Category Archives: Internet

Blogs, social media and digital ethics

A Silk Road to ruin: The Paper Machete – 10.05.13

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I’ve said this before but one of the reasons I like performing at The Paper Machete is its hard-and-fast deadline and word count. The show starts at 3pm. If I’m going to make it to The Green Mill on time to read my piece, it needs to be written no later than 130pm. There’s no bargaining, no extension unless I want to piss off the good people who run it. And unless I want to disrupt the flow of the show, I can’t go on and on for thousands of words.

Deadlines and limits make you creative. They force you to go places or try things you might not otherwise to get to your goal.

If I had more time to work on this piece, I probably would have made the ending seem less depressing or inevitable. I’d have found a middle ground. But it was 130pm and I had hit my word count and I still ended up with a piece I was really happy with.

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Whatever you think of the FBI, you have to admire its flair for marketing.

On October 1st, the FBI arrested and subsequently put a name to the man behind a website called Silk Road. Silk Road was a two year old website through which one could buy and sell drugs. An internationally-known marketplace where approximately 1.2 billion dollars were exchanged over its life. Before it was shut down, the site had a user base of 900 thousand and had earned its owner – a man known only as The Dread Pirate Roberts – approximately $80 million in commissions and a writeup in Forbes, the first two words of which referred to Roberts as “an entrepreneur.”

That’s a big deal. And naturally if you’re the FBI you’d want to make a big deal about something like this. Now, criminal investigations are complicated things. They’re a mix of tireless work over long hours and a lot of luck. You don’t always get to pick your shots.

So perhaps a signed complaint asking a judge for an arrest warrant just four days before a government shutdown – which would curtail the FBI’s ability to, say, post a press release on its website about the arrest is entirely coincidental.

It’s entirely possible that the timing of the Dread Pirate Roberts’s arrest had nothing to do with the conclusion two days prior of America’s most beloved series about a murderous drug kingpin who poisons children. (OK, to be fair, it was just the one.)

I’m just saying an organization that maintains a list of “America’s Most Wanted” and produces daily radio shows has a flair for the dramatic.

Purely as a matter of scale, the shutdown of Silk Road is interesting. But it’s also interesting because of the technology that powered it. Silk Road users maintained their anonymity through the use of two technologies: a piece of software called Tor which allows everyone from journalists to NGOs to, yes, criminals use the Internet without revealing their actual, physical locations. And all Silk Road transactions were conducted using something called Bitcoin, a purely digital currency that uses cryptography and a series of electronic ledgers to blah blah blah nerd talk sci-fi Star Wars magical unicorns of money.

As interesting as the technical aspects of this story are, you came here for a mix of current events and social commentary mixed with some showmanship and bitcoin is like the band that plays before the burlesque dancers so I’m just going to skip to the parts where the gloves start coming off.

So big drug marketplace shutdown and an interesting statement on somewhat obscure technical tools for conducting anonymous, often illicit activities. But who cares, right? Tor, bitcoin, pirates. It’s hard to take something seriously when it sounds like a game of Dungeons and Dragons. None of you are looking to create a billion dollar drug empire…OK, maybe that guy. Also, Chad The Bird. I mean, obviously.

At first blush, the real impact of the Silk Road story is that the era of the Internet as a haven for criminal anonymous activities is over, especially with the NSA listening in on every message just short of “Do you like me, Circle Yes or No.”

No, the real lesson here is “The mythical permanent record we were all warned about in grade school has finally become real and it’s the Internet.”

You see, the government figured out the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually a guy named Ross Ulbricht. According to Ars Technica’s report on the government’s criminal complaint, the first mention of Silk Road was made by a user on a website called Shroomery.org. This same user posted a comment in a Bitcoin forum back in 2011 asking for some help with the nascent digital currency. This user’s account had an email address attached to it: “rossulbricht at gmail dot com.” This same Gmail address was attached to a Google Plus account which listed some of his favorite videos, some of which were from a place called the Mises Institute, which is named after an economist whose theories the Dread Pirate Roberts frequently cited as the basis for the larger philosophical ideas behind Silk Road. Similar references to these economic theories were also found on a LinkedIn account registered to Ulbricht.

