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When I was in San Francisco last month (with Adriana, who was speaking at Vloggercon on net neutrality), one of the best things that happened to me was meeting BrainJams‘ Kristie Wells and Chris Heuer. These are fiercely intelligent, open, unpretentious, generous people who are doing incredible things through the power of their own personal networks.

One such example of this is the Rent an Expert event which BrainJams is staging at CNET HQ today in San Francisco.

The format will follow the laws of open space as the ‘how to classes*’ offered will be determined by the participants. We ask that a small fee (average is $5) be given for each ‘how to class’ you sign up for, and all the money collected during the evening will be donated to a charity that will be decided by those in the room (majority rules folks).

Check out the Rent an Expert wiki if you can attend and want to share your expertise and/or learn from the expertise of others in attendance. If you go, tell them that I sent you - and thank me sooner or later, because you won’t regret the experience or getting to know Kristie and Chris.

The grandfather of my fiancé, Antoine Clarke, was a famous French writer known simply as Exbrayat. He invented the genre of the humorous detective novel and wrote more than 100 books (plus several plays and films), on which his first name, Charles, never appeared. You can read more about him here, at the Exbrayat blog that Antoine and I set up yesterday.

We hope the blog will be something very special for Exbrayat’s fans. We will be adding more never before published family photographs, podcasts, and other goodies for fans as time permits. For Antoine’s mother, who has always been very publicity shy and has refused all interview requests, it’s a genuine case of blogging and social media as DIY PR - actually conversing with the public, bypassing the traditional media owned by others in order to speak directly with the people who really count, on a platform owned by the family. The network that nobody owns is a million times more valuable and useful to the family than any other.

May 5th would have been Exbrayat’s 100th birthday, and we’ll all be heading to France soon for the various Exbrayat centenary celebrations in that country. Antoine and I will be taking photos there for the blog, as well as noting the family’s observations on the events in France. And yes, we’ll be doing it in English. 

This is a long post, so I won’t make you wait for me to get to the point: Real authority in the blogosphere cannot be measured by current tools, because current tools cannot account for the fact that we choose not to read some blogs precisely because they are authoritative.

One thing that happens when you let RSS do the work of pointing you towards interesting information: You quickly grow weary of certain blogs that are updated several times a day.

I do think it’s important for bloggers to post often, especially in the beginning when you’re trying to build up a dedicated audience. (As Adriana points out to people about the huge number of visitors who hit Samizdata on a daily basis, what is really interesting is that so many of them are repeat visitors and make the effort to check the site once or more each day. Maybe I’ll post some other time about what this means in terms of building an emergent brand.) And I myself used to blog several times per day, in part because it was a big element of working with tBBC, and in part because...Well, I wanted to, and I had the flexibility in my work day to do so. No more.

But there are only a handful of blogs that I really get excited about seeing updated several times a day - in particular, my guilty pleasure blogs, like Perez Hilton‘s. I ignore those in my aggregator until the weekend, and then Saturday morning is a big, indulgent catch-up session.

I recently deleted Steve Rubel‘s blog from my list of RSS subscriptions. Why? Because he’s almost too good at blogging. He updates his site several times a day, and nearly everything he posts is interesting or downright absorbing. But it’s daunting to see that there are 25 or so unread pieces from him in my aggregator, just waiting to be read.

More to the point, lots of the other blogs I read also read Steve’s blog, and link to all the cool stuff he posts with their own take on each item. So I was getting a lot of duplication in my aggregator, with the truly useful posts being the ones which added commentary to the information. Anyone who used to read Glenn Reynolds and no longer does may also be familiar with this scenario.

This isn’t me trying to knock Steve or Glenn, both of whom are phenomenal bloggers and put enormous time and effort into being stellar human filters (Steve starts blogging at 4.30 or 5 AM, seven days a week). But as I know that the stuff they link to will be linked by other filters who are also commentators, and whose insights stimulate my own thoughts, it makes more sense for me only to read the filters who add relevant commentary to those links. (Your own requirements, as always, may vary. Isn’t it great that we all have the choice to tailor this stuff according to our own needs and wants?)

This is another good example of the network effect of blogging: I don’t read Steve or Glenn anymore, but the stuff they link to reaches me anyway. And because of attribution inherent in blogging, I know it when a commentator has found an interesting link via one of them. If someone asked me to name a big PR blogger or a big politics blogger, I’d name Steve Rubel and Glenn Reynolds. If someone asked for more names for each of those categories, I could keep going, naming bloggers who I’d never before read personally, but who I see getting hat tips all over the place for linking to noteworthy items. (This is particularly true of political blogs, of which I have wearied of late; I know that Kos and Atrios and Michelle Malkin are popular information filters, but I can’t say I’ve ever spent more than two minutes on any of their blogs.)

My point once again: Real authority in the blogosphere cannot be measured by current tools, because current tools cannot account for the fact that we choose not to read some blogs precisely because they are authoritative.

