WayWest

Daring Fireball hits 2-year mark

One of the Web's best Mac-related sites, Daring Fireball turns two next month. I say Mac-related, but really it's a must read for anyone wondering where this linked life is taking us. The journey from leap of faith to a true business is a tribute to John Gruber, its more-than-daring creator, who sums up:

"I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished with Daring Fireball: a self-published, profitable web site for which I never borrowed any money, and have accepted only a modicum of advertising. This has only been possible because of the direct support of readers like you."

Read the full post and support his work with a cool T-shirt.

Designers making a difference

In gearing up for a major redesign of WayWest.net, I stumbled across a site that's not only great looking, but also squarely aimed at how designers can change their work habits—and maybe slow global warming in the process.

The links and resources listed at Design Can Change go beyond the usual change-your-ways tips.
Here are just a few of the site's topics and links:

* Cradle-to-grave design, a practice aimed at creating more durable products that will land lightly in the landfill when they do bite the dust.
* Downloads for changing those ingrained business practices—like printing up those wonderful-but-not-so-green brochures. Instead, they show you how to switch to PDFs—and how to get clients to welcome the change.
* A Green Paper Guide for finding more environment-friendly papers.
*Even a sustainable design checklist to help designers stay on the green and narrow as they work.

A blunt voice of great precision

David Roberts, who blogs for Grist, is a must read for tracking the ins and outs of global weirding. In dissecting the science and politics of climate change, David Roberts cuts to the chase with righteous calm. Few use such a blunt voice with such precision.

If you're new to his ways, his guest column over at The Nation is a great place to start. Consider your stereotypes dynamited:

"When Grist hired me five years ago, I did not consider myself an 'environmentalist.' To me the word conjured not so much a set of policy positions as a subculture, with the emphasis on cult. It was a set of clothing, music, and activity choices I had little affinity with and associated with a degree of self-righteousness. I'd never hung out with environmental activists. I didn't want to subordinate my other interests (horserace politics, social and economic justice, rule of law, the web). I'm an unreconstructed urbanite with no particular love for critters, trees, or hiking/climbing/kayaking. I enjoy irony, political wonkery, pop culture, and bacon. I hate jam bands.

He'll be posting throughout February, so give it a look.

Should media 'think like a place instead of a thing'?

Mark Glaser of PBS's MediaShift offers real insight on the recent demise of Time Warner's magazine, Business 2.0, which in 2001 was expected to combine print profits with online mojo. Now, Time Warner has pulled the plug. The magazine's editor calls the problem a lack of advertisers, rather than a loss of readers. If he had to do it again, Josh Quittner, says:

I would create a social network that was for entrepreneurs, to help them find each other and find talent they need,” he said. “And I would have a staff to write articles that would be given away for free and used to bring people into the social network. Then we could show a degree of engagement that would appeal to advertisers while delivering to users the kind of information they’re begging for. I don’t think online-only is the way to go….We all make these connections to different kinds of media, and we find something that connects with us, we want to hold it, we want to touch it, we want to carry it around like a flag.

In the same piece, Glazer quotes BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis, who amplifies the point:

"Business 2.0 should not have been a product but a community; it could have been the magazine that shows how that’s done. It even had a community on Facebook eager to save it. But, sadly, this magazine was made by a 1.0 company that just didn’t understand how to think like a place instead of a thing.

Here's the thing that grabs me: Newspapers had/have/cover actual communities with engaged, actual readers. Yet too many papers, in a mistaken hunt for younger readers (presumably a more spendy demographic) are ignoring the readers they already have. The assumption is that newspaper readers are old coots stuck on print and that the real advertising money is online with the youngsters.

A glance at any family's den/kitchen tells you, however, that increasingly everyone is online for one reason or another. Many older folks may still prefer to read their news on paper. But they also avidly surf the Web chasing specific interests, whether it's recipes, Civil War memorabilia, or travel info. Research by the Nielsen/Net Ratings firm bears this out: "The number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34," according to a recent piece in The New York Times.

The coots and the kids are not separate worlds that never cross paths.

(Via PBS MediaShift)

Technorati Tags: media, newspapers

Global Voices garners award

Harvard's Global Voices has won the grand prize in the 2006 Knight-Batten Awards. Well earned, well deserved, particularly for the two powerhouses behind the project, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon.

Global Voices posts blog dispatches from citizen journalists all over the world, especially less-heard-from developing countries. It's often the most effective way to judge the internal politics of countries far off the maps of the powerful. Ethan's focus on spotlighting Africa and Rebecca's determination to sidestep the whole blogs-vs.-MSM nonsense really have shown the way for a more-powerful, less-ego new media.

(Via Center for Citizen Media)

Technorati Tags: media, Global Voices, Berkman Center, Human Rights

Kinkless it's not

I don't mean this harshly, so cease fire, but why does Kinkless Getting Things Done (aka kGTD) draw such high praise when it falls so short as a priority-setting project management program?

