Karl Rove on why liberals are more likely to be online than conservatives:
“…a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things,” Rove said. “The idea of spending a lot of time on the internet and taking their talents and displaying them there is not something [conservatives] really do.”
That’s not counting the hours spent deleting White House emails.
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University’s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. [Wikipedia]
“Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It’s also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall and pick out clothes. And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing — why would anyone put such drivel out in public?
It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.
We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us.” – Page 84
“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.
Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.” – Page 47
“For people with a professional outlook, it’s hard to understand how something that isn’t professionally could affect them — not only is the internet not newspaper, it isn’t a business, or even an institution. There was a kind of narcissistic bias in the profession; the only threats they tended to take sseriously were from other professional media outlets, whether newspapers, TV, or radio stations. This bias had them defending against the wrong thing when amateurs began producing material on their own.” – Page 56
“As Scott Bradner, a former trustee of the Internet Society, puts it, ‘The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.'” – Page 99
“We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.” – Page 104
“The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.” – Page 105
“Any radical change in our ability to communicate with one another changes society. A culture with printing presses is a different kind of culture from one that doesn’t have them.”
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.
The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society.” – Page 107
“All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the the world.” – Page 107
“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies — it happens when society adopts new behaviors.” – Page 160
“Another advantage of blogs over traditional media outlets is that no one can found a newspaper on a moment’s notice, run it for two issues, and then fold it, while incurring no cost but leaving a permanent record.” – Page 170
“As an advertising medium, the Internet is already larger than radio. It will approach $34 billion this year and is on a trajectory to overtake newspaper advertising within five years. In virtually all markets, the largest local Web site (typically run by a newspaper company) is now grossing more ad revenue than the largest radio station in that market. In some markets, the largest site is grossing more than the largest cluster of stations.”
“Your radio reps have a bounty on their heads. We survey more than 3,000 local Web sites every year about their revenues, expenses, number of salespeople and other revenue-related topics. The ones with the greatest market share and revenue have an interesting characteristic in common: a star-performing “former radio rep” on the sales staff. The word has spread that radio salespeople know how to sell the Internet, and newspaper and TV Web site managers have been recruiting them left and right. Radio reps know how to cold-call, how to generate new business, and how to sell reach and frequency. That’s a perfect match for Internet sales.” — Gordon Borrell, writing in Inside Radio
Gabe and Max explain “How to get the Dream Life of Your Dreams Using the Internet.” This is the kind of amateur video that Hollywood should be very concerned about. This is bone dry humor of the first order. Fax us your email address now! [Thanks, David]
Mark Ramsey shares some thoughts on a story in the Sunday Times of London about the growing number of Brits tuning in to personalized Internet “radio” every week (and tuning out traditional radio).
Sunday Times: “Personalised broadcasts of the future will probably have either advertising or a price tag attached, just as they do today. But once your radio knows exactly what you want to hear, the idea of a human DJ – however cheeky his banter – might start to sound a little dated.”
Ramsey: “Over the long haul I fully expect the influence of music-oriented radio to diminish. Because music, my friends, is a commodity. Not only can anyone string together a playlist, but nobody can string together my favorite playlist better than I can.”
“What it all adds up to is the gradual near-obsolescence of music radio, not in a blink, but by a slow and persistent siphoning of audience and attention and interest and advertisers. This process will take years to happen.”
I read a lot of stories like this but very few on the impact of Internet “stations” on non-music formats. Are news-talk formats feeling any effect from the web? My radio pals can feel free to post an anonymous comment.
A week ago I posted about doing an iChat consultation with my new doc. Tonight I found this story about a doctor in Washington who has taken his entire practice online:
Dr. Howard Stark’s office is quiet. Very quiet. No patients sit in his waiting room. No receptionist answers the telephone. Stark does not have a receptionist. Instead, he and his assistant Michele Norris-Bell check e-mail alerts on handheld devices and — between seeing patients in person — on a desktop computer.
Stark has moved most of his practice, based in Washington, onto the Internet and he couldn’t be happier. Since he started his Web-based service two years ago, he has received 14,000 e-mails. And yet, he feels more like an old-fashioned family doctor in a small town than a modern, harried physician.
‘ "That’s 14,000 phone calls that we did not have to answer and that patients did not have to make," ‘ Stark said.
He does not charge for answering an e-mail. "You have to come in one time a year for an annual exam," Stark said.
The idea –which makes more sense if you read the full story– came to him while booking a flight.
"I was sitting here and making a seat assignment to go to Miami. And I said, ‘why is it I can make a seat assignment four months in advance and my patients can’t book a half-hour appointment? I started thinking of other things that could be done online."
For instance, written instructions on how to prepare for a colonoscopy, general health tips, or information on Lyme disease.
Which reminded me of the Living Healthy Podcast.
I really think we’ll be seeing more of this.
One of my earliest posts (2/18/02) was a gush about the 1993 film True Romance. I titled the post: “It Ain’t White Boy Day Is It?” …one of many great lines in the movie.
Of the 3,000+ posts here at smays.com, that one still gets the most comments. But I’m more proud of the fact that this post is the #1 Google search result for “white boy day.”
Out of how many results, you ask? Put quotation marks around the phrase: 5,490. No quotation marks: 9,880,000. This is why we blog.
Mindy McAdams (Teaching Online Journalism) points to a very interesting post by Paul Conley. Mr. Conley has held senior positions at Knight-Ridder, CNN, Primedia/Prism and Bloomberg. He serves on the professional advisory boards of College Media Advisers, the national group that works with student journalists, and Northwest Missouri State University’s Mass Communications program. His clients include Primedia/Prism, Reed Business, About.com and IDG.
“I’m urging employers not to offer any training in Web journalism. There are two reasons for this. Here they are:
1. You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.
For someone to work on the Web, they must be part of the Web. That, after all, is what the Web means. The Web is a web. It exists as a series of connections. An online journalist isn’t a journalist who works online. He’s a journalist who lives online. He’s part of the Web.It’s a waste of time and money to teach multimedia skills and technology to someone who hasn’t already become part of the Web. And there’s no need to teach skills and technology to the journalists who are already part of Web culture, because the culture requires participation in skills and technology.
Or, to put it another way — I cannot teach the Web. No one can. Yet all of us who are part of the Web are learning the Web.2. When the fighting begins, the training must end.
We cannot move backward to round up the stragglers and train them to fight. It’s too late to try to convince print journalists that the Web has value. It’s too late to tell them that an Internet connection is worth a few dollars a month. As revenue shrinks, we can’t spend money on training. We can’t gather up the print folks and “prepare them as online journalists.”You can’t prepare people to dig a fighting (fox?) hole. You just tell them to dig. And the ones who don’t dig fast enough, deep enough or well enough, die.”
Wow. I confess that I agree with Conley but would never say it around my reporter friends. What good can come of telling them it’s too late. The train left the station and they can’t run fast enough to catch it.
Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman on why most TV stations haven’t done well online:
“I’ll give you these four reasons: 1) lack of investment in people and technology 2) unwillingness to take necessary risks 3) TV-driven power structure which results in the inability for web management to quickly allocate resources as they see fit and 4) a bizarre addiction to brand consistency, which limits creative ideas up and down the organization.”
I think these apply to most “old media” companies. Brand extension is not always the way to go.
That’s the title of a post by Jeff Jarvis featuring some amazing stats on Google. I’d post them here he deserves the page view for pulling them together.