housekeeping note.

brokengentleman has been stagnating somewhat, and I've decided a bit of a change of pace is necessary to keep it interesting and relevant.

I'm keeping the site (and the name), but I'm going to do my best to restrict it to longform, more considered content.  The shift of the last year, though rewarding intellectually, wasn't particularly consistent with what had been here previously.  As well, the platform has been far from encouraging when it comes to posting snippets, images, etc.

I have nothing but respect for Blogger, and for the things I've posted here, comments they've garnered, and things that will continue to be posted here.

For sporadic, theory-laden, longform content, this is still my home.

For something shorter, punchier, and (I sincerely hope) more regularly updated, you can visit attentionindustry.com.  I'm going to be doing my best to 'live' my ideas over there, while making sure the root theories get the attention and consideration they deserve from me over here.  It's still very much a work in progress, but I thought I should explain the silence at brokengentleman.  I know there isn't a comment structure (and I'm still not sure I won't change that) but feel free to contact me through the twitter / email information posted there, or the information posted here, and I will respond and/or address the point/concern publicly.

Exciting times ahead.

question four: truncated vs full RSS feeds.

What are the benefits between full RSS feeds, and truncated feeds that link back to the original content?

Full RSS feeds indicate that you actually want people to read what you are writing. That you value the ease of your readership, and you want them to have at least some control over the information you've decided to create and share with them. Full RSS feeds lower the barrier to read content, because no clicking is necessary. Full RSS feeds are generally less of a hassle on mobile devices, because they don't require opening a new page.

Full RSS feeds are an indication that you are creating content because you want people to see it, not because you want to sell ad space on your page. And given the relatively low levels of RSS adoption, and the ability to include ads in RSS, it's not a huge sacrifice.

The benefits of truncated RSS feeds, linking back to the original site, include bringing more visitors to the original site, which may drive traffic to other content located there. The original formatting and design, as well as the framing that the page layout provides, is left intact (this is one of the reasons I was a latecomer to RSS, I like seeing different designs). This might result in more ad revenue. Maybe. Truncated RSS is great, if you see feeds as a kind of bait, and your site as a kind of trap.

My recommendations, in order: Have a full RSS feed. Failing that, offer an ad-supported full feed, or an ad-free truncated feed. Failing that, have a truncated feed, and be amazed at how little of your content actually gets read by RSS users, because you seem to have missed the point.

[This is the last in a series of my answering my own questions, which I think would help a few people when it comes to interviewing potential media hires. I am glad that this is over with, and apologize for how whiny I got at the end there.]

question three: publishing online.

What services have you used to publish online?

Diaryland, Blogger, LiveJournal, Wallop, Flickr, Blogger (this time after Google acquired it), Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter.

I am nearly certain there are others, but these are the ones I can recall at the moment.  Any obvious things I've missed?

[This is the third in a series of posts wherein I answer the questions I suggested posing to potential employees working in media.]

just say no to ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting blogs came up today at Dave Fleet's Podcamp Toronto talk on Ethics in Social Media, and I've been thinking about it all day.

I disagree with ghostwriting in general, but I understand why it happens.  I disagree with ghostwriting in social media especially, because social media requires authenticity and trust to overcome the disparity in authority it faces, when compared to traditional media outlets.

That was a generalization, but I think it's a fair point.  I get my news from print media, and from bloggers.  I trust the Globe and Mail because it's the Globe and Mail.  If I trust information I get from your blog, it's usually because I trust the person I've seen writing and sharing that information with me and every other reader.  That trust is developed over time, and I think it's got more to do with the value of social media as a news source than speed does.

To clarify, I have no problem with hiring freelance writers, or bringing on unpaid guest writers, to pen entries for any blog, as long as it's made clear in some way that this is happening, or may happen.  If your blog has a note on the about page that says 'entries on (blog name) are often the result of a collaboration between myself and a ghostwriter', I might not like it, but I won't be able to justify getting mad about it later on.

