At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Al Gore said Web 2.0 can be utilized to serve a common, but higher, purpose.
“The purpose, I would urge all of you — as many of you as are willing to take it up — is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth,†Mr. Gore said.
According to the Times’ Bits blog, Gore also said, the nation needs to build “an electronet,” a unified national smart grid, with high-voltage, low-loss underground wires that deliver renewable energy from the places that produce it — like the sunny Arizona deserts or the windy Dakota plains — to the cities where the majority of it is used. Such a grid would require a $400 billion investment upfront, but would pay off in just over three years, he said.
The task, to summarize, is to use cloud computing, open source technology and viral networks to share mission critical information that directly leads to environmental upgrades in the nation’s infrastructure.
Make your own yearbook photo at Yearbook Yourself. Geek Sugar named the ad supported site “Website of the Day” back in August. It’s good for a laugh or two, not to mention a new profile picture for your favorite soc net.
Things About Portland That Suck is kind of funny, I have to say. There are so many nice things about living here that you can forget, or simply choose to overlook the not so good things. Like the site’s Reason #56: Wannabe Suicide Girls.
Contrary to the beliefs held in the hearts of hundreds of scantily dressed, overly inked, dyed and pierced girls in Portland, they are in fact not ALL Suicide Girls.
I know it’s shocking… but not all of these “gorgeousâ€-yet-alternative girls actually get paid to take it off for the camera.
Some other zingers include Street Kids With Pets; Moped/Scooter Gangs; McMenamins’ Service; Dixie Tavern; Your Band; and White Guilt.
This site is on its way to becoming Portland’s version of the smash interweb success, Stuff White People Like.
Portland is a city full of friendly, interesting people, so it’s natural that web sites would spring up from this fertile land to support that fact. One is Portland On Fire, a site that profiles a different Portlander each day. The site is currently inactive, but there may be work happening behind the scenes to bring us more profiles.
Another site I took note of is Strange Love Live, a podcast series featuring local tech persons of interest produced by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. I’m looking forward to the show’s next feature on local photographer, Mark Coleman. Mark and I met at Beer and Blog two Fridays ago.
Also at Beer and Blog, I bumped into Dawn Foster. Dawn is profiled on Portland on Fire, as well. Since meeting her, I noticed that another Portlander (one I have not yet met), Marshall Kirkpatrick, named her an up-and-coming social media consultant on ReadWriteWeb. Dawn gave me an invite to Shizzow, a Dopplr-like site that helps friends connect in real space and time.
I also met Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo at Beer and Blog. They’re working on organizing the first annual CyborgCamp, among other things.
This post is not conclusive, it’s just a run through of some of my preliminary findings in the tech and social media communities here. I’ve also had coffee with a couple of ad guys, and gotten to know someone working at Wieden + Kennedy. The someone at Wieden mentioned her frustration that the tech and ad communities are not better connected. It was an interesting observation, and by no means a situation exclusive to Portland.
I enjoyed reading Mark Bowden’s piece in The Atlantic on changes being made to The Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership.
Bowden makes the point that Rupe lives by the scoop and that he sees news as a commodity, not literature or, God forbid, public service.
This is how Murdoch understands journalism—as content, a word he uses all the time, rather than as a form of literature or public service, and as a commodity whose value largely derives from its instant retail malleability. A short, crisp scoop that dramatically advances a major developing story—Obama’s poll numbers down! Britney back in rehab! Steinbrenner to fire another manager!—can be neatly packaged for a dizzying variety of media: print, radio, TV, the Internet, or even cell-phone screens. It doesn’t matter much to a fully integrated media conglomerate like News Corporation how its customers choose to access this content, as long as the transaction pays. He wants his reporters out in front of every competitor on the planet.
This means that, at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908.
I might add that the above argument is about content, not distribution. Rupe, like every other pedaller of content, is investing in the medium of the day, the net. Here Bowden gets worked up.
The Internet is in many ways a superior medium for journalism. It costs virtually nothing, in contrast to multimillion-dollar printing presses, giant rolls of paper and tankers of ink, and fleets of delivery trucks, to say nothing of the thousands of laborers needed to operate the equipment and distribute the product. But while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.
The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.
Neither does Rupert Murdoch.
I added the emphasis in the above passage, because I have invested years of effort in online content creation. My work is far from institutional, for it’s just me and a few friends doing what we do. Yet, in this chaotic media environment, I see opportunity. Opportunity to go well beyond blogging.
I like the term micro-media for it’s obvious connection to micro-beer. Micro-brewers recognized that the big players in beer treat their beers as a commodities and nothing more, so they chose to make something markedly better and the market responded favorably. Now many micro-brewers are themselves well established entities with national distribution and legions of fans. Essentially, that’s what we’re striving for with sites like HuskerZone and AdPulp. We’re pursuing a different flavor of coverage around niche subjects we care about.
We’re a long ways from an ideal editorial product at this time, but I hope to get there by dedicating to the work. I want to see our micro-media experiments excite people. To some degree they do now, but I want to get to where Sam Adams and New Belgium are. I want our published products to become side-by-side options for consumers. To achieve this, we will need to stop blogging and start breaking news. If we can garner the resources–time and money–we can do it.
The interesting thing is online content creators can learn from the both poles—the scoops and short format favored by Rupe’s papers and the values-based, facts first reporting of papers like The New York Times and Washington Post.
Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan is offering “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” in six parts on the firm’s blog.
Here’s one paragraph from the initial entry:
Publishers – and, importantly, authors – will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities. Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ‘books’ in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.
From a business perspective, I don’t disagree with Lloyd. But from a book lover’s perspective, I still want a physical book to read, one with lots of ideas expressed in words.
If you have an extremely popular blog, other media makers might be willing to bet on you. That’s the idea forwarded in today’s Sunday Styles.
image of the white guy likin’ a dog, courtesy of Flickr user, PancakeJess
At the center of the piece is Christian Lander, an Internet copywriter who launched Stuff White People Like last January. The blog has since entertained millions of visitors with things white people like. Some of those things are: Having Gay Friends, Dinner Parties, Book Deals, Graduate School and The Idea of Soccer.
One of the intriguing aspects to this story is how literary agents have swooped in to scour the net for talent.
One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.
When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.â€
And two years after that?
“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,†Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.â€
I found it interesting that Kurt Andersen, a founder of Very Short List, who is represented by the William Morris agency and acts as an adviser to Random House, had a taste maker’s role in taking Stuff White People Like to book form. Lander’s agent asked Anderson to bring it to the attention of Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, which he did.
