Tag Archives: Quotable

Biocentrism

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I’m reading a mind-stretching book. Biocentrism by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman). I wouldn’t know where to begin describing what this book is about. Like John Sebastian said, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.”
The authors are very good at explaining the most complex concepts. Here’s a little riff on Time:
“Imagine that existance is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the recording itself, and depending on wherethe needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we all the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, ever moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.”
This book is not for everyone. If you have too much “reality” in you life to think about the possibility it’s all “in your head,” you can take a pass on Biocentrism. But it will get a spot on my nightstand as one of those books I’ll have to read again and again.

Screen shot 2009-12-14 at Mon, Dec 14, 8.15.12 PMI’m reading a mind-stretching book. Biocentrism by Robert Lanza (with Bob Berman). I wouldn’t know where to begin describing what this book is about. Like John Sebastian said, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.”

The authors, however, are very good at explaining the most complex concepts. Here’s a little riff on Time:

“Imagine that existence is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the recording itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music, before and after the song now being heard, is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, every moment and day enduring in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. We do not experience time in which “Stardust” often plays, because we experience time linearly.”

This book is not for everyone. If you have too much “reality” in you life to think about the possibility it’s all “in your head,” you can take a pass on Biocentrism. But it will get a spot on my nightstand as one of those books I’ll have to read again and again.

“Journalism is like skiing in the 50s or 60s”

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An interesting analogy by Dave Winer:

“Previously it had been a sport that very few people enjoyed, and they were all very good. But now the doors are opening to amateurs. The pros have to share the slopes with people who don’t take the sport as seriously as they do. They’re still going to be able to ski, but the rest of us are not just going to admire them for how skilled they are, we’re going to do it too. They can earn a living as ski patrol and ski instructors. Or lift operators or more mundane jobs like people who work in hotels and drive the shuttle bus. There are still jobs in skiing after the arrival of the amateurs. But the exclusivity is gone.”

I think he might have nailed it. Oh, for the days before the lift lines were long and the slopes clogged with morons who didn’t know the right way to come down the hill.

“The audience is being assembled by the audience”

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NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky on the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. On the advertising-based business model of journalism:

“Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

On the death of the home page:

“The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

You can listen to Professor Shirky’s talk here.

“Reporting is what makes news news”

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This post by Jeff Jarvis raises a number of interesting questions –and what he calls myths– about the role of journalists in the ever-changing media world. Here are three nuggets (not contiguous) from the longer post:

“In an offhand reference about the economics of news, Dave Winer wrote, “When you think of news as a business, except in very unusual circumstances, the sources never got paid. So the news was always free, it was the reporting of it that cost…. The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman.” This raises two questions: both whether news needs newsmen and whether journalists and news organizations deserve to be paid.”

“The (printing) press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us.”

“And that’s what Winer is trying to do when he reminds us that the important people in news are the sources and witnesses, who can now publish and broadcast what they know. The question journalists must ask, again, is how they add value to that. Of course, journalists can add much: reporting, curating, vetting, correcting, illustrating, giving context, writing narrative. And, of course, I’m all in favor of having journalists; I’m teaching them. But what’s hard to face is that the news can go on without them. They’re the ones who need to figure out how to make themselves needed.”

Ignore Everybody

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Telling someone how to be creative is like explaining how to wiggle your ears. But Hugh MacLeod’s little blog-to-book (Ignore Everybody – And 39 Other Keys to Creativity) has some useful insights. Here are my favorites:

  • The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.
  • Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That is why good ideas are always initially resisted.
  • The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.
  • It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to have some sort of commercial angle, for a change.
  • Doing anything worthwhile takes forever.
  • Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
  • Like the best jobs in the world, it just kinda sorta happened.
  • Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.
  • The only people who can change the world are the people who want to. And not everybody does.
  • Selling out is harder than it looks (It’s hard to sell out if nobody has bought in)
  • If you’re arranging your life in such a way that you need to make a lot of fuss between feeling the (creative) itch and getting to work, you’re putting the cart before the horse. You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.
  • The best way to get approval is to not need it.
  • Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom.
  • The size of the endeavor doesn’t matter as much as how meaningful it becomes to you.
  • If you are successful, it’ll never come from the direction you predicted. Same is true if you fail.

