Bubbles that protect and comfort us.

That are filled with familiar people, places and processes.

But these same bubbles have another side.

That keeps us from exploring.

Keeps us from growing.

Keeps us from learning that there are other ways.

Other people who are foreign… yet brilliant.

Other ideas that are strange… yet valuable.

Other places that are remote… yet filled with wonder.

As we look for success in our business and careers…

To expand our world… and that of our customers and readers,

To wake up tomorrow with opportunity and possibility.

There is only one action we can take to ensure this success…

It’s simple. It all starts with a sound.

Pop!

Confessions of an Online Journalism Tool
"There are a multitude of free (or cheap), powerful tools available to the online journalist that approximate expensive software and make you look more professional than you are. Which is a good thing."

Microblogging Mania: Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News
"One year later, I’ve found that Twitter has gone above and beyond my original expectations in terms of usefulness, allowing me to obtain and share information efficiently."

The Top 10 Tech Trends
One of my favorites: "The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer."

Social Networking Ad Spending Update
"eMarketer has revised its US social network ad spending projections, estimating that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year, down from the previous projection of $1.6 billion."

Too Many Choices, Too Much Content, Too Many New Web Services
"Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you’re behind."

"Hyperconnectivity" On the Rise as Masses Adopt New Communication Tools
"These individuals are moving up the connected ranks, using blogs and wikis in the workplace, as well as adopting multiple devices and applications to suit their work, personal, and communication needs. This places an increasingly mission-critical focus on the technology that these well-connected users demand."

Clustering News Stories Via Aggregation
"Have you noticed that when there are a bunch of articles about the same story, we’ll group them together? I think this is one of the key features of Google News. When you’re browsing through Google News and you click on a link to see "all 257 articles"

Where Does Google Go Next?
"For all Google’s success, it still has just one meaningful way of making money: its powerful search-advertising system. It’s a gusher, but it’s the only one. All the other projects it has in the works are just that, projects."

How Apple Leveraged Their Intellectual Property Through Trademarks
"The Apple strategy is particularly important because companies typically don’t give enough attention to the management and potential value of trademarks — especially when it comes to the nontraditional variety. This is partly because trademarks, like other intellectual properties, are complex assets. But they can make a significant difference."

We Don’t Need More Information or Aggregation, We Need Inspiration
"The cost of information creation/storage dropped to nearly zero and left us with infinite amounts of information, creating the problem of finding the right information. Web 2.0 provided us technology to tackle this. Partially by clustering people and information into communities. It also gave us user generated content. Instead of companies or professionals, everyone could now create information, video, audio, pictures, and share it with the whole world. the Internet changed from a static library of information into a dynamic world of opportunities. Everyone can now become a storyteller by simply starting a weblog. The subscription to a magazine or newspaper has now been replaced by RSS subscriptions to weblogs. And to structure this world full of dynamic information we need new ways of finding the relevant stuff."

Why Yelp Works for Restaurants & Business Reviews
"What Yelp did differently than [its many competitors], was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers… People come to write reviews as a hobby and also to meet other people."

How Auctions Set Ad Prices on Search Engines
"The outcome of the ad auction is efficient in the sense that the available ad slots are awarded to those who value them mostly highly. The outcome is also equitable in that the price an advertiser has to pay is determined by the other advertisers — those with whom it has to compete for slots."

Google Launches Friend Connect, Trying to Tie Social Networks Together
"Friend Connect uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps - all while on another website altogether."

Microsoft Launches Space Tours on the Web
Microsoft "…on Monday launched its WorldWide Telescope, a free Web-based program that allows Web surfers to explore galaxies, star systems, and distant planets."

The Growing Backlash Against PR Spam, And The Rationale For MicroPR
"The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk."

How AT&T Spilled the Starbucks Beans
A look at how AT&T fumbled what should have been a great product & service announcement.

Twitter and the China Earthquake
"Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences."

