Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web

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Seth Godin’s latest ebook, Who’s There? Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, is just a little 46 page PDF file but it’s packed with lots of small but profound insights. The kind of stuff you read and think, “You know, he’s right.” Some of my favorites:

We’ve become astonishingly picky. Picky about what we buy and picky about what we watch and picky about what we read. In a world where there’s a lot of clutter and where everything is good enough, most of the time we just pick the stuff that’s close or cheap or familiar. But when it’s something we care about, we go to enormous lengths to find the very best.

Radio is officially dead, especially when wireless internet access comes to your car.

The stuff you’re putting on your marketing site or in your blog or even in your brochures or in your business letters is too long. Too much inside baseball. Too many unasked questions getting answered too soon. The stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.

It used to matter a lot where an idea came from. When an idea came from a mainstream media company (MSM) or from a Fortune 500 company, it was a lot more likely to spread. That’s because media companies had free airwaves or paid for newsprint, while big corporations had the money to buy interruptions. Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact, an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of spreading.

If you write something great, and do it over and over and over again, then you’ll be unstoppable. Whether or not someone helps you.

The problem is that the very things big companies, public companies, stable companies and established companies are good at are the things that make a blog boring.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

If you care about your personal brand and career and impact, you need a blog. And you should start the cycle of getting better at blogging.

George Carlin on future of the planet

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“We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.”

— George Carlin rant on why the planet is fine

What is RSS?

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“RSS is just a little peep, a signal, a ping that comes from a favorite blog or site, telling your computer that it has been updated. If you have an RSS reader (and they’re free and easy, and two of the easiest live on the web so you don’t even have to install anything), whenever a blog is updated, it shows up in your reader and you can catch up on the news. If there’s nothing new, it doesn’t show up and you don’t have to waste time surfing around.”

— Seth Godin

Sounds like a personal computer

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Vannevar Bush, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. (Circa July, 1945)

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. A device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Page 7 of John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said.

Kevin Kelly: We Are the Web

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Kevin Kelly has written a wonderful article for WIRED.com about the Web that perfectly sums up what I’ve been feeling but didn’t know how to say. I encourage you to read the complete article, but here are a few grafs that jumped out at me:

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from? The audience.

The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born. You and I are alive at this moment.

Jeff Jarvis on cash cows

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Having a cash cow distracts companies from the future. It makes them complacent: ‘Look at all the money (still) rolling in.’ It makes them think that if they just tweak this and that — if they can still get away with raising their rates even as their audience and value are shrinking — they will continue to keep milking cash from that old cow. It makes them overly cautious: ‘Nobody hurt Bessie!’

And politically, the guys in charge of the cow don’t want anybody inside the company competing with them: no new products, no new power centers, no one else to set strategy, no one else to use resources. They win because, of course, they’re the ones bringing in the cash. Nevermind that they’re the ones stopping the company from building for the future. They’ll tell you that’s not their job. They’re there to protect the cow.

From a Jeff Jarvis post on Big Media

Hugh MacLeod on being creative

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Mr. MacLeaod offers thirty tips on how to be creative. My two favorites are:

3. Put the hours in. Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.