Ed Batista

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Reading List

I was recently asked by a colleague to recommend some books on executive coaching, and the process of drawing up that list got me thinking about all the books that have had a major impact on my professional development.  This list isn't exhaustive--and by focusing on books per se it omits many articles, papers and chapters that have had an even greater impact than some of these books--but it hits many of the high points.  I may return later to add items or make comments or to sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and (seeming) chaos:

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

Why You Drink

From Le Grand Content, a brilliant and baffling 4-minute animated film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

There's an obvious association with Jessica Hagy's Indexed (she lists Le Grand Content's URL in her blog header), but I'm not sure who's the Chicken and who's the Egg.

Thanks to Paul Hebert for turning me on to Indexed in the first place.

Happy Birthday, Slate

Slate turned 10 over the weekend, an event that makes me realize both how much things have changed over the past decade and how quickly the time has flown by.  I don't read many general interest sites, but I remain loyal to Slate, partly out of habit, partly because of writers like Christopher Hitchens, Dahlia Lithwick, and Dana Stevens, and partly because I enjoy watching one of our oldest online institutions continue to evolve--and, I might as well add, despite disappointing gaps in coverage (sports and music, for starters) some deadwood that should be cleared away (the Explainer, anyone?  Dear Prudence?) and a baffling refusal to effectively integrate reader feedback, which remains segregated in the navigation-challenged Fray.

Michael Kinsley's look back at Slate's founding highlights just how far we've come:

My original idea, believe it or not, was a publication that you would download and print out once a week. It would have been an inferior version of a print magazine—a bunch of pages stapled together (if you had a stapler nearby).

By the time Slate was launched, we had moved beyond that primitive once-a-week notion. I remember, with some embarrassment, the eureka moment when it dawned on me that an online magazine doesn't have to publish an entire issue at once. Pretty soon, I even figured out that you didn't need to have "issues" at all.

It's worth remembering how Kinsley's move out to Seattle was initially received by most members of the media establishment in Washington and New York ten years ago: they thought he was nuts.  But to me and many others who weren't particularly interested in technology but who were plenty interested in political and cultural journalism, it was an intriguing signal.

I started using email in earnest in 1994, to collaborate with some colleagues on a volunteer consulting project and to plan a motorcycle trip with a friend on the East Coast, and a year later I was just beginning to learn more about the wider world of the Internet.  It was fascinating, but as a non-techie I found the tools hard to use and found it even harder to uncover meaningful information related to the things I really cared about--politics, literature, music, food, art, sports, history.

But the news about Michael Kinsley's project with Microsoft caught my attention.  I admired him as a political and cultural thinker, and I respected him as a thoughtful highbrow with a populist bent.  If someone like Kinsley was getting involved, perhaps the Internet could begin to reflect the richness of the world around us, and perhaps it could be accessible by ordinary, non-technical people.  Of course, many people have contributed to Slate's success, and millions more have participated in the transformation of the Net, but I still mark Kinsley's commitment to the weird, experimental vision of online publishing as an important moment.  Kinsley hasn't been involved in running Slate for five years or so, but I hope he feels a sense of pride and accomplishment, not only for helping to launch a still-running and occasionally-profitable venture, but for helping people like me to see technology's non-technical potential.

tags: slate michael kinsley

Michael Goldhaber on "The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy"

Over the the course of 2006 I've been writing fewer posts about technology (blogging and dead laptops excepted) and more about management and leadership.  That's partly because I've been writing more intensively about technology on my "day blog" at AttentionTrust, the nonprofit where I serve as Executive Director.  But it's primarily because technology has always been just a means to an end for me--I only started caring about it in the mid-'90s, when I saw how it would help the social services organization where I worked be more effective and more efficient.

What's far more important to me than technology is helping people fulfill their potential (starting with myself.)  I firmly believe that technology can play an important role in that process, but looking toward the future, I'm increasingly interested in such disciplines as executive coaching and organizational development.  (If I hadn't settled into nonprofit management after college, I might have gone back to grad school to become a psychologist like my dad, but somehow I would up with an MBA.)

Given all that, I'm thrilled when I come across concepts that bridge my vocational focus on technology and my avocational interest in personal development.  So this morning I'd like to touch on a topic that springs from my technology-related work at AttentionTrust but ultimately transcends technology entirely and speaks to such issues as how we relate to each other as individuals, how we relate to the world at large, and even the underpinnings of our social and economic structures.

To provide some background: AttentionTrust's mission is to educate people about the existence of "attention data," (i.e. the various types of digital records that reflect what we pay attention to [and what we ignore], and in turn serve as the fundamental basis for determining value in our information-based economy), and to subsequently empower people to exert control over and make effective use of their attention data, thereby becoming active participants in the emerging "attention economy."

