Tag Archive for 'thoughts'

Thoughts On: Live-Tweeting

Published
by
Matt
on May 14, 2009
in ideas and twitter
. Comments

The amount of events that are being live-tweeted is steadily rising, although it was a fairly common practice with the early adopters/nerds back in the day. Now, you’ll find people live tweeting church, surgeries, births, all kinds of wild stuff. While I completely support everyone’s right to share whats going on, I’m not as much of a fan as I used to be.

First off, it’s really hard to coherently follow someone who is live tweeting a speaker or a series of speakers. Like many of you, I have a lot of action in my feed. If you’re following hundreds/thousands of people, despite being hashtagged, there’s no sense of continuity. It get’s lost in the stream.

Piggybacking on that point is the fact that I don’t think live-tweeting does the event justice. There’s no context, no visuals (which good presos usually incorporate), no completeness. I think there’s so much more to these presentations, and while I’m grateful for the quotable nuggets that people pull out, it doesn’t really illuminate much.

But that’s just me. How do you feel about the whole thing?

Thoughts On The State Of Magazines

Published
by
Matt
on Jan 28, 2009
in ideas
. Comments
  • Has anyone seen the new (starting in January on) issues of a lot of national magazines? It blows my mind to see how small they are. Wild to see how many ads were pulled after their year contract expired. The December issue of GQ is almost twice as big as the January issue.
  • I still love magazines. There’s something about the physical aspect of them that’s a refreshing change from the web. Also, to me anyway, the content seems one more step “finished” in the great writing spectrum. Which possibly looks like this Post-it Note >> Twitter >> Blog Post >> Magazine >> Book.
  • What’s the problem with magazine advertising? Can they not lower the prices to lure advertisers back? Is it just a “dead medium”? Are they stubborn, stupid, or just handcuffed? I’d really like to talk to someone at a mag who could explain this to me.
  • Will e-book readers, like the soon-to-be announced Kindle 2, “save” magazines? Digital essentially nullifies printing costs. And the e-book format wouldn’t entirely kill the physical/tactile thing.
  • Magazines should include unique URLs at the end of each article saying something like “Continue the conversation” or “Learn more” and then include a simple web address that hosts the article or discussion for the article. Also, advertisers who have ads near the print version can continue to run ads on the article page. Would this work?