What is Wrong With Media?
This is the wrong question to ask to those from the media. Fear, worry, confusion, orthodoxy are no breeding grounds for imagination and introspection.
Labels: bighow, blogging. ethics, guide, new media
Memo to Mark Cuban: Bloggers aren’t going anywhere
Dear Mark, you write in your blog (hope you note the irony) that since “
anyone can be a blogger in 10 seconds”, you were forced to make a judgment call and you banned bloggers from accessing your Dallas Mavericks team.
What was it that you didn’t like about Bloggers?- Did they not hero worship you, like the clueless mainstream people do?
- Was it the trademark bite and spite from bloggers, which you thought wouldn’t gel well with the Mavericks’ fantastic comeback run? - Is it about controlling the message?You write that a blog is a blog is a blog. Yes indeed. A blogger can do things a news reporter cannot. It was a blog that brought the Larry Craig story to light. Bloggers are in jail in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia for daring to speak out. Bloggers are running for political power in Thailand and Ukraine.
I can go on and on…
You say that ‘there is TV, and there is HBO’. Agreed, American Idol is for kids, but what about PBS? Bad analogies do not a argument make. Public broadcasting and Free voice are the touchstones of democracy, always building beachheads against the relentless tides of hidden agendas and stakes.
You became rich by making a fool out of Yahoo. Wikipedia notes that the sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo for, what was it, $5.7 million, was a ‘
silicon valley joke’ -
As of 2007, neither broadcast.com nor broadcast.yahoo.com are distinct web addresses.Point is, you made it big, playing all the 'right' cards in the Digital Industry. Hell, in some circles, they even consider you as free-wheeling ‘maverick’,
a poster boy for ‘get rich quick’ dreams – please do not kick your fellow bloggers into a
digital ghetto.
Your blogger ban is plain silly. Some day, the Mavericks may hit a trough, as is the circle of life, and then it will be a lonely fan who will blog on for your team, galvanizing other fans, not some big media outfit, which prefers to ride with the stars only.
Do what is right.
Peace.
Labels: blogging. ethics, censorship, citizen journalism, controversey, dallas mavericks, mark cuban
Can Blog Posts drive people to suicide?
This is the question we are asking ourselves in wake of the suicide by Paul Tilly, who was only 40 years old when he jumped down to his death from a hotel floor in Chicago.
According to the
New York Times, Mr. Tilley, Creative Director of ad agency DDB Chicago, supervised teams that created the “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign for McDonald’s and the “Dell Dude" for Dell.
Commenters on two apparently sharp-tongued blogs written by ad industry insiders, AgencySpy and AdScam, say that Paul Tilly was driven to commit suicide because he was troubled by some recent articles on these two blogs which criticized him for how he handled his job, among other things.
One post in question advised Paul Tilly to “go back to management 101”.
However, the Times story quotes a friend of Mr. Tilly saying, "it’s certainly not because of blogs".
Whatever the reason behind this extremely sad episode may be, it is true that Blogs (and social networking), being free-er by nature, can go to the edge, taking 'the subject/target' to the edge as well.
We saw this happening in
Kathy Sierra harassment episode. We also must not forget Megan Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl who took her life in 2006 after being the target of insults on MySpace.
I suspect some bloggers will revisit Tim O'reilly's proposed
Code of Ethics for Bloggers. Without going into the merits of a code, as free bloggers, we all must keep in mind that
"With freedom, comes great responsibility".Labels: blogging. ethics, controversey, suicide
Graduating from a ‘lone ranger ’ to ‘authorized’ blogger
I would go ahead and put most of my fellow bloggers in the
‘lone ranger’ blogger category, endless putting forth opinion pieces, rants, analysis and whatever else that passes for free voice.
In other words, our words can be hard and we don’t shy away from using derogatory words and assorted put downers.
All this goes for an overhaul when someone up there hears your voice (or had too much of it) and promotes to you a position where you are writinge as an authorized blogger, as a reporter for a regular news organization.
Your writing style changes and you find yourself doing
‘balanced’ pieces.
You begin to find that people who you earlier ridiculed were just your average folks, not so bad and calculating after all.
Jay Lassitor, a political blogger in New Jersey was ‘lone’ blogger who graduated to being an authorized blogger and found his outlook towards his subjects had changed. In his earlier avatar, he constantly ridiculed local politicians and legislators, calling them with vicious names, but that changed:
“I don’t find myself launching firebomb campaigns anymore …this whole exercise has kind of mellowed me out. These people in here, they seem like they’re doing their best.”
Labels: blogging, blogging. ethics
Blogs as magazines: the flip side
Blogs such as
Engadget,
Autoblog,
Techcrunch and its 'arch enemy' Valleywag are more like magazines; the matter has been covered on this blog before. The blog owners prefer to call these properties multi-author blogs but that is pure wool.
Goes without saying that it is good thing, blogs becoming part of the mainstream, but ironical, no poetic, when a
lame poll put ‘blog’ as a high-flying irritant.
On the flip side, the
‘magablogs’ suffer from the same
disease that their print counterparts suffer from: toeing the big-pocket advertisers’ line, hyping up big company products as revolutionary items (something that also says much about the mainstream journalists’ understanding of technology). The
‘magablogs’ are no different from the News 1.0 sites like CNet either.
The term ‘blog’ is just a huge PR ruse.
You can safely presume this disease of
‘Blogspokepersons’ (Valleywag’s invention) will spread out from the comfy environs of Silicon Valley and New Tork to other parts of the world, which is a sure thing since the patients blatantly deny they suffer from any such ailment.
So, dear Virginia, there is no such thing as News 2.0,
there is only money.
In the words of Dave Winer,
... it's a f***** up little industry and everyone needs to clean house. There are some pockets of brightness, and we need to help those shine, and we also need to shine the light on the dirty practices that pay your bills, but hurt everyone else.
Labels: Blog networks, blogging. ethics
