Entries tagged “press”

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here's where I've succeeded:

• Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it's more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That's an idea that Chris and I revisited at the BlogWorld conference last week, along with a discussion of blogging becoming an industry.
• There's a pleasantly inexplicable passing mention of me in reference to the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York. In case it's not been clear in the past, I am delighted that the tech industry in NYC is closely linked to other industries like media and finance. It gives us a useful perspective and makes tech companies in NYC wiser and less prone to falling into the echo chamber that frustrates me about a lot of Silicon Valley companies. And I never liked the name "Silicon Alley" anyway.
• The South Asian Journalists Association invited me to participate in the first of two conversations about the South Asian blogging community. I thought a lot of the points raised were pretty interesteing, and am a big fan of the SAJA blog, so this was a lot of fun.
• The less said about this, the better. I'm looking at you, Andy.

Right now I am here, but soon I may be somewhere near you! Let's see where I've been lately, and where I'm going to be:

Across the internets, Choire asked a ridiculous question of mine to Wendy and Lisa when he interviewed them for the LA Times. Michaelangelo picked this up on Idolator, and I think my work is done here.

Absurdly, an offhand comment about Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City who likes to mock people for being "too cosmopolitan", got quoted on the Playboy blog. Did you know Playboy has a blog?

And my presentation from the Mediabistro Circus back in May is now available on video, confirming once again that it's incredibly painful to watch oneself on video.

I'm also looking forward to a bunch of upcoming events.

• I'm proud to have helped out a little bit with Web 2.0 Expo New York. Frankly, we have an amazing tech scene here in NYC (Six Apart is hiring!) and we haven't done enough to get recognition for it from the tech world at large. That's why I'm quoted on the Expo site saying, "Well, it's about time." Heh.
• Next weekend in Las Vegas, I'll be joining Chris Alden, our CEO at Six Apart, in a keynote presentation at Blog World Expo. If you'll be there Saturday morning, come see us, or find me at the event before or after.
• Finally, next month, I'll be in Greensboro, North Carolina for ConvergeSouth. I am sure there will be many interesting things to do and see there, but my first priority is to get some barbeque. I'm sure y'all understand.

I forgot to mention one point when I was blathering about lists earlier this week: The easiest way to get on them is by asserting, truthfully or not, that you don't want to be on them.

Behold, my incredible mancrushworthiness, from an entire list of the mancrush-worthy. Or something.

It's nice to be called nice, but it's even better that people wrongly believe that I am nice. Thanks, Eliot!

Hey, NowPublic made a list of the 50 most influential web people in New York, and I'm on it at number six. So, thanks to the folks who made the list, and I appreciate the recognition.

However, every time a similar list comes out, I have a number of responses that immediately come to mind, and most of my friends who have to suffer through my ranting reply with some variation of "You're just complaining because you're not on the list!"

But this time, I am on the list. Which means it's a chance to talk about the reasons, good and bad, why these sorts of lists exist, and what purpose they can serve.

Update: Apparently, I'm on the TechCult Top 100 Web Celebrities list, too. Which appears to be even more blatantly link-baiting, though again, the company I'm keeping there is nice.

• First and foremost, organizations (whether they're websites, media organizations, publishers, individuals, institutions, whatever) create these lists to solidify their power and influence, and to promote their own authority. This generally works, with the most exceptional examples like Time's Person of the Year actually acting to amplify the publication's own profile. With that kind of success, it's easy to understand how Time decided to also create a Time 100 list as well.
• For less-known organizations, like NowPublic, having a list like this acts as a phenomenal engine of promotion. People who have a high profile are generally well-known, at least in part, because they put an effort into being well-known. Therefore, putting their name on a list is an extremely effective way to get their attention. On the web, we call this link-baiting, but offline, it's simply called flattery.
• These types of lists can be useful. One of the earliest and most fundamental milestones in the formation of a community is the desire for certain members to recognize those that (appear to) exemplify the values that the community aspires to, or would like to be identified by. Similarly, promoting unsung or less-known members of a community can be a useful method of indicating a desire for a community's values to evolve.
  
