Results tagged “oreilly”

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 enjoy links myself, so I thought you might want some too. Here, then:

• Graphs as art: Werner Vogels picks up the site graph meme with some nice visualizations of Amazon and A9.

• Knowing enough to be dangerous: Bad advice about Windows tweaking, debunked by Dr. Jason, who's never happier than when he's correcting misinformation.

• Flickr tag count comparison, where Nelson finds out what doesn't influence interestingness. Highly recommended if you enjoyed infographics about Flickr massages.

• The response to the Mumbai bombings has been rather hushed. Both the attacks and the lack of discussion have been on my mind, Sepia Mutiny covers the topic well.

• Bomani Jones on Prince's best work. I find myself in violent disagreement with the some of the assertions, despite being in complete agreement over the conclusions.

• Tim O'Reilly with four big ideas about open source. Especially compelling to me because, improbably, I'm keynoting (is that a verb?) the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland next week.

• And then, finally, Concerning the platinum bitch. I've been meaning to write a post about Khia for about two years; Stephen beat me to it and now I don't have to.

Ha, ha, I could have sworn I went away for a week and while I was gone the biggest thing that happened in the tech blogosphere was that people were arguing over lawyers talking about rights to a buzzword that everyone had already agreed was so far past its prime that it was only used ironically. This is the best you can do?

Want to know why the tech blogosphere is rapidly decreasing in influence, importance, and prominence among blogs overall? Want to know why Cute Overload, Go Fug Yourself, and Post Secret are more important blogs than yours? It's because of these silly little incestuous locker-room ego-stroking flamewars that the boys are prone to. A few years from now, when you're bitterly protesting that you're no longer seen as relevant, you can look to stupid cross-blog flamewars like this and remember why.

In the meantime, I'm very proud that I'd get quoted for trying to encourage people to be constructive with their conversations. If my blogging legacy is that I wore a funny t-shirt and ranted ineffectively against the unkindness of the blogosphere, I'll be more than happy. I'm not saying everyone has to be nice, just that they shouldn't be proactively stupid. Calm down or shut up!

If I were writing Tim's post, it might be more like this:

Sorry a small number of vocal people were offended that our company tried to protect a brand that they don't even like. Sometimes our lawyers treat our publishing business like they would any other company, not considering that our community expects a referendum on any business dealings having to do with intellectual property. Next time they'll check with us first, but really it's not that big a deal. To those of you who are upset you can't take advantage of the value of the name, I'd suggest you probably want your own name so you can build your own brand equity. To those of you who've just been enjoying the drama and the pile-on, I'd suggest you direct your energies to something useful. To the sane people who were bored by this whole thing, here's hoping there's something productive being discussed soon.

See? Easy. As always, my wife said it first, more succinctly and eloquently than me.

Update: Great post on the same topic from Dave Winer, who's seen firsthand just how pleasant a blog pile-on can be. Also, I'm glad that people who know little about new web technologies can find a New York Times article on this stupidity where we can proudly reveal that our community yields such attractive artifacts as "[Added 27 May 2006 by Marc:] I deleted a comment that insinuated Tim is a child molester." This type of conversation really makes us all look great.