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 I’m offline.
I’m not blogging. I’m not reading blogs. I’m not IMing. I’m not checking my newsreader.
I’m not tagging. I don’t have a cell-phone.
My business voice-mail and e-mail are being monitored, but I’m not initiating any voice or e- conversations.
I don’t know what Google or Apple or Facebook are announcing.
I don’t know what Scott Karp or Dave Winer or Steve Rubel or anyone who shows up on Techmeme or Nashville is Talking is saying.
I don’t know what is popular on del.icio.us or YouTube or /. or etc., etc., etc.
I don’t know who is friending me or poking me or reading me or “@-ing” me or adding to my groups.
If I don’t go stark-raving-mad or enter some higher state of enlightened bliss, I’ll be back here on Monday, June 4.
In an article posted today, MIT’s TechnologyReview.com picked up one of the more profound insights I’ve made on this weblog, an observation about Justin.TV: “If it were more videogame-like and we could program Justin to run into walls and walk out into traffic, perhaps it would be more entertaining.”
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Observation: Get ready for the coming flood of “me-to” announcements.
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In my post about the show, I didn’t include spoilers, but Steven has. Everything I was alluding to, he explicitly observes. I couldn’t agree with him more.
NYTimes’ advertising reporter Stuart Elliott observes at least half a dozen advertising campaigns are using the greeting ‘Hello’ as a way to attract consumer attention.
This is why a lot of big brands are wanting to say goodbye to traditional advertising.
Yesterday, Dave Winer outlined some suggestions (hopes) for the next step in the evolution of the web, somewhat related to the long-envisioned “semantic web or Web 3.0” — and what Dave calls for discussion sake, Web 3.0. Building on the read-write-share, grassroots, “amateur,” nature of what has been lumped together and called Web 2.0, Dave “hopes” for a day when “professional media” fully embraces, “the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. See amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary.”
MediaPost.com today has an article about magazines launching topical wikis. Like the steady adoption of blogging by traditional media, this is another example of the blending of “corporate media” and “personal media” into something we’ll one day call, well, whatever it is we will call the web when we stop putting numbers on it.
Ironically, I do not recommend that marketers or magazine people read the MediaPost.com article. Indeed, I have long said that if you want to understand wikis, the last thing you should do is read about them. For example, I spend a big chunk of each week tending a large-scale wiki and I have absolutely no idea what the following sentence from the article means: “The social invitation to create knowledge offers a form of audience interaction that may even be more engaging than social networks, where people create profiles but don’t necessarily interact.”
I’ll be blogging a great deal more on this topic in coming months.
Disclosure: A wiki I host, SmallBusiness.com runs on a beta-version of Web 3.0. (Note for the non-geek: while I do host that wiki, the suggestion that Web 3.0 is a release version of software is a joke.)
Wow. The recent announcement that the series Lost has a definite end-point (48 episodes left, spread over three 16-episode seasons) seems to have liberated the writers from whatever it was that caused them meander for the past year or so. Tonight’s season-ending episode was both the end of the beginning of the series, and the beginning of the end. And by turning one of the series’ core story-telling devices inside-out, the writers have both satisfied — and shocked — longtime fans. I’ll admit it: They’ve got me locked-down for 48 more episodes, easy, after tonight.
Technorati Tags: Lost, TV
I can’t wait for the release of Web 3.0 as described by Dave Winer:
“First, I think of Web 2.0 as the Two-Way Web, the Read-Write Web, the Web of User-Generated Content. It’s Flickr and blogs and wikis. It’s everybody creating the medium for everyone else….The next step after that, I hope, is the professional media fully embracing the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. See amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary. I think it will continue to shrink until they accept bloggers and podcasters as legitimate sources of news and perspective, without interpretation by professional reporters.
Observation: Originally scheduled for release in 2004, the release date of Web 3.0 keeps getting pushed back. Fortunately, we can all be beta testers in the meantime.
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The Time Inc. unit that publishes Southern Living is launching an extensive food portal called MyRecipes.com.
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Scott Karp quotes laments (and finds connections) from two very separate quarters who believe things aren’t as easy as they used to be back in the good old days when Google would index anything and journalism was a calling.
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Dylan Stableford, displaying the skills of a Cold-war era Kremlinologist, notes a Time Inc. press release leaves out the whole “magazine thing” a describes the magazine portion of Time Warner as “a multi-media content company, reaching consumers on every
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10 elements that matter to create a great magazine
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Scott Karp explains why every newspaper journalist should start a blog. And then he provides a tutorial.
 Earlier this evening on del.icio.us/rexblog, I noted that Dylan Stableford at FishbowlNY was displaying Cold War-era Kremlinological skills by observing that a Time Inc. press release today seems hellbent on describing Time Inc. as anything but a magazine publisher. I feel a bit relieved that Henry Luce didn’t live to see the day when the magazine company he started was described as “a multi-media content company reaching consumers on every platform.”
