Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

Why Print Publishing is Doomed

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At least in my opinion.

This morning, while preparing to write a blog entry about the importance of creating a meaningful bio for your social networking presence, I came across a link in my Twitter stream:

jenniferwhitley Reading @cshirky: “We don’t need newspapers, we need journalism.” http://tinyurl.com/bpxulr

Easily distracted by any task at hand, I followed the link. I found myself on a plain vanilla — indeed, default WordPress template — blog page with a long column of full-justified text just large enough to read without putting on my cheaters. It was unbroken by advertising (including unattractive or animated ads featuring jiggling fat bodies), images (including meaningless stock photos, inserted as eye candy), or even subheadings (used by so many writers, including me, to help the reader skip head to the “important” parts). It was pure content with only a trio of centered asterisks to indicate a shift in the author’s thought.

And it was good.

The blog post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” was by Clay Shirky. It summarized what has brought us to the middle of a revolution in publishing. Print publications are discovering that they can’t compete with the Internet for content delivery, no matter what they try. They’ve refused to see the reality of what’s going on. As a result, they’re not able to survive in the changing world of publishing.

Shirky compares what’s going on with the Internet and publishing today with the revolution of Gutenberg’s movable type and Aldus Manutius’s introduction of small “octavo” volumes that were less expensive to produce and easier to carry around. (I wonder…if Web publishing can be compared to movable type, can e-books and devices like the Kindle be compared to octavo volumes?) These innovation changed publishing. The brought about a revolution in how information was shared and who had access to it. This isn’t any different from today — information is more widely available than ever before.

My point here is not to summarize Clay Shirky’s excellent post. Instead, I urge to you read it. If you’re a journalist or serious blogger or any kind of writer at all, the history he summarizes and the points he brings up may be vital to your understanding of what’s going on in publishing. Indeed, I wish all of my publishers and editors would read it and begin to face the reality of what’s going on in our world. I believe that what he says applies not only to newspapers and journalism but to all publishing, including the kind of work I do.

My point is this: his finely articulated, well-researched, and extremely thoughtful piece is an example of why print publishing will ultimately go the way of hand-copied, “illuminated” texts. It’s quality content, easily accessible, for free, without advertising, on the Web.

10 Reasons Why I Won’t Follow You on Twitter

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My own list.

Twitter logoAs most folks who follow me have discovered (if they’ve bothered to look), I don’t automatically reciprocate follows. I check out new followers before I follow them. I also attempt to keep the number of people I follow down to a manageable count of 100 or so. That’s because I actually read the tweets that the people I follow post. And I interact with them.

I take Twitter seriously and have been doing so for the past 2 years. And with all the media attention it’s been getting lately, it bugs the hell out of me that people are trying to use Twitter as a meaningless chat room where the only thing that matters is how many people follow them.

Sheesh.

So I’ve come up with my own list of reasons why I won’t follow people on Twitter. If you’ve recently started following me and I haven’t followed you back, here’s why.

  • You’ve posted less than 5 tweets and/or your bio is incomplete. How am I supposed to get an idea of what you’re all about if I can’t see your tweet stream? And who are you? Unless I know a little more about you, I’m not likely to follow you.
  • You’ve posted less than 10 tweets and more than half of them are links to your own content on the Web. You might think that Twitter is a good place to toot your own horn and it could be — if your content is worth reading. I’ll follow @NYTimes and @NPRNews, which consistently tweet just links to their own content. But unless your content is as good as theirs, don’t expect me to follow you.
  • Your tweets add absolutely nothing of value to my day. Make me laugh or smile or see similarities between your life and mine. Teach me something. Show me something I’ve never seen. Give me a link to some content of real value. Help me understand the world. Be an engaging friend that can do more than use @replies to offer words of wisdom like “That’s cool!” or “Gr8!” or “LOL!”
  • You follow more than five times the number of people who follow you. First of all, I don’t believe you actually read the tweets of all those people. Second, the only people who follow like crazy and get only a handful of reciprocal followers are either spammers or complete losers. Why would I follow either one?
  • You consistently refuse to use standard spelling in short tweets. No, the letter b is not an acceptable alternative to the word be and the word sounds is not spelled sounz. Yes, I understand these are txt message abbreviations, but I see no reason for it in a tweet shorter than 100 characters when there’s plenty of room to spell it out, in English. I don’t think it’s funny or cute. I think it’s immature and a sad statement on our education system.
  • You end 75% or more of your tweets with an exclamation point. Are you really that excited about the sandwich you’re eating? Or the episode of Heroes/Lost/24/American Idol/fill-in-the-blank that you’re watching on television? If so, I’m sorry to hear that. There’s life beyond your tweet and the rest of us don’t find every one of your tweeted utterances exciting enough to warrant this particular type of punctuation. (See above comment re: education system.)
  • You consistently tweet very long stories by posting 4 or more consecutive tweets, each ending in “…” to indicate that there’s more to come. Unless the story has immediate value to your followers, save it for your blog. Twitter is microblogging. That’s 140 characters.
  • More than 50% of your tweets are about your follower count or tweet count or Twitter stats as calculated by yet another Twitter-based Web service. Does it really matter how many people follow you on Twitter? Do you really think all of them are actually reading every tweet you send out? Get a grip — and a life. And read this.
  • You are apparently stalking me. That’s how it looks, anyway. You use @replies to make mindless comments about my tweets that really don’t start or add anything to a discussion. And you do it all the time. Stop it. It’s freaking me out. If you keep it up, I’ll likely block you.
  • I’ve followed you and you’ve sent me an automated direct message or @reply. That’s an immediate unfollow in my book. It’ll also get you reported as a spammer to the folks who run Twitter.