No more creating mass through scarcity

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So you’ve got a TV station or radio station or newspaper with all this good “content.” The cost of producing it is already sunk so you put it on your website and sell some banner ads. Ch-ching. But it just isn’t working for a lot of “legacy media” and Terry Heaton explains why:

“The assumptions of any content play are that its value is so great that expensive, adjacent advertising will support it and that the mass attractive to advertisers can be created through scarcity. Neither of these assumptions is viable online, and the real problem is that both must be present for significant revenue to be realized.”

So what do we do?

“We should nurture our legacy products as best we can, but we simply must separate our ability to make money from our dependence on the content we create. The key to that is in defining, understanding and developing the Local Web.”

I added the bold in hopes that would help me understand what he’s saying. I think he’s referring to the content we are already creating. We have a story in the paper, we put it on the web. We have a good radio morning show, we stream it. And so on.

We can’t just “re-purpose” our existing content and expect to attract an audience that will be attractive to an advertiser. I think he’s right.

The unbundled media world

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I’ve been doing some work on the website of one of our networks and came across a story about what appears to be a big music festival. I exchanged some emails with the news director about linking and adding content from other sources (Google, flickr, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, etc). She expressed some concerns about this.

She, like some many veteran reporters I know, seemed to be coming from that place where you write your story (with audio/video/stills) and it goes into whatever distribution channel your company happens to own: paper, magazine, radio/TV station. That’s where her “audience” finds the story.

And it worked just fine for a long time. But then the web comes along and most of us clapped our hands because we saw it as just one more way to reach “our” audience. A one-way pipe from which they would “consume our content.”

From a recent post (“The Web’s Widening Stream”) by Terry Heaton:

“The “Browse” phase of the Web was its first, and it’s where the name of the desktop application known as the browser originated. The Web was seen as a series of roads leading to destinations, We hopped from site to site — or in the case of AOL, destinations within the site — and everybody was happy. “Visitors” to sites were welcomed through a front door, which became the most valuable online real estate in terms of advertising.

“Search” disrupted the paradigm by allowing people to access documents within a site without going through that front door. We were still visiting sites, though, because that’s “where” the content resided. Search destroyed the value of the home page, and also allowed for advertising adjacent to search results — a way of monetizing content that existed only in link form on the pages of the search. If you wanted to buy ads next to football content, you didn’t need to buy football pages, for example. You could simply buy ads on search results for football.

“Subscribe” blew everything apart, because users no longer had to even visit websites, assuming publishers were willing to make their content available in RSS form. Most major publishers refused to play the game, so media company RSS feeds have generally contained only a sentence or two, thereby forcing users back to the site of origin, where publishers can monetize pages. This irritating practice has kept publishers from exploring revenue possibilities in a truly subscriber-based environment, and it’s the key thing holding back the development of RSS.

But a new paradigm is threatening all of the others and will eventually force all publishers into the unbundled media world. The staggering popularity of social media messaging via Facebook and MySpace “status updates” and, of course, Twitter is creating an information ecosystem that is a series of real-time streams. These streams come in short bursts, but when added to the RSS of Microsoft’s “subscribe” phase of the Web, they form powerful, relevant and meaningful sources of knowledge and information for an increasingly networked world.

Mr. Heaton quotes (and links to) VC John Borthwick who views “streams” as the new metaphor for the web:

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe are a part of this flow.

And then there is the advertiser:

“Advertising will be another fundamental part of the stream, but the rub for media companies is that advertisers can enter the stream themselves, without the assistance of being attached to media content. This is the inevitable end of a truly unbundled media world.”

If I started this post with a point in mind, I lost it along the way. I think it had something to do with the notion that a reporter –any reporter– could write/produce a story and expect others to find it and read it (and comment on it?) without being connected to them in some synchronous manner.

Or perhaps: All of us can tell the story better than any of us.

Whatever. Read Mr. Heaton’s piece.

Choosing what we don’t want to see

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“For the first time in our lives we were being exposed to more information than we could consume. In the age of newspapers we had to choose what we wanted to see. But in 2004 we had to choose what we didn’t want to see. This had a devastating effect on the traditional forms of information. In the past, you could get people’s attention simply by making something. People wanted more choices, so you simply had to give them another choice. But in 2004 this changed. People started to have enough, and now you actually had to make something better. It was not enough that it was different.”

From Thomas Baekdal’s Where Is Everyone? A brief tour of the history of information.