This somehow fell through the cracks in a manic Monday. Bob Garfield, apart from providing “extraordinarily trenchant opinions via Ad Age and AdAge.com“, has discovered the miracle of blogging.
Garfield the Blog will “address subject matter in other area of interest, media, which hitherto we could pontificate on only in our other life as co-host of NPR’s On the Media.” Better yet, Garfield plans to use the new medium to research “consumer control” for his book, “Listenomics,” as it relates not only to marketing, but to politics and society.
Consumer control is the latest industry mantra, wrote Jack Myers on MediaVillage, “describing and justifying a complete restructuring of the media industry.” He predicted that consumer control inevitably will lead to the dis-integration, the dismantling, and the dismembering of an advertising industry before it will facilitate equally strong and successful new models, new structures, and new institutions. We can’t help asking, is “consumer control” the equivalent of disruptive technology, spawned by the internet, for the ad industry?
Admittedly, we are a big fan of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that “anyone can edit.” Alas, “anyone” isn’t no more.
According to the NYT, in response to vandalism and disputes, some protective measures have been put in place that result in 82 entries outside of the “anyone can edit” realm. An additional 179 entries are “semi-protected”. A cursory glance at the list of protected and semi-protected entries finds Albert Einstein, human rights in China, Opus Dei, George W. Bush, Adolph Hitler, Tony Blairand sex. And the list, still a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries in English, is not static.
Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news and information source, beating CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings. Search engines like Google, which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their results, are a big contributor to the site’s traffic, but it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers.
Wikipedia has also inspired its share of imitators in specialized subjects. For example, a group of scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of Earth, and Congresspedia is the “citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress” that anyone can edit. Perhaps more important, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web as a depot of bottom-up knowledge or group intelligence. Despite its extolled openness, alas, a gatekeeper is warranted, at times at least.
The queen of buzz, Tina Brown, was quoted in UK’s Observer yesterday, lauding London as the capital of cool. “Its nightlife, its demographic. It’s an adventurous, talented town. New York has become more of a middle-aged town. London has become affluent in many ways. New York has become about money. In London you can be cool without having money.” This is from someone with a 30-year love affair with New York, a place she now believes “hasn’t got its mojo back after 9/11.”
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