Bloggers Move Up the Fast Food Chain
Posted by goodmind on June 18th, 2008
Stranger things have probably happened, but McDonald’s, of all corporate entities, has actually elevated the status of the blogger in the professional hierarchy. (In stark contrast to the AP’s best efforts to prevent bloggers from re-publishing excerpts from their articles).
While internal employee social network sites to promote “ownership” are nothing new, Station M made good on the promise, and held a contest where first prize was the prestigious position of official Station M blogger. The eventual winner, Rick, has been taken off fryer-duty to focus exclusively on his new role. And of course, his promotion is a great promotional angle for the world’s largest fast food chain.
He hasn’t posted anything yet, but when he does, we hope he doesn’t try to incorporate any AP sourced insight. Maybe it’s OK to blur the line between producer and consumer when you’re working the deep-fryer, but it’s apparently legitimate cause for legal action, when intellectual property is at stake.
A System of Loyalties and Protections
Posted by goodmind on May 19th, 2008
Social networks are largely feud-al societies, in the sense that they facilitate a good deal of communal fighting. BuzzMachine describes the eco-system which backs all this healthy debate as a feudal society of lords, vassals and fiefs;
“So Glam is a content network. But they don’t create all the content. They curate it. So we should curate more as we create less. That’s another way to say what I’ve said other ways: Do what we do best and link to the rest. Also: We need to gather more and produce less, so we also need to encourage others to produce more so we can gather it. That’s a festival of PowerPoint lines there.”
Indeed, a spirited Renaissance festival of PowerPoint lines and Web 2.0 serfdom surfdom. The point is, Glam clearly understands what it takes to succeed in a social (network) order, mostly by doing very little themselves, while “curating” or “gathering” what others produce for mutual benefit.
More importantly, instead of posturing as the sovereign king of the world wide web, Glam functions as a physical estate, or site to be populated. More than mere aggregator reminiscent of a primitive hunter/gatherer society, Glam is a centralized and highly lucrative platform for lords (advertisers) and serfs (bloggers/content creators) alike.
Blog Id/Blog It
Posted by goodmind on April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 has arguably made Renaissance men of us all, meaning your prototypical internet user can dabble in a variety of disciplines (writing a blog, producing short films, or microfinancing entrepreneurs), and belong to numerous social networks and that span several distinct niches. Perhaps most importantly, these same tools which enable such Jeffersonian range also enable us to “share” (shamelessly brag about) what we’re up to, in real time no less.
By the same token, time saving technologies/solutions for completing repetitive tasks faster, and more efficiently, generate expectations to match; the classic Catch-22 of most technological innovations. Less time means more volume, and this in turn has created a conundrum where not only the sheer amount, but also the vast distribution of our online activities and acquaintances is so far-reaching that it’s actually more time consuming (not to mention repetitive) to issue constant updates via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.
This, no doubt, is why Six Apart has released Blog It, the first “cross-platform blogging application for Facebook,” which basically means it “helps you tell everyone you know across the web about what you’re creating, not just your Facebook friends”. We like it because it solves the immediate problem at hand, eliminating the repetitiveness of self-promotion, but are somewhat cautious when it comes to seeing what new devilry the personal PR management system will ultimately introduce into the equation.
Do we really need to see a rise in volume of unabashed online self-promotion? Rhetorical questions are not meant to be answered…
Get Caught Reading
Posted by goodmind on March 24th, 2008
The relationship between author, text, and reader has never been more dynamic, and consequently, has never been more unstable. Try reading just a small part of the extensive body of commentary and in-depth analysis of Steve Jobs’ Yogi Berra impression. Each piece links to an additional half a dozen or so other articles dedicated to de-constructing the syntactically simple yet semantically loaded sentence; “people don’t read anymore.” Or feel free to comment on it yourself, producing and publishing your own content on the web has never been easier, thanks in no small part to a number of Apple products.
While the cynics among us may feel that the ease of production is perhaps part of the problem with literacy, Ad Age points a finger at a different culprit; your friendly newspaper ombudsman. This role has had many titles over the years, from public editor, to reader advocate, and for this reason, Ad Age is asking financially strapped newspapers to “spend your dwindling budgets on reporting — instead of reporting on your reporting.”
