Google stars
: 60 Minutes just gushed over Google and John Battelle got lots of face time.
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Social
Posts from January 2, 2005
Gone
Gone
: On NBC News tonight, an ITN reporter went to a town that was gone, simply gone: only the mosque left standing, not a single soul left. He couldn’t find out the name of the town and said it didn’t matter now anway.
: Later… Ann Curry is in south Asia reporting on the tragedy for Dateline. I might have dreaded that; as nice as Curry is, she can drive me nutty with her theatrical concern. But she’s doing a very good job here. The tragedy is so apparent that there is no need to amplify it for TV.
Blog explosion
: The latest Pew Internet and American Life study has astounding findings on the growth of blogs:
: 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.
: 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users said they read political blogs
Tsunami challenge
Tsunami challenge
: Blogger Anders Jacobsen says if you put the list below on your blog, he’ll donate $1 for every blogger to tsunami relief:
International aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund)
United Nations’ World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) – comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others
North America:
Anders Jacobsen: Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I’ll give too!
: MORE: We Jarvises gave to Doctors without Borders and MercyCorps.
Note that Amazon’s Red Cross campaign is about to hit $12.5 million.
Read Rosen
Read Rosen
: I have been sinfully remiss in not pushing you to read Jay Rosen’s year-end round-up of the top 10 ideas about media in 2004. I was waiting for Jay to finish writing up all 10 but that’s taking longer than I thought it would — Rome was not abstracted in a day — and so I’ll make up for lost time and send you there now. One of my big trends for 2004 was learning from Rosen. He embodies that amazing academic talent for taking a complex world and abstracting it into clear concepts that can be investigated and studied and debated. His list for the year is classic Rosen, clear, heavy with meaning, and spot-on:
1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: “My readers know more than I do.”
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. “Content will be more important than its container.”
7. ‘What once was good–or good enough–no longer is.”
8. “The victory of affinity over geography.”
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.
He explores the first four here, the fifth here, and the sixth here.
To me, the abstraction of the abstraction of all this comes down to one word: power. It’s all about a shift of power from those who’ve had it to those who initially owned it and licensed it: the citizenry. And this is not happening just in media, of course. It is happening in marketing and advertising and commerce and culture and politics and may even come to government. But because the tools at work mimic media — though they are more than media tools — media is, for once, on the front edge of the trend. But it’s a trend that will come to the rest of society. There’s a quiet revolution underway. The people are taking back their power again.
