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 [...]

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 [...]

This week’s column

I’m thinking I should post my weekly Evening Standard column here, just in case anyone is interested.
So here is last week’s, about Twitter.
And here is the one from the week before, about the Crunchie awards.

The Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Future of Journalism

I’ve been following with time-sucking intensity the debate on the future of journalism now playing in locales as disparate as the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, various technology blogs and back-and-forth ripostes between individuals with skin in the game on twitter.
The bare bones of the issue is that traditional advertising-based models of media [...]

Why should social networks want to make money?

In a guest column today over at VentureBeat, Amuso co-founder Barak Rabinowitz writes about the failure of social networking websites to turn their phenomenal popularity into phenomenal profits.
“There’s an elephant in the room of online advertising,” he suggests.  “An elephant in the shape of 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared [...]

On booms and busts

It looks like we’re heading into a recession, and that has me thinking about the good times we enjoyed in Silicon Valley not so very long ago — which in turn has me offering a new “Perspectives” on KQED radio this week.