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After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online?

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The demise of Times Select (see previous post) has served as a milestone moment for the continuing debate over the future of news online. Kara Swisher says it’s inevitable now that her paper, the Wall Street Journal, will follow the Times and tear down its pay gate. Jay Rosen offers a good overview of the discussion. His conclusion is optimistic:

I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. “Conversation” is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea…. Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users. It means link rot cut to zero, playing for the long haul in Web memory and more blogs because they are Web-sticky.

If you read me here you know I agree. But of course there’s a “but.” And the “but” is all about money. The “but” is something that many of the believers in the bloggy future of news don’t always confront head on.

When you accept that the future for news on the Web is open and does not include much subscription revenue, you also have to accept that your revenue online isn’t going to match your old revenue; it won’t support as many full-time staff. Maybe it will improve steadily, but I don’t think it will ever reach the equivalent of print.

This is basic economics: in most cities, newspapers were monopolies or near-monopolies on paper for the last few decades. They’ll never be monopolies online. Or maybe a very small number (2 or 3) newspapers will become near-monopolies online by establishing their brand and authority — surviving into the Web age while the rest of their peers die off, as the Web replicates for the entire U.S. the same process of consolidation that happened, city by city, in the second half of the 20th century.

I write this with some experience from the trenches at Salon, where we had what I would consider hands-on, ahead-of-the-curve experience in trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenue. For all Salon’s quality and achievements, that has always been an uphill fight.

Institutions like the Times will face the battle with all sorts of resources Salon lacked. Still: the near-monopoly newspaper always had subscription revenue, display ad revenue and classified revenue to bank on. Google ads can’t match that today, and probably not for a long, long time. Display ads placed on pages readers find through Google are better. But right now, all of the online advertising an open newspaper Web site can garner is at best icing on the old three-layer cake. If that’s all you need, great. But each of those three old revenue streams has already started to dwindle, and if you take the long view and accept that they’re all likely to vanish eventually, then you face inevitable shrinkage.

None of this is any argument for simply behaving as if the Web weren’t here and rolling up a drawbridge against change. It is instead an exhortation for both sides of the whither-journalism debate — the blogosphere and citizen’s journalism believers, and the old-school newsroom brigade — to come to terms with the bottom line of the journalism business today.

We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don’t know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don’t have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.

Given all this, I think it’s important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It’s understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.

If their profession has a future — and of course it does — the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.

My Guardian piece on blog history

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This morning the Guardian published an op-ed I wrote following up on my post a while back, “There is no “first blogger.’ “ Its slightly verbose title is The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against. It was fun to expand on the argument and offer my own case for the long-term significance of blogging after a decade (or so).

It was also interesting to reread the piece (which I wrote a couple of weeks ago) after my post last night about corrections in the Times archive:

This confrontation between newspaper and blogosphere could easily leave you exasperated at both the Wall Street Journal’s sloppiness and the bloggers’ occasional self-righteousness. But as you rolled your eyes, you might miss the dust-up’s most interesting angle: the flurry of blogged retorts to the paper produced an accurate record of the facts around blogging’s rise. Bloggers aren’t any better than Johnny Deadline at getting facts right the first time around, but they’re a lot more efficient at correcting their own, and everyone else’s, goofs.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Jack Shafer pooh-poohs the Clark Hoyt public editor column about fixing the Times archives. Shafer thinks Hoyt’s specific examples are weak and that people who are aggrieved over errors in old Times stories should just combat the bad information by building their own Web sites.

I think this dismissal reflects head-in-the-sand thinking on Shafer’s part. It’s great that the Web lets people go out and publish their own retorts, but that doesn’t let newspapers off the hook. Professional journalists have no idea how frustrating and infuriating it can be to try to get a newspaper to fix a mistake. Even today, typically, the response from most newsrooms is defensive and the likelihood of obtaining satisfaction much smaller than it should be. As journalists, ourselves, when we face such problems we know how to pull the levers and we often get special, collegial treatment.

If the Times is capitalizing on its archives, it ought to take more responsibility for the new currency it has granted to old stories (and their errors). Shafer’s attitude is that people who are hurt by these old stories should go out and fix the problem themselves. I’d do that, if I were in their shoes, but I’ve been a journalist all my life. I don’t think the Times can take such a cavalier stance. Because in the end, if the paper tells its subjects that it’s their responsibility to establish an accurate public record, people will start wondering why they need the paper’s version of the record at all.