For someone who masterminded a small drug empire using an untraceable digital currency, Ulbricht didn’t exactly cover his tracks very well. You could rightly argue that if you’re going to start selling drugs on the Internet, you shouldn’t do it with the same email address your aunt sends all her “THE TRUTH ABOUT OBAMA’S MUSLIMNESS” emails to.

It’s a little hard to blame Ulbricht for this behavior. After all, he’s no different than anyone else who leaves bits of his or her interests and views in various corners of the Internet. We used to be able to think of our lives as different circles of friends and family but for most people, the dream of keeping our personal lives and our professional lives separate died in a Facebook argument about the President’s birth certificate between a significant other and an aunt we never see. You can leave a job, but your former co-workers will continue to follow you. And it’s a lot harder to get over that bad breakup when someone’s Instagram account is just clicks away.

And thanks to the current nature of the Internet’s cloud architecture it’s all tied into a central username or email address for sheer convenience if nothing else. Argue, if you like, that Ulbricht was an idiot and if you and Chad The Bird were going to start a criminal enterprise, you would at least go to the trouble of creating a second email address. But who gets on the Internet for the first time thinking they’re going to create a criminal enterprise? Or cheat on their girlfriend? Or need to lie to their boss about calling in sick that day?

The problem isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about your privacy, it’s that we think we can hide in the sheer volume of conversation happening online right now. The Internet’s ubiquity has made everything we do on it seem ephemeral. A phrase like “the Internet of things” and gear like FitBit or Google Glass means we have – in a relatively short amount of time – gone from thinking of it as worldwide network of blogs and websites – to something we can wear on our faces or wrists or clip to our belts. Because it’s everywhere there’s the sense that no one will see us if we jot down a few thoughts in a notebook we literally tuck into our pocket, only showing them to a few people we know. Conversations on Facebook, Twitter or in comments sections have now become so ubiquitous they’ve come to feel like little more than a conversation we’re having with a friend on the bus or the train. We lean over and chat conspiratorially with a friend, confident that the stranger seated in front of us can’t hear and so what if they can anyway? Our stop is up next and we’ll be gone.

So while the details of the time you sat at a bar in college and rambled on about some obscure economic theory is…long forgotten by the time your 401K breaks $500, there’s usually a trail when you do the same thing online. And someone with the time and motivation to look for it can find it.

I’m not sure what the end game looks like here. Either we’re all going to end up truer, more honest versions of ourselves or everyone is going to end up hiding their online selves behind Tor and Bitcoin and the Internet will become the least social version of social media ever.

Content marketing that wins: Making brands, readers and Google happy

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As part of my day job at Cramer-Krasselt, I presented at Social Media Week Chicago on the topic of content marketing with my colleagues Steve Radick and Nick Papagiannis. Steve summarizes our talk here and I don’t have much to add to what he says other than this: If you hate it when brands say “LIKE this post if you…” or “SHARE this if you agree!” then this is for you.

My colleague and fellow presenter Steve Radick summarizes it here.

You can view the slides here:

…or watch a livestream below.

And after the jump, there’s the Twitter-fueled recap thanks to my teammate Jeana Anderson.

Continue reading Content marketing that wins: Making brands, readers and Google happy →

Will Yahoo let Tumblr be Tumblr? Can startups go big and stay cool?

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Can Tumblr still be Tumblr if it’s owned by Yahoo? It’s a complicated question. Even someone who thinks about this stuff all the time like Mathew Ingram at GigaOm acknowledges it “makes a certain kind of horrible sense” but wonders how likely it is that Yahoo won’t screw it up.

Can a startup still remain “cool” if they’re owned by a big company? And what is “cool” anyway? What’s a set of best practices when you’re acquiring something, whether it’s a media startup or a tech startup.

I’m working through some of these questions so this post will be less of a fully-realized piece and more of a scratch pad of thoughts of mine and others. I’ll update as needed. (Please feel free to jump right to the comments and offer your thoughts.)