So how do the metrics fetishists propose to measure authority in light of this? I’m still waiting to hear.

Cross-posted at The Hole

Just a note on the LA Times wiki boo boo: Rob Barrett, the LA Times GM, deserves praise for wanting to use blogs, wikis, and other emergent technologies to reinvigorate the output of the entire media entity. I’ve talked to him many times about this kind of stuff and to say he’s on the side of the angels is a massive understatement. And far from thinking he knows it all, he’s genuinely eager to learn how to get the most benefit out of these technologies for the LAT and readers alike. He’s a true enthusiast, an incredibly clever guy, and - as this incident shows - isn’t afraid of taking calculated risks.

Well done, Rob. Short-term stumbling often precedes huge success. Those who understand that and keep plugging away are the ones who produce truly great things. 

Microsoft’s Business Solutions describes its mission thusly:

...to help small, mid-market and corporate businesses become more connected with customers, employees, partners and suppliers.

Simon Edwards is the UK MD of Microsoft Business Solutions. In an email forwarded to me by journalist Dennis Howlett, Edwards responds to his question of whether MBS is looking at the commercial applications of blogging within their app portfolio by saying:

I’m afraid I’m one of those blank pages regarding blogging that the guy on your site talks about. So, I am a long way from understanding the commercial potential.

Is there any excuse for someone in Edwards’s position to be so clueless about blogging? I can’t think of one.

Cross-posted from The Hole

As you may have read elsewhere, I accepted an offer this week to join Latitude, the world’s largest and most successful search engine marketing company, as their head of marketing.

It is not the case, though, that I left the Big Blog Company for Latitude. In fact, I told Perry and Adriana about a month ago that I felt the time had come for me to move on from our shared mission of teaching companies how to converse with their customers, potential customers, and industry peers. (Actually, we were doing a lot more than just that, but for brevity’s sake, I won’t detail every single way in which we’ve been trying to change the world.)

I have been itching to do something that would let me affect the big picture of which blogging is only one very integral part. I had no idea what that something would be, but I knew I had to try to find it. But it found me, in the form of the offer from Latitude, within a very short time of my decision to leave full-time work with tBBC. (To those who were horrified when I replied, “I don’t know” when you asked me what I was going to do next, and who thought I was insane not to have a ten year plan or whatever other rigid schemes you think people need in order to live well: The way this is working out is a good example of what we at tBBC refer to as the benefits of the emergent.)

But as I have written previously, I wouldn’t have the expertise to do what I’ll be doing at Latitude if I had not spent the last year soaking in tBBC. Most businesses pay lip service to ‘company values,’ but it’s no exaggeration to say that the values I cultivated thanks to Adriana and Perry (and our good friends like Alan Moore at SMLXL) are ones over which I’ve become obsessive in my wish to honour. Engagement not interruption. Pull not push. Individuals not ‘consumers’. Value for value. The benefit of the emergent. Your behaviour is your brand. Sneer at the Cluetrain purity of it all, but don’t doubt our sincerity. All of us from tBBC, and the people we gravitate to (and who gravitate to us), are individuals who do not like to be pushed around, who reject attempts to control our behaviour, and who resent few things more than a company that thinks it can get money out of us by pushing us around and attempting to control our behaviour.

Those are the values I’m taking to Latitude, and which will be core to my efforts there. The opportunity to bring those values to an established, highly successful company that is surrounded by the stalwarts of traditional, intrusive, push marketing is very exciting to me. Just as tBBC has been instrumental in me landing such a great gig, I hope to be instrumental in making the mentality of marketing in the UK (and beyond - if that’s not too much to hope for) one that is much more receptive to the values I learned with tBBC.

And when I say tBBC, I mean Adriana and Perry, the two people with whom I have been immersed in this stuff for at least three thousand hours over the past year. After logging that kind of time, there’s no way I can completely extract myself from what they are trying to do. Plus, we’re still friends and I still talk to Adriana on pretty much a daily basis. So you’ll probably continue to spot the occasional post from me on this blog.

So thanks, Adriana and Perry, for changing my life. Not only do I now know exactly what I want to accomplish in life, but I also have a finer appreciation for the humble hippo than I did before I met you. I could not pay you a higher compliment if I tried. 

I’ve been working on a side project for top SEM company Latitude (formerly Corporem Global) in preparation for New Media Age and Marketing Week’s Online Marketing Show 2005, which is Wednesday and Thursday at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London. Past NMA centrefold and interview subject, tBBC’s own Adriana Cronin-Lukas, will be giving a talk at Latitude’s exhibition space, and I will likely be hanging around the place both days. I am looking forward to it a lot, if only to survey the extent to which traditional marketers ("RSS? You mean the extreme Hindu nationalist party involved in the murder of Gandhi?") are hanging on for dear life and job justification in the UK.

Anyway, I have a couple of spare tickets to OM 2005 up for grabs. Want them? Email me. And if you’re going to the exhibition, do keep an eye out for us and say hello!