• Lists are different from awards. Everybody on them is a winner, of sorts, so there's very little sense of bitterness between people on the list. Similarly, having a large number of people be recognized increases the aspirational value for those who aren't on the list -- it's easy to pick someone on a lengthy list who seems undeserving.
• Creating this kind of content is perfect for the lazy days of summer. Fondly referred to in the publishing industry as "listicles", assembling faux-scientific methods of cataloging potential list members is a perfect task for interns. Here in New York, all of our local media editors traipse off to the Hamptons to sit out the sweltering days of July or August, and by amazing coincidence, much of local media publishes their "Best Of" articles around the same time. It's a credit to NowPublic that they've decided, interestingly, to publish the methodology for calculating influence.
• Pointing out these structural circumstances which occasion the creation of such lists doesn't mean that they're not still flattering and appreciated. It's nice to see your name on something. One of NowPublic's stated criteria for evaluation is accessibility, and as someone who's had his mobile phone number sitting on the side of his website for years, I am happy to see that's a factor in evaluating influence.
• There are, of course, some lists which are really important. Such as the Top 10 Boy Bloggers We'd Let Rub Our Touchpads. Congratulations to Nick Denton and Jason Kottke for being the only guys who are on both the NowPublic list and on this more esteemed accounting.

Thanks again to NowPublic for the recognition, and congratulations to the many friends and acquaintances of mine on the list. With only one exception, it's fantastic company to be part of and I can't wait to see who they pick in other cities and in New York next year.

Because my name and my big ole' head are sitting on top of this page, it's probably not making the self-indulgence any worse to collect a few links to some recent places I've popped up online:

• Gawker recommended my Twitter account as one to follow after Krucoff posted a list to Young Manhattanite based on Rex's suggestions. The strange thing to me is that Gawker is (still!) such a presence in media circles in NYC that 6,000 people would actually read such a thing. Of course, they're all just wannabees -- real Gawker credit comes from having been at the launch party five years ago. I'm just sayin'. (For more, similarly inane insights, add me on Twitter!)
• I helped Charlene Li (a.k.a. The Best Tech Industry Analyst) save $8.33 by offering up my testimonial about the Clear card. That's enough to pay for a subscription to dashes.com for more than a year!
• Mat Honan wrote a piece in Wired about The Big Word Project, the scam website where people pay for words. My site shows up because it's the link for the word "purple", even though I didn't do it myself. I blame Mike.
• CRN has a (really very good) look at what the technology industry wants from the Presidential candidates, with responses from the likes of Bill Gates and Paul Otellini. Inexplicably, I'm in there, too: "The No. 1 thing we want to see is elected officials use social networking tools online as a tool for governance and for leadership when in office, just as they do to get elected." Basically, I am tired of politicians treating web communities as an ATM for their campaigns, instead of seeing the web as an opportunity for fixing government.
• And last but certainly not least, "So What Do You Do, Anil Dash". It's a really long interview with me by the folks at Mediabistro, in advance of my presentation at the Mediabistro Circus event on Tuesday. If you know me, there's probably few surprises, but I was happy to get the chance to articulate a lot of points that I otherwise don't usually talk about explicitly. Most of all, I am really glad to help emphasize how vibrant the technology scene is here in New York City; My biggest goal in participating in these sorts of conferences here in New York is to show people that there's a lot more going on with tech here than people might realize if they're myopically focused on just Silicon Valley.

I'd forgotten to mention it yesterday, but as a number of people have asked, I had a nice little quote in the New York Times yesterday, talking about Wal-Mart (and large companies in general) embracing blogging.

Though it unfortunately is pretty accurate in quoting the clipped, self-interrupting way that I actually speak, I think the point still comes across:

Anil Dash, a blogger at Six Apart, which makes blogging software, said the evolution in Wal-Mart's thinking about blogs was typical. "You start with this total lockdown, suits read everything, one post a month model," he said. "Then you evolve. A year later, you get one that is more open. A year after that, they start to do something that is far more authentic."

Mr. Dash said Wal-Mart's decision to let buyers do the blogging reflected a growing recognition that "trying to control who can speak and what they can say does not work."

