Fgraham1’s Blog

This picture shows us a happy and contented baby and a Mother’s love for her child.

This photo shows me a guy who likes to live on the edge. He is probably a bit of a daredevil not afraid to take chances and maybe lives a wreckless life.

This photo shows a healthy guy working out. He appears to be in great shape and very focused on his training.

This is a picture of people in a relationship taking a photo of themselves. They are happy.

This photo shows me a young girl who is happy about getting a New Car

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Mr. Keen begins: So what, exactly, is Web 2.0? Mainstream media’s traditional audience has become Web 2.0’s empowered author. Web 2.0 is YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook. Web 2.0 is YOU! Is Web 2.0 a dream or a nightmare? Silicon Valley, of course, interprets Web 2.0 as Disney rather than Kafka. The people have finally spoken. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. Web 2.0’s democratization of information and entertainment is creating a generation of media illiterates. The Web is a problem. The Web isn’t Cinderella facing Gregor “The Cockroach” Samsa in a deathmatch. Despite Time — which, as a pillar of the mainstream press is of course free of the hyperbole so common on the Web — the Web isn’t even You. Your wildly unflattering picture of life on the Web could also be painted of life before the Web. People chatter endlessly. It’s the Web.
We also agree that the Web is a problem. Compare that to the previous generation of media. The Web is abundance, while the old media are premised — in their model of knowledge as well as in their economics — on scarcity.
The old media are available on line. Mr. Keen: I agree that the Web is us. It’s a mirror rather than a medium. As he argues in his book, Web 2.0 transforms us into monkeys. Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing and distributing that talent. Are you convinced that Web 2.0 is of benefit to traditional intellectuals like yourself? Talent is not either/or. We will lose some talent. Any medium which brings experts and professional authorities together is healthy. It’s the monkey chorus on the democratized web that bother me. Web 2.0’s distintermediated media unstitches the ecosystem that has historically nurtured talent. Web 2.0 misunderstands and romanticizes talent.
The mainstream media’s business model does not aim at nurturing talent. Talent isn’t engineered. The question, therefore, is not whether the traditional media’s taste is better or worse than the Web’s. The Web doesn’t have taste, good or bad. The Web is not an institution, a business, or even a market, any more than the real world is. The Web is only a web because we’re building links that say “Here’s something worth your time, and here’s why.”
Very few make a living through the traditional media.
Lots of creative people are making money on the Web, including traditional, edited, gate-kept media.
It may well be that the Web results in fewer mega-stars. The Web is actually additive for most creators.
This, to borrow your language, is what “matters” in the world of Web 2.0:

Question 1: Do you believe that the Web is “Ours”?

Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of “other sites like his” as he found them in his travels around the web. Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron’s list, and most interested people did. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. Cameron’s list grew so large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.
The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.
In Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus, Greg Ruggiero of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, “Media is a corporate possession…You cannot participate in the media. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation.”
By writing a few lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine media as a public, participatory endeavor.
While weblogs had always included a mix of links, commentary, and personal notes, in the post-Blogger explosion increasing numbers of weblogs eschewed this focus on the web-at-large in favor of a sort of short-form journal. More than that, Blogger itself places no restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box into which the blogger can type…anything: a passing thought, an extended essay, or a childhood recollection. The Metafilter interface instructs the writer to contribute a link and add commentary; Blogger makes no such demands. Searching for a filter-style weblog by clicking through the thousands of weblogs listed at weblogs.com, the Eatonweb Portal, or Blogger Directory can be a Sisyphean task. Certainly, both styles still exist; certainly the particular mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation unique to each individual site has always given each weblog its distinctive voice and personality; and certainly the weblog has always been an infinitely malleable format. But the influx of blogs has changed the definition of weblog from “a list of links with commentary and personal asides” to “a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page.” A filter-style weblog provides many advantages to its readers. This profound experience may be most purely realized in the blog-style weblog. Lacking a focus on the outside world, the blogger is compelled to share his world with whomever is reading. Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web: to pontificate, remember, dream, and argue in public, as easily as they send an instant message. In September of 2000 there are thousands of weblogs: topic-oriented weblogs, alternative viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected by mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas. Traditional weblogs perform a valuable filtering service and provide tools for more critical evaluation of the information available on the web. Free-style blogs are nothing less than an outbreak of self-expression. Each kind of weblog empowers individuals on many levels.
So why doesn’t every bookmark list contain five weblogs? Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself.

Question 1: Do you think that weblogs are the next big thing?

Ms. Digby’s simple, homemade music videos of her performing popular songs have been viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube. Her acoustic-guitar rendition of the R&B hit “Umbrella” has been featured on MTV’s program “The Hills” and is played regularly on radio stations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Portland, Ore. Capping the frenzy, a press release last week from Walt Disney Co.’s Hollywood Records label declared: “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records.”
What the release failed to mention is that Hollywood Records signed Ms. Digby in 2005, 18 months before she became a YouTube phenomenon. Hollywood Records helped devise her Internet strategy, consulted with her on the type of songs she chose to post, and distributed a high-quality studio recording of “Umbrella” to iTunes and radio stations.
WSJ’s Peter Lattman explains how musician Marié Digby represents traditional media conglomerates’ attempts at generating word-of-mouth buzz via the Internet.
Ms. Digby’s MySpace and YouTube pages don’t mention Hollywood Records. Ms. Digby certainly isn’t the first professional to feign amateur status on YouTube. The YouTube home page for singer Marie Digby.
Ms. Digby says she chose the songs. Hollywood Records bought the Apple Inc. laptop computer and software that Ms. Digby — who lives with her parents in Los Angeles’s upscale Brentwood neighborhood — used to post her YouTube videos. In late 2005, Ron Moss, Rondor’s executive vice president, connected Ms. Digby to a Hollywood Records executive named Allison Hamamura, who was immediately taken with the singer. Before the year was out, Hollywood Records had signed Ms. Digby. “I was coming out of nowhere,” Ms. Digby says. A YouTube Star’s Secret
Marié Digby’s homemade YouTube music videos, in which she covers popular songs and sings her own compositions, helped launch her career. But the 24-year-old singer and guitarist had help from a record label. “Umbrella” by Rihanna
As Ms. Digby’s star rose, other media outlets played along. The station’s programming executives now acknowledge they had booked Ms. Digby’s appearance through Hollywood Records, and were soon collaborating with the label to sell “Umbrella” as a single on iTunes.
At the show’s taping, Ms. Digby gave a backstage interview that was posted online by NBC. Even with the club’s handful of tables reserved for Hollywood Records executives and their guests, Ms. Digby continued to play the ingénue.

Question 1. Do you think more unknown talent will be found on You Tube?

Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal
By ALLEN SALKIN
A guy starts a clever blog in January and calls it Stuff White People Like. There was an innocent time, oh, about four years ago, when the idea of turning a blog into a book seemed novel, a fresh path for unknown writers to break into the big time.
The outcry over Mr. Lander’s book deal suggests the trend that has been building for a half decade may have finally reached apogee.

Question 1. Do you see books by bloggers being a trend in a few years?