Results tagged “media”

Even more fun news! Today, I'm thrilled to announce the other big project I've been working on: Activate. It's a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (you know him not just as one of the most established names in tech/media consulting, but also as former President of MTV), where I'll be joining as partner.

The compelling thing to me is that we'll be advising firms at the intersection of technology, media and entertainment. You don't have to have been reading this blog very long to know that's an area which is near and dear to my heart, and getting to work with the folks who are merging those disciplines at the highest levels of business and culture is pretty exciting. It took me the better part of a decade to figure out that I'm obsessed with how culture is made, but once I had that realization, it very quickly became clear that those of us in the technology world were the ones driving the transformation of these businesses.

But right now, most of the companies that do this kind of consulting for big media or entertainment firms operate from what I'd consider a fear-based standpoint: Oh no! Technology is happening! It's going to be scary and destroy you! The old-school consultants are good at slashing costs (and jobs), but I think it's a lot more interesting to figure out where new growth and opportunities are going to come from.

Which is important, because some of what we think of as traditional media or entertainment companies will figure out how to take their past strengths and turn them into huge new businesses that work in the modern world, and that respect the way people use technology today. Those businesses are the ones we're working with at Activate.

And yep, I'm still totally committed to my work as director of Expert Labs as well. (As I write this, I'm in Washington, D.C. trying to refine our next project.) I was very fortunate that the Expert Labs project was set up from day one to give me the flexibility to put my skills to use in all of the areas that I find interesting. More importantly, I'm learning in general how to help huge institutions evolve. Whether it's media companies, government agencies, or entertainment businesses, I am truly optimistic that many can transform themselves for the technology world that we live in. In fact, I think those are the only ones that will survive.

Honestly, I feel like the community of innovators and tech minds that I've been part of has earned the right to help determine the future of everything from governance to culture. We've made tools and platforms that have made some fundamentally new things possible. So I'm gonna do everything I can to help make sure our community has a voice at the highest level of the institutions that shape our lives. And Activate is an exciting new part of that work.

For more details:

• Activate.com: Not much here yet, but don't we have a kick-ass URL?
• Some early coverage of our goals, from The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Post, Paid Content and All Things D.

I'm going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I'd leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying.

• Dan C's Lost Garden. Though nominally about gaming (particularly Flash gaming), it's among the most consistently thought-provoking tech-oriented blogs that I read. Every idea of his is one I want to steal, and nothing exemplifies that pattern more than his recent work on Ribbon Hero.
• Sleevage. Album covers, one at a time. Single-topic blogs run by passionate individuals (instead of paid blog barfers) are still among the best sites on the web. This one is a perfect example.
• Modcult. Though I am Jeb's number one fanboy, I will begrudgingly concede that all of the authors of this venerable group blog are awesome curators.
• Mixtape Maestro. Probably the single music blog that comes closest to my own fixations on the production end of pop; I miss its erstwhile spinoff 90s R&B Junkie (the archive is still online), but this is one of those few sites where I try to read every single post and feel let down if I miss one.
• RC3. Rafe Colburn is living proof that some folks really hone their craft at blogging after being at it for a decade.

And then, two newcomers, from a genre I'm dubbing "Under a Rock" blogs:

• Hobbited, where my friend Natalie is mirthfully blogging her way through her first-ever reading of Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.
• Tellywonk, where Anna Pickard is documenting her first viewing of Lost, by trudging through every episode.

Both of those last two blogs touch on a recurrent fixation of mine, the myth of the cultural canon. No matter how ostensibly ubiquitous or universal a particular work of art is, no matter how frequently it's referenced or alluded to in culture, the majority of people have probably never seen it.

My friend Meg told me the other night that, as an early-to-bed morning person, she's never really seen an episode of a late night talk show. I would love to read a blog of her watching an episode of each of the major shows, documenting the things that seem remarkable or bizarre. I've toyed with the idea of blogging my way through playing Beatles Rock Band, since I've never actually listened to any Beatles album all the way through and only know their work from its pop culture ubiquity. This, despite my love of pop music in general. (I first heard "Eleanor Rigby" from Aretha Franklin, "Norwegian Wood" from P.M. Dawn, "We Can Work It Out" from Stevie Wonder, and probably have more examples like that than I can count.)

