Do We Really Want Another Boom in Silicon Valley?

In the face of several recent reports about the currently dismal state of Silicon Valley, I just asked the above question over at the Silicon Valley Moms blog.

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 financing are collapsing.  People still want high-quality news content, only they would rather just grab it online — and they’re not fussy about who serves it to them, be they the content’s owners or not.

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A dads’ (and moms’) utopia

Daddy Dialectic is one of the parenting blogs I try to visit regularly. This thoughtfully provocative recent post — a utopian vision of what parenting in America could be — shows why it’s worth a look.

It was ten years ago (almost) today

Nearly ten years ago I wrote a fairly widely-noticed article for Salon magazine about online diarists — that tribe of early digital citizens who, in many ways, were the forebears of the modern blogger. Ironically, the thrust of that story was that the true pioneer diarists were getting out of the business — by 98, it seemed, the joy in digital self-revelation was gone.

Then came blogs. Diaries are not blogs, as Scott Rosenberg can tell you. But I’m sure that by now a great many blogging pioneers are also long retired. WordPress, this blog’s host, claims to look after 2.25 million blogs, but only 27 thousand of them bothered to post something today.

Still, I’m thinking I could use an updatable online home. I write about technology and culture a fair deal, after all. I’m interested in how we represent ourselves to each other digitally, why we do it, and what we tell each other about what we are doing. It’s a very long time since I had a home page of any sort (although you can find me on Facebook, flickr and LinkedIn). But there’s stuff to learn in doing this and there may even be a (very) few people out there interested enough to stop by and say hello every once in a while.

So here beggineth the SimonFirth.com blog.