In the mid-1990s our friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest came out yesterday and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

Let’s keep this simple – the scenario that is unfolding in the battle between the big three internet companies that matter, Google, Twitter and Facebook, is about access to personal data; what you care to share with Facebook and Twitter is important and Google wants in on it. With Twitter and Facebook it lies in the data surrounding experiential awareness and reputation management; the who, the what, the where. In Google’s case it is, in the words of Fred Vogelstein, about how “for the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world.”

Dispassionate atlas versus he says, she says.

That’s not a pithy statement; what you and I say about a brand online is becoming more important than indexing – Vogelstein again – “Internet users behave[d] differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They use[d] their real names, connect[ed] with their real friends, link[ed] to their real email addresses, and share[d] their real thoughts, tastes, and news. Google, on the other hand, knows [knew] relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.” Characters in [ ] my edits.

He goes on – “In [Facebook CEO] Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.” Google can currently search and index your tweets but Facebook is a walled garden and unless Facebook grants access to that data within, then Google is out of luck. The battle for dominance in the “promised land of online brand advertising” has been engaged.

In the past Facebook users have spoken out angrily about any perceived misuse of their personal data and Facebook has always backed down. Last April Google announced the ability to create detailed profiles so that anyone searching for a persons name could find that profile – it remains to be seen if there was a heavy take up of that service offering.

What does this intercine warfare between Facebook and Google mean for you and I? I’d say that now, more than ever, we have to pay attention to our personal brand reputation and brands must monitor all instances of conversations, both positive and negative, online.

Related posts:

John Battelle – Google Vs Facebook? What we Learn from Twitter

SEO and SEM will be Dead As You Know It in 6 Months

Tony “Frosty” Welch – Who Killed Social Media?

Update June 24th 09 – Facebook Messages to Become Public by Default

Portland Bike Art Pic by PortlandGround.com

Recently Josh Catone wrote an article on Mashable entitled ‘Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media.’ In it he points out how NPR has been adjusting and preparing for the coming digital landscape that will affect news media – radio, TV and newspapers. To avoid the fate of other news media, NPR has embraced the triangulation of local content, social media [in its true form] and ubiquitous access.

Local: Catone quotes new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller – “To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage,” she told mediabistro.com in April.

The Social Web: Catone points out that “NPR’s Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.”

The tools now available for social web activity give news media of all stripes a way to connect, communicate and share information with their audience, attracting new listeners and retaining existing ones. NPR has taken this all the way with blogs, podcasts and mobile apps. Here in Portland, OPB Music is one of the few stations that focuses on local music and music from the Pacific Northwest. Given Portland’s rich and diverse music population there is never a shortage of great new music yet you will be hard pressed to find it on any local commercial stations. And as the audience for music fractures and spreads far and wide across the internet, online radio will be the biggest winner.

Even the face of music concerts is changing – as bands perform house parties or shows in other spontaneous locations local mainstream media should be jumping all over it working with local bloggers to bring access to live streams or reviews. Yet so far they haven’t, it’s been left to local alternative outlets such as OPB Music or local alternative newspapers like the Willamette Week or the Portland Mercury to cover. Even the New York Times has belatedly jumped in on local music activities with an article entitled ‘Indie Rockers, 90210.’

There appears to be no end to the bleeding for local mainstream radio and TV – revenues are set to plunge 15% according to this report. On the other hand NPR’s audience continues to grow. They had 23.6 million people tuning in weekly at the end of ‘08.

In a strange twist, in what I presume is a response to the obvious downturn in advertising revenues, Portland radio station 94.7FM KNRK recently laid off one of its more popular radio personalities, Tara Dublin. Byron Beck a local reporter, and himself the victim of layoffs at the Willamette Week, broke the news. It appears that Dublin does have a local fan base – her ‘Save Tara’ Facebook page is garnering support from her fans. Those fans are complaining that 94.7 won’t let them leave comments in support of Dublin on the station’s forums. If true, that is bad social web practice. There is also the opposite view – Save Tara? Save Us From Not Having Tara on the Air – that is not as negative as it sounds; people are pointing out that if commercial radio continues its decline why would Dublin want to go down with the ship? This is the social web in action – people listening and joining the conversation; NPR understands this and embraces it.

Mobile Ubiquity: It is not just the success of the very popular iPhone that now gives people far-ranging mobile internet access from handheld devices, but the new, faster iPhone S does make it even easier and is a significant driver of mobile web traffic. RIM’s Blackberry, the Google Android device and the new Palm Pre are all in the race to be the web access mobile device of choice too.

Catone mentions Happn.in a new site that tracks trends locally on Twitter in 52 different metro areas around the world. This is a very useful tool and as Twitter search begins to be a popular way for people to find trending events and news, hyper-local will be incredibly important – searching for local events and news at the zipcode level is getting easier and easier. All local media outlets need to take note.

Related articles:

SEO and SEM Will Be Dead As You Know It in 6 Months
Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web
Hyper-Local News and Portland’s Hillsdale District

There is always good reason for Portland to celebrate having our local basketball franchise, the Trailblazers, in the NBA playoffs especially as they are returning for the first time in five years. Expectations were high going in to the first game at home against the Houston Rockets but unfortunately the Blazers got spanked losing by a 27 point margin and with it some home court advantage. They rallied for a strong win in game 2 beating the Rockets by four points and now they head to Houston to try and pull off two in a row in the Rockets’ house.

I am no basketball expert but I do enjoy watching the games and trying to work out the inner workings and efficacy of any of the teams. Without delving too deeply into the psychology of teamwork it is always clear that those team members who generate the best stats are the ones hailed as the ‘leaders,’ the ‘winners’ even the ‘legends.’ To coin a phrase – ‘the squeaky wheel gets the oil…’

Put simply, as fans already know, basketball stats are all based around points scored, rebounds caught or the number of assists per game – the higher a player is in those rankings the more he is seen as the teams leading player. If you take a look at the Blazers home page you will note that the players’ stats are proudly displayed in a prominent position. And if you look closely you will also note that the Rockets’ Shane Battier appears to come up short on those stats compared to all the other players. There is much more to those numbers than meets the eye.

Meet Shane Battier and consider this:

Michael Lewis – NY Times “Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.”

Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.”

Shane Battier is what Michael Lewis has coined The No-Stats All-Star and he is an efficiently deadly competitor. As Lewis says – “Here we have a basketball mystery: a player who is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

The stats, as used by the NBA and also by every major sports team, do not always tell the truth. The Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, was a supporter of stats but also suspicious of the way the stats were interpreted. At one point he said that “I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.” Alexander hired Daryl Morey to get to the bottom of all the data. When Morey arrived the Rockets had two highly paid and highly prized players – Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming – so Morey was tasked to find quality players cheap enough to keep the team under the NBA salary cap – in short time he came across Battier. When Morey presented Alexander with the idea of buying Battier he perplexed even the man who had hired Morey to rethink basketball. Lewis again – “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to see it.”

