DefinitiveInk

Bob Stein in NY Mag

Bob Stein is featured in NY Mag's LookBook, looking a bit like Burroughs. For fellow Voyagerites this is a bit of a treat. In the interview he mentions Criterion instead of Voyager which is interesting since many people no longer remember the CD-Rom publisher but they can still buy the Criterion CDs. he manages to dis Park Slope, the Upper west Side and celebrate Williamsburg and N7th street which to me feels more like South Beach than a hotbed of intellectual pursuits at least on the weekends when we've accidentally visited. At any rate it is nice to see him in good form.

Twitter vs. Blogger a look at their growth

A long and interesting post by Jason Kottke of the growth of twitter as compared to blogger or possible lack thereof (as he keeps updating the post). Growth of posts not users. Also a link to a chart of the history of adoption of technology over time.

ConsumerSearch finds new life

About.com buys ConsumerSearch.com for 33 million.  Wow! The site had only 25 million page views in the first quarter of the year, with 3 million unique monthly visitors according to the press release. So that would be 8.3 million pvs a month  and 2.7 pages per visit. If it had great data wouldn't those be higher. A friend of mine designed the site six years ago and it hasn't changed since then. Periodically I stopped in and really thought they were not publishing. While it is a small relative amount to the deals that seem to come out daily it seems like a hefty sum for what it is.

Knowing when a medium is dead

Was in a meeting yesterday with someone who also had the pleasure of making some CD-ROMs for museums years ago. I say pleasure as it was a lot of fun to run through archives, make films, pull documents, and take photos of rare artifacts but that was the problem. My colleague ran a small company then (has a really well known one now) and shared with me an epiphany he had at the time.  He told me that one day, in the middle of the big and only project they were creating for a large museum, he looked around the table at the 12 employees he had working on it that realized that not one of them had bought a CD-ROM in the past six months. It was then he said that he realized the medium was doomed. He was right.

Video of the NY Tech Meetup

Link to video from last Tuesday's NY Tech Meetup. I had to miss it because of a meeting with my landlady. While we may have a new stove, oven, and backyard fence coming I was still sorry to miss it. So thanks to Rich for sending me the link. One note though that this only seems to work on a IE on a PC. I want to see the flickrcash, and collegewiki apps. There was also a great mashup from DayLife. As a inside highlight for those who know and love him, Mark  Graham was visiting from CA and sure enough as is his way, he asked the first question.

Assignment Zero at the NYC Social Media Club

Assignment Zero a project by Jay Rosen along with Wired, was the subject of tonight's Social Media Club meeting. I like Social Media Club. Founded by Howard Greenstein, one of the founders of the old WWWAC, and a fixture in the NYC digital scene Howard has assembled some great people to help like Jason Chervokas of @NY fame. The SMC has already spread to several cities and it is really interesting to watch Howard put together the organization.

It's taken me several decades to embrace my inner geek so I really like the title. Going to the meetings is like joining the science or chess club in High School. I never joined one, and in fact I'm not sure if my high school had one, so this is like making up for past wrongs. Since my job is in many ways to bring different forms of social media to iVillage it is also a good place to go to think about new things. Meetings are interesting and at each the subjects seem to always come back to reputation, trust, and the wisdom of crowds.

The Pro/Am connections that Assignment Zero is playing with, are very interesting. It is more structured and accountable than a wiki yet reaching towards open source unlike traditional journalism.  The HuffPo announced a political crowd-sourced project with newsassignment.net, the parent site of Assignment Zero, and soon up is Newsvine. I'm going to follow this and perhaps contribute.

Granger - The Rich Don't You Tube

"The new opiate of the masses is the illusion of participation in the culture, even as the underpinnings of a good life - money, mostly- are stripped away and handed to the filthy rich." David Granger in the Editor's Letter of the April 2007 Esquire.

(Esquire - by the way has just launched a redesign of their site. In a way it is the end of an era for me as I created the old one. I'm rather pleased that it lasted for seven years. It was fun to plan, shape, oversee and  staff. I wish them well with their new one. )

Somewhere I have notes and possibly audio of a walk I took with Mark Crispin Miller around Times Square and to the headquarters of a number of media companies. When we looked at the advertising and stopped outside of MTV's studio he said something very similar. The ads had changed from pushing a product and even an aspirational element to the idea the "you" are the star.

Random House introduces book widgets

Random house has introduced a new widget for books that you can add to your site. Interesting!

Super Bowl ads spur blog devoted to them

AdWeek is launching a blog called, SuperAdFreak covering the Superbowl ads with an all-star team of commenters. Simple fast design, lots of links to their publications. Smart idea.

SeriousEats is making me seriously hungry

I've been so busy telling co-workers, and other people I know who need to know, about seriouseats, that I've  forgotten to blog about it. The site which launched last week is  a wonderful example of the kind of instant category contender that can happen when you take some well known journalists and great food bloggers, awesome technologists, and mix in a lot of enthusiasm. The site is all MT with various extensions such as tags, it has forums, a video player powered by the wonderful Brightcove player, a reblog, and other great features. I've e-mailed about it quite a lot in the past few days and am a bit pooped so rather than list the players etc. Just go to the site and poke around.

babble - the zine not the Tower

So Nerve is moving into the crowded parenting space with babble.  Say what you will about its chances of success but I think it is a helluva URL. The press release, and the NYT Style section article on it.

