Mike: Would you recommend young journalists starting out as bloggers?
Spiers: It depends what you want to do in journalism long-term. If you want to do commentary, absolutely, because that's the only way you're going to get in. Otherwise, it's a very “pay your dues” kind of thing, where you have to be a reporter for 40 years. But if you're a good writer, you can go straight into it if your work is good and getting read.
Mike: Can blogging be a good business?
Spiers: I think it's a good business if you do it correctly. I also think that blogs could be used for testing editorial concepts. For print, broadcast, anything.
Generally, if you want to use it to get a professional writing gig, I’d say develop a distinct voice and write about specific topics instead of doing a broad whatever-catches-my-interest blog. As an editor, I’m more inclined to use freelancers if they have some sort of niche expertise/knowledge or they have a voice that’s memorable.
Mike: Where do you think media is going? Are newspapers a dying institution? Will bloggers rule the news world?
Spiers: The first question is really too complicated to answer here. Print newspapers backed entirely by print classifieds are dying, but newspapers in general aren't. And to answer the third question, no. Most bloggers write personal diaries. Very few break news. (Those that do will have some influence, but let's not write off the New York Times just yet.)
Mike: You've been very successful at launching Web sites. What are the keys to doing this? How can one go about starting a hot site?
Spiers: Same answer. The Formula.
Mike: Could you talk about how you came up with Gawker, Fashionista, Dead Horse, Dealbreaker, etc? And why did they work?
Spiers: Gawker was Nick Denton's idea, although he envisioned it more as an insider-y city guide. I wanted it to be like the late great SPY magazine and we ended up with an inferior hybrid of the two, but one that worked.
RE: the Dead Horse sites—Dealbreaker was just a matter of doing Gawker for Wall Street, and I was more personally interested in Wall Street than celebrities, as indicated by my work history pre-Gawker. AboveTheLaw seemed like a good companion to Dealbreaker and there was an excellent writer available for it. Fashionista is just a great ad category, to be frank, and there was room for something a little more light and entertaining in that space.
They worked because we used the secret recipe, stated above—The Formula.
Mike: Could you talk about your fiction writing and the differences you experience writing fiction and nonfiction? Do you find one harder than the other?
Spiers: I find them very different. Once I have the reporting done, I can mechanically put together a non-fiction piece pretty quickly because narrative journalism has many standard conventions and once you become accustomed to them, it's just a matter of fine-tuning. The same is true with writing opinion columns. (Thesis, evidence, counter-evidence, couterargument against counterevidence, conclusion.) Fiction has standard conventions as well, but they're much more flexible. As a result, I write fiction much slower because there are more possibilities for any specific story. Right now, novel-length fiction seems more challenging, but that's mostly because I have less experience with it.
Mike: What are your most interesting writing stories (preferably ones that teach a lesson)?
Spiers: I'm afraid I don't have any. Most of the “interesting” happens in the writing itself and not in the process of writing.
Mike: What are your work habits? How often do you write? What time of day? What rituals do you have? Do you have a favorite place to write?
Spiers: I'm not consistent. I binge write. I do end up writing something every day just by default—for work, or because something amuses me—but it's not a ritual. Right now I'm writing at the kitchen table a lot (which is not very comfortable) because a guitar instruction school moved in next to the office space I rent and I can't bear to hear the first 20 bars of "Smoke on the Water" anymore. I've also been traveling a bit lately, so I've gotten used to writing in hotel rooms and on planes. When pressed, I can usually write anywhere at any time.
Mike: What's an average workday for you?
Spiers: There is no average workday. When I was running Dead Horse, that took up most of the average workday and writing got done late at night and on the weekends. Now I don't really have a schedule, so I tend to plan around deadlines.
Mike: What five best pieces of advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to make it?
Spiers: I only have two, and you've almost certainly heard them before.
Read constantly. There's no better way to internalize the conventions that make for good writing than to read a lot of it. Write regularly, regardless of whether anyone's paying you to do it, or will in the future.
Beyond that, success is really specific to what sort of writing you want to do.
Mike: What great resource sites would you recommend to aspiring writers?
Spiers: I don’t read sites about writing very much, but I enjoy literary sites. My friends Maud Newton (maudnewton.com) and Sarah Weinman (sarahweinman.com) both have great sites. I also like Mark Sarvas's The Elegant Variation (www.elegvar.com), Arts & Letters Daily and the Guardian's book blog. For news about publishing, I go to mediabistro’s Galleycat, Dwight Garner's "Paper Cuts" blog at the New York Times or Michael Cader's Publishers Lunch.
Mike: How did your Wall Street experience help you in the writing world?
Spiers: I'm not sure it did in any direct way, except that I can write knowledgably about business; financial statements don't intimidate me. That said, I think doing other things and having different bodies of experience is usually healthy for writers. Variety and depth of experience is healthy in general.
Mike: What have been the keys to your success?
Spiers: I think adaptability is important in any job. I'm probably best known for a certain type of criticism in a tone similar to the one I used at Gawker, but I'm a versatile writer and that's the reason why I've been able to make a living putting words down on paper. You don't write a business plan the same way you would write an opinion column for Fast Company or a book for Penguin. If you can do all three, it's easier to have stable writing career.
Mike: What are your goals for the future?
Spiers: What I'm doing now, only more so. I enjoy several different types of writing and I like being involved in entrepreneurial media projects. I feel lucky that I get to do both and hope to continue.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism
The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism
Thank God for Tech Moguls Who Redistribute VC Wealth So We Can Cybersocialize Freely. For Now, That Is.
by Simon Dumenco
http://adage.com
Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone should thank God it was just a cardinal, and not the pope.
