the Constant Observer

White Boy Media Critics, Haute Mainstream Media, and Why We Won't Get Diverse Viewpoints Any TIme Soon

2012-01-26T16:45:00.003-05:00

Last evening, Jay Rosen asked his friends on Facebook (of which I'm one) if he should comment on Shani Hilton's Where Are The Women And Non-White Media Critics? essay, where Jay's name and blog link (along with David Carr, Howard Kurtz, and a few others)appears. The first responses, from males, told Jay that the story was "link bait" and he shouldn't respond. I ventured in to say that Ms. Hilton

Rick Perry Indugles in Political Asshattery--Blames Everyone But Catholics For Taking Prayer Out of Schools

2011-12-08T01:01:00.002-05:00

As someone who still likes to wish people a Merry Christmas, and who, when asked, refers to herself as an "academic Catholic," and has lots of friends across a variety of denominations, not to mention someone who has gay family members and gay friends, I was horrifically offended by the following piece of historically incorrect asshattery trotted out by Rick Perry: Ok, so I guess Rick Perry

Debate: Women Journalists Bullied, Threatened with Violence, for Opinion Columns

2011-11-16T13:50:00.001-05:00

Perhaps if Katie Roiphe were a journalist working online, she would have a better understanding of sexual harassment and wouldn't be asking "what on earth is that?" Because it seems that at the same time Roiphe was having a hissy over the allegations of sexual harassment against Republican candidate Herman Cain, some of here compatriots across the pond were dealing with some serious sexual

Mainstream Media Use Twitter as Broadcast Medium (and so do lots of others)

2011-11-15T13:03:00.001-05:00

The Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) issued an new report yesterday covering how mainstream media outlets make use of Twitter. Not surprisingly, 93 percent of mainstream media outlets surveyed--this included print, network television, radio, and online-- use Twitter as another means of broadcasting their own information. The study surveyed 3,600 tweets from 13 major news

Google Buys Zagat....So what does that mean for Yelp and Foursquare??

2011-09-08T16:36:00.000-05:00

It's a little late in the day to report this--as most of you probably know by now--but Google has purchased Zagat, known for its almost never-wrong restaurant ratings. Here's the announcement from Tim and Nina Zagat with a great nod to the consumer who has helped to make their guide great: It is a testament to the knowledgeable consumers who contribute their opinions that Zagat Survey has

In which Jack Shafer is laid off, freemiums are considered, and a note about this blog

2011-08-28T22:38:00.000-05:00

I don't know who the genius was who thought that giving away high quality written content on the web was a good idea, but I definitely remember when newspapers thought their websites would be cracking great promotion for their printed product. So,when I read Paul Carr's essay--Now Can We All Agree That The “High Quality Web Content” Experiment Has Failed? and a mention of Slate's decision to lay

New York Times Limits Comment Characters from 5,000 to 2,000*

2011-06-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it would limit the number of characters that can be used to write a comment from 5,000 to 2,000. Aron Pilhofer, told The Wrap that: "We've had one of the highest character limits known to humanity for a long time. We've gotten feedback from readers and frequent commenters, as well as internally, that our character limit is too high, that maybe we

Local Newspaper Experiments with Crowdsourcing in News Cafe

2011-06-20T12:15:00.001-05:00

Can a local paper really get the community involved in the process of creating local news? If you ask John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Co, the answer might be "yes." Mr. Paton was the keynote speaker at the 10th International Newsroom Summit held last week in Zurich, Switzerland, where he discussed about the company's "news cafe" experiment in Torrington, CT.... In this short recap of

The Future of Media: Women and Minorities Need Not Apply...

2011-06-16T15:06:00.003-05:00

Some of the most important conversations about where media, marketing, and technology are headed are often conducted behind closed doors, at conferences and panel discussions attended by industry insiders who received invitations or could afford to attend. Rarely, if ever, are the conversations or findings from these events reported or published where anyone might read them. As a result,

Wall St. Journal Reporter Takes Heat for Helping Us Know What They Know

2011-05-23T13:22:00.002-05:00

For years now, tech entrepreneurs have been telling us not to worry about the information we upload to their sites, and advertisers have tried to assure us that they were collecting only that information that's necessary for them. In fact, we've been told that giving them all kinds of information is actually a *good* thing. That for the advertisers, giving us better targeted ads really helps us

Screw Your Copyright Infringing Content Grab! Pay Me!

2010-11-05T13:47:00.001-05:00

It was no surprise when I heard the story that a post by blogger Monica Gaudio had been lifted by a famous cooking magazine and posted on their site. Ms. Gaudio had been given a byline, but was never informed the post had been taken, nor was she paid for the scraped post (it was not re-posted, as there was no link back to Monica's original.) Why should she have been both notified and paid?

Why I'm Quitting Foursquare (you might want to think about it too....)

2010-11-04T17:15:00.001-05:00

Update 11/13/10: Jon Evans @TechCrunch writes similar sentiments in Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let's Stop Pretending This is Fun Um, yeah--because it's not... By the time Foursquare came out, geo-location apps weren't news to me. I'd already heard of BriteKite and Gowalla. Friends (predominantly male) were using both to regularly inform me of their whereabouts. It was all rather

Mayhill Fowler and the pitfalls on the road from unpaid blogger to paid journalist

2010-09-29T15:02:00.003-05:00

The other day, Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the "Bittergate" story announced that she was leaving the Huffington Post Fowler states in her intro: I want to be paid for my time and effort—or at a minimum, to get a little remuneration in return for the money I spend myself in order to do original reportage. I would not expect to be paid for punditry. But can a "blogger" go from rank

The death of RSS might be greatly exaggerated. Here's why....