LATE UPDATE: JD Lasica’s post reminds me of the piece he did for my Salon Technology section back in 1998 titled The Net Never Forgets. These aren’t new problems; they’re just new for the Times — and it has, well, a longer tail of old issues to resolve.
[tags]guardian, blog history, jack shafer, new york times, corrections, errors, journalism[/tags]

Wanted: “test-drive” option for RSS feeds

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I love the convenience of RSS, but one of the problems of life inside the feed reader is that once you find a few dozen feeds you want to follow, the cost of adding a new feed becomes too high. When you find a site you like, you think, “Gee, I want to subscribe — but do I really want to add another feed? I can’t keep up with the ones I have!” (I know that the casual “River of News” approach, where you just let the stuff stream by you, would mean no guilt over not keeping up, but I haven’t achieved that level of Taoism detachment yet.) So over time we stop adding new feeds to our RSS diet. This perpetuates the “first-mover advantage” and makes it harder for newcomers to gain subscribers. (They still can, and do, of course.)

Here, as I mentioned in my BarCamp post, is my idea for a feature that RSS readers should but don’t (as far as I know) have: a sort of “New Feed Probation” or “Test Drive” zone. New feeds you subscribe to are automatically placed here (unless you deliberately put them somewhere else). They remain here for a preset time period (a week, a month, whatever you choose). At the end of that period, your reader flags the feed for you, tells you how much you’ve read it, and asks whether you want to keep it or not. You can see whether you actually ended up reading much of it during the “trial period,” and make an informed choice.

Sure, you could do all this yourself, manually. (I do, sometimes!) But wouldn’t it be nice if the reader helped you with this clerical task — and, in the process, encouraged you to explore new information sources and blogs?
[tags]rss, feed readers[/tags]

Skube vs. Marshall and the LA Times’ editorial kabuki

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If you’re going to write a cranky op-ed complaining that bloggers aren’t fit to shine real reporters’ shoes, as a journalism prof named Michael Skube did recently in the LA Times, and then you cite Josh Marshall as one of your examples of these failures to pound the pavement, you shouldn’t be surprised if people snort in derision. Love it or hate it (I love it), Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is the model of a muckraking blog; it regularly breaks stories.

But wait, this gets more ridiculous. Marshall emailed Skube, who told him that he didn’t include Marshall (or any of the other blogger examples) in the piece; some editor inserted that sentence. “Perhaps I’m naive,” Marshall wrote. “But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.”

Now Jay Rosen has written a blistering retort to Skube’s piece, complete with a crowdsourced litany of examples of blogging-driven reporting. And the LA Times has posted an editor’s note about the matter Marshall raised.

Ah, you figure, the paper decided to set the record straight. Think again. The editor’s note is entirely devoted to presenting a semi-mea-culpa note from Skube: “An editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.”

So, before, Skube had told Marshall that “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site…Your name was inserted late by an editor.” Now, he’s saying exactly the same thing, only he’s also admitting that he approved of the change even though he didn’t really know if it was true. And the paper is saying, “See? The writer agreed to the change! So there’s no problem!”

The LA Times editorial page editor seems to think that this comic routine closes the case. Sorry. Both the paper and the professor now look bad. The editor’s note tells readers that the paper cares more about proving its rectitude in the relatively arcane question of whether the editor had checked with Skube before inserting Marshall’s name than it cares about actually providing its readers with an accurate description of Marshall’s blog as one that does or does not do original reporting.

It’s bad enough for a newspaper to have made this silly error; but everyone makes errors. The damning behavior is the refusal to admit the mistake; the game of finger-pointing; the hiding behind the gears of process; and the institutional facade that says, “Something went awry here but we’ll never come clean because our dignity is more important than the truth.”

Ironically, the LA Times seems to think it’s OK to not correct the piece because, hey, it’s just an op-ed, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. But Skube’s complaint against blogs is built on the notion that opinion is inferior to “the patient fact-finding of reporters.” It’s unfortunate for him that an argument along the lines of “blogs such as Josh Marshall’s are inferior because they don’t do real reporting” is widely known to be false.

