connecting*the*dots

Photo by Colin Gregory Palmer

I usually tend to keep announcements under wraps until I’ve made enough progress to warrent them, but in the spirit of Tantek Çelik’s building blocks presentation, Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project and Chris Messina’s barcamp escapades, well, here goes nothing:

thepeopleyes.org

Fresh on the heels of their first campaign blunder, AT&T dives right back in and makes the exact same mistake:

Unbelievable.

Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon are Rocketboom.

“We are in an interesting time, as production tools for mass communication are dirt cheap and accessible.”

Rocketboom: “An interesting intersection of blogging, TV over IP, radical advertising, etc.”… “The art of the possible.”

• Personal filters (media, people they meet, events, etc.) - always on the lookout for more information.
• Design - “One of the most important aspects of Rocketboom is… interface design; making the interface comfortable and easy to use.” The simplicity of the interface equals the experience for all viewers/users.
• Global - “Audience is scattered all around the world. Correspondants are in Kenya, Prague, all over the States.” Very interested in global stories. Rocketboom.jp just launched to communicate from Japan, presenting video stories which isn’t language-centric.



• Time - “Time is power.” Whoever has information before another will have a huge advantage. Large organizations cannot be agile enough to move fast. Rocketboom is daily, so it becomes habit-forming. “Simple concepts, but so important to us and our success. It’s worth considering them in-depth.”
• Consequence - Unlike other business models built on one, two year business plans, Rocketboom deals with consequences in the moment. They’re able to shift their approaches in the moment to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Being open to change is huge.
• Interactive - 25% of Rocketboom stories are user-generated. Then there are comments, emails with viewers, etc. They feel very strongly about the communities this interaction with viewers build. This medium is interactive, so even though a user is digesting video, it’s not TV.

The show is already available on cell phones (thanks to a fan hack), TiVo viewers, PSP and iTunes.

Great conversation.

Now that I’ve been blogging full-time for the past year, I can relate to these ancients of the craft like never before. They’re going back and forth on the ills of advertising and subscription models — something I’ve yet to have to deal with as my readership ain’t quite there yet (read: go tell your friends to come on by!) — and the origins of their ideas, style and voice.

Regarding advertising, sustaining my effort is eventually going to catch up with me… I think. Right now balancing freelance gigs with writing is working, but the allure to blog even more is getting stronger and stronger, especially as I get more and more into a groove with my voice and my POV. And once I start connecting with more like minds…

But back to Jason and Heather; the conversation is shifting into how blogging has affected their friends and relationships. It’s interesting to hear them talk about direct feedback and how it affects their personal lives. Jason brought up Heather’s Wiki biography, where a fan ended the bio by saying, “Heather and husband remain unemployed.” Really funny. (Heather, I had to live-blog update that last line ;)

I wonder what Dave Winer will think of Jason’s view of him being a pied piper-type blogger. It wasn’t a dig of any type — it was Jason trying to make clear how he didn’t view himself — but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in “Days Of Our Blogosphere”

Kottke just called his fiance, Yoko. Doh!

Blogging rules.

The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat.

Newspapers are already hemoraging readership, as the web has created an extremely rich bazaar, allowing us to shop for unbundled content at every turn, while unbundled advertising models begin to sprout up to support this evolution. Well, get ready for the online replicas of the print world to begin to sweat even more. Following on the heals of the mass appeal of social wisdom sites such as slashdot and digg comes a revolutionary hybrid of mainstream media, citizen journalism and participatory editing: Newsvine.

Taking the aggregation features of a Yahoo! News, the collaborative properties of a digg and the citizen media aspects of blogging, Newsvine is staged to completely redefine the news. Why? Because the common man now has stake in the game.

Old School

Top/down delivery of content, beginning with organized knowledge, is a modern construct. Since the advent of television, these organized silos of knowledge have been optimized over the years for advertising to take advantage of explicit media buys — matching business audience demographics, psychographics and geographics to channeled, programed, bundled content. Great for advertisers and the networks/publications, lousy for the “consumer,” as we end up consuming more messaging and less news or interests which match *our* needs and desires.

