Cloud Culture

Meet the New Retweet

2009-11-19T19:17:00.005-05:00

Twitter has rolled out its new retweet functionality. They first started talking about it back in August. The idea is that you're given to option to put someone else's tweet in your stream, so that everyone following you sees it show up.

I see this as a great new feature. It makes it that much easier to share on twitter. I can now see something retweeted by someone who I follow, who only saw it because it was retweeted by someone they follow, and so on.

Now, retweeting is not a new idea. It's been a user convention for some time. The way it has worked is that you reproduce the text of someone's tweet, put it after @ and their username, which comes after RT (here's an example). As usual, Twitter is following the leads provided by its users.

Some people are not happy with Twitter's official implementation of the longstanding convention, however.

Taken from @zephoria

Above is a tweet from danah boyd, who wrote a really fantastic paper (PDF) on the practice of retweeting. I was surprised by her negative response, so I asked her what she found to be wrong with the new feature. This was her response:

Taken from @zephoria

I encountered her critique more than once.

Taken from @mediajunkie

The thing about doing it the old fashioned way is that you can put a little--and I emphasize, little--commentary at the beginning or end of a RT. The argument made in the two tweets above is that this commentary added valuable context.

I'm not denying that the context can sometimes be valuable, but...this is Twitter we're talking about. In the past, particularly long tweets had to be edited down before they could even be retweeted (since the RT @username ads additional characters). Only the shortest tweets could have commentary added to them without degrading the quality, and not every tweet is short.

I'm willing to admit that there is a trade-off here, but I think giving up the limited commentary that could be added for perfect copy fidelity is a good bargain.

Think of some of the famous incidents where Twitter was used for disseminating information, such as the Mumbai bombings. People on scene have used services like twitpic to shares pictures and information about what was going on. The new retweet feature makes it possible for their tweets to travel nearly frictionless across twitter accounts.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I think that anything that increases Twitter's ability to play its role as intermediary is a good thing, and this most certainly does that.

One Year

2009-11-16T07:21:00.000-05:00

It's been a year since I started Cloud Culture, and I'm already glad that I decided to go down this road.

It was the forth year since I had started my other blog, and I wanted a blog where I could be a little more professional. At the very least, a blog where I could point potential employers without having to worry about somehow stumbling on a profanity-laden post that I wrote back when I was 19, or something.

Moreover, I wanted to have a blog that was more focused in the subject matter. Sophistpundit is much more of a generic personal blog; I write about whatever catches my fancy. Cloud Culture is about how the internet is changing our lives. To begin with that mostly meant writing posts much like the ones I had done on this subject over at Sophistpundit; posts focused on the economics of new media.

I didn't really want to do that exclusively, however--it was just what I knew best. I've since tried to look more at the artistic works that can be found online, since that's a big part of what I'm interested in talking about here. My long term goal for Cloud Culture is to explore what is actually happening in art and online communities generally. This is something that's been difficult between my job and class, so it's likely I won't seriously pursue it until after my graduation in May.

The one post I feel embodies this goal, and the post that I am the proudest of, is On Webcomics, Making Money, and Art. I e-mailed a number of webcomic artists to get more information on what they do, if and how they manage to make webcomics their full time job. I put my own analysis on it, both from the business side and from the perspective of how comics as an art form benefit from their abundant presence on the web. The more posts like this that I can do, the more I can say that I have successfully turned Cloud Culture into the kind of blog I want it to be.

Of course at the end of the day I do this because it's what I love. I look forward to another fun year of writing about form and function in a networked world.

Cloud Culture Spotlight: Phil Rossi's Harvey

2009-11-10T19:43:00.004-05:00

I was introduced to the world of podcast novels when I downloaded Phil Rossi's Crescent in full a couple of years back. It seems only appropriate that Harvey ended up being the first podcast novel I listened to as new chapters were released, rather than after the fact.

Harvey is a small, sunny Virginia town that is slowly being devoured by dark forces that are a mystery to its inhabitants and, for almost all of the book, the reader. On aspect of the writing that I liked was that the creatures we are exposed to for most of the book are almost a red herring to discovering the malevolent force that is the prime mover behind everything.

Rossi populates Harvey with a slew of interesting characters, but I really liked the two main ones. They're both an exercise in contrast--the Sheriff's deputy Frank Meeks on the one hand, who is the very definition of a townie, and the Californian singer Calvin Hubbard on the other, who is retreating to the small town to work on his album in the wake of a scandalous affair with the equivalent of an American Idol judge.

Importantly, both characters are very sympathetic. As the book progressed I found myself rooting for the both of them; for Meeks to get to the bottom of the terrible events plaguing the town, and for Calvin to survive each success encounter with danger. More to the point, they both come off as genuinely likable people who you'd be comfortable hanging out with if they were real people. I enjoy stories who follow characters like that a lot more than ones where I find even the main characters to be unpleasant or reprehensible.

As with Crescent, Rossi demonstrates a remarkable ability to have an original monster--it isn't vampires or ghosts or anything else old hat--while making great use of established genre devices. So the creatures aren't exactly zombies, but they're close enough to often give the story the feel of a zombie horror. Moreover, the small town that is under siege from the supernatural has been around as least as long as Salem's Lot, arguably as long as or longer than H. P. Lovecraft.

For my own taste, Harvey had the great advantage of having dramatically fewer descriptions of hard-ons than Crescent. I don't know how many other horror fans really care about this--hell, some may find it to be a strike against this book--but I just thought I'd put that out there.

All in all, if you love horror as a genre you owe it to yourself to read this book. More to the point, the range that Rossi has shown across both of these books is striking. I for one will be paying very close attention to what he has in store moving forward, and you should too.

Wordpress Trumps Blogger in Mobile

2009-11-06T20:53:00.007-05:00

While I was waiting in a doctor's office today, I browsed Tweed on my Palm Pre. I clicked a link that took me to a blog post. In the past, this has taken me to some article that was designed to appear on a computer screen. The result is tiny text that I have to zoom in to see, and move the page back and forth to read--in short, it is cumbersome.

Today, however, I landed on a page that was perfectly optimized for my screen. It was a great experience. I was called in to see the doctor before I got a chance to see who the blog host was, but it got me curious about whether the big guys have all taken the time to optimize.

So I went to Vulgar Morality, a blog I know is hosted on wordpress. I was very impressed. Below is the main page.

