by David Burn | Jan 17, 2005 | Digital culture
Clay Shirky makes some interesting points about web publishing…
Mass amateurization is the web’s normal pattern. Travelocity doesn’t make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.
Traditional publishing creates value in two ways. The first is intrinsic: it takes real work to publish anything in print, and more work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up-front costs are large, and because each additional copy generates some additional cost, the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations prepared to support these costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And since it’s most efficient to distribute those costs over the widest possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These are economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be a small number of publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a disproportionately large market share.
Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value, because they are a platform for the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.
But the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not “the masses” but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.
by David Burn | Jan 14, 2005 | Advertising, Digital culture
The ebcb is faultless – look at the aesthetics, nicely reduced beans, those modern crunchy chips which really absorb the bean juice, and a beautiful pale egg. And the bacon is hugely flavourful – it tastes fresh off the pig. -Russell Davies, account planner and cafe lover
For those considering a venture into the blogosphere, may I point out the value in blogging a niche. The tighter the niche the better. You can be the expert on something meaningful, or something quirky. Either way, there may well be an interested audience waiting. Take Egg Bacon Chips and Beans, Russell Davies’ blog about a dish served in London’s diners. I don’t live anywhere near London and I’m interested in it. If I did live nearby, you can be assured I would enjoy eating said dish at the recommended cafes. Minus the eggs. I don’t like eggs.
by David Burn | Jan 13, 2005 | Digital culture, Media
from Wired: After Chris Allbritton returned to New York from Iraqi Kurdistan, he raised $15,000 and headed back to Iraq in 2003 as the first independent journalist-blogger sponsored by his readers. There he risked life and limb covering the war and its messy aftermath, detailing his experiences on his blog, Back-to-Iraq 3.0.
With 25,000 readers a day checking out his dispatches, Allbritton was able to build on this success by securing a plum assignment as Time magazine’s Baghdad correspondent. As a result, Allbritton has had to change his approach to blogging.
“I’m just very, very careful,” Allbritton said. “I never scoop Time, for instance. And I’ve become much more miserly in parceling out my opinions. I place a whole lot more emphasis on the reporting on the blog, rather than taking a stance. This has alienated a significant number of my readers, who have accused me of selling out, going corporate, whatever. But, I came to Iraq to become a full-time foreign correspondent, so them’s the breaks.”
He also doesn’t post as often on his blog anymore, and says he is thinking of shutting it down.
by David Burn | Jan 13, 2005 | Digital culture
from Chocolate and Vodka: In a case which has stunned and shocked the blogging world, long-time blogger and self-proclaimed blog ‘expert’ Suw Charman was today fired by the Blogosphere for alleged gross moral turpitude. Ms Charman was brought before a disciplinary hearing late last night, long after she should have been in bed, and summarily dismissed, sources close to the blogger said.
In a statement read to the press today, a tearful Ms Charman said, “This is an outrageous abuse of power and the Blogosphere should be ashamed of itself. This isn’t about gross moral turpitude, it’s just a vendetta against me because I never wrote my own blog software in BBEdit back in 1998.”
The Blogosphere refused to comment on the case, saying that there were privacy laws to be abided by, and besides, the less it said the quicker the whining old cow would vanish off the news radar.
Ms Charman later told a friend, “I was starting to think that I was going to have to start posting taudry, poorly written fabrications of my life as a slut, or become an x-rated vidcamgirl, in order to get myself a book deal, but being fired by the Blogosphere is a far easier way of doing it. Not only do I now no longer need to get my tits out for the lads, I can pretend to be hard done by and feed off everyone’s sympathy.”
by David Burn | Jan 12, 2005 | Chicago, Digital culture
North Branch, Chicago River at Lawrence Avenue bridge
My friend Chris May, a.k.a. Evil Vince, has turned his web site into a photoblog. It’s good to see. I’ve been helping friends set up their sites for a number of years now, but I just started implementing blogs for others.
