The Rage Diaries

The most exhilarating 4:15 I've spent today

I watched "Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)" and came away loving all of our planet and most of humanity. It'll probably take the remainder of the afternoon to wipe the smile off my mug. Getting paid to wander around the planet and dance with random people in beautiful places seems like an awesome gig.

Hwæt! Behold the saga of the Googlemesh!

In the fall of 1995, I took a class on the technological history of communication. I didn't particularly care for the professor -- we got off to a bad start because he preferred his students to join his cult of personality, and I don't do culty -- but I did end up loving the subject, appreciating the insights he patiently guided us toward, and giving reluctant props for how he launched us there: with a reading of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Digital sharecropping it is

You will recall the June 2 post wherein I sputter over how sites like the Huffington Post don't compensate the majority of its writers? Get a load of this:

[Mayhill Fowler] is one of 2,500 people, from writers to academics to accountants, working with Off the Bus, a $200,000 venture launched by the Huffington Post and New Assignment, the brainchild of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. The idea is to unleash ordinary folks on the presidential campaign and give them a technology-powered megaphone.

"When you're in the bubble, you cover every story the same way," says Arianna Huffington, founder of the liberal Web site. "At Off the Bus, because they're not part of the professional gaggle, they can come up with their own views of what's happening, which may be different from what the conventional wisdom is saying."

They also have to be well off, since most are given technical support but little reimbursement, although a limited number receive stipends. With help from her lawyer husband, Fowler has been paying for her own cross-country travel, often chasing the Obama bus in a rental car and blogging in her pajamas in the middle of the night.

-- "Amateur Campaign Blogger Scoops the Pros," WaPo, June 9, 08

The Huffington Post generates anywhere between 1.4 and 4 million hits per month. and its annual revenue is "on pact" to increase from $4 mil in 2007 to $7.5 mil this year. ("Huffington Posts a Profit," Portfolio, Nov 07) And yet ... it doesn't pay its writers? It's not even funding this election coverage properly?

(Insert your own snarky comment here on why anyone should bother funding election coverage "properly" when bloggers like Fowler have ambushed the candidates without anything resembling "proper" disclosure.)

I get why people write blogs for free. Lord knows I've been doing it for nearly five years. But my site is fairly small potatoes. When you're talking about a site that rakes in millions of pageviews and millions of dollars, isn't it time to fairly compensate the people who added value to your venture?

Writers would love it if someone wrote them ... a check

Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco posits:

As for the notion of the self-actualized, non-wage-slave blogger? That's turned out to be, for many semi-famous bloggers, complete bullshit. Never mind all the hype about the select few blog stars, mostly in the tech realm, who are actually getting rich doing what they're doing; they've invariably fashioned unhealthy, obsessive-compulsive-disordered lifestyles for themselves way worse than anything any old-media slave drivers ever concocted. (See: GigaOm blogger Om Malik, heart attack victim at 41.)

Meanwhile, many pseudo-celebrity bloggers have finally figured out that they're as disposable -- as cog-in-a-wheel-ish -- as any of the cubicle-dwelling suckers populating old-media combines. That realization started, in part, when Gawker Media dismissed a blogger who didn't make her page-view quota. But just wait until the Huffington Post -- which still doesn't pay most of its bloggers -- tries to sell itself.

-- "From Media Darlings to Public Enemy #1 in Five Years of Less," June 1, 08

I've written on group weblogs for love of the blog, but man, oh, man, at some point you've got to stop being sentimental and start taking a hard look at what your product is worth. I'm a little surprised that the phrase "digital sharecropping" hasn't entered the lexicon of bloggers yet.

So cute, I can't stand it

Check out this link -- professional photographers recreating children's drawings.

Want to send me your links?

Two commenters have noted that writing a comment with a lot of URLs in it is one fast way to get a comment tagged as spam and sent to the digital cornfield. That sucks for youall who are only trying to share your must-reads with the rest of us.

So here's the thing ... email me your daily reads and feeds and I'll re-post your choices in another entry. My email address is really pretty simple -- it's my firstname@mylastname.com, where you obviously sub in my first name (lisa) and my last (which is right in the address for this weblog).

Also, I wanted to share a few more regular reads with you:

• Get Off the Internet -- Reporting on the occasional insanity that grips messageboards and online watering holes.
• This Next -- Real people review the products they think everyone else ought to buy.
• Instructables -- Real people tell you how to do a wide variety of DIY projects.
• Minus -- This beautiful, painted comic strip is weird and whimsical and I'm only sorry I had to go back through my bookmarks file to find the URL.
• Magnum Photos -- Regular shots and interviews with photographers

So anyway, a few more regular reads. Now you can post small lists or just send me your recs and I'll pull them together in another post. And then our RSS readers can throw up a little white flag and surrender.

