"The Grey Album" is less great in retrospect.
ChatRoulette gets the NY Mag treatment.
Our most popular new online tools -- Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg -- were designed to help us tame the web's wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It's the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.
It's usually provoking when the academic press gets ahold of popular technology, because it tends to create new sociological, economic, or aesthetic perspectives. But this long New York Review of Books piece on Facebook reads more like an attempt to coalesce everything that has already been written about Facebook, without any attempt to say something unique. But I wonder: is this the fault of the academic press, or is popular publishing already doing a decent job of contextualizing Facebook?
Because there's nothing to see here lately, please check out these wonderful new things: Unhappy Hipsters, Star Wars Modern, Firmuhment. Already contenders for best blogs of 2010!
And the winner for "Best Google Streetview Discovery" goes to... Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne bathing nude in his backyard.
Foursqaure, on your desktop: FoursquareX. See also: Top Foursquare Users Index.
Like a lot of Gen Xers, I often wonder how college would have been different with Facebook (or for that matter, cell phones). Here's a small glimpse of what it might look like if Foursquare were: Foursquare at Harvard. [via]
Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
This and much more in Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee.
While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?
Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.
Sigh.
But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.
With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?
So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:
[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]
30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)
29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.
28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast.
(See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)
27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)
26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."
25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)
24) Best of Wikipedia
...Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe...
(See also: Double Tongued.)
23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)
22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)
21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)
20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)
19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.
18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.
17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.
16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)
15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power.
(See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)
14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer -- and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be "The BoingBoing it's okay to like."
(See also: Hey, It's Noah and Waxy.)
13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it's another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT's most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists.
(See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)
12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense.
(See also: Obama Foodorama.)
11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking -- especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly -- and a reassurance that it's okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren't for those pesky copyright issues.
(See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)
10) Letters of Note
We've known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, "Correspondence deserving a wider audience," says it all. There's Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed "Okay you lazy bitch," there's Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there's the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there's J. D. Salinger's hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie.
(See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)
9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn't sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it's also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl).
(See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)
8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn't sound like he has an agenda, who doesn't have a consulting agency on the side that he's pumping his half-baked theories into.
(See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)
7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here.
(See also: Music Machinery.)
6) Harper's Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago -- this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind "the future of books" into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print.
(See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)
5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre's Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now.
(See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)
4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.
3) TV Tropes
If you don't know TV Tropes, it's too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you've ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought "I wonder if anyone else has thought of this," the answer is: yes, a lot. I don't even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov's Gunman or Bitch In Sheep's Clothing -- or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks.
(See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)
2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn't ask, "How the hell will they make money?" But let's set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, "Why has The Awl become an internet love object?" I've done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scoccha chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it's just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don't know how they'll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck.
(See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)
1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet.
(See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)
Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.
I guess because this blog is sometimes concerned with online civility, I should link to this: The Warm-Fuzzy Web. Tumblr and The Awl exploded with comments, so you can find your side-taking there.
I wanted to pick The Awl for best new blog of the year in Bygone Bureau's roundup, but Womack took it, so I chose Mad Men Footnotes instead. And rather than actually talk about it, I choose to rant about Tumblr.
Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr's make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.
End game in the rush toward transparency and the death of privacy? Blippy, which lets you share your to make your credit card purchases public. [via]
A couple new Google things to watch: Google Goggles and Living Stories. Very different, but both potentially big deals.
This Financial Times article about the downfall of MySpace and its conflict with News Corp is pretty funny for all kinds of anecdotal reasons, but my favorite bit is this:
Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends' pages without having to open a new browser window.
Oh really? So that's what Ajax is!
Meta-Enabling should be the word of the year. It's everything that's right and wrong about the internet right now.
A South Korean holding company has purchased Barbarian Group. If those dudes weren't my friends, I would compare this to the Mad Men takeover by McCann.
Square, the credit-card reading iPhone hardware add-on and micropayments system from Twitter alum Jack Dorsey, has launched.
Like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare taps into our inner exhibitionist self -- a malady of the post-Internet era. It allows everyone to be a Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic -- an arbiter of taste. With a narcissistic quotient that is higher than a genius's IQ, it's only a matter of time before it's discovered by everyone from dithering fashion editors to pro athletes and pop stars. And when that happens, yet another tech pop phenomenon will be born.
--Om Malik
I missed this from a few days ago: Foursquare made its API public. Some new things include Last Nights' Check-ins and a Wordpress plugin.
Google Dashboard. Provided by Google as an aid, this is actually a quick view of how scary it is that you store so much stuff in Google.
"Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned." Previously: Bad Strategies.
Following the New Yorker profile, Gawker is offering $1000 for photos of blogger Nikki Finke. If you include Eater's little gimmick to give you $25 for shutting down your food blog, this is becoming a strange little trend: micropayments as a form of promotion.
The FTC ruled today that bloggers must disclose any freebies or payments they get for reviewing products. Update: Fines are up to $11,000.
The Six Apart kids gave me a preview of this last week, and it's out now: Typepad Motion. It wraps the social graph onto your blog platform. (It essentially combines Typepad and Pownce, which they bought almost a year ago. Another analogy might be "a cleaner, more extensible Ning.")
Question: who actually uses those "share this" buttons cluttering up all websites? Seriously, who? Sites are increasingly looking more like this graphic that accompanies the NYT story about those social media buttons. While I'd like to say these are complete bullshit (and I try to convince clients that they are), you can't ignore that ~200 retweet count on Techcrunch posts. Do any of those really matter? Are those influencers, or bullshiters?
(Similarly, isn't it crazy that no one has stopped and wondered how the hell ShareThis and Bit.ly, like Pluck before them, became hot startups? It's like once the legitimacy of user-generated web 2.0 companies was accepted, no one dared ever question the importance of the intermediary ever again.)
So I've read several analysis stories now and I still don't understand why Adobe bought Omniture. $1.8 billion seems like an awful lot to spend to get those Flash apps tracked correctly!
Weirdest thing Google has ever done: Internet Stats. It's little factoids collected from around the internet. I recommend @HolyCrapFacts instead.
50 things that are being killed by the internet. #1: "The art of polite disagreement." Yes, that.
The Web Ecology Group has another new paper: The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter. Example finding: "sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three major social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, and chrisbrogan)."
Gawker Media launched seven years ago. They're gloating celebrating their success with a few quotes from those heady days.
Dave Winer:
"It's such a stale idea. The Web is distributed. Try to get the flow to coalesce in a premeditated way. Not likely to work."
Anil Dash:
"Will it be profitable? I think it's possible but it's much more likely to break even long-term. Which, for the publishing industry, ain't too bad."
Matt Haughey:
"It's still too new of a site, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well written it is, and if it keeps me coming back. If so, and it makes the people behind it money while doing it, maybe professional blogging can work afterall."
If aliens invaded and threatened to kill all of the internet save one link, Auto-Tune Kitty would be my choice. [via]
I was waiting for someone to write about how Twitter isn't popular among the kids. (The 18-year-old who sounds like a 68-year-old -- "I just think it's weird and I don't feel like everyone needs to know what I'm doing every second of my life" -- has 11 followers.)
This chick totally sets the record straight on furries! (Luvs the music. Why are cute cuddly furries always into death metal?) [via]
Amidst all the debate about content stealing and aggregation, Blodget has released Embed This Post for the Alley Insider sites. [via]
Twitter to Add Location. Was wondering how this would ultimately be executed. It's at the API level and users can opt in to add location metadata. The teaser:
For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city -- whether you follow them or not.
Just imagine if a service like Foursquare was able to send your actual location to Twitter alongside the name of the place you are at. That would save the people who follow you on Twitter but don't use Foursquare the hassle of looking up the location of the place you are at if they want to meet up with you.
Google's IPO was five years ago today. I was trying to remember the skeptics. Here's one:
"I'm not buying," Stephen Wozniak, an Apple co-founder, declared to The New York Times in the weeks before Google went public.
There are two clashing worldviews. There is my view, that a human being is in charge of his or her own life and, with sustained focus, can reach higher and higher achievement every week, gradually approaching (and maybe one day reaching!) a virtuous, peaceful, and happy life.
The other view is more of a victim mentality: that life happens to you, that infinite frustration and suffering are unavoidable, that the only reasonable way of coping with such an awful world is to attack whoever seems to actually enjoy life -- because surely they are dishonest or crazy and must be brought back down to Earth.
-Jakob Lodwick, Being Gawked At, and not that different from my interpretation.
What kids searched for this summer. Seeing "sex" and "porn" at #4 and #6 reminds me of how, from age 10 to 15, I looked up "fuck" every time I picked up a dictionary. Some terms you might also need to Google:
Twitter is finally adding a new feature: making retweets part of the platform.
business.twitter.com. See also: "For some reason, Twitter is blocked on White House computers."
Meme clash: Honan's Ask A Flowchart for Single Serving Sites. Uses its own websites, such as AmIDoingThisRight.com, to come to the final app to end all single-serving apps: WiredSingleServingSiteGenerator.com.
The talent search is over. Rocketboom hired another Brit, mememolly, as their host.
Gawker is bringing back the pageview bonus model. The economy has recovered! Update: They also updated commenting with some interesting features.
Mashable story about SEO Tips for using Twitter. Sigh. Do people really think like this?
My master's alma mater, the University of Washington Digital Media program, is offering a class dedicated to Twitter. They have a blog and a twitter account.
Kottke's right about Twitter litter, which is why I want an app that will just give me friend recommendations. Update: NYT story about Vark.com, a revved up Yahoo Answers that uses your Facebook friends and their extensions.
Koogle, the new "kosher" custom search engine for ultra-Orthodox Jews that filters out "prohibited" content and shuts down on the Sabbath. What's next -- custom search engines for hipsters, Scientologists or foodies?
Three smart things to read related to the Facebook username thing: Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Messina, and Anil Dash.
YouTube's tricked out page for The Webbys has the 5-word speeches, including Sarah Silverman's.
Anyone used Wolfram Alpha since it first came out? It has new features! How about Bing? It's results might be better than Google and Yahoo! What's that -- you don't care?
Even though everyone instantly knee-jerk hated on Bing, Microsoft's new search engine launched last week, it quickly doubled Microsoft's search size and flew by Yahoo in popularity. Update: Oh, this is cool. Someone built a blind search engine where users compared the results of the big three and voted on the best. Bing apparently was winning!
Steven Berlin Johnson in Time on Twitter. "Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel." Yep, Twitter is pretty much a link blog now.
I've grown skeptical of most new collaborative communication tools. They always seem to suffer from an inherent problem: they feel like they were designed by project managers for project managers. (When I worked at Microsoft, I called this PMware. Microsoft is basically packed with PMware.) This use-case is, needles to say, quite limited. But I can see Google Wave spreading to a larger audience. The demo is 80 minutes long but O'Reilly has a summary. It essentially collapses IM and email into a wiki-like space. It's pretty cool.
Proceeding Heffernan's column last week about Mint.com, a number of commenters voiced security concerns about the site. The CEO came back with a pretty interesting response about the level of security, which includes biometric access, video surveillance, "man-trap" doors, encryption, and other things straight outta Ocean's Seventeen. But here's something that's never exactly been addressed by Mint: read the fine print and you'll see that you're essentially handing over right of attorney to Mint. (They need to do this to get this level of access.) It's kinda creepy, but I still use it.
TechCrunch: "Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? [...] This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article."
Meme Scenery. Waxy erases the figures from classic internet memes to reveal only the backdrops.
Another new cool NYT display: Times Wire. It stacks up everything coming out of NYTimes.com as blog-like/rss-like feed in reverse-chronological order. [via]
Yooouuutuuube.com. Simultaneously view every frame of a video. For instance, of course...
Is Twitter finally doing something new? "Twitter has some very interesting plans for its newly-unveiled live search function: soon it will activate crawlers that will index the links users include in their Tweets. In one fell swoop that turns Twitter into an even more powerful news and opinion aggregator." [via]
AUTO-MEME. Think of it as the single-serving site that can inspire single-serving sites. [via]
Is there any innovation left in online news design? Let's look at the experimental msnbc.com story page which creates layers for text, photos, data, videos, etc. Craig Saila describes how it's attempting to forgo pageview-driven logic in favor of "capturing the intent of what a page view is."