2010-09-16T16:23:00.002-05:00

bye, bye Bloglines There was quite a bit of discussion this week about the viability of RSS once word got out that the Bloglines reader--once the most popular RSS reader (and most simple to use)--would be shutting down as of October 1. Bloglines isn't the first RSS reader to shut down, and there are still a whole lot of people who use RSS readers, even if the casual or less tech-savvy reader

From 2005 and Present Again.....On Reviving the Constant Observer

2010-09-13T18:30:00.000-05:00

Back in May, I decided to take some time away from blogging to work on other projects. It was a good idea at the time. I had a backlog of writing projects to complete, a workshop series to teach, and a webinar to put together. It was asking way too much to divide my time between the preparation for those three things and blog with some consistency--not to mention manage the day to day tasks

Find me at Poynter.org....(or, so long and thanks for all the cookies...)

2010-05-04T11:51:00.006-05:00

May marks the five-year anniversary of this blog, and I've had some time to think about where this blog is going as much as I have about where I'm going(career-wise.)This blog is now going on extended--and perhaps permanent--hiatus. Part of this decision has to do with the simple fact that, after five years, this blog feels played out. Five years is a long time in blog years, and I've pretty

Will "content" kill "journalism"?

2010-04-19T09:34:00.007-05:00

Ever since the term "content mills" was coined, and ever since there's been much hue, cry and discussion on Demand Media (what some considered the preeminent content mill) and their deal with USAToday's Travel section, I've been wondering: is "content" a form of journalism, or is it just website filler with little or no journalistic value?Or is it really that cheap "content" on a news site

How the study of religion social media...

2010-03-25T07:01:00.003-05:00

This week, the Alumni Association of Smith College is hosting A Century of Women in Type: A Conference for Smith Women in Media. I've been asked to be on a panel on blogging and new media, for which I'm truly honored. But it's got me thinking about my major--Religion and Biblical Literature--and how the academic study of religion relates to a deeper understanding of social media....The academic

A Meditation on the Personal Nature of American Art

2010-02-28T13:09:00.007-05:00

The other day, I met up with Patrice Lamothe, CEO of Pearltrees. It was an interesting meeting, and I mentioned to him that I'd gone to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier that day. Funny thing is, Patrice is from Paris. So, there's something of an irony there, if you think about it....I tend to fall into ironic conversations with people quite often. Guess that could be because I'm

Four aspects that could make AOL's local "white spaces" work

2010-02-21T12:26:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote about how AOL's new "white spaces" for local journalism might not work. There are, however, a couple of ways they might work:1. Proprietary alogrithms. If AOL has a proprietary alogrithm (like Demand Media) that will tweak headlines to hit on the proper keywords. However, on a local level, this will still have to be connected to some sort of geo-located search capability. If

AOL Revisits the Citizen Shovelware concept with Patch.com (and why it won't work)

2010-02-20T11:19:00.005-05:00

Some time back I wrote a scathing post about "citizen shovelware": that's when an "if you build it, they will come" philosophy is applied to the idea of citizen journalism, and some wise corporate dude puts up a site and expects the citizenry to populate it. It appears now that AOL is taking on the idea of citizen shovelware as it plans to expand to "hundreds" of sites, as was reported

Could Google's focus on real-time search screw up finding older news?

2010-02-03T13:08:00.002-05:00

I recently wrote a piece for Poynter.org on Google's new focus on real-time search--which, if you're looking for the most up-to-date news, esp. on an emergency, is probably a good thing. But today, as I looked for articles on the 2008 comments controversy at the Hartford Courant (which had Mayor Eddie Perez standing on the steps of the Courant giving the publisher hell) I found zip, zero, nada...

On Writing, Wanting to be Heard, and Gratitude for Editors

2010-02-01T08:52:00.004-05:00

When we are young, the images we get of the writing life are somewhat peculiar--the image is of the writer who toils in isolation most of the time, who, almost by magic, has an editor and is then transported into the world of publishing. We are so busy studying style and so forth that we aren't taught about the process that got the book from a bunch of typed pages to a bound first edition. And,

Blogging SIIA: Henry Blodget and Info wants to be expensive

2010-01-27T11:19:00.004-05:00

Got to see Henry Blodget keynote at last year's SIIA-IIS. This year, he's moderating a panel with Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media, Cheryl Milone, CEO of Article One Partners, and Jim Fowler, CEO Jigsaw Data Corporation. There's some short intros going on now, with Gaby Darbyshire talking about Gawker Media (IMO: Gawker's got a profit based on paying their reporters very little. And from

SIIA Previews a.m.: More Great New Services & Products!