What do you read regularly online?

I ask because I want to shake up my routine surfing/RSS reading a bit.

Also, I want to read you. I know many of you blog regularly, but I don't know if I know all of your sites. So tell me what you write and what you like to read. I am always up for adding more must-reads to my feeds.

My current blogs-on-RSS list after the jump ...

Ah, the little flaw in the aggregation strategy

If aggregating is becoming the best way to make money from content, who's going to undertake the costly business of creating that content?

[...]

[Michael] Wolff argues that the wealth of content on the web from both professionals and the legions of bloggers and other formerly-known-as-amateurs effectively is creating a golden age for content. "I'm tired of that New York Times argument that only the following kind of people create quality content. The range out there is remarkable ... and it's cost-free."

-- "It's Web 3.0 And Someone Else's Content Is King," Advertising Age, Apr 14, 08

I think there will always be a need for reporters and editors. I am sure people can passionately follow a subject and become self-made beat reporters/experts on it ... but I am not sure that everything that needs to be covered will attract the interest of driven, intellectually honest, selfless folks who will provide ace coverage for free. Sometimes, you have to pay people so they'll do the hard or boring work of paying attention for you.

Or is that too cynical?

Shine on, crazy website

Do you gravitate toward online portals targeted to the ladyfolks?

Yahoo launched a portal for women aged 25-55 called Shine (no, it's not an April Fool's joke) with above-the-fold content like "Fancy Lingerie You Can Afford" and a "cheat sheet" of the day's news including

1. Al Gore launches a $300 million climate change campaign
2. Rich men behaving badly: how the super-rich just don't care
3. She's baa-aaaack: Kathie Lee Gifford to join the Today Show as host
4. Reports of March Madness affecting worker productivity are bogus
5. "The View" tackles racism, Whoopi declares " this is a racist country"

Can you spot a theme in these headlines? Other than "Hey, there's nothing there about the Treasury secretary's proposed overhaul of the Fed"?

Brandon Holley -- whom media types will recognize as a longtime ladymag editor -- writes of Shine:

[W]e wanted to avoid all of the buckets that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in. We didn’t want to be a site just for moms or just for single or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic. We wanted to create a smart, dynamic place for women to gather, get info, and connect with each other and the world around them.

I guess "women" isn't really a bucket then?

This new entry into the women's-portal business is interesting if only because current ladysites like Oxygen and iVillage are still casting about for cultural relevance or dominance:

NBC is hoping that [Bravo head Lauren Zalaznick] will devise some kind of Bravo-style leap for the Oxygen channel, where ratings have grown in the last year but still has a negligible profile among most viewers.

“Oxygen viewers have not settled into adult growth patterns,” Ms. Zalaznick said.

[...]

The iVillage franchise remains a trouble spot. Since NBC Universal paid — most analysts say overpaid — $600 million for the site in 2006, it has struggled to forge an identity within the company, even though iVillage’s online revenue has improved.

-- "Bravo's Chief Reaches Out to the Prosperous Urban Woman," NYT, Mar 31, 08

(This, by the way, swings from a lede that talks about how Bravo has become a magnet for the ladyviewers. I will admit, I do dig some of Bravo's programming, but I was unaware that my enjoyment of Shear Genius was in any way tied to my ovaries. I had thought it was tied to my enjoyment of watching skilled professionals compete in their chosen field. And also, I kept hoping Tabitha would ritualistically kill Tyson and eat his heart. What? Is that reason not gendered enough?)

Anyway -- do you find value in sites that are visibly and aggressively branded for one gender over another? Are men from Deadspin and women from Jezebel? And are you too tired to be outraged that once again, a "work and money" channel for women prominently features an idea to make a note holder from a pretty fork and tips on reducing your grocery bill, instead of a primer on recession-proofing your investing and and "everyday economics" tutorial on what hit your 401(k) will take if you drop out of an employer-matching program for a few years?

Fiscal fitness -- returning to the issues of time and money

How far will you go for a bargain?

My mom's grocery techniques involved a morning-long slalom course between no fewer than three different places on a good day. Mom's list didn't stick to the staples -- it had comparison pricing, an estimate of whether the savings would mitigate the gas used in driving around, plus coupons. Buy milk at Food Lion when it was cheaper at Shopper's Food Warehouse? Unthinkable!