The Cult of Me

• RT @mathewi: Globe union has reached a tentative deal with the paper just moments before midnight strike deadline; vote scheduled for Monday #

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• @bobmayo It's not shocking; when u run out the tech folks who can build biz and are left alone, you panic + make awful mistakes. inevitable in reply to bobmayo #
• RT @jowyang: Brands focused on tools (Twitter, Facebook, Blog) w/o strategy is like buying a hammer without having a blueprint for a house. #
• RT @dangillmor: blog post: white house "online town hall" meetings are parody, and WH is arrogant about it. http://is.gd/1lG7i #
• RT @dangillmor: WashPost blames marketing people, says fliers "weren't vetted" — http://bit.ly/TGwCr wuld journos buy that from others? #
• RT @JohnAByrne: @Brad_King Here's the rationale behind our recent design changes. http://is.gd/1lL2R #
• RT @mathewi: RT @chartreuseb: AT&T Saw 65,000 Texts Per Second Following Michael Jackson's Death http://bit.ly/124hap #
• If you wouldn't "train" a programmer to be your managing editor, why would you "train" a reporter to be a flash developer or programmer? #
• RT @JohnAByrne: Remarkable confession from a former Harvard Business prof: "What I taught has caused real suffering.." http://bit.ly/kXJEl #

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In 2004, I took a position at MIT’s Technology Review, the nation’s oldest technology and science magazine published out of one of our countries most venerable institutions. My job: oversee the redevelopment of the magazine’s website from a simple placeholder for some of its articles into a fully-functional, modern news operation.

The site was a wreck, for sure. The content had migrated through several databases, with each migration stripping the data of more and more information rendering much of it useless to us. There were very limited tools that allowed us to interact with the data. Much of what we had was corrupted or “parent-less”, meaning we had data but no way to identify what the data once did.

But the one thing we did have was a predictive market, a thriving community of users — small, but thriving — who signed up for our service and made “bets” against each other on questions that we posted. The predictive market, which was written about in James Surowiecki’s excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, as MIT used it was meant to be a market that was integrated into the editorial process, set alongside stories that journalists generated as a way to create a genuine flow of information between the readers/users and the journalists.

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• amazing (if a bit hyperbolized) analysis of Amazon's community review section: http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon #
• writing up a piece on The CUlt of Me, distribute stories, editor role, #
• RT @mathewi: “Newspaper people are living 1950s-style organization-man lives, years after that model became obsolete": http://is.gd/1kJZf #
• I kinda hope the judiciary DOES ban linking to newspapers: http://bit.ly/BfU7J #

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I’ve been sifting through the first few chapters of The Cult of Me, trying to lay the groundwork in the beginning of the book for the argument that comes later. I realized something in this process: I’ve talked about The Cult of Me without ever defining it. Really.

There are hints about it, but nothing concrete. Nothing that you can walk away with and go “that’s The Cult of Me.” So I’m going to start working that out. Here.

***

The Cult of Me is, at its heart, an idea about how we create and share stories that has, I think, tributaries that flow off other systems.

The simplest way to think of this idea is as an Internet router, a node along with information flows — in and out — along a continuum. Routers are, for the most part, traffic cops that merely take a piece of information that shows up, reads the basic directions and passes it along towards the next most logical router along the packet’s destination road. These routers are hubs, gathering small bits of information but never taking the time to assemble the entire message. They read just enough to “see” where the packet needs to go. Then they shepherd it along.

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• Just saw the flap about attribution + Free written by @chr1sa; while not a fan of his work, doesn't his explanation seem plausible? #
• Currently editing the first 3 chapters of The Cult of Me; which means I'll have 2 new chapters – later today #
• RT @vincrosbie: Loss in US n/paper stocks since Oct 05: NYT -80%, Belo -94%, Gnett -95%, MedGen -96%; Lee -98.6%, McClatchy & G'house -99.2% #
• RT @BreakingNews: Wall Street Journal: Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, is expected to lay off more than 1,000 employees. #

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• RT @JimKukral: Dear online newspaper publishers, "slideshows" that force me to create many impressions arent going to save you." #
• RT @erickschonfeld: *snip* (an) excellent article explaining why newspapers are dying :) http://bit.ly/a92aH #
• A flawed assumption, that presentation matters first: http://bit.ly/nKHOO #
• I love Gladwell's review of FREE: http://bit.ly/4bBVXi #
• Ad networks, not media companies, failed during the last few days: http://bit.ly/1fpdT5 #

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• 5,000 words into The Cult of Me chapter on what D+D taught us about distributed storytelling; Post later tonight. #
• Check out my panel, Telling Tales, in Liverpool: http://www.thecultofme.com/presentations/ #
• 2 more chapters *DRAFT* on The Cult of Me: http://themodernjournalist.pbworks.com/ – join, comment, change #

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• The top 16 stories on CNN's page are about Michael Jackson – uh, wtf? let's have some more discussion on what's wrong with the news #
• @dangillmor is, for my money, one of the only voices u should listen to about online; news much of the rest is just bitchin' on both sides #
• later today, I'll write up the formulas for making money with online news (not news products, news) + later, on news products #
• @Drevilll @gizmotastic thanks for the FF! I'm not sure what I did, but I'll try to do more of it. Double even. in reply to Drevilll #

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My buddy Glenn Platt, a professor and program director at Miami (OH) University, and I were chatting the other day about distributed stories.

I feel confident that I know what a distributed story is, how you build a network to tell those stories and some tools you might use that don’t seem obvious.

More importantly, he asked me what would a distributed story look like. Having spent a year thinking about it, writing about and fleshing out my idea for it, answering it was no problem. Until the part about archiving.

Actually, this question has dogged me for about a week. I was chatting with Mary Jean, an English professor at Miami, Sophia, a PhD student from Colorado and some folks in Liverpool about this. Everybody expressed the same thought when I got to archiving: but how do you store that?

And the answer is, I don’t know.

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