2010-01-27T10:27:00.004-05:00

Brand Thunder: a provider of customized toolbars to increase brand loyalty and reach. Not a bad concept and I can see a lot of use for it with a number of brands. They've got some great clients already. They're quick with roll-out, so there's little delay in building--and they have a revenue share (the only downside I see is that "fans" may-uninstall the toolbar at some point. but that might

Blogging SIIA-IIS: Some important notes from Ken Doctor's keynote

2010-01-27T09:27:00.004-05:00

Here at Day 2 of the SIIA's Information Industry Summit: there's lots of talk about the Apple Tablet, and what it's going to shake up. There's a video on YouTube about it.Ken Doctor just made a very interesting comment about news: 40% less newsprint, 20% less staff--he doesn't think the downsizing is a good thing. Thinks that what "we don't know what we don't know" and that local/region

Blogging SIIA--More great services at Afternoon Previews

2010-01-26T14:56:00.004-05:00

Previews can be the best part of SIIA--HearPlanet: missed most of this presentation, but it's for mobile, but they have a whole lot of ways to get content out there in real-time, to your iPhone, Android, etc. They provide white label solutions--hmmm....good for small papers??ORLive: leader in online video solutions to medical field. Video production, production support, etc. Allows surgeons to

Blogging SIIA: Notes On Ken Auletta's Keynote about Google

2010-01-26T10:53:00.004-05:00

Before his book, Ken Auletta did a piece for the New Yorker on Google, and I was shocked by it--mostly because Sergy Brin and Larry Page were so dissed by the Washington Establishmet. So, I'm very much enjoying listening to what Auletta has to say....Auletta sees Google as a huge library--and so does the rest of the world (he discovered...)The most important thing about Google, Auletta found in

Blogging SIIA: Previews of New Products Tuesday a.m.

2010-01-26T09:51:00.003-05:00

Last year, I saw some fabulous stuff at the SIIA Previews event--which was separate last year. Nice to see the Previews event into the "big show" this year. I'll be giving short descriptions of these interesting new companies/services:Boardroom Insiders: provides access to C-level execs, helps to provide info on these execs to facilitate connection to these people. Boardroom Insider searches

Intro to SIIA--and notes on Michael Hansen/ Elsevier Health Sciences on Counter-Intuitive Strategies for Growth

2010-01-26T08:52:00.008-05:00

This is my second year attending the SIIA Information Industry Summit--one of the most interesting conferences that I've had the pleasure of attending. It's always an interesting group of people--folks that are shaping what's going on in the world of content production. Now, content production isn't something that crosses people's minds when it comes to publishing--we think more of journalism,

Ken Auletta to keynote 2010 SIIA Information Industry Summit

2010-01-13T17:33:00.007-05:00

Last year I got invited to liveblog the SIIA Information Industry Summit, and have been invited to liveblog the event again this year. I'm really excited to be part of this event again: last year, I learned a great deal about SaaS (software as a service,) the "content creation" business and about guys in white dinner jackets and black ties, who take your coat at the entrance to the conference (

Is "linklove" a dying concept?

2010-01-10T23:41:00.006-05:00

As Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking tools have grown in prominence and become immediate ways to share information, is there any room left for "linklove" between blogs? I'm not so sure anymore...But let's first recap: before the ubiquity of social media tools that facilitate community building and information sharing, linking to one another's blogs, either through blogrolls or by

Transparency in Social Media: Ethical Considerations in Marketing

2010-01-07T12:34:00.009-05:00

Update 2/3/10: Toby Bloomberg and John Cass have completed their survey--see the results here: Where Does "Transparency" Fit in the New Social Media Marketing ModelAs I see more and more consultants, marketers and web design firms offer social media services to their clients, I begin to wonder what, exactly are they offering? Most of their sites don't say exactly the kind of social media

Thoughts on 2010: Good for Journalism, Bad for Marketing .

2009-12-31T13:55:00.004-05:00

As 2010 starts, I am reminded that I'll be starting my fifth year in social media. I started as a professional blogger for Corante (a blog most won't know about these days), and have had some pretty interesting experiences in both the marketing and journalism sectors of what has now become "social media." In 2009, I started to see a whole momentum-shift in social media as some newspapers folded

Dating, The Internet, and the Transformation of Rituals

2009-12-23T23:44:00.004-05:00

A short while ago, David Rogers (one of the coolest guys I know, and co-founder of the BRITE conferences), in a post on his blog, brought my attention to something I'd been thinking about for a very long time: how the Internet has changed things not for the worse, but perhaps for the better....To me, the Internet has had the most profound change on the ways in which we relate to and interact

Catching a CEO with his social media pants down

2009-12-21T14:39:00.005-05:00

When it comes to the world of social media consulting and so forth, I love when I can tell a good "emperor has no clothes" story. I've been sitting on this one for awhile because I didn't want to black-eye this particular CEO. Yet as I see more and more people advocating for outsourcing social media efforts to "virtual assistants," underpaid interns, and the like, I can no longer keep my mouth

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

2009-12-07T17:06:00.002-05:00

I haven't been updating the sidebar to this blog, so I thought it might be best to post where I'll be in the upcoming months...This week, on December 11th, I will be speaking at the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development at Rutgers Business School in Newark, NJ. I'll be speaking on using social media for small businesses. And yes, I'll be talking some rudimentary metrics. I

Small Business Blogs: Good for Goosing Google, Better for Customer Communications

2009-11-14T14:11:00.000-05:00

Good thing I wasn't lighting a match the other day when a guy told me that small business owners (businesses with <100 employees) really don't care to connect with customers through their blogs--because I certainly would have lit my hair on fire with that one! Yes, this particular social media consultant told me that blogging fits in two categories: business blogging and personal blogging.

