An Actual -Mechanical- Turk

I just had a completely random thought. This requires a bit of set up for most of my readers.

Mechanical Turk, farming and robotics, right? That's the concept.

 

I just saw that commercial above for GameStop, and it inspired a thought. The above scene really isn't that far off from the repetitive motions you go through in Ultima Online or  World of Warcraft in order to get ahead and get the gold or goal or whatever else is going on.

 

Similarly, robotic and botanical technology is sufficiently advanced that you could have a partially manned set of robotic hands that would do more or less everything required to grow, pick, and maintain most plants we use for food (like picking fruit, sowing seeds and such).

 

Mechanical Turk is a system that takes repetitive tasks that require some human intelligence, but I haven't seen it applied to much other than data processing. There are, as we know, web interfaces for robotic devices.

 

I was just at Toys 'R Us shopping the other day for my son, and off the shelf was just such a robotic device.  From your computer, as long as the robot was in range of an Internet capable wireless network, you could make it move around, pick stuff up, show you video of where it was, and make VoIP calls.

 

So when are we going to get a robotically controlled farm in which for .05 per plum picked, users just log on to a web interface and bring in the harvest? Workers aren’t displaced, just put behind a computer screen (and instead of “farming for gold,” they’ll be farming for real).  The technology is literally here right now.

 

Should I have just shut up and started a robo-farm myself?

Ethics and New Media

I think, sometimes, I'm ethical to a fault.

Take, for instance, this project I started working on putting together last night. It's collaborative, and if it prospers and succeeds, I stand to profit from it. I can't make money with this without the help of others.

The first four people I asked to help all unconditionally said "yes, they're on board" via IM. Their reply hit the screen almost as soon as my IM saying "I plan on sharing revenue" hit the screen.

In all four cases, that little devil that sits on my shoulder said "Now Mark, you're leaving money on the table. These people would've helped you for free."

Of course that's probably not altogether true.  I believe in offering payment, even when none is asked for, because when it's clear that it's not just a friendly arrangement, but a business one, there is a greater expectation of mutual performance.  Of course, as the guy paying the money, it always puts more pressure on me to come up with a supportive business plan and a solid cashflow.

I think it's the ethical thing, though.

I'm guessing, though, that even though these people are my friends and want to see me succeed, part of why they say yes is that they know I'm ethical 'to a fault,' and that I want to bring others up with me.

That, or all my friends just have no business sense. :-)

Either way, I appreciate my friends, and hope we all prosper together. You know who you are.

In other news, I'll be in Dallas tomorrow.  If you want to set up a business meeting or just a get together, ring me on my GrandCentral line (it's on the sidebar at rizzn.com).

/rizzn

Updates: Rizzn’s Link Blog

I spent the morning making significant updates to rizzn.com today. It started out as a slight problem I had with the ReadBurner widget (I had to take it down – there were some uncharacteristic issues with the load time, and I expect to have it back up once they’re addressed). But what started out as a minor update to the templates ended up with me working for five hours on the graphics, layout, and mechanics of the site.

Most of the changes were cosmetic:

• Sub-header graphics for all the sections. Link blog, blog posts, Mashable posts, community posts.
• Created a masthead style graphic. I decided to resurrect the “studio.rizzn” name. I thought about getting silly and resurrecting my “rizzo’s e-zine” name from this site in 1996, but I just couldn’t do it with a straight face.
• Created a Contact Me graphic. This site has been lacking information on ways to contact me for over a year. Since just about everyone and their mother’s PR agent now has my info, I don’t figure there’s any harm in adding it back to the site. I am, however, leaving my street address off for now.
• RSS Subscribe banner. I found these tight little grunge RSS icons, and figured I should use them.
• Minor table and CSS rendering issues. Things will generally look more balance now.

Some of the changes were behind the scenes:

• Enhanced Community Features. I made VERY prominent on the front page the last comments section. I want to build community here, and there will be further evidence of that down the road. For now, being prominently linked from the front page will be a good start, I hope.
• Joined Disqus Forums. The Disqus forum for the linkblog and the main blog were separate.  The linkblog threads have been pretty quiet so far, so I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to join them.  It certainly makes coding the JS on the various pages a lot easier.. if the linkblog becomes a hopping forum for discussion, I might separate them then. Until that point, it stays how it is.
• Better Comment Visibility. A side effect of joining the forums will be that you’ll see comment counts on EVERY page now.
• Added Native Widgetry. If you check out any post-level page, you’ll see I’ve added some Spry widgetry. It saves space, and packs in useless but interesting information in that blank space where the Readburner widget used to be.  Also, helps a bit with search engine discovery.