These constructed, mechanical relationships define false, explicit edges of our culture, which in turn raises the value proposition of media and news organizations simply by standardizing on such lexicon. This standardization of topical interests — unknowingly bought into by the public as what is *real* — enables a sussinct universe of sales and stories, broadcast on television news and pumped through newspapers, serving as the ying to the entertainment media’s yang.

A metaphor: Is it easier to entertain and pacify a child within a theme park or the natural environment of a forest?

Somewhere between the crafted, paced, 4/4 movement of greased industry palms rubbing against one another, lies our percept of reality, consistently bombarded by messaging and it’s representative experience. So while we struggle with this understanding of our surroundings, back in the news room, editors — the field managers of this construct — find themselves under the thumb of the financial steerings and pressures of this propped reality. Their indoctrinated intuition places reactionary constraints on the types of stories generated, the depth of coverage, even the language the writer chooses to employ.

The innovators and early adopters of the web… we’re basically saying, “Fuck that noise.”

New School

Bottom/up constructs, enabled by the personal publishing revolution, delivered with flexible subscription technology such as RSS, have empowered individuals to publish cheaply within our own crafted domains.

• RSS allows us to digest information passively (in a centralized location), instead of actively (surfing the decentalized web), which greatly increases our level of input and conversely, fine tunes our understanding of the world, which is represented by our output (blogging, conversations, actions, etc.)
• Those of us who publish our own information objects, apply meta-data to increase the potential of findability, both now and in future interfaces
• Many of us participate with folksonomies, helping make our POV of all information semantically rich and contextual to our neighbors interests, our future grandchildern’s recollections of us, even the desires of a family on the other side of the planet
• We create multimedia objects to compete with elite vehicles of capital, and fuel them through the same tactical approaches

This participatory environment is one aspect of the Web 2.0 phrase that gets tossed about. It’s enabling us humans to share our creative impulses with others, helping to constantly define and then redefine the world around us through our personal representations of both explicit and implicit lexicon.

This is an open paradigm, a transparent journey, based in accelerated trust and faith in one another.

So when these two worlds meet — old school vs. new school or modernism vs. post-modernism or proprietary vs. open source — the truth of hierarchy and the truth of individual POV’s collide. Guess what remains?

A truthier truth.

Newsvine has taken a position of mixing mainstream feeds with user submitted, tagged and collaboratively greenlit content. Even more revolutionary, they’re mixing the standardized embedded lexicon of our culture — topical categories — with the co-occurance generated wisdom of the people creating relevant content living within such silos (see below)

The secondary navigation points are all dynamic, altering over time as the co-occurance of tagged objects within a topical category shifts. This is how I think — how I search, discover, build my own archive in this blog — so in and of itself, the concept doesn’t blow me away. What does blow me away is that by simply placing this paradigm next to, say, The New York Times, Yahoo! News, my pseudo-innovative hometown Greensboro News & Record and a blog aggregator like Greensboro101 (disclosure: I’m on the advisory panel), none of these domains can compete if Newsvine gains a participatory, critical mass audience.

Think about it: Newsvine provides AP feeds (like a Yahoo! News), yet allows anyone to seed *any* story, from *any* site (like digging or del.icio.us tagging). Let me try to clearly paint how disruptive of a strategy this is.

• With only the AP feed, Newsvine could potentially evolve to become a successful News aggregator
• The addition of the digg and del.icio.us features completely change the game. Newsvine now becomes populated by the very content from the news sites (New York Times, News & Record, etc.) that it’s competing against for advertising
• The better the content, say, a New York Times produces, the more likely it’ll end up in Newsvine, but with more context (meta-data) and a thriving, participatory readership.
• Content will begin to be valued differently at a New York Times — as prices might become reduced at the domain, while new, shared models will be created at sites like Newsvine. Good for the Times, as they have a new market for revenue, but it will effect their organizational structure. The big advantage for Newsvine: they don’t have to completely readjust due to their recent entry into the arena and their nimble stature (compared to large news organizations)
• Community blog aggregators could possibly fall to the wayside, simply due to the fact that people can seed their own local posts, as well as their neighbors, and leverage unbundled advertising services. The very concept of “community” will be redefined on much more granular levels, moving towards a flickr existence, as explicit tags begin to define groups of interest

The Final Touch

Mike Davidson obviously knows what he has here; not only an opportunity to provide a rich, participatory environment for the redefinition of what news means to us as a collective, a community and as individuals, but this service could very well challenge the embedded constructs of media and the contradictions of Adam Smith capitalism.

