Internet adventures

How odd is it…

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…that the top 16 entries in Yahoo Sports’ Tournament Challenge ALL have North Carolina winning it all? I should have picked UConn so I could beat them all. I still wouldn’t place first, but still.

And how bizarre is it that, in a year in which I picked almost at random, I’m in the ninety-seventh percentile of Yahoo rankings? Or that even with that, I’m still not in the top 65,000? That means they got something like over two million entries, and they’re not ESPN. Ouch.

Tweeting out of a facebook in my space.

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When I started Da Blog, I mentioned that “you won’t see me get a MySpace or Facebook account” and I lumped in MySpace and Facebook along with blogs as things I didn’t think there was anyone left in my age group who didn’t have them.

Since then, I’ve seen a number of blogs shacking up with MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter and reposting the posts that are already on their blogs there. I’m wondering, why? You already have an RSS feed, why do you need to put alerts of new posts on Twitter as well? Why repost your blog entirely on MySpace or Facebook and obviate the need for people to visit your blog and view your advertising? If you really want to be on MySpace or Facebook, why not just put your blog there in the first place

I had the same questions shortly after getting my first webcomic-post-created bump, when someone created a feed for Da Blog on LiveJournal. I never really got a satisfactory answer – seems the creator wanted a one-stop shop to read Da Blog and his other feeds from his LJ friends list. I’m not sure if even that applies to MySpace and Facebook (or, to a lesser extent, Twitter).

Well, I think I’ve found the reason why people would dive in to that sort of thing voluntarily: to aid in blog promotion.

The friend function on MySpace and Facebook has become a complete misnomer grossly deprecated from its original function. Probably the vast majority of “friends” aren’t. Celebrities accept every friend request under the sun, allowing any fan to claim their favorite celeb isn’t just someone they really like, they’re BFFs! On the flip side, small-time bloggers and other attention whores (and I use that term to describe a lot more bloggers than the community would like to admit, and I’m one of them) beg for friends on the off chance that people will discover them off their “friends”‘ friend lists. Never mind that when you have 600 friends, they become meaningless. (Some people may not even know who the people are who they apply to be friends with.)

Friends have become trivialized, but their organization hasn’t. The problem with using MySpace and Facebook to pimp your blog is the hassle of applying for friends, and even more so, dealing with friend requests. (One or both may allow for en masse friend approval, without looking at the individual requests, but it’s not a networking site that wants to fight the trivialization of friends. Or spam, for that matter.)

Twitter is better for such a purpose, since “friendship” isn’t reciprocal – there’s a distinction between “following” and “follower” – so people can link you just by announcing they’re following your tweets, and you don’t have to do anything. So between the potential blog-promotion possibilities and my own growing interest in its original purpose (I’m always doing something, ideally), has actually made me seriously consider becoming the latest to follow the crowd and hook up with Twitter.

Oddly, perhaps the major reason why I have some misgivings is the tagline at the top of Da Blog: “The ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick.” That reflects, in large measure, the multi-blog nature of Da Blog as I see it, obviating the need for me to take part in any other blogs. It was originally intended as semi-ironic, since it would be pretty unlikely I (or anyone else) would need any other blogs anyway. But not only has a growth of alternate platforms increased the possibility for things that could be considered “second blogs”, if I were to join Twitter it could easily be considered, despite its restrictions, a second blog for me – if it didn’t even supercede Da Blog.

Besides, I’m better than annoying everyone with what I’m having for dinner.

At least I’m not violating my first-post promise… if only because I’d rather avoid the hassle of coming up with and enforcing a friends policy.

I’ve Found Another Prophet of the Internet Revolution!

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After going around and around and around in February about the future of the comics and Scott McCloud, it’s perhaps ironic that I may be adding his chief foil in the micropayment wars, Clay Shirky, to my RSS reader.

I may have mentioned this before, but I’m astounded at the changes the Internet is wreaking on society – and has wreaked on it, in the span of one or two decades. I believe computers and the Internet may combine to become an invention with more impact on society than television or just about any other major invention of the 20th century. The Agricultural Revolution led to the birth of civilization; the Industrial Revolution led to a rapid expansion of civilization and its capacity to make lives better; now the Digital Revolution could result in another transformation of civilization and an expansion of the human mind. It’s an invention on par with fire, the wheel, the assembly line, for its potential to revolutionize humanity – I’m not even kidding.

