Last month, Clay Shirky told The Observer‘s Felix Gillette about his initial addiction to the internet.
“I would get home from the theater at 11 p.m. and stay on the Internet until 4,” he said. “I thought either I could call myself an addict and get myself to quit. Or I could try Read More
Inside The Observer this week are two bookends on the state of journalism.
On the one end, an important story by media writer John Koblin, noting the fact that libel cases have fallen sharply in recent years. The lead anecdote is Time Inc.’s libel lawyer, Robin Bierstedt, who is retiring Read More
On Sunday, June 6, CNN aired an interview with James Fallows in which the writer talked on camera about his recent story in The Atlantic, which looked at Google’s impact on the news business. Typically, such stories are full of gloom, but this one was hopeful. Having contributed to the many woes of Read More
Two sides in the ongoing debate about the Internet and the future of humanity.
Clay Shirky, the NYU professor and prolific author, wrote a sensational essay about the Web’s disruption of journalism that passed around from editors’ desktops to high-profile Twitter accounts back in March. In his recent discussions about media, Mr. Shirky has been examining how aggregation has become a new model for Read More
Among the many lessons learned from this “new media revolution” spurred by the violent protests in Iran, one is that we are all aggregators.
The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan and Nate Silver are not the only ones. Anyone posting links to stories Read More
Twitter has been hyped, obsessively covered by “gee-whiz!” journalists (O.K., including us), and even studied by experts. But now that the micro-blogging platform is the third most popular social network behind Facebook and MySpace, and growing way beyond its core early-adopter crowd, is it hitting the hype cycle’s Read More
Writing on the Guardian‘s books blog, David Barnett reports that a couple of publishers are getting back to basics and doing choose-your-own-adventure books again. He notes a few symptoms of the apparent resurgence.
Nicholson Baker, patron saint of lost causes, has announced a new enthusiasm: Wikipedia. “It’s like some vast aerial city,” he writes in The New York Review of Books (March 20, $5.50), “with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.” I think that means he likes it.
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Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, wrote about “The Long Tail” theory of consumer consumption in October, 2004.
Clay Shirky’s essay about power laws and weblogs was published in February, 2003. (It created quite a hubbub back in the day.)
New York magazine synthesizes and rehashes Read More