My core issue with ghostwriting in general is it's not really justifiable.  If the value of your outlet or blog is the brand, it shouldn't matter who is writing, as long as it's associated with the brand.  If this is the case, there's no argument for misleading readers as to who the author is.  If, conversely, the value of your blog is the personality creating it, there's no justification (at all) for misleading your readership about what content is coming from that personality.

There's some overlap here, but the point stands even if we're talking about a 'Personal Brand'.  If the emphasis is on brand, someone else publishing with your approval (under their own name) should still carry weight.  If the emphasis is on personal, then you are obligated to do it yourself, to whatever extent works for you.

In the session mentioned above, someone pointed out that Barack Obama doesn't write his own speeches.  I (and several others) countered by pointing out that the guy who writes Obama's speeches gets profiled in the New York Times for doing so.  If credit goes where it is due, (or at least doesn't go to someone undeserving) there's nothing to get mad about.

different types of instant.

Everything on the internet happens fast.  Blogging is a demonstration of the power of instant publishing, RSS is speedy content distribution, News online makes the idea of a daily update seem quaint, and so on.  But when everything is fast on a technological level, the playing field changes, and speed on a human behaviour, or an interaction level.

The best example I can use is the mixture of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.

I inevitably find out about things through Twitter first, mostly because it encourages many small updates, and many visits to find out what people are up to.  As the content isn't identical, I usually have my favourite bloggers on Twitter as well, expanding the data shadow.

I end up clicking the Twitter links for that lead me to blog posts.  That I see later in the day in Google reader.  And that pop up again later on in Facebook, having been shared by other friends who have the same interests.

Repetition is unavoidable in social media, but the difference in speed is what interests me.  Twitter is absurdly fast, faster than email, or SMS, or blogging, faster than nearly any major way I communicate with others.  And it's not a technology issue - it's based entirely on the behaviour the service inspires.

Instant is relative.  Plan accordingly.

ranking my screens.

Many communications and business blogs have talked at length about the importance of the 'Third Screen', the informational / communications / internet device that lives in your pocket.  Inherent in the title they've worked with is the question of ranking.  I'm realizing my third screen is quickly becoming my first screen, because it's where I do the majority of my hybrid (work and personal) communications.  And now it's actually dictating which platforms I use for my communications.

Blogger isn't cutting it.  The lack of actual iPhone compatibility has become a real deal breaker.  I've tried the options available, including emailing posts, but the formatting is broken, or the presentation is messy, or the experience is generally unfulfilling.  My options are basically to either give up using the iPhone to blog, or to change my blogging platform to something that lets me work with my third screen, which is quickly becoming my first screen.

I've been on blogger for far longer than the month and a half I've been an iPhone user.  And despite the long (long) list of complaints people have about blogger, I've generally not considered switching platforms.

But here we are, and now I'm thinking WordPress might be a rational option, considering they at least consider the idea of letting what I consider an important and influential market play too.

transparency as product.

Wired is doing something very interesting with Storyboard, a beginning to end blogging of an upcoming peice on Charlie Kaufman (the dude who wrote Adaptation, among other screenplays).  In doing this, they are increasing reader involvement with the peice, advertising the upcoming issue containing the peice, and creating a new revenue stream from the article itself (advertising on the blog).  This is both creative and innovative.  And I wonder how well developed it could be in other creative media.

For example, imagine if an established band decided to liveblog the recording process, etc, of an upcoming record.  They could post half finished lyrics, snippets of vocal and instrumental tracks, videos of rehearsals and discussions, explanations of the process, etc.  While the money generated by advertising wouldn't be absurd, it would serve as a great introduction to the record.  For certain bands with a large enough following, people (read: Me) would be willing to pay some small monthly amount to get a password and login to access the page.  You could include it in the physical copies of a release, offering the feed for the next upcoming record.  Throw it in a greatest hits package, for example.

Print media isn't dead.  Music isn't dead.  But we have to change what we're selling, and how we're marketing it.  That said, I'll admit the idea wouldn't work outside of an established magazine, an article on an established personality, with an established audience.  But figuring out how to transfer old media success to new media success seems like an important step in figuring out how to create new media success stories from whole cloth.  Transparency as product might be a part of that future.

pr, journalism, blogs, and going off on a tangent.

