Topic: New media

I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought Barnes and Noble was largely responsible for the ongoing and impending collapse of the publishing industry, and that’s just the sort of thing that I couldn’t leave a lone without a little bit of further pondering.

The assertion is that Barnes and Nobel, and Borders particularly as they competed for near total domination of the local-book retail market, forced a consolidation of the publishing industry at the very moment when the worst possible thing for publishing was consolidation.

Consolidation allows an operation to make a bunch of money quickly. The mechanics of this are pretty simple, after all. When yo consolidate you can cut all sorts of mundane expenses, from the physical costs of maintaining parallel operations, to hard costs like printing and shipping costs that can benefit from collective organization.

Amazon had a role in the consolidation of sale of books, certainly, but Amazon has always been a distribution and data company, primarily. Their strategy is to find a way to turn a profit on the sale of goods, any goods: they do this by having a complete inventory of everything and levering a lot of data concerning buying habits and browsing habits to make sure people who are shopping find something to buy.

Where Amazon’s limiting factor is connecting people who want to buy things (books) with books they might like to buy, the “traditional” book sellers, are limited by the amount of shelf space they can use to display and promote books. So they edged all of the little booksellers out of business by having huge stores and coffee shops and so forth, and then faced with too many books and not enough shelf space, they used their muscle to push the publishing industry toward increased consolidation and a “blockbuster” business model.

Blockbusters are how the movie industry works. Production companies make a bunch of movies, on the premise that if one or two turn a huge profit, they can afford to make a number of movies that flop or that just break-even. Hence the great power of reliable successes: another John Grisham novel, Return of the Mummy King VI, etc., the “copy-cat” phenomena and the erosion of the independent movie production business.

Book sellers were culpable as well--consolidation is attractive in what are essentially commodity businesses--and selling easily produced paper-based volumes is a commodity business. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the undeniable market success of Barnes and Nobel is not, given what I can tell from where I’m sitting, a marker of success of the publishing industry as a whole.

And you know, when you’re a book seller, throwing the publishing industry onto the tracks before an oncoming train, to achieve some mildly impressive profits for a decade seems… not incredibly bright. And not the kind of thing that I’m interested in supporting or putting my faith in.

It strikes me that this “consolidation meme” is a common feature of unsustainable and inauthentic economy, and it extends beyond book retail into other failed and failing sectors of the ecomony.

• Banks. Obvious here. The big banks lost track of the micro economics that make the macro economics go, and we got things like sub-prime morgages, because while they make sense from the consolidated-bank perspective they don’t make sense to people. Like, the John Grisham-esque Legal/Drama/Thriller book makes a lot of sense to the booksellers and the publishers, but most people can only really read so many of them before loosing interest.
• Software. Microsoft’s production of windows makes a lot of sense if you’re a big company, but if you use computers in a specialized way, Windows is like an illfitting suit from Target. It works, but it’s uncomfortable and rough around the edges. There is general consensus that “The Microsoft Way” isn’t the best technological solution to the various problem, even among people who use it regularly (developer tools might require a slightly more complex investigation).
• Your Example Here. Leave a note in the comments.

Thoughts?

So I went to this “Podcamp” in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of getting together with geeks outside of the Internet (in real life!) to talk about the technology, communities, and practices (let alone skills and ticks). Indeed meeting people in the real world, is often a great way to advance and promote whatever it is you’re doing on the Internet, but beyond I often find the experience of having “really geeky” conversations with people in real life to be rather refreshing. So much of the geeky things we (I?) do are pretty solitary tasks, and it’s fun to have space and time with other people who get it.

On this premise I went to this podcamp thing. I went to a BarCamp last year that I enjoyed a great deal but I was somewhat intimidated by the flock of staff members from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ok, so there were only two. or three. In a small room. Oh, and a guy who signed the Agile Manifesto. Right.) And while it was great, and I learned a ton of stuff… I’m a writer, and an a critic, and not exactly a programmer, and while I write about programmers and technology a lot I think it might be useful--sometimes--to have separate conversations.

Right? That sounds reasonable.

So here’s the thing about Podcamp. Well the things:

• New media isn’t anymore. Sure its still a useful distinction given that the “old media” (e.g. book publishing, magazines, newspapers, network television, and radio) are still around. Indeed they remain an incredibly relevant component of the “media ecosystem” both globally but also online. Having said that “new media” like social media, podcasts, and the like have been around for 4-5 years at this point, and it’s mostly mainstream now: old media like NPR consistently tops the iTunes podcast charts, CNN is on twitter. and so forth. And lets not even get started about blogging.

