Category Archives: Media

Journalism and Objectivity

November 30, 2007 – 8:17 am

One of my favorite journalists and thinkers, Virginia Postrel, muses on objectivity and journalism after reading Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston’s Objectivity:
Reading the book, I began to understand why I’ve never embraced my own profession’s celebration of objectivity. Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Web 2.0, Writing | Comments (1)

On Covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM

November 21, 2007 – 11:30 am

So social media requires real people. That’s what Fred Wilson says in response to Om about turning GigaOM into a business.
Disclosure: I am a real person. But Fred doesn’t know me. And like many GigaOM readers and commenters, he doesn’t see me as a person. The flip side of trolling commenters who feel deindividuated themselves […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Blogging, Web 2.0, Writing | Comments (7)

On Book Contract Non-Compete Clauses

June 1, 2007 – 4:30 pm

I’m thisclose to signing a book contract with Wiley to write a book on web workerhood under the brand of Web Worker Daily and we had some back and forth over the non-compete clause. While I understand why publishers would include a non-compete clause, I don’t think that authors should accept anything more than the […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Career | Comments (8)

On Enthusiasm, Volunteering, and Making Money

February 19, 2007 – 5:47 pm

Johnnie Moore on enthusiasm (via James):
I found the original meaning of enthusiasm, from the Greek, was (my italics):
inspiration or possession by a divine afflatus or by the presence of a god
If you like, enthusiasm is about showing up in the here and now - a good way to counter anxiety, I find. You can invoke […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Economics, Web 2.0 | Comments (6)

Blog Flux, Or Why I Have Joined Web Worker Daily

November 15, 2006 – 10:17 am

I suggested to Shelley that the reason her semantic web post didn’t appear on techmeme was because of blog churn (referring to her refactoring of her blogging across various sites) and not because of gender discrimination; she pointed out how I was wrong, and I stand corrected. But I think the concept of blog churn […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Blogging, Career, Personal, Philosophy | Comments (19)

Blogger Relations: Person to Person not PR to A-Lister

November 4, 2006 – 1:22 pm

I’ve been following the TechCrunch/Mother’s Click story with fascinated horror. It seems to encapsulate all that is wrong with blogger relations today. Tara nailed it: “for Mother’s Click…wtf are they thinking? Why even target Mike and TC? Huh? The majority of your audience isn’t even there - you want to go to BlogHer and Dooce […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Blogging | Comments (6)

Impedance Mismatch in Old and New Media

October 30, 2006 – 5:23 pm

Kind of old hat to talk about trying to match up relational data with an object-oriented programming language, huh? Technically, the answer might be using an object-relational mapping capability like Hibernate or TopLink. Maybe iBATIS, does that count as ORM? I think so, based on my quick perusal of the website.
In case you don’t know […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Software Development, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)

An Unsatisfying Read

June 10, 2006 – 11:56 am

In Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns proposes that satisfaction lies not in simple hedonism, but in feeding our brains with challenging, novel experiences. Last week, I was exploring how to maintain enduring passion when you’re a serial enthusiast. I concluded that keeping things new was the secret. In […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Mindfulness, Web 2.0 | Comments (10)

Content’s Divorce from Advertising

May 22, 2006 – 5:46 pm

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0:

What if media isn’t a business anymore? What if it becomes like poetry — lot’s of people do it, but nobody ever expects to make any money from it.
I know, just because there aren’t obvious answers yet, doesn’t mean somebody won’t figure it out, but for the moment we all […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Shopping | Comments (22)

Business Week Gets Blogging

March 4, 2006 – 6:42 pm

One of my favorite new blogs comes from a mainstream media outfit, Business Week. It’s their Working Parents blog. They’ve gotten together five moms and two dads to write regularly about issues that impact parents trying to combine work and family. These issues affect every family with kids at home, because even when one parent […]

By Anne Z | Also posted in Economics, Parenting | Comments (2)