Update by Adriana: I will also be speaking at the Brand reputations session. That should be interesting… I hope I won’t get lynched.

Hey, I accidentally discovered a new reason why Flash sites really, really, really (rillyrillyrillyrilly) suck (as if another was needed) today! If you’re doing screenshots of websites, the bits that are Flash render as big white blank spaces in the screenshots.

Speaking of Flash, I have to blog something now that I’ve been trying to hold back on, but it’s all got a bit too much and I simply must write about it.

Not too long ago, I was visiting the offices of a very profitable web agency - the kind of company that calls itself an “interactive agency,” when what they really mean by describing their work as “interactive” is “You can click on it”. It’s like describing books as “interactive” because you get to turn the page. In any case, while I was there, I started admiring some images on the wall. One of the agency partners said, “Go check out [web address]! Those are the images we used in the design.” The following exchange then took place:

ME: It’s not a Flash site, is it?
HIM: Yeah.
ME [as disappointed as if I had just been told that I was going to have to crawl home on my hands and knees over broken glass and then through a shallow lake of ethanol]: Oh, WHY?
HIM [slightly defensive]: Well, it was what the client wanted. It’s not an e-commerce site! They just wanted to communicate the personality of the brand.
ME: I think actual human beings have more personality than a Flash site.
HIM: Well, it’s what the client wanted. We don’t do many Flash sites these days, though.

This is a professional guy whose talents and intelligence I respect immensely, having worked with him on many occasions over the years. For that reason, I didn’t really say anything else. But seriously...What is the state of things when even the cool, fun, non-BS people in the web business think that a Flash site does anything but piss people off? What is the state of things when these people can also say with a straight face that it’s okay to piss off potential customers with a Flash site as long as it’s not an e-commerce site? How is it justifiable to piss people off online, just so they can carry over their irritation with you to your offline vending? What is the big objection to offering potential customers something of real value? I guarantee that it’s cheaper than the cost of an all bells, all whistles, all annoying Flash site.

Dear ignorant business decisionmakers: The internet is not a channel. We are not all sitting here with dumb, easily amused grins on our faces, taking what’s broadcasted at us. It’s a two-way space and when useless bullshit comes at us from your direction, we’ll throw right back at you with indifference (best case scenario) or anger and a resolve against giving you money that might surprise you in its steeliness. If you want some value from us, you’re going to have to pony up some value to us. 

When MTV producer Shane Nickerson was ambushed by tabloid reporters with (what seems to be) a non-story, who showed up at his home on Mother’s Day, he didn’t let a simple “No comment” reported by the tabloids stand as the last word. Instead, he told his side of the story on his blog. And Jessica Stover, the mere acquaintance of Nickerson’s whose family was harassed by the National Enquirer on Mother’s Day? She also published her take on these events on her own blog, including Enquirer reporter Rita Skeeter repeatedly urging her to phone tips into the tabloid for “good money” or revenge.

I’m sure the tabloids would be a lot happier if relatively unknown people like Shane Nickerson and Jessica Stover didn’t have access to their own press machine via blog - another sign, as if one were needed, that things are changing for the better.

I’ll be flying back to LA on Thursday, but only until the 22nd of April. If you missed me during my last trip, drop me an email and maybe we can get together.

I know that some people contacted me about meeting during my last trip and I wasn’t able to find a slot for them, but it all depends on both our schedules. I had very productive and interesting meetings with everyone I did manage to see last time, though, so I think I’ll keep blogging about upcoming travels - just in case the stars align and one of us ends up with a (genuinely) free lunch. 

In LA last week, Perry and I had lunch with the Drudge Report‘s Andrew Breitbart, who is in the hot seat now as the press clamours to find out if he is the mastermind behind Arianna Huffington’s new celebrity group blog. (Andrew and Arianna both attended our party the week before. Don’t come near us, or you’ll end up with reporters on your doorstep, too.)

This New York Observer piece about the matter, entitled “Blogorrhea” (yawn), has been much-linked in the blogosphere. It is well worth a read, if only to delight in Matt Drudge’s paranoid distaste for bloggers. Quite ironic, when you consider that he started out as the self-styled lone internet journalist attempting to challenge and usurp the mainstream media. Drudge has a history with this kind of denial, but the Observer piece is still fun reading.

Mr. Drudge said he doubted the market for news links would support more players.

“I don’t think that need is there,” he said. “I think I fill that need.”

...Mr. Drudge said Mr. Breitbart’s influence was a moot point, because “I’m the final edit. I have control on the Web site. I always have the final edit. My name is on the page.”

If anyone is handy with PhotoShop and would like to graft Matt Drudge’s face onto Norma Desmond‘s body, feel free. 

Perry and I have returned from our month-long sojourn to Los Angeles, and are frantically getting caught up on London business - hence the unusual silence here. Even with our indispensible internal blog, which saves us untold amounts of time and energy in keeping up-to-speed and helping us to collaborate from even 6000 miles away, there is much to do.