In general, the site should just look and feel a bit better from now on (or at least as good as a greyscale website can possibly feel).

Come browse around and let me know your thoughts on the new design.

Been a Little Distant Lately…

You may have noticed that I’ve been a little distant the last few days, if you’ve tried to raise me via IM or email.

I may continue to fly relatively under the radar for at least the next 10 days, for you see: I’m writing a book.

More accurately, Art Lindsey and I are collaboratively editing a book.  I’ve finally reached some logical ending points in this series of scribblings I’ve been working on. The topics and areas of focus are politics and technology, the online video business, and the Old/New Media dichotomy.

When I finally looked up and realized I said all I needed to say, I had put to paper about 300,000 words.

That, apparently, is a lot.

Art’s going to help me pare it down and focus the whole thing.  I’m not sure how long this is going to take, but I expect this to be the easier stage than the writing part. Putting all these thoughts down has taken more than a year to do, I’m hoping we can edit it in much less time.

Wish me luck.

Finished With My RSS Reorg

It’s 4:30 AM right now. I’m bushed.

A few days ago, I started on a quest to make myself more efficient with respect to my RSS reading.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve had far in excess of 800 feeds a day I go through, and I generally spend at least three hours a day specifically devoted to clearing my reads (with light reading throughout the rest of the work-day).

I’m at a point where I want to be a lot more productive in terms of my writing output, and the biggest expendable chunk of my workload was made up of reading.

Previously, I had my feeds categorized basically in order of preference (an “A-List”, a “B-List,” etc…). It was somewhat helpful, because it’s a system I’ve used over the last year and a half with very little modification (occasionally I’d move someone from one list to another).

The problem was that it was too broad and I couldn’t glance at my tags and tell you what was important that day. I couldn’t say “hey, this was a big day for online video,” or “lots of corporate news today.”

That’s all changed. The first thing I did was go through and cut out a lot of useless feeds and removed and archived some categories I no longer monitor.  That brought my feed count down to 384 from 853.

Then I created a very detailed and descriptive tagging structure so that I can simply scroll through not my feed list or even a headline list but scroll through my category list to see what’s going on.

We’ll see how this helps. I have a feeling this will have a big impact on my workflow, but I’ll give you an update in a week or so just to be sure.

#MotrinMoms are Out of Line

I took the weekend off from the computer, so I missed this affront against humanity while it was fresh, but you're likely already aware of the greatest insult against women since the denial of their suffrage. Yes, you guessed it, I'm talking about the #motrinmoms meme.

Clearly, even insinuating for a moment that wearing a baby sling is a fashion statement or anything less than murderous on your back is akin to criticising President-Elect Barack Obama.

Here's the thing, though... Motrin? They're not wrong. I've worn the damn things, and granted my son is a behemoth compared to most newborns (he weighed over nine pounds at birth), but the thing is the least comfortable thing in the world.

The biggest gripe doesn't seem to be that they're uncomfortable, as Motrin says, but that it's offensive to call a baby sling a fashion statement. I could argue with a couple hundred words how not just baby slings, but babies themselves are becoming fashion statements in today's culture...

... but pictures are worth a thousand words.

If that's not fashionable or trendhopping, I'm not sure what is.

I originally bought one because I thought it would make my life easier. I work from home, my wife worked out of the house towards the beginning of our son's life (though she later cut back). I figured it would be easy to hook the kid up to the sling and do my daily typing.

It wasn't. The sling was bulky and uncomfortable. The straps dug into my shoulder, and tended to be much easier to recline with the baby laying on my chest while I typed.

Here's my point - the baby sling isn't a function item - meaning it must be a fashion accessory.

Boy oh boy, truth hurts. Maybe that's why everyone's so offended? They've been called out?

The question then becomes - what does a company do when they find that a special interest group on the Social Webs gets offended over nothing?

The Religious Nature of the Singularity

Do you believe in the Singularity?

Do you know what it is?

Finding it's roots in the research and philosophies of Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, it's the idea that all technology is on a path to convergence, and the results of this entail machine sentience, infinite human life extension, and a theoretical future in which the difference between machine intelligence and human intelligence might be indistinguishable from one another.

It's a future I happen to believe in, and something that I think will take place in our lifetime.

