Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Graydon: Breaking the Web: "HTTP and the general original web vision...

...enforce near-perfect competition. As soon as serious money gets involved, as much competition as possible gets removed. Predictability of outcome is preferred over quality of outcome more than often enough that predictability gets selected for reliably. We really can't have nice things...

Conor Dougherty: Apps Everywhere, but No Unifying Link: "Navigating the Internet used to mean...

...painstakingly typing the exact address you wanted into your computer. The web browser and the search engine simplified that, giving us the Internet we take for granted today.... Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves.... So it is much harder to share the information found on them.... For Google and Facebook, and any company that has built its business on the web, it is a matter of controlling the next entryway to the Internet--the mobile device.... As people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use....

Google’s solution is App Indexing technology.... Twitter has Twitter Cards.... Facebook is trying to create an open standard of deep links to help apps connect...

Ben Thompson: Blogging's Bright Future: "The entire history of social media...

...particularly the public-facing services--is a story of unbundling the old-school blog. Twitter has replaced link-posts and comments, Instagram has replaced pictures, and Facebook has replaced albums and blogrolls; now Medium is seeking to replace the essay.... Billions more people now have a much simpler way to express themselves online thanks to the ease-of-use that is characteristic of any service that seeks to focus on one particularly aspect of communication, a big contrast to a blog’s ability to do anything and everything relatively poorly.

It’s fair to ask just what a blog is good for anyway.... When I speak of the ‘blog’ I am referring to a regularly-updated site that is owned-and-operated by an individual.... There... is the reason why, despite the great unbundling, the blog has not and will not die.... To say someone follows a blog is to say someone follows a person.... This is more than a semantic point; Ezra Klein... says about the future of blogging:

I think we’re getting better at serving a huge audience even as we’re getting worse at serving a loyal one.

That, though, is good for Vox, given their dependence on advertising.... I am, of course, acutely aware that there is a tradeoff when it comes to the subscription business model: by making something scarce, and worth paying for, you are by definition limiting your number of readers. Stratechery... serves a niche, and niches are best served by making more from customers who really care.... Here’s the thing, though: the upside of my business model is that Stratechery has all of the things that Klein claims are being lost:

• An assumption my readers (especially my subscribers) read everything I write
• A single voice
• Loyalty....

Vox, in its desire for reach, asks nothing of its readers beyond tolerance for posts they don’t care about, which means no one should be surprised the user experience of the site is increasingly-annoying. I, on the other hand, ask for money and am heavily motivated to deliver value in return.... That means not wasting my readers’ time; it means focusing on quality over quantity; indeed, it means waiting four days to write something thoughtful (hopefully!) instead of simply trying to be first.... Klein... is unique, and he has 732k Twitter followers and a history of success to show for it. That, more than anything, is why I found his piece in particular so frustrating to read: blogs are not dead, but Klein’s is, and while I don’t begrudge him his choice, I question the degree to which he knows he made one....

I believe that more and more consumers are coming to grips with the reality of online media: when everything is free, you too often end up getting exactly what you paid for. If you consider the time wasted reading clickbait, a few bucks a month for content you trust isn’t such a bad deal.... I believe that Sullivan’s The Daily Dish will in the long run be remembered not as the last of a dying breed but as the pioneer of a new, sustainable journalism that strikes an essential balance to the corporate-backed advertising-based ‘scale’ businesses that Klein (and the afore-linked Smith) is pursuing.

Jason Kottke: The blog is dead, long live the blog: "Sometime in the past few years...

...the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs. Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD....

Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such. The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you’ll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs.... Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to ‘share this on my social media channels’ rather than post it to my blog....

Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work. If you want something to cry about, cry about the decline of the open web, the death of which would be a huge blow for us all. But perhaps that’s a topic better left for 2015. Happy trails, old friend. It’s been grand.