Consider this excerpt from the same Lewis article – “Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

Morey discovered that stats make players selfish which makes sense if you consider that better stats are always going to be a plus for a players’ career. After watching Battier play for more than two years Morey considers him the most unselfish player he has ever seen – “Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”

And yet there is one set of stats that Battier does well in – plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. Michael Lewis again – “A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.”

Whoever works for the Portland Trailblazers checking the stats better be aware that on paper Battier is a marginal NBA athlete at best, yet in reality on the court he is a NBA superstar.

Game 3 is at Houston Friday April 24th 6:30PM on ESPN and locally on KGW.

Read Michael Lewis’ article.

David Lynch and Singer/Songwriter Moby discuss “Wait For Me” Moby’s new album influenced by David Lynch, the song “Shot in the Back of the Head”, and their collaboration on the accompanying music video. Oh, BTW, they also both like old factories.

Watch the David Lynch directed video for Shot In The Back of the Head.

[*NB: The idea of the collapse of newspapers is moving at the speed of light across the 'net. In the hour since I posted this opinion I came across multiple arguments, all very succinct. Here's one from David Eaves - Newspapers' Decline is a Sign of Democracy's Health not a Symptom of its Death. I will attempt to keep this piece updated as the conversation rolls out.]

Jay Rosen on the Huffington Post Investigative fund.

[Latest edit March 29th 12:17PM PST]

Having spent the last decade [at least] discussing the major label recording industry’s supreme mishandling of how its customers embraced the digital music file and how they quickly became savvy internet users sharing those files with millions of other users – basically penalizing the industry for scrapping the single and charging too much for an inferior product, the CD – my interest now turns to the fate of the newspaper industry.

There are some parallels across each of these industry’s woes but it is worth pointing out that the newspaper industry is not being penalized by its customers [readers] for doing anything wrong ala the music industry [weak overpriced product, suing its customers,] rather newspapers are victims of circumstance; technology, shifting reader habits and ubiquitous access in an increasingly mobile world. Unlike the music industry they were not late to the online game even though their initial foot-dragging suggested that like the music industry they would much rather wish the internet would go away.

I must give credit to the labels as I sense that they are beginning to find new routes to profits from music sales. At a recent music industry conference in Nashville I listened to Rio Caraeff, EVP eLabs at Universal Music Group, give the keynote speech. He lamented the loss of the experiential, tactile nature of recorded music when it came in its vinyl form [his father was a famous album sleeve director.] The digital file, he argued, had stripped the experience from the music – listening to music was now a flat and unemotional activity compared with holding a well-designed sleeve filled with images, lyrics and artwork. Because of this flat experience he predicted that there was no future for selling recorded music directly to music fans.

He mentioned one area of success for Universal; the advent of the video game. An all-encompassing experiential medium that included more than just the games – the games came with a community of like-minded people and music. They also generate millions of dollars especially through the subscription fees that are required for online gaming activity.

He also said “the browser is the new iPod.”

So, how does the newspaper industry embrace the browser, what does its “video game” look like?

Umair Haque

The first thing that they must do is abandon the old business models as an idea. Those models can not be re-created for the web. As Umair Haque writes on the Harvard Business blog – “companies and investors focused on business models are simply applying yesterday’s obsolete logic to today’s novel problems.” He goes on to point out that nowadays it is about “making something valuable” – “When we can make valuable stuff, there are a plethora of business models to choose from, some old, some new, some untested, some tried and true. When we can’t, no amount of business model innovation can save us from implosion.”

Referring to Caraeff’s contention that the experience around music is what we relate to the most, why is it that newspapers, that are experiential and tactile, are struggling to maintain readership offline while attracting millions of readers online? Maybe it is just that news is not sexy. Or as Haque points out do they need to just keep providing “valuable stuff” and scrap old business models?

Here’s the quandary – newspapers have to shoulder the enormous burden of overhead required to run a newsroom that collects the news in the first place. What is clear is that the online advertising dollars for newspapers are not filling the gap in the loss of revenue that occurred in print editions – just as digital music sales are not replacing the sales of CDs. So should newspapers start to charge for access to their websites?

Clay Shirky

I have been following the thought leader and writer Clay Shirky via his web site and Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, via Twitter. Both of these men have strong opinions about the future of news media, note news media not necessarily newspapers. At the recent SXSW Interactive conference that I attended, Shirky showed the audience a slide that read – the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…. A simple and very accurate statement. We have ubiquitous and easy access to more text now than ever; it just needs to be filtered. Which is what newspapers always did for us – as the New York Times masthead proclaims still ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’

Should newspapers be allowed to die? What would replace them?

Jay Rosen

There have been many arguments about the end of newspapers. Shirky himself has said that “we don’t need newspapers we need journalism.” Jay Rosen pointed out [Edit: Jay Rosen pointed out to me that he's not the source of this info. I'll find out who said this.] recently that there are on average about five major breaking news stories each day in the USA. These five stories are covered by all of the country’s large newspapers. [Can not find the source of this information hence the strikethrough.] If that info is true it seems to me to be a massive waste of a lot of newsroom’s energy – should there be a consolidation or does that create the risk of corruption? [Paul Starr, writing in the New Republic thinks corruption will be an issue.] In an odd twist, David Simon the creator of the TV show The Wire, accuses media owners of contempt and is also fearful of corruption in this interview in the Guardian. It’s worth noting that Simon falls foul of Umair Haque’s ‘it’s not about the business model’ credo…

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”

Should we just turn to the aggregators and news feeds such as Reuters and AP? And of course to the blogs…

The fear of corruption spins mostly on the axis of believing our government would have nothing to fear if newspapers disappeared and therefore critical journalism went the way of the Dodo. [Although it's worth noting that those critical journalists all seemed to disappear in the run up to the last Iraq war.] It’s a plausible fear but given the advent of so much transparency and open access to information it may arguably be more difficult not less for governments to control the message. President Obama may be the first president in history to have fully embraced the internet during his election campaign and on into the White House but he will continue to be dogged forever by the blogging and tweeting classes throughout his term.

Control is an issue for newspapers today and has been since the early 90’s. Clay Shirky writes in an article Newspapers And Thinking The Unthinkable – “Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.”

