May 12th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I wasn’t going to jump into this one, mostly because it seemed kind of “inside baseball” (i.e., not that interesting to lots of people), but as we all know one of the main things the blogosphere likes to do is blog about blogging, so I thought I would take a crack at the Ars Technica brouhaha. Exhibit A is MG Siegler’s post at ParisLemon about what he calls “another classic rip off” by Ars Technica. You can read the post if you need to catch up on the details, but basically MG is saying that the site rewrote his post and never gave him credit for the idea.
This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.
In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).
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Apr 17th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
There have been a number of threads floating around the blogosphere recently that have to do with traditional media vs. “new media,” and the differences between the two — something that this article in the New York Observer got me thinking about again. There was the TechCrunch post about ads in Twitter, which was somewhat lacking in facts; there was the idea that journalism online has become much more of a process or continuum rather than an end in itself; and then there was the whole concept of “if the news is that important, it will find me,” which I wrote about.
I wanted to try and pull a few of those together because, well… that’s how I roll. Plus, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit, and writing about it helps me think. So bear with me (or not). If you look at some of the comments on my post about the Twitter ads story, as well as on other posts about it, you can see people talking about how it “wasn’t a story,” and suggesting — as Nate Westheimer did — that traditional media, with editors and so on, would never run something like that. I’d like Nate to read the New York Observer piece and see if he still feels the same way.
Would a newspaper or TV station or magazine have run with a Twitter story like TechCrunch did? Maybe not. But the fact is that plenty of poorly-sourced or single-sourced or anonymous-sourced stories show up in newspapers all the time — and not just the Enquirer or People magazine, but in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And it’s not only stories about nuclear weapons in Iraq either — it’s stories that are about celebrities, or wealthy Wall Street types, or politicians. Sometimes, a story is just too good to pass up, even if it’s shaky.
That’s why it’s actually a good thing that news is becoming more of a process (which it always has been). Instead of trying to pump rumours and innuendo into full-fledged stories that deserve a premier spot in the paper, journalists can toss things into the ether when they think there is more to a story, and then update the story as it develops, something Mike Arrington said at mesh 2007 that he sometimes does. This is frequently messy, which is why I like to adapt the old saying about “if you love the law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made” to apply to the media. It’s not pretty, but it is occasionally true.
And that brings me back to the idea of “news.” What do we mean when we use that word, or when we say something like “if the news is that important, it will find me?” Some people responded to my post on that concept by saying they weren’t confident that “real” news would find them, by which I think they meant news of the U.S. election, or war in Sudan. But that’s only one small part of the definition of “news” — something that every person is probably going to define differently, and may even define differently depending on what day it is.
Is the Web to blame for creating “news” out of nowhere, as the New York Observer article suggests? I don’t think so. Newspapers have been doing that for about a hundred years. The Web is probably accelerating and amplifying that phenomenon — but at the same time, a proliferation of sources is also helping to nip such stories in the bud a lot sooner.
Apr 15th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
While watching the Twitter posts fly by last night, I saw some from Robert Scoble (of course) talking about advertising, and suggesting to Twitter founder Ev Williams that he be allowed to share in the revenue from ads on the group IM service. Oh, I thought — is Twitter finally launching ads? Then came a post at TechCrunch that said it was. Or was it? Apparently not, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which emailed Biz Stone at Twitter and got a denial that any such plans were in the works.
As it turned out, a background image from Chinese Business Network blogger Christine Lu’s profile pic on Twitter popped up in a yellow box somehow, which made it look like an ad for the network, as she explained in a comment on the TechCrunch post. In other words, no story, right? Except that Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said in a subsequent comment that “ads are coming, it’s just a matter of when.” As more than one person has pointed out, however — including Frederic at The Last Podcast — this assertion comes without any real facts to back it up.
Nate Westheimer, a contributor to Silicon Alley Insider, also has a curious blog post in which he laments the state of blogging, which he says doesn’t pay enough attention to accuracy, and he uses Duncan’s post as an example. Which is fair enough, of course — except that Nate’s post is riddled with errors, including two different spellings of Duncan’s last name and a couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Fair enough, you might say — as Nate points out in a comment, he isn’t really a reporter. So is Duncan a reporter? Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.
Duncan and I have had our differences in the past, but I’m not here to beat up on him for the Twitter story. Should he have run with it based on what turned out to be very little factual information? I don’t see why not — but I think it should have been updated later, as others have. Nate says that this shows “the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.” I’m not going to argue with that — having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.
This isn’t something the blogosphere invented — wire services like Reuters and Associated Press have been operating this way for decades. Report something as quickly as possible, then fix the mistakes later. It’s when the mistakes don’t get fixed that we have something to worry about, and as Thord Daniel Hedengren reminds us, we could all probably do better at that — regardless of what we call ourselves.
Apr 14th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
I can’t help it — I like Gawker founder Nick Denton. I realize that for some he is the blogosphere equivalent of Dr. Evil, but I just can’t help liking him anyway. It’s true that he seems to come up with sweatshop-style compensation methods just for the fun of it, and he also seems to take an inordinate amount of glee in shuttering blog titles at his Gawker empire, or selling them off when it’s least expected. Maybe that’s what I enjoy: the fact that he just seems to be having such a good time, even when he’s firing people and leaking his own memos.
The one that Silicon Alley Insider has — which plenty of other people seem to have as well — is about Gawker selling off (or giving away, as the case may be) several blogs, including Gridskipper (travel), Idolator (music) and Wonkette. One is going to join Gawker investor Lockhart Steele’s stable, another to Buzznet, and the third to Ken Layne’s Blogads group. Wonkette, as Nick himself notes, is a former flagship title, which launched Ana Marie Cox to superstardom (she’s at Time magazine now), and so seems like an odd candidate for sale — but there you have it.
That’s the genius of Denton: give people contradictory quotes about the current health of the business (there’s a storm coming, but Gawker’s pageviews have climbed by almost 90 per cent to 221 million or so), shut down blogs here and there whenever it suits you, change the compensation method for your bloggers suddenly and without warning, and just generally create mayhem and confusion. Brilliant. For bonus points, read the back-and-forth in Valleywag’s comments between Nick and someone who is either Mike Arrington or pretending to be.
Apr 7th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Although I’m pretty sure his post is intended as advice for marketing people and that sort, I think Seth Godin has some great advice in his post on how to “Write Like a Blogger.” In it he provides a short list of tips for writing effectively for an audience. To me, these suggestions make sense for anyone, but especially for journalists who are trying to wrap their heads around this whole social media thing. Among my favourites:
– Use headlines: Not just boring ones that announce your purpose, but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
– It’s okay if you leave: Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
– Show up: Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
Read the rest of the list here.