Rick Astley pens the bio of moot for the Time 100 poll. He thanks him and says "I suppose at first I was a little embarrassed by it. I always liken it to when people look through their photo albums or home videos from 20 years ago and think, Gosh, did I really wear that?" More entries. [via]
Your 57th Twitter link today: Most Twitterers are Quitters. Nielsen study reveals that 60% of users who sign up for Twitter don't return to the site the following month, which I hereby declare The Oprah Effect.
The Twitter Approval Matrix. Julia owns the banal/navel-gazing quadrant, but she's gotten quite good at making fun of herself.
The relatively insightful comments to Heffernan's NYT Mag Comment Is King column led to a follow-up post commenting on the commenters which will likely bring more comments.
Kottke goes in defense of Twitter, which isn't shocking, except he even goes to bat for even the inane "what I had for breakfast" conversations, suggesting that this is the raw material of social bonds. Balk made a somewhat similar point, that those who oppose Twitter speak from a privileged position. It's true, right? Most of the people I know who are opposed to Twitter are merely holding onto a previously official way of speaking, which they are slowly losing.
Editor: So which of you hasn't written about Twitter yet?
Writers: [blink]
Editor: How about you, Dowd?
Maureen: Ah, fuck.
And things that sound like every nyc-based journalist/blogger from 15 months ago: "I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account."
Jesus, another new Google thing today: Profiles. They are sparse, but it looks like the beginning of... something. [via]
"Twripple: The vast footprint created when a single status update propagates across social media networks, blogs and search engines."
Beyond the /btards, is anyone still using Omegle? Because now people are launch apps that sit on top of it, such as Mobozo.com, which is kind of a Digg for your anon chat sessions.
I couldn't sleep last night. I don't know what sorts of thoughts occupy your mind at 4am, but I was recalling the blog/news coverage from 3.5 years ago when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It was nearly all positive at the time, but I was calling bullshit. Today, YouTube is still pulling in nickels on its investment, and reportedly losing another half-billion to bandwidth costs. This is a stupid thing to lose sleep over, but this morning I awoke to the news that YouTube will be setting up a payment program for premium content. Yawn.
I finally got around to reading Grigoriadis' NYMag cover story on Facebook from last week. No new ideas in there, but she again comes up with the phrasing to make everything seem slightly more interesting than maybe it is.
New Know Your Meme (I'll link to every one of these from now to forever): Yo Dawg. Also: Andrew announces the series as officially spun off.
Yes, I've already filed a complaint that Boxxy didn't make URLesque's 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos list, but they're forgiven for interviewing Andy about the #1 slot.
So which of you am I going to marry? (I know, I know... I'm going to marry a retweeter.)
Good work from Andy: Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital, which I won't quote at length. :)
Lindsayism confessed to me that she is only slightly annoyed with the arrival of Highdeas, which she's been doing since 2005.
Overlooked anniversary: Five years ago (yesterday), Subservient Chicken changed the internet by launching the notion of (love it or hate it) viral marketing. One of its creators, Rick of Barbarian Group, reflects on its creation and lasting impact. "Then, of course, there's the question of whether or not it worked. This is mostly answered now, I think. But to recap, yes, it worked." Happy birthday, chicken.
So let's see if this starts any debate.... my pal Matt Haughey recently wrote a little ditty called This Is How Social Media Really Works where he essentially argues that this new marketing force is completely unnecessary:
So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.I've been known to rant about this new breed of internet expertise too, but that's probably because NYC seems to have more social media experts than rats. But for the sake of argument, a counter-example of Matt's attempts to find a swingset, here's a story from Ad Age about buying an air conditioner. It makes a compelling case for a more subtle presence for brands to exist in online social spaces. Thoughts?
Web Trend Map 2009. It maps the 333 most influential domains and the 111 most influential people onto the Tokyo Metro map. Height of a station correlates to its traffic, revenue, and trend; width represents stability. And so on...
Team Scoble? Blech, okay. But yeah: "Zuckerberg is right. He shouldn't start listening to his users now."
This is making the rounds today: Omegle. Anonymous, random, one-on-one chat. Seems compelling for 20 seconds.
NYT thinky-think piece that compares the evolution of wikipedia to that of cities. The argument frames itself around Andrew Lih's new book, The Wikipedia Revolution. Meanwhile, over in Arts, there's an urban planning piece: Reinventing America's Cities: The Time Is Now.
Caterina Fake's new startup: Hunch. Via her blog post: "Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result -- a Hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn't give other people."
My probably favorite session at SXSW this year was Merlin Mann and John Gruber just chatting about being passionate about what you do online. That sounds like a bland proposition, but it turned out funny and illuminating: Obsession Times Voice.
Come to think of it, I could use a Twitter ghostwriter too.
Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago who is one of [Guy] Kawasaki's ghost Twitterers, said she judged her performance based on how often her postings for Mr. Kawasaki are "retweeted," that is, resent by other users of Twitter.
Recently, she said, she had a coup when the actor Ashton Kutcher repeated her post about a YouTube video showing someone getting high from a "natural hallucinogen."
"Facebook is like Cheers, where everyone knows your name," she said. "Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people."
She said she had been considering trying to get other ghost Twitter clients. "I don't think I could ghost Twitter for 100 people," she said. "More like 10 clients. I think I would have to get to know them."
Rocketboom revisits the Know Your Meme Gameshow. Great production, given the circumstances. And once again, we killed them. Team Boxxy!
Last night I randomly asked, "what makes my link blog different from my Twitter different from my Tumblr different from my Facebook stream?" Mat Honan then answered on Twitter ("Replies"), on Tumblr ("Reblogging"), on Facebook ("Comments"), and now he can answer here.
Winners at the SXSW Web Awards included Lost Zombies (Community), Hulu (Film/TV), Why So Series (Games), Project Miso (CSS), The Bygone Bureau (Blog) and We Tell Stories (Experimental / Best of Show).
I guess the personal highlight of sxsw was the "Bikini Flashmob" that Foursquare and I threw at the Omni Hotel pool, where I wore the worst Japanese-tourist-trapped-in-Texas outfit one could possibly assemble at the souvenir shop -- David Carr describes the scene in today's NYT. Post-Austin, people ritualistically debate panels versus parties, but for me the best part is the space in between: dinner with groups of eight or so smart people and spontaneous conversations in the hallways between sessions. The booze is fun, but you forget it in the morning; the panels are theatrical, but seldom revelatory; that leaves you with the conversation, which is always why we always trek to Austin in March.
Just in time for SXSW, foursquare is now available in the iTunes store. [Previously.]
Foursquare is already getting press, even though it's not released and Dens still won't let me blog about it. Oh wait, does this count?
Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? Nope, just you, TechCrunch.
Ev of Twitter was on Charlie Rose and at TED last week. And that story about Facebook trying to buy them -- true.
So now we can add this to the canon of newspaper-saving stories: App Out Of It, Paper-Boy! At over 6,000 words and starring many of the city's brightest meta-media bylines (John Koblin, Matt Haber, Gillian Reagan and Doree Shafrir), this should -- finally? -- be the think piece that identities the problems and presents the solutions. However, if you read closely, it's more of a "throw everything against the wall" approach than a cohesive web strategy.
Some of you might recognize the rhetoric. It feels like one of those "brainstorming sessions" that marketing/editorial execs love to hold. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know exactly what I'm talking about: every six months, it's the same dozen people trying to predict the future. (I enter a guilty plea: I've held as many of these as anyone. You know why? Because if you work for a lumbering big media company long enough, the only catharsis is trying to imagine the impossible.)
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's first admit that this story is fighting the good fight. This sort of cultural rhetoric is juicy and readymade for the <blockquote>:
The media of the 21st century is one that is blogged -- not a negative thing, see later in the piece! -- and merged with the users' own experiences and viewpoints synthesized with the original. If postmodernism came to literature in the '80s, it's got to come to journalism now.That sounds right! But what does this future look like? That's where you start to see the gaudy side of postmodernism, a pastiche of the greatest hits of the past decade. It's basically the Girl Talk version of product development, including all of the following:
Since we're all about search lately, here's something new to play with: SearchMe.
Finally catching up on some reading from earlier this week, this NYT story about Google's "deep web" initiative seems to have been overlooked. This bit was new and intriguing:
Google's Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms -- "Rembrandt," "Picasso," "Vermeer" and so on -- until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.The idea that Google is spidering via search queries is fascinating itself, but that it's building database models from this... this seems to be creeping us toward a semantic web future.
I've been thinking this too: Twitter = YouTube. The argument: YouTube is now the second-most-popular search engine and Twitter Search (as we've previously mentioned) has immense potential to become the next big thing in search. Small prediction: Twitter hasn't released any new features in a long time, but the next thing we'll see is a fancy new search feature (geo stuff? retweet/favorite filters? something....) that includes a revenue model. (More info: Borthwick had similar musings about Twitter Search a couple weeks ago.) Update: more context from Honan in the comments.
For those who were just dying to know, Hipster Runoff is not Tao Lin, but is probably Carlos Perez.
Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. (Doing research for Know Your Meme: The Game Show!)
Why do people Twitter? Because of their underdeveloped sense of the self, of course.
NYT gets lots of important people to talk about the Facebook flap. Not one of them goes meh.
Jorn's "Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0" got retweeted 50 times, which elicited the post Twitter's Two Cultures (retweeters vs. favrders). Update: Honan gives a pretty good counter-argument in the comments.
A link-heavy and quote-filled NYT story about the current controversy on Tumblr.
On an SEO forum, some people are discussing how to monetize 4chan. The funny thing is that the SEOs are bigger assholes than the /b/tards.
...and the inevitable /b/ post following the interview. Welcome, newfags!
A month ago on the eve of ROFLcon, I interviewed the founder of 4chan for a magazine story that never ended up running. He chatted about everything from the techincal complexities of keeping 4chan alive to the anxieties of operating the most controversial site on the internet. By the end of the interview, I was thinking "This kid has seen stuff that would make my eyes burn, but he seems so smart and sweet about it all." (He started the site when he was 15; he just turned 21.) It seemed like insightful stuff that should run somewhere, so here it is....
Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.
FriendOrFollow.com. Who are you following on Twitter that isn't following you back?
Is Yahoo looking to buy Tumblr? Vallewag says so... Update, Karp's response: bullshit (basically).
Twitter gets the NY Mag treatment, but with the mark of Will Leitch: How Tweet It Is. It leads with some discussion of the innards of the company and its future revenue models (the traditional story line), but it ends on a future-looking bit about the Hudson plane crash.
Fred Wilson on Facebook opening up API access to user's status updates. "It seems to me, and I am certainly influened as an active user of and investor in Twitter, that status has emerged as the ultimate social gesture." Update: Get Facebook Status Updates as T-Shirts.
Several people have noticed that I've been getting interesting commenter spam on my site over the last couple days. I've deleted most of it, but I kept it alive on this one post. Why interesting? Because the spam appears to be (actually, almost certainly is) written by actual humans, rather than by spam bots. You can tell because the "commenters" actually seem to address the topic of the post. The only quality that makes it spam is including links to spam-o-licious sites. And now it's gone to an extreme: the spammers are commenting on my comments about spamming, including more spam links. And another reason it's interesting: there must be some significant investment in hiring these spammers. It makes you wonder, is it some sort of off-shore gold farming generating this stuff? I'll continue to delete it, but it does raise an interesting question about actual commenter motives: if you're responding to an issue in a comment, is putting a product in your sig file any different than linking to your personal blog? Is this a case of commenters merely reinventing the product placement?
@PleaseRetweet. This is the end / Beautiful friend / This is the end / My only friend, the end.
Twitter is three years old; one of the founders writes about its creation. "For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball. "
Calacanis goes all emo in his post on We Live In Public. While trying to coin a new term, Internet Asperger's Syndrome (IAS), he says: "The classic argument when someone 'famous' gets beat up is to say 'Didn't you ask for this?' Well, actually, no. The reason I got into blogging was not to be famous or to get attention. It was simply to have an intelligent discussion with people I respected. The people I thought were interesting were debating stuff in the blog format, so I was drawn to it." Is there anything left to say in this hatah/empathy, snark/criticism, trolling/creating debate?
URLesque had a video booth at ROFLcon where they asked people "What do you love/hate about the internet?" I'm in there hating on hating haters, hatefully.
