Heavy clicks, man
Posted: Friday, February 16, 2007 3:22 PM by Will Femia
Here are the corresponding "heavy" links to go with yesterday's light links. You'll see why they took me a little extra time to digest.
Is it worth being wise? This is a really long essay on the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
By the way, did you ever get around to reading that Commuter Click from the other day? It explains that emphasizing hard work in kids is better than attributing their successes to being smart, which they over-internalize. It's really interesting research and I can't help extrapolate to a national metaphor. How is a country that thinks it's blessed with innate gifts different from a country that values work ethic? Actually, the word I hear associated most with that context is "entitlement."
What? Huh? Illinois Bill to Ban Social Software - I thought this was going to be one of those situations where they ban something without knowing what they're doing and it ends up essentially banning other things unintentionally. Nope. This is an actual ban on social networks. "The Social Networking Web site Prohibition Act."
"Let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players."
Speaking of online video: Report: Newspaper Web Sites Dominated Local Streaming Video Advertising - The decimating impact that free Craigslist advertising (and also eBay) has had on newspaper classifieds had (and has) people wailing about the death of local newspapers, so it's particularly gratifying to read stories about the industry defying their own obituary and adapting to the new medium. I remain optimistic that with the incorporation of citizen journalism, local bloggers and enthusiasm for hyperlocal relevance, not to mention the vast array of local tools made possible by the web, local news(papers) will actually enjoy a new robustness. (And by the way, hang around my cube long enough and you'll hear me grumble that the Internet isn't just a medium, it's all media. Whether it's newspapers or radio doing video, ultimately everyone has to learn how to do everything.)
Speaking of threats to traditional media, I haven't read anyone pointing out the significance of the fact that some mainstream stars are realizing they can strike out on their own and do quite well.
Speaking of doing well with a Web site, Selling Your Blog: What Are Blog Buyers Looking For? Includes some examples with actual numbers, which is nice, and mostly lists the ways to assess or demonstrate a blog's value through reach and traffic.
Speaking of selling blogs, On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry - This is about turning your site into a business. It's really over the head of most of us, certainly me, but it's pretty fascinating insight on young millionaire Web entrepreneurs and how they think. "At some point, you decide 'OK, I need someone else to run this thing, but I don't really trust anyone to do it but people like me.'"
P.S. See that mention of Slide? I'm going to play with that this weekend for my baby's blog. I'm not liking Picasa because it tries to make me use too many tools I don't need. This looks like it may be my answer. (And my cube neighbor Jen says she uses it on her MySpace page.)
Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database - In all of my enthusiasm for Pipes I hadn't considered the Web-as-database perspective, which is integral to a lot of thinking about the next evolution of the Internet. This piece doesn't go too far with Web 3.0 declarations but the idea is that instead of being a destination, the Web is a database that feeds smarter tools.
Speaking of paradigms for the new Web, Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others... - A lot of this blog entry is about private beta companies that we can't play with so I can't be bothered to care. But what's more significant is to recognize the terms being used to distinguish the various sites from each other. It talks a lot about the Semantic Web, which again refers to that idea of Web as database, also natural language search, which will soon enable us to search the way we speak instead of with keywords. And there's the umbrella term of "the Intelligent Web" which further builds on the idea that Web content will carry extra (meta) data to help tools understand what it is, and the tools themselves will have artificial intelligence properties that will further aid in their understanding of what the Web contains.
What else is worth noting is the explanation of purpose: "The key realization behind all this recent interest in semantics is that keyword search and traditional content and data representations are declining in productivity." I've heard this problem expressed three separate times this week (though expressed more bluntly as, "There's too much crap online.").
Josh Marshall on lessons learned from the lead-up to the Iraq war:
"One reason there was too little scrutiny of even the least controversial of the White House's claims is that a climate was created in which it was viewed as untoward, irrational or simply naive to critically pick apart the details of these claims as long as it was clear that the alleged bad guys were bad guys.
Why focus on the minutiae of the details as long as the big picture is clear? Why be a nitpicker when the people in question are such bad guys? These were the unstated terms of the debate."
If the name of the game with Iran is scrutinizing the details, this can make for some grueling reading, but really, can there be any other way? In that vein I also clicked:
