As always, John Gilmore is funny, witty, and thought-provoking. Check out his latest interview at GrepLaw: John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs.
Category Archives: Online Life
We the Media
According to reviews I have read, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People should make a fascinating read. It’s now available as individual PDFs from its home page. I also used pdftk to combine those into a single large file (1MB). I’ve also then converted that into ASCII text, Plucker, and Palm DOC formats.
Here are some other reviews and discussions about We the Media:
- Smartmobs
- One of several articles at Dan Gillmor’s own blog
- Online HTML version
- Dvorak
Interview with Joe Trippi
There’s a interesting interview with Joe Trippi, former Dean campaign manager. He has a lot to say about collaboration, the power of the Internet, and how things are shifting from television to the ‘net.
Find A Job By Blogging?
One year ago, I noted the Quovix experiment to find candidates for a job by blogging. That experiment didn’t work out.
This year, they tried it again. This time Quovix CEO Marty Morrow reports Blogging beats Monster.com for job posting. He lists some benefits, which center around greater interaction and ability to learn about what makes potential employees tick (and the ability to learn what makes potential employers tick).
Meanwhile, Dan is going the other way: he’s blogging to find employment.
Maybe someone should write something to match up the Martys and the Dans… but then we already have monster.com, right?
Does the whole thing stop working if “everybody” starts doing it, because then you have all the riff-raff too? Or does that just make it better, because the social network is larger?
People Are Even More Willing To Click On Attachments
One word: ARRGH.
An AdSense Experiment
Dan was telling me a month or two ago that he’s using Google AdSense on his blog. Now that I’m actually doing this regularly, I figured I’d try it out, and while I’m at it, on a few parts of my other sites.
I’m highly curious what sort of ads it will dish up. There isn’t exactly a massive market for products related to developing Russian languages patches for FreeCiv, for instance. Initial results are not all that positive, but we’ll see. It may be a very short-lived experiment :-)
This is presently deployed here on The ChangeLog, on the directory indices on the HTML-to-Gopher gateway on quux.org, and the message pages of the list archives on lists.complete.org.
On the monetary side, running all this costs me about $600 per year. While I would be quite surprised if AdSense brings in that much, maybe it would at least bring in enough to pay for some more disk space for the Gopher server…
I’ll keep you updated.
Tapestry – Your Favourite Comics by RSS | dwlt.net
Found this today: Tapestry – Your Favourite Comics by RSS
Tapestry is a series of RSS feeds for online comics. They help you keep up to date from within your favourite news aggregator, especially if you happen to miss a few days. Works great with the liferea reader. (Tapestry folks — you should add that to your list.)
Community Doesn’t Generate Income?
I came across this article in PC World about the rising usage of Usenet. The story talks about reasons for this, and has this quote from Forrester Research: “Community just doesn’t generate much income.”
There is where I disagree. The Internet itself developed as a new tool for communication — for building communities, and helping those communities function (yes, even when it was ARPANet). And everwhere you look people are building communities online: Usenet is one prime example, but I can also site the proliferation of IM/IRC systems, web forums, communities surrounding prominent sites such as EBay, the entire Weblog phenomenon, and several others.
To Forrester I say: Check out this new thing called “The Internet.” You might find a whole new world — er, community — out there.
Online Collaboration Shapes Politics
David Weinberger has an interesting article about the blog for Presidential candidate Howard Dean. Apparently, “Dean’s campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability than the single mind of any political advisor.” David goes on to say “they’re viewing the Internet not as a cheap way to reach the masses but as a way to let us talk together.”
New way to find a job: Blogs
It looks like my former employer, Quovix (a great place to work, BTW) decided that they’d try something new and look for applicants by posting a blog entry.
I think the idea is great, especially if the people that read your blog are the same group that you want to hire. Of course, this might not be for everyone — I can imagine whole sectors out there that don’t have people that tend to be into blogging — or even Web surfing, for that matter.