We consider this sound advice, since this post itself proves that there are plenty of us bloggers out their to report on your reporting for you, for free. The idea of a public editor is alive and well, because readers are empowered enough to advocate for themselves, provided they have an author and a text to respond to. For this reason, and despite claims to the contrary, bloggers aren’t a threat to the role of the newspaper journalists, but rather newspaper ombudsman.
The Reunification of Journalism
Posted by goodmind on January 28th, 2008
Though we have often alluded to the day when the distinction between bloggers and journalists would at last disappear (and the “citizen” could be dropped from the odious phrase “citizen journalist”), we never thought that it might actually happen in our lifetime.
The approaching collapse of this once powerful divide is being facilitated by the slow but steady increase in websites distributing “hyperlocal” content. EveryBlock and outside.in are just two of the more popular local news aggregators and filters, and while their geographic reach is currently limited to just a few major cities, the success of the concept could have much further reaching implications.
Fred Wilson, author of A VC, owns a stake in outside.in, but makes a compelling case for why the site could drastically increase the role of the local community paper in the national media food chain;
“If a mom (or dad) could blog for two hours every morning between dropping off her kids and going shopping…where are her stories going to get picked up? What if they could get picked up by the big city paper that everyone in her town reads. That’s why I am so excited about Outside.in’s effort to get it’s neighborhood pages and buzzmaps onto newspaper websites all over the country. Here are outside.in’s buzzmaps on the Washington Post website.”
What we find fascinating about this whole idea (and post) is that it genuinely believes and automatically assumes bloggers are capable of producing “stories,” and that these stories are worthy of being “picked up” by a traditional medium. While this sentiment is not uncommon within the blogosphere, supporting what was once a pipe dream with a structural mechanism is, well, news to us.
Outside.in basically aggregates locally produced blogs, analogous to an American Idol for up and coming bloggers by linking worthy posts to newspaper websites. (To see how this differs from the usual life cycle of a blog post, click here). Though Outside.in’s primary competition in this space is EveryBlock, South Korea is also taking steps to legitimize Citizen Journalism through actual academic institutions. Intended to promote best practices among graduates, OhMyNews Citizen Journalism School could steal the show as the NCAA for finding and developing amateur blogging talent.
Walk On
Posted by goodmind on August 15th, 2007
If tabbed browsing cannot contain your world wide web ramblings, then Walk2Web is perhaps the macro view of the internet you have been waiting for;
“You begin by entering a URL and then you are presented with a visual map of all the websites which are linked to it and from it. From there you can just start “walking” through the different links which show a screenshot of the correspondent website by simply mousing over it.” (via Visual Complexity)
Walk2Web could exponentially increase productivity, particularly in our case, since we seem to spend a lot of time becoming irreversibly lost in blogrolls, and annotated hyperlinks. This handy tool accurately captures the entire linked network of a webpage, making it possible to quickly scan any links without exhausting the back button, or becoming hopelessly distracted.
Yet Walk2Web could conversely make the web browsing experience a little too enjoyable…to the point where we might just become more efficient at getting lost. Hey, we never would have found Walk2Web without wandering aimlessly through the abyss that is the blogosphere.
Co-rendering is Inventive Thinking
Posted by goodmind on August 6th, 2007
In addition to being a great relief from a hectic work day, design blogs and the “blobjects” they feature are useful in that they categorize a virtual collection of the very latest in ornamental technological gadgets.
For professional purposes only, we are wont to admire the fluid design of what essentially often amounts to decadent plastic toy robots. In doing so, we continually come across mundane objects rendered totally original. These discoveries typically entail a moment of quiet reflection, where we take pause to marvel at the sheer cleverness of capitalizing on such an obvious idea, and perhaps invoke the metaphor of sliced bread and greatness.