Heavy.

In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world.

If he heads in this direction, or others evolve his concept down this line, media as we know it could absolutely cease to exist. Reputable journalists will become more enabled by freelance opportunities, as news organizations will need to drastically reduce their overhead because advertising money won’t be channeled into one out of six corporate funnels.

Then we’ll more easily find the opportunities to 2.0 the hell out of government.

———-

(Big ups to Kent Bye over at The Echo Chamber Project for refueling my tank last night on the way home. 5 hours of ECP podcasts will get you into this type of groove. Go check out his amazing project)

Brought to you from that cutting-edge crew over at Current TV. You know, that little ol’ venture from Al Gore.

Big business is already squirming regarding citizen media; they’re going to have a heart attack if this experiment takes off. I don’t make predictions often, but the day it’s the norm for companies to dive into blogging as a means to communicate with their market, citizen advertizing will take off like wildfire.

The value proposition for large companies is too high to ignore hundreds, possibly thousands of passionate, creative consumers. Aside from the media buy component of a 50 million dollar campaign (in non-Current TV channels), the remainder of the creative and production costs could be replaced by a hundred $1,000 checks.

But forget huge corporations for a minute; imagine the value proposition for small businesses. The saturation of message and community will be beyond enticing; it’ll be intoxicating.

Man, the elites must really hate Web/Media 2.0 now.

Goofy quote from this 35 year-old man: “They’re animated!”

So_much_fun.

(via Boing Boing)

I could get really snarky with this post (yes, Tish, I do have it in me), but I’ll let the images below speak for themselves:

(via Miss Rogue and David King)

Here we go again.

A blogger is just a writer with a cooler name
Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold
By Simon Dumenco

I’ve been thinking of what I am — about what any media person in the digital age is — since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There’s simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast — it’s instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It’s unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It’s voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It’s about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It’s, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn’t?).

OK, then, you might further argue, the Internet itself treats blogs as structurally distinct things. Well, sure, there are blog-specific search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, blogsearch.google.com, etc.), but the lines between blog and non-blog content are rapidly dissolving. Traditional news organizations and blogs often get seemingly equal weight as news sources in Google News. And just last week, I found out about Sprint’s West Coast fiber optic network outage from the new Gmail “Web Clipâ€? ticker that sits atop my e-mail inbox — and the clip came from a blog, not a traditional news organization.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog communityâ€? (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media. And for traditional-media types, blog/blogging/bloggers are variants of a sort of linguistic armor — labels that allow old-school-ists to convince themselves that they are the true professionals, and they needn’t radically alter the way they work (i.e., work way faster, interact constantly with readers, be vastly more voracious, etc.) to compete with the amateurs, the arrivistes.

Of course, the false dichotomy gives rise to internal inconsistencies — like at The New York Times, which is acting like David Carr is one thing (he’s a columnist!) when he’s doing his Monday media business column and another thing (he’s a blogger!) when he’s doing his Oscar-season dispatches under The Carpetbagger rubric on NYTimes.com, even though both are edited by a Times editor before being published. (By the way, why isn’t The Carpetbagger called The Carrpetbagger?) Those who remember David’s spirited, nearly instantaneous media reporting at Inside.com know that he was “bloggingâ€? way before there were blogs. (A historical note: I was a columnist for Inside; David and I never worked together directly, though we shared editors.)

