Thanks to the Lord High Commander of Planet Nelson for pointing us to Photofunia. I like this site a lot more than he did. Grown-up that he is, he dismissed the site as a place to fiddle away an "Internet minute." I expect to spend countless hours there.
My favorite political pundit, Matt Taibbi, penned a cheerful article about politics, media and class in America. Since nobody is going to click on a link to an article thus described, here’s the final paragraph:
“These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.”
Bloggers love few things as much as help a new blogger get started. George and I spent the morning with Jefferson City Mayor John Landwehr (and his wife Peggy) helping him get a blog set up. By the time you read this, HighStreetBeat.com should get you there. If not, this link will.
Hizhonor envisions the blog as a place to share news about Jefferson City…with the world. People, places, events, etc. And he’s armed with a Flip Video camera and a YouTube account so look for lots of video. The site just went up today so it’s “under construction” as we used to say.
He has a page on the official Jeff City website, called “Mayor’s Monthly Memo.” But a month is a lifetime in Internet years and memos are waaay too last century. He’s looking for ideas and feedback so hit the comment links or the Gmail link on the left side of his page.
Every now and then a super-star blogger “retires” from blogging. Or threatens to. One of the more recent is Jason Calacanis. From his farewell post:
“Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal: an email list. Today the email list has about 600 members, I’m going to cut it off when it reaches 750. Frankly, that’s enough more than enough people to have a conversation with. I’m going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people–try to get back to my roots.”
Huh. I think this is where I came in on the Internet movie. Yeah, I’d say 750 people might be enough to keep the old conversation ball in the air.
Chris Pirillo wonders if we’re getting “too big for our niches?”
“Perhaps it is time to step back and figure out what’s possible in this new landscape. Can we maintain conversation and community at a large scale without things devolving into chaos? Is beating the CNNs and CNETs at their own mass-market game what we really want, or do we need to go back to the idea of finding our niche?”
I don’t know anything about A-List bloggers but my buddy Chuck blogs (among other things) for a living and he and his wife work their asses off. I can see why someone might run out of steam if it all got too big.
I find blogging fun and relaxing. I know –or know of– many of the 250-300 people that visit here. Blogging for bucks? Not for me.
“(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world.”
From Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations.