The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
More Mad Science
Could we fix the climate crisis via absurdly cheap geo-engineering, such as filling the skies with sulphur (and turning them red in the process)? Yes we can -- and someone may do it soon, warns the Atlantic.
Ants on Stilts!
Did you know scientists have attached stilts to ants' legs, in order to prove that ants are able to count their steps? (They overshot their nests in proportion to the length of the stilts.) Did you know there's a giant colony of fire ants that now covers pretty much of the southern US? Neither did I, until I read this excellent piece on superorganisms. Well worth your time.
And thanks to a colleague's pop-inspired wit, I will never again be able to hear the Duran Duran track "Girls on Film" without hearing the line "Ants on Stilts."
Speaking of the Hyper-Organized
The NYT's David Pogue shares his productivity tips in this online-only column. I normally find Pogue a bit overbearing -- he has too much of the musical theater fanatic in him -- but in this piece he's a man after my own heart.
Why Can't We Concentrate?
Salon says it has the answer. Then again, GTD guy David Allen thinks the question is bogus -- it's okay for our minds to flit around, because that's how creativity happens.
The Writing on the Page
It's official: on-demand publishing is the future. Last year was the first that the number of self-published titles outweighed the number distributed by traditional publishers, large and small. Meanwhile, the mighty Amazon is dipping a toe in the waters with its new on-demand imprint, AmazonEncore. True, the publishing industry still sells the most copies overall, by far. But if there's anything we have learned over the last decade about digital trends, it's that they ramp up fast. Little, Brown et al should savor their last couple of years of three-martini lunches.
This is New
This has been setting the Internets abuzz for a few weeks now: An album's worth of mashups from YouTube, created by Israeli artist Kutiman. And no wonder. Watching them is like being present at the birth of a new art form. This is the flashy opener that's been getting a lot of blogosphere love, "The Mother of All Funk Chords":
But for sheer listenability, I think, nothing beats Track 3, "I Am New":
Tweet-alism
Not only an interesting series of Tweets here on how to save journalism, but an interesting example of how writing on Twitter might work:
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 1. Do custom small print runs targeted to neighborhoods and interests. Not daily.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 2. Become support for local writers, reporters and bloggers; help market them, sell their ads; decentralize operation06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 3. Replace circ, printing, print production staff with tech, SEO, community managers06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 4. Find out what the community wants in real face to face meetings, not focus groups. Then do what they want.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 5. Utilize pro-am methods. Include community contributed content edited and vetted by pros.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 6. Smart multimedia. Don't do it just to do it. Use the right medium to tell the right story.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 7. Promiscuous revenues. From ads, niche paid content, donations, non-profit grants, to directory listings.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 8. Produce mapping and database projects. Employ or train journalist-hackers.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 9. Meet regularly with local businesses to gauge their needs. Create online directories of local businesses.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
mediatwitSaving newspapers: 10. Create a bottom-up organization where innovation is encouraged and rewarded at the edges. Use good ideas from anyone.06 Jun 2009from Tweetie
I Think, Therefore I Twitter
A researcher in Wisconsin has been able to send a tweet using nothing but his thoughts, and a skullcap full of electrodes. (It was all external brain-pattern reading -- no nasty cerebral implants required.) Can the first blog by word of thought be far behind? We'd better get training an extra private inside voice, one that won't give away our innermost thoughts to every electrode that happens to be passing by.
Antarctica After Ice
We all know the ice at the North Pole will be gone (in summer, if not year round) within a few decades. But what about the South Pole? If the ice vanishes completely there too, we won't have as large a continent as we thought -- we'll have a series of islands at the bottom of the world. Check out this map, which shows how much of Antarctica is below sea level (and that's not counting the many extra inches of sea level we'll get from all that melting landbound ice). Those penguins had better get used to swimming a lot further, no?
My Latest Hero ...
literally latest, as in the late Father Theodore Heck, who died at the end of April at the age of 108. Why is he my hero? Because, according to this report, he set out to learn something new every year:
"Every year, he would take up a subject and read about it," DuVall said. "When he was 99, he decided he should learn Spanish, and when he was 100, he took up the computer."