Email made it too easy.

As soon as you could build a list of contacts, reach each one of them seemingly individually, and fire everything at them instantaneously, building a tight, targeted, well maintained list fell off most PR firms radar - and, depressingly, with good reason.  If you can send out a loosely targeted blast, and then follow up with a series of tightly, carefully targeted pitches, it's possible to get more results for a minimally greater amount of work.

But it involves a lot of risk, because PR is a reputation and relationship business.  Now, though irritated, traditional media journalists have learned to tolerate this.  While reporting may be a vocation, a calling, and an integral part of identity, in the end it's a job, done to secure the means of live a comfortable life.

Blogs are different.  The majority of them don't result in rich writers, and the ones that are centered on a personality/brand rather than a brand, and then hired personalities, are as much identity as work.  If you email a blogger, there's a good chance it's at the address his friends email him at.  If you ignore his published history, you aren't ignoring the last 6 weeks of his work, you're ignoring the last 6 weeks of his ideas, conclusions, and concepts.  Blogs are more personal.  At least, based on my experience blogging and my interactions with journalists.

The long and short is, blogging is comparatively new, influential, and generally not willing to conform to the rules of the game as it is played.  There is both more (in a personal sense) and less (in a financial sense) on the line.  What amuses me is, the journalists who will get high and mighty about the importance of their industry in a proper democracy are usually half as uptight about freedoms and independence as bloggers who cover the same information.  And, those same journalists are twice as uptight about standards, sourcing, and credibility of the reportage.

I realize I wrote bitterly yesterday about the quarterly crucifixion of PR at the hands of the social media punditerati, and I don't really think I was wrong.

But if I'm going to expect new media publishers and creators to accept that there is a lot of good in my industry despite failings, I'm also going to have to ask PR to recognize that expecting anyone they interact with to behave the same, despite the differences in mandate, delivery, drives and accountability, is insane.

The right message, in the right way, to the right person.  Sounds so damn easy, but it's also more or less the only question in communication theory, asked a thousand different ways.

in defense of public relations.

In what is a fairly common occurrence, the blogosphere hates PR this week.

This is going to come off defensive, as PR is what I do for a living, but I feel like two things need to be brought to light.

My mother is a teacher, and her and I have a fairly regular argument regarding the children she works with.  She consistently argues that the internet has ruined research skills in the generation of kids she currently works with.  I argue that the failure isn’t based on the internet, it’s a failure to teach children research skills that relate to the research tools that are relevant to them.

This came to mind when I was reading about the Cuil fiasco, and chuckled when people blamed overzealous PR, etc, for the fact the bloggers, print media, and television collectively went crazy over an experience that is more or less completely underwhelming.

If the situation has changed, and you’re having trouble delivering results, blaming someone else isn’t the solution to the problem.  If you work in a journalistic capacity, you are supposed to be the gatekeepers.  If you can’t fulfill that role, you probably shouldn’t be blaming someone for providing information that led you in the wrong direction.  Update your skill set, so you can judge what is worth covering, and how to cover it.

That said, there’s no excuse for PR reps that out and out lie.  No one, especially not the clients, is helped by that.

The other thing I’ve noticed, despite everyone complaining about PR, is that traditional media journalists complain about PR the way I complain about taxes.  I hate paying them, but I recognize they serve an important purpose.  That said, I get irritated when my taxes are wasted, or used against my own beliefs.

More often than not, it seems like bloggers complain about PR the way a 15 year old complains about curfew - they have something resembling the point, but they irritatingly ignore every positive aspect, and would rather throw the entire industry out with the bath-water than learn to work with the practitioners who get it, and the aspects which are positive.

PR has an image problem.  A serious one.  That’s something I look forward to working against.  Pretending PR has become irrelevant, however, because there is an ever larger number of unofficial information sources to parse, makes no sense whatsoever.

Signal is noise, because anyone with an opinion can publish.  Crafting valid, relevant signals, as getting them in front of the right people, is what I do.  Done well, that’s inarguably valuable.  But only done well, and with an understanding of how the game is changing.

aggregation does not a destination make.