Social Media "Experts" are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped). "The zombies then seek each other: You'll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media 'experts'. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather."
Boxxy is about to explode into LonelyGirl15 proportions. UPDATE: Waxy transcribes the video inside, it made Buzzfeed, and this thing will only get bigger throughout the day.
Riffing off an NYT story about YouTube's ascendancy as a search tool, Snarkmarket proposes Youtubeipedia. Update: perhaps this is a start... Wikipedia Beefs Up for Multimedia.
Kottke.org redesigned. No more yellow -- bold! UPDATE: not sure why, but the comments on this post took off, and Jason showed up to say he's now written about a post about it.
For anyone following Dodgegate, some links: Rick's Soliloquy, Peter's Last Days, Caroline's Eulogy, Gawker's Take-down, Rachel's Thoughts, and Dens' Retort.
Dodgeball is shutting down (which is news for about a dozen New Yorkers), but Dens is working on a replacement.
Detailed update on the Twitter account hacks from a couple weeks ago: it was an 18-year-old kid.
So if you want to dabble in this Tumblr thing, here are the Tumblr Award Winners (mysteriously without links, probably because they can't do anything that isn't a reblog -- kidding!)
Another Twitter thought: people love to mention when someone notable shows up on Twitter, whether that be Shaq or Diablo. But no one ever says, "Hey, did you see Shaq has a [MySpace|Facebook|FriendFeed] page?" Anyway, Kurt Anderson is on Twitter.
Breaking news from Fox News' Twitter. Looks like someone hacked it. Update #1: It's deleted. It said "Bill O'Riley Is Gay." Update #2: Britney Spears and Rick Sanchez also hacked. [via]
In the comments of this post, my friend Rico makes an interesting comparison: lexapro on Twitter Search vs. lexapro on Google. Very different results! It suggests an interesting question: could conversational knowledge eventually usurp search knowledge -- and doesn't it already, in many ways?
In the "if you like x, then you'll like y" category, a new WSJ blog: Digits, which some say suspiciously looks like NYT's Bits.
If we could bundle up the internet into a few snappy headlines, 2008 might look like this:
+ Commenters Went Crazy
+ Twitter & Tumblr Went Mainstream
+ Rickrolling Went Very Mainstream
+ Big Media Went Nowhere
+ Oversharing Went Wild
+ Politicos Went Online
+ 4Chan & Lifecasting Went Awry
If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.
In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.
Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:
30) New York Times Blogs
Given the variety, it's probably unfair to group them all under one heading, but the old gray lady boldly stuck her neck further into the blogosphere guillotine during a year when retreat would have been forgiven. Old mainstays like Krugman, Freakonomics, DealBook, and City Room continued to drive daily conversation, while new additions like Proof (drinking), Laugh Lines (comedy), Measure for Measure (songwriting), and Ideas (their first foray into link blogging) proved big media could still navigate the niches. The most consistently important, however, was probably Bits, a disarmingly lucid tech-biz blog that proved you don't have to be bombastic or supercilious to win the category. (See also: L.A. Times Blogs.)
29) Boner Party
If you operate a celeb/entertainment/snark blog, you know how you are supposed to talk. The voice, now deeply entrenched in the genre, must be mimicked by any new entrant: bitchy, sneering, unimpressed. Boner Party somehow hit REFRESH on the whole genre this year by instead being celebratory, horny, fanboyish. Unlike, say, The Superficial, which is all attitude and no love, Boner Party is pure happy-happy-boy-boy. Imagine remaking Cute Overload but with pictures of girls next to giddy prose, and you've got yourself a boner party. For instance: "For guys, vaginas are like a cross between a pocket knife, a really cool nightclub, and a wizard. It can do SO many things, you REALLY want to get into it, but you have no idea how it works, and therefore it must be magical." (See also: Street Boners and TV Carnage, Golden Fiddle, and Tumblettes.)
28) Newsless
Matt Thompson packed up his belongings this year and moved to the middle of Missouri to think about the future of news -- not a bad gig if you can get it! (Matt is also known for being half of Snarkmarket, the voice of EPIC, and the founding editor of Vita.mn.) His fellowship at the University of Missouri provides time to explore the issues that many of us in online media are grappling with: poor news filters, a top-down approach to news gathering, the lack of pertinent local information, a broken breaking news model, and so on. While he's been researching these problems and writing about them on Newsless, he also put his ideas into action by launching The Money Meltdown, a site that aggregates the most essential information about the financial crisis. Though his research proposal involves Wikipediaing the News, he isn't naive enough to believe that simply turning on wikis will necessarily produce anything of value -- the right solution will be more complex than that. With the news industry in crisis, it's good that someone is trying to find models for maintaining an informed populace. (See also: PressThink and MediaShift.)
27) Urlesque
Shouldn't someone really be keeping track of all these memes? Oh good, Urlesque is. (See also: Pop Candy, Metafilter, and Listicles.)
26) NonSociety
While a vocal minority of stoic internet enthusiasts screamed bloody murder when she landed on the cover of Wired (and others advised to just don't look), Julia Allison did something this year that many people have failed at: living a publicly transparent life -- or at least as close to it as possible. The snark machine may resent this, but it has been nothing short of notable. (See also: Reblogging Julia and Jake and Amir.)
25) Last Night's Party
While others were pointing to the rise of the street fashion blog, the party photoblog made a surprise resurgence this year. The fascination has always been curious -- sure, there's some prurient interest, but there's also that moment of abhorrence. The disturbing mix of envy and disgust are why party shutterbugs seemingly reinvented the moribund genre that seemed frozen in the summer of 2006. Perhaps the resurgence can be attributed to stack of party photo books that topples on you when walking into Urban Outfitters and Virgin Records -- or maybe it was the death of the hipster. (See also: Cobrasnake, Nicky Digital, Guest of a Guest, Hot Chicks With Douchebags, and Random Night Out.)
24) Gannett Blog
Have you ever wished there was an official record of the downfall of Rome? Welcome to the 20th century newspaper version. (See also: McClatchy Watch, Journerdism, and Romenesko.)
23) Know Your Meme
A subset of Rocketboom, the "Know Your Meme" series has been one of the few beacons of hope in the inspiration-deficient genre of videoblogging this year. The genius is that the episodes are funny while being actual history lessons -- sorta like the Daily Show for the internet. Personal favorites include Magibon, Reaction Videos, and FAIL. (See also: ROFLcon, Internet Superstar, Pop 17, and Internet Famous Class.)
22) Very Small Array
Chart porn: instead of dying this year, it almost seemed to flourish. Very Small Array made beautiful images out of random data sets, such as My Love Is A... (Google searches), Largest Minority Population (NYC demographics), and Hit Songs (music charts). (See also: emo+beer = busted career and infosthetics.)
21) io9
Though it already seems like it's been here forever, io9 launched in January as a less didactic BoingBoing. Some of the most memorable posts have included Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life, Imagine an America Where Socialism is No Longer a Dirty Word, and Kevin Kelly's remembrance of Gary Gygax. Hurry, before Denton slices it into space shrapnel. (See also: Offworld and SF Signal.)
20) Ta-Nehisi Coates
In one of a few areas that it seemed edge out The New Yorker this year, The Atlantic maintained its provocative blogging tradition with Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and James Fallows. But it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who leapt from the monitor like no one else writing about politics and culture this year. In his remarkable profile of Bill Cosby, Coates took on one of the most complex areas of race (comedy) while teasing out Cosby's occasional similarity to Obama. In a political season strangely devoid of genuine race commentary, Coates was one of the few keepin it unreal. (See also: TNR's Blogs, The Assimilated Negro, and The Root.)
19) Magic Molly
Of course, we need a Tumblr in here somewhere. The Tumblr Awards highlight the idiosyncratic characteristics of the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative. Magic Molly embodied all of these things, as her itinerant persona flitted around the internet, from penning the definitive piece on adderall for n+1 to contributing to This Recording. If the Tumblrverse seems like high school, Molly is the smartest girl in the class -- the quickest with the Phillip Roth quote but never hiding her Sasha Grey guilt. (See also: TopherChris, CatBird, hrrrthrrr, Kung Fu Grippe, Soup Soup, Dear Old Love, Mediation, AntiKris, Frangy, and so on and so on....)
18) What Would Don Draper Do? and I Am Chuck Bass
After serving as a useful foil for the past couple years, the fake personality blog expired this year. But a new form arose from its ashes: the blog inspired by a character. Rather than feigning a famous person, these sites explored a character through a different set of criteria. The outcome was such projects as What Would Don Draper Do?, which imagines the Mad Men mad man as a self-help columnist, and I Am Chuck Bass, which invokes the notorious boulevardier's name to explore the inner-torment of Gossip Girl. (See also: Fire Nick Douglas and Rex's Scarf.)
17) Tomorrow Museum
Responding to last year's list, Kottke made a semi-plea for "blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck." He's right, of course -- many of those sites get lost in the fracas of the mega-blog. One of my favorites this year was Tomorrow Museum, which contained nimble think pieces about such topics as Microcelebrity and Frienemies and New Media in Fiction. (See also: Marginal Revolutions and The Morning News.)
16) Buzzfeed
After first landing on this list in 2006, Buzzfeed has been slowly transforming from a blogger favorite to a legitimate cultural force. It has also become unbelievably fast at identifying online trends before they happen. (See also: Radar Archive and Stuff White People Like.)
15) Keith Gessen
You can say this about the guy: he tried. While the commenter meme was raging this summer, Gessen had taken up the noble peculiar cause of trying to tame the unwieldy beast. This didn't exactly go so well, but you can't help feeling like we all learned something from his mistakes along the way. (See also: The Millions, Lit Mob, Geekcentric, and Emily Magazine.)
14) Videogum
Launched in April as a Stereogum offshoot, Videogum aggregates, dissects, and comments on everything happening with viral videos. If you saw a funny video this year, it was probably on Videogum first. While popularizing such phenomena as the live puppy cam, Amelie Jr., and the Ice-T / Soulja Boy feud, Gabe and Lindsay mixed in the occasional funny routine themselves. And Videogum elicited the best overheard faux-insult of the year: "I hate you. I hope your viral video doesn't go viral." (See also: Tilzy, First Showing, Antville, and Flavorwire.)
13) The Big Picture
It seems illogical that a photoblog using generic wire service photos and sitting atop a MovableType installation could possibly cause such a stir, but The Big Picture did one simple thing right: super large photos. After its June launch (by Kokogiak), the design/photo blogs instantly sent their link love, causing Boston.com's traffic to reportedly skyrocket. (See also: Media Storm and Getty Moodstream.)
12) Gawker & Radar
Fourteen months ago, not long after the Grigoriadis story, I guest-edited Gawker for a few days while Choire went off to Fire Island to feed his demons or some such thing. Everything was chilly at the office, but I had no idea I was living in antediluvian times. Since then, too many things have transpired to even count. But let's try: Denton introduced a pay-per-click model for bloggers, Emily quit, Choire quit, Josh quit, Denton hired himself, whoa -- NYT Mag cover story!, Josh responded, Emily landed a book deal, Moe had that unfortunate incident, Moe went to Radar, no wait she didn't, ack, Denton axed pay-per-click model, Choire hopped to Radar, a new Gawker editor joined, Moe was laid off, poor Balk, oops Radar folded, Denton predicted the end of the world, Sheila published photos, not you too Pareene, and a few redesigns happened. What'd I miss? If this all seems like some sort of horrid bukakke ritual performed by the blogomedia on you -- it is! And yet, we somehow ate it up. So give the guy credit -- he knows how to turn his empire into a compelling, twisted tale.
(See also: Fake Nick Denton and Cover Awards.)
11) The Technium
Kevin Kelly seemed determined this year. The mission: to use technology as a stick, or perhaps a poker, to shake and jab at society. No one has written more clearly about how technology is shaping -- and can be used to shape -- culture. In influential essays like 1000 True Fans and Better Than Free, Kelly showed how to use an emerging network economics to your advantage, while Cloud Culture, Screen Fluency, and Tools For Vizuality illustrated a future that is more evenly distributed. (See also: Metagold, Text Patterns, and TED Talks.)