Why You Shouldn't Hire Someone to Manage Your LinkedIn Profile

2009-11-11T17:10:00.007-05:00

Lately, I've noticed a rash of social media consultants offering to manage the LinkedIn profiles of busy professionals. It's one thing to hire someone to help write your profile out--that's like resume writing or having some good p.r. writing done. But to manage it?? You've *got* to be kidding me.I think the idea comes from the old days of having a secretary. Having been one of those in the

Wall St. Journal Disses Women in its "Future of Journalism" Twitter list

2009-11-05T15:18:00.004-05:00

My good buddy Lisa Williams (founder of Placeblogger.com) found something very interesting today when she checked out @WSJ's Alan Murray's new Twitter list for The Future of Journalism: there are no women on this list.What gives, @WSJ? There are loads of women news innovators, who are creating the future of the news NOW, not just postulating about it. And it's not just Lisa, butAmy Gahran who

Will the FTC now help the newspaper industry get its government bailout

2009-10-12T11:02:00.002-05:00

Last week, the FTC laid down the law when it came to bloggers and others who are not just outright paid to endorse products, but who also receive products to review. There was a lot of hoo-ha about that(with some discussion on how these new regs might impact free speech.) But no one seems to be talking just yet about the upcoming two-day public workshop on the state of journalism in the Internet

When a P.R. Company Gets Social Media Wrong

2009-10-07T12:09:00.003-05:00

A few months back, I ended up on the mailing list of Ragan Communications, a "publisher of corporate communications, public relations, and leadership development newsletters" firm located in Chicago. I didn't get my knickers in a bunch over it, as I'm interested in knowing how the p.r. community is understanding how and what social media is about. And I don't doubt that Ragan Communications,

MySpace: Perhaps the problems have less to do with innovation and technology...

2009-09-21T19:32:00.005-05:00

This morning at OMAA Global, Jonathan Miller, new CEO of the digital media group at NewsCorp stated that it was a lack of innovation that has tripped up MySpace the once-most-popular social networking site on the net:"There's no question that [MySpace] fell behind on the technology front and on the product front," Miller said. "This business is one of continual innovation, and we're very focused

A few comments on coming back to blogging....

2009-09-02T14:14:00.002-05:00

In June, I abruptly stopped blogging--and with no explanation. I didn't hear any particular hue and cry about my not-blogging. I figured that I really didn't have all that many readers, or that people were just giving me my space.Because I really needed the space--to wrap my brain around what I'm really interested, in what my career is, and in what I'm doing with my life. Summer always seems

What will you do if your local newspaper shuts down?

2009-06-05T20:24:00.002-05:00

I first heard about the dire straits of central Connecticut's newspapers when I attended a journalism conference at Central Connecticut State University last November. The story wasn't making the national news, but the consequences--the threatened closing of several central Connecticut newspapers that are the "only games in town"--were potentially devastating. By January, lawmakers met with

On Knowing the Rare Circumstance of Falling in Love

2009-05-30T11:34:00.003-05:00

This a.m., @agahran tweeted a link to a story in the NYTimes by Louise Rafkin on Rafkin's work interviewing couples on how they met. Amy was a bit peeved that Rafkin's assignment didn't include polyamourous couples. Yet poliamory aside, Rafkin's meditation on her work, (as it is more than an essay) and her own troubles with finding love, struck a chord with me on so many levels....I, too, have

Busy, Busy, Busy (and then some)

2009-05-19T20:42:00.005-05:00

From time to time I have to take a blogging hiatus. It usually happens because I'm up to my eyeballs in things and can't seem to dig myself out...and that I need to engage more in the f2f world....Well, it's one of those times again. I seem to be quite busy with a number of projects, including some teaching about social media--from which I've learned that I absolutely love teaching about social

SIIA Afternoon Keynote: Brewster Kahle on Universal access to knowledge

2009-05-04T16:30:00.005-05:00

This afternoon at the SIIA NetGain Convergence of Content and Technology conference, Brewster Kahle, the Founder & Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive is speaking. I am most interested in hearing what Kahle has to say, esp. with regard to the work that's done at Placeblogger, and with numbers of sites that simply vanished when web hosting services like Geocities have been shut down. I

It takes more than a village to protect kids online

2009-04-22T11:38:00.002-05:00

Every now and then I get to talk with college-age students about social media and all the stuff going with privacy, identity, and security on the Internet (most recently at Smith College, my Alma Mater.) More often than not, I find that they really don't know too much about how to protect themselves from fraud, let alone how to construct online identities that won't hurt their job chances. Yet,

Never Ask a Teen-Ager How To Use Twitter

2009-04-08T17:10:00.002-05:00

Update 6/1/09 A new study from Pace University and the Participatory Marketing Project shows that only 22 percent of Gen Y (The Millenials) are using Twitter The blurb on the study goes on to say that Gen Y has to be convinced of the value of Twitter Um, if you have to convince them so hard, then maybe it's a medium that they don't need right now--they may need it as they get older and can't

Blockbuster's Woes are Local DVD Rental's Potential Gain

2009-04-07T09:00:00.002-05:00

Update 3/8/10 Sadly, I must report that Pick Your Flick will be closing next weekend. They started an inventory sell-off this past weekend, and will close at the end of business next Sunday. They were in operation for 3 1/2 years--not bad for a small store in an industry on life-support. Along with Pick Your Flick, Easthampton's other video store, Movie Gallery, is also closing. This leaves

The death of User Generated Content may be greatly exaggerated

2009-04-07T08:08:00.005-05:00

I wonder sometimes about Sarah Lacey. On TechCrunch, she goes into great detail about how "user generated content" doesn't make money, and how its promise to help talented people hasn't come to fruition....Oh, really? Lacey's analysis doesn't make sense in that its view of UGC comes through a lens filtered by the old-school media's judgment of value based on currently failing business models.

