Burnin’

Portland is a city full of friendly, interesting people, so it’s natural that web sites would spring up from this fertile land to support that fact. One is Portland On Fire, a site that profiles a different Portlander each day. The site is currently inactive, but there may be work happening behind the scenes to bring us more profiles.

Raven Zachary created Portland on Fire. I saw Raven present a slideshow on the iPhone at Inverge 2008, earlier this month. He seems like a super smart guy.

Another site I took note of is Strange Love Live, a podcast series featuring local tech persons of interest produced by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. I’m looking forward to the show’s next feature on local photographer, Mark Coleman. Mark and I met at Beer and Blog two Fridays ago.

Also at Beer and Blog, I bumped into Dawn Foster. Dawn is profiled on Portland on Fire, as well. Since meeting her, I noticed that another Portlander (one I have not yet met), Marshall Kirkpatrick, named her an up-and-coming social media consultant on ReadWriteWeb. Dawn gave me an invite to Shizzow, a Dopplr-like site that helps friends connect in real space and time.

I also met Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo at Beer and Blog. They’re working on organizing the first annual CyborgCamp, among other things.

This post is not conclusive, it’s just a run through of some of my preliminary findings in the tech and social media communities here. I’ve also had coffee with a couple of ad guys, and gotten to know someone working at Wieden + Kennedy. The someone at Wieden mentioned her frustration that the tech and ad communities are not better connected. It was an interesting observation, and by no means a situation exclusive to Portland.

I enjoyed reading Mark Bowden’s piece in The Atlantic on changes being made to The Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership.

Bowden makes the point that Rupe lives by the scoop and that he sees news as a commodity, not literature or, God forbid, public service.

This is how Murdoch understands journalism—as content, a word he uses all the time, rather than as a form of literature or public service, and as a commodity whose value largely derives from its instant retail malleability. A short, crisp scoop that dramatically advances a major developing story—Obama’s poll numbers down! Britney back in rehab! Steinbrenner to fire another manager!—can be neatly packaged for a dizzying variety of media: print, radio, TV, the Internet, or even cell-phone screens. It doesn’t matter much to a fully integrated media conglomerate like News Corporation how its customers choose to access this content, as long as the transaction pays. He wants his reporters out in front of every competitor on the planet.

This means that, at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908.

I might add that the above argument is about content, not distribution. Rupe, like every other pedaller of content, is investing in the medium of the day, the net. Here Bowden gets worked up.

The Internet is in many ways a superior medium for journalism. It costs virtually nothing, in contrast to multimillion-dollar printing presses, giant rolls of paper and tankers of ink, and fleets of delivery trucks, to say nothing of the thousands of laborers needed to operate the equipment and distribute the product. But while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.

The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.

Neither does Rupert Murdoch.

I added the emphasis in the above passage, because I have invested years of effort in online content creation. My work is far from institutional, for it’s just me and a few friends doing what we do. Yet, in this chaotic media environment, I see opportunity. Opportunity to go well beyond blogging.

I like the term micro-media for it’s obvious connection to micro-beer. Micro-brewers recognized that the big players in beer treat their beers as a commodities and nothing more, so they chose to make something markedly better and the market responded favorably. Now many micro-brewers are themselves well established entities with national distribution and legions of fans. Essentially, that’s what we’re striving for with sites like HuskerZone and AdPulp. We’re pursuing a different flavor of coverage around niche subjects we care about.

We’re a long ways from an ideal editorial product at this time, but I hope to get there by dedicating to the work. I want to see our micro-media experiments excite people. To some degree they do now, but I want to get to where Sam Adams and New Belgium are. I want our published products to become side-by-side options for consumers. To achieve this, we will need to stop blogging and start breaking news. If we can garner the resources–time and money–we can do it.

The interesting thing is online content creators can learn from the both poles—the scoops and short format favored by Rupe’s papers and the values-based, facts first reporting of papers like The New York Times and Washington Post.

Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan is offering “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” in six parts on the firm’s blog.

Here’s one paragraph from the initial entry:

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities. Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ‘books’ in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.

From a business perspective, I don’t disagree with Lloyd. But from a book lover’s perspective, I still want a physical book to read, one with lots of ideas expressed in words.

Did you know I was a Scottish-born pioneer and dramatist from the 19th century?

Wikipedia knows.

[via GETV]

If you have an extremely popular blog, other media makers might be willing to bet on you. That’s the idea forwarded in today’s Sunday Styles.

image of the white guy likin’ a dog, courtesy of Flickr user, PancakeJess

At the center of the piece is Christian Lander, an Internet copywriter who launched Stuff White People Like last January. The blog has since entertained millions of visitors with things white people like. Some of those things are: Having Gay Friends, Dinner Parties, Book Deals, Graduate School and The Idea of Soccer.

One of the intriguing aspects to this story is how literary agents have swooped in to scour the net for talent.

One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.

When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.”

And two years after that?

“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,” Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.”

I found it interesting that Kurt Andersen, a founder of Very Short List, who is represented by the William Morris agency and acts as an adviser to Random House, had a taste maker’s role in taking Stuff White People Like to book form. Lander’s agent asked Anderson to bring it to the attention of Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, which he did.

How is the web helping independent filmmakers today?

These insiders offer some interesting insight via their wildly divergent thinking on the matter.

Actor and musician, Glen Hansard, calls it “a toilet cubicle.” That’s a new one.

The Library of Congress has a new Flickr page, where they plan to share some 3000 images with no known copyright restrictions.

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

In other words, the Library is seeking to enhance its metadata and is turning to the wisdom of the crowd for help.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions will pick up, thereby increasing the sharing and redistribution of the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

Doris Lessing, who published her first book in 1950, won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Her acceptance speech addressed the value of books, or rather their diminshed value in our internet-obsessed modern culture. While certain members of the technorati have poked fun at her for being old-fashioned, I think we ought to listen to her warnings, or find ourselves dumbed down.

The Guardian has her speech in its entirety, but here are a few key portions:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Ouch. As a writer who has moved from producing poems, stories and essays to producing blog posts, this hits home. Of course, there is another side to the argument. The side where the internet is a place to share ideas. Many would argue the internet makes us smarter for that instanteous, worldwide sharing. I suppose it depends on how one utilizes the internet. If one’s time is absorbed in cultivating “friends” on MySpace and Facebook, one’s mind is likely not being enriched. On the other hand, if one uses the internet to seek out stories in The New Yorker or other more obscure but equally heady sites, then writers and intellectuals have every right to celebrate this new communications medium.

But what about the computer as composition tool? It’s a great word processor, but to think large and lovely thoughts, email, IM, iTunes and all other “distractions” must be disabled. I write blog posts with these apps running in the background, but the production of literature requires a deeper space.

Lessing has some thoughts on this too.

Writers are often asked: “How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?” But the essential question is: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”

I dream of that space. And wonder where it might be hiding. Is it inside my own house at five in the morning, before mundane but economically necessary work calls? Perhaps. But it doesn’t look like that in my dreams. In my dreams it looks like a cabin in the woods, or a repurposed guesthouse in the mountains. Wherever it is, I know where it’s not. It’s not inside the web of interlinked items, fascinating and otherwise.

In all seriousness, I’d love to see a candidate grow a pair and run a creative ad campaign. Leave the empty promises to the stump speeches. TV viewers don’t want vacant rhetoric. We want entertainment.