A lot of the tendency to draw lines internally, I think, has to do with the fact that most old-school publishing organizations with online components invested heavily in the ’90s in then-state-of-the-art, but now-cumbersome online publishing systems, which are functionally very different from more nimble blogging software solutions. But over the next few years those legacy systems will be phased out and everyone publishing online will be using some form of what’s now commonly thought of as blogging software.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: In the very near future, there are only going to be two types of media people: those who can reliably work and publish (or broadcast) incredibly fast, and those … who can’t.

I had planned on commenting on the article itself, but I couldn’t (ironic, eh?). So here’s my email to Simon in its entirety:

———-

Simon,

While I agree with your premise of software being a non-differentiator to the act of writing, I have to disagree with you across the remainder of the board.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog community” (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media.

If you don’t understand what the “blog community” is… what form of masterbation did I just digest? No, it isn’t a point of pride; it’s a means for expression, the only mass form of expression many of us “bloggers” have access to and one which differentiates itself from writing in any other form:

1. bloggers don’t have editors breathing over their shoulders
2. bloggers understand, use and respect the community-building, conversational power of inline linking
3. bloggers provide a means for public discourse (comments/trackbacks) to their writing

Of course, the false dichotomy gives rise to internal inconsistencies — like at The New York Times, which is acting like David Carr is one thing (he’s a columnist!) when he’s doing his Monday media business column and another thing (he’s a blogger!) when he’s doing his Oscar-season dispatches under The Carpetbagger rubric on NYTimes.com, even though both are edited by a Times editor before being published.

Here’s a scoop: a blogger doesn’t have an editor. Your reference is simply an example of an old school media giant labeling something a blog that isn’t… pure and simple. That’s “quick, call it [a blog] because it’s hot” old media, glom marketing tactics. Period.

Also, regarding your thesis; a blogger wouldn’t have framed the discussion as you did, focusing on how blogging is the same as writing in “old media” by using this example of split media (a “column” in one area, a “blog” elsewhere). A blogger would have seen that split as a sign that “old media” isn’t comfortable with explicitly running with [point] #2 from above.

Old media absolutely does not like to send people away from their *domains* because they have an ad sales infrastructure to grease, one that is too menacing for a blind leap into the world of “links in, links out.” Too many salaries, benefits, careers, etc. are on the line.

We don’t have such concerns.

-Sean

ps. Since you don’t have comments on your “writing” I want to let you know that I plan on posting this email… just a courtesy heads up.

I stumbled across the no one’s listening podcast site and their interview with Noam Chomsky yesterday. The interview was entitled, Fake News; a title fitting his perspective on the American media. I have to admit though, after reading most of Noam’s work from the 80’s and 90’s, it was good to hear that he’s optimistic about the future.

The following is a transcript of part of the interview:

Noam: The effect [of the media] on the public isn’t very much studied, but to the extent as it has been, it seems that among the more educated sectors, the indoctrination works more effectively. Among the less educated sectors, the people are more skeptical and cynical.

Irene: Right… so what can we do because now I’m depressed. [nervous laughter]

Noam: I think it’s a very optimistic future, frankly.

Irene: Really? You wrote 90 books…

Noam: Look, very much so. There’s something we know about this country more than any other: we know a lot about public opinion. It’s studied very intensively.

Irene: That it’s fickle?

Noam: But it’s very rarely reported. You can find them, it’s an open society, you can find them. What they show is very remarkable. What they show first of all is that both political parties and the media are far to the right of the general population, on a whole host of issues. And the population is just, you know, disorganized, atomized, and so on. This country ought to be an organizers paradise. And the, that’s why the media and the campaigns keep away from issues. They know that on issues they’re going to lose people.

So therefore you have to portray George Bush as a, look he’s a pampered kid who came from a rich family, went to prep school, an elite university and you have to present him as an ordinary guy, you know, who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make, he didn’t talk that way at Yale and a fake Texas twang and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something.

That’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.

Given the facts about public opinion it means what’s needed is something, you know, not very radical. Let’s become as democratic as say the second largest country in the hemisphere: Brazil. I mean their last election was not between two rich kids who went to the same elite university and joined the same secret society where they’re trained to be members of the upper class and can get into politics cause they have rich families with a lot of connections. I mean people were actually able to vote and elect a president from their own ranks. A man who was a peasant union leader never had a higher education and comes from the population.

They could do it because it’s a functioning democratic society. Tremendous obstacles, you know: repressive state, huge concentration of wealth, much worse obstacles than we have, but they have mass popular movements, they have actual political parties which we don’t have. There’s nothing to stop us from doing that. We have a legacy of freedom which is unparalleled, its been won by struggle over centuries, it was never given, you can use it or you can abandon it.

It’s a choice.

So… I guess the question is who’s ready to make a few personal sacrifices to begin to elicit change?

Blogging is a strange beast.

I was on ScriptingNews yesterday, reading Dave Winer’s spot-on post about Google web clips. Frankly, it surprised me that it was a new feature to him, as I’ve had it displayed above my Gmail client for what seems months now. Maybe Google is releasing features in chunks of user groups? I digress…

Just as I began to create a post about the differences in my mental model when I’m searching for information and performing specific tasks to accomplish a specific goal within an application (with the former being the proper place for RSS advertisements [which is what they are] and the latter a place that should be free of such junk), I happened upon his post which used an out of context quote from Tara Hunt’s post as a lead into a somewhat self-aggrandizing post. Well, that shifted my posting focus.

Within 10 minutes I had moved from one blog to another, uncovering the gist of what her quote actually referenced. In the end, I found myself watching a 3 minute-long clip of Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe going at it at Les Blogs conference in Paris. This somewhat common interaction in the midst of a conference (speaker and attendee getting worked up in debate) was different because it came into being due to the backchannel IRC conversation being presented behind Mena, which led her to call Ben out of the audience to back up his off-comment.

So instead of dropping a UX post, I found myself clued into who Ben Metcalfe is and this practice of presenting IRC conversations "to add texture" to a conference presentation—a practice which, I feel, is completely fucked up. Don’t agree? Feel free to create more noise for the sphere to devour. Monitoring the sheer amount of conversations that posted following the Mena-Ben exchange has been almost humorous. Yes, this post is my second referencing the “event.”

Look, blogging is empowering; it connects us individual human beings, allowing us to have a voice within the mass markets of consumerism. To Dave’s point, it’s also a hell of a lot more than that, as human behavior is impossible to predict or map out. The great thing about the blogoshere is that there is little to no organization or editorial control across blogs, but a snapshot of the conversation across the blogosphere might tell a different story.

We’ve already moved beyond the purist definition of a blog (or a web-log) into a sphere peppered with collaborative blogs, some laced with specific editorial agendas, others serving as a virtual world for friends in the real to pool their perspectives of the world. This evolution begs a bunch of questions to be asked:

• What happens to these voices in this ecosystem as the blogosphere continues to evolve?
• Is there a tipping point for these new blogs to leave the support system of the blogosphere and enter the capitalistic fray of the mainstream media?
• What signifies that initial shift; a weekly email between contributors agreeing upon editorial direction and goals, possibly?
• How about an advertsing or revenue model that only subtly effects the subject matter of posts?
• A blog isn’t a blog simply because of it’s posting and interactive features… or is it?

Are we moving towards creating more brand in the ether or is it the first step to creating grass roots, organized, activism with a catchy name to evoke information scent within the greased-palm structure of the mainstream media?

Oh, and about social tagging…

Indy films definitely hit a substantial delay in finding their way to my new home in Greensboro, NC, so after a month or so of waiting, I finally had a chance to see Good Night, And Good Luck this past weekend.

Classic.

Heading into the film, I had already regarded Edward R. Murrow a warrior for exposing the truth and championing the rights of the common man and woman, but if GNAGL enlightened me to anything it was to his absolute dedication to a pure journalistic method and a deeply, refined and realistic business acumen.

The Prototypical Newsman

With his classic, stoic, "just the facts ma’am" delivery, Murrow captivated his audience. He came across as an authority figure to the less media savvy audience of the 1950’s, but he also played the role of friend and confidant in the daily struggle to keep on keeping on. Murrow knew very well that if he didn’t consistently frame the paradoxes and contradictions of reality (in this case, Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt), he’d be fair game for criticism and his career would head south quicker than a goose caught up in an October jet stream. That recognition of ethical behavior and accountability was too refreshing to view on film, because in our modern day, mass media world, those self-applied standards of journalistic integrity have all but flown the coop.

Understanding Power

If the film was even close to truly representing the relationship between Murrow and William Paley (the head of CBS), they provided an amazing service by exposing the foundation which drives decisions within the media ecosystem: advertising.

While Murrow bartered with Paley at every turn in order to continue exposing the world around him, Paley seemed forever caught between a rock and a hard place; he needed to keep Murrow happy with his role at CBS by providing the latitude necessary to fuel his journalistic passion while somehow balancing the finicky palette of his paid advertisers. The character development of Paley was rich and multidimensional, as I truly felt his angst in the midst of his paradoxical role within such a Darwinesque ecosystem.

And to see Edward R. Murrow, champion of the people, interviewing Liberace, well, it spoke volumes about the character of the man. He didn’t play the role of prima donna, refusing to lower his standards to run chatty interviews. He didn’t use an agent to threaten litigation. He recognized his role in adding value to the network by spreading his good name across programming that would return a dollar for Paley and the executive team. Though, the look on his face while he ran a fluff interview reminded me of a look and a feeling I’ve seen and heard hundreds of times over.

Modern Day Murrows

The majority of present day citizen journalists—Murrow molded bloggers—have day jobs. We design websites, write code, run businesses, multi-task like madmen, etc. Do we all wish we could blog for a living? I’d venture to say that most of us would say yes, as long as we wouldn’t have a strict editorial edict with advertising pressures. You see, we’re a bit spoiled like that.

Murrow had to navigate closed, controlled environments with a high degree of grace in order to shed light through one window of opportunity, one night a week. Bloggers? Well, we’ve become accustom to firing from the hip, espousing our opinions, perspectives and, yes, researched journalism on a intra-day basis, with no editor or advertising revenues to be concerned with. Has this new paradigm created irresponsible reporting? No more than the closed venue of the mainstream media. The difference is that we’re now empowered to network common visions and dreams, driving the potential of a new day into an actual sunrise, and the power of that freedom is upsetting the status quo.

Corporate media and industries are absolutely petrified by the potential of ordinary people gaining broadcast reach. And as much as I plan on assisting corporate America through this transition into the fast track of iterative development and customer accountability, until they can recognize that everything has changed and that we, the people, are now empowered, I won’t lose one wink of sleep over their concerns.

Can There Be Flat Hierarchy?

It’s true that if it weren’t for the relentless corporate push to rapidly develop and monetize the web in the mid-90’s, blogging technology might not have come about as quickly. Just as true was that VC investment in the potential of the web greatly contributed to the explosion of the infrastructure of information retrieval — collaborative filtering, search algorithms and now folksonomies.

So yes, we are all in this together. The talent needs the funding, but not as much as the funding needs the talent. Remember the last time we danced to this tune: capitalist power players funded the development of the internet on the shoulders of false stickiness, returning large dividends of ad revenue while the innovators focused on innovation. Many of those same capitalists continued to overinvest by underwriting ridiculous IPO’s until the bubble burst. Was it coincidence that a majority of them could reinvest in the internet at a basement entry price, while the talent scrambled about just to retain paid gigs?

Now the power players are scrambling to monetize our blood, sweat and tears at every turn, on every feed, on every page, while we continue to blaze paths two steps ahead of them with our eyes focused on the greater good. We’ll keep doing our thing, they’ll keep doing theirs.

In the end, what else can we say to them but “Good Night, and Good Luck?”

Get away from the business of corrupt government. Bouncy balls in San Francisco.

(via Boing Boing)

Check out Al taking out a Colorado Righty. Okay, okay, it’s only a bit for his new book, "The Truth (with jokes)."

You gotta love a bookstore with a sense of humor.

(forwarded by blather)