Small is Beautiful: PodCamp Western Mass

2009-04-01T17:18:00.005-05:00

Who said it couldn't happen in Western Mass?? Last Saturday (3/28), Morriss Partee, Jacklyn Stevenson Archer, yours truly, and a group of about 36-or-so cool folk pulled together and made the first PodCamp Western Mass happen at Open Square in Holyoke, MA. And it was a great success! Check the PCWM Flickr stream to see all the happy PodCampers....If there's one thing I kept hearing from folks

Social Media as the Virtual Ten-Foot Pole

2009-03-27T13:34:00.002-05:00

Lots of folks on Twitter this morning seemed to be shocked by this story in the New York Times informing us that not everyone is who they say they are on Twitter--esp. high profile celebrities....Well, duh!I've known for a very long time that many company blogs, and celebrity blogs, and micro-blogs, were being ghost-written. I've also known for a long time that many "blog" aren't being kept by

Senator Proposes Newspapers Re-Structure, Become Non-Profits

2009-03-25T22:24:00.004-05:00

Apparently, U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin(D-Maryland) has proposed something called the "Newspaper Revitalization Act"....According to a post on the Editor's Weblog, under the Newspaper Revitalization Act, newspapers would be organizations eligible for 501(c)(3) status, the same status public radio and television have now, and could adopt the Low Profit Limited Liability Company business model (

Ada Lovelace Day--and Women In Hyperlocal Journalism

2009-03-24T11:12:00.007-05:00

This a.m. I got a reminder from some of my U.K. twitter folks that today is Ada Lovelace Day: a day of international blogging established to draw attention to the achievements of women in techology. Technology, however, is defined rather broadly to include innovators, entrepreurs and tech journalists. I'd like to take this one step further to acknowedge the women who create hyperlocal

How Big Corporate Newspapers Fail Community (and a little about why)

2009-03-03T22:52:00.004-05:00

I've been sitting on this post a couple of days because I wasn't quite sure how to start it--but tonight, I read Mike Masnick's TechDirt post commenting on Howard Owens' defense of GateHouse's suit against NYTimes Co. (the post has been removed.) Mike contends that if the only thing of value a newspaper is providing its community is headlines and ledes that are easily stolen by a competitor,

A few late words on SocComm09

2009-02-16T12:42:00.006-05:00

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Jeff Pulver's social media summit, SocComm '09....here's what I took away from it....Jeff really is, as Chris Brogan said, a true thought leader. And it's not just because of what Jeff's already done, it's how he thinks about things that may happen in the future. He's one of those guys I've wanted to spend some time around for awhile (and one of the

On the Twitter Team for SocComm09

2009-02-09T23:49:00.002-05:00

I'm in New York again (my favorite city in the whole world)and this time to be part of the "Twitter Team" for Jeff Pulver's SocComm09.Along with finally getting to meet Jeff (another one of those guys I've known off and on for a couple of years and through other folks and a myriad of conversations) I'm very interested in hearing Fred Wilson, as well as Shelley Palmer. Can't wait to catch up with

Five Steps for Keeping Your Twitter Stream Spam Free

2009-02-05T11:13:00.006-05:00

It was bad enough that some of us have noticed a rise in "Twitter zombies"--now, thanks to a new commercial tool (tweettornado.com) you may have to block more than you follow. Dancho Danchev in ZDNet describes this pesky pollution device as having the potential to "empower(ing) phishers, spammers, malware authors and everyone in between with the ability to generate bogus Twitter accounts and

Scoopt shuts down, Pajamas Media quits blogs

2009-02-03T12:09:00.003-05:00

Two upheavals in the citizen-generated media world: Scoopt, which sold "amateur" pics to news agencies is shutting down and right-wing blog network Pajamas Media is shuttering its blogging arm in favor of Pajamas TV (a talking-head video franchise)Scoopt was the first agency to sell citizen generated photo-journalism. Scoopt gave owners of sold photos 40% of what they made and held a 12-month

The Newspaper Industry Can't Say They Weren't Warned...