Inevitably, people react to that revelation from me with something between shock and dismay, often evolving into disgust or revulsion. But it doesn't much bother me; There's lots of culture that I haven't gotten around to participating in. I've never been to an opera, either.

What I'm curious about, though, is how people who are fairly culturally literate and very well-educated respond to works that pervade culture. Under a Rock blogs are great for showing how ideas percolate through the media world, and how those ideas are imperfectly absorbed.

So, confess: What have you never seen, heard, or read?

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag's book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd, the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War On. In the august company of these Actual Experts, we kicked around a conversation about memes and viral culture, inspired by Bill Wasik's And Then There's This, his newly-released book whose requisite explanatory subtitle is "How Stories Live and Die in a Viral Culture". We didn't talk too much about the "death" part, but the rest of it we got into in depth and it ended up being a blast to participate in the conversation.

Sam started us off with a strong intro, but I really lit up when Virginia cut to the heart of one of my biggest linguistic peeves with this entire topic of conversation: the word "viral". In her own words:

I see why virology is metaphorically convenient, but as a YouTube obsessive I’ve also been curious about a particular inadequacy in the analogical system. My problem with the analogy might seem trivial, but I think it bears on our understanding of Wasik’s justly celebrated Flash Mobs. ...

I understand how the chain-letter thing is vaguely viral: One person who is “infected” with certain information touches you, via e-mail, with that information and then you’re infected. But I don’t get how accepting a widely disseminated invitation to go somewhere—to a website, to YouTube, to Toys “R” Us—is like getting a virus. Viruses seem so yours, don’t they, when you have them, and you’re very much the host, even if your physiological party’s been crashed. By contrast, getting invited somewhere, willingly accepting the invitation, and joining a gathering makes you a guest and makes the whole experience, to my mind, not very viruslike.

From there, the conversation took off (perhaps thanks to the promotional graphic on the NYMag.com homepage, which I've reproduced here). There was some smart analysis of Wasik's book, but the standalone conversation was perhaps most interesting to me, and that's what I focus on summarizing here. Charlie followed up on Virginia's opener with a really insightful look into his experience with Improv Everywhere, including an important idea that I would key off of later: "It's fun to get together with a large group of people and try something you've never done before." Accordingly, my followup began, "Hey, wait: Isn't this shit supposed to be fun?" and from there I went into a little riff about how I like popular music and that people who make popular memes should think of themselves more like those who make pop music.

And then David took it to the next level. I'm pretty damn fussy about what kinds of PowerPoint presentations I'll praise, but the PDF of David's presentation is well worth the download — it's both funny and insightful. Charlie followed with a really thoughtful writeup from the standpoint of someone who can make videos that are both viral and fodder for memes, seemingly at will. His most resonant statement, for me:

The instant feedback through views, ratings, and comments is completely addictive. I think it's possible to learn from the data, but ultimately you just have to do what you find interesting and not worry about whether it's going to be an epic win or an epic fail (sadly, those are the only two possible outcomes in the eyes of YouTube commenters).

Obviously, fail has been on my mind of late, so Charlie's observations were especially resonant for me. Then Sam took us back to David's presentation with a follow-up that presented a series of visual explanations of a sort of grand theory of meme-making. While I must confess I wasn't persuaded by the argument that the infographics advanced, I was certainly entertained by the endeavor. From the smart-yet-accessible land of the charticle, we went to the other extreme as Virginia got to the heart of the "keeping it real" question, declaring "I don’t understand why male writers think so passionately and complexly about whether something like a band or song is ironic or authentic or produced by the right or wrong people."

That's an annoyance of mine, as well, and I tried to answer it in passing in my next update. But maybe the most useful part of that little essay was the part quoted by The Awl, where I said, "I like music that makes me shake my ass. I like my memes to be fun, created by people who are enjoying what they do."

