Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Before I forget. I'm reading an excellent Stephen King novel on audiobook, the voice work is fantastic. There are two main characters, Rosie and Norman. The parts about Rosie are read by Blair Brown, and she's great. The male voice has sort of a down-east twang to it, but he sounds like Ed Cone (who's from North Carolina) but also sounds a little Bronxy. Anyway, I didn't look to see who it was until just now, and it turns out to be Stephen King himself. He's very good at this. Anyway, the thing I didn't want to forget is that Irving R. Levine makes a surprise appearance, by reference. Who is Irving R. Levine? Well, if you don't know, no amount of explaining will do. Happily, he's still alive.  

New header graphic. Vermont cows.  

Wes Felter: "I have long wondered how creating new formats or new versions of formats can reduce the problem of format proliferation. Now I see that it works by disowning the old versions. Good luck with that." 

Lisa Stone looks at the speaker list at the AlwaysOn conference. 

Blogger dinner in Capetown tomorrow. 

Wired: Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia. 

Six years ago today, the bees were back, and Be went public. 

5/17/83: The First Idea Processor. 

Why BlogHer 

Reading Lisa Stone's piece above, all of a sudden I understand why the BlogHer conference is both a good idea, and unfortunately necessary. Not enough women have leading positions in the tech world, at least according to the people who choose speakers for industry conferences.

There's only one problem with this is -- the conferences are obsolete, and being chosen as a speaker at one of these conferences and accepting the offer, may not be the big award it appears to be.

I'd love to see some pictures or movies of the hallways at AlwaysOn. Now imagine that was what was going on in the meetings. Vibrant conversations. Chaotic interchanges. Now, let's see if the women have equal standing. (I'm not saying they do.)

Now look at the people sitting in the room. They're reading Scripting News on their laptops. If you are reading this at the AlwaysOn conference, cough three times. (Assuming they have wifi in the auditorium.) Send me email if you heard anyone else coughing.

When will blogging peak? 

Jeremy Zawodny asks when blogging will peak. He says the advertising model is set. Of couse I have an opinion about this.

First, I don't think blogging will peak, any more than the telephone will peak. It's a fundamental way of communicating, if it goes away it will be replaced by something exactly like it.

Second, what is a blog? I know this is a long tiresome question, but it matters. The distinction between blog sites that have ads and those that don't is probably a bigger distinction than between magazines that have ads and blogs that have ads. A blog without ads is itself an ad, interesting to a small number of people. Blogs with ads, like their print counterparts, strive to be as broad as possible, to reach as many people, and in doing so, lose their value as an ad for the author.

Advertising may be the thing that's peaking. The old model of advertising. How come no one ever asks if TV-style advertising is finished? I think it is.

On the other hand 

They say that when Business Week says the method of capitilizing companies has fundamentally changed, that's a highly predictable sell signal (in other words, the market is about to crash). Maybe, in a similar way, this event signals the peak of blogs.