That's why I keep an eye out for articles like the one I found today over at Gadget Lab today. The subject of the piece was a speech given by economist James Miller at the Singularity Summit a few weeks ago (an event I really wish I was able to attend - Mashable didn't wanna foot the bill on that indulgence, though).

James Miller's presentation had to do with not just the effect of the Singularity on the general economy (as something like that is almost impossible to predict with a fair degree of accuracy, it's so revolutionary in its nature), but the effect of the expectations of the Singularity.

“Long before there is a singularity, people will come to expect it,” Miller told attendees at the Singularity Summit in San Jose. “And it is very likely that could happen within 20 years.”

The belief that a vastly different future is near could change how people make choices in life, education, investment and retirement, says Miller. “People will become very fearful of death, save less and invest differently,” he says.

Most significant among their choices would be the emphasis on extending life, says Smith. “If you think there will be a machine-driven future then your top priority is to survive long enough to make it to the singularity,” he says.

That means people force Governments to increase its defense spending in a bid to ensure the greatest chance of survival.

“Believers will also want to spend more money to increase their chances of making it to the singularity with things such as safer cars and machines that make jobs such as construction safer,” he says.

This, in and of itself is logical extraction, and while it's worthy of a good ponder, what I found more interesting was some of the reaction in the comments and from the attendees. From one attendee:

Miller’s talk was among the most controversial at the conference. His financial advice especially had some of the attendees riled. “The framing of this discussion into believers and non-believers is ridiculous,” says Eric Acher, an associate with the Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Monashees capital who claims he walked out of the talk towards the end. "The discussion needs to be about the impact of technological progress on society."

And this, from one of the commentors:

Every year, the singularity is looking more like religion and less like science. It has its pope, its doctrine, its annual pilgrimage, its prophets and its prophecies. The coming super intelligent machine is its Messiah.

Decidely, you can take the boys and the girls out of religion but you can't take the religion out of them. hahaha...

Why it struck me personally is that when I was first studying singularity, I was reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil while dating a gal who was a member of the Jehovah's Witness. 

You'll Hafta Stick With Me On This, I Promise I'll Bring It Back Around From Religion
If you're not a member of the faith and haven't studied their beliefs very closely, you might not be sure exactly why they're not considered part of the main of Protestant beliefs. As I'm a fairly open-minded fellow, I took the time to meet with some folks from her congregation, attended a few 'meetings', and read a number of their religious texts to get a handle on what it is that they believe.

The chief differences in the JW faith the main of Christianity is that they're a works-based religion, and they don't believe in the Godhood of Christ (and thus discount the concept of the Trinity).

They're also a belief system that very heavily roots itself in end time theology. They have very specific beliefs on how they interpret the book of Revelations, and the timeline of the end-times is very ingrained in every JW member. 

For instance, they don't believe that those who are saved will ascend to heaven during the rapture, only a select 144,000 saints pre-selected for their exemplary duty, devotion and works. The rest of the saved will live on a Utopian Earth presided over by Jesus Christ. There will be no need to toil at the Earth for sustenance. 

The way it was described to me several times was that the only goal for those that wished to live on beyond the 1000 years Christ and the anointed reigned on Earth would be to live in obedience to him, but that the world would not be defined by the survivalist roots we exist under today.

Also, very interestingly, they believe that these days are upon us imminently, and that the spiritual battle that precedes this will not be visible to humanity, only the effects of the Armageddon.  In fact, this process began, as they say, in 1914 when Satan was cast from heaven. World War I was the physical symptom of this spiritual occurrence.

Here's Where it Got Interesting
I generally regarded these beliefs as interesting as a good science fiction novel. I was brought up Christian, but I'm one of the rare few in my particular buckle of the geographic Bible Belt who took the time to learn the why's of what I believe. As such, I came to the conclusion that there is a whole lot we're simply not meant to know, and vast extrapolations in vivid date and detail on what is exactly meant in Revelations is beyond the capability of mortal men.

Essentially, Matthew 25:12-13: "But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh."

What I did find interesting were the striking similarities between the JW's vision of Utopian Earth and the Kurzweilian view of the Singularity.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil talks about the emerging view of the human body as a machine rather than a chemical soup. This leads to the treatment of the body with more advanced machine like methods, such as Nanotechnology.  Meanwhile, the same type of technology is the future of machine building blocks, particularly of Moore's Law continues in perpetuity.

