Monday, January 13, 2003
Speaking of (and for) We
Dan Gillmor in Columbia Journalism Review: Here comes 'We Media'. Sez Dan:
...it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don’t have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. And the evolution of We Media will oblige us all to adapt.
Sorry I didn't catch that one earlier; and thanks to Mathew Boedicker for the link.
Like we said
Om Malik: AOL Saga: Microsoft wins again, for no reason. Sez Om:
Bill Gates is not only smart, his rivals are stupid.
I said pretty much the same thing in The Shrinking Subject, in Linux Journal, back in August, '00:
For a year or two, Netscape looked like it could do no wrong. It was a Miata being chased down a mountain road by a tractor trailer. As long as it moved fast and looked ahead, there was no problem with the truck behind. But at some point, Netscape got fixated on the rear-view mirror. That's where they were looking when they drove off the cliff.
Somehow AOL got this idea that they were a media company, rather than an Internet company.
Dead wrong, it turns out.
[Later...] W.A. Gerrard sez They're still selling pipes, even though they bought the oil fields.
Beatrolling
I have two post-Macworld pieces in Linux Journal, so far: The X Factor and Surprise.
Viletone
The speakerphone has been on hold with Verizon for 2.5 hours, playing dull new age music while I wait to talk with somebody about setting up some kind of direct payment arrangement.
Gotta hate it.
[Later...] It's up to 4 hours now. Amazing.
Edging ahead
Jon Udell in Infoworld: The disruptive Web.
He expands on that in Crossing the bridge of weak ties on his blog:
The two-way Web is being printed on HTML pages, distributed over the RSS network, and woven together with links. The WYSIWYG writing capability that I saw in the Netscape and Microsoft mail/news clients five years ago, and that Ingo and Greg are drawing attention to again, still isn't woven into the fabric of the two-way Web the way it needs to be. But we'll get there, eventually. That's not what worries me.
My concern, rather, is that we'll get hung up once again on applications and protocols, and miss the big picture. Ultimately, it's not about RSS any more than it was about NNTP. It's about the evolution of our species toward shared consciousness.
"Shared consciousness" is fuzzy stuff, but what we know truly matters. Blogging is a huge part of the new social fabric that is knitting itself all around the world of ends that comprises the Web.
I wrote about that in my Release Early Release Often post back in June 2001. There's a matrix there, borrowed from John Seely Brown, that sorts explicit and tacit knowledge into personal and social quadrants. What makes blogs so powerful, I think, is that they feed socially held tacit knowledge (what we know) with an abundance of explicit (what I know) stuff.
Here's what JSB said, long before weblogs showed up:
In essence the Web augments the knowledge dynamics of a region, increasing its diversity (serendipity) and expanding its learning resources by leveraging local expertise — in a lightweight way — for mentoring. More generally, it enhances the fluid boundaries between knowledge production and knowledge consumption and between the local and the virtual. The Web helps to build a rich fabric that combines the small efforts of the many with the large efforts of the few. It enables the culture and sensibilities of the region to evolve, not only by enriching the diversity of available information and expertise, but it tightens the feedback loops of bootstrapping. It increases the intellectual density of cross linkages. And it enables learning to happen everywhere—a learning ecology. And the lurking (or informal benchmarking) that happens in local hangouts can now get augmented by the Web, one feeding the other. In other words, a self-catalytic system starts to emerge reinforcing and extending the core competencies of the region.
He goes on to predict weblogs:
Let me end with a brief reflection on a very profound shift that I believe is happening — a shift between using technology to support the individual and using technology to support relationships. This shift will be very important because with it we will discover new ways, new tools and new social protocols for helping us help each other, which is really the very essence of social learning. It is also the essence of lifelong learning, a form of learning that learning ecologies could dramatically facilitate. And being able to create learning ecologies in a region is a first step to constructing a culture of learning , more generally.
This is also, I believe, the idea behind smart mobs, moblogging and the transformation of companies from the forts they were to the social organizations they have to become if the best-learning (and best-teaching) employees are going to bother working for them.
I think there's some connection between all this and Donna Wentworth's The Read-Write Web: Notes on a Blog Politics of Form, on the occasion of Dave's Berkman Fellowship.
By the way, I see a connection between moblogging (mobile weblogging, basically) and GeoURL. (Backthanks to Oliver for the pointer.) Eventually I'll want my portable GPS to automatically update my geo meta tags, if I want to bother saying where on this hollow world I happen to be.
Media antimatter: PBS' blogging nonprogram
PBS says it will run a feature on blogging in mediamatters on Thursday. Glenn sez he can't get it in Knoxville. Hmm... I'll betcha he could find something if he has an outdoor antenna (and doesn't depend only on cable). I see no less than four PBS signals around Knoxville: WKOP/15&17 and WJSK/2&41. But... it's not on any of them (which all appear to be one station anyway). Well... he might get WUNF/33 from Asheville, which radiates from Mt. Pisgah and has line-of-sight into parts of Knoxville. But... looks like UNC-TV doesn't carry it, either.
Let's see... It should be on the PBS feed that comes with many folks' DishTV and DirecTV lineups. But... Here's PBS's Thursday/Jan 16 lineup, and the program isn't there.
Is this program being carried at all, anywhere?
Well, the video clip works, and it features Glenn, Oliver, Anil and Megan. The text says Blogging: Is it Punditry? Is it journalism? Is it important?
Maybe they spent too much time around Oliver's kryptonite.
Side note: Oliver's kicking his own ass with Atkins too. Very cool. We've both been going since August, though I seem to have stopped at about 25 pounds and 5 inches. (Gotta quit snacking on those Costco macadamia nuts.)
[Later...] Gerry Humphrey give us the rundown on various times the show should be airing in different places, including Knoxville, and how to easily find the info.
Eric Norlin, warblogger
The Swami of Boulder has ten predictions for 2003. Mostly he's optimistic about The War (he's got some company there) when it gets around to happening. I just like #8.
Edge2Edge
Cut off the head and the body dies
Nobody seems to be missing Steve Case.
Consider this possibility: As much as he may have fucked up the merger with Time Warner, and mismanaged everything since, Steve Case was the only guy who could have saved AOL.
That's what I thought last Summer, when Steve still had his job. Now he's gone, and AOL is toast.
Time Warner was, and will remain, a media company. With few exceptions (hell, I can't think of any, except maybe (and very partially — see half the items below) the New York Times — maybe ya'll can help me here) media companies don't get the Net.
[Later...] Lance Knobel names two, both in the UK.
How can you tell if they do?
They expose their archives, so search engines can crawl themThey don't move around (and 404) their archivesThey don't refer to their customers as "consumers"They do everything they can to make it easy for people to find and use their goodsThey know, instinctively, that doing all the above yields greater value in authority than whatever value in dollars they obtain by selling yesterday's or last week's bird-cage linerThey don't labor to dumb down technologies, so readers, viewers or listeners are forced to endure unwanted advertisingThey value and work to improve interoperabilityThey don't try to improve on the vacuum-filled end-to-end stupidity of the Net itselfThey embrace and extend the Net's own infrastructure (which provides that end-to-end stupidity)They don't sit quietly with their thumbs up their asses when powerful entertainment lobbies railroad laws and regulations that limit or eliminate the ability of innovative media enterprises (including themselves) to do business
Hope they work it out soon
Some blogger sites still don't work on Safari.