Published on Thursday, September 10 2009
How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)
I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:
Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that
Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.
But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?
In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?
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Published on Wednesday, September 2 2009
Pardon the brief, self-promotional nature of this post, but I just realized if I don’t get one up soon I’m going to miss the deadline – voting for SXSW Interactive 2010 ends this Friday!
Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license
I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.
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Published on Wednesday, June 17 2009
One of the panels I proposed for SXSW Interactive 2009 was on the intersection of open source and design:
Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.
The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.
I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:
In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.
Extended Content at SXSW Interactive
(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).
It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.
Published on Monday, May 18 2009
I’m a big fan and subscriber of Paste, an independent U.S.-based monthly (now shifting closer to bi-monthly, with every other issue being a single-topic special edition) magazine focused on music, film, and books, with a passionate spirit.
Currently, however, they are running a Campaign to Save Paste, soliciting donations to offset operating losses. What does the need for such campaign tell us about the future of online publishing?
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Published on Thursday, May 7 2009
The spring of 2009 has been a difficult one for publishers – newspapers especially – in the U.S., with many sizable metropolitan papers moving to online only, closing, or facing the possibility of closing. It’s lead many to wonder (again) what the future holds for publishers – whose value has arguably been derived from information scarcity – in the age of information ubiquity.
What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?
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