Lisa Albers

'Tweet me in St. Louis'

Lots of advice this morning for entrepreneurs. Dorsey said the greatest lesson he learned is "you have to start. Start now. Start here and start now. Keep it simple." Interestingly, he said the company early on realized that it didn't have all the ideas. Dorsey pointed to the now-crucial @ symbol used on the service. "That sign didn't come from within the company...it came from the users," he said. "The word tweet -- we didn't come up with that, our users did. It's something our company resisted for a long time. We'd call them status updates."  

via www.stlbeacon.org

This is from the St. Louis Beacon's live-blog of a speech given by Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Besides that I follow (and have a sort of fan crush on) @jack, I tuned into this because it's part of the St. Louis Beacon's new blog, The Feed. For those of you who don't know, the Beacon is to St. Louis what Crosscut tries to be to Seattle, but with arguably much more success. Check out Dorsey's speech, and then peep the Beacon site in general.

One note of critique: Dorsey was introduced with the line "Twitter is the Gutenberg press of our time." I don't think so, not Twitter alone. I'd say the Internet itself is analogous to the Gutenberg press, with all the attendant evolutions of email and Web applications as parallel to the innovation and progress of printing technology.

Salon's redirection: 'another funnel to Google'

Apparently Salon's loss of ad revenue and subsequent layoffs has the Internet pioneer rethinking its long-form journalism model in favor of, well, looking like all the other crap on the Web.

What this article doesn't say is that they already shortened their articles; back in 2003, they were still publishing New Yorker-length pieces that were so in-depth and well-written, I used them in my college classes. Take a gander at this article on a long argument between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis that had a profound effect on the two authors' classic works. Since then, the stories have gotten leaner, and in my opinion, the quality has gone down as well. I shudder to think what the new Salon will look like, and it seems I'm not the only one:

But Bob Sacks, president of marketing and media planner Precision Media Group, says that running away from the print-style magazine format will ultimately be self-defeating for Salon. He tells NewsPay: “If we go to aggregation as our formula, as our business model, we won’t be publishers as we were. ... We’ll lose our revenue stream. We’ll be another funnel to Google.”

via paidcontent.org

I'm not saying, by the way, that short pieces are always crap and long is always better. Blaise Pascal once apologized for the length of one of his letters, saying he did not have "the leisure to make it shorter." It sometimes takes time to edit down a mess; just ask any poet. However, long-form journalism is what I depend upon in order to really understand an issue. Most news stories leave me with more questions than answers. But I read an article in Harper's on the Mexican drug cartel and come to know the complexity and nuance of the problem. Sure, I read Harper's on paper, but if I find a really good long piece online, I'll invest the time to read it, even on my little laptop screen. The best thing I've ever read about the Craigslist phenomenon is this piece in Wired, which took time and editing to produce. Note the length, and the lack of annoying page jumps.

The future of fiction? A 'digi-novel'

Zuiker has created “Level 26,” a crime novel that also invites readers to log on to a website about every 20 pages using a special code to watch a “cyber-bridge” — a three-minute film clip tied to the story.

via blog.newfiction.com

The ultimate fiction mashup--a combination book, movie, and Web site. Now if they could just add in a little interactive game....

Creating a game company from scratch

It's hard to say what's more fun — the new "Scribblenauts" game for the Nintendo DS, or the Cinderella story of 5th Cell, the Bellevue studio that created the game.

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

If you're interested in the burgeoning game industry in Seattle, you've got to read this piece in today's Seattle Times. What a story! I haven't played it yet, but I've heard great things about Scribblenauts. It would be fun to work for 5th Cell. I've been in touch, but....

It's also interesting to note the role that social media played in bringing 5th Cell founders together.

Where are the female Wikipedians?

... a revealing study conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Their research found that only 13% of Wikipedia () contributors are women.

via mashable.com

Mashable is surprised to find this stat on Wikipedia, which came out of a conference last week and was reported in the Wall Street Journal. My first thought when I saw the headline was, "Of course. Women don't have TIME to post on Wikipedia. They're too busy taking care of everyone!"

It's true that there are plenty of "mommy bloggers," not to mention women at the forefront of Web media. But am I right? Do men just have more leisure time for the kind of research and writing required to be a Wikipedian?

Last I saw general family trend stats, they showed that men still spend less time on housekeeping and child-rearing than women do (although the numbers are getting better), yet most women are now also part of the "official" workforce.