Seth Godin and the Death of Print Media

Seth Godin had some strong words today re: the death-rattle of print media:

Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris's magazine) and yes, the New Yorker (Malcolm's magazine)), is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They're going to disappear before you do. I'm not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.

The writing is on the wall for those who are willing to see it. The problem is not so much the arrogance of traditional media as they're being shown the door; it's their lack of foresight. Traditional media has been tardy. Traditional media has been reactive. Traditional media has occasionally been petulant and angry. And now they are paying the price.

Conde Nast, by the way, is the same Corporate Overlord that owns reddit.com, where I've spent entirely too much time, and with which I've always had a love/hate relationship, and about which I'll have (much) more to say in the future...

The Bullshit Generator

The dack.com Web Economy Bullshit Generator is one of those tongue-in-cheek web apps that are so popular nowadays: useless but cute. This one generates bullshit e-business phrases in verb/adjective/noun format. Here are a few pieces of bullshit the tool generated for me:

• repurpose distributed applications
• cultivate e-business channels
• exploit wireless markets
• morph viral niches
• evolve B2C schemas

The great thing about the generator is that some of this bullshit is actually believable, i.e., I could easily see the phrase "exploit wireless markets" or "repurpose distributed applications" appearing in some pretentious whitepaper.

My Favorite Bloggers

Isaac Newton said it best:

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

So before getting into blogging proper I thought I should take a minute to lay down some love for the bloggers/authors/writers who've influenced me. In no particular order:

• Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. For his thoroughly relevant bite-sized lozenges of digestible content.
  
• Shamus Young of Twenty Sided. For the D&D and game programming geekery.
  
• James Devlin of Coding the Wheel. For all things of or pertaining to poker and programming/technology.
  
• Robert Hodgins of Flight 404. For his brilliant visualizations and work with Processing.
  
• Seth Godin of Seth Godin's Blog. For those clever, 20-second posts that make you go Hmm.

If you're reading this blog, then you should absolutely be reading all of the above! I'll update this list (and perhaps do a formal blogroll) as time allows.