David brought us back with a sharp but still entertaining riff on Twitter and Iran. He put a Blingee at the top of his post (dammit, I was gonna do that!) and then bookended it by closing with a question that counterbalanced my point perfectly: "Does anyone know of a viral smash that worked because it made people SAD or MELANCHOLY rather than HAPPY?"

The answer, of course, is yes. There are countless treacly and maudlin web memes out there, especially viral videos. Any given "Sad 9/11 Montage" video fits these criteria perfectly, and countless nominally-inspiring-but-actually-depressing stories of people triumphing over adversity fit the bill as well. But I submit that even those videos are meeting a positive emotional need for their audience, those people who really just want to have A Good Cry.

This conversation might never end, of course, but that's as far as we've gotten to date. Best of all, the rambling discourse has inspired some terrific responses. My friend and meme-making kingpin Jonah Peretti, who is featured at length in Wasik's book, responded with some cogent points on Facebook. (You might have to be my friend or something to read that. I dunno.) The Assimilated Negro offered up a characteristically thoughtful take, from someone who knows the meme-making world intimately as well. And it seems appropriate to give the last word to Wasik himself, who was featured on NPR with a lengthy excerpt of the book itself, accompanied by an audio interview.

I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site. But I don't want you to do it just by copying and pasting it into your own blogging tool. I think there might be a different way to do it.

Now, I probably obsess over embedded objects and copying and pasting even more than most geeks. When I attended the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference, one of my great frustrations is that people are talking about platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial and MySpace and widgets, but they're leaving out fundamentals like copy and paste. It's a basic capability, but none of these platforms address even basic interoperability for the applications that are built on top of them.

I don't know how we get there; I've written in the past about Live Clipboard, Ajax Linking and Embedding, and more.

Despite all these developments, what's actually taken off with real users is the plain old browser and operating system's copy-and-paste, combined with <embed> or <script> tags to pull in content from other sites. It's powered the rise of YouTube and many of the biggest widget providers. (APIs are of course a big part of this, too; Flickr and Delicious propagated themselves by posting directly to blogs using standard APIs.) But regular people on the web have settled on copying inscrutable, nonstandard HTML markup as a pretty effective way of getting the functionality they want.

But we've only been using this stuff for the most complicated parts of the web, like rich media. What about text?

My blog is mostly text, with some bits of video and images embedded. So, I've created a javascript embed tag at the bottom of every post on my blog, to let you embed the title, an excerpt of the post, and a list of commenters on the post in your own blog or site.

What use is that? I have no idea. Obviously, you could copy and paste the raw text to excerpt it. And certainly, pulilng in a javascript from my site to live on your site means you've got to trust my content, unless it's sandboxed somehow.

But there seems to me to be something really interesting, some kind of potential, to including our posts (or parts of our posts) in other blogs that way, and while I'm no great coder, making the Movable Type templates to do this took about five minutes. I'm hoping something even more interesting comes from the world of compound objects or compound embeds, with a text post containing a video clip or image, and then being included on another page.

So: Has someone done this before? I've made blog templates that output widgets before, but what if we assume every blog post is a widget? How could we address the security issues? What does it mean that the included text and content can be updated remotely? What purpose does this serve, or is it just a really complicated way of copying and pasting text?

Christopher Hitchens, whose belligerence is barely tolerable even though he's almost always right, covers the Iowa caucus scam ably in Slate:

It's only when you read an honest reporter like [the Washington Post's] Dan Balz that you appreciate the depth and extent of the fraud that is being practiced on us all. "In a primary," as he put it, "voters quietly fill out their ballots and leave. In the caucuses, they are required to come and stay for several hours, and there are no secret ballots. In the presence of friends, neighbors and occasionally strangers, Iowa Democrats vote with their feet, by raising their hands and moving to different parts of the room to signify their support for one candidate or another. ... [F]or Democrats, it is not a one-person, one-vote system. ... Inducements are allowed; bribes are not." One has to love that last sentence.

