All Things Digital

The topic of blogs and their authors and owners and what exactly defines their place on the ladder of the journalism industry never quite fully goes away. That’s because there’s always something or other that drives the commentariat to reflect on the present, compare it to the past, and try to forecast the future. Some of the latest noise to be made over the matter of “the great divide” has been sparked by Robert Scoble, a writer/videographer/journeyman for Fast Company magazine.

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I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news). I’m not the only one who likes the noise: Hutch Carpenter defends the noise too.

Last year I got a tour of the Wall Street Journal’s West Coast printing plant. They print 60,000 copies an hour. At the end of the tour the head pressman said “I’ve been reading this six hours before you did for more than 15 years now and it hasn’t helped yet.” Why? Cause the news isn’t where the action is: the high value bits are stuck in the noise.

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The fans of microblogging service Twitter, led by head cheerleader Robert Scoble, were all aflutter Monday with the sense that in speedily passing along word of this morning’s earthquake in China, they have participated in a news reporting revolution. Seems Scoble started getting and forwarding tweets from China even as the ground was still shaking, an entire minute or two before the USGS posted preliminary data on location and strength, and more minutes before the bulletins started moving on the news wires.

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Yahoo is a bleeding animal. Left lying, gasping for its breath, after a larger animal (Microsoft) struck and then walked away after it proved too difficult to eat.

How will Yahoo heal?

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Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10.

What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month. Why is that important? Because in airplanes there’s no Internet. Nothing to distract you. I find I can answer about 10x more email in a plane than I can on the ground when the Internet is there to distract me.

That taught me an important lesson.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

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I just switched all my home pages off of Techmeme to FriendFeed.

I find that Techmeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

On top of my FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.

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On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).

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Francine Hardaway is here and we’re talking about obsolete skills. Things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us. Here’s some we came up with. How many can you come up with?

1. Dialing a rotary phone.
2. Putting a needle on a vinyl record.
3. Changing tracks on an eight-track tape.

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The DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that Google, Plaxo–and the big surprise–Facebook will be participating in discussions on how users can “access their friends and media across all the applications, social-networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.” This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, especially given the flap over Robert Scoble scraping Facebook.

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The great revolutionary activist of our day, Robert Scoble, is battling for the ideal of data freedom with the evil forces of Facebook. At issue, writes Kara Swisher in a post titled “Free the Scoble 5,000!!,” is “how much control you should have over your own information online.” Mathew Ingram chimes in, saying “there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble.” Sounds black and white. Scoble: good. Facebook: evil. But it’s not quite that simple. When Scoble broke into Facebook’s databank, he opened a Pandora’s Box, and I would argue that neither he nor Facebook is in the right.

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Dec. 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down. Dave Winer first linked to me on Dec. 29 (sent me about 3,000 people, if I remember my stats right). The term “weblog” is 10 years old on Monday. So lots of blogging birthdays.

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