Where you are is where it’s at

Location-based social networks are growing in popularity.  Here’s my recent take on the phenomenon — which focuses on how, when it comes to innovation, timing makes all the difference.

The growing market for virtual goods

was the subject of a tech analysis piece I wrote for the London Evening Standard this week.

Imagining the end of the Google Era

I did just that in an analysis piece for today’s London Evening Standard.

Mark Zuckerberg profiled

I just profiled Mr. Zuckerberg, my College Terrace neighbor, for the London Evening Standard.  It seemed to me that until very recently Zuckerberg had not been taken very seriously by the media.  He may yet fail to make something of Facebook, but he’s done enough now to be treated with respect

Joe Wilson hires a professional tweeter

Not so long ago I wrote about ghost tweeting as a growth market for writers.

So it was interesting to see that pretty much as soon as US Representative Joe Wilson made a national name for himself by heckling the President last week, he went out and hired himself a ghost, or professional, twitterer.

Food for journalistic thought

I’ve just found the set of radical ideas for improving journalism published by veteran Silicon Valley journalist Dan Gillmor last week.

If adopted, they’d truly create a very different-looking news experience.

One of the weird things about the  existential angst that’s currently afflicting journalism is how easily it’s become a debate about trying to save as much as we can of the old system — without acknowledging how the old system really hasn’t been serving readers as well as it can.

New technology is allowing news to be delivered in new ways.  If these new methods serve people better, I don’t see why they won’t pay for it.  And that, I think, suggests that we need to get away from the currently-dominant debate about how newspapers can survive in a world where people read their stories online for free and think more about how starting with a clean slate can create next-generation news organizations that serve us better than ever.

The solution won’t be simple.  Many of the changes Gillmor suggests would be easier to implement (and have more impact on readership and therefore revenue) at a local rather than a national level, for example.

But it will be people thinking like Gillmor, I suspect, who will be running the best and most successful news operations a decade from now.

Recent columns

Recently, I’ve written about the storm of bad PR that’s been hitting Craigslist, the pressure that children in Silicon Valley feel to appear ‘perfect,’ and the way in which suppliers tend to beat out prospectors when it comes to reaping long term gains from short term (gold) rushes.

A Growth Market for Writers: Celebrity GhostTweeter

Well, the NY Times beat me to it.  Sort of.

I’ve been meaning to write something on the consequences of celebrity tweeting for writers for weeks now.   I think there’s a whole new career path here.

It’s clear that while Tweeting adds considerable value to a celebrity’s profile, it’s also something he or she can get seriously wrong.

Intoxicated by the chance to share every moment of an unquestionably fascinating life (they’re a celebrity after all) said famous person can pretty swiftly reveal him or herself to be whiny, egotistical, entitled,crazy or — worst of all — utterly ordinary.

It’s what you could call rule one of celebrity tweeting: done wrong, celebrity tweeting destroys your brand.

Of course, a few rare folks can pull it off.  There’s Stephen Fry and The Real Shaq, whom Noam Coen mentions in the Times, both of who seem to have personalities perfectly suited to the form.  But for most famous people, being interesting many times a day is just plain hard.

Subscribe to a few celebrity feeds and it’s obvious that a lot of people are needing help.  And of those who have it, many clearly aren’t getting the help they need.  Have the wrong people write your tweets  and you quickly betray your twittering as phony PR.  What good is that?

The situation, it’s seemed to me for a while, calls for a new profession — the GhostTweeter.   And here’s the Times recognizing the same thing.

Coen is interested mostly in the fact of GhostTweeting.  I’m as curious about the mechanics.  What exactly is the job description for a celebrity GhostTweeter?

Here’s a try:

Writer needed to work with internationally known personality.  You’ll be:

• psychologically acute, able to understand what motivates both the famous individual and his/her many tens of thousands of diehard fans.
• a natural storyteller, able to take the facts of your employer’s day — whatever they are — and spin them into narrative gold, but always in the believable ‘voice’ of your employer.
• a high-performance, high-producing copywriter, able to translate that understanding into 10 or more engaging, entertaining and above all punchy 140 character tweets per day.  (You will also be expected to reply to at least 20 tweets sent to you be fans per day, to be written in the same engaging ‘voice’).
• available all hours, ready to be tweet for your celebrity wherever he/she is in the world (no, you will not be traveling with the celebrity.  You can do this from home).

Experience in brand management and creative writing is very much a plus.  Ability to work in a high pressure environment with emotional, ambitious people used to ‘high-touch’ assistance is essential.

How does sound?

My guess is this will be a rare growth industry for writers in the next few years.

Geography as journalistic destiny

Since I was writing recently about the Bay Area’s unique creative culture, it’s interesting (to me at least) to note that Ready Made magazine is moving from Berkeley to Des Moines, Iowa.  There was a thoughtful dissection of what that might mean for the magazine in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

“The move raises the question of how the change will affect Ready Made’s hip editorial sensibilites,” says the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli.

Garofoli also notes that none of the magazine’s six staff have chosen to go with the magazine to Des Moines.  I think that pretty much answers his question.

Recent Evening Standard columns

So this week I wrote about Silicon Valley’s new Singularity University.

And last week the topic was the wider Bay Area’s creative culture, of which the Valley’s own culture of creation is very much a part.