Even Wired Magazine gets in on the blog fun.

Randomly bumbling around today I found myself at the how-to wiki on Wired.com. Get what they have?

How to start a blog:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Start_a_Blog

pretty entertaining.

What the balls

My friend Sam showed me this blog:

Style Rookie

Basically, it's a fashion blog run by a 13-year old.  Her fashion is questionable, though I'm not partial to haute couture unless donned by Lady GaGa or created by Luxirare (check this blog out too and pine for her lifestyle with me), but the content is secondary to my reason for bringing it up.  This girl is 13-years old. She was born in 1996, and she runs a pretty tight blog.  She has a solid, developed voice, which I find charming but I can see other people thinking it's obnoxious, and she updates regularly with a buttload of material. Beyond even that, each of her blog posts recently has collected over 100 comments.  And she's 13.  What the fuck was I doing when I was 13?  I was writing my own web code and designing websites and maintained a blog too, but at most I got maybe 30-some-odd comments, which is actually impressive because I was egocentrically writing about my completely uninteresting life as a 13-year old and should have gotten less than 0 comments if possible. 

My point is that kids are running wildly successful blogs in terms of readership. This can be an indication of the learning curve in the information age, the future of publishing resting in the hands of the youth, the sign of things to come from our children, etc etc, but what this says to me is, "Well, if a 13-year old can do it, why can't I?"  Think of how much more you know now than when you were 13.  Think of how refined your opinions are and how you can intellectually defend them now. Yeah, maybe this girl is a fashion savant, but still: if 13-year olds are running successful blogs, why can't we?

Future of the Net

Just found this blog post predicting the major changes to the Interweb over the next year.

Rupert Murdoch & Google are Cracking Down

Hey all,

Just came across this article on the BBC: Google to limit free news access

"Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced."

At first I was wondering if this only applies in the UK, but then I found this similar article in the WSJ, and realized the new policy is universal.

Sounds like a pretty fair idea to me. Then again, I'm not currently working on a research paper that requires me to find some specific WSJ article from sometime within the past 3 months (or some such situation that would likely involve clicking more than 5 articles). But even if I was, despite being horribly frustrated, I think I'd still objectively understand the reasoning behind the limitations. Ah, free-dom is so hard to let go of once one has become accustomed to it...

PS Maureen, I bet your dad would be interested in reading this.

blogging for success, even when you're homeless

A few months ago while reading ELLE I came across this letter to E. Jean, the magazine's advice columnist:

Dear E. Jean: I’m currently homeless and living in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I’m educated, I have never done drugs, and I am not mentally ill. I have a strong employment history and am a career executive assistant. The instability sucks, but I’m rocking it as best as I can. Recently I stumbled across a job notice (a reality show casting call for executive assistants) and was intrigued enough to apply. It was a shot in the dark, and I assumed I’d never hear back. Surprise! I was called in this week! And I promptly bombed it. When I found out who was involved in the show I got kind of starstruck and completely froze up. My usual personality did not radiate. My question: How does one get another shot when one screws up a job interview? Homeless, but Not Hopeless

Her reply:

Miss homeless, my dear: You don’t “get” another shot. You take it. Wear the new suit you get from Dress for Success (the fantastic organization that provides interview suits and career development guidance to lowincome women, Dressforsuccess.org), find a company, a store, a business you admire, and show up ready to work. When you speak with the manager, don’t ask for a job. Simply introduce yourself, tell her why her company is brilliant, and give her three ways you can help her succeed. Follow up with a phone call, plus a visit the following week.

Of course, the cleverest way to land a good job (and get an apartment) is to already have a good job/internship/volunteer position. This strategy permits you to impress the interviewers with the superhuman passion you have for your current projects.

This is what you did with your letter: You knocked me out with your courage and spirit. I am therefore, Miss Not Hopeless, offering you a four-month internship. Of course it’s the most hideously humdrum internship in America. You’ll be stuck with the tedious job of organizing research for my book, transcribing interviews, and analyzing data from 1,800,000 pages (not a misprint) of a college sex survey I did on Facebook. I looked you up and discovered you’re on the West Coast and that you write a highly entertaining blog. You possess a brain and access to a computer. Excellent! If you accept this internship, you’ll telecommute to my East Coast mountain office one hour a day, six days a week. At the end of the four months, if you don’t have a job and an awesome place to live, I will become YOUR intern.

My thoughts at the time were less than eloquent: Holy shit.  This girl just got an internship with ELLE.  All because she wrote a letter to an advice columnist.  And, apparently, was entertaining enough of a writer on a blog.  Can that happen?

Apparently, it can.  Read the blog: the Girls Guide to Homelessness. I'd suggest looking specifically at the posts she made before she landed the internship at ELLE (before August).  She has a great, personable tone.  Apparently she's living in a shitty trailer now, which is eons better than living in a shitty parking lot.

TV cowers under the might of the Internet too

I know this class is more about print, but I've found myself wondering how TV and film are faring in relation to the internet (what with Netflix, illegal downloading, etc.) Well I just came across an article posted yesterday at the NYTimes about GE planning to sell NBC to Comcast (Comcast? Really?) and it cites this reason:

Although the News Corporation, the conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, considered making an offer, Comcast was the lone serious suitor, a testament to the uncertain future of mainstream media, as the Internet has fractured audiences and few viable business models have emerged for the distribution of content online.

