hey!! open salon is cool. glad to be here. fyi, as you may have just noticed, I write in lower case. its informal. collegial. casual. please dont hassle me about it. ee cummings was a poet and visionary. wink. seriously, Ive discovered that I can type faster without worrying about/ tripping over those intermittent capitals. all comments regarding not capitalizing my sentences will be forwarded without opening to my many old english teachers.

for 5 years or so Ive been reading huffpost, almost since the very day it was introduced. I thought it would open the messy egalitarian, populist gates to regular writers, and eventually pay them, but alas, neither has happened. there is not even an indication on the site how to write for it for "outsiders". sheesh. arianna is both a revolutionary and a poseur. same old closed society, just the names and faces have changed. or cult of personality of Arianna. what is the criteria to write for her site? can "civilians" do it? how does one go about bribing Arianna?

I admire her greatly, she is showing the path to a post-newspaper society. as rupert murdoch stated,

"The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years." comparing it to invention of fire, wheel, gunpowder, printing press etc.  you know when an old conservative, fossilized executive like Murdoch talks like this, revolution is in the air. (yeah I was saying this kind of stuff many yrs ago, but of course nobody listens to me because Im not a billionaire or whatever.)

Murdoch speech at Stationers Hall: full text
Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Coporation, gave this address on the future of the newspaper industry to the Worshipful Company of Stationers And Newspaper Makers, a City of London livery company
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article740587.ece

poor Rupert is probably not feeling so frisky lately as his expensive Myspace toy seems to be fading to Facebook, and maybe even Facebook is fading to Twitter. apparently you cant build sprawling media empires/kingdoms in cyberspace the way you can in MainStream Media world.

anyway, Im going to contribute my writing energies to open salon for the moment until the next flavor-of-the-moment location turns up.

I would like to become a modern day Voltaire. just waiting for the write [I mean right] site and the magic symbiosis. to send out messages in a bottle on the ocean of humanity's attention. who hopefully find the appropriate recipients via jungian cyber-synchronicity.

my big complaint with the [open salon] site so far is that I cant tell the hit/view count on the blog posts at all. it can be found on the site elsewhere if the post gets into top popularity categories, but hey salon, how about a simple hit/view count on each page?

also, it would be great to know about who is getting a lot of money in tips. it will be a self-accelerating process driving writers to the site if people know they can make nontrivial amts of money here. thats something even Huffpost isnt doing or showing any interest in doing. arianna doesnt even pay it lip service.

its exciting to see the birth of a new postmodern media in cyberspace. its still rapidly evolving. but Huffpost seems to be the closest to a new model. its worth a few tens of millions. its just like a newspaper, but radically different. its more sensational. more content rich.

the new buzzwords are "aggregation" and "curation". for content. and it will change the way the media food chain works. the implications of it all are quite staggering and still waiting to be worked out. three very good writers/thinkers on this seem to be Jarvis, Doctorow, and Keene. jarvis is optimistic. doctorow is kind of a nihilist, very entertaining, a kicker-in-the-shins-or-stomache. "forget about trying to find a new model that pays. there is none."  its great & very apropos that hes a part time science fiction writer. Keene is the cranky, bitter curmudgeon. a one-time music critic whose apple cart got turned upside down by p2p.

Jeff Jarvis: A Scenario for the Future of News
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/a-scenario-for-the-future_b_147086.html

cory doctorow, media-morphosis, 2/2009
http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=171555&

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (Paperback)
http://www.amazon.com/Content-Selected-Technology-Creativity-Copyright/dp/1892391813/

The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (Paperback), Andrew Keene
http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Amateur-MySpace-user-generated-destroying/dp/0385520816/

I think all these guys have a small glimpse of the future, or a "piece of the elephant" as the old parable about the blind men goes.

my favorite scenario is "curation" which I think there is still an opening for. ie, as something close to the future of online content. curation of posts by civilians by editors. very much like what open salon is doing, except to cultivate/stroke the winning writers more with fees and prizes and editors. my current suggestions to open salon:

- introduce an editor/writer mentorship. an editor agrees to cultivate a writer & they share revenue.

- promote longtime writers in various ways. figure out a way to pay small fees.

- how about an easy way to plug in google adsense and get revenue?

anyway, the bottom line is, it took about a century to adjust to the invention of the printing press, and the web is only about 2 decades old if you count the beginning of Tim Berner Lee's system. we are going to see a lot more mediamorphosis, its all in flux. ultimately it will be better, more real, more variegated, more vivid, for the "consumer", to use that dried up, soulless corporate word. still looking for a better one.