There are plenty of reasons why acquisitions happen. One company might want the talent or technology of another or want to put a competitor out of business. In these cases, the larger company intends on shutting it down completely. Apple’s done this a few times – LaLa and Color Labs are two examples that spring immediately to mind. As my friend Rachelle Bowden pointed out to me last night on Facebook, when Google acquired Feedburner they shut it down as a company but kept the product (and, I think, some of the talent) though six years post-acquisition, the product may not be long for this world after years of neglect. (So one rule for acquisitions might be “Don’t let it languish.”)

[In the interest of limiting the scope of the discussion here, let’s deal mainly with companies that seemingly want to keep a company running and keep it “cool.” There’s a separate question of how big a startup can get and still remain “cool.” It’s a separate set of considerations but two notable examples of ones that have: GrubHub – which is in the midst of a merger with Seamless – and (as pointed out on Facebook by my friend Carter last night), Southwest Airlines. Off the top of my head, Gawker’s an example of a digital media company that keeps growing but retains its edgy, innovative spirit. It’s new Kinja integration/redesign may just be what Nicco Mele and John Wihbey describe as the future of big media as a platform for brands. Pitchfork is another one to watch as they expand into film coverage.]

So how does one define cool? Gordon Wright pointed out that small doesn’t necessarily mean “cool.” “Some big companies have soul, many startups don’t.” 

I’d say “cool” is remaining relevant and and innovative: continuing to create new features and retain the spirit and soul of the product. (Don’t agree? Head to the comments and give me your definition.) 

Does it depend on the company who buys you? Yes and no. Yahoo’s run of acquisitions is not good as documented in this Valleywag post “A brief history of Yahoo buying and ruining things.” Flickr is a case in point and this Gizmodo post from last year explains how it all happened: they didn’t innovate, they ripped out core features and essentially alienated the audience. (So two more rules for success: Let the company be itself and help it scale.)

How does Google fare? Last year, Google’s VP of corporate development said one-third of Google’s acquisitions failed. Here’s a list of acquisitions by Google. But Google bought YouTube and that product has thrived and grown revenue as it’s become bigger. Hunter Walk explains why it was a success.

A few local examples:

On Twitter, Justin Massa points out Groupon – a company that famously refused to be acquired by Google – has been making many acquisitions as of late including Fee Fighters, a Chicago-based startup.

On the media side, there’s the Chicago Reader and Ars Technica.  The Reader was bought by The Sun-Times about a year ago and is now seeing integration of Reader content into the main paper. (Here’s a Vine I made of what that looks like.) But it’s left the Reader alone and it’s profitable. And around its 10th anniversary in 2008 Ars Technica was acquired by big magazine publisher Conde Nast yet even people who follow media are often surprised to learn this. Another example of leaving it alone, but helping it scale.

But then there’s Everyblock. It was bought by MSNBC in 2009, pivoted into a focus on community discussions and grew but was then shut down early this year. (Leading to this cautionary tale from Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty this week regarding Tumblr: “My experience: even if people @ acquirer are great, it’s inevitable they’ll one day be replaced by clowns.” (Not sure how you craft a rule around that one.)

Last night I asked friends on Facebook whether you can remain cool as a startup after acquisition. Here’s what they said, though I have re-ordered or compressed some parts of the discussion for clarity (again, apologies for the less than visually stunning look of the below. Fancy plugins next time!) UPDATE: I’ve now made the Facebook thread public. You can read it in full here or read highlights below.

Andrew Huff: Yes so far: Instagram. Yes, though “cool” is perhaps relative: TypeKit (acquired by Adobe). No (I think): Blogger. [Ed note: Google acquired Blogger in 2003 but joked about it in 2001.]

Blagica Stefanovski Bottigliero: Yes: Orbitz. [Ed note: Acquired by Cendant in 2004.] I left before the buy but what I think was cool was the sick search technology that continued on. Motorola: jury is out. [EN: By Google in 2012.) Another thing to explore is how acquisitions that worked altered or kept monetization models.

Jackie Danicki: Qik, where I loved working in 2008-2009, was acquired by Skype right before Skype was acquired by Microsoft. Live streaming mobile video, super innovative before purchase and after. There are literally hundreds of startups that are innovative post-purchase – but they are not all household names. That is no measure of their worth ($) or innovation.