Rather like the music industry the newspaper industry is faced with multiple problems on many fronts – shrinking readership, ad revenue dropping and a public who feel that information should be free. Perhaps the answer rests with the idea of hyper-local news; news that is directed to people at the zip code level, news that has hyper local resonance to readers. Jay Rosen may be heading in this direction as I noticed that he is tweeting a question – How Many Homegrown News Stories Are In Your Daily Paper?

My city of Portland has two newspapers – The Oregonian that carries national stories often sourced via AP or the NYT as well as local reporting, and The Portland Tribune, a freesheet that remains hyper-local. The Oregonian is in the unfortunate position of not having its own web site, its news is buried in amongst a site called OregonLive.com yet The Portland Tribune, a smaller and perhaps more nimble operation does have a web site that is kept up to date with only local news. Both of these papers will have to contend with Yelp or Outside.in as well as other hyper-local web sites that directly compete with them for bringing up to the minute breaking news at the zip code level. I suspect that only one of our local papers can survive.

If both of my local papers are searching for monetization through jiggling the business model they will surely fail. Let’s go back to Umair Haque and his idea of new ideals based around scrapping business models:

“Monetizing” + “business models” = zombieconomy. The reason monetization is a dirty word is simple. It blinds us to value creation, at the expense of value capture. When we seek to monetize, we end up chasing the same old lame competitive advantage. I win, you (and you, and you) lose. Put another way: “monetizing” toxic junk — from CDOs, to Hummers, to McMansions, to Big Macs – is how we got into this mess.

It is by rediscovering how to make stuff that’s not toxic junk in the first place that we’ll get out of the mess lame, evil, brain-dead 20th century thinking has left us in. That’s the challenge of a new generation of revolutionaries. And it’s not about new business models: it’s about reconceiving authentic, deep, value creation.”

Finally I’ll end with another thought from Clay Shirky – “When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.”

Other references:

Clay Shirky’s blog

Jay Rosen’s blog

Follow Jay Rosen on Twitter

Jay Rosen on mindcasting.

Umair Haque – Video presentation on Ideals

Uncle Sam The Newspaper Man

David Eaves – The Death of Journalism? [Or journalism in the Era of Open]

Follow Nemo on Twitter:
NemoHQ
Dave Allen
Trevor Graves
Mark Lewman
Nubby Twiglet

Click image to watch the video.

A wonderful speech by the psychologist Barry Schwartz at this year’s TED Conference in which he – “makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.”

Some key points in the speech:
Rules create mediocrity.
Incentives reduce responsibility.
No incentives can be created that will work, in fact they demoralize professional activity.
They also create moral loss as well as a loss of morality.

Navigating the murky waters of social networking sites and blogs becomes tricky when an avatar morphs into a less than accurate representation of your real life self. You get to decide what you’d like to add, modify and delete.

With your online representation, you’re in control which photos you’d like to upload, who you’d like to friend and which bands and movies to claim as your favorites. In a way, you get to cultivate a persona that may (or may not) mesh with who you really are.

VOYEURISM

In Sharing is Creepy, Nicholas Carr says that “Your online self … is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself…is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger.”

Carr claims that there’s an inherent arrogance to sharing so many details of your life with total strangers. In some ways, he says that it has a sadomasochistic quality because the exchange can become similar to that of a celebrity and a fan. And, when you think about it, there are a group of “A-listers” for almost every blogging niche imaginable.

I understand his assertion and we’ve all witnessed blogs where the person posting receives hundreds of positive and praise-filled comments with barely an opposing opinion in sight. At the same time, there are some bloggers that are posting solid content with a genuine interest in creating a balanced, two-way conversation.

GUILT

Another factor that plays prominently in the cultivation of an online persona is guilt. In The Burden of Twitter, Steven Levy says:

Guilty. I feel guilty that I have a blog and haven’t contributed to it for seven months. Guilty that all my pals on Facebook post cool pictures, while the last shots I uploaded were of Fourth of July fireworks—from 2007. Guilty that I haven’t Dugg anything since, well, ever.

It seems odd that one would feel guilt, not out of something they did or didn’t do in real life, but because they didn’t contribute enough to their social networking activities. But, if you blog, tweet or visit multiple social networking sites regularly, there can be a sense of not being connected if you can’t log in to deliver regular doses of content.

Though, Levy’s guilt of not contributing enough can easily flip when he finally does update.

The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It’s one thing to share intimacies person- to-person. But with a community? Creepy.

He has a valid point. Do we spill these (sometimes overly personal) details to other random strangers that we know in real life? Do you wax poetic about your new shoes to the mailman? Do you tell the person occupying the seat next to you on the bus about your hot date last night? Probably not. So, what compels you to dish out these voyeuristic details online?

WHY SHARE?

It’s human nature to want to share what interests us. At the same time, we enjoy tiny glimpses into the lives of others who may have talents, personalities (or a hot pair of shoes) that we admire.

The bottom line with social networking is that you’re responsible for what you decide to share online. You have the freedom to share as little or as much about yourself as you’d like. As sociologist Duncan Watts notes, “Now everyone is used to the idea that we are connected [through the internet], and that’s not so interesting. If I had to guess why sites like Facebook are so popular, I would say it doesn’t have anything to do with networking at all. It’s voyeurism and exhibitionism.”

Do you feel that your online profiles accurately represents you? Or, are they part of a cultivated persona? Is this a conscious decision that you’ve made?

Found on Guy Kawasaki’s Open Forum.

Today, Obama’s election is taking the center stage and New York’s biggest political star Hillary Clinton is following him to Washington, D.C. At the same time, Wall Street institutions are at the mercy of the capital’s politicians, whose bailouts they’ve come to rely on. And, the city’s key industries (including tourism, finance and real estate) are down. New York just doesn’t seem to be getting much love these days.

Long-time New Yorkers are noticing empty Midtown streets on weekday mornings that, until recently, were full of bustling workers. And, nine Broadways shows closed down on a single day this January.

In the same time that New York’s unemployment rate went up, other U.S. cities including Seattle, Washington and Dallas actually reported gains in jobs.

Has New York lost its edge? The NY Times think that it’s cyclical, though it might take awhile this time around to bounce back. As one interviewee noted, the city that never sleeps may finally need a nap.

Hot on the heels of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s decline, the LA Times is reporting that its online advertising revenue is enough to cover the costs for both the online and print editorial teams.

Upon hearing this news, Jeff Jarvis excitedly announced that “What this tells me is that we are on the cusp of the moment when online revenue could sustain a substantial digital journalistic enterprise without the onerous cost of printing and distribution. Hallelujah.”