(For any of you who may have just stumbled into this thread, let me note that in this post, I am referring specifically to Time Inc., the operating unit of Time Warner that in the year 2006 published magazines that accounted for 22.6% of all U.S. consumer magazine advertising. Again, I’m not talking about all of Time Warner, but narrowly on that operating entity called Time Inc. that publishes “approximately” 130 magazines and is the largest publisher of magazines in the U.S. and U.K.)
After reading Dylan’s earlier post, I noticed Scott Karp’s observation of a recent quote by Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons in response to the perpetual rumor that Time Inc. may be for sale: “I like our publishing business, I like the magazine business and I like the fact that it’s portable and can be moved into digital,” he said. “I am not an advocate of selling Time Inc.”
Asks Scott:
“So what does this mean, exactly? Does it mean that a magazine’s entire business can be “ported” online, i.e. so that it stops publishing in print? Or does it just mean that the content assets can be moved online.
Dylan and Scott got me thinking: What do the executives at Time Inc. think the “business” of Time Inc. is?
I figured a good way to get a sense of how “management” wants to define the business of Time Inc. is to follow-up on Dylan’s parsing of the Time Inc. press release, but rather than look at the “announcement” portion of the press release, to look at the “boilerplate” portion — that paragraph or two that is included at the bottom of every press release that provides a statement “about” the company or companies issuing the release.
Here is a comparison of Time Inc. press release boilerplate from May, 2006 and May, 2007:
May, 2006: “Time Inc. is the world’s leading magazine publisher, with more than 150 titles that are read more than 300 million times worldwide on a monthly basis and account for nearly a quarter of the total advertising revenues of U.S. consumer magazines.”
May, 2007: “Time Inc., a Time Warner company, is one of the largest content companies in the world. With approximately 130 magazines, it is the largest magazine publisher in the U.S. and U.K. Each month, one out of every two American adults reads a Time Inc. magazine, and one out of every 10, who are online, visits a company web site (more than 19 million unique visitors). Time Inc.’s popular brands and successful franchises extend to online, television, cable VOD, satellite radio, mobile devices, events and branded products.”
I guess that’s how the executives of a “publishing company” that is not for sale mean when they say “it’s portable.” Also, I think it’s amusing that in the press release, the corporate communications people don’t know exactly how many magazines the company publishes, but they guess it’s “approximately 130.” Note to the new CFO: Provide the PR Department with that “how many magazines we publish” metric.
For the record, I think the executives of Time Warner are smart to position the company as something broader than a magazine publishing company. And I pity the Time Inc. executives who obviously would rather call it a “media” company but have to call it a “content” company because they are part of a multinational corporation where other units have already grabbed up all the cool words like “online” and “digital” and “broadcasting” and “film.”
And finally, I’ll admit that even small magazine publishing companies that are experiencing significant growth in areas outside of traditional print properties are burdened by the limitations conveyed in the word “publishing.” And yes, that is a cryptic message that doesn’t require one to be a Kremlinologist to decipher.
Technorati Tags: magazines, media, timeinc
 For the past week or so, the weather in Nashville has been perfect. Achingly perfect. Vivid and full of spring color like that photo of the flowers I took a few days ago while walking along the Harpeth River Greenway. When it is that beautiful, it is hard to conjure up the darkness necessary to understand why Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble are longing for the good old days when everyone who had a weblog moved to Silicon Valley so they could hang out on Michael’s patio every Friday night. Frankly, it is so beautiful in Nashville these days, that I had to stop reading both their posts a sentence or two into them.
I think their gloom has something to do with the fact that no one they know seems to be talking about anything other than the transactions and business of Web 2.0 (note to Mike and Robert: that’s what happens when you blog ’round the clock about Web 2.0 transactions). They seem to be suggesting that, after “the bust,” back when no-one would fund or buy anything, there was this golden-age when all the charlatans moved away from Silicon Valley and it was left to the true-geeks who did stuff because it was cool, not because of how much money they could make. According to this Web 2.0 creation myth (thanks, Gabe), all the charlatans are now back in town and it takes the Moscone Center to handle all the people who want to pitch Michael on some goofy startup idea — and that sucks.
At least, that’s what I think they are saying before I shut down my computer to have lunch with a friend. Fortunately, in Nashville I get to go to restaurants where all the waiters are budding musicians, not budding Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. In Nashville, I get to talk with people about the weather — have I mentioned how beautiful it is? — and not Ruby on Rails.
One last thought on this topic before I head home to check out the tomatoes I planted recently: One of the really cool things about having a blog and being rather prolific in posting to it is this: When you start reading things about web-venture booms and busts and how people are obsessed with the “money” thing and not the “idea” thing, not only can you recall previously having lived through such a cycle, you can actually go back and read what you wrote when you lived through it. Dave Winer can remember the booms and busts and what he was writing at the time. Kara Swisher was writing during previous booms and busts, so she can recall with ease how jaded one becomes when everyone you know becomes a web entrepreneur.
What shocks me, however, is that I, a non-resident of Silicon Valley who lives in such a middle-America-sounding place as Nashville, can point back to a post on this weblog written on December 27, 2000 that had the heading, “Dot.com crash, enough already.”
