“Asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.” — Dave Winer’s
Scott Rosenberg recounts how he got the news that the next version of Windows will be delayed, and what that might mean for people in the news business:
As tech news goes today, so ultimately will go the rest of the news. It’s not the death of newspapers or pro journalism, but it’s further evidence that the pros face an extremely tough challenge: they’re rarely going to be first, so they’d damn well better be good. But it’s hard to hire enough good people to be good at everything; a newsroom has only so many seats, and the Web’s supply of amateur experts, anonymous insiders and random kibitzers with an occasional insight is limitless. The pros had better prepare to be outgunned.
This competition will force journalists to stop being lazy and to find and reconnect with what is unique about their work, now that so much of what they used to do is being done for free, and often well, by amateurs.
If I had the time (and the nerve), it might be interesting to look at every story one of our networks did for the past 30 days. Put a check-mark beside every story that was “original”…that we didn’t get from an affiliate, a news releases, or from some other source.
The next question might be: Did we do this story any differently or better than the other news organizations that covered it? Like the man said, we’re rarely going to be first, so we damn well better be good. [via Scripting News]
Dave Winer’s simple explanation of blogging and OPML:
First, create a new weblog on one of the free services, like Blogger or MSN Spaces. It takes about five minutes, and is about as hard as creating an email address on Yahoo or Hotmail, and represents less of a commitment. Then make your first post, something like Hello There, or Testing 1-2-3. Once you’ve verified that it works, you can stop there.
Then someday, when you’re in the shower or lying in bed in the morning and get an idea that you wish you could tell everyone, remember that you have a blog, and go to the computer, and write it up and publish it. That actually feels pretty good, even if you think no one will read it, because you got it off your chest.
Then in a few days Google will probably visit your site and index the post, and then when someone searches for that subject, your page will come up, and maybe you’ll pass that idea on to someone who can use it, or meet someone who agrees, or someone who disagrees. And that’s blogging, and that’s all it is.
As for OPML:
Did you ever have an idea you wanted to post on your blog that didn’t seem big enough to be an essay? An idea that could be expressed in a sentence, or less, but still deserved to get out there? In writing school they teach that less is better. If you can say something in three words instead of twenty, say it in three. It communicates better. Well, none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts.
Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you’re gone?
An intriguing question posed by Dave Winer (a couple of years ago). If I read the post correctly, he’s wondering if there is really more to us than the stories we tell. For those of us that attempt to share our hopes and fears, successes and failures (in journals like this one)…is there really more to us than our blogs? Reminds me of a great T-Shirt David (Brazeal) found on someone’s blog: Enough about me. Let’s talk about my blog.
“We’re seeking out commercial information all the time. When you look up a movie review, or choose a plane flight, shop for an apartment, pick a restaurant or review your stock portfolio, you are seeking commercial information. So, therefore, there’s nothing particularly bad about commercials.”
— Dave Winer’s Advertising-in-the-age-of-podcasts Manifesto
“In less than six months, more than 2,000 podcasters have sprung up. Eventually an iPod-like device will have a subscription capability built in so you won’t even need to be tethered to a computer. It’s not hard to imagine an iPod with WiFi capabilities that could become a radio with no geographic limits.”
— Dave Winer
Dave Winer asks: “wouldn’t it be great if we had a TV network whose only job was to explain what was really going on on the other networks? “
“Weblog software is going to be like mail servers. Lots of ways to deploy, every niche filled. For the masses, services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Blogging servers for corporations, inside and outside of the firewall. For schools, for the military, specialized systems for lawyers, librarians, professors, reporters, magazines, daily newspapers. The next President will have a blog. Writing for the Web, the prevailing form of publishing in the early 21st Century, will come in many sizes and shapes, flavors and styles. It won’t be one-size-fits-all. Open formats and protocols will make this possible.”
— Dave Winer on blogging