Scott Rosenberg's Open Salon Blog

Levy: “Say Everything” 2009’s “best technology-related business book”

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:11:19 -0500

Forgive this author a moment of own-horn-tooting.

It was always flattering and humbling to me to hear Dreaming in Code spoken of in the same breath as The Soul of a New Machine. With Say Everything I also had a model in mind: Hackers, Steven Levy’s groundbreaking and still-valuable account of the pioneering mavericks of hacker culture — which first taught me, back in the early ’80s, that there was a fascinating and important cultural story brewing in the computer rooms I’d haunted as a high-school student. In fact, we considered titling the book Bloggers, partly as homage to Levy’s work.

So you can imagine my delight at reading what Levy had to say about Say Everything in an article on the year’s notable technology books in Strategy and Business:

Say Everything is not only a delightful history of the form but a surprisingly broad account that touches on a number of major issues of the past decade, quietly making a case that blogs now play an indispensable role….

Rosenberg’s approach is to tell the stories of the storytellers, constructing his brief history of blogging by way of the bloggers themselves. He does this so well that it appears almost serendipitous that each aspect of his subject is almost perfectly embodied by the story of one or two individuals….

Rosenberg is a mensch, resisting cheap shots even when his subjects behave badly. But he is quick to puncture pretense, whether it comes from the self-importance of bloggers suddenly thrust into the public eye, or the snobbery of mainstream media dismissing citizen postings because their authors lack the training or credentials to participate in a national discussion…

Ironically, Rosenberg’s extended encomium of blogging also turns out to be an implicit defense of another allegedly endangered form: the book. Only by such an extended and well-organized presentation can Rosenberg both give us a comprehensive account of blogging and successfully argue for its importance. The pages of Say Everything provide not only an expertly curated burst of information, but also entertainment for several evenings. The book provides thought and provocation. It illuminates the deep economic challenges of the Internet. And, as is the case with blog postings, Rosenberg speaks with the clarity and wit of an authentic voice — even after the highly filtered, far-from-real-time processing of a major publisher. That’s why I think Say Everything is the best technology-related business book of the year.

OK, </blush>. And thanks!

A geeky problem with Mac scripting

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:11:47 -0500

Here’s what turns out to be the most intractable problem I’ve encountered in my move to OSX as my primary work platform:

For years I used a programmers’ text editor tool in Windows called Ultraedit. It worked great and allowed me to record macros. The most indispensible one, which I used constantly, was for automating the creation of HTML links. I would store the link-to URL in a clipboard, select some link text and start the macro. The macro would magically surround the link text with the proper HTML code to link it to the URL in the clipboard.

I achieved this by
(a) copying the link text to a second clipboard;
(b) typing the <a href=”

(c) pasting in the URL from the first clipboard;
(d) closing the tag with “>
(e) pasting the link text from clipboard #2;
(f) ending the link with </a>

It sounds kinda complicated but it worked beautifully, and Ultraedit’s macro recorder simply “got it.” I created the macro years ago, and its keyboard shortcut became hardwired in my memory.

Now I’m using TextWrangler and, alas, AppleScript doesn’t seem to get it at all. The AppleScript recorder seems to grab the actions at too specific a level — i.e., it doesn’t capture “switch to next clipboard” but records the specific clipboard number; it doesn’t capture “current active document” but records the specific document name that I happen to be using while I’m recording the script.

I was gearing myself up to learn enough AppleScript to try to write the script (or edit a recorded script well enough to make it work). Then I discovered that, perhaps thanks to Snow Leopard upgrade, the entire AppleScript recorder in TextWrangler doesn’t seem to work at all. When I record a script and try to save it I get the following error message: (MacOS Error code: -4960). As far as I can tell, I can’t save any scripts at all, making any AppleScript solution to this problem seem hopeless.

I know, I know, if I had learned emacs years ago I wouldn’t have any of these problems. But I didn’t. I welcome any tips/suggestions! Is there a text-editor for Mac that will make my life easier? (I used to use the full version of BBEdit, and, back in those days, it wasn’t any easier to script than Textwrangler.) Is there some obvious solution I’m missing?

