The deed is done. This blog, which has carried my name in its domain for more than six years, no longer has a title other than my name.
For now.
Until I change my mind.
Or freak out about branding.
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Archives
The snark of working in public
Jul 27, ’11
8:11 AM
The art of working in public: In which Robin Sloan writes a great blog post about other people writing great blog posts.
“I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they’ve both aged just a little in their tabbed casks. They have something deeply in common—though it might not be obvious at first.”
From my point of view, “writing great blog posts” feels like a thing of the past, except for a faithful few inspiring souls who still strive to build connections and point to common threads on the Web, not just curating the work of others, but adding something much more valuable than a pithy comment in the process.
It’s certainly a stock/flow issue these days, but I think so much of what I see passed around these days qualifies as flow: Short snippets, curated clips, a video, an animated gif, the trafficking of cleverness in the form of tweets or stars or likes or plusses or some other sharing system that helps us superglue badges to our vests like so many Indian Guides.
Finding time for stock is tricky. Often I feel like the writing I do here that gets the most attention (as measured by aforementioned counts and scores and RTs and stars and comments, etc.) is quick, throwaway, blast writing (not entirely unlike what you’re reading at the moment, eh?), spun up without a great deal of deep research or forethought.
But I do so admire the Dashes and Sloans and Carmodys et al, who do find the time, and provide us with more than fodder for the sharing circuit.
Daniel’s status treatment
Jul 27, ’11
7:56 AM
I really like what Daniel is doing with his “statuses” in WordPress. Assume this is a custom post type. I think he started blogging these while taking a(nother) break from Twitter.
In his RSS feed, these show up with a plain title of “Status” — I find this to be sort of amusing.
What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?
Jul 27, ’11
6:59 AM
What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?: I feel like this list and its evolution over time provides us with a really depressing mirror directed at our commercial society.
“11. Conference Call”
Branding
Jul 27, ’11
6:50 AM
I’m strongly leaning toward dropping the “Invisible Inkling” brand from this blog entirely, in an effort to appear moderately less pretentious.
I am fully aware that using three adverbs in the previous sentence — and writing it at all, not to mention this one, makes it difficult to make the “less pretentious” argument with any level of confidence, so let’s just pretend you didn’t read that part.
Reaching back into the archives of this here blog, it looks like the switch from “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog” to “Invisible Inkling” happened in September 2006 when I was done with most of my graduate school classes and had started looking for a full-time job. I suppose I wanted this thing to appear to be a bit *more* professional, and thus, dropped the j-school reference so I wouldn’t look like an undergraduate of some sort. (No offense.)
From the bit I wrote about “so what’s an inkling, anyway?” that day:
“The newspaper business is changing, and so is journalism education, and so are the technological paradigms that supposedly mark the boundaries of both. So, as the nineteenth-century rapid/mass communication method of ink-on-paper dries up, it’s time to go stand under the waterfall of clues, open your mouth and your ears, and see how the information flows.”
Writing! Yay. OK, so I think we’re all in agreement that I can drop the double-I brand, and put something succinct and to the point like, say, my name in the top-left corner of my blog.
Plus, I’m sure children’s book author Emily Jenkins and Harper Collins will be pleased.
Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund
Jul 26, ’11
10:11 PM
Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund: I missed this while on vacation last week, but as a sort of expansion of the Knight News Challenge, there’s now a 10 million dollar Knight Foundation fund to invest in for-profit companies. I continue to think this is a good idea.
Best of Digital News Design Winners
Jul 26, ’11
10:07 PM
Best of Digital News Design Winners: From March 2011, SND’s online news design award winners.
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map
Jul 26, ’11
9:50 PM
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map: Alexis Madrigal, like many who have commented so far, are impressed with Tackable’s tablet news map app. Me, too.
Machine Learning Fairy Dust
Jul 26, ’11
9:48 PM
Machine Learning Fairy Dust: A warning against putting all your innovation eggs in a natural language processing basket. One key reason to be wary? Accuracy of most automated tagging services approaches “good enough” at best without a healthy dose of human intervention to tune the system.
Google Prediction API
Jul 26, ’11
9:45 PM
Google Prediction API: Seems like a useful resource for building inexpensive personalization tools for news, depending on how structured your metadata is at the start. Warning: This is a Google Labs project, which makes it seem like it could vanish at any time these days.