The net effect is that once vast portions (if not all) of the human body are run by nanobots, the idea that we'll need to be constantly fueled by digestion of bio matter through our gastro-intestinal systems becomes a thing of the past. In this Utopian future, virtually all matter could be broken down at the molecular level and re-assembled into the matter needed to deliver nutrients or repairs to the body and mind.

Thus, the need to exist in a world defined by survivalist codes ceases to exist. Fighting over physical territory or raw materials becomes pointless, since virtually all physical matter could be used for the purposes of sustenance.

Furthermore, the process of progressing towards this Singular existence has begun already. The very first steps to understanding and utilizing nanotechnology have long since begun. The progress towards this future takes place hidden in plain sight - we don't notice the technological leaps because we don't see the forest for the trees (could you have predicted the iPhone or The Cloud twenty or thirty years ago?  how about five years ago?).

Do I Have a Point?
I'm certainly not suggesting that the Jehovah's Witnesses are onto something. While their end-times beliefs may have some very striking similarities to Singularity theory, their culture and real world effects on their members are very negative, in my experience. 

Not to venture too far off into judgementalism, but my personal experiences in their "meetings" left me feeling very cold, almost as if they were attempting to brainwash me out of any sense of individualism. It certainly isn't an experience I'd recommend.

I think the best way to describe this odd correlative story is to relay a different story I picked up from SlashDot earlier today regarding the age of the Monty Python skit:

laejoh writes "Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' — which featured John Cleese — is some 1,600 years old. A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece. A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave. It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service. His companion replies: 'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!' The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD. Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969."

Once in a while, two trains of thought will arrive at the same station from different origination points. I think this is one of those times. It just so happens that these two origination points couldn't be further from one another, in my opinion.

I'll Admit It, I Liked Valleywag

Now that my linkblog is all exposed for the world to see here, it'd be pretty hard to deny that I'm a daily reader of Valleywag.  I'll admit it.  I enjoyed pretty much everything about it. Schadenfreude, voyeurism, whatever.  I was disappointed with the staff cuts and I'm not pleased with Boutin getting the boot.

Mostly what I hate about this is when I see posts like this one from CNET:

Valleywag is dead (or, at least, diminished), as CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. About time. I used to like Valleywag, but then it started trying to drive page views by breaking "news" about the sex trade in Silicon Valley, trying to foment controversy around Peter Thiel's personal life, and so on.

When it broke news, even scandalous news, it was good. When it didn't, well, it wasn't.

Contrast that with TechCrunch. TechCrunch routinely breaks real news. It covers startups that matter (and many that don't). It has become an hourly read for me, as it offers content that I don't easily find elsewhere.

Is it unique in this? No. CNET breaks a lot of technology news and has done some interesting work with blogs (pats himself on the back), plus it remains a must-visit product reviews site. Nobody does general business news better than The Wall Street Journal. The Register? It provides a great deal of exceptional content with a fantastic, biting tone.

Valleywag? Increasing snide, decreasing substance. Owen Thomas did much better work while he was at Business 2.0. I like his writing. I just think he had to pander to the wrong elements at Valleywag. Hopefully we'll get the best of Valleywag (and Thomas) as it's folded into Gawker.

It was written by Matt Asay, who I don't think I've ever read before, and based off this post I don't think I'll ever bother to read again. The whole thing revolves around undocumented allegation, and then is followed up by several "you betcha!" commentors below.

My usual reading habits had me read Valleywag as a sort of reward for getting things done during the day, but more recently, I've found that the blog had increased in value for me, with Nicholas Carlson and Owen Thomas doing long editorials talking about recession woes and media commentary.

The fact that Matt hasn't seen these shows that he's shooting from the hip, hasn't read Valleywag in a while, and isn't qualified to write what he wrote.

Regarding the thing that is happening, and that is VWag staff getting cut yet again and merged into Gawker, I'll repeat what I said during Denton's first round of cuts:

“This is an opportunity. There will be tightwads and there will be bold faithfuls. This next turn in our economy will show which business philosophies actually work. I'm not just saying this because I'll miss their writing, but Denton is making a mistake here. You double down on your sales efforts, not reduce the inventory quantity and quality to sell against. Gawker Media is insignificant when it comes to the size of all media sales. There's plenty of other smaller organizations and sliding bigger organizations for them to take the slack of.”

But then, I'm not Denton. Heck, I'm not even in charge of sales at Mashable.