Interesting observation:

I set up Facebook to import my posts from BrokenGentleman.com as notes.  A post that appeared both on my blog, and tumblr, to no response, got 5 comments within 5 hours on Facebook.

This, oddly enough, got me thinking about FriendFeed.

If a service’s only value as a destination is the ability to import data from multiple places and aggregate the same grouping of data from multiple contacts, then why am I headed there instead of to Facebook, which can do many of the same things (and could do all of them, if Zuckerberg and company saw potential there), while providing an established wealth of value and content of it’s own.

Honestly, if Facebook would let me set it to import more than one blog feed, and expanded importing support to more outside services, I could easily see it becoming even more of a destination than it already is.  If people are already going there to see what is going on in the lives of their associates, why not take advantage of that and put the things you are doing in front of them, whether they are RL or online based.

This is likely one of the posts that is more for me than for anyone else.

the integrated content debate.

Over the last month, I've been trying to keep my online writing / outposts / profiles more up to date, and more connected.  This has gone fairly well, as it serves to keep me involved in more of my accounts online, commenting, communicating, writing and linking more.  But I also wonder if the feeling of RSS incest that I get when something particularly vapid travels my watched corner of the blogosphere, is going to start to kick in for the small group of people who follow me, and the even smaller group who follow me on several different networks.

Currently, My tumblr, twitter, and facebook accounts will post links to anything that goes up on broken gent.  Similarly, facebook and broken gent link to all other accounts online of note.  It won't be long until I try to integrate my tumblr feed into my facebook account as well.  I admit I worry that people will think the multiple locations are meaningless if they interconnect too much, but my rationale is this:

Brokengentleman.com is for my theory and experience related to communications.  I use tumblr as a less focused clearing house for what interests me, and brokengent is definitely part of that world, as well.  Facebook is about me in entirety, so I intend to unify my various accounts there as well as I can.  Twitter is really just a collection of status messages, and linking to blog posts there is the same (in my mind) as changing my MSN status to 'New post at brokengentleman.com'.

Is this level of interconnectedness, which will probably only increase, beneficial, or will it only serve to over-saturate my already limited market / audience with the same content.  I can't say yet, but I'll be watching, and probably changing my approach to fit my observations.

crowley's second rule.

I’m proposing the following social media uncertainty principle:

At the moment you are unable to respond personally to the volume of comments and emails generated by your commentary on social media, you are no longer participating in social media.

This came to mind when I read a recent post talking about how great twitter is as a research tool, that simply asking one’s list for recommendations is far more useful than checking a site dedicated to the topic. This is certainly true, for a comparatively small number of pundits. But if you can do that, you aren’t really using social media. You’re being famous on a platform designed for the ‘Famous for 15 People’ world of augmented social interaction. And really, this level of internet fame makes it impossible to really comment on how social media works.

You can’t tell me how twitter, or tumblr, or even blogger works when you’re using it in a way 99% of people will never use it. You aren’t talking about how social media works. You’re talking about being internet famous. And as wise and informed as your perspective may be, it’s not a perspective that benefits most users.

So, the short version is, fame breaks social media. It alters the experience to the point where it’s unrecognizable, and often, breaks it so completely that the internet famous individual gets sick of the vitriol thrown their way and gives up.

You can’t comment on social media without experiencing it. And often, I find the social media punditry crowd is really just talking about personal publishing. It would help me, I think, if I thought they realized it.

my english degree vs. my new media savvy

Vacations are good for creating a distance from one’s normal circumstances.  This has been useful as I’ve got a more accurate, I think, view of what I’ve been doing right and wrong in many creative and professional endeavors.  I’m not going to examine every conclusion I’ve come to, but I’ve spotted a large number of holes in how I’ve been conducting my online life, especially through this blog.

I’ve been playing to my personal strengths and habits, rather than the strengths of the medium.  In other words, I’ve been spooging habits from other writing I’ve done in my life into my blogging.  My English degree is showing through the cracks in the following prominent ways.