Though, Valleywag is quick to counter this claim, noting that the LAT newsroom still houses more than 660 people. And in December, the newspaper said that its website only generated 120 million pageviews (one Gawker blogger generated double that amount in just one month). Something doesn’t add up. Valleywag also points out that the cost of actually selling the online ad space isn’t mentioned, nor is the fact that the Times’ parent company recently filed for bankruptcy. Stay tuned…

A few years ago, a nonprofit group called the Center for a New American Dream conducted a poll in which 81% of respondents felt that Americans were too focused on shopping and spending, while 88% agreed that our nation was too materialistic. And, this year, consumer spending declined for the first time since 1991.

In his Consumed article for the Times Magazine, Rob Walker discusses how consumer spending is finally slowing down. The recent decline has many people assuming that there is a direct relation to a new focus on personal values. Some observers feel that since people are buying less, they must be searching for a deeper meaning in life beyond the spoils of material goods.

Instead, Walker argues that it’s way too convenient to conclude that consumers have suddenly morphed into thoughtful, frugal shoppers with redefined values. He conveniently points out that at the same time spending shrunk, access to easy credit also evaporated. Home equity loans and the barrage of low interest credit cards have dramatically decreased; could this be partially responsible for the decline?

While it’s true that more consumers are bargain hunting, they’re still buying stuff. And, if they seem to be spending less, it’s probably related to fear over the volatile market, not because they’ve shifted into a more frugal mindset.

The pop star and the professor … Mike Skinner talks to John Gray. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

Mike Skinner and me have some things in common – we are both well-known musicians; me as bass player for Gang of Four and he performing under his moniker The Streets, although he is arguably more popular. That aside I now find that we are both ardent supporters of the work of the philosopher John Gray, especially his book ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals‘.

In The Streets recent release ‘Everything Is Borrowed,’ Skinner reveals Gray’s influence in his lyrics while Gray’s influence on me comes through in my writings on the conceit of ’social media’, a term that I feel is empty and is peddled furiously only by those that would profit from harnessing social networks for the purpose of creating advertising revenue. Here we are then – two musicians, a philosopher, Charles Darwin and Facebook; such a wonderful mashup. Much food for thought. Here’s the interview:

Few records this year addressed themes such as human consciousness and evolution (as well as reflecting the linguist’s pleasure in a good piece of slang) as smartly as the Streets’ fourth album, Everything is Borrowed. OMM detected in it the influence of the work of the philosopher and occasional Observer contributor John Gray – and a quick call revealed that Mike Skinner is a huge fan of the Straw Dogs author. That bestseller, first published in 2003, argued that humans have still not come to terms with Darwin or accepted that they are like other animals – thereby knocking the humanists’ belief in progress.

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation – covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism – in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.

Mike Skinner: Reading Straw Dogs… I was aware of the idea that consciousness is an illusion, but it really made me think about a lot of things differently.

John Gray: The book is not intended to convert anyone to anything or to impose my world view. It’s intended to stir people’s thinking so that they see their lives in different ways. People have said to me – young people, old people, a couple who were trapped in a religious cult for 40 years – that they liked the book because it helped to weaken the story that they’ve woven of their lives, the story that was ruling them.

MS: What you seem to be saying is that it’s all an illusion, life goes on and shit just happens…

JG: Well, good things happen too.

MS” But what’s a good thing? It’s just something that we perceive to be good…

JG: I’m not saying we should rid ourselves of the need for stories, but when that need becomes tyrannical then we can give up too much of our freedom. One story of the past few years was that wealth was going to grow indefinitely – we were all going to get richer and the ups and downs of history weren’t going to apply to us. Well, stories are not true or false in the way that science is, but some are closer to human reality. And this Prozac-like story of the last 20 years – people believed it!

MS: The financial situation: the impression I have is that we’re not in as much trouble as we were in 1929.

JG: Not yet.

MS: OK… and the reason for that is memes – it’s the knowledge that if you don’t bail the banks out, we’re in really deep shit. So does that represent progress?

JG: It’s an interesting question. And I’m serious when I reply by saying the proof will be in the pudding. You can say we studied the 1930s and so we won’t commit the same mistakes. We’ll do what should have been done then and maybe it will work. But there is a different way of looking at it. Even if avoiding those mistakes now is the right thing to do, there will be different consequences which will get us into different types of trouble. Bailing out the banks might lead to the sort of stagflation we saw in the 1970s.

The point is: there’s an element of luck, and while I’m not a religious believer, if you want stories in your life, it might be better to follow religious stories rather than those you know to be shallow – like the story of unending growth.

MS: Your work can be very dark. But as a person you seem very amiable…

JG: Well, I’m not writing in order to provide consolation. One idea that’s really unpopular nowadays is that there are any aspects of a human being which are inherently bad. But one thing that’s distinctive in human beings – it might not be unique – is cruelty.

Now what should we do about cruelty? There’s a belief that if people have a proper education, if they live in a peaceful, safe society, there won’t be any evil. But is evil – for example, cruelty – normal or abnormal? I think it’s normal. It doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

MS: Just to get a bit Dr Who, if we’ve also lost control of technology, could robots take over the world?

JG: There’s nothing inherently unique and inexplicable about humans, so we could create devices that could indeed become conscious. But if we create robots that are only conscious – that don’t have the 99 per cent of unconscious mental life that we have – could that hollow replica of how we imagine ourselves to be start painting in the same way as van Gogh?

Most creativity in the arts, and even in science, comes from levels of the mind that are not conscious. Conscious thought is a tiny, tiny part of the life of the mind. Have you heard of transhumanists? These are people who are interested in technologies that will allow them not to die – some of them end up having their brains frozen. They think they can remodel themselves. Now I’m not as unhappy as they are with the idea of human life…

MS: But you don’t want to die – you’re never going to want to die!

JG: Is that true? Do we really, really want to be different from all the human beings in the past and all the other animals?

MS: I think we all do. I think you do!

JG: If I could become the sort of creature that doesn’t need to die, I’d be different from the way I am. And I don’t want to become like a robot.

MS: I was famous, I guess, for a while, and one of the fascinating things about it for me – and one of the unnerving, scary things – was how my boundaries completely controlled me. I wasn’t as autonomous as I thought I was.

JG: The person you were before was a by-product of your limitations and circumstances.

MS: Exactly. Dying is a boundary. Everything we do is to try not to die, and once you don’t have that… I’m 30 soon and all I’ve got behind me are the years when I thought I was never going to die.

JG: If the boundaries that you associate with growing up are removed, you can live in a different way. The picture you have of yourself alters or dissolves. But if the wall of mortality disappeared… well, you can almost not imagine the change; I think it would turn us into something different.