Given the relative insignificance of any blog (let alone the major brand names of the tech space) in the grand scheme of all media, without a doubt I'd know in my mind that there's enough cash to sustain my business, and that the trick would be to approach sales in a way that would somehow make that happen.

Or, as I said recently in a related conversation in the comments at Mashable: "Selling is hard right now," should be words I never here from my sales guy.

Introducing: Rizzn's Link Blog

Over the weekend, I finally undertook a project I remember discussing with MG Seigler almost a year ago. I built a rudimentary platform to better showcase my linkblog.

Ever since I started doing the old Rizwords podcast I did with Art back in late 2006, the easiest way I found to put together shownotes rapidly was to utilize a combination of Google Reader and Tumblr. With the two combined, I would tag all the articles for the show that day in Reader with the tag "rizwords", which would then be picked up via RSS to a tumblog and displayed.

Of course, when I came online with Mashable, I started using Google Reader in a much bigger way, and the volume of articles I read on a daily basis provided me with a larger number of posts that I found interesting than I could conceivably write about. Those that I didn't write up but still wanted to share with my friends, I would share using the built-in function in reader, and then I syndicated that list via Magpie to my personal domain.

As I announced on Saturday, I think I've pretty much outgrown MagpieRSS.  It's been a great RSS library that's served me well over the years, but there's been a number of limitations with it that I just can't seem to work around lately, namely it's inability to read RSS feeds from FriendFeed and Google Reader Shared Items very well. 

So What Did I Use for This Version

I essentially used variations on the themes of what I've used in the past.  Magpie may have had limitations in what sorts of depths into feeds it would read, but that which it could read was very customizable.  

• The replacement I chose for it in this version was SimplePie, which does better interpretation of the texts, but reads a much more limited range of XML elements.
• Google Reader Shared Items was still the manner in which I generated the raw RSS / ATOM for the linkblog (a great utility made only better by the ability to add notations to each item).
• To do some minor text correction and clarification, I had to run the feed through Yahoo Pipes to clean up some of the XML element names.
• To allow for discussion (similar to what takes place over at FriendFeed), I implemented a version of Disqus.

After that, almost all the changes to the site I made were cosmetic. You can view them all by looking at the root domain at Rizzn.com, or on the blog pages and back pages, looking on the right hand column under the picture of me.

This Might Cause Controversy

I hope to grow the community here at Rizzn.  One of the things I got the most complaints about when I announced that I was leaving FriendFeed was that people would be unable to follow my linkblog.

Of course, anyone can plug in the RSS feed for my linkblog into Google Reader and follow along there (http://feeds.feedburner.com/rizznNewsFeed), but a lot of the community feel is gone at that point. This way, I'll be able to replicate some of that community feel back over here at Rizzn.com that I've had in the past versions of the site and that was present at FriendFeed.

The majority of my regular readers have Disqus, so their entries will show up on whatever lifestreaming services they choose to use, and I'll have a fair amount of control over what shows up and who can post (so that I won't have as much of a problem with drive-by griefers like I did over at FriendFeed).

Here's the controversial part: on the linkblog backpages, full texts of the blog posts exist (in most cases). More on that below

I've Taken a Measured Approach Here

In the past, I've used some fairly course words to talk about those who essentially steal others content without paying for it and seek to profit from it. In the most recent round of that discussion, I was told outright that I was stupid to seek to pay for content that I could get away with freely taking.  From Alexander (SquidLord) in that discussion:

You're a fool to pay for content AS LONG AS you can get it for free with no repercussions. At the present time, it looks like not only can you, you can do it and dance a happy jig while people shower you in golden wreaths.

While I'm not exactly aiming to be  in the same camp as Nick Halstead and the site Fav.or.it, I am taking a page from that (figuratively speaking of course).  I'm posting full blog posts that I didn't write (with a clear disclaimer saying I didn't write them), and soliciting comments below them.

What I'm doing that's different is that 

• I'm not keeping them on the site for any length of time.  Typically, I share enough items that the full blog posts will be pushed out of the RSS feed (where they are pulled from every time a page is viewed) within a maximum of two days.  
• Further, I do no PingShots, so the content here in those feeds are very unlikely to get indexed by any search engines.
•  Lastly, I do keep a link in every article to the original, so that those who would rather comment at the author's site can do so.
  

