Gillmor Gang: Nothing was delivered
Somehow it’s Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday this week. Some of you may not think that’s a big deal, but I do. The fact of his talent pretty much drowns out most other ideas of what to write about, but here’s to the birthday boy. Keep up the good work.
Back then, we wondered why Dylan kept changing, refusing to be pinned down, going electric, photographed at the Wailing Wall, you name it. We sure were hungry for direction, it seemed. Growing up in the Sixties, everything was possible. After Trump, we’re rethinking that. Crypto is a grift, better than gold, down 50%, up a third. If I wanted to throw money away, just stand on the corner and hand out NFTs.
In the early days of social media, all things seemed possible. Twitter was this weird reboot of blogs, with a social layer atop an RSS feed that gave authority to last in/first out musings by providing data not just about read or unread but shared by who. You could take that authority data and rank […]
Gillmor Gang: Walk the Dinosaur
Clubhouse hosted another excellent conversation between Josh Constine and Facebook’s audio czar Fidji Simo. The format continues to sparkle, as I was once again forced to choose between MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell and just plain audio. JPA won going away. The talk was crisp and the strategies thick with optimism about the creator economy. Monetization, priming the emergent pump, etc. If this were the Gold Rush, it would be blue skies ahead for picks and shovels and pans.
It remains hard to listen to the creator talk. If this is the moment for creators, then what is the moment for us listening? The question is who gets the short end of the crypto stick, a zero sum game where the losers are the equivalent of who buys high and sells low. I guess in the elegant world of startups, being one and not the other nine of ten is worth it.
Gillmor Gang: FreeCoin
The current rave about newsletters and so-called or social audio is just the latest version of the story of podcasting. Take the idea that podcasting is experiencing a new wave of popularity and scaffolding. Are you sure? Apple is bent on turning the space into a subscription model, and we’re all going to twist again like we did last summer. Somehow I doubt it. The basic attraction for me is not paying for podcasts. Subscription startups may be an important step forward, but the heart of the matter is talent formation.
Back when they first started, the real charge was the ability to own the whole stack: writer, producer, editor, star, and marketer. Making money for this may have been a future goal, but right now the real power was in figuring out what might work without the intrusion of what people other than yourself thought about the product. Only if something made itself apparent was it necessary to address the needs and wants of the audience.
Gillmor Gang: Days Go By
You may ask yourself, say the Talking Heads. What is this thing working from anywhere? Or as Google says, work from right here in the office. As the vaccines roll on out, some of us are just not ready for returning to normal. On this edition of the Gillmor Gang, the office is a state of mind, served up by Zoom and Clubhouse. It sounds like Clownhouse, with unlimited fungible bozos on the menu.
Surely we are binged out, election recalled, floating in a vat of VC alphabet soup. SPACs are everywhere and nowhere, water cooled conversations masquerading as big ticket conferences, right wing looneys seeking blanket pardons. And we’re applying for permission to stay home in our digital workshops? Yes, it will probably work for a hot second, but when will the research measure what has really changed. After a year of living a nightmare, some of us are ready for anything but the rest of our lives.