by David Burn | Dec 11, 2004 | Digital culture, Politics
John Perry Barlow, former rancher, internet freedom fighter and renowned songwriter reveals quite a lot in his latest blog entry. For one, we now know he attends Burning Man in the black rock desert of northwest Nevada (and here I thought only the cool kids were doing that). He goes on to tell how he’s fighting the Constitutionality of drug charges brought against him. He was taken off a plane bound for New York last year, after authorities allegedly found pot, ‘shrooms and Vitamin K in his suitcase.
Here’s a passage from his entry: I was stripped, cavity-searched, and eventually tossed into a small cell with a marvelously odd collection of California’s less fortunate. There I spent most of the remaining day, while I attempted to raise the truly astonishing $25,000 bail upon which my liberty now depended. Finding rescue was tricky. The “phone” in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn’t know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won’t accept collect calls. Furthermore, they’d taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head. Lunch consisted of a slice of baloney between two unadorned slices of Wonder Bread, but I didn’t have much appetite. At some point in the recent past, someone had thrown up in our cell and no one had bothered to clean it up. I was getting what Rudy Giuliani liked to call, during his tenure as the Mean Mom of New York, “a taste of the system.”
by David Burn | Dec 1, 2004 | Digital culture
i-am-bored dot com brings us an hilarious spoken word performance of Sir Elton’s “Rocket Man” by none other than Capt. Kirk, a.k.a. William Shatner.
The web has so many wonderful, even noble, uses.
by David Burn | Nov 19, 2004 | Digital culture
Sour Bob is one funny dude. In fact, I can’t think of a funnier blogger. Here’s some of his thinking, from a blog entry titled, “Dear White Guy With Dreadlocks” >>
“The most obvious thing I could point out is that no matter how much you might enjoy smoking weed, being a scruffy Caucasian white guy from Illinois pretty well eliminates your claim on the distinctive hairstyle of a black Jamaican religious sect.
Then I might draw to your attention that you seem to have no knowledge of whatever secret techniques Rastafarians use to keep their locks moderately clean and presentable. Their locks look like slinky tendrils of tribal goodness.
Yours look like you hold them together with Crisco and poop.”
by David Burn | Oct 16, 2004 | Digital culture, Media
“I do believe that weblog publishing tools have enabled the rise of the individual journalist-entrepreneur, away from the shackles of underpaid, under-utilized, under-appreciated jobs with formal media companies.” -Rafat Ali of Paid Content
I started blogging in July 2003 because I had something to say. My intention was never to make money. Like most writers I simply wanted to be heard.
As I have grown more comfortable with the form and learned much more about the blogosphere, it became quite clear that one can do more than simply be heard. Rafat Ali, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton have all made this into a living, and a healthy one at that. Some reports have Ali pulling in ten grand a month in ad revenue. For a one-man show, that’s pretty damn good.
In recent days I’ve noted that Ali and Calacanis are looking for bloggers to help them grow their media products. I have contacted both gentlemen about the possibility of joining their firms. Yet, even while doing so, I had to confront the question, “Why?” Why work for them when I have the ability and the temperament to go it alone. Not here. This blog is covers too much ground to make money (and as I mentioned, that was never the purpose here). The key to monetary success with a blog is to exploit a niche, particularly a well-defined niche that you know a great deal about.
I decided tonight to embark on a new path with my friend Shawn Hartley–a technology and marketing wizard and a former colleague of mine from Bozell’s Omaha outpost. We’re launching Adpulp.com, a blog dedicated to covering the ad industry, in our own inimitable style, of course. Sure, there are some blogs already operating in this space, but space on the web is infinite. We will establish our own voice and an audience will find us. Blog it and they will come, you might say.
by David Burn | Oct 11, 2004 | Digital culture
Official corporate blogs are still rare, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, largely because “corporate marketing and branding is often an exercise in hypercontrol of a message, and that doesn’t work well in a blogging context.” -from New York Times
Robert Scoble of Microsoft has put together a helpful guide to corporate blogging. Microsoft is a firm that has hundreds of bloggers on staff. These bloggers opinions are not official company doctrine, they are personal opinions. Yet, Microsoft encourages the activity by hosting many of these blogs and also by linking to them from company web pages. Scoble’s guide applies to this loose framework situation, but even more so to firm’s considering making a blog part of their marketing strategy.
As Palfrey suggests, very few corporate blogs exist at this point in time. I have but four listed in my Blogroll here. Please notify me if you know of others.
by David Burn | Oct 5, 2004 | Digital culture, Politics
NYC blogger and frelance copywriter Paul Ford of F-Train fame describes the inherent logic in getting the far Christian right to vote for Kerry. From his blog:
“Maybe the rapture is coming, and all of those who have taken Jesus into their heart will be pulled to heaven soon. Which is why I’m asking you to vote for the godless devil-candidate, the abortion-loving, bible-hating John Kerry. Because if you vote for George W. Bush, and the rapture comes, his entire administration could vanish at any moment, plunging our government into chaos.”
by David Burn | Sep 30, 2004 | Digital culture
“Supposedly cosmopolitan, San Francisco is in fact a collection of separatist ghettos. Mexicans live in the Mission, Gays live in the Castro, Chinese out in Sunset, and transient yuppies in the Marina; and they avoid each other as much as possible. The city is entirely lacking in glamour. The old money is inbred, and the new money is too geeky. The pretty people are in Los Angeles or Miami; the intellectuals are in New York; and the carpetbaggers left as quickly as they came.” -Nick Denton
Outspoken Oxford grad, Nick Denton, is a former journalist and currently king of his very own nanopublishing empire. In short, he’s the man responsible for Gawker, Wonkette, Fleshbot, Defamer, and Kinja. That is, he is the publisher, not the writer. He hires writers. Notably, Choire Sicha and Ana Marie Cox*, of Gawker and Wonkette fame respectively. Elizabeth Spiers was the first Gawker writer, until traditional media swooped in. Now she works for New York Magazine.
