Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short) It’s unusual that I blog about a book before I’ve actually finished it, but this one is too timely to pass up given today’s news about newspapers. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, at least the first 1/2 of it, is a pretty intense rant about how the Internet’s trend towards democratizing media and content production has a double dirty underbelly: poor quality — “an endless digital forest of mediocrity,” no checks and balances — “mainstream journalists and newspapers have the organization, financial muscle, and and credibility to gain access to sources and report the truth…professional journalists can go to jail for telling…
Category
Current Affairs
Book Short: Smaller is the New Small
Book Short: Smaller is the New Small Last month, it was Microtrends. This month, it’s MIT Professor Ted Sargent’s The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives. It seems like all the interesting things in life are just getting smaller and smaller. (Note to self: lose some weight.) Sargent’s book is geeky but well-written. He dives into a couple dozen examples across many fields and disciplines of how nanotechnology holds extraordinary promise for solving some of mankind’s toughest scientific challenges — while creating a few new ethical and economic ones. The science is for the most part beyond me, but the practical applications are fascinating: – making solar power the sole source of global energy needs a possibility…
Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Guy
Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy As I said in this post, sometimes calling for the boss’s head is a mistake, and that an alternative — an honest apology, some kind of retribution, and a clear and conspicuous post-mortem can often be a better way for an organization to move forward after a leader-involved crisis. But not today. Elliot Spitzer has to go. The hypocrisy he displayed in running a law and order campaign, administration, and career, using his office as a bully pulpit and unnecessarily ruining innocent people’s careers to stroke his own ego, while willfully breaking the law himself in the manner that he did, is way too much for an elected official at that level. I just…
Voting in Manhattan
Voting in Manhattan I’ve written about this before. I won’t focus on the pre-war (unclear which war) voting machines. But here was the conversation I had with the voting inspector when I checked in to vote this morning: Her: Name? Me: Matt Blumberg. Her: Sign here…ok…head over to booth #1. Me: That one? Her: Yes. Republican or Democrat? Me: Don’t you know that from my registration? Her: No. You have to tell me so I can disable half the ballot. Me: You mean it doesn’t matter which party I’m registered with? I can just pick one on the spot? Her: Welcome to Manhattan. Me: Huh. Ok. Republican. Her: Really? Huh. First one of the day. Not a lot of you around here. Poor Rudy. At least the Giants won.
Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves?
Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves? I love David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column called Fast Forward. In his most recent edition, he talks about the connection between technology and world peace, which is insightful. But it also led me to click on a link in the first paragraph to Wikipedia and its great map and listing of ongoing global conflicts here. I’m not sure if anyone has ever done any research on this — I’m guessing the answer is yes — but what jumps off the page for me is that all of the ongoing global conflicts today are clustered around the equator. I do know that crime in urban areas swells in the summer when it’s hot out and…
Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way Almost exactly a year ago, we welcomed our daughter Casey into the world, and tonight, we are proud to announce the arrival of her little brother Wilson Sass Blumberg. Will’s official birth announcement is here. Everyone is doing fine, and please – no presents!
A Dreary Day at Ground Zero
A Dreary Day at Ground Zero I walked down to the World Trade Center site early this morning before work, which I usually do on September 11 if I’m not traveling. It was raining and still dark out at the time, which made the scene a little more dreary and rushed (no one stopping as long to reflect) than usual. But something felt different this year that went beyond the weather. Obviously for those who lost friends or family six years ago, the day will always be one of mourning and memory, but for everyone else, though the day is still quite solemn, the vibe and focus seem to be more focused on “next steps” than in past years. Between…
Book Short: Blogging Alone?
Book Short: Blogging Alone? I usually only blog about business books, but since I read Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam, because of its connection to the topic of Internet community and social media, I’ll record some thoughts about and from it here. It’s an interesting read, although a little long. Putnam’s basic thesis is that America’s social capital — the things that have brought us physically and emotionally together as a country throughout much of the 20th century such as church, voting, and participation in civic organizations like the PTA or the Elks Club — are all severely on the decline. The reasons in Putnam’s view are television (you knew all those re-runs…
I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too
I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too Fellow entrepreneur and MyWay blogger Chris Yeh takes me to task for my post last week entitled Humbled at TED. Although his blog post was pretty harsh on me — saying essentially that I’d lost my brain and made him sick by fawning over celebrities (which I didn’t do) — his comment on my blog was a little more measured, just reminding me that people like Bill Clinton is human and puts his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. I think Chris missed my main point, and since he decided to go public blasting me, I’ll repeat here what I emailed him privately before he…
An Execution Problem
An Execution Problem My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem. This is a common phrase in business, right? You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it. Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones. And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen. And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together. I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic…
Humbled at TED
Humbled at TED I’m at my first TED Conference this week, and while I’ve watched countless other bloggers around me pounding out post after post summarizing different presentations (which I won’t do — feel free to see the site for official stuff), I’ve been struggling to find something to write about. Then it hit me today. I kind of feel at this conference the way I did when I started college. Totally humbled. I was #2 in my class in high school. Straight As, a few A+s thrown in for good measure. Then I got to Princeton and felt like an idiot. I was convinced I was bottom quartile at best. Everyone around me was either like me or better,…