Miscellany of the moment

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:11:55 -0500

Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the different kinds of mistakes journalists can make? Do weigh in over there and help us sort out this epistemological puzzle!

Andrew Leonard had a fine take on the Duran Duran guy’s complaint that easy access to the musical past devalues the present and inhibits innovation:

But rather than worry about whether the Internet is exerting a baleful influence, I think we just need to make our peace with the fact that every new technology creates a different space for cultural practice. Duran Duran without cable television or a high-end production studio is simply unthinkable. Recording technologies enabled the commodification of musical performance on a mass basis. Networked computers have crippled the profitability of that commodification. The adventure is ongoing.

Perhaps the digitally-enabled overhang of the cultural production of previous generations is a heavy burden. But I guarantee you that those artists who do break free of its restrictions, and can come up with something interesting to say, will be easier to find and easier to enjoy than any pioneers of any previous era were.

Nick Carr’s is worth reading too:

Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

Carr seems a little bummed about that price, but I’m more sanguine: Our culture had swung way too far in the direction of artist worship anyway. Less fetishization of the purchased object and the personality who produced it is fine with me.

Megan Garber’s piece in CJR on the Pacific garbage patch story funded by Spot.us and appearing in the NYTimes sparked an extended debate in the small but vocal world of new-media journalism punditry. The framing of Garber’s piece, in particular the headline, positioned it as a critique of Spot.us for failing to “deliver” a New York Times piece of sufficient quality. But the body of the piece made the far more useful argument that the garbage-patch reporter, “Garbage Girl” Lindsey Hoshaw, shone far more brightly in the daily blog she produced than in the relatively conventional Times feature.

To me, it looks like Hoshaw gave the Times what it doubtless asked for in terms of fairly impersonal feature writing. The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — the blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.us model.

Hoshaw’s postmortem is worth reading in full, but this comment stands out:

And the most rewarding part of the Spot.us project was getting to meet some of the donors in person before I left, listening to their ideas, writing to them on my blog from the middle of the ocean and emailing them when the story came out to celebrate our success.

I had images of my readers’ faces in my mind while I was at sea and it kept me accountable. These were real people not some unimaginable group called “the public.” I knew their names and I’d met with some of them in person. They were tangible and I thought, “what would Alex think if he knew I blogged on behalf of the ship or that I wasn’t diligent about taking photos at every opportunity?”

(Full disclosure: I was one of many people who kicked in a small donation via Spot.us to fund the garbage story.)

The “millions of results are useless” myth

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:11:12 -0500

While we’re on the subject of the value of search…

Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s provision of millions of results means it’s doing a poor job of serving it’s users.

“I searched for ‘the real William Shakespeare,’ ” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I got five million results. That’s useless.”

We hear this one all the time — and it gets Google’s value precisely wrong. When Google came along in the late ’90s we already had search engines, like AltaVista, that provided millions of results. Google is the antidote to the millions-of-results problem. All of Google’s value — and the reason that Google originally rose to prominence — was that it solved this problem, and got columnists like me to rave about its value while it was still a tiny startup company.

Let’s do that “real William Shakespeare” search. Right now I actually get 15 million results. Who cares? Nobody ever looks past the first, or at most the second or third, page of results. And Google’s first page of results on this query is not bad at all. Many of the top links are amateur-created content, but most of them provide useful secondary links. As a starting point for Web research it’s a pretty good tool. If you fine-tune your query to “Shakespeare authorship debate” you do even better.

Yes, it’s true that the Google search box is less useful with generalized product and commercial searches (like “London hotels”), where the results are laden with ads and fought over by companies armed with SEO tactics. Google has all sorts of flaws. But it’s time to bury the old “millions” complaints. They’re meaningless. And Auletta’s willingness to trot them out doesn’t give me much hope for the value of his new book.

Why “junk traffic” isn’t so junky

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:11:48 -0500

I’ve been reading Ryan Chittum’s recent posts at Columbia Journalism Review about the whole Murdoch/WSJ “We’re seceding from Google” flap.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.