COPA on trial in Philly

Rufus Griscom of Nerve.com is blogging from Philadelphia scene of a trial in which he and others including the ACLU are plaintiffs against the DOJ regarding the COPA act. This hasn't caught my eye on many of the blogs I read daily. Perhaps the focus is too much on new things than protecting our rights to publish. Here is the DOJ response to the petition from the ACLU.

ReadyMade bought by Meredith

What a nice turn to the story for ReadyMade. They get to continue to produce it from SF rather than Des Moines and Meredith gets to move into the younger hip crafter space. (via MediaBistro)

Links: 08/21/06

TED Blog is being highlighted by Typepad today. It is the work of Apperceptive which is led by two immensely talented people - David Jacobs and John Emerson. The blog has a post about Natalie MacMaster who I got to see at Celebrate Brooklyn this year (and last on Canada Day), as the post on TED Blog says, if she is playing near you - drop everything.

John Battelle has a post about the bubble we seem to be in called "Failure to Fail". It is worth a read.

...In short, we don't have a company creation crisis. But we might have a company destruction crisis. Something is off in our ecosystem - there's simply not enough failure out there right now. For an ecosystem to be truly healthy, bad ideas (or good ideas poorly executed) need to fail, so we can all learn from the failure, incorporate the lessons, and move on.

On a similar note Tom Evslin's post "Life on the Long Tail - an Introduction"  (via avc.blogs.com) Very interesting post about  authorship but it also contains this which is related to the article above.

...The power law also explains why it is bad idea to be the twentieth social networking site or VoIP phone company even if #1 was just purchased for a gazillion dollars. Let’s assume that a gazillion means a $24 million just to make the math easy. Power law says that #2 is worth  $12,000,000 (still not bad), #3 is worth $8,000,000 (you’d get by even after your VCs’ cut). But #20 is worth only $1.2 million. When you check the liquidation preference (see Brad Feld on this) in your financing, you’ll find that you don’t get any of that – it all goes to the investors and they won’t even be happy.

The lengthening tail affects copy-cat entrepreneurs as well as authors. The ever lower cost of starting and running an Internet business means that #20 will always have to contend with #21 through #50 if it looks like any money is going to made in the category. Tough to get the investors’ money back. Actually, since so much of the value is at the head of the curve when talking about network businesses, it is impossible for any but a handful of network business to succeed within a category.

Scoble defines what blogging is, hmm.

If there are any masochists in the house then today's Media Bistro job board contains something big for you. The NY Observer is looking for a VP General Manager Online. On the one hand you could go after NYMetro.com and gawker, etc but though, I don't know first hand, I suspect that working for someone "whose “... 25-ness is a huge asset" and "who is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom." could really be a drag but then again I'm perhaps I'm just too jaded a character.

Someone I know is creating a novelization of the next Mr. Bean movie. Now that is a tough assignment.

 

Old timer vlogs and tries something new

Today on WNYC I heard; that musical tastes are somewhat set after 30, that if one isn't pierced by their early twenties it isn't going to happen, and if you haven't had Sushi by the time you are 40 you aren't likely to try it. (I may be getting some of these ages wrong but listen to it for yourself.) The story talked about how as we age we may lose our sense of adventure and it tied in well with a new study about the "N Generation" from Interrepublic called, "The New ‘Digital Divide’: How the New Generation of Digital Consumers Are Transforming Mass Communication” ClickZ (via PaidContent).  The study looked at 16-49 year-old "power-users" who accessed the Internet at least 11 times in seven days and found; that 71 percent of  them are involved with blogs, and are three times more likely to be so than the next age bracket up, and that twice as many of the them belong to a social networking site. So given that, it is really interesting to see the vlogging being done on YouTube by an older Englishman called Geriatric1927 who doesn't look like he has any piercings but who is definitely trying something new.

Geritaric 1927  is making videos and telling stories from his life,  and what I find fascinating are the number of people not only commenting, but making videos in response to his videos. I usually go to YouTube,  check out what is most popular, and  watch short silly videos, so this was new to me. I first noticed the creations of video responses last week when I saw a short video of a girl who made an emo video. This may have been a parody, she spoke very slowly about no one understanding goths and outsiders, and how someone was taking someone else to the prom. In their responses people were trying to outdo themselves with depressed monologues, and one or two, if they were serious, seemed to be in need of  help.

This video response to a video is amazing, it is a forum of messaging but unlike the comments one can leave on a board it isn't threaded. Each video is its own entry and has its own set of comments but I digress.  The remarkable things is that so many people have access and the wherewithal to sit down and create video responses with what looks like the same effort as leaving a comment. Some of these responses are very short as in "nice video", others are more drawn out and filled with advice. Geriatric1927 is talking to the N Generation, he is reaching out. Perhaps he was lonely but with thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of viewings he should have some comfort. His video has helped bridge the divide even more as he had elicited response from other  members of his generation, these are mostly other older men, so far no older women. 