I will let Skube have the last word: “Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life… The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.”
[tags]blogging, josh marshall, michael skube, journalism, corrections, los angeles times[/tags]

Gnomedex and respect for the crowd

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There’s a debate going on about Gnomedex: Dave Winer posted a critique, Chris Pirillo responded.

My thoughts (I originally posted on the conference here): I don’t mind that Gnomedex mixed up politics and technology. Heck, I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades now. That’s good. By assuming that this is the root of people’s beef, Pirillo lets himself off the hook a little too easily: “We were just taking risks, don’t you want that?”

My problem with Robert Steele‘s keynote (and some of the other presentations) was a different one: I’ve got no issue with the extremity or outrageousness of Steele’s positions and statements. Bring on the controversy! I just thought he was disrespectful of the crowd.

In my years as a theater critic, covering night after night of often under-funded and under-attended underground and avant-garde performances, I was always ready to give anyone a break as a long as it was clear that they’d had something they were trying to express, and they’d put an effort into trying to express it. What got my dander up was watching shows where the creators had plainly failed to try — they hadn’t worked at it, they’d just thrown something together.

When you get on stage, you’re commanding some public time. It’s a precious and valuable resource. You owe it to the people who come to try to use it well. I’ve begun some regular public speaking this year — once or twice a month, I come to some group or company and talk about the topic of my book — and invariably, I spend a day or two in advance reviewing my talk, customizing it for the particular crowd, updating it with new material. I owe that to the people who are giving me their time.

Steele? He raced through his slide deck like someone with an ADD seizure, flipping forward and back through dense, unreadable slides like someone whose keyboard was gummed up with ketchup. At first I thought it was a comedy routine. Then I got it: he hadn’t prepared. He was doing his preparation live, in front of us, deciding what he was going to talk about, and in what order. So instead of provoking us with his ideas we ended up exasperated by his incoherence. If he’d taken his hour to explore, in depth, any one of the stream of controversial pronouncements he was spewing, it might have been fascinating. Instead, it was a bit of an insult.

As for Michael Linton, another controversial speaker who drew criticism with his introduction to “open money,” I felt he had more substance than Steele. But he, too, failed to introduce his material in an accessible way, and missed an opportunity to win support from a crowd of unconventional and open-minded tech enthusiasts because he couldn’t even begin to communicate his idea clearly. Linton needs to become as effective an evangelist for open money as Guy Kawasaki (who also spoke at Gnomedex) is for…Guy Kawasaki. Then maybe we’ll have a chance to figure out whether we like his ideas or not.

I haven’t been to previous Gnomedexes so I can’t compare this one to its predecessors. Overall I still thought it was better than many other conferences I’ve been to, but maybe it was a let-down to some alumni. Either way, Gnomedex is no more exempt from the laws of public speaking than any other conference: If a keynote speaker can’t be bothered to prepare a cogent talk, the audience has a right to its disgruntlement.
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007[/tags]

Derek Miller at Gnomedex

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Before Gnomedex recedes too far, I wanted to post about what was by far the standout experience of the conference for me and, I imagine, many others present.

Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger who lives in Vancouver. I encountered his writing at Penmachine several years ago the way bloggers often discover one another — he’d linked to a post of mine, I saw the referrer, I checked his site out and liked it. I’ve followed Miller’s blog sporadically over the years but hadn’t read it in a good while, and so I missed his news earlier this year: he’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Since then he has written with honesty and openness about his ordeal. He’s using his blog at once to keep his community of friends and relatives up to date and to give a wider audience a little window onto the nature of this experience, which in our culture frequently gets hidden from view.

Apparently he’d been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he’s still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn’t in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it’s been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-conferencing hiccups (a few stuttering images and such), it was an electrifying talk.

This wasn’t about peddling a new product or handicapping startups or any of the usual conference fodder. It was a moment for everyone present to think about mortality, strength in the face of adversity, and the ways that resourceful people find to forge strong human connections with our little technological tools.

(I haven’t been able to find a posted video of the event, but if I do, or if someone posts a link in comments, I’ll add it!)
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, derek miller[/tags]

Gnomedex report: Friday

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Gnomedex is a friendly, human-scale conference of early-adopter geeks. When Jason Calacanis asked the crowd how many people were on the Web back in 1994 or 1995, four out of five hands went up. The event’s marketing tagline is “The Blogosphere’s Conference,” but of course this is only one slice of one blogosphere (there was, for instance, almost no overlap with this other blogosphere).