In thinking about this phenomenon further, we began to connect it to the larger esoteric concept informing Co-render.com. Ordinarily, we try to share examples of co-rendering which (ostensibly) portray the aggregate wisdom of the crowd as open source market research. To create or invent based on this model, however, a systematic approach to managing insight is required. We admit that up until now, Co-render.com has failed to expound thoroughly on the tactical measures such a system requires.
The Inventive Thinking Project will provide instances of ingenious thinking and original ideas within this blog, while explaining (systematically) how “Citizen Pioneer” created this novel solution. We hope to offer a remote reconnaissance system with insights that are entirely applicable and easily adapted both by our research clients at Goodmind as well as the casual reader of this blog. We want our posts on this topic to come across as an “un-consulting” oriented collection of co-rendered objects, and co-rendering activity. In other words, we want to prove that inventive thinking can be achieved at any place, at any time, and under any circumstances, provided the creator is sufficiently endowed with the proper tools and insights. We want to show that the question “where’d you get that great idea?” always has a tangible answer.
Press Button, Receive Bacon
Posted by goodmind on July 10th, 2007
When you write a blog for so long, you start to feel pretty good about the power of the written word. There are plenty of times however, when it is necessary to present some information visually, in order to ensure that the message is properly conveyed. So, when searching for an an accompanying image for a post, one might find oneself tampering with the original picture so that it will better suit the given context. Nothing too egregious there.
It’s somewhat puzzling then to come across physical instances of public vandalism, geared toward altering the intended meaning of a message (albeit to great comic effect). The examples of vandalism on Cool Stuff4u appear benign, and equal to the”criminal” level of the Photoshop tweaks you might find on Worth1000. It’s not really so different…is it?
Urban city counsel commissions committed to eradicating vandalism ought to consider giving convicted vandals their own blogs, a far less criminal canvas on which to inflict their interpretations of reality.
Hаше здоровье (To Our Health)
Posted by goodmind on June 25th, 2007
A recent BBC poll revealed a rather startling fact about current realities in Russia. No, it was not that 90% of Russians “regularly” drink anti-freeze to ward of the frigid bleakness of those long Siberian nights. Rather, these “findings” emphasize an interesting trend; Russian bloggers are a force to be reckoned with.
BBCRussian.com ran a story revealing the alcohol consumption/mortality rate correlation in the province of Izhevsk, and featured an informal poll probing readers about their own drinking habits. One thing led to another, and the poll was efficiently spammed due largely in part to the efforts of Livejournal.ru bloggers.
This flashmob is along the lines of a more pedantic Digg-style “revolt,” so you may perhaps be wondering how Russians, of all people, could demonstrate such a lack creativity when it comes to revolution. However, let’s not miss the Katyn forest for the trees here;
“Until recently, Russians rarely ever saw what was said about them in the Western media. When they did, language barriers and scarcity of internet access meant they had no way to respond in a timely manner, and to set the record straight…For the first time in history, the global reach of the internet is allowing large numbers of Russians (and others within the former Soviet Union) to talk to the West directly, rather than only through the filter provided by visiting journalists and pundits.
This means the free pass given by Russians to those who write about them, something that most of us here have long taken for granted, is rapidly coming to an end. We already see the first signs of the new era in the blistering comments from outraged Russian readers that now appear regularly on the web sites of major British newspapers.”
It’s kind of hard to understand why we of “the West” have such a difficult time finding a common ground with our Eastern bloc friends. Given the blistering comments to be found on Park Slope, New York community forums, about as far away from Izvhesk as you can get, clearly there IS a common element of humanity. Unfortunately, it is the catharsis to be found in blasting someone in a heated online argument.
Carnival of Capitalists
Posted by goodmind on January 9th, 2006
Over the last couple of years, Blog Carnivals have proven to be a unique way to make the blogosphere just a little bit smaller.
A Blog Carnival is a group of high quality blog posts on a given topic. Some examples are: the Carnival of Cars, the Carnival of Satire, and the Carnival of Recipes.
We thought our readers might find the Carnival of Capitalists, which deals, not surprisingly, with a wide variety of business and economic topics such as sales and customer service, IRS updates, and the best ways to fire someone.
There is a different host every week, so be sure to check it out!
