Journals

This is an archive of all posts published under a paid journal subscription that ran between 2011 and 2014. When I ended the paid journal, all entries were consolidated into an existing category. This ‘Journal’ tag provides access to that prior list of entries.

There are 144 posts tagged Journals (this is page 8 of 8).

Notes: Testing Ideas and the Beauty of Being Human

This comment was left by Jaive on Ali Dark's site. Jaive is a native of Indonesia and is trying to help improve the country by using the potential of the Internet.

The comment gave me a perspective into how people in developing countries are exposed to technologies that many in the developed world take for granted. I loved Jaive's point about how humans have the special ability to take theories and ideas and challenge them and how when we don't challenge them, we're throwing that gift away. (His English isn't great, but I decided not to correct it so that I could preserve his voice.)

You know when i was in Uni, we didnt have any internet connections, emails or web mails. ( this was in the early 2000s). We all shared computers, 40 PCs between 200 students.

In our library all we had on computers and internet where books from the 80?s, early 90?s.

And like you said…when people talked about the internet and the possibilities, it was all third hand ideas, collected from random articles in newspapers and second magazines.

But the beauty of being human is to test ideas, take theory and apply. It is when we are no testing ideas, that we are slaves to someone else’s opinion of what works or what doesnt. We are trapped in their interpretation, caught in their translation, forming our own opinions based on what is not our own opinion.

It is only when we test these ideas, its is only when we challenge them and challenge ourselves that we move beyond and in the process if discovery, helps others move to make or break their own ideas and concepts.

I have seen how an increase in blogging and internet projects by many friends in PNG and many tell me that it was because i started.

Notes: Thom Chambers on the Future of Publishing in 2011

This entire interview between Everett Bogue and Thom Chambers is great, but this particular response from Thom really made me think (I had to read the last two paragraphs a few times to let it soak in):

Ev: How do you decide what is important enough to make it past your high filter?

Thom: The lack of gatekeepers online means that we’re living in the age of the amateur. It’s great that you don’t need anyone’s permission to create or to publish anymore, but the unspoken consequence of this is that there’s a lot of low quality stuff out there.

That’s not necessarily the creator’s fault, either – now you need to be your own writer, editor, designer, publisher, marketer, promoter, customer services department, PR department, and all the rest. It’s rare for anyone to be capable at all those things.

That said, the gatekeepers were there for a reason – to keep out the dross.

For every JK Rowling who was foolishly turned away by a dozen publishers, there are a thousand correct calls about authors who simply aren’t up to scratch.

The way I choose who gets through? Professionalism. There’s a bit of a craft stall mentality at the moment online – “I’ll set up a store and try and sell some stuff if I can, it’s not particularly pretty or grammatically correct or anything, but I’m only one person so that’s okay. As long as I’m ‘myself’ then people will forgive me”.

But there are others who set up with a boutique mentality – “I’m small now, sure, but I’m high quality and I take pride in every aspect of what I do and anyone who visits can see that I’m going places”. Both are small, niche people trying to make an impact but the mentality is poles apart. Within a few seconds of visiting someone’s site or reading their work, you can see which attitude they have and whether they’ve actually got a future and are worth your attention.

Notes: 'Curation,' and journalists as curators

While trying to figure out if the word 'curations' was the correct thing to call the bits and pieces of stuff I save from around the web (I later decided to use the word Marginalia), I stumbled across an interesting article. It's is a bit old in Internet-time (2008), but it's very insightful. I love what Phil Meyer says in one of the comments regarding how the Internet is causing us to view information differently.

"It is a natural result of the shift from information scarcity to information overload. When information was scarce, journalism was mostly hunting and gathering. Now that information is plentiful, journalism has to shift to processing. Mindy's list enumerates many of the ways to add value through processing."