Blogging
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Sourcing Persephone
We are what we do. We are more than that, of course, but it helps to have answers to the questions “What do you do?” and “What have you done?” Among many other notable things Persephone Miel did was survive breast cancer. It was a subject that came up often during the year we shared… Continue reading
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Enough with the branding BS
The backlash against “personal branding” has begun. I saw it first in this post by Yvonne in BlogHer. Now you can feel the line begin to whip with Manifesto: I am Not a Brand, by Maureen Johnson, also in BlogHer. Bravo. The pull quote: “We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags… Continue reading
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A newspaper progress report, sort of
Back in October 2006, I posted Newspapers 2.o, listing ten “hopefully helpful clues” for papers needing to adapt to a world that would only get more and more of its news online. I ran the same list in August 2007, adding an eleventh suggestion. So here I’m visiting the original ten, with my own brief… Continue reading
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Manners vs. Mores
Until her Supreme Court nomination turned Elena Kagan into big-time news fodder, there was not an abundance of great pictures of her to be found on the Web. Among the better ones to be found were a couple I had posted on Flickr a couple years ago, when she was still Dean of Harvard Law… Continue reading
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TTT vs. The News Cycle
In the old days the “news cycle” was the interval between the news media’s pumpings: the paper’s daily print run, the TV station’s morning and evening news programs. Now that cycle is as short as the TTT: Time To Tweet. Consider yesterday. Sitting in an idle subway car at the Alewife station, from which all… Continue reading
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Write and Wrong
When Gizmodo reported on the next-generation iPhone that had come into its hands, I was as curious as the next geek about what they’d found. But I didn’t think the ends justified the means. The story begins, You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look… Continue reading
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The Unbearable Lightness of Branding
Lots of trackbacks (or pingbacks) are spam, and I don’t approve them for the comments section. But some pass the first sniff test, and some are interesting enough to warrant a reply. That’s what happened with the post “To be (a brand) or not to be (a brand)”, at a blog called Daily Breaking News… Continue reading
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Brands are Bull
At 11:30pm on April 22, 1978 Saturday Night Live opened with Paul Schaffer, made up to look like music promoter Don Kirshner (whose show ran in most markets right after SNL). What followed was a lesson in branding that we’re still learning. Here’s how it looks in the show’s transcript (sorry, the original isn’t on… Continue reading
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Bubkes’ next stand
Bubkes, Stephen Lewis explains, is “Yiddish for beans; early-20th-century Bronx-, Brooklyn-, and Lower-East-Side-ese for very inconsequential matters.” It’s also the name of his blog at Bubkes.org — which, perhaps miraculously, is back up again. Though not for long. Bubkes is hosted by Userland, a company that has been bobbing belly-up for the past few months.… Continue reading
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What’s Old is Nude Again
In Social Media Crisis Management By This Fluid World, Jonathan MacDonald reviews his own reporting of a real-life incident in the London Underground — and what happened next, as the ripples spread. Good stuff. In the midst of his talk (slides are presented in the post) he cites my own small contribution. Interesting how normative… Continue reading
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Can we have some first sources, please?
One of the things that drives me nuts about stories on the Web is absent links to first sources. Two examples: this piece by Nate anderson in Ars Technica and this one by Greg Sandoval in BX.BusinessWeek Cnet.* Both report on briefs filed by the MPAA and the RIAA with the FCC. Both quote from… Continue reading
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Season’s Leavings
So I’ve been out and about London the 2-3 days. Had a great time. Beautiful city in Christmas season, even (or perhaps especially) in the rain. Not much connectivity, or time to connect, actually. The above is one of the few pix I took, before breakfast with JP Rangaswami this (or yesterday, depending) morning. Shot… Continue reading
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What’s right with Wikipedia?
“I make my living off the Evening News Just give me something: something I can use People love it when you lose They love dirty laundry. — Don Henley, “Dirty Laundry” Look up “Wikipedia loses” (with the quotes) and you get 20,800 results. Look up “Wikipedia has lost” and you get 56,900. (Or at least… Continue reading
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Beyond Social Media
Consider the possibility that “social media” is a crock. Or at least bear with that thought through Defrag, which takes place in Denver over today and Thursday, and for which the word “social” appears seventeen times in the agenda. (Perspective: “cloud” appears three times, and “leverage” twice.) What prompts the crock metaphor is this survey,… Continue reading
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The REAL real time search
Blog search is mighty thin in Wikipedia. Technorati’s entry is stale. IceRocket and BlogPulse are stubs. BlogScope is minimal. It’s really wierd. While “real time” is heating up as a topic, real time search seems to have fallen off the radar of everybody other than itself. Take this piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick in ReadWriteWeb. It… Continue reading
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Liking IceRocket
In The new Technorati: advertiser-friendly, foreigner-free? Ethan Zuckerman unpacks a bit of what remains (“highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content”) and what’s gone (everything but English) at Technorati. (This blog is still there, at #2659 and falling, with an authority of 549. I was informally advising Technorati when they came up with the authority thing, but I… Continue reading
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Subscribe Sunday
Hey, Twitter has its Follow Fridays. So I suggest blogs have Subscribe Sundays. For pointing to other blogs you think are worth subscribing to. I haven’t subscribed to particular blogs in awhile (mostly I subscribe, temporarily, to topics, or search strings). But two I just came across seem extra interesting to me. One is Enjoymentland,… Continue reading
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Metaphorging
Interesting volley between Cliff Gerrish (also @cgerrish) and myself, centered on the topic of silos vs. pipes, beginning with my post Values and Valuation, then continuing in Cliff’s The Silo & The Pipe: Doc Searls gets Venezuelan, and in the comments below that post. While I don’t wish to abandon the silo metaphor (or any… Continue reading