MS: If we believe in Darwin we have to believe that every evolutionary stage brings an advantage.

JG: Darwin has been turned into a humanist icon. Darwin’s followers think they’ve renounced religion, but they cling to the idea that while other animals can’t control their destiny, humans can – a belief that comes from Christianity. Darwinism has actually been turned into another religion.

• ‘Everything is Borrowed’ (679) is out now; John Gray’s latest book is ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia’ (Penguin)

The term cyberchondria was coined back in 2000 in reference to people who jump to conclusions about their ailments when seeking out information online.

Microsoft researchers have just announced the results of their study on health-related web searches. People with health issues often use search engines to help them determine what they’re suffering from. Unfortunately, they tend to adopt a worst-case scenario. Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft says that many folks treat search engines as human experts when looking for answers. He claims that “people tend to look at just the first couple results. If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘A.L.S.,’ that’s their launching point.”

Usually, they just scan the first few search results and come away with the conclusion that their condition is much more serious than it really is. Naturally, this can cause anxiousness. With the assumption that they are really sick, subjects escalate their searches to seek out more information about the affliction.

According to the researchers, jumping to the worst case scenario is basic human behavior that has been backed up by decades of research. They hope to change this in the future with the development of search engines that can detect medical-related questions and offer sound advice in return.

Until then, if you’re sick, pay a visit to your doctor instead of a search engine.

Find a way to humanize your brand, use your personality, and take your brand
from good to great. -Guy Kawasaki

Do you envision your blog as a brand? If you do, try embracing the concept of brand personality. To understand what brand personality is, envision your brand as if it were a person. It would have values, beliefs and interests. These attributes are what would make it unique.

Groundbreaking package designer Walter Landor felt that everything you project into the world goes toward creating your brand. Each little piece is of equal importance, equal weight, and has to be appropriate to the audience it is reaching or the message that it is trying to promote.

The energy that you put out on your blog will be directly related to what you receive in return. Since your blog is a brand and you are the central driving force behind developing its personality, it is further defined by every action you take and every post that you create.

THE KEYS TO TURNING YOUR BLOG INTO A SUCCESSFUL BRAND

1. Determine what your goals are. These goals will pull you through the tough times, give you a focus and ultimately, a way to measure your success. Defined goals that can be measured (specific traffic levels, rankings, make it much easier to see if you’re hitting the mark.

2. Find out what your readers want and need. How does your brand fit into their life? The best way to determine your reader’s needs is to ask them. Develop a direct connection between your blog and its readers. Do some old fashioned research, whether it’s through polling, emails or a survey post.

3. Clearly communicate your blog’s personality. This can be facilitated through being trustworthy, relaible, developing a unique slogan and having a memorable blogging voice.

WHY THE PERSONALITY BEHIND YOUR BLOG IS SO IMPORTANT

Marketing has become a mass-produced commodity that lacks authenticity. Our saturation point has been reached and the old rules no longer work. Though used mostly for products and services, branding can also be applied to people. The key to developing an authentic brand is to be true to who you are and to follow your own, unique path. Give some thought to the one thing that makes your brand unique, the one attribute that no one can take away from you. This is where you should focus your energy.

The characteristic that many of the most successful blogs share is that people are following the BLOGGER, not the BLOG. A blog’s theme can be replicated, but the personality behind it cannot. There may been hundreds, if not thousands of blogs in a saturated niche. So ask yourself, why do you repeatedly go back to the same blogs when you can probably get the same information from another site?

As Tom Dorresteijn notes, “The concept of brand personality combines inside-out and outside-in; identity and image. A personality has its roots in the identity but is strongly externally focused. It is not ‘be who your are’. Personality is: Become who you should be.”

DEVELOP A SOLID BRAND IDENTITY

If your blog was a living, breathing person, what adjectives would you use to describe it?

The world belongs to those who stand out, stand up and stand for or against a cause which they can strongly defend, those who can talk crowd and keep their virtues or walk with kings and not lose the common touch – their identity. An independent mind is a frontier of change in the world. -Tayo Korede

Spin The Black Circle

McLuhan and Vinyl? I know – I sometimes stretch an idea to its snapping point but isn’t that why I bother to type all day?

Here goes – As I sit on the panels I’m invited to I often forget to remind myself that at the heart of all my discussions about music and technology the root of it is about my enduring passion for music.

Computer technology, especially web 2.0, has fooled many of us into thinking that we now have a “new” way of communicating. That is simply not true; we forget that Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago new technologies simply create new environments – the old environment then becomes the content of the new environment; Facebook simply allows us to digitize our Rolodex. The computer and its keyboard are the medium in this particular message. Our constant need to remain in touch with friends and family endures, and still will well beyond technology.

We should really be considering technology’s effect on the individual and society. Remember, e.e. cummings warned that “progress is a comfortable disease.” So where does music with its myriad genres and forms, its emotions and passionate responses, its common currency, fit into a “technological” culture?

Well consider this – Music is the medium is the message; bear with me here.
If music is the message then in McLuhan’s terms the vinyl record can be described as a technological extension [the medium] of the musicians body. The medium then creates the environment that produces effects [the media.] This then has an effect on society and culture where the starting point is always the individual – that is, you and me. McLuhan also advised against a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological.

If we then consider that the physics of media have changed yet the media that provides the atmospheres has not, and we understand that the effect is still psychological and can not be separated, do McLuhan’s ideas help us unravel the mystery of what innately binds us to the rhythms and lilts of music around the globe? [My argument carries over into live performance too where the instruments are extensions of the players bodies.]

Vinyl racks at Music Millennium Portland

Anyway, on to my thoughts about vinyl.

In a world of 320kb MP3s, FLAC, loss-less this that and the other files, I’m going to take a leap of faith here and hope that many of you jump in too – my premise is that a vinyl record surely has to be the purest embodiment of our universal love for music. It’s the closest thing to experiencing music live that I have heard. When compared to A to B, with A being an analog record and B being a CD, A wins every time for me. I share Neil Young’s comments in the digital vs analog wars – Young has acknowledged the benefit of hiss-free recording that digital technology offers, with the caveat that “along with the hiss went depth of sound and the myriad possibilities of the high end where everything is like the cosmos, exploding stars, echo.” [Read more of this discussion here.]

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.

For some reason I decided at about exactly noon last Saturday to drive over to Music Millennium on Portland’s east side to buy some vinyl. Any vinyl. I came home with three weighty albums – comfortable with their heft and size and glad that I couldn’t just peel them open and stick them in the car’s CD player. [That's rather like the audio equivalent of Slow Food, Slow Music.]