2009-01-30T10:20:00.003-05:00

Take a look at this news report on "electronic newspapers" from 1981 (via @johncabell)I was stunned by the editor of the S.F. Examiner who said that it was just an experiment and they didn't plan to make any money from it. Well, maybe not in 1981, but the fact that 500 of the 2,000 people in the Bay Area with computers subscribed to the "electronic" version should have been a bit of a clue that

Spitting incident prompts Arrington "time off" from TechCrunch

2009-01-28T12:04:00.005-05:00

Ok...the stuff we worried about a couple of years ago with the Kathy Sierra incident has crossed over into Real Life: Mike Arrington--good guy to some, really bad guy to others in the tech media space--has decided to take some time off from TechCrunch after being spat on: Yesterday I was battling the flu, jetlag and little sleep, and had been battered for three days straight with product pitches

Social Media & Monetizing UGC panel at #SIIA

2009-01-28T10:55:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting panel,w ith Joe Robinson, CEO of A Small World; John Blossom, President of Shore Communications; Chuck Schilling, Research Dir Nielsen Online; Robert Barber, CEO Environmental Data Resources; and Shawn, Gold, Chairman of SocialApproach. Joe Robinson says that he's able to monetize the sharing of content. Interesting. But how? That's the thing: will anyone be able to *

Henry Blodget and "The Rise of Online Journalism'" #SIIA

2009-01-28T08:49:00.002-05:00

I'm here for the second day of the SIIA Summit--with Henry Blodget speaking about online journalism....and considering how much time I spend in that space in many ways, this should be interesting...Henry sez: online journalism isn't "lifecasting"--it's also not shovelling print content online. "It's fabulous to read the NYT online...but it's not the real form of what online journalism will look

Some notes on the late afternoon at the SIIA Summit

2009-01-27T14:27:00.009-05:00

Kristian Hammond's presentation on "Frictionless Information" was about how to keep Google from eating your lunch. The best thing about this presentation is that it will be available online. I can't begin to transcribe or paraphrase it--don't know if it's that I need some coffee or there's just TMI...On the "What's the Value of Value-Add?" panel, a comment's made about the Blogger's table (

Some interesting comments from SIIA panel on licensing digital info

2009-01-27T13:37:00.007-05:00

There is a perception that young people are the only ones that don't understand copyright--but that's not exclusive to young people. Lots of bloggers, and people who are trying to collaborate in corporate settings, and a whole host of others don't understand the copyright as well as other rights and licensing of content. "Just because you Google something doesn't mean you can use it in a

Some Observations from the Sink or Swim panel #SIIA

2009-01-27T09:58:00.005-05:00

There's much discussion here about writing for the Web being different from writing for print. This is true, but there's still no answer on how to monetize...Michael Wolff talked about creating a site where one doesn't pay for content. IMO, this thinking seems to distort why we--I'm thinking of bloggers here--link to one another. There's definitely a disconnect between how individuals link to

Liveblogging from the Software & Information Industry Association Summit--Keynote #SIIA

2009-01-27T09:03:00.010-05:00

Invited to attend the Software & Info Industry Summit as a blogger, feel like I have Arrived. Cipriani, the meeting place for the the event, is gorgeous. Someone even checked my coat for me. There's something to attending an event like this--a sense of being part of something important. There's a sense of being a mover and shaker, not just someone who's toiling away somewhere in the middle of

NYTCo. agrees to no longer aggregate Gatehouse RSS feeds.

2009-01-26T19:32:00.006-05:00

Update 3/2/09: Howard Owens (who used to be with GateHouse) explains the reasons for the suit. A very important read.Update Zach Seward's wrap-up q&a on GH v. NYTCo. on NeimanLab blogOne of the things I predicted in the Gatehouse v. NYTCo. case was that NYTCo. would have to stop aggregating Gatehouse's RSS feeds. This is indeed one of the provisionsin the Agreement reached with Gatehouse 2)

Gatehouse and NYTCo. Reach Settlement in Aggregation Dispute

2009-01-26T09:24:00.004-05:00

Update 1/28/09: Dan Kennedy has the full text of a memo from Rick Daniels, President of GateHouse Media New England explaining to GH employees about the settlement...Just in from @NeimanLab on Twitter: GateHouse v. New York Times Co. has been settled, court officials say. (ZMS) (settlement reached over the weekend--see below) andSettlement in GH v. NYT Co. was encouraged by Dan Kennedy &

What Journalists Get about Twitter, Social Media "Gurus" (and others) Don't

2009-01-21T16:55:00.009-05:00

Over the weekend, I blurted out a four-tweet kvetch about journalists and social media types that went something like this: Journalists handle twitter far better than many marketers and p.r. people. And *far* better than most social media people. amazing!And: freelance writers handle twitter pretty well too. not surprised, really.. . .Then: It was when the baby diape(r) company started to

Today We Begin a New Era. . .

2009-01-20T11:26:00.007-05:00

Watch CBS Videos OnlineAs I sit watching the Inauguration of Barak Obama,can't help but to think how much our country has changed in 48 years--48 years ago John Fitzgerald Kennedy became our first Roman Catholic President....My Mother always reminded me of JFK's Inauguration. I happen to have been born during that historic inauguration, and I can't help but to think what that inauguration mean

Gatehouse sues NYTCo (Boston.com) over aggregation: But do they have a point?

