Results tagged “interviews”

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web:

• In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine apps as walled gardens. Overall, Mathew's got a strong skepticism about a lot of efforts in this area, but I was pleased to see him say "About the only magazine that has taken any kind of creative steps in this direction with its iPad app is Gourmet magazine". Ron Mwangaguhunga of eMedia Vitals continued the conversation as well.

• A few weeks ago I was quoted in the New Yorker talking about Facebook and its impact on culture. In this week's issue of the New Yorker, I pop up again, but this time quoted in Ben McGrath's lengthy profile of Nick Denton. Spoilers: The piece closes with me asking, "Who has more freedom in the media world than Nick Denton?" People seem to like lines like that, as the quote popped up in The NY Times Dealbook blog and elsewhere.

• I argued with Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that social media can't be tools for real change. Eric Harvey offered a thoughtful, well-reasoned counterpoint to my piece, which is well worth a read.

• Last week, Twitter changed CEOs with Ev Williams focusing on product and COO Dick Costolo becoming the new CEO. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick examined the transition, with a nod towards my piece on ten years of history behind Twitter's senior execs.

• At Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week, I did an interview with Mac Slocum of O'Reilly. While I included the video here in an earlier post, Mac revisited the interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog under the title "Why blogging still matters", focusing on one of the points that came up later in the conversation. It had been a long day with lots of different ideas flowing, so I'd nearly forgotten that we even talked about that, but now I'm pretty glad that part of the conversation was captured.

• I was a judge in the Apps 4 Africa contest which ended last week with some amazing winners, including my favorite iCow, which came in first place. You can listen to an interview I did with Future Tense about the competition, or check out this video of Secretary of State Clinton congratulating the winners:

• This past weekend, I attended the Open Web Foo Camp hosted by O'Reilly. While the camp itself is off the record, Scott Rosenberg did an admirable job of documenting one of the key themes of the event — whether the present "open" phase of the web is merely an aberration. I tried to use my access to influential open web advocates at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other big web companies to push them to make their employers more open and to resist the urge to compromise on their principles despite the understandable pressure they must be under. Hopefully a little friendly urging can give them the support they need to make the right choices.

• Finally, with ThinkUp well into beta-testing and Expert Labs supporting its first deployment by Code for America, Gina Trapani and I joined John Moore on The Lab for a brief interview about Expert Labs and where ThinkUp is headed.

Okay, that's enough roundup of Other People's Content. We'll return to original content here again shortly.

I've found some nice responses to conversations I've had recently that are probably worth checking out.

First, and most importantly, Soundwave: The Touch, the story behind Soundwave's omission from the recent Transformers movie.

Thanks to Nima Yousefi for the link to this amazing work of art.

Meanwhile, over at InmanTV, I did a brief interview on blogging as part of their recent Bloggers Connect conference. And finally, some notes from a conversation about journalists and blogging, courtesy of Lisa Takeuchi Cullen.

The information in those final two links is pretty good, but really I just wanted to link to the video of Soundwave.

I was very flattered and a little bit surprised to be interviewed by Claire Zulkey for her site. I’m a fair bit geekier than most of her regular interviewees, but it was still a lot of fun and I talked about parts of my day job and what goes into it that I usually don’t talk about anywhere. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, go check it out.

It features me saying, “I don’t see any hipsters here in the East Village who are running out to learn how to code in Ruby on Rails just to pick up chicks” and other bits of startlingly-obvious observations wisdom.

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.

It's almost like all I do is talk about blogging all day. Debbie Weil hosts the Corporate Blogging show on VoiceAmerica's business channel, and the other day we recorded a pretty interesting hour-long conversation.

From Debbie's description of the show:

• What it means to be an A-list blogger (and whether it matters)
• The importance of niche communities who are loyal to particular blogs
• The natural deaths of some blogs
• Tools like digg and del.icio.us and how corporate bloggers can use them
• Time's 2006 Person of the Year (You!) and what this means for corporate blogging
• Using blogs for progressive social change
• And more…

Though I've been talking to a lot of different groups in the past few weeks, I really enjoyed this chance to talk to Debbie because I think her audience is people who know business really well, but might not be all that familiar with blogs. That's a perspective that I always appreciate. If you've got an hour to kill, or need help sleeping after staying up late on New Year's Eve, it's just the thing for you.

Andy Plesser of Beet.TV stopped by our offices at Six Apart a few weeks ago, and I had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes. Andy recorded the conversation on video, and now he's just put up "The Simple Secrets of Effective Videoblogging".

Though I'm pretty good with text blogging, I'm by no means an expert at video blogging, so this was really just a chance for me to talk about what I've observed from video blogs so far that seems to work well. The clip is only about two minutes long, and two more parts of the interview should be following shortly.

As part of my continuing quest to create as many posts as possible with as little original content as possible, let's take another look at my revisitation of my own earlier post on web dev trends for 2006. This time, it's in the form of an interview on devpapers.com:

Q: With the rise of code generators and powerful application developer tools, it seems we are all developers now. What do you think of that approach?

A:I think the democratization of tools is almost always a good thing.

The best, least predictable innovations often come from people outside a discipline. And people who have a really unique contribution to make will never be threatened by the masses of amateurs who are just trying to scratch an itch.

There's some other good questions in the article, including "[W]hat do you think you would have said differently if you were to predict web development trends for the next 5 years?". I'll apologize in advance for all the horrible ad cruft on that site, though I don't have any control over that. If I can find a cleaner link to the article, I'll post that.

... let's hear more about me! I had the chance a few weeks ago to do be interviewed by Leah Peterson. It was a nice chance to talk about some things that I don't usually blog about, and if you're interested in more, Leah has a whole series of interviews on her blog that I found pretty interesting.

As a special bonus, there's a goofy picture of me at the top of the interview from when I was speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention back in July.