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Links for February 27th

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  • Ethan Zuckerman — Searching for common ground with Andrew Keen: Zuckerman wants to ask Andrew Keen, the Cult of the Amateur provocateur, a pointed question:

    I planned to ask Keen when he’d become worth listening to. He argues that we should listen to experts, not to amateurs… but this is his first book. Did he become an expert in a single moment of enlightenment? Or when the check from the publisher cleared? If it wasn’t a quantum process, was there a moment as a very good amateur where he was suddently worth listening to? And if so, doesn’t that mean that there could be, theoretically, out there on the citizen-generated internet, someone else worth his time to listen to?

  • JOHO: is the Web different?: David Weinberger divides us all into Web utopians, dystopians and realists. An argument of great clarity.

New blogs of note

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  • Kevin Kelly appears to be blogging, and, unsurprisingly, in just a few posts he’s providing considerable food for thought. In this post, he describes his (successful) effort at creating a sort of desktop memento mori:

    I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

  • David Edelstein, my favorite film critic (I’m biased, as we’re old friends and former colleagues), has begun a blog called The Projectionist for New York magazine’s Web site:

    Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

    And who knows where this might lead? Movies connect with us on an unconscious level, and blogging is a pipeline to the id.

  • Finally, Bill Wyman, who I worked with for many years at Salon, has a fine new blog on the entertainment industry — with a heavy emphasis on music — at Hitsville.

Links for July 6th

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  • What are we going to say about “Cult of the Amateur”?. Many-to-Many:
    Clay Shirky’s cogent and fair retort to Andrew Keen’s book:

    The hard question contained in Cult of the Amateur is “What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?” Our side has generally advocated having as few limits as possible (when we even admit that there are downsides), but we’ve been short on particular cases. It’s easy to tell the newspaper people to quit whining, because the writing has been on the wall since Brad Templeton founded Clarinet. It’s harder to say what we should be doing about the pro-ana kids, or the newly robust terror networks.

Links for June 20th

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  • John Heilemann, in New York, has written a grand, sharp profile of Steve Jobs on the threshold of the iPhone release. One notable footnote to the piece is that — great as it is — it is forced to do a little tapdancing around the obvious fact that Jobs would not talk to Heilemann (or, at the very least, Heilemann did not interview Jobs for this piece, though he extracts key quotes from Jobs’ onstage talks at the recent D conference).

    I may be a little hyper-aware of this because, almost a decade ago — as Jobs reassumed his post at the head of Apple — I, too, tried to write a definitive portrait of Jobs without having the chance to actually sit down and talk to him. Heilemann’s piece is, I think, the better of the two, and it’s also obviously a lot more timely. Nonetheless, mine still holds up pretty well.

  • PowerPoint turns 20: Lee Gomes has a good column in the Wall Street Journal (free this week at this address, later on available for subscribers here) focusing on the creators of Powerpoint — their pride in providing the world with a popular tool, and their misgivings at how it is so often misused:

    Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

    Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

    More at Robert Gaskins’ web site.

  • Essential reading: Julian Dibbell’s fascinating and touching New York Times Magazine piece about Chinese gold farmers (workers who perform drudgework in game worlds to earn game money that can be resold for real-world cash).
  • Also from the Times: in the wake of the “Sopranos” finale, Charles McGrath looks at the long tradition of in medias res endings, a topic in which I have an abiding personal interest.

[tags]steve jobs, john heilemann, lee gomes, powerpoint, robert gaskins, julian dibbell, chinese gold farming, charles mcgrath[/tags]