It is the mass response that is so special about Geriatric1927's efforts. In many ways he is leaving us a record similar to the recorded interviews that StoryCorps creates, but he is reaching a different audience. StoryCorps plays highlights of interviews on NPR,  sends the audio documents created in its booths home with the  people who were recorded, and sends a copy to to the Smithsonian, but it is not truly shared in such a mass way. For  this it is the magic of YouTube as it exists right now, the unexpected stew that enables someone born before television but adventurous and younger than his years to elicit a video response from someone born in the nineteen nineties.

Links for 06/16/06

Susan Mernit has two great post of links -

• One to an article about social networking sites and how they are working to combine play and micro-payments.
• A post by her fellow Yahoolian Leonard Lin (using Vox) who muses and creates a list of technology/life elements that will be very much in our lives in 2011. I too am quite blown away by the Nike ipod module, aware and scared (my feelings) of RFID, and interested n personal aggregaters. Susan says she will follow with a list - I see a meme starting and can't wait to read hers.

WashingtonPost launches PostGlobal - an ongoing discussion of great thinkers on specific topics - A friend of mine and me were talking about something like this with a POD component. It will be interesting to watch. (via IWantMedia)

Donald Trump caught cheating at golf. Not really that surprising but it is interesting that TMZ got the photo. There was a very respected man who was a member at my father's golf club who was caught cheating. No one looked at him the same way again and he eventually resigned. It is something you just don't do.

A teaser - my friend and client Ron Suskind has a book coming out on the 20th called The One Percent Doctrine . It is going to be explosive but it also under strict blackout, I don't even have the copy for the site yet (joy oh joy)  That said his site is being updated so take a look on the 19th. Here is the current Amazon Book Description

Relying on unique access to former and current government officials, this book will reveal for the first time how the U.S. government - from President Bush on down - is frantically improvising to fight a new kind of war. Where is the enemy? What have been the real victories and defeats since September 11? How are we actually fighting this war and how can it possibly be won?

Little, in fact, has been revealed about the nature of this struggle and the methods being used. This book will change all that. Readers will, for the first time, see harrowing close calls in America where thousands of lives have been saved - and learn how terrorists have artfully adapted to America's early successes in capturing al Qaeda operatives.

Suskind will show readers what he calls "the invisible battlefield" - a global matrix where U.S. spies race to catch soldiers of jihad before they strike. It is a real life spy thriller with the world's future at stake.

Suskind's report is filled with astonishing disclosures and will profoundly reframe the debate about a war that, each day, redefines America and its place in the world.

Soccer Jews of the world unite - Article in typical NY Observer smugness about a certain type of NY Jewish type who is mad for the World Cup. Damn them for writing this - I am guilty as charged. How I really hate being told I'm a stereotype. Arghh.

NSA to mine data on social networks

An article about how information on social networks is going to be mined by the NSA and then combined with other forms of information to give them complete profiles etc. (This article was originally sent to me by Mark Crispin Miller but I see the link in MediaBistro's daily news feed as well. A rare convergence from these two link sources.)

Lala

A new site with a nice name and concept called lala.com launched today. Basically it is a used CD trading marketplace with a $1 fee that goes into a fund for the musicians. It is true that when you buy a used cd at a store the artists get nothing. (This is also true of art auctions but at least then, if the artist is living, the value of their future work can go up or down.) Anyway it has a very simple interface as well as what seems like a great "if you like this artist you might like this artist" function. The only thing I find a bit precious is their request that "I ask you to do your part by doing the right thing: remove songs from your iPod or PC if you've agreed to send the CD to another member." which is something I doubt people will actually do.

Utne in a 2.0 world

I'm saddened by the sale of The Utne Reader. I just recently resubscribed after a few years off  but I've always liked them and appreciate their Internet efforts as well. In a way you could do a similar thing with a reblog with some integrated community elements.  Perhaps their new owners will invest in the magazine and the web presence but right now it seems they are just cutting staff.

Martha Stewart to launch social network

What I find interesting about the announcement is how dismissive Rafat and others' attitudes are about it. I realize that the CEO brought up the MySpace comparison but I think that the reality is that it makes a lot of sense for them to revamp the site with user generated content as a focus.  Martha has rabid fans, they stand in line for her cookbooks, and name their dogs after hers, her magazine is filled with projects and recipes(some of which I’ll even admit to doing), so the idea of her readers being able to share their results and help each other make them perfect will probably have great appeal. They have great editors who can also contribute, and most importantly (according to NPR) the whole thing ties into their site which has a large commerce component. So getting people to the site and then near the store makes sense. I think they are using the term social network because it is hot when what they are really doing is simply re-launching their site to take advantage of the user driven content and that isn’t as sexy. When HomeDepot launches something similar I bet they say the same thing.