cheapeasyglobal

Great post Hugh, I’d describe it as, “cheap and easy on a global scale.”

I agree! It’s really all about how you view this global media thing.
Cheap. Easy. Global. Media. –> Nice way of putting it! 🙂

great point, hugh. and it’s true: “the yakkers push the players to higher standards”
really a great point. so sorry it takes soooo long for the emergence of collective intelligence
sometimes I feel like a trilobites on the beach, fighting for evolution to happen faster 😀

It is little difference to your “Global Microbrand” idea – that “web 2.0” has given everybody the power to become a global force through the low cost of entry to publishing tools.

I agree, although I do think that these other services will influence to some extent comment distribution. In the long run, comment frag will probably help blogs, not hurt them.
Anyway, blogging is here to stay. Microblogging is another medium, not a replacement.
Referencing Clay Sharky was smart. He won’t be proven wrong anytime soon. Nor will you.

I thought reading Techcruch was dead.

Thank you for reminding me that blogging may be dead, dying or merely passed out in the closet but publishing has caught an unexpected second wind; is alive, well and looking for another drink. It’s easy to get wrapped around the fad and miss reality.

Exactly, what Brendan Cooper said “but this begs the question”.
There seems to be a pattern that whenever anyone who gets *heard* writes about how a negative aspect is playing out in practice, it triggers an immediate defensiveness, a reaction I’d characterize as:
“Don’t think about that! HYPE! HYPE! HYPE! Stand up and cheer! The world is changing! Buzzword! Democracy! Buzzword! Community! Buzzword! Personal! …”
The point about “blogs and bloggers and blogging” is that it’s marketed as one effect of that change, and when the evidence comes in that the change at least has some pretty negative aspects, there’s great effort to claim that somehow doesn’t count.

I follow your blog. Through you I read about Clay Shirky. I bought his book. I wrote to him about it. A day later he kindly wrote back to me. That quick. That easy.
Your post sums it all up superbly.

thanks for the inspirational words as always hugh. Prompted a post over at my own blog, chronicling my journey writing my first novel. the Cheap. Easy. Global. Media. is obviously something i’m pursuing.
i think one thing that remains pertinent however, is as easy as it is to publish the material, to get anyone to listen is a whole lot more difficult. but that’s life and the way it’s always been i guess, if it was all easy, it wouldn’t be any fun now would it?

Since I’m outside the tech world, I’m sometimes amused and sometime irritated by the whole rockstar/A-lister appellation. But I’ve realized that it’s frequently used ABOUT other people, not by the people themselves. So, why all of the kissing up? It’s almost like some folks need to create celebrities to keep things exciting.
I won’t deny there is an awful lot of self-promotion on services like Twitter (half of the posts I read are “look at my blog!” posts), but it’s also their readers (sometimes called “fans!”) who help create these self-important personas. Why? To curry favor, to get positive press, to gain access, to hope for reciprocal acknowledgment of superstar status…I’m sure there are a variety of reasons for people fanning the flames of egotism.
And like with all celebrity, these A-listers get praise that is undeserved as well as criticism that is equally unwarranted. And I think the only thing that the rest of us can do is to stop using them as a reference point of what is hot or what is not. The problem is not with what they think but why so many people seem to care (and chronicle) what they think.
I’m sure there are equally or more insightful blog writers out there getting 1/10 the attention and readership they deserve. So, it’s our job not to seek the easiest, highest profile writers and seek out people who have the most interesting things to say.

The commencement address from my undergraduate class was given by an influential economist and politician, having very recently stepped down from the post of minister of economic affairs. He wasn’t too poetical, though, and didn’t inherit us any nice soundbites. His final advice was — labor and love.
Over time, I came to think that what he really meant was “don’t suck”.
Anyway, how does not wanting to be constantly obsessed by the slow drift of the memesphere make you an armchair quarterback?
I mean, we *are* doing it. The C-listers, the long-tailers, the people who never follow the advice at Problogger and Copywriter. Not. Armchair. Quarterbacks. Street basketball players, maybe. Maybe lone jugglers or people into similar feats of skill and intensive training.
The guy from Problogger knows the technicals of writing “compelling content”. The problem is that I can’t seem to reconcile “my voice” with his notion of “compelling content”. So my voice goes online, with the perhaps predictable result of only attracting transitory traffic when misinterpreted into some silly controversy.
I do have a day job. I did find a means of making a living that’s easier, more intensive in technical skills (I’m always awash in pleasure when mastering new technical skills) and less soul-crushing than problogging.
It’s still cheap — even if I pay for a cheapie shared hosting account as opposed to using the free hosts, and I do it on highly-paid time. It’s still easy — even if writing in english is still a tad bit artificial for me, even though I /think/ in english a lot of the time because of all the time spent reading Reddit or suchlike. It’s still global, which is why I switched to writing in english in first place.
I end up either writing very personal, very context-intensive one-liners or pouring an hour of intense ritalin-powered spirits into some long-winded essays on abstract subjects sprinkled with run-on sentences and strange uses of propositions (I’m still getting used to “naturally” writing “on”, “in” or “at”).
And even when I’m writing on my best-honed subject — the one I went to graduate school for — I still want the freedom to go the extra inch and spell out the leaps of thought I wouldn’t put on an entry to the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. I value that freedom enough to have added a disclaimer that basically disqualifies me as a thinker: “you should not believe in me”.
Needless to say, I’m not doing very well at blogging. Unless you count the judgement of my 20-odd RSS subscribers — I suppose they are enough “into” the intensive context of the flow of one-liners. Or the once or twice a month 900-hits days driven by plain stupid misreading. But really, I don’t count 20 regular readers as doing well, as much as I rally for micropolitics and the power of mouth-to-mouth actions to “save the environment” (and I don’t mean reducing carbon footprints) or reducing social inequalities by reducing the monetary aspects of social life.
And it’s not that I take “offense” or such at the suggestion that I’m an armchair quarterback — I have enough to take offense at. I’m just doing my share of micropolitics in some place that has more visibility than my blog for a change.
It’s not about empowering the little guy. It’s about lowering the threshold. At the end of the day, all that my blog’s worth is a document of my brief, weird and unredeemably personal existence. But while we only know tidbits about Van Gogh from letters to his brother, we know plenty about Hugh McLeod from the long-term pattern of his blog — nevermind if it’s popular or not.
On the other hand, when McLeod starts posting for the sake of being a blogger, things suck.

Seth, you so often say the Right Thing and then pick dead wrong examples to “prove” your point and/or further your relentlessly unchanging agenda. Worst of all, you don’t recognize when you’re guilty of precisely the things you accuse the “A-list” of. You use the cred of The Guardian, for example, to hurt others you believe ‘deserve’ it. I have no doubt your heart is in the right place, but a little self-reflection is in order.
Hugh, as always, you rock : )

The “free” part attracts a lot of cranks, but I wonder how long the new media will stay so “hot” and contentious. Unmediated media — and media that can transmit a variety of forms — is such a new concept that the consequences of freedom will take time to sink in.
Publishing was either so expensive, so suppressed, or so controlled by institutional gatekeepers that upstarts had to be outrageous to make a splash. It may be my imagination, but as we get away from text-only, I sense that that hotter styles aren’t wearing as well (or self-segregate).

There’s a great song by TQOTSA, to the sound of sharpening knives U can hear the mosquito conspiracy.