The universe works in mysterious ways. Why is it that when I spend my day riffing on ideas like the ones in this post, drawing them out like an endless piece of string only to have it end up in a tangle of knots, why, why do I find myself buying three vinyl albums for completely different reasons and upon getting home and spinning them find validation for my thinking in the lyrics of a song each on two of them?!!

Nick Cave’s ‘Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!’ pressed into oily, rich, satanic black 180 gramme vinyl suggests an artisan at work tattooing a litany of sins and black portents upon the skin of Lazarus himself. In typical N.C. fashion all the lyrics revolve around the push and pull of sex and death yet here the underlying theme is of resurrection and a return to the grave as if the grave is a better place than the world currently is. Quite by coincidence the story of Lazarus provides a fitting metaphor for the resurrection of the vinyl record.

Along with the album comes a free 7″ single with a 7 minute long song pressed over two sides called ‘More News From Nowhere.’ In its epic journey, Cave bangs [pun intended] into woman after woman in a world of no consequence, of ‘news from nowhere,’ as if he’s hearing nothing but white noise from all the multimedia outlets, as if its the end of decency; a Rovian embrace of the end of history, a plague on us all this constant transmission from each of us to millions of others often unknown and without consequence – until its too late.

don’t it make you feel so sad, don’t the blood rush to yr feet
to think that everything you do today
tomorrow is obsolete
technology & women & little children too
don’t it make you feel blue, don’t it make you feel blue
for more news from nowhere, more news from nowhere
don’t it make you feel alone
don’t it make you wanna get right back home
more news from nowhere
more news from nowhere
goodbye/goodbye/goodbye

Wonderfully bleak but kinda makes me reconsider Twitter.

I also picked up ‘Cardinology’ from Ryan Adams and his Cardinals. Although a talented and prolific song writer he isn’t in the same league as Cave. Adams gets to a deep grey but never reaches the dark bloody hues that Cave revels in. [BTW, Cave is an apt surname now I think about it.] ‘Cardinology’ is strong but no game changer like Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!.

The song here that caught my attention is ‘Magick’ – where a song is often the total sum of our emotional response to music, wherever we hear it, however we hear it we can’t deny it. In ‘Magick’ Adams suggest it rights all wrongs, overcomes rogue nation states’ sabre rattling, fends off missile attacks and shuts down “power hungry clowns.” He says “give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams.”

I wish I had secret powers, I’d find all the power hungry clowns
and I would shut them down
Give ‘em radios & heels and wake ‘em up with jams on
right after I disappear then disarm, disarm, disarm
and watch the record go round….

In these lyrics the music is on vinyl and the theme is again resurrection – the record keeps on going round. It’s recurring, ‘Magick’ is the power it always brings to challenge popular culture and most importantly, politics. It’s also about addiction.

Pearl Jam visited this space well before Adams with their song ‘Spin The Black Circle’ released on Vitalogy in 1994. This from Wikipedia – According to singer Eddie Vedder, the track is about his and the band’s love for vinyl records. At the band’s July 1, 2003 show in Bristow, Virginia at the Nissan Pavilion, Vedder proclaimed “This song is about old records, old records, anyone remember old records?”

The lyrics play on the similarities between drug addiction and addiction to records and music, as many of the lyrics may be interpreted either way. It is unclear to what extent this is intended to be a serious comparison of different types of addiction and to what extent it is just intended to make the lyrics interesting. Jon Pareles of The New York Times referred to “Spin the Black Circle” as “one of the few songs from Seattle in which a needle has nothing to do with heroin.”

All for the love of vinyl.. Vinyl has a special place in the hearts of a certain demographic – I’d guess those in their late teens and early twenties, definitely those over 40, DJ’s, analog freaks and audio purists. Vinyl brings something to the ear and the heart that MP3s don’t – full-range emotional sonic ra[n]ge…

On a side note it is obvious to many that vinyl has seen a substantial rise in sales over the last few years. Whilst still a small percentage of overall music sales it is carving out its niche amongst music lovers. The labels have embraced this in different ways, mainly through different incentives in the area of giving away MP3 downloads with the vinyl purchase. For the Cave release, Anti allows 3 downloads, presumably as back up should you lose the files, but asks for an email address. Lost Highway offers only 1 download of the Ryan Adams album but doesn’t ask for an email address. Amazingly Warp offers no downloads at all for the Nightmares On Wax album.

Irony of irony’s – after they have fought tooth and nail against the drop in CD sales, music retailers are selling USB record players! Perhaps a better move would be to sell medium to high end turntables. It’s a hardware and software play.

If you run a blog, do you consider yourself a blogger? Or, do you feel like the term is too limiting?

Yesterday, Dave Allen and I got into a discussion about the term blogger (a contraction of the words web and log). Is it still considered cool and relevant? Or, has it lost some of its appeal now that everyone’s doing it (there are currently over 110 million blogs in existence)?

Dave relayed the thought that since many people still don’t know the difference between a blog and a website, the label blogger can be off-putting. Many times, if you ask someone if they read blogs, they’ll reply no. But, after some further quizzing, they’ll admit that they do read blogs. They just didn’t realize what these sites were called.

During the time my site has been live, I’ve always used the term blogger fairly loosely to describe what I do without much thought. My main career is in graphic design; I simply use my blog as a way share my work and thoughts with others. My frequent postings about design, style and marketing could get tricky and convoluted in another format, but a blog with categories and tags makes finding related subject matter a cinch.

TRENDING AWAY FROM BLOGGER

Some folks like Problogger’s Darren Rowse are inching away using the term blogger because it can be too limiting.

Writers can be especially sensitive to being categorized as just bloggers. It’s easy to see why the term can be viewed as downplaying their talent and craft. Though, as Mark Glaser points out, these worlds have started merging over the last few years:

The time-worn debate of Bloggers vs. Journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly, what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.

DOES YOUR TITLE MATTER?

On the other side of the argument, categorizing oneself as a blogger can make the discussion of what you do for a living less taxing. Entrepreneur Kevin Muldoon relays a common experience:

One of the things I have found about working through the web is my inability to correctly give myself a title, ie. a name which explains what I do for a living. Lots of people online seem to be using the term ‘Entrepreneur’ but I really hate it, it’s kinda pompous in my opinion. With blogging taking up most of my time now I am more than happy to use the title ‘Blogger.’

FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION

The blogger label is hip and cool now, but where will it be in five years? Will it still have merit? Will using a different term really make a difference in how you’re perceived by your audience?