• On the frontier of any new media, anyone who is stubborn enough and the first person to stake out a claim to a niche has a pretty good chance of finding success. Four years later or more, success is something that’s much more difficult to parse or assure.

• The Search engine marketing *thing*, hasn’t, as I would have hoped, died in a fiery and epic death. This shit is all over the place, and everyone seems to be talking about pay-per-click advertising and not the fact that what really matters is word-of-mouth. I’m so incredibly frustrated by all the crap that gets generated both in sport of “SEO” and in service of it as well.

  I can tell when you write articles that are designed to get voted up on reddit and digg, and I throw up in my mouth a little when I see them.

  I got through a day of that, and I couldn’t cope with any more.

• Everyone was talking about how to promote a venture, and how to do marketing in “this brave new world we’re in,” but no one was really talking about how to develop and make something online that works. The marketing thing takes works and there are a couple of non-obvious aspects of the marketing effort, but it’s not rocket science. Sometimes, figuring out what is likely to work online and how to present things in an effective way is by far the largest challenge.

• I’m not sure that hybrid-un/conferences work. And I’m pretty sure that the space didn’t work. Unconferneces are great: they let you get what you want out of a meeting, like the Internet they help deconstruct the boundaries between presenter and audience. Here’s what didn’t work for me with the format at this podcamp:

• The talks were all in these rooms, and the door was at the front of the room. So unless you sat by the door, you had to walk between the speaker to get in and out of the room in the middle of the talk. Which you’re supposed to be able to do. Awkward.

• The opening session was entirely self-congratulatory, and a general waste of time. Better, I think to have let presenters in the morning sessions talk for a few seconds about their session. There weren’t that many sessions.

• I’m not wed to the idea that people have to determine the programing on the spot in the morning of a camp, and sometimes preparation is a good thing, but if you’re going to have multiple parallel “tracks” there should be some sort of thematic unity for a given track, and some organization around that. Randomized conference schedules don’t provide attendees value.

• In an effort to provide hyper-accessible content for people, there were a number of topics that I’d consider to be “hot” like, free network services, content curration, microformats and semantic web stuff, the real time web, and so on and so forth. Instead there was a lot of “get a facebook account and sign up for google analytics.”

  So yeah. I hear there’s a BarCamp in philly in november. We’ll see how I’m faring, but it might be cool to talk with people about Sygn at that.

I posted a link to an article about the professionalization of blogging in an earlier link dump post, that I’ve been thinking about rather a lot in recent days, and I wanted to reflect on this.

The argument of the article, which I think is pretty much spot on, discusses how contemporary blogging has become this thing that that isn’t just the sort of thing that “nobodies” can throw up a blog with WordPress and become an Internet sensation in fairly short order. Now setting aside the fact that this might never have been true in the first place, I think there’s some serious merit to this argument: blogs have gone mainstream, lots of people read blogs, and the people who have the resources to write blogs tend to be people groups of people who have a lot of resources, and most of the popular/successful blogs these days require a lot of resources and sustained energies.

This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I think it forces us to rethink what it means to be a blogger writer “internet content producer” both in the current moment and looking to the future.

There are a number of different factors contributing to this larger moment. Some of the more prevalent ones are:

• There are more blogs now today than there used to be, this means both that the “cost of entry” is higher than it was five years ago or even a year ago. This means new blogs will:
  • Need to focus on more unique subject areas, this is the “long tail” or “embrace your niche” approach. Rather than be the most popular blogger on Technoratti (do people still care about technoratti?) be the most popular blogger in the homemade breakfast cereal niche.
  • Blogging can’t be the casual thing that it was in the beginning, In the early days people started blogs and posted occasionally and it was just this novel little thing, and they were able to be successful as bloggers. Now, blogging is something that one really has to dedicate an embarrassing amount of energy to to be successful.
• The “Blog” as a literary genre, or media forum has become much more cemented, so that rather than be this experimental form that really only describes a website that updates regularly in a serialized format, there are now a whole host of expectations regarding the forum.
  • Blogs that reject the primacy of these forms will tend to be more successful, in that readers will tend to find them more innovative. Forum and approach, as much as a subject area, is one way that small independent content producers will be able to differentiate themselves from “big media blogs.”
  • Blogs can be projects onto themselves. We’ve seen a convention where every site uses a blog as a way of providing more up-to-date content, but independent bloggers are able to create independent blogs which accent other projects, but are nonetheless independent and self contained texts.
• Independent bloggers might not be able start up and field vast readerships on their own any more, but may be able to define their success on their own terms. Old media business models, that rely on advertising revenue and large readership numbers might not be the most stable anyway, and independent bloggers may be able to contemplate success on their own terms. Possible “new media” definitions of success include:
• Using a blog to support and promote a consulting or services based business, by presenting general information to help justify your expertise in a given area. Think RedMonk, Merlin Mann, and in some ways, me.
• Using a blog (and its moderate audience) to support some sort of “rockstar” business model, where you sell something (tickets to shows, dead-tree books, tshirts, etc.) that people mostly want because they know you from something which doesn’t make you much money (ie. record sales, blogging.)

