Chris Anderson Gets It – Even If You Don’t

by | Feb 20, 2007 | media 2.0

People love bandwagons. One of the popular memes at the moment, re-invigorated by some bloke called Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Topix.net, is about “The Failure of We (the) Media”. Anil Dash jumped on it. Even Ben Barren jumped on it.

Are these people living on the same planet I am? The one with 60 million blogs, squillions of YouTube videos and tens of thousands of podcasts? And it’s still the dawn of time as far as new media is concerned. Talking about the failure of “We Media” in 2007 is like the mental midgets who were talking about the failure of the internet to live up to the hype in 2001.

Thank Darwin Chris Anderson gets it.

Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don’t visit “news sites” or use a “news aggregator”. I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or “help” me by defining what’s news and what isn’t. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn’t call most of it news at all. I will probably never visit any of the sites Skrenta mentions, and never did visit the ones that are now defunct. In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.

Paul Montgomery – I see he lists TinFinger as one of the “We Media” businesses that failed? Does he know something I don’t?

GDAY WORLD #203 – Fabian Frei’s Thesis on Podcasting

by | Feb 19, 2007 | Podcast, TPN

I got an email a couple of days ago from Fabian Frei, a student at The University of St Gallen in Switzerland, who is writing his master’s thesis on innovation in the podcasting scene and wanted to chat to me about TPN, so of course I recorded tonight’s interview.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

TPN Gets A Birthday Present From Apple

by | Feb 19, 2007 | Uncategorized

The VERY fine folks at Apple (you know who you are) provided TPN with a WONDERFUL 2nd birthday present today by making us a “Featured Provider” on the iTunes UK homepage! As regular readers will know, we’ve been “Featured Providers” on the Aussie iTunes homepage for a while but I’d love to see us hold the same position in our other key markets (esp the UK and USA), so this is an awesome happening!

Would Jesus Be A Christian?

by | Feb 19, 2007 | Christianity, Podcast, science, science vs religion

An interesting post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog recently from one of his readers who says:

I am an atheist (who was once a Christian) and wanted to comment on your latest missive to Sam Harris. I would describe my own embrace of science and secular humanism as being motivated by a form of faith that is deeper than Christian faith. I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he “rejected” Judaism and inspired Christianity. Christianity was once the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality, the brotherhood of man, and the human condition. I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of “God” (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.

I’m not sure I agree with the author’s claim that Christianity was ever “the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality” – bolder than vedanta? However, he makes a good point that, from what we know about the man called Jesus (which as we saw from my podcast with John Dickson, is very little), he doesn’t seem to have been overly concerned about tradition or authority.

Would he have been like Father Bob Maguire, who I had another of my regular skirmishes with last week?