Some things are more enjoyable to share face to face, though. You don’t really get the satisfaction of seeing a look of horror on a person’s face when they absorb some bit of information that you’ve posted to the internal blog. For me, the expression of disgust and revulsion on Adriana’s face when Perry and I told her of the widespread fake blogging that we heard of firsthand, from people who are actively executing fake blogs for companies, was priceless.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody...who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.

The really sad thing? A quick Technorati search on the blog’s URL shows that it has only been linked to by one other blog - whose author just happens to be a friend of the PR flack. The companies - household names of the highest order - that pony up for coverage on this “big traffic” blog could easily check its credentials. Instead, they continue to pay lip service to taking part in a “conversation” with customers...and pay PR companies that claim to “get blogging” for utterly worthless “services”. Niall Cook’s prediction for 2005 is as spot-on as ever.

Big Blog Company client Kamal Aboukhater, producer of the independent film Blowing Smoke (yes, that’s our lead designer’s gorgeous creation), has put an invitation out to readers of the movie’s blog to come to a special screening of the film on April 21 in Los Angeles.

I think this is a first of its kind invitation from a film producer via movie blog - very exciting stuff. Blowing Smoke is a provocative film - the New York Post’s Richard Johnson called it ”the most politically incorrect movie ever made” - and well worth checking out. RSVP now, as space is limited. 

You want people to reinvent your product in new ways, unnamed client? Well, why don’t you try asking your customers to do it for you; they’re the ones who’d know best. Start a blog. Start a conversation. Read others’ blogs. Join in the conversation. Ask people what they think. Surprise: They’ll tell you. Then all you have to do is listen.
-Jeff Jarvis

This Creative Commons-licensed iPod stand (”Seeing as the new iPods don’t come with docks, and no-one wants to spend $30+ on a bit of plastic or metal to stand their iPods on, I’ve drawn up a template for a simple, functional and attractive iPod stand you can download as a pdf, print out, stick on some card and assemble,” says the creator) is a very good example of what SMLXL’s Alan Moore is talking about here:

[A]ll these additional devices iTrip, Airplay, etc are brand building for Apple, without Apple spending a cent...And this I think is important to think about as companies work on their siloed approaches to innovation, marketing etc. That by creating a product, a service, an innovation process, that people can co-create value, eiither economically or from a perspective of it being a valuable experience. That has got to be good...[W]hat Apple has done to my mind is great marketing. Because you don’t even know it exists.

Homework assignment from me: Spend five minutes thinking about how your company can apply this concept to its business model, rejecting siloed approaches to innovation and marketing.

I had lunch on Monday with Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild, here in LA (yes, still). I was so cheered that she was well aware of the thriving food blog niche - which, by the way, should have a lot more food companies engaging it and taking part in the conversations going on there. Indeed, Julie/Julia Project blogger Julie Powell won a James Beard Foundation Award for an article she was commissioned to write for Bon Appétit last year.

As we sat eating lunch, who should walk in but Hollwood Reporter editor Anne Thompson, who attended our LA blog party a couple of weeks ago, and who met with Adriana in January for a blogging bootcamp. It’s a small world, online and offline - especially when you blog.

That would be Howard Owens. And this would be him, in a photo I took when Perry and I visited him yesterday at his office overlooking the newsroom of the Ventura County Star in southern California.

Howard came to our LA blogger/media party last week, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him at length. So it was quite buoying to hear him, as a mainstream media guy, saying quite smart and correct things about how blogging does and can relate to established media. Sometimes, just connecting with someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to this subject can set me on a high for the rest of the day. “Yay, a total lack of BS and a whole lot of intelligence!” Don’t worry, I don’t embarrass myself or Perry by exclaiming this aloud. Not usually, anyway.

Perry and I met today in Los Angeles with someone whose blog I have linked to previously, someone whose office we would not have been sitting in if not for the network effect of the blogosphere: John Bryant, founder and CEO of Operation Hope.

It’s clear from John’s blog that he’s got the blogging bug - not only does he post on an almost daily basis, but he has also started podcasting his speeches! John has a lot of inspiring and intelligent things to say about empowering people to do better for themselves by teaching them to do better, and these podcasts are a great gift to the blogosphere.

Thanks to our pal Loic Le Meur for helping John to set up his blog - if you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known about what John and Operation HOPE are achieving, wouldn’t feel such an affinity for their mission (I wish I was attending this upcoming Operation HOPE event), wouldn’t have met John today, and wouldn’t be telling everyone I talk to about this amazing organization. Now let’s replicate that word of mouth online, across the blogosphere, shall we?

Saturday night’s American Cinema Foundation panel at the American Film Institute in LA, moderated by Cathy Seipp, was fascinating on several levels.