Mike Fourcher: All State and esurance: Yes. Sears and Lands End: Yes. Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s: Yes. Disney and Marvel, yes. [EN: Disney is a great non-media, non-tech example of a company that let its acquisition be itself and helped it scale.]

Benjamin Lipsman: Cisco bought Flip cameras when they were popular, then shuttered it a few years later as smartphones ate into market & Cisco realized they couldn’t market to consumers. Zappos had stayed true to their values after Amazon purchase.

I asked Benjy the following: Do you think that was an example of the market overtaking it or Cisco making missteps?

Benjamin Lipsman: Cisco should’ve seen the market threat before they invested in buying Flip, then they seemed to give up pretty quickly when it was still popular. Had they been able to market to consumers, they could’ve probably sold millions more. David Pogue’s take.

Leah Jones: Considering “Flip” is still the generic word for a small, HD, simple video camera… I’m going to blame Cisco. I think you could look at Twitter acquisitions for examples of how to uncool acquisitions. [EN: Here’s a history of Twitter acquisitions as of 2012. It acquired Vine in 2013.]

Andrew Huff: The time between Cisco takeover of Flip and Cisco killing Flip was shorter than a few years, I think — maybe two? [EN: Two years.] Regardless, I blame Cisco. Flip had and still has strong brand identification in the category, and could probably have evolved to remain relevant — see GoPro’s continued success. [EN: Here’s a look at GoPro.]

Joanna Brandt: Tom’s? Or are they not big enough yet?

Ellen Malloy: GrubHub merger/bigness just happened. Too soon. I’d say Instagram is also too soon. That said: FourSquare is No Longer Cool with too many big years under it’s belt. Groupon was Never Cool and was also Always Big. Toss in: Apple seemed to have muffled the brilliance of Dragon from afar. 

Then Ellen made a great point about how funding startups may affect their ability to grow and stay cool.

Part of the issue you explore is the dynamic of funding cool startups. And they need funding to reach their cool goals. But the goal of folks who do the investing is the exit. Not the coolness. So the system of how startups get from cool to big is set up to ensure big not cool. Which is not wrong… Since the investor is in the business of the exit not in the business of cool. And it is his money doing the funding. 

Carter Liotta: Ben & Jerry’s is an interesting case study. To a lesser degree, Southwest Airlines.

Here, Mike Fourcher noted SWA was never acquired. Still, they got big but still retained what their customers loved about them.

Carter Liotta:  They retained a fun attitude, but their core business changed dramatically. Their prices are now often higher than legacy carriers on many routes, and they no longer serve many small airports (Providence RI and Manchester NH) after starting service to Boston Logan. The whole point of SW was keeping costs low by flying to small airports… At least at first. Now they act more like a legacy carrier. But you’re right- no acquisition that I know of.

Mike Fourcher: Carter, I disagree. Their first strategy was not small airports, it was low-cost, point-to-point flights, rather than the traditional hub-spoke system. Second, they placed a high emphasis on creating value with hiring and personnel, rather than the cost-plus system competitors had been using. SWA is still behaving that way, but now has enough margin to afford gates in more central airports.

Benjamin Lipsman: Something interesting to watch will be to see how effectively Southwest extends their “coolness” and company ideals to the employees of AirTran, which SWA acquired last year and is finally beginning to integrate.

Ellen Malloy: One follow up on Justin Massa: Groupon looks to have killed Breadcrumb, a company they bought a year ago.

On Twitter, Justin says Breadcrumb is “far from killed, a major focus for them. giant booth at NRA show this last weekend. same for Savored.”

Laura Chavoen: Tom’s Shoes/Warby Parker. Easy Jet.

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I’m going to continue to use this post as the hub for this discussion happening on Facebook and Twitter and pull interesting posts from there as well. Updates to come. But let’s take this to comments: What other examples are there of acquisitions that kept the spirit of the acquired startup? Or ones where it all went horribly wrong? Thanks for contributing.

UPDATE 5/24/13:

This post became the basis for the first hour of WBEZ’s The Afternoon Shift. In thinking this through with host Niala Boodhoo, we started to think about some of the big issues behind Yahoo’s acquisition.