Denton appeared on my radar last spring when this Wired article arrived in my mailbox. The timing was especially interesting, as I had recently advised CenterStage, Chicago’s indie-owned entertainment site, on the need for a blog. I contributed to this effort for a time, but stopped shortly thereafter, realizing that I was the wrong blogger for the job.
Now, there’s another opportunity to be a paid blogger. Denton’s chief rival, Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. is looking for a blogger to take on the advertising beat. Basically, what Denton and Calacanis are up to is carving out, and then capitalizing on, a highly defined niche for each blog they create. Which is smart, especially when the objective is ad revenue. The blog you are reading now is not laser-like. I write here about several topics. Should I ever devote myself to one topic, my traffic would surely increase. But, I do not blog for more traffic. I blog because I have something to say. Of course, should Calacanis bring me onboard, I will focus on the ad world with laser-like intensity. Sounds like fun.
*Cox, a native Nebraskan (like me), reportedly just inked a deal for a book, film, and TV show. This according to Calacanis. You go girl.
by David Burn | Sep 30, 2004 | Digital culture, Politics
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a.k.a. Kos (rhymes with rose) is one of the world’s most popular bloggers. Thankfully, he’s also a smart guy and good writer. Actually if his traffic is any indication, he may be much better than good. His blog DailyKos receives 350,000 to 400,000 visits a day or over 8 million a month. That’s twice the traffic of FoxNews dot com, and a readership that equals many of the world’s leading print publications.
Now, Kos has a new gig. He’s writing a column for The Guardian. In his first effort for this venerable news organization, Kos pontificates on the rise of a true liberal media online. He also wisely points out that liberals are just starting to shape the story–something conservatives in this country have been successfully doing for over 30 years now.
From his Guardian column: “It would be really sexy and dramatic to claim that a few brave blogger souls set out to build an alternative media structure, but that’s not really true. We set out to write for ourselves, to provide an outlet for the angst we felt in a politically hostile environment – where criticising the president on domestic policy was somehow unpatriotic. And we weren’t alone: there was a huge audience out there hungry for this content. And suddenly, the seeds of a liberal media blossomed online.”
by David Burn | Sep 24, 2004 | Digital culture
Mainstream press organizations are at once embracing blogs as source material, while also discounting them as coming mostly from men in their pajamas. Why any one blog gains traction among mainstream journalists, I can’t say for sure. I suppose existing readership has a lot to do with it. When a writer has thousands of daily readers, which some popular bloggers do indeed have, journalists correctly respect that kind of thing, and they are no doubt forced to question their own numbers.
Dan Rather’s recent “document situation” didn’t pass muster in the blogosphere, and I’d say that’s a good thing. I think the ongoing nature of the story is overblown, and totally hypocritical coming from other equally-guilty, faux journalists. Regarding the role bloggers now play in fact-checking a story, I’d say it’s a positive development for society. Knowledge is power and the blogosphere is a living web of knowledge. An intelligent, interconnected community working, mostly for free, to keep it real. Like Linux–the open source operating system created by a Finnish student and made better by thousands of contributors around the globe–the story of the day, whatever it happens to be, is now being made better by bloggers.
This cat has an interesting pro micro-fame slant on why bloggers blog.
by David Burn | Sep 21, 2004 | Digital culture, Literature
My current penchant for making blog entries, often several a day, leads me to question, “Does this web-based activity cut down on my overall production of essays, poems and stories?” I suppose it does. I continue to produce literary work, hoping against odds for professional representation. Yet, this new essay from Columbia Journalism Review, on the process of publishing a book today, paints a bleak picture of the traditional book publishing business, making one question the value of traditional book authorship. Here are some of the none-too-flattering details from Gail Beckerman’s interesting piece on the selling and production of Stacy Sullivan’s book:
~ Nearly 175,000 books were published in 2003, a 19 percent increase from the previous year, and a mountainous climb from the 45,000 published in 1991.
~ At last count, the Publishers Marketing Association tallied 86,641 legitimate publishers with at least ten books in print. Of those, 1,804 had two hundred or more books to their name.
~ In the 1940s, an average issue of The New York Times Book Review was sixty-four pages long, more than twice today’s length.
~ In the Los Angeles Times only 1,500 books a year are reviewed or mentioned out of the more than 100,000 published.
What conclusion may an aspiring author/prolific blogger draw from such findings? In the crowded marketplace of ideas one might get a chance to be heard, and the opportunity may even take the shape of a book, but it would be foolish to expect a consistent stream of income to be generated by this process. For that, the author/blogger needs a job. The book can play a huge role, however, in determining which job the writer eventually finds himself with.
