The Unbearable Childishness of the Web

December 15, 2006

Since you don’t have to face the person you’re dumping on, you don’t see any reason to display courtesy.”… A lack of consequence to anonymous interaction inevitably leads to an avoidance of personal responsibility for one’s actions, with fairly predictable results. And so, what was in the early days of the internet a mere trickle of incivility has become a raging torrent of unrestrained, frustrated, adolescent angst. On the Web, everyone can hear you scream.I’ve often thought that Web 2.0 was far too much like high schoolRegular readers may have noticed that posting here has been scarce recently.

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Yahoo! 2.0

December 6, 2006

All of this brouhaha strikes me as enormously tedious, but three observations do come to mind, all about the media angle.First, there is little in any of the coverage that links the reorg to the so-called Peanut Butter Manifesto, which called for organizational change and seemed at the time like an effort to force that issue out into the open. There are references, but surprisingly few.Second, the spinny headlines of Yahoo!’s PR and corporate blog contributions are very like – no, pretty much exactly like – flashing red lights pointing the reader to tediously official and profoundly less interesting content about the event…. One always reads this material with a jaundiced eye, but a point comes when incredible becomes discreditable…. Mainstream media really has few advantages left, if any, over the ‘tropolis’ ability to report original content about tech and write it up in a smart, engaging and savvy style.

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What Will Happen to Professional Photographers?

December 5, 2006

It seems clear that many pros are going to get squeezed out – a lot of content that has been created by people with more equipment than ability is going to be displaced, and those 10,000,000 typing monkeys are inevitably going to produce some interesting work…. But quality will always matter, and paradoxically may even come to matter more.Gillmor seems to be particularly concerned about the risk of fakery from the rise of the amateur: “democratized media tools also include easy and cheap ways to fake or alter reality.”… And when it comes to photo fakery, the pros seem to be pretty accomplished already – a recent doctored photo of Beirut by Reuters’ photographer Adnan Hajj being only the most recent example. Fakery, incidentally, that was spotted by this same democratized media market; a pretty powerful disincentive, one would think, to your garden variety fakery (a lesson that also brought down Dan Rather after the ‘sphere raised questions about the authenticity of documents reported on by Rather that cast doubt on President Bush’s National Guard service), and perhaps a quick path, as GIllmor himself acknowledges, to tools that will help manage this problem.

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The Demographics of Mac Users

December 4, 2006

There’s a story working the rounds to the effect that 46% of Mac users are older than 55 years of age. That’s certainly possible – it’s ease of use is bound to be especially appealing to people who don’t like playing under the hood. But at last year’s mesh I counted laptops in the room and Macs were easily 1/3 of those in the room, 75% of which was probably between 25 and 40 years old.

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Best Photo of Toronto Ever

December 4, 2006

This is easily the best shot of Toronto I’ve ever seen.

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VC 0.9

December 4, 2006

Mark Suster on his (mis)adventures raising venture money for Koral.

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U.S. Political Bloggers Cashing In

December 4, 2006

Forget the controversy over PayPerPost – controversy over payments to bloggers in the political blogosphere generates far more heat and light.

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The Slow Death of Mass Market Media

December 4, 2006

Scott Karp posts on why content no longer scales. For those not hip to the lingo, let me break it down: with the obliteration by the internet and other technologies of the cost of producing and distributing media, barriers to entry have tumbled and virtually anyone can now have an audience for their particular voice […]

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Another Sign of the Mac Times

December 2, 2006

Yet another sign that Mac-itis is highly infectious – the kids at Google seem to taking it really seriously.

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Where Lawyers Go When They Become Cool

December 2, 2006

To HuffPo’s Eat The Press, it seems.

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More Trouble for Canadian Media

November 30, 2006

Much movement in Canadian media today: it is surely not coincidental that the Toronto Sun is announcing more lost jobs in the same week that Canadian broadcasters are pleading poverty at the CRTC.

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Online Real Estate Heats Up

November 30, 2006

One can’t help but wonder whether the walls surrounding one of the last big consumer categories – real estate – are about to come down. Yesterday a Chicago district court cleared the way for antitrust litigation against the US National Association of Realtors: The DoJ contends the NAR is engaging in anti-competitive behavior against online […]

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