The sessions have been a wildly mixed bag. Things got off to a rocky start with the keynote by Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer turned crackpot libertarian who delivered a scattershot rant whose agenda was so vast that it was no agenda at all. For instance, Steele simultaneously advocated the “restoration” of the U.S. constitution (through, among other things, the impeachment of Dick Cheney) and the abolition of the U.S. constitution (via a new constitutional convention).

Steele believes that “central banking is an evil cancer,” but he could not make the effort to explain why. He raced flippantly through his own slides, showing a complete disrespect for the crowd (if he couldn’t take the time to prepare a presentation, why should we take the time to listen?). Among Steele’s positions: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal; the federal government is “going away”; wikipedia is for “morons” but Amazon.com will become the hub for a new global mind; we can attain world peace through “open everything” — including “open carry” of guns. There was something here for anyone to agree with, something else for anyone to disagree with, and in the end nothing of substance.

Far more valuable were Darren Barefoot‘s exploration of the relative value of different forms of digital do-good-ism and Ronni Bennett‘s presentation on aging and the Web (sites need to do a better job of making themselves accessible to the elderly). Vanessa Fox led a thoughtful discussion about the line between public and private information in a blog-based universe.

The day closed with Calacanis. His title slide read, “The Internet’s environmental crisis: How the Internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters — and how we can stop them.” Calacanis pines for the early days of the Web, before the SEO spammers got involved. But the talk was really a pitch for his new “human-powered” search company, Mahalo (which I wrote about here). Dave Winer called him out from the back row, declaring that the talk itself was “conference spam.”

I just thought there was something naive and/or disingenuous about the idea that Mahalo is a blow against spam. There are many classes of spam-related pollution of today’s Net — e-mail spam, comment spam, spam blogs — and of them all, actual spamming of search results is probably the least pressing. Google still does a pretty good job. The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.

Mahalo is ad-free today, but sooner or later it will begin running search advertising. already runs Google text link ads, and one imagines it will push that more aggressively over time. (If the service succeeds in drawing big numbers, the pressure will be on to “monetize” the traffic; somebody has to pay all those “humans.”) Calacanis has an editorial background and promises clear labeling of all ads. That’s great. But Google’s ads are clearly labeled and separated from the search results, too. Having editors is a fine thing but it is no more a guarantee of incorruptibility than a good algorithm.

UPDATE: Darren Barefoot posted the full text of his talk. It’s an entertaining and enlightening walk through the comparative social value of many of the different kinds of volunteer activities and contributions people make on the Net to try to improve the world.
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, robert steele, jason calacanis, mahalo, darren barefoot, ronni bennett, vanessa fox[/tags]

Drudge, Rosenstiel, and the news media’s RIAA strategy

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At the end of an LA Times profile of Matt Drudge, journalism teacher and expert Tom Rosenstiel admits that Drudge has “come to play an important role”:

In a study of the online medium’s election-night performance in November, Rosenstiel says his group found that Drudge quickly sent his audience to the best destinations. “He had figured out in real time what we figured out more conclusively in hindsight,” Rosenstiel says.

When the balance of the Senate came down to the race in Virginia, for example, Drudge linked to the secretary of state’s office for updated tallies. The resulting flood of visitors crashed the government site.

Still, Rosenstiel says, “Drudge is vulnerable because he’s not producing anything. He’s just got muscle through his links to the work of others.”

One day, he says, news organizations are going to say, “We’re not going to give this stuff away to Drudge. We need to get some source of revenue to subsidize the creation of the content.”

Although Drudge has spent years taking aim at the mainstream media, Rosenstiel says, the truth is he needs their links for his livelihood.

“The dirty little secret about Drudge,” Rosenstiel says, “is that he’s a gateway for conventional journalism.”

I found this a fascinatingly muddled perspective. On the one hand, Rosenstiel says, Drudge is doing something better than the big newsrooms: figuring out where to send his visitors in real time. On the other hand, he’s vulnerable because all he’s doing is linking to other people. Rosenstiel describes a situation in which the big, established publications know that Drudge can send them firehose-level traffic; yet he somehow concludes that it’s Drudge who “needs” the media’s “links for his livelihood.” In fact, he’s just described the precise reverse. Then there’s the threat that the media might somehow stop “giving this stuff away” to Drudge. But nobody’s giving anything away to Drudge — when we publish on the Web, we hand the URL to everyone. How exactly would you boycott Drudge without also sequestering your work from the entire Web?

