gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

random notes

: William Gibson is blogging again. My friend Hamish will be well pleased. Thanks to Joi for the tip.

: Nick Denton, probably the most successful (and famous) commercial blog publisher interviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Talking about how blogs are a great mainstream advertising medium (something I concur with). Thanks to Bruner for the tip. The link to this article is set to expire in five days (WSJ.com is a paid subscription site), so read it while you can.

: "Success in the Creative Age: The Internet, Not TV, Is The Harbinger of the Future." Evelyn rocks yet again.

1. The psychological center of gravity (+/- 5 years of the adult median age) is skewing towards older, more mature mindset. Sorry, to have to say this so bluntly but the Donald Trumps are stuck in Erik Erikson's stagnation stage. Trump was the last generation. The leaders of the future will be generative. Even Gen Y is exhibiting more traditionally mature values (btw, I get some ideas about youth sent my way from a relative that works on tween and teen market research).

: "We pay our lawyers $250 an hour to tell the world that we're utterly clueless."

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Heck, I'll tell the world for free. Thanks to Mary Hodder for the tip.

: From Wired: The Long Tail:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

Thanks to Tim Oren for the tip.

: "Mommy, how come Daddy lost his sorry-ass job in Big Media?"

From David Sifry:

The chart above shows a graph of the most influential or authoritative blogs as compared with the most authoritative “big media” sites. Certainly, top-quality journalism, interesting articles, and consistency of quality show why the top big media sites are on top. But it also shows that a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and that these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites.

Sure, Big Media still has the high numbers, but if you factor in how much they actually had to pay for the privelege (salaries, office space etc), the business model starts going into meltdown.

[UPDATE: 16th October] On a similar subject, I just got done having a big ol' rant over at Buzzmachine:

"People control the media". That's only a radical statement if you're worried about your ever-fading 6-figure career in big media.

"Wow, I get to help control the media from my window office in Times Square, and in return my boss pays me enough to afford a 3-bedroom in Darien. Hooray!"

It's that ever-pervasive, mid-level sense of entitlement. It's old, it's boring, it's corrupt and it's over.

I do like a good Big Media rant. What would I do without Jeff Jarvis, I have no idea.

Posted by hugh macleod at October 15, 2004 11:37 AM | TrackBack