The the beginning of the first post is visible, and if you want to continue read you click "read this post". The rest of the posts just display the title, date, author, and categories. You can contract the first post to this state by clicking the arrow on its top right. To get to the other posts, you expand them by clicking the arrow on their top right, and then clicking "read this post." Below is what the first post looks like if you click "read this post".

The design is perfect, or as close to it as could be reasonably expected. Wordpress gets the most words on the screen without making them too small to read.

Excited, I went to check out my other blog, Sophistpundit. Like Cloud Culture, Sophistpundit is hosted on Blogger. You can imagine my disappointment when I was greeted by the following:

It's basically the same page as the one you get looking at it from a computer.

Blogger is owned by Google. Google. How can they drop the ball on mobile like this?

All I can say is that they'd better get on this, and soon. Mobile readership is only going to get more important; it's only a matter of time before it begins to rival regular web readership. Blog platforms cannot afford to fall behind in this space. I'm very disappointed to discover that the one I've used for years now is lagging in this important area.

All I have to say is I hope they're already working on this.

Bringing Money into Scanlation?

2009-11-06T11:58:00.007-05:00

I've written about scanlation before, and it's an area I hope to do some research in at some point in the future. For those who've never heard the term before, scanlation is the process of taking manga (Japanese comics) that are released in Japan, scanning them, then translating them and making them available online.

Today when reading a chapter that had recently come out I found this:

Hey guys, I'm Zambo, leader of Keishou Scans. We're really in need of donations at the moment because we're going to be paying a raw provider money to provide us with better quality raws for our Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu releases, which would mean that we could put out higher quality releases for you to read, so we could really use all the donations we can possibly get because as you all know, every little helps. So please visit our site at: http://keishou.net and donate some money towards the payment to the raw provider. We're also looking for a raw provider that can provide earlier HQ Beelzebub scans.

Thanks very much in advance, Zambo.

Let me translate some of that.

A "raw" is just the scanned version of the manga straight for the scanner--in other words, still in Japanese. The guy with the online handle Zambo is the "leader" (whatever that means in practice, my guess is webmaster) of the scanlation community called Keishou. They have people that provide them with raw scans on a weekly basis, and they're hoping to actually pay them to put more effort into making the scans higher quality.

I thought that the whole process was just completely volunteer labor; I'm surprised to hear anyone talking about money. Especially given that this is basically a pirating operation; cross-country and cross-language, but illegal nevertheless.

The thing that interests me about all of this is that, as an economist, I see a clear public good problem that they seem to overcome pretty effortlessly. That is, getting the scans online, translating and proliferating them is something that benefits all of the fans of these manga, not just the specific subset that does all the work. You would therefore think that there would be an enormous amount of freeriding. I mean, I myself am a freerider--I don't speak Japanese and I have no intention of donating money to any of these guys. I enjoy the fruits of their labor but contribute nothing to encourage them to continue it.

Of course, the freerider problem just doesn't seem to matter on the internet the way it does for situations faced more traditionally. You see more and more examples of things like Wikipedia where a small fraction of motivated users from a big enough user base seems to be enough to overcome the costs of collective action.

But that's exactly why I'd love to do some research into the guts of how these things actually work in practice. So over on the Keishou website there are a few things that stand out to me. First of all, they actually have a specific amount that they said they need every month--$30. As of right now, they're almost there, with $26 having been donated.

Second, they have a list of the people who donated, and with the specific amounts donated by each individual. This obviously provides some rewards in the form of reputation within the community. I have to think that the primary donors (or all of them) aren't going to be guys like me, but people who are already active in the particular community in question.

But I don't know how a lot of this works in practice. I don't even know if it's unusual or typical to pay the raw providers like these guys are going to try to do. When I get out of grad school, I'd like to spend more time looking into this sort of thing. There are so many little communities all over the internet that, empowered by modern technology, are actually able to do some pretty amazingly productive things.

Podcasting Short Stories

2009-11-05T20:30:00.004-05:00

Maybe a month and a half ago I discovered Escape Pod, a podcast offering a science fiction short story every week. It struck me as a pretty awesome idea. Shortly afterwards, I discovered that I was actually three times as lucky as I thought I was--Escape Pod is just one of three podcasts under the Escape Artists, Inc. umbrella. There's PodCastle which focuses on fantasy and PseudoPod that focuses on horror.

Up until I found these guys, the only form of audio fiction I was consuming were podcast novels. They're great, of course! I've got a couple of reviews up and one in the works on Phil Rossi's Harvey. But novels have their downsides. Sure, the greater length means that you can build to something much more spectacular. And if you like the characters, you get the fun of following them around for much longer. But it's much more involved than something shorter.

Moreover, when they're done, they're done. In general, podcast novel feeds are author specific--Scott Sigler has his feed, so does Phil Rossi, and J. C. Hutchins, and so on. When their latest novel is over, there's usually a lapse between that and the next one. Authors are, after all, only human--writing takes time, and so does recording and promoting your work and doing all of the various things required to make a living. In short, now that Harvey is over, I'm not expecting another novel from Phil Rossi to fill my commute over the next few months.

The joy of what the folks at Escape Artists are doing is that it is perpetual. It may be that you can't cram as much into a short story as you can into a novel, but it is no less an art form in its own right. Meanwhile, because the stories are all written by different authors, there is an endless supply to draw from. If all of the authors featured up until this point on Escape Pod stopped writing henceforth, it would not diminish the producers' ability to keep putting up new ones each week because there are so many science fiction writers out there.

Frankly, I'm surprised there isn't a lot more of this. I think this is going to be one of the important frontiers in which new writers will cut their teeth the same way that they've done so in genre magazines up until this point. And it's great for genre readers who have any kind of commute to work.

As a jumping point I'd recommend the Escape Pod episode 222: Infestation. It's the one I've most recently listened to and has two things to recommend it: it's an awesome story, and I actually really enjoyed the monologue afterwards.

The Modern Face of Professional Reporting

2009-11-01T15:54:00.006-05:00

The question of what will replace the professional print reporting has been a subject of contention since the rise of the internet made it clear that things were going to be changing, one way or another.

Much of the debate has focused on the role of amateurs--people writing about a particular subject who don't do it as their primary job, and for the most part don't make any money off of it. Their certainly will be--and already is--substantial, but I think there is always going to be an important role for professionals.

To begin with, the really successful amateurs usually end up giving up their day jobs and going professional. Examples that come to mind are Prince of Petworth and Perez Hilton, for instance. This follows the same pattern found in webcomics and just about any kind of content.

