The Master Switch, by Tim Wu

Amazon link Subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, Wu has no lack of ambition as he addresses how information and communication companies such as AT&T, Paramount Studios, NBC, and CBS have dominated our discourse over the past century. The title comes from a quote illustrating the perils of such domination: “At stake is […]

The future of television

I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica this morning. This wouldn’t be surprising except that I don’t get the Sci-Fi channel, which broadcasts that show on Friday evenings. I watched it over at hulu.com, the video site started by NBC (which owns the Sci-Fi channel) after they pulled their content from iTunes last summer. […]

True Fans

Last night after class, I was skimming through my RSS feeds and saw Kevin Kelly’s post on how creators can make a sustainable business for themselves if they can get 1000 True Fans. I really liked Kelly’s take on it being more important to reach a smaller number of fanatics than to reach the mass […]

Movies vs. TV

I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading […]

Community media usage

As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read. Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and […]

What I know about blogging

My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I’m sharing my thoughts here. The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link […]

The Decline of the Amateur

I went to my third likemind a couple weeks ago (and, yes, I plan to continue mentioning likemind each month because I think it’s a wonderful concept, and because I continue to enjoy it). I was chatting with somebody there who expressed the opinion that he couldn’t start a blog because he wouldn’t be able […]