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Saturday, December 6, 2003
The New Tradition 
| | "Traditional media sources are no longer the primary source of information. Internet news sources, especially non-mainstream sources like "blogs", are challenging the traditional rules of journalism. |
| | - How is the media landscape evolving?
- What are the implications of this revolution for traditional media suppliers, producers and viewers?
- How should the mainstream media respond if it is to remain competitive in the future?"
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| | First, I've been saying for years that Napster and P2P MP3 file sharing are the market's correction for the failure of mainstream radio not just to adapt to the Net, but even to fulfill the missions it established for itself over the decades. From that last link: |
| | The Force is markets, and Markets R Us. We're the 20 million music lovers (we're customers, dammit!) who used Napster to get from each other what we couldn't get from commercial radio. |
| | I want to thank Dave for sharing that insight on the phone the other day. It was brilliant. He's so right! Napster is radio! It's about sharing record collections the way the great radio stations of yesterdecade used to do, and today's robotic commercial radio can't remember and can no longer even begin to conceive. It's the way the market routes around a long-dead intermediary. |
| | It's finally starting to get clear: if you think business is just about moving goods, you're gonna lose. |
| | If you still think consumers are gullets, that markets are buckets at the ends of conveyor belts, and that everything you can sell is nothing more than "content," you aren't going to survive, because you won't be in the conversation. |
| | The conversation is the market, and the conversation will prevail. |
| | I don't think we have the same situation with traditional print media. On the whole they've kept up much better than radio ever did. They haven't failed. But while they haven't tried to fuck the Net (the way the record industry, which more or less runs commercial radio, successfully fucked Internet broadcasting, and the Net along with it) they haven't embraced the Net all that well, either. |
| | So I think Loïc is right to compare blogging's challenge to journalism with Napster's and P2P's challenge to the music industry. But I also think the outcome is already radically different, because the journalism industry hasn't fought blogging the way the RIAA fought Napster (and continues to fight file-sharers). To a limited degree, mainstream journals have embraced blogging. In the long run they'll come to depend on it, because they'll need both the abundant portfolio of sources and quantity of good information — the self-gathering intelligence — that bloggers provide. There will, inevitably, be abundant symbiosis. AND logic, not OR. |
| | Where the conversation at Davos risks going off-track is around the notion that blogging is one of "the media," or subject to traditional understandings of "the media." |
| | See, what matters here is the new "media landscape" comprised by the prevaling condition that underlies all media now: the Net. Blogs are native to the Net. They were born here. Traditional media were not, though they'll have to adapt to it or suffer serious disconnection from reality. It's as simple as that. |
| | The job of blogging entrepreneurs like Loïc is to help facilitate the connections, the new dependencies on both sides: blogs and mainstream journals. |
| | That's my short take. Loïc has many more questions. Go check 'em out and see if you can help answer some. |
Meanwhile, back in the trenches...
| | Journal management has been found guilty of 27 labor law violations. Yet the paper keeps using unlawful tactics. Refusing to bargain for a fair contract. Stalling negotiations. Intimidating employees. |
| | Seems the Journal hasn't had a contract with its journalists since the paper was bought by Belo nearly four years ago. More here in the Phoenix. |
A little RSStraint?
