I have had the privilege of being on this campus for each of the past 5 years. I enjoyed the company of President Duane Larson where we compared notes on the critical importance of strategic planning and of making hard, but essential, leadership decisions. We have both received much affirmation and a bit of grief for hard decisions that we've recently made and announced. So, it was good to compare notes. It was wonderful to hear the enthusiasm in his voice as he talked about the future of Wartburg Seminary and the educational opportunities they provide for future pastors, youth ministers, CE directors, etc.

AF author, Norma Cook-Everist, was the catalyst for my visit to Wartburg Seminary. But, my visits always expand off of her hospitality! I enjoyed speaking to the students in her Christian Education class. Not only was I able to share information about some of the innovative and successful resources that we have published over the past several years, but I was also able to give them a sneak preview of some of our forthcoming resources, including those related to the Book of Faith Initiative and our spring 2009 Sunday School curricula, Spark! They reacted to the slides just as I expected they would. With energy, enthusiasm and excellent questions.

After class, Norma had invited anyone from the Wartburg community to join us for lunch and Q&A about publishing. There was quite a turnout! People came and went, so I didn't have an exact count, but there must have been 20 people who stopped by at some point during the lunch hour. Students, faculty, staff, spouses of students. They had excellent questions for me related to their interests as writers of curricula, music composers and arrangers, copyeditors, book authors, etc. There is obviously a lot of talent in this community!

Last, but far from least, I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time during the day with Barb, Jill & Jean, all staff members in our Augsburg Fortress bookstore on campus. It was bittersweet to be with them. We announced on November 7 that we will be closing 9 bookstores, including this one, by no later than April 30, 2009 so that we can focus our time, talents, and financial resources on the creation of new resources for the church. So, these good, hardworking people will be laid off. But, they were incredibly gracious, warm and welcoming to me. Class acts! They noted that they are sad and a bit nervous about the future. But, they also commented on how much they appreciated the 6 months' notice that we have given them along with the safety net of severance, outplacement assistance, etc. We are blessed by such loyal and gracious staff members. I encourage anyone who reads this blog to say a prayer for these good people and the others from AF and so many other companies, who are being laid off. These are challenging times, to be sure.

I always enjoy my time on our ELCA Seminary campuses. Interacting with the students who are our future pastors and other church leaders gives me such optimism for the future! These are nurturing, challenging, inspiring communities!

Blessings,
Beth

A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

If you want to know who's writing, there's an introduction to the five man team as well.

The New York Times already publish the technology blog Bits, which is frequently linked, and a good read really. In that sense, they are not new to the scene. In fact, their blog index is huge, although it looks better than it is.

I don't doubt that Gadgetwise will find some readers, but compared to the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo, as well as a wealth of smaller gadget blogs, it looks a bit thin at the moment. That might and will probably change, and there's the possibility of finding their own reader niche just by the fact that they are located at the New York Times, and the push it can get from there, but my guess is that Gadgetwise won't be the official CES blog partner for years to come

Possibly Related Posts

• New York Times examines the rivalry between TechCrunch50 and the DEMO Conference

According to at least one account, the big star of the NewTeeVee Live conference put on by the gang at GigaOm wasn't the CEO of Hulu, or the head of Netflix, or even alterna-star Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. It was 15-year-old video artist Lucas Cruikshank, otherwise known simply as Fred. Lucas was a bored teen somewhere in Nebraska when he decided to parody some of the self-obsessed video bloggers on YouTube and came up with the persona of Fred, a hyperactive pre-teen who speaks in an incredibly annoying, squeaky voice. He is a bona fide YouTube superstar.

While musicians and comedians with years of training and talent are desperately trying to get more views for their videos on YouTube, the phenomenon known as Fred records a video of himself leaning into the camera and making faces while sounding like one of the Chipmunks and gets more than a million views. The video I've embedded here has more than 11 million, and that's after less than four months. His latest video has only been up for a day a single day and already has more than 400,000 views, and the one before that (two weeks old) has 2 million. His is the most subscribed channel on YouTube and has more than 125 million views in total. Next up: product placement and celebrity cameos.

Watching Fred's videos is one of those things that separates adults from kids, just like Ren & Stimpy or any one of a dozen annoying and yet hilarious cartoon shows. As Cruikshank says in one of his interviews, viewers almost instantly either love Fred or they hate him and no doubt plenty of older viewers will argue that all Fred's success proves is that any old piece of crap can get millions of views. I disagree. Young Lucas has done one thing that even big networks do fairly infrequently: he has tapped directly into the heart of his target market, which is probably easier for him because he is the target market. But he is also obsessive and passionate, and as Jason Kilar of Hulu says, that is a big part of being a success.

But Lucas is also a smart video producer, whether he does it intentionally or not. His clips are short, they aren't exactly complicated, he builds loyalty by using the same routines or catch-phrases, and he times the release of new videos for when his fan base gets out of school. That's smart. Annoying he may be, but he is clearly far from dumb. Whether he can translate any of his popularity into a real business without irritating his fans remains to be seen, but if I worked at Nickelodeon or Teletoon or some place like that, I would get him in to teach my staff about how to play this game.

Sponsor

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Malcolm Gladwell's latest book in the New York Times: Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable or dated any particular study might be.