Back in January, I linked to an article on Mashable titled, “FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter.” On reviewing the Mashable piece after I wrote the above, I realized that many of my gripes are the same as Atherton Bartelby‘s. I’m just apparently a lot pickier and more sarcastic about the way I present them. Still, I hope you’ll go read his take on this when you’re finished here.

And one more thing…don’t be offended if I don’t follow you or if I stop following you. It’s [usually] nothing personal. I only have so many hours in a day and a lot of that is taken up with work. Remember, I can only follow around 100 or so Twitter users before being overwhelmed.

I want my Twitter experience to be high-quality. I want it to build relationships. I want to learn from it. Just because I don’t follow you doesn’t mean I don’t like you. It just means you’re not making the “Top 100” on my Twitter user list. That doesn’t mean you’re not on the top of someone else’s Twitter user list. You’re just not on mine.

And let’s face it: does it really matter anyway?

Literacy Might Be a Good First Step

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I’ve received messages and comments that were barely literate, but this one takes the cake.

I just received the following e-mail message from someone who had likely read one or more of my posts about flying helicopters or the helicopter job market:

Bare in mind that I have never flown a acraft of any type before…… I want to get into flying a turbine helicopter (of my owne) and I live in Mississippi. Everything I find online about schools is very, for lack of a better term eather full of crap and or confusing as all hell. and there are more schools than you can shake a stick at, but all have a list of requierments a mile long just to take a class. I ask you because you are already a pilot, and might atlaest be able to give me a guide line and rough idea with out all the bullcrap to confuse it. I need to know what I have to do to get a helicopter pilot licence, both for comercial and privet flying. where I can go to do so. and a high ball estimit of what it will cost me. could you please help me on this matter?

I did not edit the above. This is exactly how I received it, copied and pasted into my blog editing software.

Those of you who don’t see a problem with the above…I have one question: what the hell are you doing here? My writing must seem like Greek to you, since I tend to write at a Grade 8 level or higher.

While I don’t know anything about the age and background of the author of the above (other than the tell-tale Mississippi comment), I like to think that he’s in at least eighth grade. (And, for the record, although I live in Arizona, I didn’t go to school here.)

I had to read it three times to understand what he was getting at. I can see why he finds online information “confusing as hell” — his understanding of properly spelled words in the English language is likely minimal.

This is the kind of e-mail I get sometimes.

You know, I want to help people achieve their dreams. I really do. That’s one of the reasons I blog about the things I do. I can do these things, so it follows that other people can, too.

But I can’t tell people how to perform miracles.

This guy is doomed before he starts. I know that if I were hiring and someone sent me an e-mail or cover letter or (heaven forbid) resume with as many errors as the above message, I wouldn’t even bother to answer it. This guy’s failure to put together a single error-free sentence makes me wonder how he’ll fare when it’s time to study the POH (that’s Pilot Operating Handbook) for the turbine helicopter he wants to fly.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you cannot get anywhere in life without basic communication skills — including writing skills. These days, with spelling and grammar checkers built into half the writing software out there, there’s no reason to send out a communication like the one above.