I've been obsessing lately over what it takes to make change happen, in both culture an technology. And the answer to me seems to increasingly be the embrace of iteration. I never imagined that I'd spend five straight years of my life advocating blogs, long after the novelty factor had worn off, but that's where I'm at now. And It's been enough time to see, for example, Wal-Mart start with a site that used Movable Type, but was barely a blog in any other sense, and then iterate their way into a site so human that it can easily have an individual post taken out of context by the New York Times.

There's a little quiet victory for myself in the story, too. When Michael Barbaro asked me how I'd like to be credited for the story, I just said I was happy being described as a blogger.

I've been doing a good bit of speaking lately, and have some more coming up, so let me share it with you if you're interested.

• I was flattered to have my post about Gawker quoted in passing by Jim Romenesko while talking about Vanessa Grigoriadis. However, I was mortified at the context -- Page Six of the NY Post had published a thinly-veiled threat of sexual violence against Ms. Grigoriadis. Let's repeat: The traditional, mainstream, dead-tree media institution published a threat of sexual violence on newsprint. And those who objected? The folks typing away in Movable Type at Radar Online and Media Bistro. This is why we need blogs to help fix traditional media.
• I got to spend an hour talking to John C. Havens over at Blog Talk Radio which was ostensibly about transparency, but ended up getting into a good bit of blog history and some more philosophical parts of blogging. That was a lot of fun, and I was glad to get to do it.
• On Friday, I'll be speaking at the Online News Association Conference in Toronto. I'll only be in town for a few hours, unfortunately, even though I love Toronto, but the discussion about Journalism Next is right up my alley. And I'm especially looking forward to getting to meet the other folks on the panel.
• And then on Saturday, I'll be at ConvergeSouth 2007 in Greensboro, North Carolina. It looks to be an absolutely amazing event, and I'll be joining in at 10am on Saturday for my panel. I'll also be hosting a dinner at 6:30 on Saturday, you can sign up on the wiki to join the table.

Phew! Can't wait to meet a bunch of new folks, and if you want to get in touch and will be at either event, my mobile number and email address are both right here on my blog.

What makes lolcats appealing is that it's simultaneously obscure and accessible. It's an inside joke told in an online lingua franca, but with a bit of effort anyone can become an insider.

"An in-joke used to be constrained by geography and who you knew socially," says Anil Dash, occasional lolcat critic and vice president of Six Apart, which creates several popular blog-software programs. "This is a very large in-joke" that blurs the old distinction "between Net geeks and the normals," he says.

I've seen some bloggers put up media quotes on their sites as examples of their credibility and expertise. I've already got the ridiculous photo of myself at the microphone up there, but thanks to my most recent appearance in the Wall Street Journal, I am sorely tempted to put "occasional lolcat critic" on my sidebar. Whatcha think?

I’ve been holding off on updates about lolcats and related memes for a while because it’s easy to get burned out and probably as boring for you as it is for me. But there are still some interesting parts to it. As I alluded to in Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations, once you’re known for something like writing a post about lolcats and grammar, you become the central place for both people looking for information about such things, as well as the go-to place for people to pitch their new ideas about the topic, whether they’re exciting or not.

As is usually the case, most people who are just trying to fill in the blanks with a lolwhatever site are not only unfunny, but tedious. I have what’s called a “Hippo Problem”, based on the problem of someone offhandedly mentions a fondness for hippos once, and is plagued the rest of their days with hippo-emblazoned kitsch for the rest of their days.

My hippos are captioned cats.

It’s a thankless burden — imagine if you were an expert on “I Kiss You!”, or the go-to guy for All Your Base. I’m just glad I didn’t write anything about that goddamn dancing baby.

The truth, of course, is that it’s not so bad, and I try to remember that there’s inevitably somebody out there who feels like they really understand this topic. They’re sitting in a cafe somewhere with a laptop, resentful and bitter that a hack like me got associated with lolcats in the first place. I’m sure the I Can Has Cheezeburger folks get hate mail from people who said they started a lolrus site exactly four days earlier and have thus been completely ripped off.

For every angry would-be lolcat expert, though, there are some perks to this kind of thing. “Cats Can Has Grammar” is (I think, I’m lousy at tracking stats) my most popular post in the nearly 8 years that I’ve been blogging, with something like half a million people having read it since it went up. I’ve gotten mentioned or quoted in stories all over the place, from the Chicago Tribune to a TV station in North Carolina to an Associated Press story that ran all over the place. I even talked to the Wall Street Journal, though I’m hoping some editor spiked the piece that was being researched, in a fit of good taste. Somewhere, Mahir’s talent agent is shaking his head sadly. “Enjoy it while it lasts, kid.”