I was in Des Moines and Ames in the early fall, and I must say that, as small and landlocked and white and rural as Iowa is, I would be happy to give an opening bid in our electoral process to its warm and generous and serious people. But this is not what the caucus racket actually does. What it does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political professionals, to the full-time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and crackpot candidates.

This year, for me, is all about persuasion and how things get made. What's clear with the Iowa caucuses is that the process is about the quiet coercion of peer pressure. And the primary beneficiaries of this broken system are the traditional media outlets which both uses the process as a source of content and as a source of advertising revenue. Secret balloting is part of any real election process for an important reason, and we've empowered a system that forsakes that goal.

Worse, as much as people like to talk about the Internet revolutionizing politics, the measure they're still using is the ability of the web to improve the efficiency with which candidates can funnel money from supporters to traditional media advertising purchases. This is progress?

(Thanks to Clay for the pointer to the Hitchens piece.)

It looks like I wasn't the only one having a Gawker reckoning; A remarkable post revealed that both Emily Gould and Choire Sicha are leaving the site. (Thanks to Rex for the link.)

That post impressively uses Carla Blumenkranz's words about Gawker to highlight the worst tendency of the site: "The status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully." I'd tried to make the same point, albeit less eloquently, in my own post a few weeks ago:

I'm all for snarky-smart assed blogging, I just think that emulating traditional media's willingness to destroy people who aren't villains isn't a strategy for long-term success.

Perhaps as impressive as Emily and Choire's self-reflection was Gawker's post announcing an opening for a new Managing Editor. It kind of makes explicit that this (re-?) imagining of Gawker is not as the site that takes down the traditional media by mocking them, but as the site that takes down the traditional media by stealing their advertising dollars. In their own words:

It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker's evolution.

I always believed that those of us who were creating personal media online would win. I still hold out hope that when we do so, it's not because we were willing to fight dirtier (or work cheaper) than the media that inspired us, but rather because we could do a better job of making media than the legacy media does today. Congratulations to everybody involved for being willing to indulge in a little bit of the most positive sort of creative destruction.

I've had the chance to follow Gawker Media since before it launched, really, and so it's been interesting to see a couple of items pop up recently about the direction of some of its titles and practices. The big story, of course, is New York Magazine's piece, which is appropriately petty, self-indulgent, and honest, as any piece about Gawker should be.

A lot of the complaints in the article seem to boil down to "but they're not nice!" and I have to say -- I think that's a completely fair criticism. Not that media has to be nice, but because journalism in many of its forms aspires to having a sense of social responsibility. I've had enough friends or acquaintances who've had their day (or week, or reputation) ruined by one of the Gawker blogs that I've gotten a lot less willing to say "oh hey, they're just trying to drive traffic". I'm all for snarky-smart assed blogging, I just think that emulating traditional media's willingness to destroy people who aren't villains isn't a strategy for long-term success.

From the New York mag story:

It’s long been known to magazine journalists that there’s an audience out there that’s hungry to see the grasping and vainglorious and undeservedly successful (“douchebags” or “asshats,” in Gawker parlance) put in the tumbrel and taken to their doom. It’s not necessarily a pleasant job, but someone’s got to do it. Young writers have always had the option of making their name by meting out character assassinations—I have been guilty of taking this path myself—but Gawker’s ad hominem attacks and piss-on-a-baby humor far outstrip even Spy magazine’s. It’s an inevitable consequence of living in today’s New York: Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city. It’s that old story of haves and have-nots, rewritten once again.

The problem with this conveniently simplified narrative about Gawker's sites, particularly its flagship namesake blog, is that it's always accompanied by assertions that this sort of sniping is what blogs are about. This isn't just inaccurate, it's the kind of assertion that is easily disproven both qualitatively and quantitatively. But whether it's Gawker in NYC, Wonkette in DC, or Valleywag in the Bay Area, people who have loud mouths want to believe that news about them must truly be all the news that matters. Therefore, if the blog that talks about me and my friends is snarky, all blogs are snarky. Which is, you know, kinda obviously horseshit.

