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Sep 20 2009
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Food for Thought Links

Food For Thought Links

food-for-thoughtThe Holy Grail of the Unconscious

The Ny Time Magazine article tells the story about the lost book of Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology. For almost 100 years, the red leather bound book has been the subject of speculation and controversy. Sarah Corbett writes about the struggle to get it published. Below is a snip of what it’s about:

“The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.”

I want to read that.

via Give Me Something to Read

Project Gaydar

“You wanna know how I know your gay? You like Coldplay.” That’s a line Paul Rudd says to Seth Rogen in the 40 Year Old Virgin. Well, that man-child joke is soon to become obsolete if this project is proven valid, which I doubt. Two MIT students created a software algorithm that studies a person’s Facebook profile and they claim it can predict if the person is gay.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

via Meta Filter

Post-Medium Publishing

Paul Graham on publishing and it’s shift and fight between selling content or selling the medium.

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

via Snarkmarket

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Jul 13 2009
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Technology and Web

What Isn’t Social Media?

There’s a post over at Copyblogger that asks Since When Are Blogs Not Social Media?. It linked to my post Why I’m Quitting Social Media as example of an author confused with the term. While I don’t agree about the being confused part, I’ll admit that I’m wrong on giving the idea that a blog isn’t “social media”. At least with giving the perception that I think that, which I really don’t. But what are you going to do?

That said, if you can’t really see differences between a Twitter account and a blog, that’s what in my neighborhood they call being anal. Social networking sites are set, excuse the redundancy, as social networking sites first. You can use it as a medium to broadcast and publish content, but that doesn’t mean it stopped being a online social networking service. A blog in contrast is not set up as a social networking service. You can use it, and it has been used, as a way to “talk” and “network” with people, but it’s primarily a publishing tool.

Again, you can use social networking as a tool to broadcast and you can use a blog to tell you friends what you’re up to. You can use Twitter as a mini blog (remember the term microblogging?) and hell, you can even use your blog like email. Good luck with that though. You can blend and mix the purposes. The possibilities to share and consume information are endless.

The thing is and here’s the question, what media, specially on the internet, isn’t social?

I have a post trying to riff on that question but it didn’t come out to well, but it made me stumble on that key question. It’s not as much that the term is confusing, but more why do we need it and what exactly is it naming? What new thing it’s pointing to? See, on a macro level every media is social. Newspapers, Television, Radio, the Internet… they are all forms of communication between you know, humans, and usually more than two. We can have an endless argument about the ways people can talk back, with comments, conversations, community, and all the hippie web 2.0 utopic idealism, but you can’t say that a Newspaper is anti-social.

But we know that the term is mostly meant as social networking services used as mediums to publish and broadcast content. If a writer says that he’s quitting social media, nobody says, “oh my god, he’s going to stop writing books”. See what I’m trying to get at? If we go with the authoritative wikipedia definition, saying that a blog is social media is like saying water is wet.

If you’re the one that always starts the conversation, no matter if people can comment and talk back, or send a letter, it’s still a “monologue and one to many”, but that doesn’t mean you’re a misanthrope and anti-social.

And the question a second time: What media isn’t social on the web? A static page with a person’s portfolio? Even that serves a social purpose. I’m trying hard to think what isn’t social in the web of interconnected computers, but I can’t.

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Jul 06 2009
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Technology and Web

SocialMedia – A Semantical and Etymological Inquiry

Scott Berkun’s rant, Calling Bullshit on Social Media, and Joshua Michele Ross counter argument in an Orielly Radar post, got me thinking about how much the idea of “social media” is a semantical problem. Scott Berkun wrote:

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way.

Ross answered back:

Railing against the popular lexicon is always a losing bet. Language is formed by collective agreement and it sticks because it resonates and serves a purpose.

Let’s take these two words for a moment and define them separately.

Media - noun 

1 plural form of medium . 2 (usu. the media) [treated as sing. or pl. ] the main means of mass communication (esp. television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet) regarded collectively : [as adj. ] the campaign won media attention.