In a recent blog post on the future of newspapers, Shirky focuses on one such comparison in particular: the printing press.

(Before I go on, scroll down to the bottom to the comments section. It may not seem that surprising that the post has over 600 comments – after all, Shirky is reasonably popular, certainly more so than I am, for his musings on the Internet… until you realize that Shirky doesn’t even allow comments, which means that every single one of those “comments” is a trackback from another site. Over 600 different sites linking to one post.)

There’s been a lot of going back and forth on how to Save Newspapers in the face of recession and the Internet, whether it’s by imposing a paywall like Newsday’s doing, shutting down the presses and going all-digital like the Seattle P-I, or moving to micropayments like Walter Isaacson proposed semi-recently, and in the process preserving the valuable journalistic functions the newspaper provides. Shirky’s thesis is that the newspaper is out of date, an artifact of the economic paradigm created by print, and its functions need to be adapted to the new paradigm of the web.

Shirky takes us back to when print was just getting started and chaos was erupting and questions were being asked over such things as vernacular Bibles, popular versions of ancient thinkers, and other such things. He identifies a trend of experiments turning out in retrospect to be big turning points, be it the birth of small, portable books or Craigslist. For Shirky, old paradigms getting disrupted without anything to take its place for a while is a natural part of any revolution like the Internet. McCloud painted the newspaper comic strip as a marriage of convenience between the medium of comics and the industry of newspapers; Shirky paints the newspaper itself as a marriage of convenience between advertisers, publishers, and journalists. Advertisers have more outlets now, and the publishing industry itself is out of date. That means a rather dim near future for journalism: the answer to the question “what happens to journalism when newspapers die?” is,

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

To Shirky, newspapers are about to die, and it may take a few decades of experiments to arrive on a new model for journalism going forward, and it probably won’t end up being one patch to fill every function once filled by the newspaper, but several.

Shirky, it appears, shares my vision of the Internet as a revolutionary technology that will serve as the major differentiating force and theme of the third millenium AD. He realizes that we live in an important transitional age, one that will irrevocably change American and world culture for years, even centuries, to come. Things we do now will have impact many, many years down the road. He’s definitely someone I’ll want to refer to while I write my book on the internet revolution.

Actually, screw that. Writing a book on the magnitude I want to write is a pretty massive undertaking, and I don’t know if publishers or agents would be willing to take a chance with someone of my age and lack of experience. If I need a co-writer, or if I’m unable to write the book at all, Shirky would seem to be an ideal choice to write it instead (or as well).

Stewart v. Cramer: What the Media is Doing Unequivocally Wrong, No Matter What You Believe

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Why aren’t real news people more like Jon Stewart?

The Colbert Report debuted in 2005. That means that The Daily Show had been earning rave reviews since well before that for its biting satirical take on the news that in some cases seemed better than the real news shows. Even before The Colbert Report, Stewart made a famous appearance on Crossfire a year earlier where he so called out the culture of news of the day it led to Crossfire‘s cancellation. (And his show put out America: The Book the same year.) But news organizations have changed so little since then that TV news is arguably poorer for the loss of Crossfire as a place where liberal and conservative views would be forced to confront each other (and made stronger for it) rather than stay within their shelters of Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh. (I’d like to see some news network start a PTI-style show for news and politics.) As early as 2002, Stewart was rumored to be replacing David Letterman.

We’ve had Stewart helming The Daily Show for a decade now, and earning rave reviews the whole time, and a recurring theme of his tenure has been calling out and making fun of the mainstream media as much if not more often than politicians. (The media was a particular target of America: The Book.) And for being, as Stewart is wont to remind people, a “fake news show”, its popularity still would seem to suggest it’s something today’s youth actually want in their news. So why hasn’t anyone taken up the challenge? Why is journalism still as bankrupt as it ever has been in this decade? Why hasn’t anyone become the “real” Jon Stewart, or at least taken up his grievances?