The theme of the event was “Mass market, smart content,” and featured four TV writers/producers/directors: Paul Feig (creator and executive producer: “Freaks & Geeks;” director: “Arrested Development;” director and writer, the feature film “I Am David;” author: “Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence” and the upcoming “Superstud: How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin"), Scott Kaufer (executive producer: “Boston Legal;” writer: “Gilmore Girls,” “Chris Isaak Show,” “Murphy Brown"), Rob Long (co-creator and excecutive producer: “Men, Women & Dogs,” “Love & Money,” “George & Leo;” executive producer: “Cheers") and Tim Minear (executive produer: “The Inside,” “Wonderfalls,” “Angel,” “Firefly"). Together, they tackled the issue of how successful television writers manage to keep their distinct viewpoints when writing for the mass market.

I believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as ‘the mainstream,’ and that the mass market is dead, and being replaced by a mass of niches. I also believe that the mass media is not being destroyed, merely altered radically, and individuals are being liberated from the mass by the unprecedented choice of personal relevance that (thanks to things like blogs, mp3s, TV on DVD, podcasting, and TiVo) they have today - and that choice of personal relevance is increasing exponentially at a rapid rate. So the topic of the panel was extremely appealing to me as a total geek on the social ramifications of emergent technology tip.

I didn’t want to hit the guys over the head with the beliefs I laid out above, so I asked them if they thought that TV series on DVD (which they all seemed to agree was the best thing to happen to TV in a long time, even if the lack of leadership in the Writers’ Guild means that they get screwed out of decent earnings, receiving only 2 or 4 pennies per DVD sale), TiVo, and that greater choice of personal relevance is going to affect what they do in any significant way. Every panel member had something to say about that, but the most interesting answer came from Paul Feig, who said that the bottom line is that the show that draws the most advertising revenue wins, and it will always be that way.

Except I am sure that it won’t always be that way, and that the advances in emergent technologies and the rebirth of niche will bring about that dramatic shift a lot sooner than we may think. The business model of broadcast must change if it is not to die (and with only 12 per cent of US viewers getting their TV via antenna these days anyway, ripping it down isn’t a bad idea). As viewers (read: customers) get used to having that personal choice of relevance, they will throw their attention (read: value) to the places where they can get it: cable, satellite, and the internet. And if you think advertisers won’t pick up on that and move their ad spend accordingly, I’ve got some stock in broadcast that I’d just love to sell you.

The kicker being, I don’t believe that advertising revenue is going to be the bread and butter of TV on cable, satellite, and the internet. Sure, there will be ads in the world as long as there are lazy, clueless companies who believe in ”just in case” marketing. But the costs of that kind of marketing are rising, the effectiveness declining, and profits down as a result.

Which brings us to my point: This drive to niche dovetails very nicely with the need of companies to put customers at the beginning of the value chain instead of at the end of it. The increasing emphasis on the individual also means a move from push marketing to engagement marketing. So instead of wasting a great deal of money on a TV ad, a company can spend a fraction of that on, say, developing great blogs to provide value and engage the niche they are targetting. (They can throw some podcasts up there while they’re at it.)

So here’s the question I really wish I had asked the panel: Ten years from now, who exactly is going to be spending the kind of money on network TV ads that they need to maintain this broken system? And if that money isn’t there, will you be running over non-TV-watching freaks with your Kia instead of your Mercedes?

It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to do it…

Friday night in Hollywood, Perry and I hosted a party for bloggers and media types: film producer Brian Linse, LA journalist and media critic Cathy Seipp, advice columnist Amy Alkon, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, senior Variety editor Pat Saperstein, husband-and-wife journalists Matt Welch and Emmanuelle Richard (who went straight from the party to E!’s studios to do some punditry on the Michael Jackson case for French TV), and Ventura County Star director of new media Howard Owens.

There were even some people who don’t have blogs: Mickey Kaus (no permalinks, no blog, dude), Arianna Huffington (who came to our party from dinner with Barack Obama at David Geffen’s house - talk about a nosebleed-inducing descent from the A-list), Hollywood, Interrupted author and Drudge Report co-editor Andrew Breitbart, Vanity Fair contributing editor Richard Rushfield, Hollywood political activist Donna Bojarsky, digital motion picture guru Bijan Tehrani, LATimes.com GM Rob Barrett, journalist Ruth Shalit, transatlantic TV and filmmaker Peter Stuart, The Hollywood Reporter senior film editor Anne Thompson, film critic Jeffrey Wells, and director James Orr. There were others there, too, but I’m not sure how they feel about being blogged. 

It was a great bash. I got an email from one of the attendees this morning, saying: “It was like a party with old friends.” After hearing about it, someone asked me today, “So are you from LA? With that guest list, it’s like you’ve lived here for years.” Well, no. I’m from Ohio, where I grew up on a farm. My first trip to California took place in December 2004. All the people I know in Los Angeles, even those who are themselves not bloggers and perhaps not even internet users, I know because I started blogging and engaging with other bloggers. I’ve said it once and God knows I’ll say it again, but while the technology that enables this is certainly remarkable, it is the network effect of blogging that is truly amazing. 