This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

Friedman and Gladwell's outsized, flat-world success has lead to a huge number of wannabes. I was really looking forward to reading Simplexity, because it sounded like an interesting topic, until I settled down with it tonight and discovered that it was chock-full of all those amusing bedtime stories about the map of the cholera plague in London in 1854, which I've heard a million times, and then suddenly I noticed (shock!) that not only was the author a journalist, not a scientist, but he was actually an editor at Time Magazine, which has an editorial method in which editors write stories based on notes submitted by reporters (the reporters don't write their own stories), so it's practically designed to get everything wrong, to insure that, no matter how ignorant the reporters are on an issue, they'll find someone who knows even less to write the actual story. Panicking, I began to flip through the book at random. There's that story about Don Norman and complicated user interfaces. Here he is reading Nassim Taleb. I've heard all these anecdotes! Stop, already! I threw the book away in frustration.

This is the third one of the day. My business partner Jeff Atwood was busy extracting himself from the flamewars he started by writing an article on, of all things, NP-completeness, which is, actually, something that it's possible to know something about, because it's not a vague sociological hypotheticoncept like simplexiflatness or blinkoutliers, it's actually a real, important result from Computer Science, with a rigorous definition and lots of published papers, and poor Jeff got himself in something of a pickle by writing a book review when he hadn't read the book, and fortunately, he has comments on his blog, so his readers called him out on it.

Now, I am not one to throw stones. Heck, I practically invented the formula of "tell a funny story and then get all serious and show how this is amusing anecdote just goes to show that (one thing|the other) is a universal truth." And everybody is like, oh yes! how true! and they link to it with approval, and it zooms to the top of Slashdot. And six years later, a new king arises who did not know Joel, and he writes up another amusing anecdote, really, it's the same anecdote, and he uses it to prove the exact opposite, and everyone is like, oh yes! how true! and it zooms to the top of Reddit.

This is not the way to move science forward. On Sunday Dave Winer [partially] defined "great blogging" as "people talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course)." Can we get some more of that, please? Thanks.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Here's a 15min highlight reel:

We did a lot of the standard stuff that makes Hack Day so interesting, but there were a few innovations to the event format itself that I thought worked really well, too:

1. DabbleDB. Simon Willison setup a simple hack submission queue using DabbleDB, a handy online database tool. It's as if the software was designed for this purpose. Two nice benefits: 1) you can upload a screenshot with your submission which it displays nicely, and 2) it prints beautifully. I handed out a hardcopy of the hack demo queue for each judge who then used the list to take notes.
2. Double Screens. We setup 2 projectors so we could jump back and forth between presentation locations and save some time. While one person was presenting, the next person was setting up on the other screen. I was a little worried it would be distracting, but that wasn't a problem at all.

   I think this is primarily what kept the pace up. We got through 37 hacks in just about an hour. At that pace you couldn't really afford to look away. Oh, and Simon's lightning timer was hugely helpful, too.

   This then had the nice effect of giving the judges more time to deliberate

3. Comprehensive recognition. The judges went through every single hack and found a way to acknowledge each participant. Emily Bell did a sort of improv act dishing out the jokes. She first went through all the hacks that we would have given an award to. Then she handed out the trophies
4. Silly trophies. These worked perfectly. You can keep it on your desk. It makes no sense to anyone else. And it reinforces the idea that the recognition is for the work itself, not for winning a competition. We did hand out a couple of Flip cameras and Make Magazine generously offered some free subscriptions for the hardware hacks, but the emphasis was clearly on the hackers and their hacks, not the idea of winning'.

Otherwise, it seemed to operate much like other Hack Days, except for the refreshing focus on hacks that mean something. I wasn't sure what kind of hack quality to expect which was in fact very high, but I loved the fact that most of the hacks had the added dimension of context.

Many times a Hack Day results in a lot of amazing technology solutions for problems that don't exist. I would never challenge the value of creativity for creativity sake, as that's a big part of what Hack Day is about. But I was really happy to see that in addition to the impressive technical hacks things like Ben Griffiths', Rob McKinnon's and Simon Willison's hacks (to name a few) presented data and information in new ways that could influence the way people think about what they are reading or interacting with.

Anyhow, the event was fantastic, and I'm really looking forward to doing it again.

Here, in no particular order, are ten observations you could make from this data, which speak to the the future of media:

1. Professional content still has A LOT more value than user-generated content.
2. Legal content still has A LOT more value than illegal content.
3. Professional content produced for analogue media is worth pennies on the dollar when distributed in the web's commoditizing content marketplace.
4. It probably costs a lot more than $180 million to produce the content on Hulu, which means that it's not a standalone business.
5. Ads inserted into online video are about 1,000 times more annoying than TV ads (I say this having watched many shows on Hulu) losing control of your content is not a web-native experience. This suppresses advertising value.
6. TV/Video will likely follow the path of music and newspapers in suffering a dramatic decline in content value on the web.
7. Video is probably not a panacea for newspapers trying to reinvent their businesses on the web.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
9. Google isn't doing any better than anyone else at solving the content commoditization problem on the web.
10. Six years after Google perfected search advertising, there has been no innovation in online advertising that even comes close to the same scale.