Blogging was a direct attack on MSM hegemony at both the micro (fisking) and macro levels (explanation space). I just don’t see Twitter as the same threat. It is a flood of unmermorable chatter that is easy to ignore. Blogging had the potential to break the power of the MSM guild. Bloggers, at their best, presented arguments. Arguments can both change minds on the immediate subject and undermine the credibilty of those establishment pundits who present weak cases on a regular basis.

-Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Twitter is an example of a relatively new medium. When information was expensive to transmit, it tended to be sent in large batches. For examples, books, newspapers, magazines, letters, etc.. When transmission became cheap with the internet, at first we made cheaper versions of what we already had with handcrafted web pages and their blog successors. I think it took a while for the internet to sink in (I think this still hasn’t happened, BTW) and Twitter was a natural outgrowth of the trend of cheap communication. If you can transmit as often as you like, why not just send out messages arbitrarily often? As tweets are more of a creature of the internet, and not a cheaper and faster version of a pre-internet form, I assume that Twitter doesn’t feel like competition to journalists. A blog can do what traditional periodicals can and blogs also have several advantages that periodicals are just now starting to catch-up with (mostly by launching blogs). Twitter is just different and can feel like a compliment to the “Old Media”.

All that said, if you’re as skeptical of traditional media as I am, then you can read the message of the blog post I link to above and remember that blogs are still the medium that can offer what the “Old Media” either can’t or won’t provide. Help save the world, read and write blogs!

The Archive Team is really doing good work. In addition to the actual back-ups they are making, they are also reminding us all that the web is made by actual people. Those people deserve dignity and respect and that means their web sites do, too. This video is one of the most humane things I’ve ever seen on the internet. I wish I saw more of it and I’m going to try to remember that I should show more humanity as well.

“They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”

“Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?”

- Don Norman on Google, via GigaOm

Google Plus is a case of Google becoming what it is. Google’s business strategy has never been dignified, but it used to be largely invisible. There are many things people will go along with, so long as we don’t have to pay too much attention to it. Google Plus provoked some people into paying more attention to Google’s strategy and now what used to be invisible is slowly becoming the dominant fact in the conventional wisdom about Google.

U by Kotex Inspiration Series: Anne Emond from E.J. McLeavey-Fisher on Vimeo.

Her Tumblr and a MetaFilter thread about her.

Checking a webpage when what I want to do is ssh into a server is kind of a bummer, so I wrote up a quick ruby script to grab that status page, nokogiri it up, sort the 32-bit servers, and then send me on my way. I assume that at some point the script will stop working and I’ll have to do a better job, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy not touching a browser when I do my school work.

I’ve read that these changes give users more control and make Facebook “better”, but all this post did was remind me that when I put my information into Facebook, Facebook makes the final decision about how it’s displayed.

We grabbed our badges this morning and we’ll be hitting the first parties tonight. SXSW has begun!

Half of all registered users still log in to Facebook every day, says Sandberg in the interview. That’s 175 million people. And that doesn’t include Facebook Connect logins, only those people that visit the Facebook website.

175 million people is far more than the number of people who voted in the 2008 US presidential election (131,257,328). It’s far more than the population of Mexico (111,211,789). It is far larger than the nation with the second largest national economy on Earth, Japan(127,530,000). And it’s still growing like crazy. Facebook, of course, is not really comparable to a country, but at some point the size of a community becomes a very important feature.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. – The Official Google Blog

Good for Google! As an American, I grew up with a pretty steady drumbeat of praise for free speech. It’s not easy for me to think of many values that resonate with me as strongly and as clearly as freedom of speech. And so I’m very happy to see Google withdrawing from their arrangement with the Chinese government. Freedom is the ultimate complementary good.

Oh, Android phones aren’t better than an iPhone, not yet; but the Nexus One and the Droid and such will push Apple to do things its closed mentality would rather not do. It will push battery technology — you need power to use a network machine all the time. It will push cellular companies to commoditize their bandwidth. Add in Google Voice, and you no longer need a separate voice plan. Having lots and lots of super-capable smartphones will push people (and then companies) to cloud data, which will make RIM unhappy but Google very happy. The list goes on.

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Google is intent in raising the average in areas it thinks are key to its future. – Why Did Google Build a Phone and a Browser?

Another way of saying this is that Google is a company that takes complementary goods seriously. When the price of the PS3 goes down, the sales for PS3 games will go up. When your browser’s javascript engine gets faster, you will be happier to use websites with more javascript. These things complement each other.

Google is the only firm I’m aware of with a position of Chief Economist, held by Hal Varian, a UC-Berkeley economist. And it’s with issues like this that we see why such a person is worth their weight in gold (probably literally). I think a lot of what makes Google the friendly company that it is is its understanding of complementary goods. In general, Google seems happy not only to help the growth of industries that it makes money from, but also complementary industries. As far as I know, Google doesn’t sell bandwidth. But they do give it away for free sometimes. Google would be happy if people were a little more used to using the web at the airport. Every additional unit of time on the web that a person spends is a win for Google, because time on the web is a complementary good to their advertising and other services.

For this reason, Google gets to be the technology industry good guy. They’re not trying to squeeze money out of every sector they look at. They do shake things up, as in mobile phones and desktop browsers. But they are great friends of the web for solid business reasons. So, maybe the industries that are fighting the web, like mobile telecoms and some media companies, have something to worry about in Google. But those of us who are also friends of the web have nothing to worry about.

At least for now. My previous post was partially about one of my worries for Google. Right now Google succeeds in large part because it has smart people like Hal Varian, LarryNSergey, and probably thousand of other folks I’ll never hear about. But corporations outlive their staff. One day Google might be run by folks with less sensitivity for a complementary goods strategy, but will still feel the pull of strong quarterly results. I think that Google will remain a company we can trust, so long as they talk the talk and walk the walk of the web. Once they start trying to push everyone into Google services and away from the rest of the web, we should worry. Which is exactly what worries me about Chrome OS.