When it comes to professional reporting, though, I look at Engadget and I see the future.

With bundled content becoming increasingly uneconomical, there's going to be increasing specialization of subject matter reported. Of course tech journalism is something that has existed long before the internet, so Engadget and blogs like it don't exactly exist in a vacuum, either.

Engadget is primarily a blog. There's the main one, there's one that specializes in news about mobile, and one that specializes in news about HD. Each one has a podcast corresponding to its subject matter. And they recently launched a show that streams live once a month. So they certainly have the multimedia approach down. I've read their main blog for some time, and the corresponding podcast has helped improve the quality of my commute for almost a year.

Engadget puts a lot of energy into keeping on top of the latest news in consumer technology. Online outlets get a lot of flack, which is why I found this podcast particularly interesting.

In it, they describe a recent incident where the Wall Street Journal had reported that Apple was going to give up MacWorld and go to CES from now on. Engadget Editor in Chief Josh Topolsky described how they were unable to get another source to confirm the WSJ's report, and so they watched the story bounce around the internet purely on the strength of the WSJ's reputation before it was finally shot down for being wrong. Topolsky emphasized that, despite rumors to the contrary, they do have fact-checking at Engadget, and he is constantly amazed at how bad the mainstream outlets are at it when it comes to the subjects he knows about.

Providing the latest information isn't the only valuable service that Engadget's staff performs. We live in a world where reviews are everywhere--I review fiction all the time on this very blog; just about anyone who has an opinion about a product can put it online on a blog, on a social network, or a million other places. As such, if you want to get attention in this area there are a couple of dimensions you can compete on.

You could, like Amazon.com, attempt to accrue many reviews in a single location, making it more advantageous to go to their page than to look for the scattered reviews across the web. Or you could take the Engadget approach and provide a high quality, very thorough review.

The first serious review of theirs that I read was the Blackberry Storm review. It gave a lot of background information, as well as detailed observations on its performance, design, and many different aspects. Along the way the review provided a lot of photographs to show its design or particular features, and even videos to show it in action. After I read the review I felt like I had a good idea of what the strengths and weaknesses of the device were, and decided against getting it. Similarly, when I did eventually buy the Palm Pre, I felt that the Engadget review had more than adequately prepared me for its shortcomings.

I think the quality of the reviews has received a fair amount of attention. I've noticed that a lot of places that tend to only quote the old mainstream reviews when a product comes out will include a quote and link to Engadget.

What Engadget does in consumer electronics, I expect we will see in every subject that garners enough attention to support that kind of organization. I'm sure there already are equivalents, in subject areas I have not paid as much attention to.

For all the pessimists who think that everything is going to get worse once old media institutions dissolve, I hold up Engadget as one example of how we can expect it to get better, as professionals take the fullest advantage of the available technology.

The Many Faces of the Blog

2009-10-30T19:11:00.002-04:00

Following a line of thought here. After considering just what it was that blogs bring to the table, I got to thinking about the many varied uses people have found for the platform.

Political blogs have an update rate like a news cycle on crack--the big guys here update many, many times a day to keep up with the latest. Blogs displace news in a lot of other areas--such as celebrity gossip, sports, and consumer technology. The ease of updating on a blog facilitates the kind of continual coverage that blogs like these specialize in.

Just because you can update frequently doesn't mean that you have to. Cafe Hayek, one of my favorite economics blogs, updates several times a day, but does not reach nearly the volume of posts of an Instapundit or Boing Boing. The bloggers at the Cafe post thoughts on a few subjects every day, sometimes relevant to current events and sometimes more broad than that. The Vulgar Moralist posts much less than once a day, but writes philosophy essays with a little more thought put into them than your average political blog post.

Travel and photo blogs obviously are more focused on the visual side of things, rather than on writing. The blog simply provides a platform on which the photos can be organized and presented, with varying amounts of additional commentary.

Then of course there is the personal blog. LiveJournal, created months before Blogger, was built precisely to cater to this side of things. These are what get the most flack from people who think all blogging is self-absorbed myopia; teenage girls writing about their new purses or something like that. There's nothing wrong with that--after all, it was a teenage girl like that who ended up covering the military coup in Thailand--but personal blogs can be a lot more than that. In an interview on EconTalk, Friendfeed founder and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit described how he started a blog to keep his family updated on the status of his new born daughter, who had health problems.

People blog their books and short stories.

As I said in the previous post, all of these things could be done without blogs. But blogs have made it so much easier. It's hard to imagine that the sheer volume and variety of content found on blogs today would be out there without a platform that allowed nontechnical users to flood onto the web and share their stuff.

The Life and Times of the Blog

2009-10-29T21:26:00.004-04:00

Technorati's invaluable State of the Blogosphere went up for 2009 a couple of weeks ago.

With a lot of other, more social venues for content like Twitter and Facebook, there has been a continuing debate about the relevance of blog. I think discussions like those miss the point--ultimately, what is relevant is content.

It did get me wondering, though: what do blogs add? I mean, specifically.

Walk with me for a moment. You can write the exact same content that you put on blogs on a regular old website that you just update and make new pages for. All of the benefits of linking different pages to one another can exist without blogs. All of the benefits of having video, images, audio, and text online can exist without blogs. So what's so special about blogs, exactly?

Blogs are a platform. They are to internet content what the assembly line is to manufacturing. They minimize the cost of getting your content out there and making it as easy to proliferate as possible.

The first, and most important thing that blogs do is minimize the amount of technical knowledge required to put content online. You don't need to know any HTML tags in order to write a blog post. Over time, blogs have incorporate more and more buttons that make it easy to embed images and video without needing to know much, if any, code.

The second, almost as important thing that a blog does is create distinct units of content. An old school Angelfire page made no distinction between the website and the content on the website. The blog post creates distinct units, which makes all kinds of things possible.

Think about that last point for a moment. There is no practical limitation on the length of a blog post--something I certainly have taken advantage of--but at the same time there isn't a minimum, either. Long before Twitter existed, there were bloggers like Instapundit and Atrios who had many posts that probably did not exceed 160 characters. In fact, Instapundit was notorious for the one word post that just linked somewhere ("heh.")

The post is an extremely flexible unit, therefore, but it is a unit. Having a unit means that you can link to a specific post rather than a whole web page. Having a unit makes it possible to have an RSS feed, where readers get new posts as they come out without you having to do a thing to alert them.