After doggedly using it for about a year now, I just recently gave up because so many things remain kludgey about it. Despite Merlin's many useful tips on using it with OmniOutliner Professional, using it became a constant time suck. I think the reason kGTD gets such good Web buzz is because it's so clear how great and useful it could be. The dream of seamlessly integrating kGTD with Quicksilver, iCal, and Cocoa services burns bright! But kGTD's just not there yet. Here's a typical day or two's worth of user questions, warnings, and pleas from the kGTD discussion forum:

When Ethan smooths off the edges—and I know his plate is full—I'll be back with money in hand. But the whole point of David Allen's hugely useful Getting Things Done is, well, getting things done, not constantly fiddling with the tools. In the meantime, I've settled for EasyTask Manager, which isn't nearly as comprehensive as kGTD. But, hey, at least it's easy.

Using Google to highlight spamming

Here's how it works: I just cut and paste this item from Dori at Backup Brain and that helps move it up in the Google results any time someone searchs for this fellow.

Michael S. Cox is a spammer

(A little cross posting to spread the news. Read all about it at: Backup Brain.)

Will someone grab Dave's olive branch

Dave Winer, the love-him-or-hate-him godfather of blogging, is mending some fences with John Markoff, a technology reporter for the New York Times and, in the process, beginning to see why bloggers and journalists don't have to treat each other as enemies:

I've given guest talks at two Markoff journalism classes, one at UC-Berkeley and one at Stanford. At the Stanford one we talked about coverage of City Hall, which he pointed out was a problem, as professional journalism was retracting, it was leaving civic politics uncovered. I may have pointed out, probably did, that the people can fill in and increase coverage of civic politics. I vaguely recall that Markoff was unconvinced. But as time has passed I've become more sure this is the answer, and that the respective role of professional and amateur is that of editor and reporter, teacher and student, coach and player. There is a relationship, but it's a new one, and newness is always hard (but often fun).

We're not going to get anywhere by calling each other wrong, there's been finger-pointing both ways, and I've done it myself at times, and I've got to remind myself that it's not constructive. The pros have often erred by being dismissive of the bloggers, but maybe we're getting past that. They now tend to see the problem as economic -- that Craig's List is eating into their revenue. But there's a balancing opportunity. Some, perhaps not many, of the people reading Craig's List, share the passion for informaiton and democracy that a good idealistic reporter does, and will do it for love, not money. I believe the vast amount of editorial writing will be done for no money. This isn't really new, after all, the publications don't pay their sources -- and that's ultimately where the information comes from, right?

I envision an offsite, off the record, not for quoting or attribution, no grandstanding, no blogging, with five thoughtful reporters and five thoughtful bloggers. We set up in Big Sur for a week, go for hikes, sit around campfires, and do the bonding things that human resource consultants have Silicon Valley management teams do. During working hours our job is to figure out how we can help each other. I have no doubts that if we can relax and approach this creatively, we can solve a lot of problems that way, very quickly, because there's a lot of potential locked up in the connection between amateur and professional media.

Oh, and will someone please hand Dave a towel before he gets out of the hot tub.

(Via Scripting News.)

When popular drowns unique

Monday morning's class ran late so I caught just the tail end of the Shorenstein Center's brown bag seminar by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. Together, they founded Global Voices Online, an international online citizens’ media project housed at Harvard's Berkman Center.

They talked about how and why they wound up creating the site, which is one of the most useful spots in the blogosphere for hearing non-mainstream voices and views. They realized that much of the media (blogs and mainstream media) focuses on the developed world—and that the developing world winds up invisible. Global Voices offers a stage for bloggers from other parts of the world to talk about what's going on where they live. The result—fresh views and insights for everyone.

Early on, as MacKinnon and Zuckerman trolled for global blogs, they were quickly overwhelmed by all the material out there and abandoned the notion of merely aggregating such posts. Instead, they now pick items based on what their own regionally based editors find most engaging and useful.

In explaining that approach, someone in the audience asked if they'd considered the model used by Daily Koz, where posts rise to the top based on readers' clicks. The problem, Zuckerman said, is that in any discussion of world affairs the Mideast consistently generates the most traffic. It rockets to the top and issues like Africa drop off the table, and out of view.

Since Zuckerman's whole purpose for Global Voices was to focus attention on overlooked things like African news, he said, a most-popular approach was exactly what they didn't want.

A lesson, perhaps, that the loudest voices are not the only voices.

John Palfrey has more on the talk.

Remember (again) why you blog

Skipping past metaphysical stews and new-old media rehash, Rex Hammock boils down the reasons to blog to seven items. The gist:

If you believe the size of your audience is the measure of success, don't blog. If you think how many people link to your site is the measure of success, don't blog. Blog because you want to have a voice in a conversation.

OK, that's three reasons but then I'm doing my own sauce reduction. His longer, highly seasoned, nicely reasoned version is worth savoring.

(Via: rexblog)