10) Alley Insider
I'm as surprised as you are. When Alley Insider launched last year, it seemed like another unessential tech/biz blog whose purpose was to clutter the internet with more rewritten press releases. But Henry Blodget, the infamous former Wall Street analyst taken down by Eliot Spitzer in the first dot-com boom, had something else in mind. What immediately differentiated Alley Insider from the fracas of other also-rans was analysis -- sometimes provocative, generally accurate, and occasionally funny. A Wired profile chronicles Blodget's difficulties with living down his past, but the empire is growing with spin-offs like Clusterstock (financial dish) and The Business Sheet (business gossip). (See also: Paid Content and Techmeme.)
9) This Recording
From what I wrote in July: "What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice.... It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup." (See also: Public School Intelligentsia, Fey Friends, and Hipster Runoff.)
8) xkcd
It's been around for a while, but the pithy cartoons on the unpronounceable xkcd seemed especially poignant this year -- especially after YouTube took one joke and turned it into a reality. Known for poking at our peculiar online passions, some of this year's best strips involved pointing out the obvious weirdness of Wikipedia and the Large Hadron Collider. (See also: New Yorker Cartoon Lounge and Gaping Void.)
7) The Daily Beast
I don't know if it's really a blog either, but Tina Brown is creating, well, something over there. She has claimed in interviews that the site's intent is to sift through the online detritus for the best information -- a noble cause, but it already seems to be busting at the seams with its own information overload. Then again, features like The Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, and Big Fat Story are at least trying to winnow the data flow to something manageable. (See also: Culture11 and AllTop.)
6) Kanye West
At some point in October, I made the most difficult decision of the year: I finally unsubscribed from Kanye's blog. The fatigue of trying to keep up with his 50-posts-per-day pace had finally set in. But I still say everyone should be forced to ingest all-things-Kanye for at least one week. And I mean everything -- including the random cut-and-paste jobs from IMDB and Google Image Search. And the comments -- oh yeah, you gotta read the comments. And you know what -- who cares if he's really writing all this stuff! You don't think Warhol made every painting, do you? (See also: Aziz is Bored, Lovely Package, and Pretty Much Amazing.)
5) Fred Wilson
Although there's no way to prove this, it seemed like the tech/media blowhards finally became less relevant this year. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the old guard of Scoble/Winer/Calacanis/Arrington/Cuban seemed to lose influence, while more sober voices emerged -- those who weren't creating incestuous diurnal feuds with each other to game Techmeme. In the vacuum, Fred Wilson, who has been around the scene for a long time, became the analyst to turn to. Though he is a venture capitalist (with investments in del.icio.us, Outside.in, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, FeedBurner, and Disqus), he uses his blog (and Twitter and Tumblr) to address everything from his music tastes and Halloween costume to investor liquidity and google juice. (See also: Shirky.com, Rough Type, and Steven Berlin Johnson.)
4) Waxy & Ana Marie Cox
Whattup, old skool? Andy Baio and Ana Marie Cox are blog pioneers, which means they would be forgiven for getting crotchety and sedentary like several of their grumpy peers. But this year they adapted to the changing landscape and invented new ways to deal with it. Andy tore apart the data-centric stories that no one else was bothering with -- by using Mechanical Turk to collect Girl Talk data, by visualizing one-hit-wonder trends, and by investigating pirated Olympics video. (Along the way, he also coined "Supercuts" and tried to end FAIL.) Meanwhile, after losing her job at Radar, Ana Marie launched a pledge drive to cover her travel expenses on the McCain trail. Both of them repurposed old-fashioned blog ideas -- the tip jar and the online investigation -- for modern times. (See also: Young Manhattanite, ASCII, Alex Balk, and Tony Pierce.)
3) Twitter
Though it came in tied at #1 on last year's list, Twitter gets a rare repeat appearance because it made a big jump this year from a chatty novelty to a legit news stream. Toward the end of the year, people were still struggling to define the microblogging platform on a continuum between publishing and communication -- a debate that only illustrated the complexity of a such a simple platform used differently by so many people. (See also: Posterous and 4chan.)
2) FiveThirtyEight.com
Nate Silver for president! (See also: Politico, Talking Points Memo, and Flowing Data.)
1) Single Serving Sites
More than any medium before it, the internet is fueled by gimmicks. This particular gimmick, the single serving site, has been around for a while, manifesting itself in odd forms like YTMND and The Hamster Dance. While amusing, these sites were mostly inside jokes for the Goatse Generation. But then something happened last year when the concept was applied to a useful binary question -- IsLostARepeat.com and IsTwitterDown.com, for instance. These sites provided the kernel of an idea that exploded at the onset of 2008, beginning with Mat Honan launching BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com in February. Three days later, Jason Kottke officially coined the term, which unleashed the craziness. (In its own way, you could label Sergei Brin's one-post abandoned blog a single serving site.) This all concluded with the brilliant and inevitable IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com, the definitive academic investigation on one of those short-lived phenomena that makes the internet feel continuously new, even if hitting refresh changes absolutely nothing. (See also: RickRolled and ICanHasCheezBurger.)
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Special thanks to Rachel, Noah, Andy, Emily, Spencer, Matt, Lindsay, Joanne, Matt, Karina, Kelly, Robin, and Taylor for their tips -- and inspiration -- in compiling this list. See you next year!
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This list on previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007
There was a rumor floating around that Obama might pick Lessig to run the FCC. Um, guess not -- he wants to demolish it. (Anyone else notice Larry becoming increasingly libertarian lately? It seemed to start with his apology for getting Microsoft wrong in the '90s and more recently we've seen a drastic shift in stance on net neutrality.)
It's starting to feel like if an event was live Twittered, it didn't really happen. This guy tweeted the runway plane crash in Denver yesterday.
I kinda love that Twitter is being used for an impromptu nyc snowball fight right now.
I'm pretty sure Tumblr makes you stupid. [via -- reblogged!] See also: Tumblr is Second Life for people who dont realize they're losers.
I helped Rachel launch a new thing today: Charitini. For the moment, it's a hub around doing charitable giving for her birthday, but she's got big plans with expanding it.
Three new interesting features on NYTimes.com: 1) a unique way of handling letters to the editor, and 2) click EXTRA for an alternate view of the homepage with copious external links, and Nicholas Kristof is on Twitter. Clever.
Over on Tumblr (that locked box of inside jokes and sex talk, reminiscent of AOL in 1995 -- OMG, I'M SO KIDDING), a scandal is breaking out because someone named Tara Michelle (dead link now) faked an online identity that eventually led to an online boyfriend. The Tumblr gang is now having fun with the meme. [See previously: Plain Layne, Kaycee Nicole Swenson, etc.]
Two headlines that ended up next to each other in my rss reader: YouTube Says Monetization is Coming | Twitter Says the Revenue's Coming Soon.
The NYT Mag story on Google's international legal quandries is worth reading. The backdrop is how free speech is defined country-by-country (holocaust denial, for instance, is illegal in France and Germany), especially as it pertains to removing content from YouTube. Lest you think that America is free speech oasis, it also tells the story of how Joe Lieberman has been trying to get YouTube to take down videos produced by Islamic terrorists, even if they don't feature hate speech or violent content.
I've been more-or-less offline for a couple weeks. Here's everything that happened in my absence: Shaq joined Twitter, the Macy's Day Parade was rick-rolled, that tween fashion blogger turned out be real, Jarvis yelled at someone again, a super whale fail, Michiko railed against Gladwell, a whole issue of NYT Mag went to screens, SearchWiki, Hannity dumped Colmes, Arrested Development movie... again, and... yeah, not much.
Hoo-fucking-rah. YouTube switched to widescreen. Obama's Weekly Address is no 16:9.
I expect a very very very long reply to this over here. (I'm half-way through Jarvis' book, What Would Google Do. Rosenbaum has the right take so far.) Update: there it is, shorter than I guessed it would be.
Guess who signed up for Twitter -- Al Gore! Wait, I didn't hear you cheer....
For the true Web 2.0 addictive-compulsive personality: UserNameCheck.com. Lookup whether a username is registered on 68 sites.
David asks what features Tumblr should add, and a bjillion people answer. But no one requests more Tumblettes, so I will!
NYT Styles story on Likemind, Noah's hivemind-cum-meetup-cum-flashmob group.
Heffernan looks at something you've probably encountered, The Hitler Meme, which uses a 2004 German movie to satirize everything and anything -- Sarah Palin, Burning Man, Brett Favre, Obama, Hillary, HD DVD. It's basically FAIL meets Godwin's Law.
This is retarded. Seriously, terrorists can use anything. Why not: "Walkie-talkies and batteries on FBI most-dangerous list"?
Dude killed his wife because of an update to her Facebook status. Now that's complicated.
Qwitter. It tells you when people unsubscribe from your Twitter. So now you know when you've been BAD.
Waxy tried to kill FAIL earlier this year. Now Slate gets all Safire on its entry into the lexicon.
Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" from The Atlantic will probably be the most quoted thing on the internet for the next few days. So here are a few quick excerpts for faking your way through conversations:
A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.
The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is -- more than any writer of the past -- a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human -- whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.
A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.
To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.
The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, bloggings gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.
Chicago has mysteriously become ground central for the local online media battle. The Onion recently launched its entertainment portal, Decider, in Chicago. Huffington Post last month launched its local effort in Chicago. NBC just launched a new affiliate site, NBCChicago.com, that is heavily entertainment-based. Curbed and Eater will be spreading there soon, and EveryBlock also hails from ChiTown. And in addition to the normal Gothamist and MetroBlog presence, Gapers Block has a huge following.
Workflow for Online Editorial Content. Somewhere in there is "write story."
Vallewag rumor: Google wants to buy EveryBlock. (Previously: my interview with Holovaty.)
Are you a rabble-rousing blogger who worries they might get sued? You can now take out liability insurance!
Disenchanted by the lack of good information about the economic bailout, Matt starts a new site, The Money Meltdown, to collaboratively assemble the best information.
Is snark killing the web? Have at it, kids. Update: Gawker sez, "If there was less snark, the world would maybe, possibly be a better place. But it would be way less fun."
A new study reveals that narcissists can be identified on Facebook. As if you needed science.
Whether you call it a "blog war" or a "blog theater," more proof that the commenters are winning: commenters take over Slog thread and create an impromptu play about George Washington.
The link bait to beat all link bait: The 50 Buzziest Blog Posts of All Time. (Not bad, though. Full of nostalgia.)
Twitter's CEO on how traditional media is Tweeting. "Twitter provides a great man-on-the-street account of what's happening right now." Update #1: in a twist, Gawker scolds Dorsey on race/class issues and compares it to relying on commenters. Update #2: TwitterIsAPenis.com.
The Big Money, Slate.com's new business site, launches today. As NYT suggests, it could be the best worst day in recent financial history to launch a financial publication. Features will include a blog dedicated to Google, an ad comparison engine, and a Twitter account that takes jabs at WSJ. (Disclaimer or whatever: I might write for it.)
Sorry to ruin your weekend, but you have another internet-related NYT Magazine story to read: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. (It's Clive though, so it should be okay. But it can wait until you're back from shooting wolves from airplanes.)
This is just the kind of good publicity bump that MySpace needs: MySpace Cofounder Tom Anderson Was A Real Life WarGames Hacker in 1980s.
NYT catches up on the Truman Show Delusion (in Styles, nice). [Previously]
Haughey on the demise of commenting over the years. It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Yes.
The most boring site on the planet, FriendFeed has a new beta redesign, which is still mighty sucky, but it has added the most important feature in the history of social networks, Fake Following, which TechCrunch describes as a "seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they're following their friends without actually getting their updates." More like this, please.
Some days I feel like turning off my RSS reader and just watching this all day.
Two interesting personal management startups that launched today: Daytum (in beta) is a home for collecting your daily data; Itsaris is a bookmarking site for storing entire web pages.
5 Ways the Newspaper Botched the Web. A nice little history of early newspaper consortium projects starting as far back as 1983, including one ugly company I was involved in.
It seems such a small revolution, but one of things I instituted at msnbc.com was embeddable video. A year later, no other site affiliated with a news network had gotten on board -- until recently. It looks like cnn.com just added an "embed" button. [via]
Six Apart puts the domain to use: Blogs.com. It's basically an editorialized aggregator.
Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story on Adrian Holovaty (cover), whom I interviewed earlier this year. Update: EveryBlock has launched in three more cities... Seattle, DC, and Boston.