2008-12-23T11:49:00.006-05:00

Things have been buzzing over here about the news that Gatehouse has sued NYTCo, the parent company of Boston.com, for aggregating headlines its headlines on Boston.com's new hyperlocal sites....Now, in hyperlocal-land, getting aggregated is a good thing--(theoretically)it's supposed to drive traffic to the smaller, lower ranked site. But is that always the case--and is it the case in the Boston

Taking the "Social" out of Social Networking

2008-11-17T10:29:00.010-05:00

Over a period of a couple of months, as the word has been spreading about how to market oneself or one's company through various forms of social media and social networking, I've noticed a few disturbing and rather anti-social networking trends. IMO, these spam-handed techniques seem to have evolved out of ham-handed f2f networking practices.I started to notice the changes when a flurry of people

Twitter: potential terrorist tool, mainstream media marvel, or still just web wankers wasting time

2008-10-27T08:52:00.013-05:00

For some reason, mainstream media's got some kind of cyber-woodie on for Twitter with several stories appearing in the mainstream in the last two days. This got me wondering why there was so much ado about Twitter and if our mainstream media outlets just might be jumping on a new Twitter hype bandwagon. But why?It started innocuously enough with this crazy little article in the The Wall Street

A Few Late Words About BlogWorld Expo

2008-10-22T13:21:00.002-05:00

Blogging conferences used to be a big thing for me. Over the years, as I've made connections with people I only see at conferences, I have less time (or is it less desire?) to blog about the conferences themselves. Lots of times I don't even mention where I've been and I've left that section of my sidebar rather untended. One of the events I attended in September was BlogWorld Expo in Las

Can Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook Replace the Humble Blog?

2008-10-21T07:40:00.004-05:00

Wired used to be cool--at one time it interviewed guys like Linus Torvalds. But today, it kinda sunk to a new level of link-baiting with Paul Boutin's declaration that blogging is over and how everyone who's anybody will be sharing bits and pieces of oneself all over a variety of social networking sites....(yes, I'm going for the link-bait...)Paul goes on a bit about how new voices just can't

Local Band Releases New Album for Free

2008-10-10T15:14:00.002-05:00

Perusing the local scene thru my Facebook account, I found this interesting tidbit: local band The Figments have released their new album "Twelve Belles" for free. The Figments are a bit on the down-tempo side for my taste (what can I say, I grew up too close to NYC where everything's a bit hyper), but I know there's a whole bunch of people who will enjoy their music...You can download it here

Magnify.net Curates "How To" Videos

2008-10-10T15:07:00.002-05:00

Just found this great announcement from Steve Rosenbaum at Magnify.net: they're going to start curating "How to" videos. Check out Steve's announcement here:Steve's already spotted a trend in "how to" videos--and with the economic downturn, I'm sure more people will be entering the realm of DIY (do-it-yourself.) Magnify's made some strategic partnerships with some of the biggest repositories

Web 2.0: It was all great fun till Johnny lost his V.C. funding

2008-10-10T13:28:00.004-05:00

So, the folks at Sequoia Capitol, one of the leading VC firms in the Silicon Valley, put together this absolutely fabulous presentation that basically tells us why there ain't gonna be a whole lot of cash for start-ups any time soon....(thanx Eric Eldon @ VentureBeat)Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturnView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

Start-up death could foster hope for innovation in hyperlocal media

2008-09-28T14:26:00.013-05:00

I'm sure that Jason Calacanis has certainly spooked a lot of start-up folks with his latest prediction (reprinted on Silicon Alley Insider) that 50-80% of start-ups will fail. Yet whenever I see this sort of thing, I have to wonder if it's something of a Chicken-Little prognostication, or just bad news for a lot of iterative app and widget builders...but not for online communities and hyperlocal

I just flew in from BlogWorld Expo and boy! are my arms tired! ;-)

2008-09-23T12:01:00.003-05:00

But seriously folks....I did indeed just get back from BlogWorld Expo which was held in Las Vegas this past weekend. I'll have more to say about that in another post, but the "just flew in" thing is kind of how I feel about coming back to blogging after taking most of the summer and part of September away from the medium.Part of that distancing was a need to mentally re-group--to figure out what

Futurist Rogers leaves NYT, CNN gets Twitterized, CNBC links up with LinkedIn

2008-09-05T10:39:00.006-05:00

Two years ago, new media guru Michael Rogers joined the NYTimes Company as its "Futurist in Residence." It was supposed to be a one-year appointment--and turned into two. This a.m., Jeff Bercovici in Conde Nast Portfolio reports that Rogers is now leaving NYTCo to go back to consultingWhat did Rogers find out about the newspaper biz in the two years he was at NYTCo? Well, he's pretty sanguine

My Twitter Stream is NOT the Place for Your Personal Brand Marketing Message

2008-09-01T09:09:00.006-05:00

Lately, I've had some people I've never met add me to their lists of people they're following on Twitter. Some of those "people" aren't really people at all, but are commercial ventures, start-ups mostly. Like @ignighter which is a group-to-group dating service that's come out of TechStars, and probably started following me because of People's Software or @ideablob which is a really cool "

Businessweek's Soc. Media Strategy--What's in it for the community?

2008-08-18T08:42:00.016-05:00

Could social networks run by media companies be nothing more than ways of herding all of us into little niches so we can receive targeted marketing? That's the question I asked myself this a.m. after reading in the NYT about BusinessWeek's new hyper-niched social media strategy. The brief summary in the Times: The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as broad as the

Taking a Breather to Find Something Lost

2008-07-07T16:00:00.012-05:00

I have been doing a lot of thinking....and the last four days I spent in Lake Placid has helped me get my head around a few things, including what I'm doing with various projects, including what I'm doing (or not) with this blog....Recently, Heather Brandon of Urban Compass announced an hiatus, as did David Eisenthal at the Eisenthal Report in May, when he was elected to a post as selectman in

Things to do on your summer vacation...WOM, Widgets and Writing Notes

2008-07-07T13:36:00.009-05:00

So, you've got some time to spare this summer? A few of my friends are doing some cool stuff you might want to check out:Word-of-Mouth marketing guru Andy Sernovitz will be hosting a small-group w-o-m crash course in Chicago on July 30th. Andy'd also like me to let you know they're offering a $250.00 discount (use the code "welovebeelinelabs" when registering.) RSS widget-building just got

The Death of Blog Comments and the Rise of the Commentosphere (??)