You want a career as a pilot — or anything else? Learn how to communicate first.

And, for the record, it is not my intention to ridicule the author of the above. If I wanted to, I would have included his name and e-mail. (Even I’m not mean enough to do that.) I’m just using his communication as an example. I’m hoping that my e-mailed response to him — that it’ll cost $40K to $80K to get the ratings he needs to fly helicopters for a living — scares him into more reasonable aspirations.

Like getting his GED.

Scamming Jobseekers

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How low can some scum go?

This afternoon, my sister called me to chat about some things. The topic of her ongoing job hunt came up and she told me about what we both think is a scam.

She’d applied for a bunch of jobs that were listed on Craig’s List. Later the same day, she got an e-mail message from someone identifying herself as “Sister Mary Joseph” who claimed that one of the people my sister had applied for a job with had forwarded her contact information. Sister Mary Joseph was supposedly a recruiter who had dozens of high-paying jobs waiting to be filled. She provided a partial list that was short on details. The problem was, my sister’s resume needed some work and Sister Mary Joseph’s company would have to revise it before they could apply for any of the jobs.

The fee for this service? $100.

Sister Mary Joseph offered to give my sister 90 days to pay the fee. All she had to do was give Sister Mary Joseph her PayPal information, and Sister Mary Joseph would deduct the money from my sister’s PayPal account when the time came.

All this was revealed in a series of e-mail messages between my sister and the oh-so-generous-and-helpful “Sister Mary Joseph” — one of which actually ended with the phrase, “God bless.” When my sister pointed out (truthfully) that her resume had just been redone for her by a professional, Sister Mary Joseph said that she’d shown the resume to a bunch of people and they were all critical. It definitely needed the work that Sister Mary Joseph’s company would provide.

At this point, my sister, who recognized this as a scam as soon as the $100 fee was mentioned, broke off communication. Baiting a scammer is fun, but after a while, it does become a waste of time.

My sister thinks that a number of too-good-to-be-true job ads in Craig’s List (New York) were posted by a person or company who uses them as bait for desperate job seekers. They con them into coughing up $100 for resume services they probably don’t need to get jobs that probably don’t exist. Or, for the really dumb ones, they get PayPal information so they can suck an account dry or go on a shopping spree. She’s reporting the scam to Craig’s list. With luck, they’ll act and remove these scammers before they con anyone else.

Because I’m sure they’ve already sucked money out of enough job seekers.

On Keynote Queues

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Wondering about the kind of person who would wait in line overnight to see an Apple keynote.

I’m not going to Macworld Expo this year. I used to go regularly and didn’t miss a show for about 10 years. Then I started skipping them. It just didn’t seem worth the time and expense. I went last year but am skipping this year.

I always watch the Apple keynote presentation, though. For a while, it was available as a live Webcast. Since then, it’s been available a day or two afterwards as a streamed QuickTime movie. That’s good enough for me.

Evidently, it isn’t good enough for some people. When I finally tracked down the date and time for this year’s Keynote address on the Macworld Expo Web site, I also stumbled upon some information for attendees wishing to see the presentation live. Here’s part of the instructions:

FOR PLATINUM PASS ATTENDEES:
As a Platinum Pass attendee, you have priority seating to view the Keynote in the main presentation room, based on availability. You may queue up on line any time beginning Monday evening, along 4th Street adjacent to the Moscone Center. We urge you to make every effort to be on line by 7:00am Tuesday morning to ensure your place in the queue, as we cannot guarantee seating late arrivals. Show management staff and security will be present to assist with any questions.

I should probably mention here that the folks who have “platinum passes” spent $1,695 to get them — if they bought them before December 1. If they waited, they paid $1,895.

I don’t know about you, but the thought of waiting on line in San Francisco overnight in January after paying nearly $2K for “priority seating” seems a little extreme. What kind of person would do this?

Now there’s a lot of hoopla over the fact that Steve Jobs is not doing this year’s keynote address. There’s even a bunch of whiners who claim they’re going to give Phil Schiller, who is doing the presentation, the cold (and silent) shoulder with each announcement. (These could be the same people who are willing to wait in line overnight to see a trade show keynote address.) So although I don’t expect a bunch of people to be standing out in the cold tonight on 4th Street (or Howard Street for the people who don’t have “platinum” passes), I do wonder how many people stood on line overnight in the past. Anyone have this info? Use the comments link or form for this post to share it.