There’s more. And I think that I might be talking about this kind of thing at PodCamp 3 Philly. I’d love to see you there.

“I’m giving up blogging because twitter has more energy and satisfies my online media needs these days.” I here yet another person say, as they give up the blog that they’ve been working on sporadically for the last 4 or five years for a twitter account.

I’m certainly not giving up blogging any time soon, but I hear people say these things. Not always so explicitly, and less often now that twitter has become more established, and less of a novelty. Nevertheless I think its high time to take a step back and take an account of “the state of blogging.”

While I think we need to consider the impact of twitter on the current state of blogging, I think the past five years and maybe the past seven or eight years (most of which have been without twitter) have had an even larger impact on the forum.

I’m not sure, exactly, what the state of things are, but the following are the questions I’m asking myself.

• Are blogs simply the default way of publishing serialized/periodical content and updates to websites?
• Blogging, at least in my mind, grew out of online-journal communities, and while there’s a lot of division between “bloggers” and “journalers” there’s a lot of connection. Blogs can be self-referential, and first-person, and they can drift between multiple threads of the author(s) life. What’s the state of blogging/journaling?
• Are blogs things that people grow, develop, and build over a long time, or are blogs commodities that serve a specific purpose attached to some other purpose. In other words, do people say, I want to create a blog, and they have a blog which meanders and continues for years, or have blogs become something that people start on a whim in response to communities or current events, and then discard when the mood passes?
• Do people read blogs? I have a good excuse for being more than a thousand post behind on my feed reader (moving across the country, starting a new job) but I’m pretty sure that blog reading isn’t exactly flourishing. There are some really well read blogs, of course, but I don’t know if people are really reading.

My answers, if not obvious are: yes, strained and under-appreciated, more commodity and ephemeral than they used to be as a result of software development, and readership hasn’t grown with the growth of the web.

And then we introduce twitter.

I’ve always seen twitter as an evolution of the “chat room” of “IRC” and phenomena like that, rather than an evolution of the blog, though it makes sense to think about twitter and related formats as being “microbiology.” At the same time, I think microblogging becomes a viable format because it makes it “OK” for folks to post lots of little ephemeral thoughts, which is hard in conventional blogging, both in terms of time/energy, but also in terms of what the software and social convention will allow.

In order for a blog post--just one--to be “successful,” in today’s world, it needs to be clever and well written, and it needs to hang around for long enough for people to notice it. It might also need to provide a useful analysis in combination with some useful information.

In order for a post to twitter to be successful, it needs to be and timely (so that people see it), it probably needs to include some sort of link, and other people need to “Retweet” it a lot (which has got to be the most annoying thing in the short history of the medium).

I don’t think the “short form” is going to kill the long form, or that that has even begun to happen, but might twitter kill off some of the cruft that that’s built up around commodity blogging? Does twitter reintegrate the journal-form with the more-objective form?

Maybe. We’ll see in a little while.

When I started doing this website thing on the eve of the millennium, the burgening buzzword of the time was “web standards.” All of us in the know were working on learning and then writing to web standards like HTML 4.0 and eventually XHTML 1.0 along with CSS 1 and 2. And we were all hankering for browsers that implemented these standards in a consistent way.

Really all we wanted was for our web pages to look the same no matter who was viewing the page.

This pretty much never happened. Web browsers are pretty good these days, or they at least--in many ways--don’t suck as much as they used to, but they’re all a bit quirky and they all render things a bit differently from each other. And on top of that they’ve got poor architectures, so as programs they’re really bloated, and prone to crashing and the like. I’ve written before about being “against” websites, webapps, and the like and I think my disdain for the “web” grows out of the plan and simple fact that:

the web browser is broken, beyond repair.

So where does this put the cause of web standards in web design? Thoughts and questions:

Do we write to standards which aren’t going to get adopted usefully? Is ad hearing to standards a productive use of time?

Do we write to clients (specific browser implementations) that are broken, but at least assure that content looks “right?”

When the previous goals two goals aren’t compatible which wins?

Will HTML 5 and CSS 4 fix these problems, or is it another moving target that browsers won’t adopt for another 10 years, and even then only haphazardly?

