The paradox of mainstream media.
Oct 11My good friend Dave Gray (also my co-host at the global geek podcast ) called me this afternoon with some great news. He got a reply from Scoble on his WordPress blogg actually encouraging people to get him on the A-list over at wordpress. Now I know this might all sound like jibber jabber to most of you , so let me explain. Dave has a Blog over at WORDPRESS. WordPress is a service that hosts people's blogs (the biggest service actually) and has a top five list of most read blogs. The Scoblelizer is one of these blogs (we call these people A-list Bloggers) . Made by Mr Scoble (former Microsoft employee and major internet celebrity). Daves Iny tiny article about the impossibility of getting mentioned in this top five as an average-joe blogger with all these A-list bloggers on the wordpress service. And mr Scoble replied ! encouraging everyone to take a peep at Daves blog. Basically saying he was tired of being on the top five ant thought that it was somebody else's turn. The equivalent would be a Pablo Picasso telling the world to come take a look at the skeches you made in your hobby room. It all inspired me to write up this little article.
The paradox of mainstream media.
One of the great things that have always attracted me in both blogging and podcasting was the fact that the means to make the cut where the same for everyone. In the beginning you would need an publisher to get your message in the paper , get a book out or whatever. You used to need a radio station to get your voice heard and you would have to sleep with the producer to get on the tube.
All of that has changed thanks to the power of the internet . Now think about it : Everybody could be somebody. Everybody had an article , everybody has a voice and everybody has equal access to the masses.
But the maturity of the internet has taken its tole. Even in cyberspace we are becoming aware of what can only be called "mainstream media". In our little microcosmos we have our own celebrities. Rest asured : mentioning their names to the average joe on the street will probably get you a "huh?-and-a-shrugg" but to us cybernauts ringing names like Scoble, Dvorak, Curry, Lewis and others are as common as apple pie in Alabama.
Somehow sites like Digg, delicious and others that are the "lords of the lemmings" drive the droves of socially bookmarked surfers towards these mainstream lanes of Top-bloggers, Celebrity podcasters and unintentional amateur pornstars (hello Ms Hilton). So somehow I wonder if the single voice of the average Joe can still be heard.
And what about the average Joe ? An interesting discussion lately presented me with the following dilemma. Would you bend your words, twist your tongue and flex your ideas in order to be popular ? Or would you rather speak from the core of your soul to ten people who appreciate what you are doing.
I (for one) have made up my mind. With an itti titty podcast reaching some 150 people a week. My blog gets hit about 80 times a day. And you know what ? I don't mind. Once in a while one of my regular listeners or readers drops me a comment, taps me on the shoulder or even walks up to me at work and says : Great post ! I love that . I appreciate the small crowd more then the large amount of people that will probably never really care what I say , but just hit my blog cause "everybody does" or cause it was at the top of some list.
But in fear of being branded as "Sulking blogger with digg-rank-envy" let me reply that one of the greatest pleasures of writing is not being read, but to write. One of the joys in podcasting is to create from the core of my soul and not molding my content to appeal to the masses. I wouldn't mind 50 000 people to FIND my site , I would just feel weird having to write for all of them on a daily base. Somehow all these eyes or ears would change the acoustics of creativity. Would I create just like that , or change my content in order to remain popular ?
So let my tree fall in the forest , I don't really care if somebody hears it or not. The joy is in making unique stuff that is read by unique individuals. If somewhere around the world ONE person smiles when reading this .. i'm satisfied. Because the reward of creativity is the creation itself.
Related Posts
Is AIM Pages a MySpace Killer? No Way!
May 29Sometimes is wierd to say how story's evolve on the internet. One would think, that between thousands and thousands of voices, blogs, websites and podcasts it is hard to seperate the songs from the static. But still. Sometimes a story is written in just the right key that it chimes out and resonates through the internet. Sebastians review on AIM pages is a perfect example. An article that begun on his own website has been picked up by AIM and its hardcopy's are now scattered over the tables of the design team at AOL to guide them in the redesign of AIM pages. Enjoy.
Knightwise.
AIM Pages by Sebastian Prooth.
As you will find out when you listen to episode 4 of the Global Geek Podcast I tried to sign up to the new AIM Pages service.
I decided to go back today and try and get a profile going over on AIM Pages. I started to create the profile about 20 minutes ago and I have had multiple problems while creating the profile which I will share with you, so you don’t waste your time with this website until you have read the problems you might encounter while registering!
Number one, the site is NOT intuitive, not easy at all. I am glad I have blog creating experience or I would have been struggling to get this profile up and going. Once I selected a profile from the tech group, I applied one I liked, or so I thought, more on this later.
Then I proceeded to actually fill out the “modules” and build the profile. What a yawn. The about me section malfunctioned every time I opened it up to edit it, and once I had placed the text and said OK I want to keep it, I saw that it did not show up against the background, so I went back into the editor and selected white text, to show up on this brownish clay coloured background.
The photo uploading system is difficult as well, once you figure out that save does not mean upload/keep, and you have to hit upload, you will be greeted with a dialogue box that has an upload interface, good luck getting it to work the first time around! When I selected the images to caption them once I had uploaded them, it took clicking around them, on them, everything, to get the caption box.
I realized after trying to set up the Contact me section, not to bother. Why? Because what you select to show up as methods of contact don’t even show up when you hit apply!
And if all these problems were not enough, I decided to have done and apply the profile. When I did I was greeted with a totally separate theme than the one I had selected, my words did not show up against the background so I had to highlight the text on the page to read it, and most of all when I went to edit the page again, it died in the ass. Totally. I was not able to get back into the edit area where I had been before.
One final problem and the one that just made me leave the entire endeavor. I went to settings, and it brings up a dialogue with one option. Leaving AIM Pages? Click Yes to delete your profile!! Oh yeah, thats a setting alright! You can check out what I eventually got out of the profile here – As you can see, the text is the wrong colour (Invisible)!
Is AIM Pages a MySpace killer? Umm.. Let me think about this one. Absolutely not. There is no way on God’s green earth that this website is a Myspace killer, I could not even configure a profile, with 11 years of Internet using experience. I have been using Myspace to store a profile for over a year, and I have never had the problems like I have had in 20 minutes trying to build a profile on AIM Pages. Web 2.0? More like Web .20. If I were AOL or whoever is behind this, I would be ashamed that some meeting deemed it ready to be released for use… it just isn't – Comments Welcome