And returning to our first point, bloggers don't have to be aware of the advantages of having distinct units in order to benefit from them.

Blogs will continue to have these advantages, and even more goodies will get baked in along the way as well to minimize the difficulty of making use of them and maximize the ability of bloggers' content to proliferate.

On the other hand, the ecosystem of which blogs are a part has certainly grown far more diverse over the years. And this is to the good. The many varying forms of social media help lower the cost of sharing content--be it content on a blog, hosted on YouTube or Flickr, or a podcast. But I'm pretty confident the blog is going to be alive and well many years from now, because the basic advantages of the platform will remain.

Cloud Culture Spotlight: Scott Sigler's The Rookie

2009-10-28T22:15:00.003-04:00

I was pleasantly surprised by The Rookie. I am a fan of Scott Sigler's work in general. Nocturnal was probably the most fun I've had listening to a podcast novel. The Rookie is very different from any of his other work, however, and I have to say I applaud him for branching out with it.

Sigler throws us into a future where humans have spread out across many planets and met many other species of intelligent life there. One of them, the Cretarakians, have conquered almost all of the known universe by the time the book picks up. But none of that really matters, because it isn't what the book is about.

What the book is about is football.

And this isn't the wussy little football you see on TV where the refs are throwing down yellow flags every five seconds. Football in the world of The Rookie is literally red tooth and claw; where with humans and enormous, bloodthirsty aliens alike taking part in the game.

The story follows the progress of quarterback Quentin Barnes, starting in a third tier team in a system of planets known as the Purist Nation, where nonhuman species (aside from the Cretarakian overlords over whom humans have no authority) are not allowed to tread. He is sold to a tier two team with aspirations of getting into tier one.

Quentin goes from being a big shot to a rookie, and struggles with disgust for his alien teammates, as well as with the speed and ferocity of play in the big leagues. His journey of growth as a quarterback, a team player, and a leader is both charmingly cliche and captivating in its originality. In an effort to tell us a football story Sigler goes to the trouble of creating an entire universe! You've got to give the man credit.

I honestly would get this book for my father. If you like science fiction and you like football, I think you'll find this one hard to pass up! I started out saying I was pleasantly surprised--I never would have thought I'd be so into the concept. But it definitely sucked me in.

Also, if you want to get a flavor for the universe of The Rookie, check out Prize Fight, an ongoing novella Sigler's got going on right now in collaboration with Matt Wallace.

Who Benefits from the Internet?

2009-10-25T16:26:00.002-04:00

My last post was intended to be a lot more positive than it ended up being, in terms of providing practical advice for actors. I saw Amy Walker's 21 accents for the first time and found it exciting. I've long thought this was the sort of thing that aspiring actors ought to be doing, and seeing the video inspired me to finally write a post about it.

The problem is that the deeper into the post I got, the more I felt the relative advantage that any individual actor could enjoy from putting themselves out there on the net would ultimately be marginalized by the fact that any actor could do the same thing. Digital video cameras continue to get cheaper and better, and internet connections are only becoming more and more ubiquitous. Competition will ultimately make it difficult for actors to not create a cloud portfolio of sorts, but will also provide very little benefits for doing so.

The story is the same for any artistic endeavor in which it is possible to make your content digital. So once again, the marginal economic gains to the individual artist from moving online will be minimal, and the distribution of winners and losers will remain mostly unchanged. So who will benefit from the increasing migration of content into the cloud?

The answer is art lovers, a group that surely must include most if not all artists themselves. Sure, it may not make it any easier for a given artist to make a living practicing their craft. But it will provide an easy window into what other artists are doing, allowing them to learn from and be inspired by one another. And of course, for those of us who are not practitioners of a particular art but still enjoy being a spectator, the benefits will be enormous. They already are.

Cloud Portfolio

2009-10-23T20:50:00.005-04:00

So you're an actor, and like the vast majority of the members of your trade, you are out of work (excluding your day job, of course). What's the best strategy for getting your foot in the door?

In the past auditioning was about all you could do, along with networking. Of course the internet has supercharged both of these activities; finding auditions is now extremely easy and as for networking--do I even need to elaborate? Competition does tend to drive out the additional benefits that any one actor can enjoy, however--the cost of finding auditions has dropped for everyone, meaning the audition you know about is undoubtedly known about by many others who intend to show up and compete with you for the available parts.

In between auditions I think anyone who has any ambition of making it in acting needs to be doing everything in their power to get themselves in front of a camera and do something that shows off their talent. They should then take the video and put it online.

Actors already have to do a lot of work for zero pay. Moving up to paying jobs means starting out by building your portfolio with a lot of unpaying ones. So why not take some initiative and put out free content on the web?

Take Amy Walker for example, star of the video embedded above. She made a video of herself just speaking in 21 different accents one after another. This isn't even a skit, this is just Amy Walker, saying mostly the same thing 21 times in different accents. Pretty much a pure show-off of skill when it comes right down to it. But a great thing to show anyone potentially interested in casting her. And by the way, it's been viewed over two million times.

Live performances and auditions do not scale. Digital content scales--which is to say, it costs about as much to provide it to one person as it does to provide it to a million people. This is especially true when you put it on the internet.

That doesn't mean that you're going to get two million views just because you showed up online, even if you're talented and you put out quality stuff. To begin with, the same principle of competition mentioned above in the audition example applies: you can put your stuff out there, but so can everyone else. In this case, not only will you be competing with other people seeking to make a career in acting, but also with a lot of amateurs who simply enjoy making videos.

Beyond that, mediums that scale will inherently conform to a power law--a tiny minority will account for a gigantic majority of the attention.

Nevertheless, I think that building up a digital portfolio is going to become a necessity for any aspiring actor. It gives you something to show even if you haven't been in many professional productions yet, and who knows--you might end up getting lucky and having something that goes viral. After all, the more you put out there, the greater your odds that at least one thing will get fifteen minutes of fame, or even better.

Proliferating the Comic Strip

2009-10-13T20:37:00.003-04:00

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of webcomics. I've been learning a lot about the mobile web lately, and I got to thinking about how some webcomics will probably translate onto mobile devices better than others.

Then an idea occurred to me.

What if you had a site for webcomic artists that put some constraints on the comics that could be published there in order to make them more mobile friendly. In particular, publishing only comics that are one panel wide and progress downward---IE, panel one is on top of panel two, which is on top of panel three. Then the width of the panels would be limited to some amount deemed optimal for rendering on the screens of mobile devices.