Yahoo is the third biggest display ad server, behind Google and Facebook. Yahoo gets 76% of its revenue from display ads. If you look at what it’s done with Flickr recently, it’s clear they want to scale out Tumblr’s ad business.  Zach Sweard of Quartz looks at how this might work for Yahoo/Tumblr.

So who will Yahoo be serving those ads to? Peter Kafka at All Things D notes Tumblr has 300 monthly uniques but no one’s really sure how many active users; Kafka estimates it at 30-50 million. But it’s not just about Tumblr’s raw numbers, it’s about who those users are, specifically how old they are. If you look at Quantcast’s numbers on Tumblr’s users 29% of them at 18-24 (Internet average is 12%) and 24% are 25-34 (Internet average 17%). Yahoo’s audience is significantly older and the purchase of Tumblr youngs those numbers up quite a bit.

As the news unfolded this week, we also saw Xbox reveal its new Xbox One and how its always-on functionality was meant to deliver a seamless gaming experience. Of course, it also collects data: usage data and data on the physicality of its users. And then during the show, we learned Yahoo made a formal bid for Hulu, confirming rumors about its interest.

Here’s how all of the above played out during our discussion on the show with Samuel Axon, Editorial Director of Sprout Social – with a drop-in from Jim DeRogatis with some breaking news about the Congress Theater. There are a few callouts by me of comments from the Facebook post above.

 

Links to the past: Digital publishing edition

Internet

Here’s what caught my eye over the past week:

A hotel doorman from the Talbott Hotel in the Gold Coast helped save a baby’s life, which brought us this quote from him: “I’m 54, but I can still run pretty good, especially if there’s a baby that needs help.”

Lots of print publications use “Tell us what you think!” or “Send us your picks” when trying to create Web content around its top lists of burgers, bars, etc. The Chicago Reader took it up a few levels by creating an evolving virtual jukebox of its readers’ favorite songs.

This Adweek piece about ghost websites that manufacture traffic for the purposes of selling ads but have no real readers was a big talker this week. In related news, 60% of people can’t recall the last banner ad they saw.

Even monkeys don’t want anything to do with selfish people.

How The Onion, Vice and Gawker are creating mini-agencies within their media companies.

Time Out Chicago is shuttering its print edition and going all-digital, triggered by an offer from The Sun-Times.

The City of Chicago owes $57.8 million dollars to the company that owns the parking meters because the Daley administration allowed a competing parking garage to open near one the company owned. (In related news: The parking  meter contract included monopolistic guarantees!)

A Gingrich/Santorum 2012 ticket was scuttled because neither could agree who would end up as vice-president which is the Republican primary contest in a nutshell.

Google Alerts are kinda busted.

There’s plenty of information to be had out there unless you’re hoping it’s about your local neighborhood.

And finally, here are a couple pictures of Allison Janney dancing on a table and looking like the coolest person ever.

Links to the past: C-word edition

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Here’s what caught my attention on Twitter this past week.

NASCAR’s removal of a YouTube video showing an accident on the track was unintentional. It’s funny to me how important this seemed a week ago.

Speaking of things that had everyone in a tizzy last week, The Onion apologized for that tweet during the Oscars. Former employees used it to bring attention to their new project no one had heard of yet. And speaking of the Oscars, Vulture’s Margaret Lyons dismantles every lame defense of Seth MacFarlane’s hosting gig. If you didn’t think it was that big a deal, here’s why that might have been. Finally, here’s an interesting roundup of brand-focused tweets during the ceremony.

Digiday argues brands are in a 24/7 marketing/conversation model. I had a good back-and-forth discussion with some folks on Twitter about this. Not sure all brands need to be 24/7 but not quite sure how to draw the line.

Art Spiegelman – author of the great graphic novel Maus – used to work on Garbage Pail Kids.

Farhad Manjoo on why Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer made a mistake in getting rid of work-from-home privileges.

Chicago might finally get its act together and create a real music industry for the city.

These pictures of little kids dressed up as iconic figures from black history might have been the best thing I saw all week.