2008-07-01T16:41:00.004-05:00

Something strange has been happening in the blogosphere--lots of people have noticed that blog comments aren't as plentiful as they used to be. This lead Robert Scoble to declare blog comments dead and Duncan Riley to say "no they're not, they're just someplace else"....like on Disqus, FriendFeed, etc...This is something a Aldon Hynes and I recently discussed both online and off--we'd noticed

Hearst Digital Media's Daily Green gets an "F" in LinkLove

2008-06-30T12:10:00.009-05:00

You know how Big Media is constantly harping on the blogosphere about how bloggers always "steal" information, when the fact of the matter is that by linking we send information *back* to the original source? Well, this afternoon, I was directed by the Yahoo front page to this post on The Daily Green a new Hearst Digital Media blog. And guess what? The first paragraph mentions a Los Angeles

Friday Vintage Video: Bruce Lee Naked!

2008-06-27T15:15:00.002-05:00

Well...kind of....in possibly one of the best fight scenes ever in a film--which happens to be 1973's Enter the Dragon--which will be shown at MassMoCA tomorrow in a special program with music by Karsh Kale. But it's great just as is!

Looking to Google to Help Us Define Obscenity

2008-06-24T09:11:00.003-05:00

Back in 18th century New England, what was considered "obscene" was determined often by the leader of the local community church. Beginning in New York City in the 19th century, the Courts were put in charge of defining obscenity for us. Courts had to consider a mish-mash of local customs, notions of free speech and criminal libel, access to appropriate medical information on sex, where and

Don't Scoop Before We Tell You To: When Social Networking and MSM Worlds Collide

2008-06-23T08:58:00.011-05:00

When it comes to "the news," getting a scoop used to be a good thing. Now, not so much. But what can the mainstream do about it when scoops leak out through social media--get you fired or delete your posts perhaps. The New York Times reports on how a "junior employee" at Internet Broadcasting Services updated Tim Russert's Wikipedia entry before the story of Russert's death was revealed by NBC

Friday Vintage Video: More Christopher Lee

2008-06-20T13:33:00.002-05:00

Did you know that Christopher Lee reprised many of the great roles of Boris Karloff--only cheezier? Here's the preview for "The Face of Fu Manchu":Lee played Fu Manchu in a series of really bad Fu Manchu movies. Karloff was spared repeated Fu Manchu'ing, but Lee was spared the role of Mr. Wong, Detective. Lee also played Frankenstein (in a less cheezy '57 production--you can see Lee in this

Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Developers

2008-06-17T12:19:00.006-05:00

Note: this post first appeared last friday in Poynter.org's E-Media Tidbits column. Much thanks to Amy Gahran for the great editing job!Getting back from the New Pamphleteers conference, I considered how many news organizations sites that, one way or another, are doing some sort of community building. This can mean anything from using Topix Forums to implementing a custom-built community tool (

Good night, Online Journalism Review...Thank you, Robert Niles...

2008-06-16T17:39:00.004-05:00

Sad news from Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review: after 10 years, USC Annenberg School of Communications is suspending publication of Online Journalism Review...This does mean that Niles is leaving USC, but he's not leaving online. He's started a new site, SensibleTalk.com--and I wish him the best of luck in this new endeavor :-)I had a brief history with OJR, where I wrote a couple of

Social Networking's Tipping Point and the Sub-Cultures of MySpace and Facebook

2008-06-14T10:03:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, a friend told me about an NPR report on how MySpace is doing a re-design to try to compete with Facebook. Darned if I can find that NPR story today, but I was able to find something about this in Businessweek. As we were talking about this, I brought up how I think that, no matter what it's re-design, that MySpace couldn't gather the Facebook business crowd due to the nature of the

Friday vintage video: Christopher Lee...

2008-06-13T14:13:00.005-05:00

..."as the man who makes a living from striptease clip-joints!" wow!I was looking up something on beatniks for a post on my personal blog, and I came across this trailer from the movie "Wild for Kicks" which also went under the title of "Beat Girl" in the U.S. It was pretty common for films to have one title in the U.K. and another in the U.S. (as it was for exploitation filmmakers to re-title

JTM Minneapolis: New Resarch, Burning Out, Bouncing Back, and Moving Forward

2008-06-12T10:05:00.004-05:00

Last week I attended the latest Journalism that Matters event, which was held at the utterly fascinating McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota (which was identified by: "oh, the one that looks like a Klingon space ship.") Klingon space ship or not, the event was quite different than other conferences, or even unconferences that I've attended. Some unconferences tend to be a bit

When Blogging Leads to Writer's Block (and what that problem really might be about...)

2008-06-02T16:48:00.003-05:00

Lately, my blogging's been off. Way off. And as I've been struggling with what might be called "Blogger's Block" I asked my life coach about it. "You're totally out of oxygen," she said, "There's nothing nourishing you. No wonder you're not able to create anything."Yep, I can't even say I'm on half-steam. I kind of feel like I'm on no-steam. Although there's obviously *some* energy there.