December 2008
32 posts
4 tags
Twitter: Your All Access Pass
Two nights ago I was jotting down some thoughts about how Twitter’s democratic nature is vital to its utility. Then, ironically, along comes this controversial suggestion from Loic Le Meur that Twitter should rank search results by authority. Dangerous. There’s room for more granular search, sure (see Scoble’s quick suggestions), but the slippery slope to avoid is introducing...
“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a...”
– From Bertrand Russel’s essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.” For anyone whose Christmas is a modern tradition based on the celebration of all our fellow men rather than just one.
“It’s the most fundamental shift since Gutenberg. The Internet is basically...”
– Astrophysicist/supercomputerist Dr. Larry Smarr in 1994. (via NYT)
“We will definitely advertise on the Internet again. It appears to be a very...”
– Report from the first known web spammer in 1994. From “An Ad (Gasp!) in Cyberspace” via NYT.
“Very few people read text on-line; it’s not that much fun.”
– An AOL exec in 1993. (Via an NYT article that describes magazines’ first forays on the web.)
“We’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective...”
– Who else but Thomas Friedman in today’s NYT op/ed - “Time to Reboot America.”
“But it always strikes me as weird when bloggers, whose primary task is to...”
– A commenter on Ezra Klein’s recent piece on the decline of newspapers.
“For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of...”
– “News You Can Lose.” James Surowiecki for The New Yorker.
“The idea of a bailout for big media has been joked about a few times, but I’m...”
– I hope not. The idea of mass public dollars underwriting the publication of news and opinion makes me uncomfortable. Particularly when those dollars would mostly be funding news and opinion about the entity that is providing them. (Cue screeches of ‘FREEDOM OF THE PRESS’ wheeling in the...
“Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable.”
– Clive James (via mills)
Magazines Are Digital Misfits
Maybe: in moving to web, value proposition of digital format is greater for newspapers than it is for magazines.*
The other day I twittered that half-baked thought and got several prods to flesh out my musing a bit further, so here you are!
As it concerns the reader, the web’s major advantages over print publishing are content accessibility and delivery speed. The web reaches more people...
“Gawker Media — the blog network that over the years has evolved from pirate ship...”
– WWD
“It has somehow come to feel normal that on a Tuesday morning in early January...”
– John Gruber of Daring Fireball on what he proposes is Steve Jobs bucking tradition.
“STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me,
why should you...”
– Walt Whitman, from his days as a subway poet. So many friends we almost make every day in our travels, but mostly never do.
“The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been...”
– Brian Eno on his creative process when composing the Microsoft sound for Windows 95.
