blogging

Showing 178 posts tagged blogging

Letters To The Author

Tomasz Tunguz:

Whether on-site or off-site, comments aren’t the right communication vector. Instead, a redesigned, curated section for Letters to the Editor or one step further, Letters to the Author might cultivate a reading community much more effectively than the commenting platforms in use today. 

This is a part of what I like about Tumblr’s “Ask” functionality. It’s not that I don’t want to hear from my readers, it’s that typical blog comment systems are a horrible way to facilitate any sort of meaningful discourse. I much prefer to straight-up publish insightful comments sent my way and respond to them as necessary.

The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It

Fascinating post by David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale.

I think about what constantly-flowing information means for blogging. In some ways this is Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. But what if someone started a stand-alone blog that wasn’t a series of posts, but rather a continuous stream of blurbs, almost like chat. For example: “I just heard…” or “Microsoft launching this is stupid, here’s why…” — things like that. More like an always-on live blog, I guess.

It’s sort of strange to me that blogs are still based around the idea of fully-formed articles of old. This works well for some content, but I don’t see why it has to be that way for all content. The real-time communication aspect of the web should be utilized more, especially in a mobile world.

People aren’t going to want to sit on one page all day, especially if there’s nothing new coming in for a bit. But push notifications could alleviate this as could Twitter as a notification layer. And with multiple people on “shift” doing updates, there could always be fresh content, coming in real time.

Just thinking out loud here.

To Be Truth Tellers

Michael Arrington on the CBS/CNET debacle:

What I don’t get is why CNET staffers have stuck around. They’re the ones who are supposed to be journalists and all that entails. They’re the ones I blame right now.

I blame them because they’re the only reason CBS is able to get away with this. Every single journalist at CNET should have resigned by now.

More than once at TechCrunch we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we’d write a post about the whole thing.

There are some good arguments in the comment section as to why people are sticking around — mainly it has to do with not walking away from a paycheck when they have families to support. But that still rings a bit hollow. There are no shortage of other tech sites/blogs that are trying to hire writers right now, including TechCrunch.

CNET has turned from an afterthought into a complete fucking joke. Sure, if you have no other options, I guess you work for a joke. A paycheck is a paycheck in a tough economic environment. But there sure seems to be other options.

Anti-Apple Anger

Marco Arment:

Apple’s products are opinionated. They say, “We know what’s best for you. Here it is. Oh, that thing you want to do? We won’t let you do that because it would suck. Trust us. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.”

And:

Apple’s products say “no” a lot. No, you can’t have that hardware keyboard or removable battery. No, you can’t install that app. No, you can’t have that feature.

These are usually compromises to improve the products in other ways. But if that missing app or feature is important to you, it’s easy to be put off by Apple’s refusal to deliver it, especially since it’s done in such an opinionated manner, as if to say, “Not only do we not offer that, but nobody should need that.”

A great piece, which, by the way, first appeared in The Magazine. I do like the idea of a story going out early to Magazine subscribers then being available later to share on the web. It obviously wouldn’t work for breaking news, but for this type of content it makes sense.

Civil Fucking Conversations, Finally

It’s hard to say what I hate worse: the disjointed nature of trying to have a conversation on Twitter, or blog comments. Actually, no it’s not. It’s clearly blog comments. They are quite possibly the worst and most useless thing on the internet. But both of the aforementioned things are the reasons I love Branch.

I first wrote about Branch almost a year ago, when they were just getting started. CrunchFund subsequently got involved in an advisory role to the company because they were trying to do the impossible: create a civil, smart place on the internet for discourse. Today, they’re officially launching out of private beta and into the public.

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You should stop saying "shitstorm" so much.

Asked by Anonymous

Actually, I say “shitshow” a lot. I don’t think I had ever used “shitstorm” before yesterday. But you better believe I’m going to start!