Blogging will probably always exist in one form or another. It’s not surprising that there are over 175,000 new blogs popping up every day. Blogging is an easy way to connect with a much larger audience while investing very little upfront in the process. And, because of this, the number of blogs will continue to grow, whether a niche is already saturated or not. The appeal of sharing your views with the world and receiving instantaneous feedback (with the prospect of earning a decent income in the process) is highly seductive.

In reality, the people reading your blog probably don’t care what your title is. They are visiting your site regularly because it offers a perceived value. Whether you’re a writer, an information architect, a blogger, a web publisher or a content developer, what really matters is that your readers love what you’re creating.

Image via The New York Times

Banksy, the famously mysterious British artist (who has yet to publicly put a face to his work) has been whipping up some fantastical creations in New York City as of late.

Billed as his first official exhibition in New York, a storefront with signage reading “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill” has popped up in Greenwich Village. Now, here’s where it gets really weird: passersby stop dead in their tracks when they notice actual bales of hay lining the city sidewalk and see a mechanical leopard swinging his tail in the shop window.

Upon entering, there are sausages and hotdogs moving along in sand-filled tanks, fishsticks swimming through water-filled aquariums and chicken nuggets singing nearby.

Not to be outdone by these oddities, a massive rabbit wearing a pearl necklace (above) is filing her nails and a frighteningly lifelike monkey is wearing headphones and watching its fellow primates on a television.

What does all of this mean? “I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming,” relayed Banksy. This ‘exhibit’ should definitely get you thinking…and if not, it’s worth the stop for the mind-altering trip alone.

In a recent post entitled ‘The Biggest Irony on the Internet,’ Ethan Bauley attempts to draw a line between Social Media on one side and Mass, or Traditional Media on the other. His argument is simply put; if there is a true arena that we insist on calling Social Media then clearly there is its opposite – Mass Media, Traditional Media etc, or Old School Media as I like to call it.

I liked the idea of defining the parameters but not the Google-bait moniker he had come up with to describe it – Industrial Media. [Industrial Media makes me think of heavy industries such as ship building or ordinance factories although it is true that mechanical devices are required to deliver most of old media...] I left a lengthy comment on his post. Here’s an extract – the animal references are a result of another fine post that Ethan referred to on a similar subject entitled ‘Dogs and Birds Can Make Social Media, You Can Too‘ by Bryan Landers.

…..so, when we consider Twitter or FaceBook as “social media” we miss the point. They are just tools that users think have a ’soul’ but there is no there, there, to coin a phrase. We are not connected at all – no dog pee, no ant colony eusocial structure, no bee hives – just blather, photos and updates at the base level.

Social Media vs Industrial Media seems a weak argument to me and just serves to muddy the waters more. Drop the term Social Media altogether and then we can just go back to broadcast, traditional or mass media on the industry side – it’s worked for long enough why change it now? As for what we are all up to online on social sites I would say that arguably we are not connecting the dots – we are sending technological semaphore signals that are being misunderstood, misread or mangled in an attempt to find the results we are expecting. Unfortunately those results will always leave us wanting. Throw a party, go to a concert, commune with your inner animal to remind yourself what socializing really means….or just follow a dog around its neighborhood and see how many times it stops to pee.

Here’s Ethan’s reply – “Ultimately, trying to define “social media” or “industrial media” isn’t really the game I hope to play, and I should be more transparent about that. In fact I think that pursuing a definition as an outcome of this discussion is tantamount to trying to “decide” whether or not In A Silent Way is “jazz.”

My goal instead is to share a little insight about what I’ve learned from books like TWoN, get some feedback on my thoughts, and help others and myself make better business decisions through an understanding of information economics (production, distribution, and consumption). Reading and thinking about comments like yours, I’m feeling pretty good about that goal.

In general, I find it a lot easier and more fun to design businesses and marketing plans while pursuing a systematic study of the economic differences between dog pee, Usenet, cable TV, et al. To that end, you might love Brian Haven’s piece from last week, All Media Is Social, which is kind of the happy medium between Benkler and your comment.”

Ethan is right, I do like Brian Haven’s post ‘All Media Is Social.’ He at least considers Nature.

When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic – we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.]

Here’s an extract from an essay of mine called ‘On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising:

“most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival.”

As for marketers who wish to advertise on social networking sites, they must first consider our everyday lives before they consider our online ‘personas,’ – the ones we all make up as we fill out our profiles on social network sites. We are far more complicated than those shadowy online personalities suggest. Marketers wishing to reach the millions of people in social network sites face the same conundrum that pollsters face during a general election – if a Republican candidate for office were to ask a registered Republican which way she will vote he will get the answer she thinks he wants to hear – “for you of course.” But behind the secrecy of the ballot box curtains she will vote the way her heart tells her. In my online profile I may lie about my age, my sex and my race, my income level, my home town, my likes and my dislikes and more.

But, am I really lying? Maybe I am just reinventing myself for the digital age – giving people the information they think they want which can easily be shared with other people who also think they want it. Good luck marketing to me.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in the movie ‘There Will Be Blood.’

Much is being made in the current election cycle of which presidential candidate will bring about change. The Vice Presidential Debate twisted and turned on which party’s presidential candidate was more of an agent of change than the others. ‘Maverick’ was a word that I heard a lot during the VP debate and it only came from the lips of Governor Sarah Palin when describing herself, Senator John McCain and their team. It suggests McCain and Palin will act with single-handed impulsiveness more than checking their guts. The Obama camp meanwhile sticks to its message of change and hope, something that sounds more inclusive.

It had me thinking that maverick is a word for describing an agent of change; after all it’s not a word we use often in common currency. But no, a maverick is defined as someone who is not inclined to conform to accepted rules or standards. It has its western connotation too – an unbranded range animal, especially a motherless calf.

De Niro as Travis Bickle

Stepping outside of politics and into the world of movies, maverick brought to mind three brilliant actors in perfect screen roles. Robert De Niro in ‘Taxi Driver,’ Paul Newman in ‘Cool Hand Luke‘ and Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ Not that maverick is a word that describes the actors although arguably it could. The men they play in each of their roles are most definitely mavericks and notably the characters in these movies are all loners, they manage very well without help from others; there is no team spirit here.

As I looked up these movies online I came across a review of Cool Hand Luke that was prefaced with this paragraph:

“For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.”- Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It seems to sum up Luke in the movie quite well – the authorities attempt to control Luke’s every movement and unsurprisingly Luke fights back regardless of the consequences that befall him. The review goes on – “Luke is sent to prison, and what follows is one of the greatest existential movies of all time. His conversations with God, the nature of his offense, his isolation and alienation, his experiences and a pair of profound scenes, both involving his mother, elevate “Cool Hand Luke” above most prison-break movies.” A portrayal of a true Maverick.