Moreover, this would make it easier to proliferate the comics across the regular web. A comic that reads from left to right is a lot more trouble to embed in a blog post, for instance, than one that reads from top to bottom. For a blog template will leave posts with a limited width--I have often found blogger's to be unsatisfactorily small--but by their nature are completely unbounded in height.

I would also want to give artists the option to enable embedding of specific panels rather than just the whole comic.

This would be asking artists to sacrifice the freedom to play around with the shape and size of their comics in order to maximize the comic's portability. It could be construed as sacrificing artistic discretion for practical purposes, but I don't really think it would be a bad thing. First of all, it's the internet, so no one would have to sign onto the site. They could go elsewhere and do whatever they wanted. Second, I actually think that being able to make the most of limitations is what good art is all about.

Think of it as like the Twitter of webcomics.

I have innumerable excuses for why I'm not pursuing this myself. But I just like the idea so much that I thought I'd put this out there. Maybe one day I'll be in a position to make the attempt; maybe someone else will see this and do something with it. Maybe nothing will come of it. But I thought it would be better to have it written down than to leave it in my mind, where no thought is safe from my fickle attention span.

Local Communities in the Cloud

2009-10-10T12:16:00.003-04:00

The internet makes it possible for someone writing from their home to be read anywhere in the world. It's easy to get caught up thinking about the global implications of this, to focus on the online communities made up of residents from many different parts of the planet. Something I have to admit I overlooked for a long time was the ability of the web to enhance our local experience.

Last May Gawker's Ryan Tate wrote this post about the level of scrutiny local politicians have found themselves facing from a combination of amateur and professional bloggers.

I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

Tate went on to link to a number of articles where the impact of these local "gadflies" was chronicled.

Here in DC there is a vibrant community of local bloggers, from the more professional DCist (part of the Gothamist empire) to blogs focused on particular neighborhoods or subjects, there is a lot to explore.

And blogs have no monopoly on local content. Many DC restaurants have twitter accounts, for example. Other community institutions can be found there as well. And of course, Yelp is a valuable source of information about local businesses in a huge number of American cities.

One of the great advantages of local online communities is that there is so much information that can have practical value. When you're trying to figure out where to go one particular evening, it helps to know what new businesses have opened and what other people's experiences there were like.

Another big advantage is that you actually have the opportunity to meet one another in person. Prince of Petworth every so often organizes a happy hour for readers to get together, for instance.

The global potential of the internet is of course very valuable. But one should not overlook the ways in which the internet is also enhancing people's ability to get the most out of where they live.

A Tale of Two Platforms

2009-10-03T19:00:00.003-04:00

Why do some platforms succeed in gaining mass user adoption, while others remain marginal?

Consider for the moment, two services: Twitter and Friendfeed.

I have heard buzz around Friendfeed for some time, but nearly all of it comes from early adopter types who are into trying out new and different things. Friendfeed never gained the kind of mainstream prominence, never saw the continual rapid growth month after month, that Twitter has had.

On the face of it, these two services should not have been in competition. On Twitter, the question is "what are you doing?" Your answer must be 140 characters or less.

Friendfeed has no such constraint, and its focus was never so narrow as what you're doing at the moment. Friendfeed is a platform for sharing images, videos, links, and thoughts. Every post can be commented on, allowing extended conversations to take place. Every post can also gain some simple positive feedback in the form of people who select the option to "like" it.

Twitter was nothing like that in the beginning, and yet, that is exactly what it has turned into. Using URL shorteners to keep within the 140 character constraint, people have turned Twitter into a serious intermediary for content. With the dedicated feed for displaying every tweet that has @ next to your username, Twitter has also become a platform for conversation. With the new retweet functionality that they're planning on implementing, the ability of users to share content will only grow.

Though Friendfeed set out to do this in the beginning, its users have largely not ended up using it this way. As the co-founder Paul Buchheit explained, Friendfeed was supposed to be about sharing. Yet in the end it has ended up being used as an aggregator for other social networks; you can have it automatically update your feed whenever you share content on Google Reader, post on your blog, bookmark something in delicious, post on Twitter, or put content in any number of other places. That's all well and good, but the original idea is that the bulk of the content in your feed would be put their directly; the aggregation feature was just a way to make it easier on you if you were also sharing somewhere else--particularly if you had a blog and didn't want to have to manually put in a link to it each time you posted.

But because a lot of those other platforms were a lot more popular, many of the people who did use Friendfeed would just use it to aggregate what they were doing elsewhere. In this end, this made Friendfeed somewhat redundant--but through no fault of their own. The functionality was all there, Friendfeed could easily have succeeded if it had managed to get enough users who made it their primary outlet for sharing.

In fact, Facebook's strategy in competing with what Twitter has become has almost entirely been made up of copying Friendfeed. Right down to having an option to "like" particular items. And if you ask me, the entire reason Facebook decided to just buy Friendfeed is because the latter company was doing everything Facebook wanted to do already, while Facebook actually had a large enough user base to put the tools to go use.

Twitter's success has been almost entirely user-driven. In as much as the company can take credit, it is in their willingness to quickly adapt to how their platform is being used. It was not originally a conversational platform, but users started @replying one another, so Twitter's staff turned that into a supported feature. There have been innumerable little features like this that have been born exactly this way.

I take it back, there is one other very smart move that the Twitter team has made--and that is the release and maintenance of their API. There are an enormous number of third-party applications that make use of Twitter's API, many of which have facilitated Twitter's role as intermediary for picture and video content. For example, when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, a picture of the plane was taken by someone on the boat going to rescue the passengers, and shared on Twitpic.

However, the fact that you have an API doesn't mean that developers are going to do anything with it. It's true that once they're there they can attract additional users because of the functionality that their apps add. But you need the initial base of users to attract the developers in the first place.

Which brings us back to the mystery of this story: why do some platforms succeed while other platforms with just as much functionality fail? Why did Twitter become the rising star while Friendfeed remained fairly marginal, eventually acquired by a larger company?

I'm sure a lot of it is chance, but is that all there is to it? Did the 140 character constraint actually give Twitter an edge? Even if it did, is it enough of an edge to explain the gap in the success between the two platforms?

I don't have an answer. File this one under "food for thought".

The Future of the Professional Content Producer

2009-09-27T20:47:00.006-04:00

Further pursuing a line of thought I've been following.

On the one hand, there are the producers of content. The painter, the writer, the film maker, the guitarist, the animator.