This hoary-but-false chestnut makes its requisite appearance in the NYMag piece in reference to Elizabeth Spiers and Nick Denton: "They didn’t exactly invent the blog, but the tone they used for Gawker became the most important stylistic influence on the emerging field of blogging and has turned into the de facto voice of blogs today." (Personal note to those who follow in the steps of Vanessa Grigoriadis: This is false. Stop saying it.)

The misrepresentation of blogging is especially tragic because not even all Gawker blogs are snarky. Case in point is the excellent Lifehacker, the best-written of all Gawker blogs, helmed by Gina Trapani. Since they're public, I don't feel too wrong pointing to her recent Twitters, one in praise of a recent attempt by Gawker editors to object to advertising encroaching on editorial on the site, and one celebrating Lifehacker's omission from the recitation of snarky Gawker sites in the NYMag story.

I'm not sure one of the best editorial talents at a publishing company should be reduced to celebrating such small victories. Don't get me wrong: Gawker gets a lot right. There's absolutely a value in speaking truth to power, and there is truly something noble in deflating the self-importance of the various industries that the Gawker sites poke holes in. My contempt for those who insult journalism by pretending it shouldn't evolve remains as strong as ever. At the same time, there should be a sense of social responsibility to the community of bloggers, if not to the traditional media. And to my mind, that means highlighting the humor, incisiveness, and lack of favoritism that made sites like Gawker such a breath of fresh air when they started. Put more simply, tearing apart the innocent bystanders in these industries isn't just bad journalism, it's boring blogging.

And really, as long as print magazines like New York Magazine are still quoting the likes of Julia Allison as an authority on blogs, there will be no shortage of material to poke fun at. But these points of reckoning should serve as useful milestones for making sure we're not becoming the worst of the legacy cultures we're trying to criticize.

Disclaimers, such as they are: I've got a million little connections and biases about this story. I'm an unabashed blog promoter, even after all these years, so I'm protective of the medium. I don't read many posts from Gawker blogs, but still have an inexplicable affection for them, and am quite pleased that at one point years ago, I think I knew almost everybody in the Gawker organization. I like Nick Denton, both personally and professionally, even though he exasperates me regularly and antagonizes my friends almost constantly. (And I certainly admire Nick's diplomatic abilities, which allow him to maintain friendships with people even as he's paid others to publicly embarrass them.)

I've known Liz Spiers for a few years socially, and may even have introduced her at Nick, at a MetaFilter meetup, of all things, and think she's underrated as a blogger. I consider Gina Trapani a friend (which will now be particularly awkward if that's not mutual) and I think indirectly had a hand in her meeting Nick as well. Gina is perhaps the most underrated high-profile blogger in the world. I'm a fan of Gawker editor Choire Sicha, and have a genuine affection for both his talents and charm. I pitched a fit earlier this year at Valleywag editor Owen Thomas because I think some of his pieces on the company I work for were full of shit, though we've since sorta made up and Valleywag continues to publish wacky and wrong articles about our work. I also like New York Magazine, though I only read it when someone sends me a link to a story. And both Gawker and NY Mag use Movable Type for parts of their publishing, which I work on and means I probably indirectly get paid from some of these sites. Batteries not included, your mileage may vary, my name is Anil Dash and I endorse this message.

Update: Can't believe I missed linking to this one, but Nick Denton weighed in, going predictably meta with the absolutely accurate assessment that traditional media has to stop using "bile" to refer to bloggers. I always use "unkind" -- it feels satisfyingly quaint.

I often lament the lack of perspective in tech reporting, so it's always a delight to find a story that typifies what I'd hope technology reporting could be like: Smart, informed, and with a good sense of history. Take Caroline McCarthy's look at the allure of Fake Steve Jobs. Now, CNET's not known for being the most circumspect tech news venue around, but this is a brililiant dissection of why Fake Steve Jobs is so appealing.