Best Web video of 2009, May entry
Again, it's Star Wars-related. (See a pattern developing here?) The premise this time: what if you took James Earl Jones dialog from other movies and put them in Darth Vader's mouth? The result: brilliantly executed.
A Curmudgeon's View of San Francisco
I came across Rudyard Kipling's American notes (1899) after Googling the Bret Harte quote that adorns a mural in my house:
San Francisco: Serene, indifferent of fate, thou sittest at the Western gate
And now I know, the next lines are:
Thou seest the white seas fold their tents, Oh, warder of two continents; Thou drawest all things, small and great, To thee, beside the Western Gate.
Kipling, however, hated the city. He arrives on a steamer, and his first impression is that Fort Point could be handily destroyed by a couple of gunboats from Hong Kong -- in other words, the city is defenseless against British invasion. He then wanders around, being wowed by the cable cars, but like a lot of tourists looks for reasons to hate the locals. He even refuses to accept the beauty of the hills, deriding them as sand dunes pegged down by houses "today." Money quote:
"San Francisco is a mad city--inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty."
Fairy Tale as Infographic
There's no link here to the previous blog. Absolutely no connection between the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the financial crisis. My, Citigroup, what big collateralized teeth you have!
Maintain equanimity and proceed
Here's an excellent Laughing Squid blog from FOB (Friend of Blah) Aaron, detailing the various remixes of "keep calm and carry on," the British wartime propaganda sign. Which, according to this Guardian story, is only receiving wide release now -- written by some civil servant, whose name is lost to history, it was only meant to be posted in the case of an invasion. How odd to see it applied -- only half-jokingly, one suspects -- to the present crisis.
"Get excited and make things" is now my desktop background.
Do It Yourself
Self-publishing is starting to look like a solution in the book world. Maybe some version of that would work for newspapers? Imagine it: millions of newspapers across the country, cobbled together from the best of online content by your local know-it-all. Content providers paid a share of each subscription. Let the best editors win.
Crosstalk
Local newspapers will never get a bailout, even though they need and deserve one far more than Goldman Sachs or AIG. They would never dare ask. So what is going to save the declining print industry? A G20-style summit, perhaps? If it's anything like this Charlie Rose gabfest, that's not going to help us either. There is, it appears, no Steve Jobs for media, no strongman strong enough to impose micropayments en masse. The industry is trained from birth to be hypercritical, to not speak with one voice. So what's left? What we do best: talk, lots of it; talking over each other.
The Tech World's Best Pick-me-up
is Gary Vaynerchuk, whom I saw at SxSWi and instantly described as "better than three shots of espresso." He's in-your-face inspiring, and his keynotes would be worth watching every morning. For example:
SxSW vs. BM
I returned yesterday from my first South by Southwest interactive, and my browser is still buzzing with cool links to share. First off, a journal entry from my Austin-based friend Epiphany compares the annual conference -- which also highlights music and movies -- with Burning Man.
Blog love
Some blogs I've been enjoying lately: Daily Routines. What we all really want to know about successful creative types and other heroes: how do you do it? How can I do it too? How are the nuts and bolts arranged in the machine of your days? This blog collects the answers from a variety of sources; it hasn't been updated since February, but the archives are extensive.
Passive-aggressive Notes. We've all written at least one. We've all received at least one. Luckily, they weren't posted on the Internet (we hope), unlike the contributors to this hilarious blog. The irony, of course, is that posting a photo of a passive-aggressive note for all to see is a particularly passive-aggressive kind of revenge.
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. My greatest grammatical "bugbear" gets its own "blog." When I see them in the wild, signs with "unnecessary" quotes -- increasingly prevalent in the U.S. -- are like "fingernails" down a "blackboard." Stick them in a "blog" with "snarky commentary," however, and I can't stop "laughing" at the result. But one question goes perpetually unanswered: just what were they "thinking"? Seriously, what do these illiterate authors think quotation marks "signify"? I can find no "rhyme or reason" to their misuse.