On the other hand, there are the institutions that have emerged to attempt to pick out those producers that can be profitably promoted. These are the publishers, the record labels, the movie studios, the television networks.

Those institutions all developed in a world where the relevant costs were associated with production and distribution. Printing presses don't pay for themselves, and the costs of distributing and displaying records are way more than trivial.

The rise of digital technology and the internet have completely shifted the relevant costs. Production is becoming dramatically cheaper year after year, and distribution of any content in digital form costs practically nothing.

The old institutions will wash away or change until they are unrecognizable. I don't know what specific form the institutions that replace them will take, but I think I can guess at their functions.

The less physical, and more informational that content production has become, the more it has conformed to the Pareto Principle--a tiny minority of producers enjoy a vast majority of the attention and the income. Content production was this way already in the 20th century; it will only become more so in an era where the medium is digital and the distribution channel is the internet.

Now, the way that most content producers are going to get started in the public eye is by simply putting out their work online for free. A minority of them will at some point become popular. Even when they are getting a lot of attention, however, it is unlikely that they will be able to charge for their content directly--the competition on the internet, given the gigantic amount of alternatives available, will drive the monetary price of content down to zero.

There will be money to be made off of getting a lot of attention, however. Some ways are obvious, and are already being made use of--putting up advertisements, selling merchandise, organizing live events that your charge admission to, that sort of thing.

My feeling, though, is that there are ways to make a lot more money off of attention than some of the most popular online content producers are able to get at just yet.

Say you had someone who made films online, using the technology they could afford. If they managed to get a sizable following, the institutions of the future could be in place to enable their growth; providing them with more resources to buy higher end technology and hire actors. Doing this would likely increase the ability of the filmmaker to gain an even bigger following. On top of supplementing the producer's budget, the institutions of the future could focus on running the entire business end of the operation; getting paid to speak at conferences, finding the best advertising deals--all in exchange for a percent of the proceeds.

In other words, the institutions would allow artists to focus on making art, minimizing the amount they would have to know about the business side of their profession. This is precisely what the current institutions developed to do for producers in the pre-digital, pre-internet world. Minimizing the costs and maximizing the potential profits associated with the current technology, however, will require a drastic restructuring. It won't be pretty for the existing institutions, which are currently being rapidly eroded away. It's only a matter of time before they are replaced.

But really, I don't think that a lot will be functionally different. There will be a tiny group of producers in any particular content industry who enjoy a majority of the attention and revenue, a larger group that makes a decent living in their profession, and much larger group that makes a mediocre living in it, and the vast majority of content producers, who won't be able to quit their day job.

The biggest change will not be in the nature of professional content production, but in the fact that the professionally produced content will be in perpetual competition with content produced by amateurs, and in the fact that consumers will be able to enjoy both for free.

A Quiet Community

2009-09-27T10:30:00.003-04:00

Ichor Falls is the brainchild of Kris Straub, creator of the popular webcomics Starslip and Chainsawsuit. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the concept began as a comic. What it ended up being, however, was a short fiction, horror concept site.

I am making my way through the archives and I love it. Straub provides a lot of material to draw on--A fake "wiklopedia" page detailing the history of the town, and brief descriptions of three local legends. Writers submit stories within the Ichor Falls framework, and Straub puts out more than a few stories himself.

I love this concept. It provides some constraints--however loose--on the writing, since writers are supposed to connect their stories with the fictional town in some way. It also provides a central point for a lot of different stories to accumulate. As I have started seeking out more fiction to read, I've found that writing on the web is often very dispersed and very individual. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it often makes it challenging to find more than one story at a time.

In his book, Clay Shirky talked about an aspect of Flickr I had no experience with--the group. He looked at one group in particular that formed with the intention of being a place where photographers could share their work with one another and get feedback. There are difficulties to successfully organizing such a group, however; every photographer has an incentive to submit their photo to try and get attention, but pay no attention to anyone else's submissions. So the group organizers made rules to try and counteract this; in order to stay in the group, after submitting a photo, you had to go and look at the photo submitted just before yours and comment on it. Then they added that you had to have a substantive comment, not just "nice work!" or something equally as effortless to write.

The idea is that the web is a big, open place where anyone can put up anything, but that doesn't mean that it's going to get any attention. So people can join communities and associations that are more closed off in terms of who is let in and what can be submitted, but offers the promise of the attention of the other members. These things don't just spring up and start working perfectly, however; as Shirky's example illustrates, there are many challenges associated with the development of a successful community.

I think Ichor Falls has a lot of promise. It could use a lot more submissions than it currently gets, to be sure; but as far as I can tell just about every story gets feedback in the comments section. And I really do love the concept; I hope more writers pitch in to making the little community a little less quiet.

Check out the latest story, The Cedar Cove Incident; a great horror story in its own right.

Episodes in Irritating Marketing

2009-09-24T20:25:00.005-04:00

See anything that might make you hesitate to comply with the nice big "Click to Play Now!" button? Even if you aren't aren't particularly interested in this sort of thing, you might be tempted to go "what the hell" and give it a try.

Unless you look very, very closely a little further down:

The key sentence, which I zoomed in on here, is "Click here if you don't wish to invite your contacts automatically." That was what alerted me to the fact that clicking the gigantic red button would automatically invite all of my Twitter contacts. I have no desire to spam people, and the only reason I'm aware of this thing is because one of my contacts probably didn't see this happy little disclaimer himself.

Talk about annoying. I don't see things like this going away any time in the foreseeable future, unfortunately. The fight for attention brings many benefits in its wake, but it turns out, unfortunately, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Cloud Culture Spotlight: Toothless

2009-09-20T12:10:00.001-04:00

Images taken from J. P. Moore Online

As I wrote in my last book review, I am working harder at finding good online fiction. The Podagogue review of J. P. Moore's historical fantasy podcast novel, Toothless, convinced me to check it out for myself. The Podagogue set high expectations, but Toothless delivered.

The book is set in 1180 AD, in a world in which the armies of the undead march across Europe, led by dark priests and demons that serve a mysterious entity known as the Yew. In a battle against this army, a knights templar is struck down by a demon that clefts his jaw clean off of his face and slits his throat. That knight is then risen and joins the ranks of the army that he had fought; because of his appearance he was named Toothless by those that raised him. He is the protagonist of the book, pictured in the illustration above.