For those of you who were shocked to see that Exxon was on Twitter: it was fake.
Random blogging etiquette observation: it's curious that bloggers almost never link to the "printer friendly" version of a story, when that version is more visually pleasing and usually advert-free. (Even more strangely, the only person I can think of who occasionally uses that link is Romenesko.) Is this actual courtesy, or mere convenience? And what would happen if every blogger started to suddenly change their seemingly good-willed linking practice?
[Apologies for the insidery nature of this, but just this once.] Hey Blakeley, you managed to wrap what I like least about both Gawker and Tumblr in one simple paragraph! There's a whole established history of crediting links -- Gawker and Tumblr are the most flagrant abusers of that history.
AsPostedontheNYTimes.com. Some dude who appears to be crazy is cataloging all the comments he makes on NYTimes.com blogs.
How much of a meme has it been this summer? So much, that it's even in The Onion now: Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet. "After clicking the 'submit' button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments. It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it."
Responses from Weev, Fortuny, and Schwartz to the NYT Mag troll article. Update, from the comments: Heffernan & Weev 2.0. Update: Fortuny Gets Sued.
NYT: Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call. The story uses SlyDial, a service that allows you to leave a voicemail without letting the person hear their phone ring, to set up a thesis about "tools that let users avoid direct communication." Clever thesis, but it rubs dangerously close to falling apart when it cites other tools (including Twitter and Facebook) which create more direct communication, not less.
The last episode of lonelygirl15 will be released today. WHAT? YOU HAVEN'T BEEN WATCHING?
Pretty much designed to explode the internet, NYT Magazine's story on trolls: Malwebolence. Who knew these people were self-identified? Welcome to backlash to the backlash to the backlash. Link stream: Metafilter | NY Mag | Slashdot | Digg | Gawker | Weev.
Delicious.com (no more periods!) relaunched with a new design. They even made you a movie.
This is long, but it's actually pretty fantastic, if you're into academic studies of goofy internet phenom: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, from the guy who did The Machine is Us/ing Us. [via]
Good Valleywag headline: Forrester acquires Jupiter, creating monopoly in Internet quote-factory market.
From Lewis Black's Root of All Evil: How Blog Comments Could Have Ruined America. See also: Jarvis' recent tirade. And also: Merlin Mann on bystander culture. And, wtf, Bob Garfield interviewing Ira Glass on commenters. What the hell -- Poniewozik too. Will commenters be the Time Person of the Year?
Two okay follow-ups to Sunday's NYT internet literacy story: long-form non-fiction is needlessly overwritten and the idea of literacy is changing.
StupidFilter tries to programmatically identify stupid comments. Good luck with that!
SF's version of Jakob/Julia: the public breakup of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina. [via] Update: responses from Chris and Tara.
Two psychiatrists "believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows." You mean, I'm not? [via]
Though perhaps the most statistically dubious and blatantly linkbaitish list of all time, I have only one response to NowPublic's MostPublic Index: suck it, Sklar!
"How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?" Heffernan gets all Safirey: Online writing is a typographical and grammatical mess. Should we fix it? Hey, lookie there, Derrida reference.
It's been a while since you've asked -- actually, you've never asked -- but let me tell you... my favorite new blog is This Recording. What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice. Most of the writers are, I think, from LA, or at least it feels like LA. It's not done-with-it-all jaded like NYC or earnestly passive-aggressive like the Midwest. It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup. Whatevski, I could read this Molly person all day. Update: "when Walt Whitman liveblogged Abraham Lincoln's funeral".
Hey West Coasties, don't forget, you have your own Julia too. "I wonder if the discrepancy between Internet fame and real fame has something to do with being so hate-based?"
Since I'm talking about comment culture too much lately, linking to Gessen's new post seems required. "I think, generally speaking, that every site gets the commenters it deserves... It's disingenuous for people writing online, especially for people who are expert at writing online, to pretend like the commenters they attract (over and over again) are somehow incidental to the work they do, or the context in which they do it... You may not be legally responsible for the things that appear on your site, but you are I think morally responsible." See also: Choire thinks NYT should sue anon commenters. Controversial!
Kottke: Just. Don't. Look. It's great advice if you're tired of the relentless "look at me!" blog onslaught, but it's more difficult if you feel compelled to be in touch with it all -- able to talk about all corners of politics/culture/media/tech. Sometimes you need to see bad movies to recognize the good ones, ya know?
Though it might seem that every ounce of nuance has been sucked out of this whole "commenter culture" meme -- yesterday it was Time with "Post Apocalypse" and previously it was NYT Styles with "All-Stars of the Clever Riposte" and NY Mag with "The What You Are Afraid Of" -- I'm still convinced there are some missing pieces, even if I can't put my finger on them....
A lot of people (and by "a lot" I mean the 47 people who are trudging through this whole confessional bloggy moment) will find Chez Pazienza's "Droll Models" in HuffPo edifying.
Jorn of Robot Wisdom, who invented link blogging, takes up Warren Ellis' critique from earlier this week in which he said, "The world does not need another linkblog." It might seem that I'd naturally rally around Jorn on this one, but I'll say this instead: if Fimoc had not existed for the past way-too-many years, and I had to invent something now... I would probably not try to invent a link blog. We are compelled by our histories.
This should momentarily balance those other lists: Fifty Most Influential Female Bloggers.
Hello, future: WSJ on 4chan. Update from the comments: Time also has a 4chan story today.
This response to the Jezebel Incident is getting passed around a lot right now in Tumble-land. I think there's something smart to this reaction... but I also think there's the voice of dad saying "You kids should learn your place." (I shouldn't be trying to unpack this on a link blog!)
You favorite Tumblr for the next five minutes: One Person Trend Stories. (It's media criticism, fiction, humor, and decent writing, all wrapped in one.)
I love the "In Popular Culture" section of nearly every Wikipedia article (which inevitably has at least one Simpsons reference). XKCD does too. Unfortunately, some Wikipedians took that one seriously. [via]
Good issue of Technology Review this month, populated with articles about various Web 2.0 conundrums (privacy, data portability, internet gridlock) and companies (Plaxo, Facebook, KickApps, Twitter, Pownce, Qik).
Makes me wish I had actually finished a year of Japanese in college: Wired gallery of Japan's Hottest Celebrity Bloggers.
NYT profile of the downforeveryoneorjustme.com creator, who uncoincidentally works at Twitter.
Good column on this whole over-sharing debate: The Overshare War. "I think the people who complain about oversharing are snobs. They want their art filtered, processed, sanitized and read-only. They don't object to emotion per se, they just want it managed and packaged for them."
ChaCha.com. Huh, I've never heard of this before, but you text a question to 242242 and a human texts you back an answer. [via]
VioletBlueVioletBlue.net, an archive of the deleted BoingBoing posts. [via]
The exact median blog post: "I was new to the city and scared, so I drank too much and met someone." That's it, I quit.
Update: Xeni wrote to point out that the reason the post was deleted was because it was accidentally double-posted to BoingBoing Gadgets. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, which basically invalidates most of what I say below.
LAT's Web Scout on Violet Blue's scrubbing from BoingBoing. I've got an inkling of an idea of what happened, based upon previous gossip I heard. But I'll wait for a while to see what emerges. Anyway, some people have been asking me what exactly BoingBoing deleted about me. I've decided to reproduce the post, which was originally at this location, but is now gone:
Filmolicious [sic] dug a 15-year-old copy of Wired issue 1.0 out and gave it a loving, thoroughgoing examination through the lens of history. My life was changed by that issue -- I read it on the bus on the way to university in Waterloo, Ontario, got off the bus, took one look at the campus, and thought, "Christ, why am I here, when all this stuff is going on out there?" A few months later, I'd dropped out to program CD ROMs for the Voyager company, whose wares had been reviewed in that inaugural issue.
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
My post that they are referencing is here, and the reason I think it was deleted is here.
See also: MeFi erupts in speculation.
UPDATE #1: BoingBoing responds, sorta.
UPDATE #2: Valleywag floats rumors.
ENOUGH with the parties, where is the innovation? What the fuck are we celebrating anyhow? Of course I happen to like parties, but I agree with Ethan's point about Mashable. Seriously, when the fuck was the last time you heard someone say, "You must read this Mashable post"? And it's in the Technorati Top 10! Whatever, great parties though!
Tomorrow Museum takes up the issue of BoingBoing deleting posts from people who are marginally critical of the site. It happened to me a few months ago too, seemingly because I wrote this, more as a disappointed fan than a disgruntled rage machine. It's a nasty moment online right now, where a lot of people are trying to figure out how to write critically about internet society and its participants while not joining the throng of noisy hatah culture. BoingBoing's tactics suggest they are on the wrong side of this debate.
Sasha Frere-Jones guest-stars on Pot Psychology. Looks like he didn't smoke enough.
Deadspin's conversation with Buzz Bissinger. This conversation is becoming ground central for this debate about the public internet, commenter culture, and the tone of online chatter.
Without comment, I give you:
19TH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
(Jagger/Richards)
You're the kind of person
You meet at certain dismal dull affairs.
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud
Running up and down the stairs.
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years.
And though you've tried you just can't hide
Your eyes are edged with tears.
You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
When you were a child
You were treated kind
But you were never brought up right.
You were always spoiled with a thousand toys
But still you cried all night.
Your mother who neglected you
Owes a million dollars tax.
And your father's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax.
You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nilne-teenth nervous breakdown.
Oh, who's to blame, that girl's just insane.
Well nothing I do don't seem to work,
It only seems to make matters worse. Oh please.
You were still in school
When you had that fool
Who really messed your mind.
And after that you turned your back
On treating people kind.
On our first trip
I tried so hard to rearrange your mind.
But after while I realized you were disarranging mine.
You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.
I killed Tim Russert (on Wikipedia), aka why editing Wikipedia still is exciting.
After another completely retarded week for those who live publicly on the internet, some advice from Will Leitch: Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended.
My favorite blog right now, you ask? The answer is not Keith Gessen's Tumblr, which causes much brow rumpling and eyebrow raising. (Sometimes I read his posts like poetry, repeating the lines, hoping that something will reveal itself. It's annoying because I really believe someone should be carrying the flag he's unfurled and raised. There's a legit point in his ruckus, but I just don't know where the fuck he's going with it.) No, my favorite blog right now is my pal Joanne's Tomorrow Museum. She has been doing careful thought pieces on little cultural phenomena. Sure, I like the stuff on internet celebrity -- Microcelebrity and Frienemies and We Live in Public -- but there's also the essay on Boss Culture and the one about Hypertext and the Kindle. She has a super-informed voice that eschews trickery. Maybe this is the flag we should be flying under.
The news that Reddit is going open-source got me thinking about other sites that have done the same. The three other examples I could come up with are Slashdot, LiveJournal, and Consumating. All seem to be, well, increasingly obsolete. (A different debate might be does Slashdot still matter? I'm sure it's audience is still sizable, but does it matter?) Are there any better examples? And who would benefit from this, if anyone?
The One Red Paperclip Guy (refresher: he started with a paperclip and kept trading up until he had a house -- and then he published a book about it) is now trying to trade his house. So far, he's gotten one proposal: a red paper clip.
Over the past couple months, I've been working with New York Magazine to develop some stories related to internet media. The first is "The Microfame Game", an analysis of how micro-celebrity is generated, with advice on how you -- yes you! -- can use the internet's self-publishing tools along with the new networked media machine to generate well-deserved acclaim. The eight-step plan is intentionally cheeky, but it's also probably helpful, if you're the kind of crazy person looking to create a successful online identity.
My original inspiration for writing about this topic was Kevin Kelly's essay 1,000 True Fans, which is a motivating take on how small amount of renown can be turned into a successful career. In thinking about the idea, I smacked out the three paragraphs below, which never made it into the story but can serve as the spark of the original idea:
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to stand in front of large groups of people and scream at them. I wanted to proclaim my love for their mid-size city and then show them my genitals. I had no interest in becoming a musician, because I wanted to be a rock star.
Before the internet, or before whatever weird historical moment we're in that causes us to overuse the phrase "before the internet," being a rock star used to signify something grandiose. As subcultures arose, the term itself became imbued with meaning beyond music: one could be the "rock star of sushi" or the "rock star of hedge funds."
