BuzzMachine

This weekend’s burp in Movable Type installations — which came because of a conflict in an update of the Control Panel that controls many web servers — reveals an odd vulnerability of citizens’ media. No medium before could be so handicapped by a single bug or glitch (or virus or spam attack). Of course, in blogs, we’re used to it; Blogger used to go down all the time and with it half the Blogosphere then . But what’s oddly unnerving in this case is that an external change could have such an impact. Then again, because this is a community, people shared symptoms and then solutions with dispatch.

David Carr in today’s NY Times on podcasting (full disclosure: he quotes me with a full disclosure):

For the time being, podcasting is a cipher, a technology that seems to further threaten established media’s stranglehold on public consciousness, but offers little opportunity in the way of a real actual business. Big media are aggressively attempting to get their arms around the next big thing. But it remains elusive, a medium that is viral and uncontrollable by nature, and that does not threaten to become a business any time soon.

To evade the long arm of the FEC, Bill Hobbs is, as you probably know, closing his blog and opening instead an online magazine. I congratulated him in is comments with these observations:

Well, as a magazine publisher, you now get:
– A table at Michael’s.
– An expense account.
– A clothing allowance.
– A car service.
– An assistant who will go get you Starbucks coffee whenever you ring your bell.
– A minimally but expensively designed office with a view.
– A large ego.
– A reputation not as big as your ego thinks it is.
– The opportunity to go to too damned many conferences in Florida.
– A new hostility to those things called blogs.
Enjoy.

Hugh McLeod, marketing genius, has convinced a wine maker to create a brand image via bloggers: We’re smart, we’re tasteful, we drink.