The picture above shows that the Houston Chronicle actually ran a cover story about the lolcat phenomenon that referred to me as a “legendary blogger”. Look, mom, I still don’t have a college degree, but now I’m a lolcat legend!

And the final lesson is that we all create our own misery. If I complain that this one lighthearted and offhand piece gets more attention than all the writing I’ve carefully crafted over the years, then it’s of course only fair that I get my comeuppance. My favorite newsweekly, Time, published their own lolcats story today, and I was kind of disappointed to see that I’m not mentioned anywhere in it. Be careful what you ask for…

A couple of months ago, I got to talk to Lynne about business blogging for Fast Company's podcasts series. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though the lasting lesson you might take away from the conversation is that I talk really fast. There's a downloadable MP3 of the conversation as well.

I've found some interesting articles around the web recently that mention me or my blog, and while I don't try to be comprehensive in linking to everything that mentions my name, I thought these were compelling enough on their own to be worth reading.

• Ross Mayfield's Twitter Tips the Tuna. I think the title is an unfortunately awkward parallel to "jumping the shark", but the title is the only part of the piece that's off -- the rest is really great. Ross has already done a few posts about Twitter's popularity and I'm glad to see someone who knows what he's talking about become the go-to guy for quotes on a new web technology. Ross' post references my own Consider Twitter.

• Jason Calacanis, More proof that there is no A-list. Inexplicably, I'm on there mentioned as an A-list blogger. The whole "A-list" meme was tired back in 2000, but now it's kind of sweetly anachronistic to even talk about it. For what it's worth, my blog is far less popular than it was at its zenith of readership, and the blogosphere is far more crowded. So I don't know how useful I am as a data point, except to note that yes, I was "a low-level webmonkey at the Village Voice" before my current job, and that, yes the barriers to entry are lower than some people imagine them to be. Four years ago, when my blog was still relatively popular, I wrote Beyond Power Laws. The post reminds me that I used to be a snob about LiveJournal before I started using it and loving it, but it also featured some tips on how to make your blog popular:

* Consider having started your site in 1998 or 1999
* Know a whole lot of people and consider becoming real-life friends with people who have popular sites or are involved in the media
* Get on TV and in newspapers as frequently as possible to promote your site, because those really help drive traffic
* Make sure to insist that you are smart and attractive if you can't actually demonstrate those traits through your site

• Jeremiah Owyang has a list of Asian technology speakers. It's an interesting effort, but I've seen people over the definition of "female" on lists of female technology speakers -- I don't envy the task of defining who belongs to the diaspora of the largest continent on Earth.

• And saving the goofiest for last, Blog Spring in Wired: "Look! There’s Anil Dash of dashes.com". Here I am!

I've been amused for weeks by 37signals marketing for their upcoming micro-CRM app Highrise because of the example contacts they've been using.

Every single screenshot has a list of contacts including the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon founder (and 37signals investor) Jeff Bezos, and Newsweek scribe Steven Levy. The big product shot is a full-screen profile of Walt Mossberg that has DHH reverently quoting Wired calling Walt a "kingmaker". I'm sure it's gonna be a good product, and I've always been alternately pleased and bemused by the swaggering chutzpah of the Chicago boy band. But the real lesson I'm reminded of here is that you can do a lot worse than name-dropping those whom you want to impress.

This could be considered tending to the blank slate of press coverage.

I was very flattered last week that GeekSugar post an interview with me and my wife Alaina that they did a few weeks ago. It's strange enough to be asked to do interviews, and while we've both done a bit of public speaking and press, I don't think we've ever done anything like this together before. But we were asked to do it for Valentine's Day, so what the heck.

The funny thing was the interview's focus on gadgetry and geekiness led to some assumptions about how our household actually works. I'm pretty sure we've never had any debates about whether we want a particular gadget or not.