| | I've been pointed to some contrarian counterweights to my frequent assertions that RSS is a Good Thing. |
| | Gary Lawrence Murphy laments The End of RSS. At the top of the webstats, the smoking gun: 30,000 requests for the Drupal-generated RSS feed from teledyn.com. That's after all his daily traffic quota was used up with more than 12 hours left. He explains, |
| | Herein the black hole of RSS: If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed. |
| | As friends tell friends, as links lead to visits which lead to subscribers, the snowball rolls on towards that day like last Friday. RSS may have thepotential to be a saver on bandwidth, but when you are getting hit once an hour or more by thousands of sites, 24,000 extra hits ads up, and it's all the worse when so many are using broken clients that ignore the caching rule. |
| | I have faith that smart and respectful tech folks will work things out. My advocacy here is on behalf of syndication. I don't want to get into technical arguments, unless they're about language, which is where my own technical expertise lies. |
| | Yesterday I said I thought Nova Spivak's "meta" talk was too vague, and that "syndication" was a better word to describe what RSS (which he likes) does. |
| | While "syndication" may be more specific, however, today I'm not sure it's not misleading, unless we redefine it, which I think we can. Both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com agree that the root verb syndicate means to sell something. Here's Webster's: |
| | To sell (as a cartoon) to a syndicate or for publication in many newspapers or periodicals at once, or to sell (as a series of television programs) directly to local stations. |
| | Now here's Dictionary.com: |
| | To sell (a comic strip or column, for example) through a syndicate for simultaneous publication in newspapers or periodicals. |
| | To sell (a television series, for example) directly to independent stations. |
| | Note the framing examples: cartoons and TV shows. At least Dictionary.com countenances syndication's role in serious journalism (the column example). |
| | We need to enlarge that meaning beyond what can only be sold by organizations. It should now include the form of voluntary publishing — and credit-giving back through links and quoted sources — that online syndication facilitates. |
| | Words evolve. So should this one. |
| | Syndication is a nouned form of the verb syndicate, which is a verbed form of the noun syndic, which has a real English meaning. Says Dictionary.com, |
| | 1. One appointed to represent a corporation, university, or other organization in business transactions; a business agent. 2. A civil magistrate or similar government official in some European countries. |
| | The roots of syndic go back through Old French (sindiz) and Late Latin (sindicus) to Greek (sundikos). Sundikos was a public advocate. |
| | Makes me wonder... are news aggregators "syndics?" (Alas, Syndic.com is taken by the firm Demers Beaulne Lachance Inc., a Membre de l'association canadienne des professionnels de l'insolvabilité et de la réorganisation.) |
| | Meanwhile, it seems to me that notification is the key function provided by online syndication. And that's the revolutionary thing. Publishing alone carries assumptions framed by the permanance of all the media that predated the Web in the world. Hence the sense of done-ness to the result. The finished work goes up, or out, and that's it. |
| | But the Web isn't just writable. It's re-writable. I'm writing this live on the Web, and I'll probably re-write parts of it two or three more times. |
| | Hence the need for notification. |
| | Seems to me the polling problem Gary and Dan talk about is solvable, one way or the other, especially since I don't see much Big Boy involvement in the arguments about how to make it happen. Yes, I know Google owns Blogger, but they don't play the role here that the big boys play in, say, arguments about digital identity. Nobody has formed a Liberty Alliance of giants to jointly guide industrial standards here. That's because the industrial giants (Google, I suspect, included) still don't care enough about the issues to make a Big Official Thing about it. |
| | [Later...] Now I'm on the piphone with Steve Gillmor, who's blogless at the moment, and who says he needs to "regroove" me and that I'm fulla shit. Or that some of my quotees today are fulla shit. Too many subscibers? The network effect? Traffic? Saving bandwidth? The idea that RSS is just about the convenience of clients who live in bandwidth deprived situations? Heaven forbid! Why does RSS have to be limited to the small payload? By fixating on the word syndication, you're buying into the notion that the pristine originating dynamic of RSS, as a way of pushing, which goes back to CDF, and Active Desktop, and Microsoft's urge to dominate the Web. He says. |
| | He's advocating thinking larger than the Web as it stands. Blogs are a subset of RSS. So is sndication a subset of RSS. He says. In a time constrained universe, it's a killer app. |
| | It's the platform for synergy between the stakeholders and the journalists. He says. To limit it, by implication, which you do here by focusing on syndication as being the nub of what this is about, is self limiting in terms of understanding the new economic model that's emerging here. Among other things. |
| | He wants to respect :the disruptive nature of RSS. |
| | This technlogy has already supplanted email as the core of your desktop. A conditional yes. On the other hand, my email is far more searchable, and manageable, and private and personal, which makes it highly significant, though hardly disruptive and therefore kinda irrelevant to this discussion. Of course, Steve points out, this won't be the case "when RSS scoops up 80 or 90% of that functionality too." (I'm blogging this live, which Steve is monitoring, he pointedly points out "not in my browser.") |
| | Bottom line with Steve is that he wants me to respect the opportunities for rich clients (e.g. RSS info-router), which my post here "veers away from" by "focusing on syndication as a signaling tool." When in fact the world, he thinks, is going toward a rich peer to peer enabling technology that uses something like an RSS info-router as the center of user activity, and not just the Web. The browser will become a rendering tool. |
| | Okay, I gotta roll. It is a weekend, after all. |
MeetOut
| | Had a fun time touring the Dean Headquarters by remote piphone last night with Halley and Britt. The journey involved meeting Joe Trippi for the first time while embodied (that's me, not Joe) in a computer. I even took the opportunity to invite him to speak at a (non-partisan) eDemocracy event next year. To my surprise, he said gave a tentative (schedule-permitting) yes. I'm sure this was a first of some kind. Here's the gallery. |
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