«
»

24 Nov

Posted November 24, 2006 by Dave Winer in Scripting News.

New feature in FeedLand. Timeline updates are more humane. 😄#

4 responses to this post.

  1. Posted by Jamie Parks on November 24, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    Listening to your conversation with Cecile was a great time, thanks for making it and sharing. Collaborate and Deliberate.

    If Life is a trial, our blogs will be the exhibits.

    Reply

  2. Posted by Ryan on November 26, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    Regarding your Evan Williams item yesterday, you’ve found a very real bug in news media.

    That is, we rarely publish early, high-profile stories about an entrepreneur’s first endeavour on the first go around — the one that almost always matters the most. How much coverage was there of Google before it launched, or in the first month, or in the first year? Ask the same question about Blogger or Mosaic or Napster or AOL or RSS or podcasting or Yahoo or Myspace.

    Then, compounding the error, the news media lavishes attention on the sophomore efforts of people once they’ve made a big name for themselves. It’s a more obvious story. It doesn’t require one to go out on a limb or understand a sector deeply. Follow the tail lights of a now-big name.

    This is such a common media meme it’s not even funny: “Can JOSH DOE do it again?”

    And copious ink is spilled for Loudcloud or Orkut or Zune or Newton or — remember this one? — Eazel.

    What’s incredible is that the big media companies keep not fixing this bug.

    They watched Red Herring fix it and get rich by spotlighting early-stage companies, even many dubious ones. Time Inc. would have paid tens of millions for the mag if Tony Perkins had been willing to sell.

    Now Mike A is doing is again with TechCrunch. I don’t mean that as a slam. He’s fixing a big bug in media. It serves readers better to spotlight some companies that will be out of business in a few years along with some winners than to only highlight winners when they are no longer news because they already have millions of users, or when they are not news because everyone is already watching the superstar founder.

    One exception to this is Business 2.0, owned by Time Inc. They do seem to act as a useful radar quite often. Dislaimer, I used to work there.

    Reply

  3. Posted by Ryan on November 26, 2006 at 12:13 pm

    PS I don’t fault Evan Williams or anyone else simply for taking free publicity when it comes their way, nor do I argue stories about big names should not be written — people *are* interested in their sophomore or junior efforts. But there should be some major skepticism in the coverage and a big effort to stay away from the tendency to mythologize these people as heroes, which makes for an easy narrative so is way too common.

    And it should only be done when coupled with a real effort to find under-covered startups, IMHO.

    Disclaimer, I have not actually read the NYT piece!

    Reply

  4. Posted by stephen bove on November 26, 2006 at 1:40 pm

    re: upside down turkey cooking…

    interesting to note “upside down” is actually right side up (at least while the turkey is stll running around)…

    Reply

Leave a comment