Perry and I went to the Art Institute of California yesterday to talk to some students about blogging. The campus has a lively atmosphere, and the students we met were all bright and personable - and very curious about blogs.

We had a great conversation, as I talked to them about how building an online portfolio with a blog - perhaps using one of Typepad‘s mixed media templates - could help them to make their talent and expertise tangible, searchable, and accessible to the sort of people to whom they would love to show their work. Bijan Tehrani, the editor of Digital Journal Online and the man who arranged our talk with the students, said that just two days ago he had talked to someone at one of the major global entertainment companies who volunteered the information that they are scouring blogs for new talent. These kids are lucky to be entering the workforce at a time when it is so easy and inexpensive to reach a network of millions and demonstrate for the people within that network who are worthwhile to them - like the guys at entertainment companies who scout blogs for new hires - exactly why they should sit up and take note of their talent.

One artist who should take note of this is a guy named Todd Goldman. Walking around The Grove in Los Angeles earlier this week, I wandered into an art store that was full of his prints. They’re all pretty humorous, and there was one in particular that made me think, “I want to have my picture taken with that one!” Inside the store, I asked the manager - who pounced on me as soon as I entered, which I hate - if my friend could take my photo inside the store. “No,” he replied, in a tone that suggested that he had mistaken me for a retarded child. “We want people to buy the prints, not take pictures of them.”

If this guy thinks he’s selling more prints by limiting peoples’ ability to spread the word about them, I want to know what he’s smoking. The real kicker? There are multiple websites where the images of the prints can be easily downloaded in various sizes. So I can do that, but I can’t take a picture of myself with a print and post it to my blog, along with a link to the artist’s site, thus increasing the chance of him selling some of his work - which, in addition to the prints, includes a whole line of licensed merchandise. Bad business decision, dude. I’ll let one of the artist’s images speak for me, because it really does say it all.

Yep, Perry and I are still in LA. One of the nice things about being here is that - with the torrential downpours and landslides (hopefully) over for the time being - we get to have meetings outside in the sunshine.

And so it was on Tuesday, when we worked on our tans (yeah, as if pasty white London dwellers ever get tan) while talking to stellar film journalist David Poland of Movie City News and Hot Blog. David’s been blogging at the latter since the autumn of last year, and in that time has broken a fair number of stories on his blog. And he told me and Perry that when big media outlets pick up on his scoops, they will never cite his blog as a source - it’s always “an online report” with no actual credit given. Amazing, especially coming from people who see fit to lecture bloggers about how they need to sharpen their journalism skills.

I had a similar problem with the Guardian newspaper here in Britain, when they picked up two different scoops from one of my blogs and refused to cite the source. Instead, they attributed the items to “an internet website” (as opposed to those websites you get in places other than the internet...I guess). I got an apology from an editor, but never any sort of clarification - and it happened not once, but twice. This was more than a year ago, and the Guardian has some clever sticks on board now who actually do understand a lot about blogging - Simon Waldman, Neil McIntosh, and Bobbie Johnson amongst them - so one would hope that they now understand that scoops grabbed from blogs do actually count.

And speaking of Neil McIntosh, check out his post on the struggle the New York Times is having over putting their content behind a paywall. He quotes Steve Outing at Poynter, who writes:

I think that the only news publishers who will be able to charge are those with extremely narrow and unique content niches. For everyone else, the benefits of being reachable in a Google-driven world outweigh what can be gained from subscription revenues. That’s because the network makes it so easy to find similar or the same information elsewhere for free.

Further testament to the fact that the mass market is dead, to be replaced by a mass of niches. If that’s not news that’s fit to print, I don’t know what is.

Well, Perry and I landed safely in LA yesterday, and I’ve already had my first conversation with a total stranger about blogging.

After having my eyebrows and nails done in Beverly Hills, I got a cab back to where I am staying in Park La Brea. Along the way, the driver asked me what I do. “Have you heard of blogs?” I asked. “Of course I’ve heard of blogs!” he replied. “That’s all we hear on the radio all day in our cabs, the conservatives and the liberals are all blogging and it’s all blog-this and blog-that. It’s pretty interesting.”

As it turned out, the cabbie had grown up in the UK, gone to boarding school there, but was born in Iran. When I told him that there’s a thriving Iranian blogosphere, he was surprised - and eager to find out more. I gave him my card and promised to email him links to Iranian blogs. “Wow, that really is something,” he said. “I had no idea those kinds of worlds are out there on the internet.”

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when that guy actually starts getting into the Iranian blogosphere. For now, I’m just happy to have pointed him in its general direction. 