1)    What I write here is generally far too long.  Reading 1200-1500 words on a blog isn’t pleasant, and most people won’t do it.  But given my experience writing Lit papers, this feels like a short amount of space to express complex ideas from beginning to end.  I’m naturally verbose, but this is an easy thing to fix in two ways, I can either be concise, or break things up into multiple posts.   Which brings me to…

2)    Blogging is naturally serialized.  As in, nothing HAS to be expressed in terms of one long essay and complete idea.  I can take it piece by piece and spread it out, as most of it isn’t time sensitive.  If I published more complex ideas in 3 -5 post sections, it would also help me with my other major problem…

3)    Inconsistency makes it difficult to keep people interested.  I tend to not write at all, and then write 3000 words in a week, then not write for another 6 days.  Things don’t need to be all boom and bust, but here we are.

I’m hoping that by addressing these issues, I can point them out to other people, and watch them more closely myself.  The other big issue, or course, is that all I’ve posted here in a long, long time is text, which is, to say the least, not very engaging to all readers.

More to come.

'the medium is the message' and 'messages by the medium' - corporate social media.

Everyone remembers 'The Medium is the Message' - it's succinct, and is a great reminder that means of delivery alters potential interpretation.  It's a classic for a reason.

We're reaching the era of 'Message for the Medium' - your content will have to be defined by, and tailored to, the limitations and most importantly cultures of each medium.  Regurgitating the same creative across social networks, banner ads, billboards and TV spots won't work unless your creative operates like a native, to the natives on each platform.  Awkwardness is tantamount to invasion, and will be responded to as such.

Corporate blogging is almost always terrible, mostly because it's usually press release content, advertising content, or marketing content designed for another channel, spooged into blog form.

[Spooged is, if I remember right, taken from Douglas Coupland's Microserfs - the context is in taking an application made for one OS, and then screwing with it until it works on another one.]

Spooging content is poised to become an even bigger problem, for many reasons.  First, social media has larger corporations in a panic, and they are starting to demand a presence without understanding that they don't fit.  Second, old business models are being made less relevant by the second, so content and business plan are being spooged into new media in an attempt to 'modernize' without having to completely re-create a revenue stream.  Third, mobile internet, and mobile social media, are going to be dead easy to sell (who wouldn't want to advertise in someone's pocket) and hard to execute.  The first iteration of this will be horrid, like most first iterations.

Some corporations have such a perfect angle, though, I wish I could convince them to blog just so I could enjoy it.  The one I want most: 3M's Research and Development Division.  A bunch of geniuses with a colossal budget creating tiny outbursts of the future, and sharing it with us step by step and constructive narratives by both the research team, and the project.  But it won't happen, due to trade secrets and the simple fact that it's too alien a concept for the higher ups to approve.  But it's an example where a corporate element would actually fit into the character and requirements of blogging, as opposed to trying to turn the medium into something more familiar.

who cares: social media and the 'assumed' audience.

So, I started using twitter. This is only notable because it started an interesting conversation, one I have had before, in various permutations. It was kicked off by this Penny Arcade comic, and went from a question of 'does anyone really care to read what you are doing at any given moment via twitter' to 'why do you use social media?'

I explained, pretty clearly, that for me, social media is about interaction, but not really about the potential or intended audience.

Some people using services like tumblr, or twitter, or pownce, etc, are doing so as a promotional extension of their dominant destination, whether or not they are thinking of it as such. When someone has the power to break websites by linking to them, yeah, they have to consider their intended audience. But these are not the people that make social media work, really.

It's become cliche that most blogs only have one reader - the person who writes them. And yet, blogs continue to be created in a non-professional capacity, and facebooks and twitters and tumblrs follow suit.

For me, social media is about building my context. It's about building an archive, a data shadow, and something to point people at when something I thought or wrote or experienced has new relevance. This became clear a little while ago, when I shuttered my livejournal account. I backed up the whole 5 year ordeal as a PDF, and it's sitting in my laptop, and on my backup, as a giant pile of information that could be best labelled 'Jon Crowley, 2002-2007'

It's a wonderful side effect that people who care what I have to say, however few, can dig through the trail I'm generating, and possibly find something that interests them. But I'm not, and in all probability will never be, one of those people who can ask the legion of fans to help me with a technical issue, or to surge to the defence of something I have a personal interest in. And while that's cool, it's not what I was after when I started playing around on the internet.