Don’t lump Beverly’s Horse Thief Hollow in with the rest of the Western Avenue death march.

The Kansas University basketball team’s uniforms are half-Zubaz.

Which parts of the country say pop and which parts say soda? There’s a map for that.

Finally, here is Nick Offerman next to a quilt with Ron Swanson’s face on it.

Links to the past: Lyndon Johnson’s pants edition

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Normally, these Sunday week-in-review posts will have a few blog posts in between. Guess it was a busy week. Onward then:

This past week was the anniversary of the E2 club disaster. Thomas Conner of The Sun-Times looks at how it changed Chicago club safety and licensing.

Won’t usually be self-linking in this space but Cork & Kerry in Beverly has a new exterior patio wall meant to ape the St. James Gate at the Guinness brewery. I posted a photo of it to Instagram. (Follow me on Instagram via ourmaninchicago).

Chicago comedian Kate MacKinnon was hysterical on SNL last week as a woman in a Russian village who witnessed the fall of meteorites. “Bear with me, Seth…”

Via Charlie Meyerson, here is an animated recording of Lyndon Johnson ordering pants.

I loved this piece by fellow Ohio U./ACRN-FM alum Jillian Mapes on Catfish, meeting people online and self-presentation. It was in Maura magazine, which you can subscribe to here.

Seth Lavin’s Chicago School Wonks e-newsletter used to be required reading before he stopped publishing it to take a full-time job teaching. But he’s still contributing to the Chicago school reform debate. Here are ten questions he asked in the wake of proposed Chicago public school closings with responses from CPS.

Playboy got the Wall Street Journal to run with the idea that it’s more about making money through licensing than nudes these days, a continuing effort to leave its past behind. Nevermind that revenue is down significantly and it missed its 2012 profit projections and its CEO earned both HR complaints about his behavior and a lawsuit accusing him of embezzlement.

Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce calls the waaaaahh-mbulance on Politico.

Taste of Chicago lost $1.3 million dollars last year.

Rainbow Cone opens March 6th!

Facebook conducted an audit of its Insights tool and “uncovered bugs that impacted impression and reach reporting.”

The posting, removal and subsequent re-posting of a NASCAR crash video should have some interesting implications on the attempts of brands to claim copyright of fan-created content.

And finally, it looks like someone started a new site with the old EveryBlock code at chicago.wikiblock.com.

Links to the past: Crain’s Chicago hip-hop edition

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Every Sunday, I’ll be posting a “best of” roundup of items I linked to via Twitter with some brief thoughts. Here’s this week’s.

The Beverly community’s first responders will be the grand marshals of the South Side Irish Parade (note: I am a volunteer on the SSIP committee).

For some reason, Crain’s Chicago Business published a timeline of Chicago hip-hop, most of which had nothing to do with Chicago hip-hop’s affects on business, Chicago or otherwise, which is a shame because that would have been interesting. Keep on slicing up an ever-decreasing share of media verticals, everybody!

This “all-headline, no body” post is the dumbest thing I read last week, possibly ever.

Kevin Willer is leavingthe Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and the deservedly-heralded 1871 tech hub for a venture capital fund.

I’m 99% sure Billy Dec is in on the joke of this parody video of himself. Mostly because the joke isn’t that funny (for a Mancow-fronted video about an easy target it’s pulling its punches a bit, no?).

Not sure if this article from Digiday means Virgin Mobile sits in on the actual editorial meetings with Buzzfeed to discuss story ideas or an “editorial” meeting (read: advertorial) with creatives to help them craft story ideas. Either way, it should scare the crap out of everybody, publishers and agencies alike.

According to DNA Info Chicago’s read on neighborhood census data, Beverly has the 2nd highest number of married men in Chicago. And as Rob Hart replied to me when I posted it on Valentine’s Day: “they’ve all made reservations at Koda, so good luck getting a table.”

Finally, last week’s Time Out Chicago cover story on what you can do to combat gun violence perpetrated against Chicago kids is a must-read, including its list of 30 ways to do it and Alex Kotlowitz’s essay on why downtown and North Side communities need to pay attention to the plague eating away at the South and West sides.