The Challenge Of Non-Local Newspaper Advertising
"Here’s the economic reality for national newspaper brands: Print readers are scarce. Online readers are a commodity… Here’s the bottom line business model problem: Unlike in print, newspapers create no unique value for advertisers online."

Rip-Off Journalism on the Web
MG Siegler outs an online news site that "see a news story. They sit back for a few days and let everyone else weigh in. They take the best of those ideas and craft a post out of it. The stories often look well-crafted because of this."

Three Reasons to Use the Commenting Tool Disqus
Disqus offers bloggers these features for their commenting functionality: threaded discussions, email replies and shared profiles.

Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media
"If there’s one thing to be learned from social media tools, it’s that these services were not made to interact with one another. Here’s a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms."

Going

Deciding

Buying

Teaching

Consuming

Juggling

Worrying

Dreaming

Learning

Waiting

Competing

Helping

Carrying

How have you helped today?

How Little Do Users Read?
"In the full dataset, the average page view contained 593 words. So, on average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page."

Publisher Tested the Waters Online, Then Dove In
"Across the company, the remaining print publications still typically play a vital role, but a lesser one — physically smaller and financially diminished. In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side."

TV Guide, Having Just Been Bought, Is Bracing to Be Sold
"The new owner has made clear that it is interested in some of Gemstar’s electronic assets, not the one made of paper and ink that has suffered through years of plummeting sales."

How to Foster Innovation
"Trying to hang on to your past success is a sure way to commit suicide, because it will kill all real efforts at innovation and creative growth."

Minneapolis Star Tribune to Restructure
"The Minneapolis Star Tribune, reeling under a heavy debt load and plummeting advertising sales, is on the brink of bankruptcy."

Newspapers Eye New Media to Regain Ads
"As vehicles for movie ads, papers must continue to become more nimble. That means offering synergistic, cross-media campaigns, designed to reach broader demographics than the daily entertainment section alone."

Survey: Ad-Supported Content Best
"A majority of industry executives expect that advertising-supported content will remain king and that digital advertising will eclipse traditional advertising during the next five years, according to a new survey."

Huffington Post is Death to Professional Journalism
"The Cult of the Amateur author said technological advances were turning ‘the media into the blogosphere’ at the expense of accountability and paid-for journalism."

How to get your site into Google News
"First, invest your time in original content, not just setting up more wire feeds. Second, "edit more." Don’t just stream out a new story with every altered keystroke. Take a moment and do a tough edit that will hold up until you have substantial new information to add to the story."

NewsTools 2008: Journalism that Matters" conference at Yahoo!
"The NewsTools 2008 conference sets its agenda as participants identify (and sometimes, exemplify) problems confronting online journalists."

NewsTools2008: This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
"I often prefer the unconference style to the more formal conference, and this newer way of doing discussions was something I really enjoyed, especially the way it tended to include people rather than exclude them."

Duncan Riley Leaves TechCrunch
Another bloggers strikes out on his own to create a small media company.

MTV Plans to Increase Its Blending of Ads and Shows
"We are increasingly being asked by advertisers to create messages for audiences in our own voice."

Customer service via Twitter works for unpopular people too
"There’s clearly a need for people who can give large, often faceless companies some personality–and more importantly good customer service."

5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence
"Today I’m going to give a few tips on how I’ve grown my own Twitter Follower numbers up over 5500 in the last few months."

Top Innovators in Business Publishing
"It’s a difficult environment these days for b-to-b media companies, as the slowing economy puts the squeeze on marketers’ budgets and added pressure on business publishers’ bottom lines. But where many see challenges, others see opportunities."

min’s b2b 2008 Women To Watch
"This issue started as a conversation among a handful of b2b media executives and has turned into a collage of inspirations, struggles, advice and most importantly success stories."

The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web
"Here’s the takeaway for original content creators: BE ORIGINAL. That means when you consider publishing an original news item, be aware of the larger marketplace for that news. If it’s hugely competitive, consider allocating your limited reporting resources elsewhere, and instead find other ways to create value around the story."

Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise
"The proliferating number of blogs, user-generated content services and online news sources has created a dense information jungle that no human could machete his or her way through in a lifetime, let alone in an afternoon of surreptitious procrastination at work."

The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit
"Microsoft Vista, the latest version of the software giant’s Windows operating system, looks like it could turn out to be one of the great missteps in tech history."

Google News now available on your iPhone and iPod Touch
"Today, we’re happy to announce that Google News is now available to iPhone and iPod Touch users in over 30 countries. This means that you’ll see a full-fledged version of Google News on these devices."

Ideas that move your business forward.

Ideas that take you to your goals.

These ideas come from problems.

Problems that your customers face everyday.

But don’t always know they have.

Sure, you need to talk to your customers.

And watch your customers.

To understand the needs they don’t even know they have.

But you also need to look outside of your industry.

In the most unlikely of places.

To find the most absurd connections.

At the most unexpected times.

These new ideas are hiding.

Skipping.

Jumping.

And you can find them. Easily.

If you simply open yourself up to the possibilities.

New ideas are born.

Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online
"With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis."

How We Use Twitter for Journalism
"While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we’ve got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the microblogging medium."

Changing Habits: How We Consume News Today
"I’ve been away from the newsroom for only two months, and I feel my news consumption has changed considerably."

Examples of Online Investigative Journalism
"I’ve decided to put together a big honking list of all the investigative reports that have happened online. I will include mainstream media reports, as long as they started online or are completely contained on the Net, as well as citizen journalism…"

‘How do I get people to come to my website?’
"Question from a reader: OJR’s editor offers tips on how journalists can promote their great work to readers online."

U.S. newspaper circulation falls 3.6 percent
"U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6 percent in the latest set of figures released by an industry group on Monday, reflecting a migration of readers to the Internet and publishers’ efforts to streamline their businesses."

At The Wall Street Journal, the Words Not Spoken
"Inside and outside of the paper, there’s no confusion about who the paper belongs to. Not the editors who built it, not the reporters who fill it with articles, but the men who bought and paid for it."

9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog
"I actually think that most of us as bloggers could improve many of our posts by pausing before hitting ’submit/publish’ and asking a few basic questions about the post."

Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers)
"If people trust the reviews of friend that they know and trust 14% more than your corporate website, what is your web marketing team doing to accommodate this? Are you spending 14% more effort to listen, learn, influence peer reviews?"

PR 2.0: PR 2.0: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
"What happened to PR? It no longer triumphs as a darling among the various marketing disciplines, and in many cases, is regarded as a necessary evil these days."

Crisis in News: State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting
"I am blogging live from the conference, “Crisis in News: Symposium on Investgative Reporting,” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism."

Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz’s Marketing Blog: How to Twitter an Event
"There’s a lot of discussion now around how Twitter can be used at events. It gets even more interesting when the people on stage try to use it to monitor the reactions to what they’re saying. "

A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search
"Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages."

The Evolution of My Social Media Interactions
"The pace of change is about to accelerate dramatically, as an open Social Web unleashes a wave of innovation as significant as what we saw in 1994 and 1995. This time around, it will be sites, applications, and devices that harness a new “who-you-know” layer of the Internet."

Conversation Agent: Citizen Journalists and Responsibility
"More and more we find our roles overlap - blogger, employee, stockholder, customer, etc. Do the rules of engagement overlap? Where do we stand on ethics and responsibility?"

Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tips on how to attract more search engine traffic.

RSS Needs An Easy Button
"…it’s time for marketing people to step up and save everyone on the planet a boatload of time by making RSS digestible for the 98% of people that don’t spend their days drowning in techie acronyms and buzzwords."

Sarah and I went to see The Verve reunion concert in New York. We went with one of my best friends… Dan Black. Of course, he is marrying a girl named Sarah this summer, so it will be Dan and Sarah Black, along with us: Dan and Sarah Blank. Life works out in funny ways sometimes. This is a photo of my wife Sarah on the left, and Dan’s fiance Sarah on the right. New York is pretty in the rain.