And now, with an eroding mass culture, and with the internet slicing everything to tasty bite-sized morsels, the "rock stars of _____" are the only rock stars who matter. With subcultures now the dominant culture, the only solution is retreating to the fringes and joining these new niche rock stars, the microfamous....
Mark Cuban stays on message with his rant against YouTube: Hulu is kicking Youtube's Ass. At least he's got a point this time...
Where Are They Now? Profiles of first-generation dot-coms eToys, Webvan, Pets.com, Boo, TheGlobe.com, Entertaindom, Excite@Home, Kozmo, Garden.com, and DrKoop.com -- early giants that I bet most of the dot-com kids have never hear of. [via]
TimesPeople (FAQ). It's an NYT app (a Firefox add-on) that you can use to "create a network of like-minded readers." You add friends and it adds a social networking bar to the top of NYTimes.com. There's also a Facebook app. Some people will likely criticize the closed nature of this, or the "do I need another social network?" aspect, but I think this is a smart move. UPDATE: Caroline's CNET story.
Slog + Gawker + Commenters = Mean Commenters Are Running Bloggers Out of Town. This seems like a good way to wrap up a truly fucked up week on the internet.
All of the five-word Webby speeches. Colbert: "Me, me, me, me, me!!!" Update: video from WSJ.
Keep me away from Rock Band from now on, m'kay? But that Tumblr party was fun, right? (Me, me, not me.)
The Ira Glass Twitter page that made a lot of people giddy has changed its named to "Fake Ira Glass." Sorry kids, you were punked.
TechCrunch launched Elevator Pitches yesterday. Make a video to pitch your startup idea, then upload it. I'm not sure why, but this sorta annoys me.
Plurk is Twitter on a timeline. Kinda sexy. See also, minimalism taken to its furthest logical conclusion: Adocu.
I think this, partially, is what I was also trying to say:
It's not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group's open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature -- so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what's, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web's peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.
ROFLcon, last month's internet meme conference in Cambridge, appears to be now taking its act on the road. Events of some sort are scheduled this summer in Chicago, Seattle, San Fran, and NYC. They need to go wherever this kid is.
Emily is doing a Q&A after that NYT Mag story. Also, she was on NPR's Day to Day.
A new "best of Twitter" application: Favrd. From the blog post about it: "By any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks -- unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about -- must and shall be filtered out of view." Perfect.
Emily's NYT Magazine cover story: "Exposed." Chat windows across NYC are lit up like ticker-tape parades right now. (I haven't read it yet.) Update: Alright, I've read it. I vomited out a ridiculous amount of nonsense (with footnotes!) in the comments.
Denton got ahold of the cover to the upcoming NYT Mag expose by Emily Gould, which will have everyone in nyc media blogland in a tizzy this weekend.
Twitter seems to be bringing out the experimentation in people... TweetWire.com tries to build a newspaper out of Twitter posts. And Firehose is just that.
The headlines will write themselves... GodTube has raised $30 million. Holy fuck.
NYT Sunday Styles feature on Jezebel . (Hey Kruc, what's the state of that commenter party? And please, be careful with how you spell Jezzies this time.)
Rocketboom posts another of my favorites from ROFL Con: David Weinberger's keynote.
Mena Trott imagines what it would be like if videoblogging were available to us in 1994, which actually isn't that different from if I did a videoblog now. UPDATE: Videogum did a fake videoblog too. [via]
Place your bets on the make-believe Twitter follower race between Ira (800+), Diablo (700+), and Julia (600+). I'm still winning, but this can't last much longer!
One of my favorite presentations at ROFL Con last weekend was Jason Scott's aggressive tour of pre-LOL memes. Rocketboom caught the action.
New viral internet content blog from AOL: Urlesque.com. Gawker says it will destroy me, but they haven't heard about my miraculous new compensation model that will DESTROY them. Pageview bonus compensation? Phrack that, number six six six! We're going PPF -- that's right, Pay Per Fuck. Consider this the press release: the Fimoc blogging empire will compensate its employees based on how often they get laid. As the only metric that matters in blogland, it will force my minions to greater heights than your intern commenters and non-celebs could ever imagine. (LINK TO THAT PSHIT, AOL!)
SixApart buys Apperceptive, launches ad network. Congrats to David Jacobs and company, who I've been working with a bit, because nearly everyone in online nyc media has worked with them at some point. Update: Anil's post.
Kevin Kelly: "Digital things I've been wrong about." A list of predix he got wrong -- Photoshop, Quicken, eBay, etc. What would be at the top of my list? Easy: Huffington Post. The internet, after all, is supposed to be anti-celebrity, yet it continually proves me wrong. So, your biggest prediction gaffe?
Michael Arrington doesn't like to make corrections. He'll even block you if you suggest he's wrong.
New uber-meme: unquitting. Hugh, Julia, Andrew -- I'm looking at you. (Can we blame it all on Choire?)
A bunch of random domains that I own, which, when clicked on, redirect back to this site, for now: viewsource.tv, azineaboutyoutube.com, seattlespeak.com, fimicolous.com, ficklecorp.com, remoter.tv, saltychewy.tv, voyeuse.tv, rexsorgatz.com, watchingparis.com, realfakereal.com. It's like a history of forgotten and future projects. Fess up, what are your weird domains?
The rumors are true: three of the Gawker Media sites are being spun off. Wonkette is going to Ken Layne; Gridskipper is going to Lock; Idolator is going to Buzznet. Update: Gawker post | Wonkette post | Valleywag post (where Denton is dropping juicy comments).
Andrew is auctioning his Twitter account on eBay. He has 1,395 1,542 followers, which right now is worth $510 $1,125. I have 1,034 followers, and plan to sell all of them up the river if that bitch hits four figures. Update: It hit four figures. But if you look at the bidders on the auction, you see lots of people who have recently tried to purchase domain names on eBay. So, sorry Andrew, but I think you're selling yourself to spammers.
I'm writing this at 10 pm ET, which is usually around the time that newspapers break their big stories online from tomorrow's papers. Tonight a funny thing happened. WSJ just reported that Yahoo and AOL were close to brokering a merger that would thwart Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. But NYT also just published their story claiming that Microsoft and News Corp were in negotiations to make a joint bid for Yahoo. The stories don't necessarily contradict each other, but they are clearly written from radically different sources. I say we just merge them all and call it Yahooglenewscorpaolsoft.
The internet show that Twitter spawned? Sure, that's what You Look Nice Today (iTunes) is. It comes from the medium's three best voices: @lonelysandwich [Adam Lisagor], @hotdogsladies [Merlin Mann], and @scottsimpson [er, Scott Simpson].
Jack Shafer rants about links on news websites, including seo-friendly keywords, keyword popup ads, and other topics.
Current.com redesigned, and it now includes a new video news show updated every hour. Hm, not sure about the computer-narrated voice though... [via]
In "An Example of Creative Commons Not Working", my pal Aaron talks about how his Flickr photo was stolen by BoingBoing without attribution. (I've tipped it to Valleywag, who will probably title this "Cory Doctorow Is a Hypocrite.") Update: Cory apologized.
Got an idea for a stupid YouTube video? Whatever it is, it's not nearly as bad as the SEO Rapper. [via]
The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs. Drudge = $10 mil, BoingBoing = $8 mil, Gawker Media = $150 mil, etc. [via]
NYT yesterday: "[Rick Astley] has not spoken publicly about the meme and efforts to reach him through his agent were unsuccessful." Maybe no one has tried hard enough, because LAT tracked him down for his comments on the most important meme of our time. (Also, Rick Astley looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Rick Astley.)
Quotably tracks Twitter conversations -- a feature that Twitter desperately needs. [Me on Quotably and Twitter.]
In this week's NYT Mag, my pal Tom writes a profile of Patients Like Me, a networking site where people enter their medical conditions and talk about them. I like the charts.
Last week I saw a presentation for a site called Cafe Mom -- ya know, a social network for moms. I started joking that Cafe MILF would probably be more successful. Then today I read that Cafe Mom landed $12 million in funding. Huh, maybe I'm not so clever.
Scientology responds to Anonymous with YouTube video. Up next: attacking Gawker with a Facebook widget.
[SXSW-influenced post #4.] So yeah, Lacygate. Not that you need another opinion, but since I was there... My take is that the audience reaction was unnecessarily harsh, and based mostly on style than substance. Some people have criticized her for "softball questions," but I don't think those people have ever been to a keynote before. Rather, it was mostly her passive-aggressive interview style that seemed to annoy the masses. And make no mistake about it -- the audience really was annoyed. (It's interesting to read the opinions of people who weren't there -- their perspective is similar to that of Lacy herself, who was clueless of the mounting tension until nearly the end. But if you were sitting in that room, you could feel something horrible was about to happen.) Even if the crowd was over-reacting, it was surreal how aggressive Lacy became toward the audience once she realized what was happening. She could easily have recovered pretty quickly, but instead chose to get combative with a couple thousand bloggers. It was like a lesson in how not to manage a community -- like Web 2.0 in reverse.
[SXSW-influenced post #3.] The best SXSW presentations are never explicitly educational. Most of what's left to be learned from others about online interaction is around what not to do. Which is why Andy's Worst Website Ever session was my favorite. (My contribution would have been my idea to do a print zine about YouTube. I'm not even really kidding.)
[SXSW-influenced post #1.] Julia has sworn that she's going to make her Tumblr more mature. This could be interesting/disastrous to watch. Meanwhile, people like Ryan want to ban mentions of her from the internet. It's understandable. However, Julia's most recent post about breaking up and the internet is actually a decent attempt (counterpoint!) at talking about something more substantiative -- and it reveals a lot of what I suspect some people will be talking about in big mainstream media places over the next couple months. Even I have become fatigued by the way break ups have become massive public events!
Spielberg is starting a social networking site for "users who've had or who are interested in sharing paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences." Zoinks.
Arrington starts off with something of a point about Valleywag, which seems to be getting less interesting as it gets desperate for scandal. (The whole Jimmy Wales storyline that it's currently obsessed with is just boring. And it sorta makes me feel sorry for everyone involved. Which is hard to do!) But Arrington's faux-ethicist values aren't up to the task -- he eventually loses our attention by playing the suicide card. It's a ridiculous gesture, especially since everyone knows suicide is more likely in The Valley if you get added to the TechCrunch Dead Pool than if your weird kink is revealed on Valleywag. (Dave Winer's decent counterpoint: Isn't Wikipedia the scurrilous one?)
Nicholson Baker's fantastic essay in the New York Review of Books: The Charms of Wikipedia. The first half proposes that the attraction of Wikipedia is its game-like quality, full of characters who play out anon roles on the encyclopedia's stage. "Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons." And later: "Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals -- up to a point -- the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context." And then later, he admits his obsession with fighting against the "deletionists," those curmudgeons who are purging hundreds of articles every day. Baker's profile (username: "Wageless") lists all of his contributions and edits. [via]
A minor moment in meta-blog genius: a Gawker commenter by the name of IndianSlipper has taken over a random Gawker post and declared it her his blog. Update: dude even has his own t-shirt!
It's, like, totally lonelygirl15 cute that Frrvrr is intensely sticking to its guns.
Guardian article on videoblogging featuring Joanne Colan (Rocketboom), Alex Albrecht (Diggnation), Xeni Jardin (BoingBoing TV), Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoing TV), and Ze Frank (The Show) that gives one the impression that there's a movement.
New site alert: "Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles." What!? Exactly. Lindsay and I were debating the legitimacy of site -- to my eye, it seemed just crazy enough to exist and it's even having a launch party at SXSW. Then she noticed the party is sponsored by The Onion. Oh. Oh, nevermind. I signed up for the Beta anyway!
Strictly No Photography. "Photo-sharing for pictures taken where you are not allowed to take them."
If you read the EveryBlock interview, you might recall Adrian mentioning that they would later explain why they decided to eschew Google Maps and instead build their own mapping application. The explanation has been posted.
Webcomic that makes me shiver in its accurate portrayal of what it is like to date me.
The New York Times is trying to gentrify Twitter. A column from a self-confessed parent contends that Twitter can be used to manage household communication. I suppose that's true, but that's like saying Craigslist's Casual Encounters can be used to meet really great friends.
CNN has launched iReport as a stand-alone site, dubbed as "unfiltered, uncensored user-powered news." Hm.