It seems the distinction between blogs and web sites may soon fade as all sites become blogs, or blog like. Forgetting the “frequently updated” part of what a blog is for a moment, and just looking at the content management tools (all available via your web browser), one might think of a blog as the fastest and easiest route to publishing on the web. Ease-of-entry is clealry one of the blogosphere’s major selling points.
by David Burn | Jan 11, 2005 | Digital culture
spamshirt.com was created out of a determination to find a use for spam, the curse of the in-box. spamshirt came up with a unique solution: a way of recycling irritating, useless spam messages into an expression of personality and style.
spamshirt does exactly what it suggests, we take spam and we put it on a shirt. But not just any old shirt – spamshirt use a range of comfortable, stylish cotton shirts to ensure cheap, nasty spam is transformed into quality fashion items, turning spam into glam.
by David Burn | Dec 31, 2004 | Digital culture
One joy of reading blogs is stumbling upon a new voice that strikes a chord. It doesn’t happen everyday, so when it does, it feels like a genuine discovery. Today, I found Dooce.com via Chicago blogger, Pismire.
Dooce is the work of Heather B. Armstrong, a Stay At Home Mom (SAHM).
She writes, “My parents raised me Mormon, and I grew up believing that the Mormon Church was true. In fact, I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old. I had pre-marital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee. There had better be a special place in heaven for me.
I attended BYU from 1993-1997 and graduated with a degree in English. I firmly believe that BYU is the most horrible place on Earth, worse even than Disneyland. I am no longer a practicing Mormon or someone who believes that Rush Limbaugh speaks to God. My family is understandably disappointed.
This website chronicles my life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up during the pregnancy, to when I became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression I currently suffer. I talk a lot about poop, boobs, my dog, and my daughter.”
Other memorable voices from the 2004 blogosphere include: F Train, Sour Bob, Narayan Nayar, Jim Romenesko, John Perry Barlow and Ana Marie Cox (because no list would be complete without her).
by David Burn | Dec 31, 2004 | Digital culture, Film
Darby and I watched the documentary Revolution OS tonight. It’s a low budget film written, directed, produced, shot and edited by JTS Moore. Prior to this project, Moore, a Hollywood screenwriter, had little knowledge of hacking, open source politics or the characters involved. A friend suggested the idea for the film.
The level of discourse in the film is quite technical, but the political themes and business opportunities are readily available to the less technically inclined. One area of tension that emerges in the film–and all good films need tension–is the conflict between Richard Stallman’s purist “free software” philosophy and Linus Torvalds’ “open source” execution of that philosophy.
Stallman mentions that free means free as in free speech, not free, as in free beer. He also says he intended for there to be business applications from the very beginning of his work with GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix), his project to replace Sun’s proprietary Unix workstation. A project that pre-dated Linus Torvald’s independent, but related efforts in Finland to construct an operating system kernel. Torvalds’ kernel combined with Stallman’s programs ostensibly made up the first versions of what became known as Linux.
Today’s Linux OS, argues Stallman, ought to be rightly called GNU-Linux. But Linus does not like that option. He sees GNU-Linux as but one bundle or distribution of the operating system, like Red Hat Linux or others available on the market today.
by David Burn | Dec 26, 2004 | Digital culture
I’ve been inundated with comment spam, or c-spam, of late (here, and at AdPulp). And when c-spam comes it comes in waves–40, 50, 100, 150 at a time. This nefarious activity poses a significant threat to the blogosphere, in that bloggers will be tempted to shut down comments altogether, rather than try to stay one step ahead of the jackasses who commit these crimes. Take away the back-and-forth of legitimate comments, and comments on comments, and you remove the conversational nature of blogs. Which is why blogging software providers like pMachine, Word Press and Moveable Type must make defeating c-spam a priority for 2005.
While on the topic of online scams, let’s also look at the practice known as phishing. Phishing involves the use of e-mail messages that appear to come from your bank or another trusted business, but are actually from imposters. By the way, phishing has nothing whatsoever to do with the rock group from Vermont.
Phishing e-mails typically ask you to click a link to visit a web site, where you’re asked to enter or confirm personal financial information such as your account numbers, passwords, Social Security number or other data. Although these web sites may appear legitimate, they are not. Thieves can collect whatever data you enter and use it to access your personal accounts.
When you receive these bogus e-mails (and you will), you can forward them to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov, or contact them at www.consumer.gov/idtheft* or 877.IDTHEFT (877.438.4338).
by David Burn | Dec 14, 2004 | Chicago, Digital culture
I love maps. I love blogs. Hence, I’m naturally drawn to maps that pinpoint where the bloggers are.
Click on the map to visit ChicagoBlogMap dot com. From there you can search for Chicago bloggers by their CTA train stop.