One of the intellectual forefathers of the concepts that underlie our work is Michael Goldhaber, an incredibly thoughtful and gracious man whom I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the past year.  Michael just posted "The Value of Openness in an Information Based Economy" (PDF, 198 KB), a paper he delivered last month at First Monday's "FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content" event.  I posted the following excerpts from Michael's paper on AttentionTrust's site, and I'm re-posting them here because I think they have some significant implications for how organizations and individuals define and obtain success.  (More on that in future posts.)  Please note that I've invented the headings--they're not in Michael's original paper:

Debord, Stewart, Colbert

In an astute assessment of Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents  Association performance (Parts One, Two and Three on YouTube), Salon's Michael Scherer identifies Colbert and his contemporary and mentor Jon Stewart as the latest (and most politically influential) public figures in a lineage that stretches back to the French situationist Guy Debord:

Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery "détournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

This analysis explains perfectly why Stewart and now Colbert have had such a significant impact on our political culture (and it also explains why I'm so annoyed by Stewart's shrugging, "Hey, I'm just a comedian" disclaimers).

As Scherer makes clear, Stewart essentially plagiarized the network news, and now Colbert's doing the same  with talk-show pundits.  They're taking an established cultural form and turning it against itself.  And this plagiarism primarily serves to highlight the fundamental falsehood of the original.  It's an intensely political act that can also be side-splittingly funny (although Colbert's White House Correspondents performance was over-long and poorly paced), but the humor can't be separated from the underlying critique.  If Stewart really were just a comedian, he wouldn't be nearly as funny.

But Scherer's Salon piece doesn't follow through on the implications of invoking Debord, and it's worth taking a longer look at the man's profoundly unfunny ideas.  Like many radical critics of contemporary society, Debord never came up with an alternative vision that could be implemented.  And his pessimistic worldview was surely influenced by the depression and personal problems that led to his suicide in 1994.  But these factors don't eliminate the analytical brilliance of many of his insights.  From 1967's Society of the Spectacle:

1. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles...

6. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life...

9. In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

This says a lot to me about Stewart and Colbert's success and influence.  Stewart was not a news anchor, of course, just as Colbert was not a pundit, but decades of immersion in the ultimate society of the spectacle have taught us that even "real" news anchors and pundits are acting out roles, and so Stewart and Colbert had license to do the same.  And their actual message, well-understood by their audiences, is in direct opposition to what they appear to be saying.  The true is a moment of the false.  So by taking on these roles, Stewart and Colbert have become them.

No matter how much Stewart demurs, he is now a "real" anchor and Colbert is clearly on his way to becoming a "real" pundit.  Some critics--and even Stewart himself--like to use the fact that an increasing number of people rely on Stewart's "Daily Show" as their primary source of news as an example of cultural decline.  I think that's true, but it's not because people are stupid, which is the subtext of that argument; it's because people are smart.  They're sufficiently smart and media-savvy to know that A) Stewart is an incisive political commentator, and B) the "real" broadcasts and talk shows are not only boring and patronizing, they're also at least part bullshit--they're spectacles.

Debord would probably see Stewart and Colbert's success as yet another spectacle, and I understand that logic.  Stewart and Colbert aren't working on radical journals to circulate among a few dozen of their similarly disaffected friends.  They're reaching millions of people through television and mass-market books and having a significant impact on the culture at large (and presumably making millions of dollars in the process.)  They are, in fact, spectacles themselves.

If you inherently distrust the spectacle, as Debord did, this is probably a recipe for despair.  Stewart and Colbert have embraced Debord's critical methods, but their successful use of those methods means that they've also embraced the apparatus of the spectacle.  That success has come because of--not despite--their highly critical and politicized perspective, but the society of the spectacle has no trouble absorbing that critique, because it does nothing to challenge the spectacle itself.

Fair enough, but I can't help but take a more optimistic perspective.  (Not that it's hard to have a sunnier worldview than Debord's.)  Yes, we're all deeply embedded in the society of the spectacle, and that's never going to change.  But Stewart and Colbert's success in employing the apparatus of the spectacle to mount substantive challenges to established political and media hierarchies suggests that the spectacle itself is inherently neutral.  There's no tautology that will inevitably lead the society of the spectacle back into the dark heart of fascism--in fact, the spectacle can be an effective anti-fascist tool.

The spectacle is also, quite obviously, a source of great satisfaction and an object of intense fascination.  We love spectacles; that's what makes them so successful.  And if, as I do, you accept the idea that spectacles can be employed for salutary purposes as well as malign ones, then the issue boils down to one's view on consumer capitalism (which, I'd argue, will always triumph over competing worldviews largely because of its superior ability to create compelling spectacles.)

Does consumer capitalism fundamentally respond to and fill--or manufacture and exploit--our individual desires?  If you believe the latter, then you're back in the boat with Debord; consumer capitalism's mastery of the spectacle has turned us all into sheep waiting to be fleeced.  If you believe the former, then life's not perfect, but it's a lot rosier; for better and for worse, we get the society/politics/culture we deserve.

