Stuff I’ve been reading

• Media as a hobby is not sustainable as a business – broadstuff
  Great article by Alan Patrick.
  

  "We tend to forget that the reason for profits is unique access to bottleneck resources. In the case of the media it has been production and distribution. The 'Net changed all that of course – production and distribution is now in the hands of anyone with a PC and a 'Net connection."[...] To me the message is fairly clear – the New Bottlenecks will be Independent Thought, Editing & Curation, and Journalistic Storytelling. [...] This to me is the issue that "HobbyMedia" will face – the "Pro" media will find the new bottlenecks and spend all their time and energy in mastering them.

  I've long been skeptical of Alan's view on amateur produced media but his position is becoming clear now and I think this could well be applied outside of news journalism. What are your bottlenecks?

• DRM for news? Inside the AP’s plan to "wrap" its content
  Nice Ars Technica analysis of how the Associated Press intends to protect news. In short, they can't, it won't and the microformat technology they're planning to use doesn't even do that. One for the "sad death throes of traditional news distribution" files.
• The Goal of Twitter’s New Homepage? Be the World’s Water Cooler
  Articles on Mashable about Twitter are usually so niche as to be uninteresting or coloured by systemic bias around how the Mashable folk use it, but this one is worth a skim. In short, Twitter have changed their front page as seen by prospective new users which indicates a change in business strategy. Or "Twitter’s no longer about updating your friends, but about being THE place for global events." I don't want to read too much into this, and it doesn't affect how the infinite micro-communities function, nor how those introduced by word of mouth will use it, but it registers on my Interesting Radar.
• Lotka’s law – Wikipedia
  I think I saw this in the distribution of Twitter users over Supersonic. I have no idea what to do with this piece of knowledge though. "Lotka's law is one of a variety of special applications of Zipf's law. It describes the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. It states that [...] the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of articles published increases, authors producing that many publications become less frequent. There are 1/4 as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved (as a function of 'a') are very discipline-specific."
• Andy Gibson’s talk at Ambition Roadshow
  10 minute mp3 in which @gandy looks at how we're playing with conventions of audience, power, conversation and more. I aspire to be this coherent and to strike such a great balance between optimism and caution. Highly recommended.
• It meant that you were a protest singer
  Tom Ewing looks at the "United Breaks Guitars" protest video not from it's status as a viral hit but through the novel and more useful perspective of a music writer. In short, the medium – country music – is a potent vehicle for "hard-luck stories and straight-talking". The medium is the message and all that.
• Social by Social – A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact
  Written by some people I respect, but I haven't found time to delve in yet. You may have time. Have a delve and tell us what you think
• If the Twitter community was 100 people…
  Nice infograph showing how 5% of Twitter users make up 75% of content on Twitter. That sounds about right to me and is the same across most distinct communities. What interests me is how the other 95% are probably making up most of the content somewhere else, offline or on.
• Social Media Is Punk
  Nice little video drawing comparisons between the punk movement in the 70 and the blogging, etc stuff happening now. While I think the video simplifies thing a bit I do agree with this. The DIY nature of online participation is what makes it so important. Anyone can play three chords. Anyone can do a zine. Anyone can start a blog.
• The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank
  Best read with a "hmm, yeah, maybe" attitude but this hits on something our current social networks are missing out on – finding the middle ground between your "friends" and everybody. Twitter kinda had this with their option to see replies people you follow made to people you don't follow until it was scrapped for performance reasons but that was only a hint, while Facebook sort of does it for discovering new people but, afaik, doesn't play in the search arena. I want to see friend-of-a-friend search. Just as my local community is made up of people I don't know but who are probably connected to me via someone I do know, so my online community works the same way. Being able to query the data in that network would be invaluable.
• I get by with a little help from 94552 friends
  Matt Haughey on the 10th aniversary of Metafilter, the first community weblog (I think). Someone needs to write the book on Metafilter – if they have do let me know – since it's a wonderful case study on how online communities work.
• Andy Dickinson’s Bookmarks for June 5th through July 27th
  Usually I shy away from Delicious link-dumps like this (even though I'm just as guilty – I suspect this link will be accompanied be far too many when it gets published) but a quick skim through Andy's indicates it's chock full of goodness, especially if you're interested in online journalism and news.
• How to search Twitter using Google
  Interesting, not just for the tips but as an illustration that there's more than one way to access data in a service. I'm reminded of how I used to search for bands on MySpace using Google partly because MySpace's search was so torturous but also because the way Google ranks pages usually bubbled the bands above the non-band pages.

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