Results tagged “wired”

If you liked my post on Google's Microsoft Moment last week, you may well enjoy Fred Vogelstein's detailed piece in this month's Wired.

I think no small part of the reason so many people enjoyed my post and responded to it was that I deliberately chose an evocative title by referencing Microsoft. Microsoft is shorthand for a whole, complicated set of emotions and responses in the tech and business world, and the brand itself is very effective at communicating a complicated idea very efficiently. Wired's made a few interesting choices in their own headlines:

• The online story is titled "Why Is Obama's Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?"
• The print magazine's teaser line on the cover says "Is Google a Monopoly?"
• The story itself is headlined in the table of contents and on the page as "Keyword: Monopoly".

Now, "monopoly" in a context like this is intimately associated with Microsoft, but "Keyword" actually feels like AOL speak, not something particular to Google. And the Obama reference (as opposed to, say, the DOJ or the administration as a whole or Eric Holder as Attoryney General) seems a little off. But I think it's no accident that the story itself opens with the quote "I think you are going to see a repeat of Microsoft."

Clearly, this perspective on Google's current dominance and cultural shift has reached its moment in the zeitgeist. But aside from the fact that this is an idea (or at least a meme) whose time has come, I think it's interesting to see exactly which way of articulating the idea is most effective in getting people to talk about Google's moment of reckoning.

• I've been ruminating about radio a lot lately (more on that later), but one of the most pleasant radio discoveries of late has been XM Radio's 80s and 90s stations, as well as their "20 on 20" pop hits station. Imagine my delight when I found that AOL Radio is streaming them for free.

• Let's see: Free Jay-Z concert, cute pictures of Shiba Inus, and gratuitous Prince references. Andrea Harner's blog is apparently what I would get if I commissioned a blogger to make a site for me. For the rest of you, BuzzFeed will be more to your taste.

• How to share your event on Google Calendar. Shouldn't the microformats çrew be automating this stuff for all of us?

• Michael Arrington's taking some time off from TechCrunch. One of my main criticisms of the site has always been that he's just a youngster in blogging years. Take it from those of us who've been around for half a decade or so -- this whole "I'm quitting!" thing is only the first step in a bigger cycle. After you quit once or twice, you have to get in a big flame war, post an embarrassingly personal item to your site, have a grandiose Third Anniversary blog post, coin a catch phrase, and have your last name turned into a verb before you can even consider yourself a serious blogger. On the other hand, "TechCrunch is a new kind of publication" so maybe I know nothing.

• I like the Wired cover story on LonelyGirl15, especially because they embed a number of relevant YouTube videos into the story. But how come the it's-not-porn-we're-journalists photo shoot video isn't on YouTube, too? It'd be a great promo for the story!

• "Feature" has many definitions. It can describe a full-length movie or a particularly prominent or compelling article in a magazine or newspaper. Alternately, a feature is an individual bit of functionality in a software program or application. What do I think of Jeffrey McManus' blog post? It feels like a feature.

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.

• "Two of the most financially successful Web 2.0 personalities ... are rooting for the financial failure of their competitors." Hmm. I tend to root for the success of our company's competitiors, because I want the entire industry to be healthy, I think the competition is good for all of us, and because I actually give a damn about the web. I'm not sure if I believe the sentiment that's quoted above, but I do know there are lots of people who take digs at their competitors or wish them ill. In the long term, this is a self-correcting problem. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

• On a not-entirely-unrelated note, congratulations, Jason. A break is well-deserved, and a lot of what Mena said about Ev applies here as well.

• What's it look like after people have rooted for your failure but you make it work anyway? It looks like a WSJ profile of marca. I remember being in high school and my Morrissey-listening friends would tell me they would hate it if I became successful.

• 
  What was that about successful friends? Dear Flickr team: Did you know the official Justin Timberlake SexyBack Tour Photo Contest happens to run as a Flickr photo group? I'm also pretty entertained by the cover of the new album, FutureSex / LoveSounds, which is pictured here. (See also: my earlier review of SexyBack, the lead single.)