Bottom line, I'm not doing this for SEO juice, and I'm not looking to steal traffic from the original bloggers. I'm just looking to get conversations started in the context of site, my personal views, and my linkblog, and having the original text provides a much better diving board for starting those discussions.

Have I crossed over to the dark side?  Do you think it's a cool idea?  Would you have done things differently?  Let me know.  This is very experimental, and I'm looking to get feedback.

Personally, I like the idea, and the biggest driving factor behind me spending one of my Saturdays making it was to see how it would be received by the public. Linkblogging has always been good to me, and it's one of my favorite pasttimes on the Internet... making my site reflect what I do in that arena seems like the next logical step in creating an Internet locale that reflects me.

Obama is a Media Money Maker

Brian Maloney over at The Radio Equalizer was one of many bloggers on my reading lists today to talk about the rumor published by the New York Daily News regarding Fox News' new editorial policy concerning President-Elect Barack Obama.

Fox News boss Roger Ailes doesn't want to spoil Barack Obama's political honeymoon, we hear. A source says Ailes has told prime-time hosts Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren to lay off the President-elect - at least for a while. "We're not going to have any personal attacks on Obama," a network insider says. "The public has spoken - we must treat him with respect."

For those of you who are brainwashed by Jon Stewart and every liberal pundit on the Internet into thinking that Fox News is a bastion for conservative apologetics, this is your wake up call.

I have always said that Fox News could care less about political alignment. They, like every other Fox media property, are business units focused on filling a free market need to make the most money. Political agenda plays a part, but as any conservative that's been watching FNC for the last eight years will tell you, the station is less and less about politics, and more and more about sensationalism.

Whether it's round the clock coverage of the latest white girl to be kidnapped in the Caribbean or whatever local yokel is being chased by helicopters and the red'n'blues, there always seems to be some sort of action or intrigued packed drama going on.

Right now, politics is still high on the bestseller's list, so FNC is peddling... and they're peddling the leftist variety just like everyone else (and if you don't believe that other networks have an agenda, you should try watching MSNBC some time).

I was going to let this whole thing pass without so much as a comment until I got the stats back tonight on Tuesday's blog posts.  What I saw simply shocked me.

When Barack Obama went on UStream to give his acceptance speech, I offhandedly posted it up to Mashable just because it was the only news going on at the time, and I happened to have the URL handy. I was working on a longer editoral piece at the time and almost didn't post the speech at all since it's a little off topic for the blog.

Looking at the stats, it's amazing to me exactly how much interest it garnered, though. The traffic to just that one post accrued between 5x - 10x the normal traffic that even my most highly viewed and controversial editorials get. The traffic to that article accounted for 69% of the pageviews to new content for that day.

Even more astoundingly, it achieved this level of traffic without being Dugg or Buzz'd.

So yeah, this thing with Fox? It's a business decision. Their bias, whether it be conservative or sensational always has been a business decision.

My guess is that as this settles in with all news organizations of all types, you'll see a whole lot more glowing Obama related coverage.  I'll leave that to you in the comments to discuss whether or not you think this is healthy for America.

Get Off My (Virtual) Lawn!

Just another cynical observation today, but it seems that with the election out of the way, and all of us settling into a routine of living in the world of our current "Great Depression," it's time to trot out the tired old tropes of the social media punditry world. 

They're only trickling in now, but I'm starting to see the resurgence of the blog post on the "A-List" and "B-List" blogs that follows the format...

• Pick some well established and known aspect of social media or Web 2.0 that's a primary focus or recurring topic for the blog they're writing on..
• .. talk about how poorly it's monetized or harp on every single failure that company has had over the year(s)...
• .. and then somehow tie it into cynical overtones of how there's a culture of stupid with a trite quote mangle like "Dude, where's my business model?" or "Honey, I Shrunk the Payroll!"

I'm not naming names, but I'll be honest, there are very few people in my business that have earned the right to write articles like that. Most of the ones who tend to write these articles either live and participate in the Silicon Valley culture... 

You know what? Skip that thought. The irony is that these people don't realize that they absolutely require high levels of technology euphoria to continue in perpetuity if they want to keep collecting paychecks. The thing that they lazily work to undermine every day is what's responsible for their lifestyle.

That never seems to prevent them from jumping on the bandwagon every single time Steve Rubel puts up a blog post with the Kool-Aid guy in it, though.