Okay, remember, I wrote the following in late December, 2000, when it was hard to find any optimism about the future of the web:
At some point in the near future…we (will) conclude that it is not significant to our lives anymore that dumb businesses managed by dumb individuals and funded by dumb investors die. Even smart businesses managed by smart individuals and smart investors die. Businesses start and die every day. They always have. They always will. I am old enough - and have been fortunate enough - to have succeeded significantly and failed miserably and frankly, the failures have done more for me than the successes.
The real impact of the Internet will come when coverage shifts from “the deal flow” onto “the idea flow”…The roller-coaster of explosive hype, a disillusioning trough of despair and the underestimation of (a) technology’s positive longterm impact can be seen playing out as the marketplace and media and beleaguered participants try to make sense of the current ‘crash-meltdown-depression.’ As tiresome as the over-hyped ‘boom’ story was, the (’bust’) story is long due for a correction. Let’s move on.
I guess my advice is still the same. Let’s move on. But not before we stop, take a walk along a greenway and smell the flowers.
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Okay, so I blew my prediction on what his next book would be. While I came close to the timing, I missed the topic, which I thought would be radical transparency. Come think of it, this book sounds more interesting. Kudos.
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Re: “Applegate” - Quote: “The digital age may have had its ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ moment. Observation: All media has blown it. The new part is that a blog post could knock $4 billion of market cap off Apple in a few minutes.
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A new feature of Google Trends that lets you isolate “hot” search terms and phrases by the date.
 According to the Wall Street Journal, “On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Last year, I joked Facebook’s worst decision ever was to allow me to join. My point, in addition to being a stab at humor, related to the resentment it would cause among their core audience when parents started showing up. However, I was wrong. I don’t think many parents (other than those who strive to understand social media, or who are weird) showed up. However, lots of marketing types did, and they want to do more than purchase banner ads.
I’ve noticed that many savvy marketers haven’t waited for Facebook’s announcement this week. For example, the “Southwest Airlines” group has almost 28,000 members. I assume that the linked-to Southwest page will be one of those “special pages” that Facebook demonstrates on Thursday.
It doesn’t take much leaping of logic to realize that Facebook is a “marketing platform” for brands marketing to high school and college students. While today, that network is silo’d in Facebook, today’s announcement indicates that, for example, the Facebook group of Southwest Airlines customers could also have such relationships follow them over to Southwest.com.
As Facebook users already collect themselves into groups according to schools attended, cities lived in, and causes supported, bands followed, shows watched, why should they not be tribe-ing up around products purchased or any of those other tribal groups we form. Markets are conversations, you know. Markets are also tribes.
While there is a dash by many developers to offer “white label” social networking platforms that groups can use to create their own, in some cases, silo’d “Facebook for one-armed wall-paper hangers,” what a lot of Facebook users will want to do is travel around with their Facebook identity, rather than replicate it.
Later: I just noticed that the WSJ story lit up Techmeme. However, reading a few of the posts convinces me that nobody knows what this announcement is about — especially me. The speculations range from it becoming more “portal-like” to it becoming an anti-portal; from it being a “Facebook API,” to it being a “Facebook Reverse API.” I think, however, there is a growing group of people in the cheap-seats who believe Facebook will remain more interesting if it stays independent of the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/global media company empires.
Technorati Tags: facebook
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Synopsis of this ‘law,’ which sounds to me more like a theory than a law, but whatever: Being number 1 is twice as good as being number 2.
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The Social Security Administration has lots of information about the rankings in popularity of first names. You can see the top 100 names of any calendar year. Or, you can see how your name ranks from year-to-year.
 Accompanying an excerpt from his new book, Time.com last week ran a photo gallery that included this photo of Al Gore’s office. As a board member of Apple Inc., I’m sure he gets a good deal on all of those 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Displays. However, on the Macosphere, some are wondering why, with all of that computing power, he couldn’t grasp a little better the concept of the “paperless” office.
Those who know my aversion to office paper can rightly assume I cringed when I saw the photo of Gore’s desk. All I could think was how he should have Merlin Mann come hang out with him for a few days.
Heck, I’ll be happy to ride my bike over to his house and help out.
In a paint-by-number article about the state of the business magazine category, the rather obvious conclusion that the marketplace can’t handle an unlimited number of titles in the category is, well, concluded.
Online rivals are one of the reasons, according to the magazine. Consolidation among advertisers, another. And more titles, yet another. Key to survival? Says the president of the ubber media-buying agency, Starcom Worldwide, “Unless you have the package of events and digital to complement the print publication, we’re not really interested. Smaller publications who don’t have as mature and developed 360 properties are going to continue to lose in the marketplace.”
The oft-repeated observation on this blog is worth repeating: One thing is consistent during the 250-year-history of the magazine in America: they launch and they die. New ones will continue to launch. Existing ones that do not respond to the changes in the marketplace, or among their readers, or in the world around them, will go away.
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