This will be a post of brilliant but random ideas – culminating in the idea behind the title
Things I want to know more about.
Animal Stem-cell research. I know human stem cell research isn’t going to get a green light in the US anytime soon. But while taking my kitty to get spayed yesterday, I wondered why animal stem cells aren’t all over the place?
Space Elevators. I’ve always wanted to write a story on the space elevator. One day. I will.
Currently looking for: People who admit to taking money for submitting stories to Digg. If you talk to me — you will remain 100 percent anonymous. I will not snitch. This is for research on a book. Please ask.
Journalism Theory: I need to create two new categories for this blog. One will be journalism theory, the other, journalism practice. Then I’ll have to go back over every single post I’ve ever done and sort them. It just needs to happen for my own clarity.
Journalists as Stock Traders
Not too long ago I tried to create my first Internet meme.
It was an article titled "Internet Multitasking Syndrome," or IMS. I also wrote a post on how I came up with the idea for IMS — what the logic was behind creating a new disorder (which we have too much of anyways).
Both posts dealt with the extreme speed at which people surf the net. This is a new skill set for journalists to learn. When I would watch my older (but wiser) professors surf the web, I would get agitated. They type slow, they don’t use Firefox or any of the time saving plug-ins it offers. They don’t even know how to do a command-f search for a word on a web page if they are doing research. In short, they didn’t develop as journalists on the web. It’s not their fault, but for obvious reasons, there is a skill set that I have which they don’t, that enables me to be far more productive on a computer.
Things like RSS, social news sites, social networking sites and all the rest are great — but they fundamentally change the way journalism is done.
Journalists are still out to seek the truth, but as the job description changes, we have also become information traders. Buy low, sell high equates to publish early and pounce on emerging memes fast, so the links flow back to you.
I’ve got to go check to see who is gchat/Iming/calling me now. Multitaskers unite!!!!
I was reading this post in gReader and then clicked through to read the whole thing and then read it and was going to leave a comment but then check out your sidebar and ended up on Digg and then thought about how to re-arrange my blogroll and then about how to re-design my blog and then about dark matter and buying-low-selling-high as a metaphor to play with when trying to get newsrooms excited about breaking news online, and then I came back to leave my comment, and it’s been about 130 seconds, round-trip.
Multitasking? Never heard of it.
David, life is a series of trade-offs.
Warren Buffett is not a day trader, and speed is not the only virtue.
Time compiling is time not synthesizing. And time spent jetting around learning snippets from the outside is time not spent reflecting and learning from yourself.
As Brenda Ueland wrote in “If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit,” —
* “The imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
* “These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: ‘I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.’ But they have no slow, big ideas.”
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader