A Blog About Making Culture
The Internet Is Where The Truth Is
March 15, 2007
The exact thing you are looking for is out there on the Internet, if you just know where to look. So here are some hints.
- Making the connection between Girl Talk and DJ Drama, Congressman Mike Doyle (Pittsburgh represent!) breaks down remix culture and the obsolescence of a lot of current IP law for the Congress. Check out the video, or refer back to hodling a gun to Dick Clark's head.
- Diversity in Open Source Communities: Lynne breaks it down. I don't need to explain this one to you folks, right?
- The Wall Street Journal alludes to Google's biggest weakness -- the lack of transparency around the AdWords/AdSense/PageRank market. It works like this: Sites can't predict how they'll rank in search results, but some sites depend on that traffic for their business to grow. To scale up a business requires managing risk and volatility, and having a key factor to growth be largely opaque increases risk greatly, limiting investment and confidence and making it impossible to plan. So sites that aren't can't reach scale without relying on search traffic have a limit on the maximum growth they can achieve in a PageRank-based economy.
- That WSJ story also reminded me that Rich Skrenta's blog is as consistently compelling as Dick Costolo's "Ask The Wizard", which I raved about the other day.
- Of course Wikipedia has a list of fictional bears. What's even better is the discussion about the list of fictional bears.
- Fuck Garrison Keillor. Yes, really.
- Nelson Minar looks at distributed computing startups that used to be competitors for his startup. The writeup is honest, smart, and geeky -- all the things that make Nelson so charming. And whatever happened to Google Compute? I used to be somewhat less critical in my analysis of new technologies.
- Todd Levin acerbically points out what's wrong with SXSW. He alludes to many of the reasons I didn't go this year, but I am pretty conflicted about getting easy laughs by tearing down something that other people enjoy. Would be a lot more impressive to get laughs by praising the conference for what it does well.
- Susan Rogers was getting her PhD to understand "whether the human mind is specialized for music [and] how musical training shapes your auditory memory and cognitive abilities". But I just love her for being Prince's long-suffering engineer during the best and most productive years of his career. I kind of have an affinity for her because her story stuck with me during a much more emo period in my life.
- And if you were still thinking about blogging technology evangelists, you might want to note an interesting trend. Recent Microsoft hires in evangelism lasted nine and a half weeks and three weeks. Quitting Microsoft evangelism is the new evangelism! Your mileage may vary.
Previously: The Called Shot
Next: Telling the Backup Story
todd levin
Ordinarily I don’t feel compelled to address my writing on other people’s sites, but I wanted to concede something you said and defend something I said.
First, I understand the conflict you feel regarding getting laughs by attacking vs. praising. It’s a conflict I experienced even while writing the piece, and I’m still not entirely sure where I sit with it. On the one hand, I respect that SXSW Interactive means a lot to a certain group of people. It’s importance socially is at least as great as its importance professionally or creatively.
But—and maybe this didn’t telegraph itself clearly enough, for which I take full responsibility—I’d hoped it was obvious that this piece was written from the perspective of someone who was very much an outsider to the event so, naturally, I’m going to have a much different perspective than a regular attendee. It was an alien environment for me so, obviously, the elements that seemed most profoundly absurd or foreign were the ones that stuck with me and made it into my writing.
Something else that might not have come across clearly enough for you to see past the article’s “acerbic” tone or “cheap” laughs was that, while I made fun of some of the geekier elements of the conference (something I copped to in the story as possibly unnecessary), I also concluded that my judgment only served to keep me on the outside of everyone else’s obvious enjoyment of themselves. That irony was not insignificant to me.
Anyway, like I said, I’m conflicted, too. I met some excellent, friendly people who I hope to see again. And I know those people really love coming to SXSW, which I completely understand and respect. But for me not to point out what I found a bit ridiculous about the conference would be, well, ridiculous. I appreciate your desire to see a very funny article about how great SXSW is, but for that I think you’d need a writer who was comfortably on the inside, rather than somewhat awkwardly on the outside.
Dare Obasanjo
The Wall Street Journal alludes to Google’s biggest weakness
How is this their biggest weakness? Giving people tips on how to game their system doesn’t sound smart to me.
FS
FWIW, Levin had some regrets about the tone of the piece as well, and has since revised it.
Jemaleddin
Re FGK: Wow - I’ve never seen so many people not get a joke in the same place. That’s comedy! =-)
todd levin
Yes, “FS,” it’s true––I’d already expressed whatever regrets I had and sent TMN a slightly revised version a couple days ago, before I read or responded to this post. I didn’t think it was necessary to mention that in my comments here because I didn’t want to give the false impression that my revisions were somehow a response to Anil’s original post.
Instead, it was just something I did upon reflection, mostly after seeing other people’s reactions. (“todd shits all over…etc.”), Basically, I realized maybe in my rush to finish the piece, I’d employed a bulldozer to the festival, when an axe would have been sufficient.
Thomas
About blogging evangelism, while I can’t agree to the ethics of it, I don’t fully understand the uproar.
A blog is, largely, just something any ‘ol person decided to put on the internet. Shouldn’t there be an obligatory caveat emptor?
Meep
How do you find these things? Apparently my Google-fu fails me.
Post a comment