Just another person parroting what we've said 400 billion times in class, I know, but at least from my experience, TV has been thought of as a "safer" industry than print (this one time an older guy, an alumnus of Pitt, said, when I told him I was a writing major, "Welp, hope you're thinking to get into TV!")

The article also says NBC's ratings are last place in primetime. What? The Office and 30 Rock are the only two prime time shows I watch right now. Apparently having two Emmy-winning comedies doesn't mean jack-shit:

In a risky move, Jeffrey Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, moved Mr. Leno into the 10 p.m. slot, clearing the way for Conan O’Brien at 11:30 and radically remaking prime time.
But so far the move has only produced lackluster ratings and a poor lead-in to local news, further exacerbating NBC’s problems in prime time. The move has also become emblematic of network television’s struggle to re-imagine itself at a time of declining ad revenues and online competition.

Sort of funny, but when I first moved into my apartment I decided I only wanted internet because I can do without TV (thanks to Hulu and Netflix) and landlines are worthless. And the Comcast website said it would be 20 bucks a month. But then the lovely Comcast lady goes, "Oh, well, internet by itself is $69.99, BUT you can get this awesome splendiferous package with digital cable for only $74.99!!!!!!!!!" So I said, "Okay," but thought, "Eff you Comcast and your overpriced bullshit. Why am I paying you anyway, you annoying middleman? Shouldn't I be paying the people who actually make the content?"

So I guess now I am. Kind of.

In Defense of Murdoch

Hey all,

Maureen sent the following things to me and, because of tech difficulties, asked if I would post them on the class blog. Then I had even more tech difficulties and was unable to. But now it's all good once again. - Joel

First, a note from Maureen, which includes a note from her dad, to whom she sent the Jeff Jarvis article in which he criticized Murdoch:

So prompted by the discussion that we had in class about Rupert Murdoch,
I decided to ask my Dad's opinion on the subject, since he works for the
New York Post. I sent him the article by Jarvis and here's what he had
to say:

"It makes sense for Murdoch, and others, to keep their news content off
Google and other sites that collect and distribute proprietary content
without compensating the producer, because the websites like ours
are struggling to make money. What Google is doing is very much like
what Limewire and similar music file-sharers did: they took other
people's music without permission and gave it away, which infringed on
the rightful owners - the bands, the publishers - ability to sell their
work to paying customers.

The internet is a dicey marketplace. People who sell tangible products,
like amazon, can make money. Pornographers make lots of money. But news
sites, who have been giving their content away in an attempt to attract
advertisers, have not been profitable. Murdoch's plan is to charge a
subscription fee for a comprehensive News Corp web site that would
include content from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The
Times and Sunday Times of London, Fox News, and all the other News Corp
products. But, he can't do that if people can go to Google, for example,
and access for free the content he spends billions of dollars to
produce.

The is not old-fashioned thinking. This is the direction internet
publishing is taking today. If internet publishers cannot find a
business model that allows them to make money, they will stop putting
their info on the net."

Then my response:

Hey Maureen,

That's excellent that your dad responded to Jarvis's article. Please thank him for his response, which is really thoughtful. A lot of people would completely agree with him, and in many ways I do, too. The problem is that, now that readers have become accustomed to getting stuff for free online, there's a lot of resistance built up to the idea of suddenly having to pay for it. The strategy works for Murdoch at the WSJ, because subscribers are willing to pay for authority they feel only the Journal provides. Harder with other news sites, though, to get readers to be willing to pay for what they deem to be "just the day's news." The Post has its own voice and authority, obviously, but even when the New York Times tried to put a handful of their marquee columnists behind a pay wall, readers revolted, and people found ways to make the columns available on other sites anyway.

He's completely right that what's happening at Google is the print analogue to music file-sharing, and so there are probably some lessons to be learned there. One of them is that the corporate music industry is drastically smaller now than it was ten years ago, and individual bands and small labels are once again making money by touring—essentially giving their music away online and using that as a way to attract listeners to tours, rather than touring to get listeners to buy albums, which is a complete reversal of the model.

As Clay Shirky said, right now print is in the middle of change, we're at the moment of the printing press, which means we can see what's being lost but we can't yet see what the new landscape will look like. It may be that Murdoch is right, that NewsCorp is, collectively, authoritative enough that readers will pay to get through a door that allows them access to all its brands. Recent history suggests otherwise, though--that readers don't want to pay and that someone will find a way to make that info, or the most desired portions of it, available for free anyway.

It's a brutal time to be in publishing, though someone is going to figure out how to make money off Internet journalism. It just might not be all the same old players. (Which isn't to say that I think Murdoch is going broke any time soon; just that my instinct--which is certainly no more informed than your dad's--is that pretending the Internet isn't there is probably not the path, though maybe NewsCorp readers are loyal enough that it will work. As with all of these questions, who knows?)

Then this from Maureen:

Maureen: I found something on Gawker that talks about the Murdoch pay wall. They
actually agree with it.
http://gawker.com/5411780/the-coming-search-engine-media-wars