Notes are the default blog postings – the thoughts that are heavier than 140 characters, more than one link, and simple enough to not warrant too much explicating.
What am I getting at? Your relentless drive to discredit and demonize the Freshman: the blogs. Not only is it mean spirited it just demeans you. You’re better than that. Sure it’s fun and easy to pick on them – they’re awkward, they make mistakes, they can’t get girls – but you were there once yourself. And guess what? At the rate you’re going – and with the kind of smarts these new kids have – you’ll be working for them in a few short years.
This time around things are different. There are undercurrents and shifts in the very nature of the economy that make it unlikely that this storm can simply be waited out. Institutions that grew strong on the centralized, master-servant, control oriented industrial model are being destroyed by a rapid shift to a decentralized, networked, peer oriented social technology model. We are speedily moving away from an economy dominated by a small group of big companies to one dominated by a big group of small companies.
This video is illuminating. If you want to know – to really know – why the newspaper is a failing medium then just watch this report from the Rocky Mountain News. (more AND video after the jump)
This kept me up past my bed time last night. All in all a pretty good conversation between Marc Andreessen and Charlie Rose – although Andreessen tends to come off as a bit manic (if not maniacal) and Rose a bit assumptive. (More commentary and video after jump)
When it rains it pours – yet another titan of the corporate media model offers a scheme to “fix” the New York Times. In this memo Steve Brill puts his bias for corporate supported journalism on full display in a plan that rivals Mr. Isaacson for its sheer ignorance of developing and significant trends with regard to human information consumption.
Simply put, newspapers cannot be saved. They are big bloated, convoluted corporate anachronisms that derive their strength and power from an economic model of news information that is in rapid and steep decline. These corporate entities were built and grew powerful in an age when new information was remote, precious, scarce, capital.
Imagine a day when a reader – coming to your site because your are a trusted source of high quality editorial content that resonates deeply with them – can give you more than just an email. Imagine that reader giving you the key to their entire social life. You can instantly connect them to their friends already on site – direct them to highly relevant content – give them a valuable contextual relationship from the outset. All they had to do was fill in a field and click a button – all they ask for in return is what you have always given them: respect and quality content.
Clear Magazine has done something interesting – they printed a magazine without killing one tree. Not one. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of this news is that it is more than a month old. Yes friends while we were all obsessing over the imploding magazine market, the legions of let go media workers, the [...]
Something deep inside me – call it the ghost of the slacker English Major arrogance – wants to recoil at writing and thought geared toward business. I have always felt that the deep truths, genuine epiphany, and intellectual stimulation, just could not be found in writings on management. And to some extent this remains true. [...]
Planning for any emergency or crisis requires that the planner be able to ideate and chart solutions for the most pessimistic of possible outcomes. For me – given the current economic state – that means listening not only to the more conservative “things will work out” analysts, but also the “sky is falling” folks who [...]