Results tagged “publishing”

A few more recent links/responses to posts I've written, collected mostly for my own future reference:

• Mediabistro published video excerpts of a panel I was on earlier this year, talking about publishing, blogging, ebooks and The Future of It All. Mediabistro Circus has turned into an unlikely favorite of mine among all the events I attend each year.
• Jeff Atwood offers an exceptionally kind appraisal of Movable Type (We just released a new version today! Best MT ever!), and in passing offers some truly effusive praise for me. While I'm flattered, the credit of course belongs to my talented coworkers who actually make the damn thing go. And, true story, when I was first sent this link, I saw only the URL and my response was "Jeff's a mensch. I really like that guy." It's nice when the feeling is mutual.
• Swiss Miss had a brief but thoughtful look at Last Year's Model. Even though it's been months since the site launched, there has been a pretty much constant flow of people discovering both the site and the idea behind it, and that's been very gratifying to watch.
• Finally, Brian Oberkirch is downright embarrassing in his flattery of me. But I link to this as a reminder to myself — my tendency is to always believe that either my best writing and blogging are behind me or that I'm not being critical enough of my own work, and so getting unprompted outside validation that the ideas that matter to me also matter to others is really inspiring.

Okay, back to work!

If the words I write in these blog posts are my acts of speech, then the trail of actions I leave around the web must be the body language that accompanies them. So I made a page to capture what I'm doing around the web.

If you read my blog in HTML (as opposed to via the feeds), you've probably seen a short version of this on my sidebar. Now, I'm not supposing that all of this information is of interest to everyone reading this site. And in fact, there have been some pretty good essays written about how some of these more trivial updates can be perceived:

We'll finish up with Anil Dash's blog. Anil has been blogging for a long time and he places a prime importance on good, clear, effective, writing. His articles are always a great read. Most of one of his sidebars, however, is filled with a neverending Action Stream that only kills the freshness of his blog. Perhaps Anil is playing along by employing the Plugin on this site -- there's a lot of peer pressure to Twitter and Action Stream if your friends are doing it -- but I somehow expected Anil to be above that sort of verneration of dead deeds.

I appreciate David's kind words about my blogging there, but disagree strenuously with his conclusion about sharing one's actions online. As he notes, I do have a dog in this fight — I'm an unabashed advocate of the efforts my coworkers have put into technologies like Action Streams. But I support it because of its ability to capture the many actions we perform online, not despite that fact.

Part of it is that I know some people with whom I have a real personal connection do read my site, and may well find it interesting to see which YouTube videos I've marked as favorites. If you read this site years ago when I had my Daily Links blog, you might well be the kind of person who appreciates that.

It's just as significant from a technical perspective, though, that the most useful types of metadata are those which are captured passively. If you let people tag and share things themselves, you have to deal with spam and inaccurate data and any matter of other social complexity. But look at the data that's automatically captured, like when Microsoft Word tracks the number of times you've saved a document, or when Facebook lets people know who you've added as friends. That data is captured on the fly, and thus tends to be accurate and useful while requiring very little effort on your part to share.

I think that's a promising new area of sharing data online, and I think it's key that this kind of data is shared using open standards. But ultimately, I think the highest goal is that we enable more nuanced, complex communications online, where we don't just have our spoken words, but also the body language and gestures and facial expressions that inform those.

Words should be accompanied by actions. So now mine are. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

There are lots of different corners of the web, most of which have the good graces to be supportive and interesting and to act like, well, a community. People generally like to be social. But then there's the high-profile personal websites, full of pundits and supernerds, and the kinds of people who I imagine talk on wireless headsets on their cell phones while at a restaurant. For these people, it's always August.

First, a little background. If you've never worked in the publishing or media industries, you might not know that August is officially the month where everyone basically phones it in. Back in New York, people would speak of going to The Hamptons so often that it's been verbed into "Hamptoning" and used as a generic term for going on vacation. While bigwigs and editors are away cavorting, a makeshift army of interns, temps, and recent college grads generally takes over. These kids usually don't have much experience, and newspaper editors don't want to have to do any hard work during the dog days, so the end result is that you get a combination of lazy writing and some really crappy journalism.

What kind of crappy journalism? Listicles! "Best Of"s. Special Theme Issues. And all of these pieces are topped by blaring, or alarmist, or horribly-punned headlines. You might notice that the other time of year this happens is around the end of the year or at New Year's, when Christmas and the other December holidays conspire to leave major media outlets virtually unstaffed. Then, you get year-end wrapups or another round of Best Ofs.

Indeed, as former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously told the New York Times, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

So, then, why is it always August in the "look at me!" part of the blogosphere? Because the people who are blogging for an audience of thousands, or for hundreds of thousands, are prone to a lot of those same tendencies. Digg and delicious and the rest are littered with Top 10s and geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines. It's not long until we get "21 Ubuntu Install Tips That Will Drive Him Crazy In Bed!"

It's harmless, mostly. Hell, lots of it is even fun reading. But I'm struck by how the combination of light or lazy editing, an attention span too short to suffer much fact-checking, and the temptation of easy distractions like, say, a day at the beach can result in the exact same tropes being trotted out, regardless of medium.

I should point out that, despite the fact it sounds like a criticism, I'm not against this kind of thing, really. I just find it ironic that the people who make up the high-profile part of the blogosphere spend all their time living like it's August while accusing the rest of the blogosphere for sounding like the September that never ended.

The photo, by the way, is what Shackleford Banks looks like in August. So I'm not saying August is a bad thing.