I got an email from The Correspondent this morning, the first communication since they disappeared. I contributed $25 so I could find out what contributors got. Did it ever amount to anything? TheC didn't make sense, didn't come close to earning the universal acclaim it got, or the money they raised from the people. They claimed they would open a new kind of news org in America, and when they met their money-raising goal said that was never their intention. The problem with snake oil pitches like The Correspondent, aside from the fact that they're dishonest, is that they suck resources away from ideas that might actually make news work better. This happened repeatedly in tech. A famous successful tech entrepreneur claims to have found a breakthrough, and the press gets all excited. It sucks up all the money and attention that might have gone to products that could really have helped, and then they do it again and again. People should be suspicious of grand claims, no matter who is making them. And if you, an analyst, really think you've found The One, you should get opinions from friends before you stake your rep on it. #The other day I wrote a short definition of blogging, including a word I suspect not a lot of bloggers would use -- fluid. To me the process of writing on your blog, if it isn't fluid, it isn't doing its job. By fluid I mean this. I have an idea. Count the steps before the idea appears on your blog and how complex the steps are. The more steps the more likely you'll lose your way, and find it hard to get back to what you were doing. You respond by skipping it altogether next time, the idea is lost. You can engineer fluidity, the same way you can optimize for other attributes. But most blogging software doesn't imho even try. #
Twitter btw is quite fluid. That's one of the things I like most about it. But it has severe limits on what it can do.#
I've been listening to Cuomo's daily briefing on a pretty regular basis, and enjoying them. Maria DeCotis' dramatizations of his talks, which I just discovered last night, are LOL funny. Taking Sarah Cooper's classic parodies of Trump to the next level. #
I don't think any of us from previous generations of tech can say what the current leaders should do, because the scope today is so much bigger. We don't have more experience with today's medium than they do. #