I'm not naive about the influence of advertising or other tools at capitalism's command, but I'm firmly in the former camp.  And so even though I disagree with a number of Stewart and Colbert's positions (and even though Stewart's disingenuous denials of political influence drive me nuts), I'm thrilled by their existence and success.

By putting Debord's critical methods into practice on some of the biggest stages our society has to offer, Stewart and Colbert are casting a harsh spotlight on the extent to which the object of their ridicule--not just news broadcasts and talk-show pundits, but our entire political and media culture--relies on insincerity, on falsehoods, and on the gullibility of the audience.  In contrast, Stewart and Colbert are saying to their audience, "We're smart enough to know how smart you are, and together we're all going to have a laugh at those idiots' expense."

This thrills me primarily because my foundational belief is that people should be free to make choices for themselves, and if you believe that people are smart and not stupid, it's a short step from there to respecting their freedom.  (That actually puts me at odds with any number of liberal supporters and conservative critics of Stewart and Colbert, but that's a post for another day.)

Many thanks to Michael Scherer for framing this discussion around Guy Debord.  I've been intrigued by Stewart and Colbert and the success of their form of political discourse for some time now without being able to fully understand why, and seeing them as Debord's spiritual descendants is a brilliant insight.

tags: guy debord jon stewart stephen colbert michael scherer salon white house correspondents

Wikipedia Edited, Dog Bites Man

Verne Kopytoff has a "What's Web 2.0?" article in today's SF Chronicle, and in general it's a fine primer on the concept, neither too credulous nor too cranky.  I particularly liked this quote from Dave Winer, which Kopytoff pulled from Winer's Scripting News:

Web 2.0 is a way for certain marketing people to claim they invented stuff that they didn't invent, without actually claiming they invented it.

Although Kopytoff doesn't include the full quote in the Chron, Winer's original post goes on to say:

[Web 2.0 is] the kind of double-talk marketing guys love.

In a sense people are right when they say it's another bubble. It's dishonest like the bubble was. Yet the technologies they're hyping are honest.

Winer's full quote gets at the essence of Web 2.0: a marketing buzzword that nevertheless represents something real. I understand Winer's resentment of marketing bullshit and appreciate his ability to cut to the heart of the matter, but some buzzwords which start out as pure marketing-driven hype gain traction because they effectively translate technical issues for non-geeks like me.  Of course, they're subject to abuse by unscrupulous flacks, but that doesn't make the terms themselves illegitimate.  (For more on buzzwords, Tim Oren had some interesting thoughts on the useful purposes they serve, which I excerpted last year.)

But Kopytoff goes astray when he backhands Wikipedia:

The reputation of Web 2.0 was recently sullied by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers. Held up as a shining example of Web 2.0, it suffered a scandal after one of those amateur contributors rewrote history by accusing a former government official of being involved in the Kennedy assassinations. [emphasis mine]

Scandal? Really?  That strikes me as absurd. Crackpots screw around with Wikipedia entries every day.  That's the price of having an open system which anyone can edit--it's not called Wikipedia for nothing.  But errors are typically corrected within minutes. And debates will rage over controversial and highly politicized topics where a definitive answer can't be found, but that's as true within Wikipedia and other user-supported systems as it is anywhere.

This isn't a scandal--it isn't even a story.  It's the way Web 2.0 (sorry, Dave) works.  It's the wisdom of crowds. By allowing everyone--no matter what their authority or credentials (or lack of same)--to contribute to the intellectual marketplace that is the Web, we guarantee the system's fluidity and maximize accuracy at the macro level.  Of course we sacrifice accuracy at the micro level--with no editorial apparatus constraining the system, anything you read at any given moment could be total bullshit.  But in a free, open and fluid intellectual market, bad ideas will eventually be driven out by better ones--and sooner rather than later.

Perhaps it's not surprising that a newspaper article completely misses this point, but it is sad.  I love newspapers, and I don't want to see them die--I want to see them adapt and thrive.  I'm hopeful that publishers and journalists--the smart ones, anyway--will find a way to do that.

tags: web 2.0 wikipedia verne kopytoff dave winer

On Ombudsmen, Objectivity and Infotainment

I post on a sports bulletin board that often veers into other topics, and I wrote the following yesterday in a discussion about the relevance of ombudsmen (I saw Jeff Jarvis use the gender-neutral "ombudsers" recently, but since I think they're dinosaurs anyway, I'll stick with the traditional usage).  I seem to be covering similar ground a lot lately:

1) Ombudsmen: They were (marginally) relevant when media was strictly a one-way, broadcast channel. The media told us the way it was, we listened obediently. But sometimes they screwed up. This happened very, very rarely, because the media were "objective," but they're human and occasionally made mistakes. But no one in the audience had a platform to talk back to the media directly, so ombudsmen were invented to play that role. They were toothless pariahs in their own organizations, disliked by both the publishing and editorial sides of the house, but having them around was a price you had to pay.