I was, and am, in love with the utility of a recorded history of minutiae. I'm addicted to information, no matter how miniscule, and how it all fits together. I like the idea of that information, that minutiae, being parts of a person, thoughts, ideas, random snippets. I'm willing to (with a clear understanding that nothing is private), put selected thing out there.

So, I understand the appeal of twitter, at least for me. It's another way to record my minutiae, and another solid point I can direct people to if they want more context, more snippets. That's what this blog is for, the utility of recorded ideas, not some imagined readership that (frankly) I know I'm a little too unknown, and a little too inconsistent, to have.

the newspaper i want to read.

I was talking with a friend who is just finishing her education in journalism, and about to enter the workforce. In the midst of one of those conversations that are universal among my generation, the 'I don't know where my industry / career / aspirations will fit in the everchanging landscape'. I told her, and still think, that there will always be a market for trained investigative journalists, mostly because they can do a story justice in a way most bloggers often can't.

I do, however, think that the newspaper is more or less dead in the water, and the magazine (in terms of news, not niche interests) is in a similar, though less drastic, situation.

The newspaper I would operate, on a base level, like a blog network. Individual blogs, run by trained journalists, covering one specific beat. Stories could be reported in full, or as they develop, but each beat would have a distinct voice, and the overarching narrative that can be established by having the same person covering the same issues over time.

Mix this with a solid amount of professional oversight, and it could be curated into a standard daily paper, and more than that, into tailored subscription papers, online or in print, that would only include selected beats, or writers, or even tags. Obviously, this would be available online as it happened, because speed is the other major advantage that blogging has over traditional outlets.

Depressingly, the idea of a voice, or author narrative coming through for current newspapers is more likely to mean a columnist that completely ignores the concept of critical distance from the story (paging Rosie DiManno) than it is to give each beat a character.

This isn't a well defined concept. But I think the current approach taken by newspapers to maintain an online presence that mixes the failings of blogs, with incompleteness when compared to the print edition, is doomed.

If someone would print me a one section version of the Globe and Mail, written by only people I respect, and containing only stuff I care about, I'd be willing to subscribe just for convenience. This is, of course, related to my obsession with print on demand.

curation, projected identity, and value.

The internet has become a taste economy.

Most of my daily reads are very selected reportings that reflect a view point. Most of this isn't wholly original content, either - it's analysis, or opinion, of news stories, and other creative artifacts. The few items that I encounter that are wholly new creative work, are usually presented without context.

Blogging is about curation, more often than not. Curation is about, at it's core, the idea that some people have superior taste, or at least a greater ability to separate the boring from the not boring. Entire businesses are based on this idea, the blogging just takes it further, because there is no minimum level of 'class' needed to rate an item being selected. This is in opposition to the idea of, say, a gallery or museum, where value (perceived or otherwise) is set rather high.

Like most shifts related to the internet, this is based on the non-rival nature of digital information. A gallery has physical space, and therefore limits. While there are maximum amounts of traffic, or maximum space that a site can take, these limits aren't hard and fast, and are expanded relatively cheaply.

This is a large part of why internet culture is so interesting to me. With the lowered minimum judgment of value, culture incorporates a wider array of objects and ideas into the presiding taste. As well, taste is fractured deeper - I'd argue the larger amount of more specific sub-genres is in large part to the minimum number of interested parties per area being reduced. It's easy to have a community even if no one around you wants to be part of it.

Curation is an interest of mine for a lot of reasons, but foremost because it's a function of persona. Whether the identity of the writer, or the brand identity of the company, website, what have you, curation is an act of forging identity. Attracting readers, interested parties, a group of stakeholders is more or less clear validation of the curator, and therefore the person they have constructed.

In terms of understanding what someone means, and who they are, there are few better tools for analysis than an ever growing selection of what they find interesting, relevant, and worth sharing.

Projected identity, in terms of brands, people, and websites, is the most important differentiator available. Be aware of it.

the perils of new media consumption.