This came into focus for me while watching Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer last night. The interview went on so long that the unedited version had to be posted on The Daily Show‘s web site, but really, the interview could be condensed into one or two sentences. Stewart called out Cramer and CNBC for not digging down deep in its interviews with CEOs and challenging them to bring the goods, instead of “trusting” them and then “regretting” trusting them so much later. More broadly, Stewart both cast doubt on the ethical standards of people like Cramer who have had experience with the shadier side of Wall Street and suggested that experience could be used to actually enlighten viewers, and wondered if CNBC’s target audience was ordinary Americans looking to invest their 401k’s or Wall Street insiders.
This isn’t new stuff with Stewart. Regularly he will show pieces of a real news network’s softball interview with a newsmaker and ridicule it, or criticise the practices of the mainstream media in a similar fashion. But to flip it around, if Cramer were to come on an Anderson Cooper or someone else in the mainstream media, he wouldn’t be so heavily pushed – even if he weren’t a member of it. It says a lot that Stewart is doing a lot of the asking of truly penetrating questions and actual debate of guests in the media today.

Why do we have to tune in at 11 PM on the comedy channel to watch a comedian do it for only thirty minutes? Doesn’t Stewart’s popularity suggest there’s a real market for real, hard-hitting journalism, not pandering and demagoguery?

Last summer after reading True Enough, I decided I would start reading the two major media watchdog sites on both sides of the political spectrum, Media Matters for America on the left and Newsbusters on the right. I eventually stopped – I got the impression that Newsbusters was more obsessive about rooting out bias and had a larger density of posts, and for the first time I started semi-seriously considering the conservative claim of liberal media bias – but the impression I got from the sites dedicated to claiming the media was biased to the right or to the left wasn’t that it was biased to either side. It was just incompetent.

That led me to claim that what was really needed was for the media to fight back against claims of bias from both sides and lay out why they’re right after all. But part of the reason the media isn’t fond of doing that is because it’s all too fond of playing up the extreme differences between left and right. It’s as much a willing participant as anything in the red-blue divide with shows from the likes of Lou Dobbs, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity. (Bill O’Reilly and Rachael Maddow might deserve at least a little more respect from their respective other sides.) And there may also be the factor that the media really is falling down on the job. Certainly it’s not just left and right complaining about it, or even minority groups like backers of third parties. Anyone you talk to will likely bemoan the loss of real journalism, of investigative journalism, of substantive journalism, of coverage of events that really matter rather than, say, Jennifer Aniston, of any virtue of journalism that doesn’t follow the almighty dollar.

The people running the news networks will likely say that sort of thing doesn’t sell. I think the popularity of Stewart says otherwise and that, given an alternative to the sort of hollow, flashy, scratching-the-surface, substanceless journalism they’re getting now, people will flock to it in a heartbeat. Certainly that’s the sort of thing my mom likes best about Stewart; I suspect it’s what America will find they like as well. (Although presentation matters; the fact it may matter more than content is how we got into this mess. Once, I was inspired by anti-American-media comments to check out BBC America’s “World News America” and found it boring as hell. And not entirely free from schmaltzy human interest stories to boot.)

Newspapers aren’t dying because they can’t make money on the Internet, except in the sense they don’t know how to capitalize on the Internet (and that they’ve been losing classified revenue to Craigslist). They may even be best off silencing their presses – besides the cost of the press itself, there’s distribution and middleman fees to consider – as the print versions have really become loss leaders more than anything else. They’re dying because they’re so incompetent that two groups that have never been such bitter enemies nonetheless both hate their guts, and because they’re getting new competition and scrutiny from blogs – and because they believe their “can’t make money on the Internet” excuse for their struggles, they aren’t realizing the real reasons and adapting and evolving to them. (I wrote more on this here.) Rather than getting better newspapers, we might end up with no newspapers at all. I mean, after decades of conservative accusations of media bias, how is it that the mainstream media is STILL doing stuff like this? Or this or this?

I hear that a major reason we need to save newspapers is because of all the “financial resources” they have to do real broad-scale reporting. If newspapers want to keep those “financial resources” they need to come up with new and better reasons for people to patronize them. And as for television news, they’re well overdue to take a long, hard look at themselves and figure out if they’re really doing the best they can. Stewart may be telling them – in word and deed – that they aren’t.