Month: December 2007

The state of mass media

I really enjoyed this interview of Mike James, done by Terry Heaton.  Simple, direct, and to the point.  Some things discussed are obvious to anyone with a common sense.  Others are not so.   Here are a couple of quotes to get you started.

Television news (if you believe it is a form of journalism) has the ability…the responsibility…to capture and preserve the moments, the events, that pass through our daily lives. Instead, it has fallen back on trivial weepies and frothy feel-goods, on medical “studies” and video news releases, or political spin and opinionated shoutfests, hypothesis, rumor, and supposition. TV news is no longer in charge of itself. It deserves to be shot at sunrise.

Bloggers are banging at the door of reality. But there are too many of them. They are unfocused. Too wild-eyed. Too unconsidered. And they fade away with time. The internet is generations away from fulfilling its promise. Bloggers have found limited success only because mass media has failed so miserably.

So, it is possible …

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive.  One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress).  This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive.  And I am not much sad about it.  It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience.  But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works.  And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business.  These are some good news for me – failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.

Blogs in Plain English

Common Craft created yet another amazing 3-minute video.  This time they explain what a blog is, in plain English.  This is really useful for those of us who bring new people to the blogosphere.  After being around for a few years, it’s sometimes hard to express things in simple words, avoiding most of the terminology, and staying on the subject.  With this video, there is much less talking needed.

If you liked this one, check their Explanations in Plain English category for more videos.

What social people do …

In yet another Twitter review (and a nice one at that), I caught this quote (emphasis is mine):

If you are a twitterer, you can follow my infrequent tweets under my screen name of tevslin. My last tweet is from 3:45AM this morning complaining that I was up for an early flight. Don’t know why you want to know this; don’t know why I wrote it; but that’s what social people do.

Excellent!