Fake Steve, as a concept, is downright old-school. Think about it. In a culture captivated--obsessed, even--by the antics of high society, an anonymous satirist starts publishing over-the-top missives purporting to be from an insider in that privileged niche. In the process, the faux-mogul skewers political elites, entertainers, business titans, and ordinary people in a way that's at once outlandish and provocative, hilarious and appalling. It reeks of Swift or Dickens or Twain (although a friend of mine who's better-schooled in 19th-century literature informed me that the most apt comparison is likely Edgar Allan Poe). Were it the 19th century, or heck, the 1990s, the satirist's medium of choice likely would've been a serial or set of letters in a major news outlet.

And she's absolutely right. The fact that tech culture has become so pervasive as to merge with pop culture, and that personalities are so well-known that they can be used as a springboard for social criticism, is a milestone for the technology industry. It also points out why unmasking Fake Steve would be a little bit like telling a kid the truth about Santa Claus: You may be factually correct, but you'll have ruined all the fun and lost the little bit of magic that we have left.

I’ve been holding off on updates about lolcats and related memes for a while because it’s easy to get burned out and probably as boring for you as it is for me. But there are still some interesting parts to it. As I alluded to in Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations, once you’re known for something like writing a post about lolcats and grammar, you become the central place for both people looking for information about such things, as well as the go-to place for people to pitch their new ideas about the topic, whether they’re exciting or not.

As is usually the case, most people who are just trying to fill in the blanks with a lolwhatever site are not only unfunny, but tedious. I have what’s called a “Hippo Problem”, based on the problem of someone offhandedly mentions a fondness for hippos once, and is plagued the rest of their days with hippo-emblazoned kitsch for the rest of their days.

My hippos are captioned cats.

It’s a thankless burden — imagine if you were an expert on “I Kiss You!”, or the go-to guy for All Your Base. I’m just glad I didn’t write anything about that goddamn dancing baby.

The truth, of course, is that it’s not so bad, and I try to remember that there’s inevitably somebody out there who feels like they really understand this topic. They’re sitting in a cafe somewhere with a laptop, resentful and bitter that a hack like me got associated with lolcats in the first place. I’m sure the I Can Has Cheezeburger folks get hate mail from people who said they started a lolrus site exactly four days earlier and have thus been completely ripped off.

For every angry would-be lolcat expert, though, there are some perks to this kind of thing. “Cats Can Has Grammar” is (I think, I’m lousy at tracking stats) my most popular post in the nearly 8 years that I’ve been blogging, with something like half a million people having read it since it went up. I’ve gotten mentioned or quoted in stories all over the place, from the Chicago Tribune to a TV station in North Carolina to an Associated Press story that ran all over the place. I even talked to the Wall Street Journal, though I’m hoping some editor spiked the piece that was being researched, in a fit of good taste. Somewhere, Mahir’s talent agent is shaking his head sadly. “Enjoy it while it lasts, kid.”

The picture above shows that the Houston Chronicle actually ran a cover story about the lolcat phenomenon that referred to me as a “legendary blogger”. Look, mom, I still don’t have a college degree, but now I’m a lolcat legend!

And the final lesson is that we all create our own misery. If I complain that this one lighthearted and offhand piece gets more attention than all the writing I’ve carefully crafted over the years, then it’s of course only fair that I get my comeuppance. My favorite newsweekly, Time, published their own lolcats story today, and I was kind of disappointed to see that I’m not mentioned anywhere in it. Be careful what you ask for…

I hate the abbreviation "MSM". It's almost always used by those who are lacking in perspective. We're all either too lazy to actually differentiate between the technologies and types of media, or just don't know much about media beyond our emotional reactions to it.

I don't usually blog about my process of blogging (my longer posts are usually in gestation for a week or so, some take a few weeks, a couple have taken longer than a year to write), but I thought I'd share some great links that might be useful in a future discussion of "MSM is dead" or "citizen media will conquer all" or "Are blogs journalism?" These are all tedious topics to me, since I've been having these conversations for the better part of a decade, but since the questions keep popping up, maybe I can contribute something more constructive than just bitching.

Until then, check these out:

Rich Skrenta on The Failure of We (the) Media. Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net, nails it:

Tremendous excitement followed the publishing of Dan [Gillmor]'s We the Media (the conference's namesake). It accompanied the trumpeting of a new model of media by the newsy press, and the rise of blogs with attendant breathless hype.