Today the audience can and does speak back directly. We talk among ourselves on bulletin boards, we launch our own websites, we podcast, and when the media gatekeepers deign to let us in, we comment on their own sites. There's no way an ombudsman can claim to represent my views better than I can myself, and now that I have plenty of platforms through which I can speak back to the media, the ombudsman is a superflous relic. Get rid of them all, and compel all journalists to accept responsibility for communicating directly with their audience.

2) "Objectivity": The media's pretense of "objectivity" that some people feel is being lost today was, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a shroud that masked more active agendas. Of course, we should strive to distance ourselves from preconceived ideas and emotions and seek to understand and address issues dispassionately. But we, all of us, still have those preconceived ideas and emotions, and we need to be transparent about them, rather than pretend they don't exist.

I don't lament the loss of "objectivity," and I think we're more likely to get to the truth in a post-Internet world where the diversity of voices insures that every issue will be subject to the wisdom of crowds.  This is why Wikipedia works. No one of us can be completely objective or accurate, but if you get enough of us thinking and talking about an issue, an approximation of objective, accurate truth will emerge.

Will unscrupulous individuals and organizations seek to promote their biased agendas in this wide-open intellectual marketplace? Of course. But free markets work so well because they distribute information so effectively, and the true "value" of any information will be ascertained more quickly the more free the market.

3) Infotainment: The rise of infotainment and the supposed decline of more serious fare is a red herring. Hand-wringing over the tabloidization of broadcast news ignores the meteoric rise in serious exchanges being enabled by the Internet and the increasing intellectual complexity of every form of culture, from sitcoms to video games. In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson makes a compelling argument that we're constantly getting smarter as a society and that many supposed examples of our decline are actually just the reverse: kids spend hours playing video games because they're learning incredibly complex sequences that allow them to continue playing; we flock to reality television because it taps into our wiring as social animals and challenges us to predict participants' reactions, etc.

This isn't to say that the world's just fine and dandy. But Cassandras are a dime a dozen--it's a lot more interesting to me to figure out why so many things continue to improve despite all the challenges we face.

tags: journalism ombudsmen infotainment james surowiecki wisdom of crowds steven johnson everything bad is good for you

Andrew Sullivan at Time

Andrew Sullivan moved to Time last week, and it's interesting that  what once would have seemed like a major event almost escaped my notice entirely.  Sullivan did more than any other single writer to get me reading blogs, not just because he was so early to the game or because 9/11 and the War on Terror gave his writing a uniquely compelling context, but because (as I wrote last February), he "blazed a path for people like myself who don't feel particularly well-represented by the reigning ideologies on the Right or the Left."

When Sullivan temporarily retired from blogging last year,
I missed him, but it wasn't difficult to fill that void.  Perhaps not suprisingly, Sullivan couldn't stay away from blogging, but I never got back into the habit of reading him--partly because I was simply tired of the shrillness of the blogosphere's political discourse and found myself more fulfilled by reading and writing on other topics, and partly because I felt that Sullivan himself had become somewhat shrill in response to his critics.  (While I'd praised him as "a sassy, snarky writer with a keen bullshit detector," I suppose the line between snarky and shrill is finer than I once thought.)

But reminded of his presence by the move to Time, I've added him back to my Bloglines subscriptions--I'm curious to see if I stick with it.

On a related note:  This is a win-win for both Sullivan and Time--he's freed from the headaches of maintaining his site while sacrificing relatively little (so far) in the way of branding, and they get the attention and traffic that come with a bigfoot blogger.  But I also sense that missed opportunities in the past have brought Sullivan and Time together today, and they're hoping to make up for lost time.

For example, a number of serious political bloggers who followed in Sullivan's footsteps have turned their sites into sustainable and freestanding destinations: Daily Kos, Instapundit, Eschaton, Michelle Malkin, and PowerLine, to name just a few that get more than twice Sullivan's daily traffic, according to the TTLB rankings.

And plenty of media & news sites are far more popular than Time.com, according to Alexa.  As of today, Time is a respectable #1,087 in Alexa's traffic rankings, but the BBC Online is #22, CNN is #26, the New York Times is #72, the Washington Post is #196, USA Today is #240, Forbes is #270, Fox News is #290, Reuters is #291, and the Wall Street Journal is #399.

Those are perhaps unfair comparisons, but I think its fair to say that neither Time nor Sullivan took full advantage of their respective opportunities (Time as the leading pre-Web newsweekly, Sullivan as the first political blogger with a national profile), and that perhaps this union will be a fresh start for both of them.

tags: blogging journalism andrew sullivan time time magazine