Too much of my information comes from the blogosphere. I realised that today when, on three separate occasions, I found a story that I had already been exposed to popped up next on my RSS feed. This doesn't bother me when there is actual commentary, but very often it's something I saw yesterday, with a link to where I saw it yesterday. Often, there's not even a quote for context.

This is an old complaint, that there's very little original content on the blogosphere. And that's true, to a point. But I read blogs not for facts, but for curation, opinion, and analysis. Curation is the hard one, because very often (and I'm guilty of this) bloggers use blogs for inspiration and information.

This is me promising to add, at the very least, commentary, context, or opinion to links posted.

engagement as facilitation.

While working on the last 2 posts, and considering how to generate engagement, I realised that my core point wasn't the focus on issues, per se, but rather creating a tool to facilitate action. This is a pretty simple rule for whether or not something will generate engagement in a user base, so I thought it should be made explicit.

Content, or Information, or even Distraction don't guarantee engagement, and if they do, they can only do so for the short term. People talk about the value of Facebook as a 'social graph'm but I find I can only explain the value to non-users as a means of keeping in touch with people I would otherwise lose track of. Facebook is filled with information, and things to do, but the engagement comes from it's use to facilitate events, or friendships, or contact.

Wikipedia works the same way. It's not naturally engaging to the majority of users - we show up, get the information we want, maybe click a link or two, and move on. But to those who see Wikipedia as a way to facilitate explaining their expertise, and sharing it with others, it becomes an addiction. These superusers are the ones who keep the project alive.

I use Tumblr because it facilitates sharing short bursts of information with my friends. There are other ways I can do that, but Tumblr also facilitates interaction with the information my friends post. It gives me a dead easy way to take someone else's content, respond to / remix it, and repost it on my own account. This is then shared with anyone following my account.

This is obvious, and should be fairly intuitive. You can't just offer something, you have to offer a means to action, to actually engage users. So, there's the short version of how I need to consider any changes to anything in my life - what action am I facilitating, and what am I trying to shore up with nothing but content?

new media and the oscars.

I watched the majority of the Oscars this year, although I had assumed I wouldn't.

I'm neither strongly for or against the awards show, I just didn't see a point. The formatting of the Oscars seems more or less irrelevant, given the way I curate my online media consumption.

Standard (old) Model: Watch the red carpet, discuss / mock interesting choices, ignore bland ones. Watch the intro, laugh / discuss good jokes, ignore bland ones. Watch the performances, usually well executed but somewhat boring. Watch the presenters, half-paying attention to the pre-presentation patter, and half checking to see if they flub a line or mispronounce a name. Watch the Winners, ignoring the bland (often technical) awards, and agree / disagree with the marquee award winners.

Debatable Model: Read / Compulsively refresh 2-5 different liveblogs of the event on your laptop while watching, so as to achieve the maximum amount of witty commentary / recap possible. (Does anyone actually do this?)

New Model: Ignore the Oscars broadcast. Wake up, and go to your RSS reader. You now have a breakdown of Winners, Snubs, Reactions, Bad Outfits, Good Outfits, Great Jokes, Flubs, and the Performances deemed relevant. With this comes youtube videos of anything notable (therefore, time/location shifting, replay, etc), smarmy commentary, little bits of supporting info you wouldn't have known otherwise, etc. This is basically a distilled version of the standard watching experience, and you can feel free to ignore what doesn't interest you. You will learn everything you would from the show that you cared to, and in around a quarter of the time.

More importantly, the parts that most people enjoy are readily available in online coverage. The context, critique, jokes, etc, take the place of the unending montages that no one cares about, the technical awards (which, I'm sorry, do not matter to wider, not intensely dedicated to film crowd), and the thank you speeches.

Funnily, watching the Oscars made my RSS list a lot faster to sort through this morning, as most of the information had already been absorbed. But, it should be noted that I didn't finish watching the broadcast, because I got bored at around 10, brought my laptop to the TV, and then left at 11.

The standard counterarguments about 'knowing first' or 'shared experience' only partially apply. The interesting thing to me is that watching the Oscars has become an entirely dispensable part of the Academy Awards Experience.