This American Life devotes two shows to these issues, with a special emphasis on Harper High School “where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot.” You can listen to part one here. (Part two goes up this week.) Throughout part one, you’ll hear a recurring theme: school as a refuge from gun violence. Perhaps now’s not the best time to be closing Chicago public schools on the South and West Sides.

Why I decided to stop posting to Tumblr

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With a presence on various platforms – here, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr – I’ve been wondering how to balance  them all without publishing the same stuff in every space. In particular, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to get myself to blog more. If you’re a writer, you tend to write because you have something in you that needs to be expressed.  And writing it – as opposed to putting it in a song or delivering a monologue – is the best way to express it.

I have those moments and Twitter, for the better and the worse, is the way I usually do it.

For the better because, as an outlet, Twitter is immediate and anywhere, if my phone is available. The laptop doesn’t need to be opened nor do I need to bother with logging in to WordPress, writing a headline, etc. And if it’s only a thought then that’s just fine. No need to climb the hill of composing a full essay.

For the worse because, honestly, becoming a better writer and having some permanence to my writing would be nice. Sure, Twitter forces you to omit needless words, but really digging in on something and not having to scroll back through countless posts to find it would be virtues. How best to take the good and leave the bad?

The “if this, then that” statement I’ve come up with here is if I’ve got three tweets or more to say on a subject, then it’s probably worth a blog post. Not a blog post instead of tweets – and probably not a Storify of posts either unless I’m feeling lazy as that still leaves the problem of having work I’ve done locked up in someone else’s space – but a blog post after the fact, using Twitter as a first draft. Three tweets seems a good number because that’s around 50-100 words which could stand on their own or easily extend into 250 with a few additional thoughts (I’m hitting about the 300-word mark now, for instance). With WordPress’s app, I could even do most of the work on my phone and save it for editing later. This process seems like a good way to encourage blogging without holding myself back from tweeting on the regular.

Even a comment on Facebook might end up as a post, which is what happened when my browser crashed as I was leaving a comment on a Facebook link Marcus posted to his story. Jolted into a realization that I was once again putting a bunch of time and thought into creating work on a platform that wasn’t mine, I threw together a quick post, which got picked up here and here. It’s always the stuff you toss off in a hurry that ends up resonating. There’s something to be learned there.

Seeing what happened with that post was the last push I needed to officially step away from Tumblr. I started on Tumblr in 2008, but mostly used it as an RSS feed from my blog (this post was an exception) until I was canned from Playboy and then really got into it, mostly because I had plenty of time on my hands. The Tumblr bookmarklet allowed me to combine the speed of Twitter with the weightiness of blogging. I’d grab a quick pull quote from a piece and respond without the concern of 140 characters. Loved it.

After a while though the constant outages made me wonder if I was spending a bunch of time on something that was too ephemeral. The last one in November lasted two days and prompted my break. Even now, I tried to find a few posts of value there and got hung up on its lousy search function. (It’s 2013, Tumblr, why don’t you have a decent search function? Compare this keyword search on Tumblr with this search I ran on my Tumblr via Google.) Then I figured out how to create a similar WordPress bookmarklet and create posts like this and that was the death knell for my posts there. I’ll still keep an account there because even in the three-month break from writing on Tumblr, I still enjoyed reading posts from people I follow there.  But it will likely be little more than an RSS feed to this blog.

It just became too important to me to own as much of the work I was doing online as possible. I’ll still post regularly on Twitter because what it gives me is as great as what I feel I’m giving to it. Tumblr stopped delivering on its end of that bargain so I found another way to keep writing.

Curious though: Am I alone here? Have other folks who publish on various free platforms thought about any of this?

UPDATE: Kiyoshi Martinez posted a thoughtful reply to this post here – on Tumblr (heh). He cites the lack of maintenance, the reblogging and the inherent social networking features as reasons that drew him to Tumblr after a less than ideal WordPress adventure. On my Facebook page, Jaime Black praised many of these same features, especially Tumblr’s speed. All solid counterarguments and reasons why I was initially drawn to the platform.