Toothless takes place in three parts. The first part introduces the titular character, chronicles his struggle to retain the memories of his life and his fear that he will one day lose his sentience and become one of the mindless walking dead, known as shamblers. It is by far the darkest part of the book, as the reader is brought into the world of the army that brings death to mankind by plague as well as by violence, swelling its ranks with the usable corpses along the way.

The only thing that keeps the utter lack of hope for humanity from rendering this part of the book completely depressing is the process of getting to know Toothless; who he was and what he has become. Part of learning about what he has become is being in the strange position of viewing the inner workings of the wicked army that advanced across Europe.

As with the rest of the book, the writing is fantastic. But I don't think I could have handled an entire book told from this perspective. Thankfully, the second part brings us back to mankind, though I must say it is rarely mankind at its best. However, the focal character of this part--a young, deformed seer named Lil--is very sympathetic. And the third part of the book returns us to Toothless' perspective, but also in a way shows us mankind at its best. I won't say any more for fear of giving away too much of the plot, but I loved the progress across the three parts of the book.

The Podagogue review points out that Moore sets a pretty tough constraint on himself in writing for Toothless. After all, the very characteristic that gives him his name renders him completely unable to speak. The Podagogue's assurance that Moore met the challenge is a large part of what convinced me to check out the book for myself.

I was expecting some contrivance to allow Toothless a voice, but Moore plays the hand he has dealt himself with sheer determination, never once bowing to the lure of dark magic or telepathy to allow his anti-hero communication. In doing so, he reminds us of just how cheap talk really is. Toothless doesn't need to talk. His actions are everything.

I would add to this that there are definitely moments in the book where it's clear Toothless despairs for what just cannot be expressed without using words. But that only makes Moore's discipline in sticking to the constraint more admirable, from a writing perspective.

Toothless is available in 24 mp3 file installments over at podiobook.com. If you like fantasy creatures, adventure, redemption stories, or writing at its best, I strongly recommend going over and downloading it.

Adding Some Form to all the Function

2009-09-12T11:28:00.004-04:00

I have written a ton of analytic posts about new media. That's all well and good, and it's certainly part of what I wanted to do here, but there's a reason that I called this blog Cloud Culture rather than Economics of the Cloud, or something like that. Inspired in no small part by my friend Kelly's appreciation of the many art forms thriving on the web, I wanted to delve more deeply into the cultural aspects of the cloud myself.

But I ended up mostly writing new media analysis, because it's what I know. It's what I spent years thinking and writing about over at Sophistpundit. Along the way, I have definitely found some art to appreciate, but they remained in the minority.

There are definitely posts that I am the proudest of that are very much about culture. In particular, I'm happy with how this post on webcomics came out, and this post on the future of music.

However, I've made a concerted effort to finally start taking a crack at immersing myself in artistic expression on the web. In particular, I have attempted to find more good fiction, because writing is my personal passion, and it's really shameful that I haven't done this sooner.

That's the reason I found and reviewed Kristine Williams's science fiction novel Keeper. I did so through the Web Fiction Guide; a site I will certainly write about when I have used it enough to get a better sense of its quality. Writing online seems to be a far more dispersed thing than I thought it would be; you're more likely to find novels and stories of various length on dedicated websites for them specifically than in big content hubs like you find with videos on sites like YouTube.

I have also continued to delve into podcast novels, because my long commute makes this convenient for me. I just read J.P. Moore's novel Toothless, and will be reviewing it very soon. Earlier in the summer I read Scott Sigler's Earthcore followed by Nocturnal, both of which I liked but the latter I really liked.

I followed up with the first book for J.C. Hutchins' Seventh Son trilogy, which was well written enough but which didn't quite grab me. I might go back for the second and third books at some point; like I said, I spend a lot of time on the road and good writing is hard enough to find. I'm currently subscribed to Phil Rossi's Harvey, making it the first podcast novel I've actually listened to like a podcast--that is, in installments, as it comes out, rather than all at once after it's finished. I'll review it and the experience once it's over. I know of it because last year I listened to Crescent, Rossi's first podcast novel, which was very Stephen King--who in general I enjoy reading.

There will still be plenty of new media analysis, as I continue to love writing it. But I am going to try to remember that the tagline here is "form and function in a networked world", so there ought to actually be some discussion of form amidst all the talk of function.

Influence

2009-09-07T10:49:00.004-04:00

Bloggers don't have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are.

-Seth Godin

Seth's post is about attempting to figure out which among your readers are the ones who have the clout to really spread an idea. I recommend going over and reading the whole thing.

Part of the reason that I take the long view when it comes to investing time and effort into Cloud Culture is because I believe that with a persistent presence in the social web over time, nearly anyone with some skill can have some influence. In the almost five years since I started my other blog, I've seen some proliferation of my writing in a few fun forms. I recently discovered a thread at the Student Doctors Network forum that linked to a post of mine that I wrote while studying for a math class a few years ago. The biggest surprise was a couple of years ago, when I discovered an online course that had one of my posts on its syllabus!

Like Seth, I've long had an interest in attempting to quantify as much as we can about influence online, and what exactly happens when a piece of content goes viral. I had an idea for a study, in which you get a large sample of blogs, then attempt to figure out all the blogs that link to them, then figure out all the blogs that link to those blogs but not the original sample, and so forth for a few tiers. The idea would be to see how content that appears at the top tier is replicated down the others, or how it might even move up in the other direction.

Of course, the channels that content travels down is far more varied than just blogs that link to one another. Twitter often serves as an intermediary for content, as does Facebook, and content is often replicated in full and shared in places like Google Reader. Data on clout, which Seth is so interested in, is very elusive.

But that's part of the fun--after all, if figuring this stuff out was easy, it would be boring.

Do Not Hide From RSS

2009-09-06T17:34:00.003-04:00

I've just started reading the webcomic Girls With Slingshots, so naturally I started looking for a link to its RSS feed to add it to my vast collection of webcomics I follow on Google Reader.

There isn't one. I put the URL into Google Reader just to check, but no, it comes up with nothing. Then I find this interview from December of 2008 with Danielle Corsetto, the artist.

There are two reasons that I don’t have a feed yet. One, I simply don’t know how to create and maintain one! But I can learn that. So two, and most importantly, this is my only source of income, and I’m afraid I’ll lose advertising and merchandise revenue if people are ONLY seeing the strip. Even people who never click on ads are helping my advertising revenue by simply visiting the website and increasing the visits to that page (and thus, the value of my ad spaces).