If you ever want to befriend someone who works in online media, I suggest you just say these words: "I hate my content management system." You will become instant friends, quickly sharing tales of cached pages, ridiculous workflow, outrageous downtimes, and reprehensible slowness. Which is why I love that there's an upcoming NYC media event entitled I Hate My Content Management System. Go there, meet your soul mate!
Email yourself from the future: FutureMe.org. ("Dear Future Me, I told you it wouldn't last.")
I hope everyone else sees the hypocrisy of Google's press release on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. Invoking the spectre of monopolies hardly seems like a good move here. The "wise Google-ish thing to do" here would have been just to stay quiet. (Update: Microsoft's response came in quickly.) [More inside.]
Some good new Twitter apps: Twitter 100 (shows 100 of your friends on one page), Tweet Scan (search Twitter), Favotter (shows everyone who has favorited you), Tweetmeme (tracks popular links), Twitterverse (big Twitter tag cloud), and Politweets (tracks candidate name references).
Two sites I've been playing with lately: DailyLit emails you snippets of a novel every day; Instapaper stores articles that you want to read later. (There's something interesting here about how these two sites represent reverse trends of each other. Or not?)
Extending my thoughts on prediction applications, there's now HubDub, another site that lets you make predictions on news stories. AP story.
At long last, Adrian and Wilson have launched their neighborhood-aggregation site EveryBlock.com (funded by a Knight News Challenge grant). It's available for Chicago, San Fran, and NYC. It's a data emporium -- for instance, here's graffiti in nyc. (Poynter.org: interview.)
It was easy to see how this would turn out: Ana Marie Cox starts Twitter account --> Jarvis calls it out --> NYT publishes story on microjournalism --> Fimoc recaps.
The Observer has a profile of Tumblr founder David Karp. Because NYC is a media town, it's a little slow to everything -- but after years of making fun of Tumblr and Twitter (because they didn't get it), several media types across town are starting to get on board.
Karina makes some good points about Zack Galifianakis' web stardom. The online video persona that he's built (sorta like a reticent Jack Black) is pretty interesting.
There is something clearly faulty with a study that suggests BoingBoing is fast.
So if I somehow talk Anil into explaining how one easily gets to Harvard from NYC, I'll be going to ROFLCon in April. You should go too. See also: I Can Has Rezearch Papar?
Doing research on a project, I accidentally just stumbled across Suck.com's NETMOGULS, a project I remember so well yet completely forgot! Scroll down the names on the left (frameset!) for a flashback to who was hot online in 1997.
So this is sorta interesting.... last week Nick Douglas did a post on Gawker about 2 Girls 1 Cup. The commenters FREAKED like nothing I've ever seen since the last time I made fun of MetaFilter. But realizing that their freakouts would in fact lead to more pageviews for the post (and per the new retribution model, more money for Nick), the community decided to take their comments to a four-month old post instead. Crafty, this industry's audience. [via]
Twitter + reviews = TwittCrit, which Jeff just launched. Almost a year ago, I was working on the exact same idea but for music. Of course I never finished it.
Wikipedia + bar codes + tags+ the physical world = Semapedia.org. Further explanation.
I'm probably obliged to link to Radar's profile of Josh Harris. I was once obsessed with We Live In Public (dead link), Harris' long-ago-defunct attempt to do an online reality tv show, which predated other panopticon phenomena like Justin.TV, Ustream, The Hills, and even Big Brother. In the middle of the dot-com boom (and perhaps the most telling sign of that age), Harris, who also founded Pseudo.com (big press and big bomb), famously wired his entire house with video cameras. (One of my most-recommended items of all time is Errol Morris' First Person, which includes an absolutely fascinating episode about Harris and his girlfriend living 24 hours/day online.) Harris is now back with Operator 11 and, more importantly, a movie called We Live In Public, the trailer of which actually puts the whole voyeurism/exhibitionism world under something of a microscope.
Gawker Media's sci-fi blog, edited by Annalee Newitz, has launched: io9.com (explanation and interview). Also, the new bonus-by-pageview structure has launched and Nick Denton is editing Gawker.
A new super stalking site: Spokeo. Enter someone's name and it will update you whenever the person does something online -- updates their Facebook notes, adds to their Amazon Wishlist, uploads photo to Flickr... and so forth. [via]
Time reports on a Parson's class where the goal is to become internet famous: Googling for Your Grade. Update: here's the blog for the class.
Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.
It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:
30) The Informed Reader
As mainstream media organizations continue to close their foreign bureaus out of cost-saving desperation, the less expensive version -- "the international news blog" -- has become a staple property on nearly all sites (nytimes.com, msnbc.com, cnn.com, newyorker.com, etc.). Though the foreign news consumer might be tricked into believing these will reveal new forms of international reporting, it actually means that none of these sites stick out above the rest -- except for the Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader, which somehow kept my attention this year by finding the right balance between gathering links and providing context. (See also: Good Magazine.)
29) Songs About Buildings and Food
Imagine if your favorite college prof got hooked on meth and The Hills -- and you were more concerned that the latter was killing him. That's this blog. (See also: Advanced Theory Blog and The Medium.)
28) Paleo-Future
If the dictum "the future is now" has any veracity, then what do we do with the past? This blog chronicles how past generations envisioned what the future would look like. With an archive that goes back to the 1880s, Paleo-Future is an essential compendium of a new historical category: nostalgic futurism. (See also: Subtopia.)
27) TV In Japan
If ever there were a genre in need of aggregation, Japanese TV would be it. This site (from my friend Gavin Purcell, whose day job is running Attack of the Show on G4) is religious in its pursuit to bring you the best moments of televised weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun. (See also: Neojaponisme and Ping Mag.)
26) BookForum
For those of us who have given up on the once-spectacular and oft-praised Arts & Letters Daily, the transformation of Book Forum to an aggregation blog has been nothing less than a savior. (See also: ArtsJournal.)
25) Rock Band Logos
Design criticism applied to rock band logos? Yes, please. (See also: Book Covers and Core 77.)
24) WTF CNN?
FTW! (See also: Best of CNN.)
23) Metafilter Popular Favorites
Every year I sneak a reference to Metafilter onto this list. And every year a Metafilter post ridicules its inclusion -- can't wait to see this year's! My longstanding love-hate relationship with Metafilter (check the archives) tilted back toward the negative this year, which is why the Popular Favorites feature was almost a panacea for my frustration. More big sites are adding this "favoriting" feature (BoingBoing, Gothamist, etc.), which I initially appraised as a cheap way of avoiding depth, but now find the only way I can continue reading some sites. (See also: Ask.Metafilter.)
22) Drawn.ca
Drawn bills itself at "collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw," but it acts more like a comprehensive guide to visual culture. (See also: Design Observer.)
21) FourFour
The overabundant jungle of pop culture blogging leaves little room for new voices to emerge. One can read only so many snarky reviews of every episode of every reality tv show on every network every night (I know!). As an antidote to Perez Hilton's pretty hate machine, FourFour's Rich Juzwiak (whose day job is blogging for VH1) has carved out something unique in the pop landscape by balancing critical insight with a celebration for the lovable. And what does FourFour love? For starters: Tyra, America's Next Top Model, Beyonce, Tyra, Project Runway, and... Tyra. (See also: Golden Fiddle and Best Week Ever.)
20) Reverse Cowgirl
Her: "Why don't more sex bloggers make your list?" Me: "Cuz they all talk about the same thing." Her: "Yes, but in many different ways." It's true, sex bloggers don't usually end up on this list, but Susannah Breslin's blog was one of the few sites in the genre to stay in the "to read" pile all year long.
19) Kanye West: Blog
Too much was made again this year about famous people getting blogs. Do you really want more insight into these people's opinions? Of course not -- you want to know their passions, their desires, their interest in dropping $7K on a bottle of cognac. Kanye's blog is more like a scrapbook of his id: some links (hey look, the new Lupe Fiasco vid), some photos (hey look, a Delorean), but surprisingly little ego.
18) Passive Aggressive Notes
Take the Found magazine genre and thin-slice it to only include the notes you left for your college roommate. (See also: Best of Craigslist and Overheard in The Office.)
17) Strange Maps
Does saying "it was a big year for maps!" sound retarded? Well, it was. (See also: Great Map.)
16) Pussy Ranch
Several years ago I included Diablo on a "hot new blog!" list. Now she's super famous, and I'm still making this stupid list.
15) Serious Eats
Food blogging has always been a blind spot for me, but Serious Eats was the first site to find the right mix of editorial voice and community interaction.
14) Shorpy
The photoblog genre is easy to overlook, but this blog puts itself in a curatorial role by collecting photos up to 100 years old. (See also: The Triumph of Bullshit.)
13) La Blogotheque: Take Away Shows
Drag a band out into the street, shoot video of them playing, upload it to the internet... and magic. If you're looking for a place to start, I suggest The Cold War Kids, but there are 70+ more. (See also: RCRD LBL.)
12) Jakob and Julia
Jakulia was the worst best (and the best worst) thing of 2007. Don't know it? Just thank your lucky stars and move on. (See also: NYGirlOfMyDreams.com.)
11) The Daily Swarm
Looking for an alternative to Pitchfork? Who isn't! But Daily Swarm isn't exactly that -- it's a music news source that somehow seems to break news before anyone else. And it's not "press release" news that Pitchfork delivers, nor the salacious celeb news of TMZ, nor even the industry banter of Idolator; rather, The Daily Swarm's beat is a rare kind of -- dare I say -- investigative work that no one else is doing. (See also: Stereogum and Culture Bully.)
10) A Brief Message
Brevity seemed to only increase its role as the ruling doctrine this year (see: Snack Culture), and the designers hopped on board with their micro-manifestos on this site. (See also: Very Short List.)
9) The "Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks
You've seen them -- too many times to count. And if you had taken pictures of every unnecessary instance of quotation marks, you "probably" would have made this list too. (See also: Apostrophe Abuse.)
8) emo+beer = busted career
When Earl Boykins mixed the infographic with a passion for Brooklyn indie music, he ended up with several pieces in the New York Times that could have passed for art installations. (See also: Infosthetics.)
7) Frolix-8: Philip K. Dick
What we once called "the news" is increasingly becoming different filters for perceiving reality. If you think about it, watching the news is just putting on someone else's reality goggles. Philip K. Dick would probably agree, and so this amazing site gives you today's headlines matched up next to which PKD novel the story corresponds with. If it seems that science fiction gets less fantastical every year, then this is the site for you. (See also: Cyber Punk Review.)
6) Snowclones
A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it oughta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "No rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
5) Jezebel
Gawker Media's modus operandi is to enter a content category (gadgets, politics, sports, music, etc.) by summarizing that industry with enough volume (in both senses of the word) to basically become the essential trade mag in that sector. This is why Jezebel represents the biggest coup in the empire's history. Rather than beguile its way into the women's magazine industry, Jezebel burst onto the scene in May by defining itself in oppositional terms. It isn't so much a thing as it is not those things. To be clear: it is not the celeb porn that Conde Nast and Hearst have been splooging on you from newsstands for decades. Whereas the average Idolator post would fit in just fine in Blender or Pitchfork, Jezebel was an entire take-down of Glamour, Cosmo, and the rest of the airbrushed crew. This is the holy grail of publishing: to find a voice that is completely unique while still appealing to a broad category. Nicely played, Mr. Denton. (Note: By the numbers, Jezebel probably doesn't qualify in the "overlooked" character of this list. But with as many dudes like me reading this "women's fashion" site every day...) (See also: Spout.)
4) Smashing Telly
Smashing Telly is the antidote to all those skull-numbing viral video aggregators. Instead of gathering 30-second clips of dogs on skateboards, the site meticulously curates long-form clips that will make you wishing to extend your office hours. It's where I found the Mailer/McLuhan interview, Manufacturing Consent, a random Clockword Orange documentary, and countless other things. (See also: First Showing and vidoes.antville.org.)
3) Vulture
New York Magazine is a perplexing contradiction. It is probably the best magazine on the newsstand right now (Wired is the only competition), but it also has an editorial voice that is occasionally annoying in its sense of privilege and entitlement. On its worst days, I call this attitude "Aggressively SoHo" -- as in, it surpassed believing that NYC is the center of the world by declaring the epicenter somewhere south of 14th St. and north of Chambers St. When my bestest friend Melissa (disclaimer!) said she was co-launching this blog (she has since moved onto Rolling Stone), I was worried that this voice would ring through on its cultural coverage. But the opposite has happened -- Vulture has kept the best parts of New York Mag (the nuance, the design, the clever), while leaving the Aggressive SoHo Tude at the door. (See also: Wired's Blogs.)
