Happy birthday, Dave:  Dave Winer turns 50 Monday and all he asks for is a link. That was easy.

(Steve Kirks suggests the
following Technorati tag: davewinerat50)

The “content” business: One thing I’ve learned from the blogosphere
(from Doc Searls,
primarily) is that I should bristle anytime I hear someone in the media
business use the word “content.”

I think it goes back to a long-ago quote from
John Perry Bartlow that Doc pointed
to:

For the next couple of days, I’m hanging out with about 350 men and women who run
large and small companies in the “business-to-business” media space. 
I’m at the annual spring meeting of the 99-year-old organization that
used to be called the American Business Press. A few years ago, it (we
- I was a board member at the time) changed its name to American
Business Media because the companies generate less than 1/2 of their
revenues from things like advertising, rather they’re in the business
of running trade shows and maintaining databases and consulting and owning online media with famous brand names.

Most
of the people at this conference are suits (like me). They talk about
“integrated media” products — which means packaging together
everything one produces and selling it all at once. Unfortunately, they
have decided to use the word “content” most of the time to describe
the buiness they’re in, as in, “We’re in the content business.” But
because of that whole Doc-don’t-call-it-content thing, I bristle when I hear the word.

Earlier
this evening, I spent some time visiting with an iconic figure in American
business-to-business publishing –
someone whose name I won’t mention, but whose name is synonymous with at least two American industries.
This person has been a hero of mine for a long, long time, but he’s
always treated me as if I were a peer. As I talked
with him tonight, I kept thinking to myself, this is a person who would
never call what he creates “content.” And then it struck me why: he’d
never call it content because he’s
one of the few people running a huge media company today who started his career as
a writer (albeit, for his dad) and still writes regularly.

And so, I  decided once again. I’m not in the content business.
If I wanted to be in the content business, I would have chosen shipping
or pallet-building or selling Rubbermaid products as my career.

What I do ain’t content.

Update: Although (see comments) what Rafat does is content. And, I must say, some of my favorite content.