As a total aside to the point of this blog post - did anyone ever stop to ask what the hell Steve was trying to alude to when he made that post? The title was "The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid." What does that mean?  Is it an allusion to cults? Like Jim Jones, drinking the Kool-Aid?  Is it saying that the Web 2.0 world is hick-ish or redneck-y (skunk drunk is a southern or rural colloquialism). 

Does Steve even know the answers to these questions? Everyone just started quoting it (including me) as if it made any sort of sense.

To try to bring it back to my original point, I think that form of "critical opinion piece" is the laziest form of editorial (and I know a little bit about lazy - and editorials). It's essentially setting up a straw man, something easy to knock down, but for the purpose of no greater cause. 

In debate, a straw man fallacy is typically used to prop up some sort of overarching point or position, but too often I see it used just as a way to sound like they're adding analysis to a story. 

"Oh look, YouTube is putting full length movies up but guess who forgot to set up a business model!"  And then comes the "Oh, when will Google start making money?"

Anyone who's ever,  I don't know, looked at a Google quarterly income report or even a traffic report on YouTube.com knows that the company is probably making more than any two or three other video purveyors on the net combined. Is it a perfect business model? No. Are they best utilizing their assets? Probably not.

But actual analysis is too hard for these people, so they just toss up a couple lines about how Web 2.0 is known for not having business models and call it a day.

This isn't me calling out insightful cynics like Steven Hodson, Sean Aune, Loren Feldman or even (on occasion) Drama 2.0. All of these folks either work in the actual trenches of this business or have the age and thus the perspective to make these sorts of calls. I'm talking about the pundits for which this bubble/bust cycle is their first rodeo, and the ones that don't seem to have any particular area of expertise yet still talk about all aspects of Web 2.0 as if they know everything.

It's annoying as hell. Heck, I know I'm wrong on occasion, and I know I annoy a lot of folks. My goal is generally to stick to criticizing things where I know what I'm talking about though - and I wish it were a rule more people stuck with. 

I'll put it another way, and then I'll stop banging this drum: I remember a time when the blogosphere's most highly read blogs and indie news sites were places where you could find accurate and informed information - stuff that put to shame the Old Media stuff. I mean, those of us doing this five or ten years ago would look at what would pass for tech news at the New York Times, CNN or on MSNBC and generally laugh our asses off.

These days, I'm even seeing local Dallas network TV and newspapers doing tech news that rivals in quality what shows up in parts of the supposedly "respected tech blogosphere."

That's something to think about, if you do this for a living.

James Smith and the IITW

If you've read this site for more than a year and a half (and let's be honest, there's probably only about six of you), then you know James Smith.

For those of you who don't know James, I consider him a brother from another mother. When I was a youngster, I used to ride my bike over to his house to hang out and chat about BBS's and Internet and other such malarky. I'm lucky to have called him my friend for over a decade and a half.

Usually, we work on projects together, but since my work at Mashable has consumed all waking hours of my life for the last year, we haven't had a chance to work on much together in a while, and as such, I was only vaguely familiar with his latest thing up until the other day.

His project, IITW, is finally seeing the light of day.  InfoWorld did a piece on it Tuesday. It's brilliant. It's a union for tech workers without all that "damn the man" sentiment going on.

Check out what InfoWorld said, or what I said about what InfoWorld said.

On Unity and Reconciliation

Look, I respect the fact that Barack Obama is president-elect now, and when he assumes office, I'll give him as much respect as the station demands.

It doesn't mean I have to like it that Obama won.

All that unity and healing that you guys keep saying needs to happen now? Calling me a sore loser isn't a great first step. Just because your guy won doesn't mean I'm drinking the kool-aid here.

The reference to cult-like behavior is intentional. I've never known the joy of "my guy" winning the office of the president, so maybe it's just sour grapes, but I've seen hundreds of reactions on the web in various places that make reference to tears of joy and other sorts of orgasmic sighs of relief.

If your expectations are set that high, you will be disappointed. At the end of the day, President-Elect Obama is still a politician. Politicians say what it takes to win office.

At any rate, I'll close with my tweet from when I saw the networks call the election for Obama: 

"If you thought I was annoying during the elections, just wait for the next four years. Be careful what you wish for!"

The way I see it, it's the least I can do. There are going to be an avalanche of people taking credit for Obama's win, tons of substance ascribed where there is none, and a lot of "in your face, Rizzn." 

(update: in fact, that's already started).

And I'll be annoying as ever as all the things I warned about inherent to Obama's tech policies come to pass over the next four years. I'm never averse to saying "see, I toldja so."