Love this shot… I am always more interested in the audience than the band.

Look at all the cellphone and camera screens. Everyone is a reporter.

More screens.

Even the simplest things in New York seem magical… like this Parking sign.

If you were going to open a store in New York City, would you call it “Hippo Shoes?” I much prefer “Get ‘Em,” two stores down!

The New York Times building… somehow ancient and modern at the same time.

Feed me!

Two icons.
]]> http://danblank.com/blog/2008/05/02/meal-of-the-week-10/feed/ http://danblank.com/blog/2008/04/28/authenticity-perfectionism/ http://danblank.com/blog/2008/04/28/authenticity-perfectionism/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:41:49 +0000 Dan Blank Uncategorized http://danblank.com/blog/2008/04/28/authenticity-perfectionism/

I spend a lot of time listening to, and thinking about music. I love dissecting the artistic process, and trying to understand why music moves people. In thinking about this, I can’t help but see connections to the current state of the media industry and journalism. I find myself meditating on two concepts:

• Authenticity
• Perfectionism

Let’s take a look at both, and dig into why each is a driving force in how the web is reshaping media.

Authenticity:

When I think of authenticity in music, one of the things I think of is the punk ethos. Mostly, I suppose, I think of The Clash. Pure power. A blend of the cognitive and the primal.

Now, the thing about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field in terms of the power of gatekeepers. Anyone, anywhere, can publish, for free, and reach a worldwide audience.

So what we have, is a lot more direct contact with information sources from any corner of the world. You can say a lot of things about the "wild wild web," but authenticity is a key element that the web has driven into the deepest corners of our lives.

In journalism and news reporting, we find many more voices from "in the trenches" - first hand reporting via text and video. Some is commentary, some is just bearing witness - but we have become a world of reporters. Everyone has their cell phone camera… their social networks… their blogs… their Twitter account… or email… or instant messaging… what have you.

The masses have a voice. The voices are not always polite. Not always accurate. But then, neither were The Clash. However, they were authentic, and say what you will about blogs and new media - it allows for an unmediated sense of authenticity at a compelling pace.

Perfectionism:

Where authenticity can lie in the raw expression of someone’s passion, perfectionism is often the result of slowly crafting something - experiencing the journey of creation in its most minute detail - in order to strip away anything that is not absolutely essential.

Perfectionism in my mind tends to lie with those who produce records… like Brian Eno. People who spend countless days and nights fiddling in the studio, remixing, rerecording, searching for the perfect sound. No beat is errant - no path has gone unexplored in even the smallest decision.

In journalism, perfectionism can be viewed from the standpoint of objectively reporting only proven fact. What new media has added to this are the concepts of a "living document" and of crowdsourcing. Both attempt to do what could not be done in the past due to the limitations of media.

By a "living document," I mean the concept that a piece of reporting - can constantly be revised as new facts are uncovered. It is a living breathing thing. It is fluid. It is a process. Wikipedia embraces this, as do many blogs - the sense of an event unfolding in real-time.

The concept of voice is where crowdsourcing comes in…

Crowdsourcing is the idea that the many can create something more nuanced than a single person could on their own. The knowledge and experience of a group, often outweights that of the individual.

You see this in blogs, through comments, and the hundreds or thousands or millions of voices commenting on a single story.

Can this be a slow and painful process, where you are constantly confronted questions, not answers? Sure. But then, what’s easy is not always what’s right.

And that is the beauty of Brian Eno’s work… you find yourself asking questions… expanding your experience, rather than simply fitting it into preconceived notions and categories.

Perhaps what I like most of all about new media is the limits it has removed in terms of creation, cost, and reach, which allow us to further explore the tenets of journalism. And the beauty of it is that there is no one answer - there is no one voice. What we are left with is a deeper connection to each other, as we explore what it is to communicate, to become aware of our world, and to play a part in shaping it.