Weblogs have been massively hyped by the media. And they aren’t going to change the face of journalism any time soon.
-Nick Denton, July 2, 2002 - as quoted by Elizabeth Spiers, February 24, 2005

Dissemination of information is great, but how much of it is trustworthy? [Blogs] are an interesting phenomenon, but I don’t think they will be as talked about in a year’s time.
-Mike Smartt, (now former, but not before getting an OBE from the Queen) editor of BBC News Online, 25 March, 2003

First, big media denied that blogs existed or mattered. Then we saw anger...We are starting to see bargaining as blogs are incorporated in, gingerly, by some big media. I’ve seen depression; some people I know in this business say it will never be the same (and I try to supress my grins). Acceptance isn’t far off.
-Jeff Jarvis

In a very brief post, Fred Wilson encapsulates the thoughts that jolt me every day when I consider the times we live in and the reasons I love the things I get to be involved with in working for tBBC. The amazing thing is, many of us who are aware of these developments are incredibly nonchalant about them. The even more amazing thing is, the progress does not stop here.

Link via Jeff Jarvis

I gave my blogboy presentation to a bunch of strategic guys at a certain major mass media company (not my employer’s) the other day and said that the mass market was dead, to be replaced by the mass of niches, and the young MBAs in the room screeched as if I’d goosed them. Fine, I said, imagine that things won’t change and others will come along and eat you up bit by bit. You’ll still be there, but you’ll have new competitors and your growth will be gone.

-Jeff Jarvis, president & creative director, Advance.net

Last night, Adriana and I attended The Fall and Fall of Journalism, an event at the London School of Economics which aimed to debate whether the traditional role of journalists is being usurped by simply anyone who has access to a digital camera, camcorder and the internet and explore the new phenomena of citizen reporting, blogging and other new technology/new media-enabled reporting. (Details of the panellists can be found behind the hyperlink.)

It can be quite a drama, in Britain, to be very straightforward about the quality of debate on blogging in this country. If you take issue with a particular argument that someone has made, people seem to feel that you are insulting the person who made the argument. The alternative is to nod and smile and pretend that a splendid bunch of people have inevitably produced a splendid event, full of splendid insights and imparted knowledge for the audience.

That alternative is, quite frankly, dishonest - and it is not the sort of thing any self-respecting, truth-seeking person (blogger, journalist, or otherwise) can do without compromising his or her integrity. I preface my comments on the LSE event if only to prepare people who may be very unfamiliar with blogging for something that is one of the universal truths about those who operate in blogosphere: Our BS detectors are very sharp, and we do not hesitate to use them.

Considering how well Microsoft does blogging, in general, it’s disappointing to see that they think a page of text with no permalinks is a blog. Amusing content, courtesy of Gael Fashingbauer-Cooper - who does actually blog at the excellent Popculturejunkmail - but not a blog. (Considering that Fashingbauer-Cooper also writes Test Pattern for MSNBC, which does have permalinks, I’m not sure how they got the Oscars “blog” so wrong.)

Congratulations to my favourite obscure SME blog, Butler Sheet Metal’s Tinbasher, for winning the best small business blog award from the 2005 Business Blogging Awards. I would say that the best recognition one can get from one’s business blog comes from customers and industry peers, but I’m glad to see Tinbasher blogger Paul Woodhouse receive this gong. If his piece on the benefits of business blogging is anything to go by, he understands all too well that his company gets far more than just awards out of their blog.

Back in November, a BBC interviewer asked me if blogging is “the new jazz”. I cannot tell you how hard my eyes rolled at that one.

When I related the exchange to Mike Sigal from Guidewire, the group that stages DEMO, his eyes widened. ”Actually,” he said, “the interviewer didn’t realise it, but his question could be interpreted to make sense.” Mike’s take was that, since bloggers riff off of one another, in a way the whole process of blogging is somewhat jazz-like. Well, okay.

Slate’s Josh Levin has taken an analogy that just about makes sense and managed to get it all wrong. No, I’m not referring to his mistaken belief that credential is a verb (c’mon, dude, didn’t a grasp of basic grammar come with those credentials of yours?). His claim that rappers and bloggers were “separated at birth” is, I guess, supposed to be a humorous take - or so the exclamation point in the subtitle indicates. Levin proclaims:

[I]n newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts. For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage.

Levin maintains that citing sources in blog posts equals stealing. The logic that has led him to this conclusion can only be imagined, and it ain’t pretty. (Does he pride himself on never citing research or sources in his own work, or did I imagine all those links to, er, bloggers in his piece?) Still, he’s demonstrated adept use of another trick of the trade that makes “credentialed” journalists, as he’d refer to himself, so goshdarned special: Dressing up an incorrect argument as a humour piece, all the better to claim, “Hey, it was meant to be funny, don’t take this stuff so seriously!” when he gets laughed at for being wrong. As Peggy Noonan wrote recently (and Adriana blogged here even more recently):

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

Congratulations on your credentials, Levin. I hope they have served you well in an industry where you imagine that citing research and sources is tantamount to theft, because you won’t be getting by on them for much longer. 

For those who haven’t seen it, you simply must check out Jon Stewart’s Daily Show take on bloggers. In addition to hitting the nail on the head about credibility and journalism, using words like blogosphere without explanation, and providing a graphic illustration of the waves of influence of blogs and how a single permalinked post from one blog can eventually reach the mainstream offline press, it’s pretty freaking funny, too.