Meanwhile in ‘Taxi Driver,’ De Niro’s Travis Bickle, tortured by what he sees as a night shift cab driver, becomes a one man nihilistic machine dedicated to cleaning up the streets of New York, as he says “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.” In ‘There Will Be Blood‘ Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview “is a charismatic and ruthless oil prospector, driven to succeed by his intense hatred of others and psychological need to see any and all competitors fail.” Real Mavericks.

In Hollywood this maverick stuff makes for gripping plot lines and thrilling movies but it should stay right there on the movie lot. A Maverick or two in the White House is a whole different storyline and that script should be relegated to B movie status.

I wonder why?

I have a friend who is studying journalism at a decent university. Before she started the course and took on the financial burden it would entail she had asked me for my opinion about the value of having a journalism degree versus just diving in and finding a job as a writer. Tricky question.

Here we are in 2008 where ‘citizen journalists‘ abound and they are here to stay as Wikipedia shows. Although getting a good degree is a worthwhile endeavor my gut tells me that my friend should be writing; every day, everywhere. A degree in journalism may no longer be the prerequisite to being gainfully employed.

As more businesses begin to embrace radical transparency (as they should) then new job positions are opening up that do not follow the old tried [tired?] and tested methods of ‘corporate communications.’ In the new world of PR/Communications I suggest that the following list of abilities/talents would be a very large part of the job description. See how you score:

01. Do you have a personal blog or website? [ Yes? - good. 10 points. No? - start one.]
02. Are you an influencer? [Do your peers look to you for advice and insight into how people are snapping up the latest gadgets and are immersing themselves in music, fashion and technology? Do they ask you what your opinion is before they make a decision themselves?] 10 points.
03. Are you a trusted source? [Do people trust your opinions on subjects in your area of expertize? For instance, if you are a devout environmentalist do you think the Toyota Prius is a boon or a bust? Explain.] 10 points.
04. Are you a thought leader? [Do you contribute articles and essays that outline your thinking on subjects that you are well versed in? Do people care?] 10 points.
05. Are you a filter? [Do you carefully distill content, media and messages into relevant posts for your readers?] 10 points.
06. You are, of course, well versed in the art of Google Alerts, right?
[No? deduct 10 points.]
07. You use Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Flickr, MyVidoop, LinkedIn, Twellow, Ma.gnolia and faithfully follow Daily Candy, BuzzNet, Idolater and Perez Hilton. [Good. Award yourself any number of points.]
08. You understand that a Combine Harvester is not a competitor to Yahoo! Pipes?
09. You understand the function of memes in the cultural sociosphere? [If you can understand the relationship between Richard Dawkins, his writings on natural selection, Darwin and John Gray's thoughts on The Human Animal, award yourself untold amounts of points.]
10. Finally. You understand that there is no reason whatsoever for a company to have a FaceBook Page, yes? [Good.]

Ok, so my points system is lame but hey, if you scored more than 50 points you can now apply for any position that includes the following in the job description – Social Media, PR 2.0, Web Content Editor, Blogger, Web 2.0 Communications Director, Online Evangelist, New Media Communications Director, Online Guru…etc, etc, etc…Or you could follow your heart and get that journalism degree.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posts that Microsoft has hired danah boyd, who Marshall says is – “probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.”

boyd (who only uses lowercase when typing her name) is a leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks. She caused a ruffle when she concluded in a report that “The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other ‘good’ kids are now going to Facebook. …MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

She spells out her own thoughts on joining Microsoft Research New England here.

One thought re Microsoft and its compulsive obsession with the desktop…aren’t the next generation of social networkers supposed to be surfing exclusively via mobile devices?

The retail market of skateboarding is saturated with a dizzying array of shoe brands releasing signature models featuring athlete names. The athlete benefits from the deals through both sponsorship and cash payment. In return, the brand can earn a tidy sum from sales fueled by the buzz of a hot athlete name. But, what happens to a design once the athlete and sponsor decide to part ways?

The situation can be sticky because ownership differs with each brand. Etnies and its sub brands retain full rights when an athlete leaves, but some brands like Osiris will reissue a shoe without the athlete’s imprint. Others throw caution to the wind and keep an original design on the market.

Often, it’s accepted that the ownership of a model lies with whomever was responsible for the initial design and concept. If the athlete develops the design, they usually have rights to the shoe when they switch sponsors. But, if they initially did little more than picking the style out of a lineup of options and had their name stamped on it, the sponsor will usually retain the rights.

Kelly Bird of Lakai relates that “you can patent or trademark technology, but you can’t really do that with design.” Because of this, it’s completely possible that multiple brands can output similar models. If the demand and money are there, it’s likely to happen.

How do you think this gray area should be defined? Would you be more likely to side with the athlete or manufacturer if contention arises?

Photo by cactusthesaint

The richest part of the U.S. population is now working more hours in comparison to lower wage earners. Instead of using the money from a hard-earned raise to lessen their burdens, they are feeling even more stressed and working harder.

This response is due in part to the opportunity cost of taking time off. Time away from work is now viewed by higher wage earners as money lost so they are less likely to step away from their professional lives.

Another contributing factor is the increasing divide in income. While the middle class and poor are holding steady, the richest part of the population is swiftly pulling away from everyone else. Surprisingly, a recent poll of workers in New York revealed that those earning a healthy income of $200,000 a year were most likely to admit that “seeing other people with money” makes them feel impoverished! While the rich are getting significantly richer, everyone else is dealing with the sting of not moving at all.

The New York Times announced that Senator McCain has picked a running mate – Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

In a surprise move, Senator John McCain announced here Friday that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On the surface this seems like a great opportunity to celebrate equality – the first woman chosen by the Republican party to be on the VP ticket. Give McCain’s choice some thought though and you soon realize that this not about helping women ascend to higher office, this is just politics as usual. Gov. Palin is just a pawn in the game and the game is to attempt to attract disaffected female Democrats to the McCain ticket. Gov. Palin brings no experience to the ticket whatsoever, and at his age you would have expected McCain would have picked someone with a great deal of experience should she have to take over the Oval Office.

McCain’s advisors clearly think that in this campaign women voters will presumably flock to the McCain – Palin ticket just because she’s a woman. So, women of America, congratulations you are now thought of as a demographic group to be wooed for votes. No experience necessary. If I were female I would find this all very demeaning. Women deserve more in this election. Both camps should be very aware of their voting power.

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

An image of the galaxy NGC 1275 and its network of filaments (in red). The center of the galaxy hosts a giant supermassive black hole.