Tape Noise Diary

HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog with Credibility!

The link takes you to 43folders where there’s a podcast with said name. It’s a talk that Merlin Mann and Daring Fireball author John Gruber gave at SXSW Interactive. They basically talk about making and putting things on the internet and how to do it in a way that in the long run, benefits both parties (i.e. you and your audience). Funny, but equally inspiring. It’s a must listen, specially if your drive to make things is something more than making money on the internet. To get into Stephen Covey territory, it’s a “paradigm shift” in the way people usually think about being successful on the web. Gruber has a better grip at what they where trying to get at and he wrote a nice post about it. Here’s a quote:

No one gets into something like this without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages” and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention.

Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet

This is a guest post by Eric Clemons on Techcrunch. It’s an in depth and controversial analysis of not just why internet advertising is “failing”, but why it plainly doesn’t work or isn’t going to keep on working. From the article:

It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media.  Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail.  It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information.  We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising.  We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind.  The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below.  Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.

Bolded emphasis mine. [Via]

Shel Holtz Vs Kurt Vonnegut

I found this through a Seth Godin post were he explained The Pillars of Social Media Site Success. It doesn’t take much deep thought that the more these sites satisfy the individuals ego, the more success they have. That’s not surprising. But pretending that online communities can be better and replace their meatspace counterparts is a little crazy, specially when someone decides to Tweet that someone has fainted, instead of calling 911. From the Writing Boots post:

The other reluctance we should all have about Twitter, even as we grudgingly accept its occasional social utility, is the Kurt Vonnegut Rule of Farting Around. “Electronic communities build nothing,” my favorite humanist wrote near the end of his life. “You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you different.” *