Also on Facebook, I reiterated the outage-induced ephemeral feeling I’d been getting from Tumblr lately and John Morrison said he felt similarly about what he’d done on Gowalla and wondered if Everyblock fans were feeling the same way now, a point I hadn’t thought about until he said it.

And in case you didn’t see the pingback, Matt Wood had some things to say about the above. Interestingly, he notes his post was initially going to be a comment here but he decided to make it a blog post for himself, which echoes what I was saying above about wanting to have more of an owned archive of what I create online. (Incidentally, this also led me to create this page.)

If you’re interested in this kind of discussion, you should come to this event on Monday. I’ll be on the panel there and Jaime is hosting it so we’re sure to get into more of these kinds of issues.

 

OMIC roundup: Taken 2 edition

Comics, Fatherhood, Internet, Media, Music, Politics

Have felt somewhat creatively bereft this week so here’s a roundup on the topics this site’s most often devoted to:

Comics: Part of me still wants to reserve judgment on The Superior Spider-Man, the new Marvel title arriving in the wake of Amazing Spider-Man #700; a story arc in comics can’t be judged from one issue. But all my concerns about this new direction seem to have come to bear and a new one’s risen: the idea that Doc Ock is burdened with responsibility is jettisoned for a literal deus ex machina. I won’t spoil it here but if you thought Peter’s death lacked weight before… *

The other Marvel relaunch I checked out recently was Fantastic Four. I really liked where Hickman was going in the previous series so a Reed who charges ahead without considering his family first – or bringing him into his plan – is a step back. Again, we’ll see.

All this was enough to make me pick up last year’s Spider-Men crossover, which was excellent and touching and therefore recommended.

Fatherhood: Last night I watched Taken 2 while I assembled a small pastel table and chairs for Abigail – a gift from her grandmother. I’m sure many fathers mentally see themselves as Liam Neeson, willing to do whatever it takes to save their families from enemies both foreign and domestic. Let’s be honest though: Most of the time fatherhood means assembling a pastel table and chairs at 11pm on a Saturday night while you drink scotch, eat beef jerky and watch Taken 2. I am perfectly fine with this.

Internet: This video of a Fisher-Price record player spinning a bootleg “Stairway to Heaven” blew my mind.

Here’s the backstory (via @SennettReport).

Media: Alpana Singh is leaving Check, Please so the show is looking for a new host. This sentence from a report on the move caught my attention:

“The station hopes Singh will continue to appear occasionally on Chicago Tonight, WTTW’s nightly newsmagazine, where she answers viewers’ wine and beverage questions posed by host Phil Ponce in the “Ask Alpana” segment.”

Hopes? Has there not been a conversation about this yet? Is this high school? “Yeah, I know we’re broken up and everything but I’m really hoping we can still be lab partners without there being all kinds of weird vibes. I mean, she didn’t say we couldn’t so I’m sure everything will be cool. We’re adults, you know?”

Music: I’ve found Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, especially “Two Girls,” to be revelatory. You ever hear something for the first time but find yourself able to sing along with it? I’d also recommend a listen to Taj Mahal’s “She Caught The Katy” if only to hear how much the Blues Brothers version nicked from it.

Politics: With so many problems facing Illinois, the possibility that the governor’s race will become Daleys vs. Madigans is profoundly depressing.

* If you don’t mind spoilers, this AV Club summary gives you the gist.

MySpace could stand to be more complicated

Internet, Media

So far, all the news stories I’ve read on the new MySpace make it sound like Jessica Biel: it’s very pretty and has an ongoing relationship with Justin Timberlake.

If people are talking more about the design of MySpace than its functionality that’s probably not a good long-term sign. When they do talk about the functionality, it’s compared to other social networking sites: Pinterest and Facebook, mostly.

Oddly enough, this is the reverse of MySpace’s previous problem: people ignored its lousy design because they loved its functionality. Facebook enjoys the same pass on its design even though it makes it harder to do things like tweak your privacy or sharing settings. But hey, who cares about that when there are so many pictures of babies and food and links to Buzzfeed lists?

Maybe MySpace had to lead with an exciting design to get the benefit of the doubt as it continues to create new features. That’s a decent argument.

But at least Jessica Biel also knows how to act.