Geeksugar: Who makes the final decision when it comes to gadgets for the home?
Anil: Actually, we almost never even have discussions about this. We're fairly moderate in our gadget purchases, so we can each pretty much get whatever we want. It's always a nice surprise to come home and find that the other person has something shiny to show off.
Alaina: We’re pretty in sync when it comes to gadgets and our finances and trust each other to make these kinds of decisions. If it’s a big ticket item, like the flat panel tv we just bought, we’ll discuss it together first so there are no surprises when it comes time to balance the checkbook.

I think it's reassuring that we answered our questions separately, but came up with pretty much the same answers. And it's telling that my answers are generally 10 times longer than Alaina's, just like in real life. As I tried to say in the interview, it's like being married to Michigan J. Frog.

Another follow-up to blood diamonds: The New York Times offers Hollywood’s Multifaceted Cause du Jour, Marc Santora's look at Hollywood's engagement in the marketing or unmarketing of diamonds.

Diamonds are love. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Diamonds are forever.

Diamonds, obviously, are much more than that. They are big business. They are hardly rare. And they have been used to finance some of the most brutal warfare of the last two decades.

Worth revisiting is the BBC story outlining Al Qaeda's use of diamonds to help launder their funds, and Cory Doctorow's comment on my earlier post, outlining allegations against Warner Bros, the studio that produced the Blood Diamond film. I'd caution that the original gossip source of the most damning quote is unsourced.

Okay, you probably don't need to be told that spam is bad. But you might find it interesting to learn about the economy that's sprung up around blog spam. Good thing, then, that Charles Mann wrote an extensive piece for Wired detailing this scary new world. I'm quoted pretty extensively in the story and, for a change, I'm not entirely unhappy with how it turned out.

The emails, Dash believes, exemplify the fundamental difficulty in fighting splogs and Web spam. With the rise of pay-per-click advertising, the big search engines have, in effect, created a kind of currency: ranking in search results. Put up the right Web site, with the right collection of links and keywords, and – ka-ching! This cash is available to anyone on earth who can manipulate search engines' site-ranking systems.

Little wonder that the entire world's supply of spammers is trying to seize the opportunity. They are combing through the Net so assiduously that they are attempting to capitalize on individual blog posts about products that won't even appear for months to come. No single company, Dash believes, can withstand that much collective rapacity. As a result, he says, "there's going to be a reckoning with the economy that's building up around search engine rankings, one way or another." Something fundamental will have to change, either in the search engine world or the blogosphere, because things can't continue the way they are now.

Ian Kallen has a smart look at the problem as well, informed by Technorati's unique perspective. "The blogosphere has thrived on openness and ease of entry but indeed, all complex ecosystems have parasites. So, while we're grateful to be in a successful ecosystem, we'd all agree that we have to be vigilant about keeping things tidy. The junk that the bad guys want to inject into the update stream has to be filtered out. I think the key to successful web indexing is to cast a wide net, keep tightly defined criteria for deciding what gets in and to use event driven qualification to match the criteria."

I think we have to bolster Ian's recommendations with a big push for accountability, as well, though that's a difficult thing to achieve with mere technology. It's especially challenging given the folks who are on the other side; I found John Jonas's blog an interesting read. Jonas is one of the sploggers interviewed for the article, and seems like, at least in his offline life, he's striving to be a moral and devout guy.

That leaves us with the problem of accountability: How do we make individuals feel personally repsonsible for the web, in the same way that we hope they're personally responsible for the their surroundings in their physical community? Mann asked Jonas' partner whether he thinks about the impact of their work on the web, and elicited the response, "I'm just making my living. I guess I don't think about that kind of thing very much."

Three years ago, Nick Denton made a prediction: "Google text ads will give blogs a business model; but they'll also warp the format." It appears he was right.

It's an all-Office day today. The Globe and Mail embraces the bad pun with "Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life". Tralee Pearce amusingly asserts that "The must-have fall accessory is your desktop spreadsheet program":

This fall's coolest accessory is not a trophy handbag, a designer shoe or a pair of skinny jeans. It's a computer program sitting right there on your desktop.

Sure, you use your Microsoft Excel to track business expenses and create spreadsheets by day. But legions of Excel-literates are databasing their lives, charting their wardrobes, dinner-party menus and DVD collections by night.

My only lament is that there's no link to the canonical post about people geeking out in Excel.