USAGE The word media comes from the Latin plural of medium. The traditional view is that it should therefore be treated as a plural noun in all its senses in English and be used with a plural rather than a singular verb: : the media have not followed the reports (rather than : has not followed). In practice, in the sense ‘television, radio, the press, and the Internet, collectively,’ media behaves as a collective noun (like staff orclergy, for example), which means that it is now acceptable in standard English for it to take either a singular or a plural verb.

Social – adjective1 [ attrib. ] of or relating to society or its organization : alcoholism is recognized as a major social problem | a traditional Japanese social structure.• of or relating to rank and status in society : a recent analysis of social class in Britain | her mother is a lady of the highest social standing.• needing companionship and therefore best suited to living in communities : we are social beings as well as individuals.• relating to or designed for activities in which people meet each other for pleasure : Guy led a full social life.2 Zoology (of a bird) gregarious; breeding or nesting in colonies.• (of an insect) living together in organized communities, typically with different castes, as ants, bees, wasps, and termites do.• (of a mammal) living together in groups, typically in a hierarchicalsystem with complex communication.

O.K. Hope you keep those definitions fresh in your mind and that the next paragraphs make sense. Here we go.

While I agree with the statement that “railing against the popular lexicon is a loosing bet”, I don’t think this compounded word and term isn’t that collectively agreed upon. If it were, these discussions wouldn’t happen as much. Even terms like “blogging” and Web 2.0 have more collectively agreed upon definitions than the terms “social media”. 

The problem is that this is truly a buzzed out term in the worst sense because it’s not pointing out to anything new. Web 2.0 is a cheesy term, but it pointed out to something that was truly new, which was the shift in letting users customize and participate with their web consumption as much as possible. In contrast, social media is a vague term that falls apart because according to it’s definition, then everything on the internet is social media.

We know of course that it’s really to highlight the use of more social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, etc., as tools to broadcast content and, ironically, less to truly socialize and network. That’s what I think is truly meant by social media and that’s my beef with it

The social, in social media, is meant as a noun, highlighting what is ridiculously obvious and self evident about broadcasting content on the internet. Scott Berkun says that all media is social, in some ways. But I’ll go as far as saying that all media is social, in every way… as a noun. Newspapers, Television, Radio, the Internet, etc., they are forms a communication, you know, between humans, and usually more than two. And yes, online you can talk back, collaborate, and have much more options to the way you can interact with information, but that’s just a technological advantage and it doesn’t mean that old media is anti-social.

But social is mostly meant as an adjective, as in socializing, smooching, and chit chatting. Social networking services are just that: digital locations for mammals to congregate and communicate. Using Facebook as a means to broadcast content is an option, but that isn’t it’s true purpose. Even if you decide to use social networking sites to broadcast content instead of say, having a physical newspaper column, that doesn’t make you a more gregarious human being. Sharing vs publishing may have different agenda$, but it has the same end purpose, which is to communicate something to people. This mixture of purposes is its key problem: an unrealistic expectation to be social without being trivial, banal, or noisy.

The point: You are either friendly or resourceful. You either share or publish. You either have an audience or friends. But you can’t have both at the same time.

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Jun 17 2009
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Technology and Web, Videos

The New Media Landscape

How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History

New media thought leader Clay Shirky in his latest TED presentation asserts that the days of broadcasting a message of “one to many ” are over. It will be “many to many”. (It will make sense when you watch the presentation.) I don’t agree with his prediction that the traditional model of broadcasting and publishing is going away. More importantly, I don’t think we should let it go away. I don’t know about you, but I’m not too psyched of living in a world were everything is socialized media. I state one big reason here. Sure, the paradigm shift that’s happening with publishing and broadcasting is very empowering and a great thing for society in general. But relying on groupthink and the echo chamber to understand your world is not so smart. That said, the media landscape is changing indeed and it is sure to keep on changing. As always, Shirky’s talk is very insightful and interesting. The guy really has the pulse on this thing.

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Apr 24 2009
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Writing

Snobbish Magazine Envy

theeconomistWhy Times and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist

Magazines are having a little envy with the success of The Economist. Even when they have raised subscription fees and prices, their circulation has doubled and are growing in ad support. Other publishers are are trying to jump on that, so they guess they have to be more like them. But according to Vanity Fair, they are making a mistake because trying to imitate them is a “fool’s errand”. They list four reasons why. Here’s part of number one:

1. They can’t match the snob appeal
Every eight years someone writes a well-argued take-down of The Economist. The most popular charge, which James Fallows first articulated in The Washington Post in 1991, is that people just carry the magazine around to look sophisticated. Its readers, Fallows complained, are in thrall to its “smarty-pants English attitudes” and “Oxbridge swagger”.