I’m no fan of Drudge; I’ll visit other filters, thank you. But vast swarms of people clearly like his approach. He had a first-mover advantage but he’s also found a formula that works. If many people are choosing Drudge as their “front page” over the front pages of newspaper sites and magazine sites and portals, the appropriate question to ask is, why? Why is a low-budget two-person operation satisfying some significant chunk of the public better than the formidable resources of the big newsrooms?

Rosenstiel, lost in the same “who stole our business model?” fog that is enveloping so many of his colleagues at the journalism schools and in the newsrooms, doesn’t even notice this question buried in his contradictory statements. Sure, these new Web news models erode the underlying media businesses that pay newsroom salaries. But the answer isn’t to ignore customers’ preferences and threaten to take your marbles home. That’s the RIAA strategy the music industry pursued, and look how successful it proved.

Editors and publishers need to start by accepting reality. Drudge’s neo-Walter Winchell act is simply one example of what the Web does to the news: It places new “front ends” on the mainstream news back-end — remixing new front pages to the pool of news the network aggregates. The algorithmic editing of sites like Memeorandum is another example. The communal editing of Digg is another. Here’s yet another, which, apparently, springs in part from the efforts of Michael “Burn Rate” Wolff. (See this piece in today’s Times about Wolff and Newser.) Despite that, I rather like it. (In fact, it’s where I found that Drudge profile in the first place.)

Why aren’t today’s newspaper editors conducting more of these experiments themselves? Why have they ceded the field to twentysomething entrepreneurs and marginal mavericks? Obviously, institutional inertia, turf-protection reflexes and disappearing-profit panic are all potent forces. On a deeper level, I think most editors just hate the idea that readers might prefer an alternative mix of their news product. They’d rather go down with their ships than accept a demotion of their authority.
[tags]matt drudge, newser, newspaper industry, tom rosenstiel[/tags]

Dave Winer: we need an open identity system

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On Sunday at Wordcamp, Dave Winer chatted entertainingly about “The past, present and future of Web publishing,” and pointed toward a handful of areas where the Web needs some hard work.

One is “future-proofing” our blogs and other content. If, as several speakers at Wordcamp argued, the stuff we’re writing today –even the most ephemeral stuff — is going to provide a window onto our era for future generations, what can we do to insure that it will survive, in a world where file formats and physical media have a short shelf-life? No answers here, but it’s a criticial question.

The other need Winer pointed to was an open identity system — a repository for simple account information that different Web services can rely on so you don’t have to leave your identity scattered across a billion different sites. A lot of people are talking about Facebook in these terms, but that seems hugely premature, since today Facebook’s idea of “openness” is strictly one-way (it’s the roach-motel approach — data can check into the Facebook world but it can’t leave very easily). There have been lots of long-simmering discussions and slowly bootstrapping formats in this area, including OpenID, but none has yet achieved critical mass.

Winer suggested that Twitter’s open API offers a potential path toward such a system, one that he’s already experimented with via his Twittergram project. On the one hand, he said, it would help if some company that already had a vast pool of registered users would open up their service; on the other hand, he noted, the big companies — Yahoo, Microsoft, Google — best positioned to do this are the least likely to make such a move.

I wonder, though, whether we might ultimately end up with the long-dreamed-of identity system as a by-product of some company’s loss in the big Web wars of the late 2000s. Think back a decade: the reason we have a great open-source browser platform is that Netscape got trounced in the commercial battle by Microsoft, and, with little left to lose, decided to release its code for free. It took more than half a decade after that for Firefox to emerge in its present form, but now it’s a central piece of any open Web infrastructure.

I think it’s possible that, over the next few years, if we end up with a social-web business battle that, say, Yahoo or even Microsoft feels that they can’t win under current rules, a big company might decide to make its identity system truly open — or somehow merge it with an already-evolving open-source approach to the problem. As Winer said, that could be a game-changing move — one, I’d argue, as significant as the release of the Netscape code. It won’t change things overnight, but in 5 or 10 years we might end up with the useful system Winer outlined.
[tags]dave winer, open identity, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]

Wordcamping

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I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of WordPress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.

One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.

Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”

I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.

Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on WordPress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (“burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)

What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)

In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]