Friday, September 23, 2005

Speaking as a former sperm, I have to agree

I never heard anything called "Consumer-Generated Media" before Henry Copeland (who sees trends long before most of us do) rightly smacks the label down:

Calling blogs consumer-generated media is like calling sex the "clothless generation of heat, musk and mucus."

Great piece. Read the whole thing.

By the way, Henry and BlogAds are in the short rows of selecting a new logo.

High, if not heeled

Follow a link trail far enough and you too may reach the Manolo Shoe Blog. Is this Manolo himself (bio) writing here? And why does Vogue.co.uk call that last link a 'blog'?

[Later...] Andrew Playford writes to say,

Doc, while you are on the subject of Manolo's, we at TheGiftBlog.com are trying desperately to give a free pair away so if your readers are stylish women or men who like to wear stylish women's shoes, point them to The Gift Blog - I suspect no one reads our blog anyway so the odds should be rather good!

Here's that link. If you win, I'd like a kickback. (Just not with a pointy end of those shoes.)

Incident exposure

While Jet Blue's flight 292 displaced all other news coverage on Los Angeles (and even national cable/satellite) television, I enjoyed watching the coverage with Britt Blaser on the line, thinking he should have been on with CNN instead.

Here's his report. An aviation incident, not an emergency. And this:

Here again, on a tiny scale, we could see the problems that surround every emergency, from a Katrina or Rita to something as energizing but non-threatening as a cocked nose gear. What's obvious to everyone with a little experience and, in this case, with an explicit written procedure in place, is no match for the need for everyone with the slightest authority over the situation to take up as much room as possible in the mind of the collective.

Which he summarizes with, Confusion in an Emergency Expands to Match the Time and Voices Available. Damn. TV sure helps with that, huh?

His conclusion:

They talk about the hours of boredom punctuated by the moments of terror, but pilots rarely talk about their core lifesaving skill: getting the administrators to shut up long enough to put this promiscuous aluminum tube on the ground.

That's under the subhead The Rightest Stuff. Nowhere in his post does Britt remind us that he won three Distinguished Flying Crosses in the course of his career in the Air Force. (Although he does his best to put those, and much more, in perspective.)

[Later...] Chip Hoagland points out that the bright flames from the nose gear were burning magnesium, not tires.

Gang up

Before we record the next Gillmor Gang, (at about 11am today) I should point to the last one.

The case for conservation

Hello Houston? We have a problem. And it's not just the hurricane.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan's correspondents, and this NYTimes story.

Olds news

Jay Rosen: Charging for Columnists: Notes and Comment on the Launch of TimesSelect. His encapsulating subhed: If one faction wanted to go the Wall Street Journal's pay wall route, and another wanted to remain free like the Post, then TimesSelect is not a hypothesis for how to succeed on the Web, but just a mid-point between competing theories. That alone is reason to worry.

That expands on my earlier remark, This whole thing looks like an ugly political compromise between warring factions inside the paper.

There's a market model that will work someday. The Times is right to try figuring one out. Times Select will end up being a step in the learning process.

Here's where I think we'll end up: Charge for the news, recycle the olds. That's the same business we've always had in the daily print news business, and I think it will leverage just fine on the Web.

The only problem with that is having no live Web presence, right? So, a suggestion: take everything but breaking news off the home page (which is way too crapped up with clutter anyway). Make it clear that subscribers get to see the rest of today's news today. Make links to today's news work tomorrow, even if only subscribers see those links today.

That way the paywall for each story or column is up only for 24 hours, and down for the rest of time. That way the paper gets plenty of authority and influence from having its full archives on the Web in searchable and linkable form. News customers get to pay for what they've always paid for. And hey, maybe once the high value of fresh news gets full respect from its producers, the papers will start making customers out of its consumers.

Bonus link: Jay's piece in the Huffington Post.