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Apr 22 2009
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Technology and Web

Another End of Print Books Prophecy

kindle-2How the e-Book will Change the Way we Read and Write

Steve Johnson over at WSJ makes some interesting speculations about how the book industry could change. He writes about the “aha” moment he had with the Kindle, which everyone that reviews a Kindle has. (I haven’t seen that much negative “aha” moments when people write about the Kindle.) Here’s his take on how with the marriage of Google, books could become into some sort of “booklog”:

With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.

Via Kottke.org

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Apr 08 2009
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Technology and Web, Videos

You Get the Readers You Deserve

The title is a quote taken from the video above. Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution, talks about his approach to blogging and advises that you shouldn’t be thinking about what readers would like because “it makes the blog boring, less innovating, and less entrepreneurial”.(paraphrased)

The 8 minutes are totally worth watching and it’s great to hear about smart people other than tech bloggers, or the “how to blog bloggers”, talking about the medium.

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Mar 30 2009
2 Comments
Writing

You Are Not a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.” – TD

I think there are two blogger types: Those that love the topic they write about and those that love to write about a topic. I think I’m the later, but I’m trying hard to be the former. Everyone that’s been publishing stuff online for a while and has been “successful” at it, agree unanimously on this one tip: you have to find that one thing that your “passionate” about. And the more focused and narrow you are about that passion/topic, the better off you are. The problem is that most of us are not as weird or unique as we might think. 

What I realize is that it’s not about the capital P Passion thing. That’s just too much Pressure and too ephemeral. It is important, but what you really have to figure out is what you shouldn’t talk/write about. What not to put out there. It’s about disciplined self-editing and that’s why it’s so freaking hard.

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Mar 28 2009
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Food for Thought Links

Food for Thought Links

food-for-thoughtHOWTO: 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.” *

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Oct 06 2008
5 Comments
Technology and Web

Are You a Publisher or a Conversationalist?

I ask myself this question because I’m suspicious of the idea that blogging is all about having “conversations.” This is an idea that a lot bloggers like to push forward. They like to view themselves as “conversation” enablers. But this idea is just marketing speak. It’s a simple and clever strategy to keep people talking about them and their blogs.

Good blogging though is about being a great publisher of content, not being a wonderful conversationalist. People that read blogs and people who publish blogs, are not looking for chit chat. They’re people who have something to say and people looking for someone who has something to say. If you’re blogging to know what people think about a particular topic, then I suggest platforms other than blogging, like chat clients.

Most of the time, when people are pushing and encouraging conversations, what they really mean and want is feedback, but there’s a big difference between wanting feedback and wanting conversations. Conversations are spontaneous and not well thought of rants. They are unstructured streams of thought between a group of people. Feedback, on the other hand, is evidence that you’re provoking a reaction, good or bad.

This is not me advocating for or against commenting. That’s a whole different issue. There are many pros an cons that have been discussed, but comments are not the only way to know if your causing a reaction. I’m just not sure if I can agree completely that blogging is about having and enabling conversations. If I want to see what people think of a particular topic, I prefer to use other methods other than blogging. There are better and more effective ways for having conversations. There are things like chat clients, forums, and even services like Twitter are better for having conversations.

And there’s always a hypocritical conundrum with the conversationalists. They say that’s it’s ok to moderate. But that’s not a conversation. A least not a natural conversation. That’s controlling perception and quality control. That’s being a publisher.

I view blogging as a tool for the amatuer publisher. Wanting feedback, criticism, and validation are totally different things. It’s not the same with having conversations. Publishing, like blogging, is about having something to say, not wanting to “talk.” A good blog post is a monologue that sometimes people enjoy and sometimes they don’t.

So don’t get obsessed or trapped with the idea of provoking conversations. Unless you’re Robert Scoble, your blog should be about having something to say. Don’t focus on what people may think, focus on what you think. Focus on being a good publisher.

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