Now, what I want to know is, why doesn’t the Daily Show have a blog?

Link via Jeff Jarvis

It’s about a year ago that I started the Butler Sheetmetal Ltd site and also the first time I’d ever touched one. I’d never touched a blog and I thought SEO and SERPS were something you had to attend when they stopped your welfare benefits...[I]f I could go back a year knowing what I know now, the only thing I’d have done differently would be to have a blog from the off. It’s now the most crucial aspect of our web presence by a country mile.

It’s just a shame that it took so long to work it out.
-Paul Woodhouse, Butler Sheetmetal Ltd

tBBC’s Perry de Havilland and I will be descending on Los Angeles for the month of March, in order to deal with clients there and do all sorts of interesting things (plus a lot of sitting in traffic jams) in the name of blogging.

Our calendars are quickly filling up, but I know we’ve got some clever people reading us (and linking to us) in LA. So...Wanna get together? Drop me an email (jackie - at - bigblog.net) and let’s talk, even if our previous conversations have been confined to the blogosphere, or even if we’ve never talked before. If nothing else, we need people to help us sample all the delights of the Farmers’ Market on the tight schedule of four weeks to do so…

Jeff Jarvis has some wisdom to share with his fellow Big Media players about what the resignation of CNN chief Eason Jordan - and all of the other big stories pursued relentlessly by bloggers and all but ignored by mainstream media until someone resigns or is fired - means to them:

First, journalist-priests are no longer the gatekeepers in either direction—to authority and truth for the public, or from newsmakers to the people. Now the public can demand answers from the powerful and the powerful can avoid the press and talk to the public in new ways.

Second, news just speeded up and old media isn’t ready for this. We used to control the speed of news because we were the gatekeepers. No more. That is a big disconnect between big and citizens’ media: We want answers and we don’t want the press or the powerful to take their sweet time to give them to us.

Third, off-the-record is dead. Now that everyone has access to a press—the internet—anyone you talk to could be a Wolf Blitzer in sheep’s clothing.

Welcome to the age of transparency.

How long it will take old media - and business - to get up to speed with this new age is anybody’s guess. I suspect the ones who lag will find themselves left behind. Forgive me if I don’t shed too many tears for their demise, though. 

The article on Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble in the current issue of The Economist ends on a pondering note:

Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? [...] Will [Scoble] criticise only the small things, but toe the line on the big issues? As his page views, fame and influence increase, it might become increasingly difficult for him not to feel self-conscious, and to resist the deadening effect that this can have on any writer’s prose.

Could happen. And if it did, who would suffer? Well, as the article implies, both Scoble himself and Microsoft would be worse off if the ongoing peer review called the blogosphere calls him on his (at this point hypothetical) suckage. That’s the thing about blogs: anyone can have their say on one, and if the influential nodes in the network are of the opinion that you are full of BS and nothing more than a PR puppet, well, word gets around.

Look, the only reason Scoble has credibility is because he has earned it. Earned it with whom? Sure, with his employers at Microsoft. But it’s the credibility he has earned with the blogosphere that makes him so influential.

The key thing to remember is this: When it comes to credibility, the blogosphere giveth and the blogosphere taketh away. I’m pretty sure Robert Scoble understands this perfectly. How long it takes other companies to cotton on to it is another question entirely.

Blogger Patrick Crozier is wondering how in the world the blogosphere, considering its relatively limited readership, has brought down yet another mainstream media journalist, CNN’s Eason Jordan.

As I explained in Patrick’s comments, there are several waves of influence with blogs:

1. That blog’s own readers
2. The readers of other blogs, whose authors link to Number 1’s posts
3. The readers of online publications - Guardian Online, Wired.com, MSNBC.com, Slashdot, Janes.com, etc - which pick up on blog content
4. Offline publications which pick up on stuff from online (such as when Matt Drudge in 1998 broke the Lewinsky scandal and it then hit everywhere in the mainstream media)
5. Readers of those offline publications spreading the news via more traditional word of mouth

Because, you know, this is what it’s all about - word of mouth, but in an incredibly accessible, unprecedentedly permanent, tangible, searchable way. It is entirely correct to credit the blogosphere and not blogs. The format makes all this possible, but without the network to pass on the information, it goes nowhere. 

I get more out of my blog than it gets out of me. And you know what, I started out as an advice columnist by giving free advice on a NYC street corner. Sometimes, chasing a dollar at every moment isn’t the best way to get to piles of them.
-Advice Goddess Amy Alkon (in the comments at fellow journalist Cathy Seipp’s blog), whose column is syndicated in more than 100 newspaper, and who is also an ardent blogger (Amy goes on to say: In fact, after putting all this down in a paragraph—it occurs to me that I should probably have to pay a fee to blog—but I’m glad that it hasn’t come to that.)