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http://doc.weblogs.com/
The Continuing End of Business As Usual
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Copyright 2004 Doc Searls
Wed, 17 Nov 2004 05:30:08 GMT
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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#sometimesYouGetLucky
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#sometimesYouGetLucky

I'm loving the Alexis Park Hotel, because it's providing excellent fodder for my talk tomorrow at Apachecon. (To my Apachecon friends: don't worry; I'll be nice.)

I will say it was great to get away last night to Bellagio, and one of the finest dinners, ever, at Picasso.

Ben Hyde got lucky too. A very attractive woman just ran up to me and told me my lap top is extremely cute! He declined to say if he was talking about a computer...

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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#theShortAnswerIsNo
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#theShortAnswerIsNo

Sheila Lennon, as so often, nails it with Does the message need the medium?, about the Online News Association event in Hollywood that Dave reported on as well. She runs with the opening remarks of AP chief Tom Curley, the crux of which is this line here:

The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site. The franchise is the content itself.

Then there's this set-up...

We are shifting from an old "telegraph" model of pushing news to our subscribers through proprietary pipelines to a database model, where our customers can retrieve what they want, when they want it, over the network....

To which Sheila adds this:

While this may be news to some in mainstream media, I immediately think of Cluetrain's Doc Searls, who hates the term "content." This snip of Doc at a Jabber conference (original link has vanished) explains it,

Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other content,

Geeks see the Net as a place - a commons - where people can make culture and do business.

Ask, "Who creates this 'content'?" and you've bridged the divide. Ask, "Who finances the creation of this 'content'?" and another problem emerges.

The Jabber source may be gone; but I've said the quoted lines a number of times in a variety of places. Here's a slide with that text, from a 2002 OSCon talk.

The problem, for the APs of the world, is that they can't stop thinking in terms of distribution, of piping, of moving the goods they call "content."

Funny thing about "content." I'll bet that AP didn't call their stories, features and other goods "content" until the dot-commies popularized the word in the late '90s. As John Perry Barlow says, "We didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened."

There are two big problems with the word "content." First, it treats creative works as container cargo, which is demeaning as well as misleading. Second, it denies the creative, transformative and essentially unfinished quality of all creative works. Plus their authority.

Google's PageRank, which organizes search results, doesn't treat linkable goods as "content," but rather as sources. The value of those sources is ranked by authority, determined by pointage from other sources, each of which are also ranked in the same way.

Keep "authority" mind as we revisit something I wrote more than four years ago:

Hackers didn't build the Net for business. They built it for research. They wanted to make it easy for people to inform each other, no matter who or where they were.

Several days ago Tim O¹Reilly and I were talking about information, which is a noun derived from the verb to form. We use information, literally, to form each other. So, if we are in the market for information, we are asking to be formed by other people. In other words, we are authors of each other. It follows that the best information is the kind that changes us most. If we want to know something — if we are in the market for knowledge — we demand to be changed.

That change is growth. Our identity persists, yet who-we-are becomes larger, because we know more. And the more we know, the more valuable we become. This value isn't a "brand" (a nasty word that comes to us from the cattle industry). It's reputation.

What these hackers made was an extraordinarily vast and efficient market for knowledge — a wide-open marketspace for information — where everybody gets to participate, to contribute, to grow, and to increase the value of their own reputations.

That's what's still behind the new ecosystem in which old news organizations need to find a new way.

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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#theWorldLivelierWeb
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#theWorldLivelierWeb

USA Today has a pile of RSS feeds, on 30 different subjects, with lots of essentially live news flow. Thanks to Big Rick for pointing out the URL, which shows the feeds coming from the marketing corner of the newspaper.

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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#smellsGood
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#smellsGood

Dave Slusher posts his Podcasting Recipe.

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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#whatItSortofWas
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#whatItSortofWas

Mark Finnern has located the original artwork for this blog.

Also some family history of his own.

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http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#wayToGoAgain
http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/11/16#wayToGoAgain

After starring at Bloggercon, Julie Leung makes the cover of the local paper at home. Lots of bonus links to other local bloggers in Bainbridge Island.