Unfortunately, after doing the author's victory tour, Dan then attempted to put his ideas into practice in a business venture. I suppose there is some due credit for having the courage to cross the line from a long career as a newspaper journalist (observer) to become a startup founder (participant), and try to prove the viability of his alt.media business plan outlined in the book.

But, like nearly every News 2.0 venture so far, Dan's Bayosphere was a failure.

He has a lot of company. The dog's breakfast of new media startups includes Gather, Backfence, Newstrust, Daylife, TailRank, Associated Content, Pegasus News, Tinfinger, Findory, Inform, Newsvine, Memeorandum, NowPublic. The highest distinction on this list is to be one of the few still spoken of in the present tense (or present perfect -- "They haven't yet succeeded...")

And yes, I would include Topix here as well.

Over on CNN, Old media isn't dead. Hey, my link proves Paul R. LaMonica correct! But he makes the point himself:

That notion is just silly. Consider a few questions. If old media really was on death's door, then why are new media companies so eager to cozy up to established media giants?

Why does YouTube, now owned by Google (Charts), have a partnership with CBS? Who cares about that network's stodgy TV programming when you've got scores of hilarious user-generated videos on the site?

What's more, why is Google eager to work with its customers on ways to automate the purchasing of print, radio and TV advertising? And why is eBay working with advertisers to develop an online auction exchange to buy and sell commercial spots on the boob tube?

If old media is about to kick the bucket, then why is TMZ.com, the popular Hollywood gossip site that, like CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner, launching a TMZ television show that will air on News Corp.-owned Fox stations this fall?

And why did popular social networking site Facebook announce a deal last week with cable company Comcast to launch a "Facebook Diaries" TV show?

Simply put, old media still matters.

If there are other links along these lines I should be paying attention to, particularly signs that old and new media are collaborating effectively, please send 'em along.

There are lots of different corners of the web, most of which have the good graces to be supportive and interesting and to act like, well, a community. People generally like to be social. But then there's the high-profile personal websites, full of pundits and supernerds, and the kinds of people who I imagine talk on wireless headsets on their cell phones while at a restaurant. For these people, it's always August.

First, a little background. If you've never worked in the publishing or media industries, you might not know that August is officially the month where everyone basically phones it in. Back in New York, people would speak of going to The Hamptons so often that it's been verbed into "Hamptoning" and used as a generic term for going on vacation. While bigwigs and editors are away cavorting, a makeshift army of interns, temps, and recent college grads generally takes over. These kids usually don't have much experience, and newspaper editors don't want to have to do any hard work during the dog days, so the end result is that you get a combination of lazy writing and some really crappy journalism.

What kind of crappy journalism? Listicles! "Best Of"s. Special Theme Issues. And all of these pieces are topped by blaring, or alarmist, or horribly-punned headlines. You might notice that the other time of year this happens is around the end of the year or at New Year's, when Christmas and the other December holidays conspire to leave major media outlets virtually unstaffed. Then, you get year-end wrapups or another round of Best Ofs.

Indeed, as former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously told the New York Times, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

So, then, why is it always August in the "look at me!" part of the blogosphere? Because the people who are blogging for an audience of thousands, or for hundreds of thousands, are prone to a lot of those same tendencies. Digg and delicious and the rest are littered with Top 10s and geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines. It's not long until we get "21 Ubuntu Install Tips That Will Drive Him Crazy In Bed!"

It's harmless, mostly. Hell, lots of it is even fun reading. But I'm struck by how the combination of light or lazy editing, an attention span too short to suffer much fact-checking, and the temptation of easy distractions like, say, a day at the beach can result in the exact same tropes being trotted out, regardless of medium.

I should point out that, despite the fact it sounds like a criticism, I'm not against this kind of thing, really. I just find it ironic that the people who make up the high-profile part of the blogosphere spend all their time living like it's August while accusing the rest of the blogosphere for sounding like the September that never ended.

The photo, by the way, is what Shackleford Banks looks like in August. So I'm not saying August is a bad thing.