2) Ill Doctrine
When Ze Frank sadly abided by his promise to shut down his much-celebrated but under-watched show in March (after exactly one year), the internet was left to gasp for unique video programming. Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine has been the only video blog to emerge with a distinct voice, a mature vision, and brilliant programming that mixes essay, criticism, and attitude. Check it: Chocolate Radiohead and Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People. (See also: Epic-Fu and Rod 2.0.)
1) Twitter and Tumblr
"Blog" has always been an elastic term, just barely surviving the stress of containing everything from Hot Chicks With Douchebags to DailyKos to your mom's Vox account. But this year the seams of the term finally burst, and out spilled some brand new words, tweets and tumbls, and these two new forms of quasi-blogging that are more personal, more immediate, and of course more annoying than anything online communication has rustled up so far. Twitter and Tumblr are the Rubik's Cube and the Tetris of the blogging world -- simple concepts that are immensely more complex and compelling than they logically should be. I've explained Twitter to a hundred people in a hundred different ways, each time not quite capturing why it's different, why it matters. "You just have to play it to understand," I eventually say, choosing the only verb that approaches the nuanced complexity. And yet, there's another very simple way to say it: Twitter and Tumblr made blogging fun again this year.
And finally, thanks to Taylor, Ben, Robin, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Alisa, Gavin, Jason, Peter, Matt, Choire, and Anil for their tips on this project. See ya next year.
The term "weblog" was coined 10 years ago today by my sorta-kinda-mentor-hero Jorn Barger. He gives 10 Blogging Tips at Wired.com.
Since Drudge is also reporting it, I guess it's safe to now say: the leading contender for the job of new managing editor of Gawker is... Nick Denton. Valleywag was at its best when Nick helmed it, so we'll see how this works. Update: Now NYT has the story.
My old friends and colleagues at Internet Broadcasting launched an interesting new site today: Slantly.com. The idea is that you make claims (Wikipedia has a legitimate competitor in Google Knols, An Arrested Development movie would please me, etc.) and people vote on whether they agree or disagree with them. So it's basically Digg for opinions. (You have to vote to see other people's opinions, but even that feature is up for debate.) You can seemingly build a profile with various claims, which others will either support or deny. Clever -- and a nice surprise.
TheSixtyOne seems like a promising new music site. It borrows small ideas from Critical Metrics, Hype Machine, and ImInLikeWithYou.
Everyone knows I despise Fark, so let's just note their attempt at trademarking "NSFW" and move on without comment.
When the Seattle-based online photo editing site Picnik launched, the first thing I told Davidson was, "Flickr is gonna buy this." Instead, it looks like they're licensing the tools. [via]
Now available: that n+1 piece that sorta kinda tumbled the Gawker house of cards last week.
While guest-editing Gawker last week, it was pretty easy to tell that something was wrong: IM conversations were quirky, people reacted in strange ways to innocuous comments, and, well, Choire said so. And so, it's no surprise that Emily and Choire are leaving (sorta brilliantly buried in that post), but the job posting (which contains Gawker's first acknowledgment of the NY Mag article by linking it with an "existential crisis" -- errr) does strike a peculiar note: "It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site." New York is weird.
Although I am no fan of LOLcats, I am definitely interested in the intersection of pop culture and internet memes -- and so is Anil, who's going to ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and celebrities. Sign me up.
Ben has been riding high on the fame handed to him for launching his social weather site Cumul.us (which he coded up at night while working for me by day, natch). Current TV even picked it up and did a segment.
One of these days I'm going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I've already got a few ledes written: "BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man's Fark," "BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links," "BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991...." And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang -- they're swell people. And I bet I'm the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING -- the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it's also the third-most-popular). I thought that maybe BoingBoing TV might finally give me the opportunity to write this imaginary critique, but, like Slate, I'm mostly just bored with it (though the John Hodgman interview was alright). So until I write that take-down (oops, is this it?), I will continue to mumble about BoingBoing being slow, single-minded, and DIY smug... every single day, because I somehow can't unsubscribe from the damn thing.
Romance in the digital age? This one's for you! This dude -- Patrick Moberg -- set up a website called NyGirlOfMyDreams.com after he fell for a girl in the NY subway. The girl -- Camille Hayton -- has found him. The dude, it turns out, works for Vimeo, so of course Jakob Lodwick made a video about the whole thing. If this doesn't make sense, certainly a NYT Styles story will put it in context for you next week! And while this all sounds pretty sweet, it unfortunately is not the way the world works. Please, people -- just resign yourself to unrealized Missed Connections like everyone else. [via]
"Twitter sort of not really saves man from suicide." I thought the same thing as Nick when I read the NYT Styles piece. Even back when I followed the story in real time, it seems sorta hoaxy.
If you didn't notice, NYT Mag gave Virginia Heffernan a column about online video culture. "The Medium," now its third week, this time sets up a discussion of GodTube by differentiating between videos that people view and those that people comment on.
Slate is starting a business site (just linking to this so you get a new Spiers photo -- hey Liz!).
Don't call it nepotism! Lock got $1.5 million in funding for Curbed -- from Gawker Media and others.
Daily Mole asked me to pick the best "pro-Google and anti-Google" blogs out there. This is what I came up with.
Newsweek has confirmed that Tom from MySpace lied about his age on his profile. He continues on at 32 though. [via]
Prediction sites are popping up like mad. Predictify pays you for predicting future events. [via]
Ben announced his forthcoming social weather site, cumul.us. Or as we like to say, "the wisdom of clouds." Good stuff. I'm gonna miss working with these guys!
My favorite TechCrunch post of the year: Tom from MySpace has been lying about his age on his profile all these years. Perfect.
Portfolio's story on YouPorn describes how none of the site's founders want to acknowledge their involvement with the site yet want to sell it for $20 million. See also: Proposed Law Could Be a Cold Shower for YouPorn.
The guy who did the much-linked Web 2.0 video has a new clip out: A Vision of Students Today. [thnx]
Jason linked to this a couple days ago, but I read it today on the bus and it's pretty interesting, mostly in a meta way: Is the Net Good for Writers? It's a good question, posed to several decent writers (most of them cut from the old-school-hippie Wired mold). But it's surprising to see how many of the contributors truly despise the internet because they think it destroys serious, long-form writing. The irony is that this article is a serious, long-form piece of writing found only on the internet. [My thoughts inside.]
I have been musing about the absence of Ze Frank. NewTeeVee does a little round-up of some potential Ze replacements.
Wired interviews SlashDot's CmdrTaco, and Slate thinks the Fark book is great. Sigh.
Ever wonder what a blog newsroom looks like? Here ya go: the NYC Gawker office has a livestream of itself up on Justin.TV. I can't look away. Update: they streamed the booklaunch party last night, and if you happen to look right now, you'll seen Denton is on.
The re-emerged meme du jour appears to be about how digital memory is affecting human memory. Three unconnected recent examples: The Advantages of Amnesia (Boston Globe), Britney? That's All She Rote (New York Times), and Human Memory and the Outboard Brain (Wired).
Pretty decent analysis over at NYT Styles (didn't see that one coming!) on how some blog commenters are becoming micro-celebrities: All-Stars of the Clever Riposte. There's also a slideshow about a MeFi event in Portland that I actually attended.
A 19-year-old admin at Wikipedia deletes an entry by Jimmy Wales -- and all hell breaks loose (discussion). The article also contains a mention of the interesting site Wikirage, which lists the most-edited entries.
Christine Rosen -- who you might remember as the crypto-techno-conservative author of The Age of Egocasting -- is back with another tirade in The New Atlantis: Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. Actually, it's one of those foreboding pieces that you will want to dismiss, but it's also fun to read -- so you'll probably make it through all 12 printed pages only frowning (and grinning) a few times. [via]
Months ago, I asked what the over/under of LinkedIn adding profile photos would be. Now it's happening. I think of this as the contemporary version of the New York Times switching from b&w to color photos (a controversy at the time -- and not all that long ago, kids).
A couple weeks back, I mentioned Cory Doctorow's short story "Scroogled" being published in Radar. Today, WSJ interviews him and includes a response from a Google spokeswoman.
Bubble? What bubble? We give sixth-graders $6.5 million for startups all the time!
The Gawker Network is adding some new features, including small-scale social networking functionality. (Some people might think the blog format has expired its innovation potential, but Gawker has been doing several new things lately.)
And now, your moments of zen: Tokyo Brass Style - All Girl Brass Band Covers Dragonball Theme and Cougar Ruffles Duck's Feathers. Or for the complete opposite of those, my pan Nav's long post on Trapped in the Closet. Have a good weekend.
"Jean Baudrillard, as any philosophy student will tell you, theorized that, in the postmodern world, 'the territory no longer precedes the map.' In other words, if you are a member of N.Y.U.'s class of 2011, you probably arrived in New York City with a preëxisting web of soon-to-be college friends from Facebook." --The New Yorker (the umlaut gave it away).
Join the thread on SnarkMarket in which I try to identify which punk rock band is your favorite blog.
________ should do ________. ShouldDoThis.com, from our Seattle pals at Robot Co-op.
The story in this month's Wired about sex and mistaken online identity starts off reading like something you might see in your daily paper... but it wraps up with a magnificent surprise ending. Recommended.
For those who haven't seen it yet... what would happen if corporate meetings were blog posts. First!
If there was any doubt that the market is flooded with social web apps, Techcrunch reviews 34 sites that allow you to create your own social networks.
Estimate: Gawker has $52 million / year in revenue. Sources say this is a tad exaggerated ("laughable"), but who trusts sources anymore?
I'm finally watching Kate Modern. For the uninitiated, it's a video blog from a hot, young, confessional artist -- oh, and it's from the creators of lonelygirl15. So the question is: will you watch it? Although this clip will bring you up-to-speed on the plot, this clip in which she discusses Derrida's The Truth in Painting will pretty much make you decide one way or the other.
Remember how you stopped watching lonelygirl15 immediately after her identity was revealed? Well, prepare to stop reading Fake Steve Jobs: it's moving to Forbes.com.
Fake Steve Jobs revealed as Daniel Lyons via some small-time sleuthing. (Ahem, I was wrong.) Best quotes: the Real Steve saying he has no interest in reading the Lyon's novel (via IM?!?!?!) and "One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag" (Fake Steve).
I know, you've been watching every single lonelygirl15 episode.... there's a finale coming! It will be on MySpace, which is lame, but the sorta cool part: it will consist of 12 episodes released hourly.
The Wired blog Epicenter gave Drew "Fark" Curtis' book a 5 out of 10 rating, which frankly is way too high, but which, of course, got Farked, so now it's got 560+ moronic comments. Hey, you stupid fucking Farkers! Over here!
Oh yeah, the Sunday Styles section discovered emoticons as a trend. Their angle? That professionals use them too! Even better, the Wall Street Journal just discovered IM in the office.
If online community management is your thing, the exchange about blog comments between Joel Spolsky and Lockhart Steele is must-read.
Facebook acquires its first company. Sorta reminds me of the day when Google made its first third acquisition -- Blogger.
In Wired, Clive Thompson describes the "telepathic awareness of the people" that makes Twitter so engaging. I described this as "ambient friend awareness" a while back, but I love Clive's analogy: "It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are.... Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination."
RapLeaf looks really interesting. It's an online reputation lookup -- drop in someone's email addy and it will provide metrics on their rep. Bruce Sterling compared it to whuffie.
WSJ celebrates the 10-year anniversary of blogging with commentary from people like Tom Wolfe, Mia Farrow, Elizabeth Spiers, and Newt Gingrich. Best part is seeing Jorn get his due. (Update: everyone wants to debate "first blogger" status again.)
Wired's Undercutter attempts to play the Cloverfield ARG. Also, for anyone who's playing, more sites have popped up: EthanHaas.org, Stay Underground, Tribble Agency, and ABZ 3293. Too much for me...
Video: what the future of the web looked like in 1994. It's true, I remember it. [via]