Blog Atrophy
Everyone knows that the best way to start a new blog is to launch and then immediately ignore it for a week. Naturally, that’s what I’ve done here.
I do have to defend myself- in the past week I’ve had to plan my office move, reevaluate my entire workload, address roughly two dozen “growing concerns,” begin a new workout regime and travel to my girlfriend’s house every few days to clean her cats’ crapbox. I’ll spare you a rant about the lattermost, instead leaving you with the old Seinfeld quip, “If aliens visited Earth and saw us following our pets around and picking up their dung, who do you think they would assume is in charge?”
The good news is that only about a million interesting things happened in the tech and new media/interactive worlds recently. I will give my broad strokes on a few:
1.) Facebook friends Friendfeed. It’s all about the metabuddies… and specifically the organization of your interaction with them. Ever tried to have a running dialogue Twitter? Overall, I think that Facebook is on a conquest to shedding it’s social “network” rank and promoting itself to a social engine. They’re buying up properties and essentially obtaining active users, which is incredibly valuable. Anyone who remembers what happened to their Friendster accounts once MySpace popped up, and then what happened to their MySpace account once Facebook arrived understands this completely. And I agree with Ian Schafer- they’ve gotta get through Twitter first.
2.) MySpace loves iLike. I don’t think that there’s much debate as to what’s really going on here. MySpace is retreating into the entertainment space as Facebook dominates the one-site-does-all social network scene. Next up will be the acquisition of comedian-centric sites like the egomaniacal brainchild of ex-TV execs, Comedy.com. (Note that I didn’t hyperlink to it, as I don’t wish to bear any responsibility for what might happen if you were to end up there. Here’s a guess- you probably won’t laugh.)
3.) Redbox and Goliath(s). I don’t care. In my opinion, Redbox was introduced half a decade too late. The very second that the studios switched to DVD distribution over VHS, a vending machine was primed as a retailer. Really, this argument should have been had back then… specifically back before Netflix (which, in my opinion, is oranges to Redbox’s apples as a retailer) offered streaming capability. This conflict will be short-lived as consumers quickly stop caring about physical format and flock to on demand viewing, which the studios can better control. What will be really interesting is Redbox’s impact on video game rentals and their relationship with those distributors- which is still currently way more proprietary than movies.
4.) The New Journalism debate. I have an education in journalism. I’m passionate about journalism. I’m cocky about journalism. There are two types of online written journalism these days: batch and live. For a great 101 as to which is which and why, read this. The real issue here is ethics. Live writing is, in my opinion, more akin to blogging in that you don’t have an editor. You report directly to the masses- hopefully with an acute sense of editorial standards ingrained in your mind as you write. That’s a lot of unfair pressure on someone who’s job it is to call themselves a journalist. The solution is, for the time being, consumer beware. Anyone relying on a source for information should do so critically. I forsee a future application that immediately searches for and aggregates information about a topic of controversy, so as to inform the reader, in short bits of information, of every side of the issue. Until robots write the news, we’ll just have to live with humanity’s fallibility and penchant for subjectivity.