I've heard this before, and I honestly believe artists like Corsetto, and content producers generally, are shooting themselves in the foot by not embracing RSS.

I have a lot of webcomics that I follow through Google Reader. Eyeballing it, I'd say I have over forty, with a few that have gone inactive. The only reason that I'm able to enjoy this many is because I don't have to actually go to each and every one of them to check if they've updated.

Webcomics are in general quirky about their updates, at times. Sure, the artists who are doing it for a living are usually more reliable, but even they have their slip-ups, and frankly I wouldn't want to limit myself to just the people able to make a living off of it. After all, none of these guys started out able to quit their day jobs.

The cumulative amount of time spent going to comic websites that had not yet updated would be enormous if I attempted to keep up with the same number that I do now without relying on RSS feeds. It would not be worth my time. I would read only a fraction of what I do now--and I know this from experience, because I was reading webcomics years before I started using Google Reader.

RSS reduces the cost of keeping up with a comic by a gigantic amount. It is basic economics that the lower the cost of an activity, the more people will engage in that activity. I like Girls With Slingshots, and I may keep up with it, if I think of it. But it's asking a lot more of me than all of the other webcomics I read.

Sometimes I get lucky with the more popular comics that are stubbornly refusing to provide feeds and discover that a tech-saavy fan has managed to gerryrig some kind of proxy RSS feed themselves.

Let make this simple. Top reasons why content producers have nothing to fear from RSS:

There are people who will not stick by your stuff if you don't provide them with the ease of access that RSS provides
You can advertise right in each item in your RSS feed!
You can track how many people subscribe to your feed, and provide that information to your advertisers. I've got Feedburner, which is so-so, but if this is your livelihood there are many more options out there just like any variety of analytics.

And if you're still uncertain, you can always do what David Willis does for Shortpacked! and have a blog that links to each new update. I prefer to be able to read all of my comics from Google Reader, but I can live with Willis' compromise. At least I only go to the website when there's a new comic up!

RSS: A Powerful Tool for Filtering Content

2009-09-03T19:50:00.002-04:00

A few new media types, chief among them Steve Gillmor, have decided that RSS is dead. The argument is that they can just use social media like Facebook and Twitter as the sources of their content. Twitter is indeed a great place to find links to things, and Facebook has pretty aggressively moved towards a more Twitter-like experience lately.

But to think that links put up by people you connect with on social networks can replace RSS is simply absurd, and I'm glad to see that more and more people are saying so.

To begin with, most websites with continually updating content--like blogs--have RSS feeds but do not have equivalent Twitter accounts to tweet links to their latest updates. This is changing of course, but at the very least it means that one of the functions of RSS--to alert the user when there's a new update--cannot entirely be replaced just yet.

Moreover, what RSS does is different, and useful in ways that social media is not. Take a blog that does have a Twitter account. If I am not paying attention to my Twitter stream when a link to the latest update is tweeted, then I could easily miss it (especially if you follow hundreds of other people on Twitter, as I do). If you go to their Twitter account directly to check, then you've saved no more effort than it would have taken to go to the blog directly and see if there are any updates.

RSS brings updates to you. If you are not there the moment that the feed updates, it does not matter; it will remain unread to alert you of its existence until you become aware of it. Moreover, most feeds will bring the content to you in its entirety; you won't even have to leave your reader account to see it.

I have embraced Twitter, Facebook, and many other social media for finding content. But Google Reader remains my window to the web. I currently have 263 subscriptions--that's 263 sources of content that I don't have to waste any time checking on when they haven't updated; their updates come to me. Moreover, when there are people on Twitter whose tweets I want to be sure not to miss, I subscribe to their RSS feed!

It is fashionable among a certain crowd to declare things dead once they are no longer shiny and new to early adopters. Links are dead, blogs are dead, and now RSS is dead.

Yet the fact remains that links are as widespread as ever (perhaps more so if you count the shortened URLs on Twitter), social media feeds often are pointing to blog posts, and people are still using RSS to be able to consume more content in a lot less time. Just because the tools aren't as new as they once were doesn't make them any less useful. If anything, their uses are increasing as the ecosystem expands and evolves.

Cloud Culture Spotlight: Keeper, a science fiction novel by Kristine Williams

2009-09-01T17:59:00.001-04:00

The internet has given the lovers of many art forms a lot of reasons to be excited. Be it in music, painting, or comics, the gates are now open for any and all artists willing to put their stuff out for the rest of us to enjoy. My own passion has always been writing; and I've lately regretted the fact that I haven't taken much time to get to work finding and customizing the filters that exist to help me find some good fiction.

So I got to work and I wanted to share a truly excellent piece of writing that I discovered along the way: Keeper, by Kristine Williams.

Keeper is set in the distant future, in a time when human slaves are engineered with special abilities, tailored to be unyieldingly loyal and obedient. Explorer Alex Marcase believed such slaves to be a fanciful myth until he inherited one himself. The revelation begins a series of events that turn his world upside down and back again.

The plot itself is enjoyable and subtle in its development; I have to say that towards the end Williams kept me guessing every step of the way, and I didn't see the ending coming at all. Whether that's a tribute to her great writing or my stupidity, I'll let you decide.

Plot aside, the work is primarily a character piece about Alex as well as Evan, the man Alex inherited from his father. Individual chapters tend to focus on either Alex's or Evan's point of view, so that the story ends up being told almost entirely through their eyes. Watching the two get thrown together, unsure of how to deal with one another, and develop a firm respect for one another is an enjoyable read in itself. Evan's peculiar abilities and circumstances and Alex's eccentric personality kept me interested, and they played off of one another well. It helped that Williams made them both easy to like, as well.

If you like science fiction or simply appreciate good writing, I really recommend Keeper. If you like it enough, you can make a donation from the book's main page, or buy a print version of the book on Lulu.

I was happy to discover that not only has Kristine Williams written other books, but that Keeper is part of a series with three more books in it. So if you haven't already, get started on Keeper--I'll be busy working my way through Madness.

Economics Bloggers

2009-08-25T22:07:00.002-04:00

Halfway into my MA in economics I can honestly say that it is the discussions I engaged in as a result of become a blogger, as well as the other blogs I read, that drew me to economics in the first place.

Of course I went to the place I got my bachelor's from; GMU--where the economics department has the highest density of bloggers of just about any university.

I think it is fantastic to see economists in the blogosphere. The more specialists, academics, and scientists with training and experience that can contribute to discussions in an open and accessible way, the better.

Hat tip: Growthology