• The other kids aren't listening to Justin Timberlake, they're listening to Kelly Clarkson! So says the wildly erratic Google Music Trends, which relies on the apparently completely unreliable "Now Playing" status of Google Talk to determine song popularity.

• Want to talk to Google Talk users without using Google's system at all? For free? Using open source software? Hmm, that sounds interesting... Act now and we'll throw in a free Jabber server.

• If you're not sick of me yet, pick up this month's Wired. The story's not online yet, but I talk a bit about spam blogs (as mentioned by Steve Rubel) but come off sounding a little half-witted at points. That's okay.

• And finally, some outstanding conversations have started based on my talk at MeshForum a few months ago. Slouching Toward the Era of Quality of Life, What blogspace needs now and Audience and purpose in blogging all delighted me with the great ideas that seemed to come from these bloggers thinking out loud on their sites. I like it when my ideas' competitors succeed.

I'd started reading The Long Tail (You've read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I'd read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris' blog since it started. Was there really anything new left? How could I still be interested in a topic that long ago became part of the scenery for the Web 2.0 and VC crowd?

In short, it's just plain good writing. My enjoyment of the book probably centers around the extensive amount of hard data used to gird the book's examples, as well as the pleasingly broad set of cultural influences and examples used to illustrate the effects of the Long Tail. I've criticized the technology industry often for its unrepentant insularity; The breadth of culture in The Long Tail amply evidences the fact that the phenomenon extends well past the confines of the traditional definition of "technology" as an industry.

Above all else, using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique. The Long Tail is profoundly intellectually honest.

I'm on the record as a genuine admirer of Malcolm Gladwell, but I have to say that one of the most accurate of the persistent criticisms of his work is that it often substitutes qualitative anecdotes for qualitative evidence. Given that this is, to some degree, what Blink is about, I don't find this a particularly egregious habit. But it is nevertheless a valid point to raise, and The Long Tail is a stronger book for the near-scientific rigor of much of its analysis. (Informing this discipline, no doubt, is Chris's stints at Nature and Science.)

But here's an example of how the breadth of the narrative really got my gears turning. If you read this site back when I used to do my Daily Links, you might remember the history of house music I linked to. It's an encyclopedic and comprehensive resource that, along with the dictionary of samples, was one of my favorite links ever. Interestingly, house music comes up near the end of The Long Tail.

Now, I believe that, without hip hop and remix culture (of which house music is firmly a part), there would be no blogging. "Rip, Mix, and Burn" isn't merely a tenet of digital culture, it's among the fundamental principles of post-disco black music, which has consistently shaped contemporary culture. And that's important to note because The Long Tail isn't a book about business, or the Internet, or even economics. At least, it isn't merely about economics; It's a book about a change in culture.

Of course, The Tipping Point reached its, well... you know, after somehow morphing from being a book about cultural trends into being perceived as a business guide. So I'm not surprised that The Long Tail is packaged that way; The same audience might well purchase it for the same reasons. Indeed, Reed Hastings' back-cover blurb suggests that The Long Tail will sit on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. Presumably these books are all also bad and good for you.

But I digress. House music, you say? Let's go to the tape:

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

Naturally, there's a lengthier explanation of why this is so in the book, along with an acknowledgement of Umair Haque for contributions to the analysis. But what struck me as noteworthy in this, admittedly minor, part of the book was the pleasantly catholic set of influences. There's a lot of commonalities between the various long tail-based media that media hackers and culture jammers tend to gravitate towards.

I think it's no coincidence that many early bloggers (and, especially, many people who made blog-related tools) have been influenced by hip hop's remix culture, or by the multifaceted beat-matching culture of DJing. It's not just the methods of distribution that are similar; It's the aesthetic of mix-and-match, more lately referred to as Rip, Mix, and Burn.

Have I mentioned that, in addition to being an early investor in Six Apart and a skilled blogger, Joi Ito used to be a house DJ in Chicago? It's true.