Success rarely reveals its secrets to us even when we attain it. Failure is more generous -- it shares its lessons with us, if we just listen. In his Letter to the Bayosphere Community, Dan Gillmor undergoes the rite of self-examination as he looks back on the short history of Bayosphere.
There's a temptation to look at the Washington Post blog blowup and perform a cost-benefit analysis on interactivity. Clearly you can't just toss interactivity technology -- comment systems, forums, chat rooms, whatever -- onto a website and get nothing but happy flowers and joy blossoms. User comments alone aren't interaction. Staff needs to be involved -- responding, leading, and occasionally mopping up spills. Human resources aren't free.
Writing for the Jan. 9 issue of Business Week, media columnist Jon Fine has a five-point plan for "the daily paper of tomorrow." Four of his initiatives already are in operation at a number of daily newspapers, but then, as William Gibson said, the future is already here -- it's just unevenly distributed.
If your website's message boards read like a men's locker room, here's a clue that you're out of sync with society. A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project points out that women now outnumber men online in the United States, and that's especially true in the troublesome (for newspapers) 18-29 age bracket.
Have I been stuck on a message for this long? Steve Rubel's post on how to read books for free using Google reminded me I haven't looked very closely at Google Books since it got fat with content. I searched for my own name (doesn't everybody?) and found myself quoted in Christopher Harper's 1999 "And That's the Way It Will Be:"