Last week, according to the Times of London, Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland told the country's Catholics to "Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or e-mail every day. Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another."
Oh, my. That's a nice sentiment, but Twitter really doesn't need more users around the world tweeting in ways that can never be monetized. Ireland's got just 4 million Catholics, but the Vatican counts more than a billion baptized Catholics worldwide. If the pope endorsed tweeting prayer, Twitter could be out of business by the end of the year! The 3-year-old company, remember, still lacks a revenue model and just burns through more venture capital every time a new user signs up. (Fortunately, given how retro-conservative Pope Benedict is, he seems more likely to issue a papal encyclical condemning Twitter. We all know it's more likely to enable sin -- pride! sloth! -- than piety.)
It's telling that Cardinal Brady grouped Twitter with texting and e-mail. The former, of course, is a paid service and a massive profit center for cellular carriers around the world, and the latter you also pay for, albeit indirectly, as a service bundled with your monthly internet access or by allowing yourself to be subjected to advertising. (As a Gmail user, I decided to see what would come up when I e-mailed myself the Lord's Prayer. The ads Google served included ones for BeliefNet and Don Helin's paperback pulp thriller "Thy Kingdom Come." Ka-ching!) But when it comes to Twitter, we not only don't pay, but we all take it for granted that somebody's going to keep footing the bill for the rapidly expanding server farms needed to process and store zillions of tweets per minute.
It's sweet, really, that venture capitalists have ponied up millions so that we can all keep tweeting. It's also more than a bit scary. Because more and more of us are increasingly addicted not only to Twitter, but to other services that lack workable business models. What happens if the "dealers" who feed our habits disappear? (It's been known to happen. Last week, for instance, Yahoo announced it was shutting down last century's hot social-networking-esque service, GeoCities, for which it paid $3.5 billion in 1999.)
Read the entire story:
Click here
Thank God for Tech Moguls Who Redistribute VC Wealth So We Can Cybersocialize Freely. For Now, That Is.
by Simon Dumenco
http://adage.com
Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone should thank God it was just a cardinal, and not the pope.
Last week, according to the Times of London, Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland told the country's Catholics to "Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or e-mail every day. Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another."
Oh, my. That's a nice sentiment, but Twitter really doesn't need more users around the world tweeting in ways that can never be monetized. Ireland's got just 4 million Catholics, but the Vatican counts more than a billion baptized Catholics worldwide. If the pope endorsed tweeting prayer, Twitter could be out of business by the end of the year! The 3-year-old company, remember, still lacks a revenue model and just burns through more venture capital every time a new user signs up. (Fortunately, given how retro-conservative Pope Benedict is, he seems more likely to issue a papal encyclical condemning Twitter. We all know it's more likely to enable sin -- pride! sloth! -- than piety.)
It's telling that Cardinal Brady grouped Twitter with texting and e-mail. The former, of course, is a paid service and a massive profit center for cellular carriers around the world, and the latter you also pay for, albeit indirectly, as a service bundled with your monthly internet access or by allowing yourself to be subjected to advertising. (As a Gmail user, I decided to see what would come up when I e-mailed myself the Lord's Prayer. The ads Google served included ones for BeliefNet and Don Helin's paperback pulp thriller "Thy Kingdom Come." Ka-ching!) But when it comes to Twitter, we not only don't pay, but we all take it for granted that somebody's going to keep footing the bill for the rapidly expanding server farms needed to process and store zillions of tweets per minute.
It's sweet, really, that venture capitalists have ponied up millions so that we can all keep tweeting. It's also more than a bit scary. Because more and more of us are increasingly addicted not only to Twitter, but to other services that lack workable business models. What happens if the "dealers" who feed our habits disappear? (It's been known to happen. Last week, for instance, Yahoo announced it was shutting down last century's hot social-networking-esque service, GeoCities, for which it paid $3.5 billion in 1999.)
Read the entire story:
Click here
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
20 Ways to Know If You're Addicted to Your Blog
You know you’re addicted to your blog when...
1) You get terribly depressed that your monthly “unique visitors” is down by a smidgen of a percent.
2) You check Google Analytics every five minutes just to see if you’ve gotten more page hits.
3) You dream constantly of, if not obsess upon, the words “Digg” and “StumbleUpon” and "del.icio.us."
4) You change the font 20 times in just a couple of hours and the color around 50, frantically going up or down, down and up a single shade.
5) You are utterly convinced that virtually everything you do in your life is worthy of a post. And if something you did wasn't, well, you vow never to do that thing ever again.
6) You think about your blog while eating out with friends, or even when you're in the bathroom.
7) You Google the name of your blog at least once a day simply to see who’s mentioning it.
8) You get goose bumps when you think you wrote a great post.
9) You thoroughly loathe people who don't visit your blog after you've invited them.
10) You pull up your blog five times a day just to stare at it lovingly.
11) You check your Adsense numbers more than your bank account.
12) You suffer withdrawal symptoms, like the shakes or a twitching eye, if you haven’t blogged in an hour.
13) You take three seconds or less from the time you finish your post to sharing it on Twitter.
14) You get incredibly sad that no one has commented on your last post.
15) You wake up from a deep sleep just to post something, then go right back to bed.
16) You sometimes whisper the letters RSS as if it were a mantra.
17) You look at your bio and it ALWAYS looks wrong.
18) You will do anything, even something a tad undignified, simply for a little link love.
19) You break into a feverish sweat while desperately searching for the “perfect” image to go along with your post.
20) You alternately think your blog is absolutely brilliant, or totally sucks.
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