Are there other methods of networked content delivery that bypass the browser that might succeed while the browser space (and the content delivered therein) continues to flounder? I’m thinking object/document databases with structured bidirectional, and limited hierarchy (in the system, objects might have internal hierarchy)?

Is the goal/standard of pixel-perfect layout rendering something which the browser is incapable of providing? Might it be the case that CSS is simply too capable of addressing problems which are outside of the ideal scope for defining a consistent style for a page: Let me run with this idea for a moment:

Maybe the problem with XHTML and CSS isn’t that it’s implemented poorly, but rather that we’re trying to use CSS classes and IDs and div tags in an attempt to make pixel-perfect renderings of pages, which is really beyond CSS’s “mission.” What would web standards and the state of the browser look like, if you dropped CSS IDs (eg. #id-name{ }) and made single instance classes (eg. .class-name{}) verboten? Aside from crashing and burning and completely killing off browser-based applications?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.

Several notes to with regards to information fast that I’m undertaking. And because this is the internet and this is my blog… Well here goes:

• I had initially suspected that the cause of my ailment was the special thinkpad-track point driver that deals with scrolling didn’t get updated when I upgraded to jaunty. This turns out to not be the case, as I had a freeze (again in firefox) just moving around with the arrow keys. That theory gone.

• C.K. and I determined that--counter to my supposition--the slight/occasional clunking noise is probably the drive head parking itself, and doesn’t seems to correspond with the problem. So replacing the drive is both awkward (weird form factor) and not likely to fix the problem

• I installed emacs-w3m on both computers. It’s not entirely intuitive. There are debian/ubuntu packages, but if you install the emacs-snapshot package, then the sequence is upgrade to the latest emacs-snapshot, install w3m-el, uninstall emacs22, and then add w3m code to your emacs init file (.emacs).

  It’s, remarkably nice, particularly for looking up links while I’m writing something and reading content-rich pages. The key-bindings are, by default excessively lame and require attention (which I haven’t figured out yet). I always thought that emacs web-browsing was way too dweab-y for me, but learning that it’s actually really cool is a good thing indeed.

• This isn’t a real fast, as I am still using firefox a little bit bit, and I suspect that I’ll always need to have it installed, but I think it’s generally good to not have firefox be the default environment for everything that isn’t emacs or the terminal.

• I’ve basically been avoiding my RSS reader during the course of this experiment. Which I need to spend some time tending to, at least so that I can start using some other reader. This has been an issue since I switched to Linux, and I’ve failed to come to anything that I really like. I’m tempted to use the gnus news reader to read the RSS, but I fear this might be incredibly awkward/complciated for a very small amount of pay off.

• By moving web browsing, insofar as it needs to occur, into emacs, the windows I see are: stuff inside of emacs (mostly org-mode and writing); and stuff inside of terminals (mutt, Micawber, bash, etc.). As a result, I get the feeling that all of my windows look the same. I’m interested how people might solve this problem themselves. How do you make an entirely text-driven, undecorated environment have texture? Have… variety between windows that might provide some context to specific tasks.

  This is an aesthetic/design question more than a programmatic one I guess. I’ve tried playing around, a little with colors in emacs, and still use the default for emacs23 because the others seem difficult to read. I’ve tried different fonts (in both programs) and I’m quite wed to my current font. I’ve tried transparency (which doesn’t run well for emacs on the laptop)… I’m thinking that adding Conky, or more informative widgets might be helpful, but I’d love to get some feedback from you all…

I just wanted to check to see if you all use RSS, and if so I have a few questions:

• Is one of the primary ways you interact with content on the web?
• What software do you use to read feeds? (Google Reader? NetNewsWire? Lifrea? Newsbeuter? FeedGator/FeedDemon? LiveJournal?).
• What’s your biggest pet peeve about the RSS ecosystem? (including feed readers, feed parsers, variations in feed generation/publication, under/over adoption).

Thanks.

(my answers? yes; google reader; non-full text feeds and generally lackluster reading options.)

I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

This isn’t a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what’s coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I’m wondering what the status of conversations are “older” media like blog comments…

Are people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don’t have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don’t get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the “me too” vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read). Here are a few questions:

• Do features (threading? email notification? persistent identities?) make commenting “work better” or flow more productively?
• Are conversations about content moving away from comments into more centralized media like twitter, email lists, and discussion forums?
• Are we more likely to respond to a blog post we read in our own blog, rather than in a comments thread? Has the blogging community reached a saturation point?
• Dose a vibrant community of comment-posers indicate a marker of blog-success, these days? Did it ever? What might replace comments?

I’m pretty convinced that comments are dying, but I’d love to get your feedback. I’m not terribly mournful about this but I’m very interested in thinking about how we (as a community will replace this niche.)