Goodbye to all that (consumption)
How heartening to see Thomas Friedman's latest column in the New York Times going viral. Everywhere I look, netizens are posting it -- on blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter. It simply says what many of us have known for a long time: the engine of American consumption, as it stands, is unsustainable. The collapse of a financial system that grew rotten from within has changed everything. The culture of trying to get ever more wealthy and buy ever more stuff has vanished. Americans just needed to get off the treadmill for a minute to see how dumb it was.
They tried investing in real estate, and got their hands burned. Spurred by informercials, they bought tons of plastic junk from China, and it didn't make them any happier. They worked longer and longer hours -- but for what?
True, consumers are currently hoarding cash because they're afraid of losing their jobs, if they haven't already. But at the same time, they're starting to realize just how cheaply they can live. They don't actually need that cable subscription for the channels that are mostly there to sell them plastic crap from China. The Internet has all the free entertainment they could want, and targeted ads that are actually useful. Neither their homes nor their cars need to be big and shiny. A walk in the park is more pleasant than a trip to the mall: better for your bottom line and your waistline. They can split that entree, and still have enough leftovers for breakfast.
Yes, you knew it, I knew it, the rest of the world knew it, most of the coastal elites knew it. But now the penny is dropping in the heartland, in that vast cattle pasture of consumerism. America is growing up.
Which is why it is increasingly vital that Obama shunts us into science and infrastructure jobs as fast as possible. Because if we don't start making useful, sustainable things -- if we assume that the engine of consumerism is alive and well and need only be sluiced with tax rebates -- there's going to be a black hole at the center of the global economy, and the world will collapse into warring fiefdoms faster than you ever thought possible.
Whenever this subject has come up in the past, I've argued that given the size of its population -- 60 million to California's 30 million -- my homeland deserves to be at least five states (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Northern England, Southern England). But one of the comments on this article makes an excellent point: keep us together as a single state, and we'll be worth about 100 electoral college votes (actually, 114, if you simply double California's total).
Instantly, the Great State of Britain would become the richest prize in U.S. politics. Forget New York, California and Texas. American presidential candidates would spend most of their campaigns pressing the flesh in London, Glasgow and Cardiff. Because the motherland would likely lean towards the Democrats, the GOP would never again be able to win the Presidency with a coalition of Southern and Midwestern states. It would likely collapse altogether, or be taken over by the Conservatives. Which is no bad thing: Better Cameron than Palin any day.
Moreover, the Presidency itself would be certain to fall into British hands. Consider how many presidents have succeeded to the office after governing or representing one of the larger states such as California (which gave us Nixon and Reagan), Texas (both Bushes) and Illinois (Obama and Lincoln). In the primaries, a British candidate would have an enormous head start in electoral votes, not to mention fundraising (the UK economy is about twice the size of California's).
Then there's the charm offensive. The Yanks just love our cute accents, in case you haven't noticed. They also invest us with the appearance of confidence and competence, two qualities the U.S. economy is crying out for. Tony Blair would have won the 2000 and 2004 elections in a walk, and that's without British electoral votes. Brown as Treasury secretary would have been a damn sight more effective than Paulson and Geithner. It's not inconceivable that the White House would remain in British hands for decades at a time.
So tell me again: why is it merely tongue-in-cheek satire to consider leaving a chaotic union (which hates us) for the Union that stands astride the world (and loves us)?
Goldsworthy in da hood
How nice to have an Andy Goldsworthy structure, Spire, just a five-minute bike ride away in the Presidio. I went to check it out yesterday, and it's taller and more substantial than it looks in photos. It overlooks Inspiration Point, but is up the hill, a respectful distance away. Alcatraz gleamed behind it. An airplane contrail bisected it. On a nearby tree stump, someone's pink plastic Buddha contemplated it.
Barnes vs. Orwell
Julian Barnes rugby-tackles George Orwell, brings him crashing to the ground, pulls off his superhero mask and reveals him to be nothing more than that dull curmudgeon Eric Blair. Given the esteem I hold both writers in, it's rather a shocking sight, and one suspects that Barnes is defending his brand of "fancy" erudite writing against Orwell's stout yeoman's prose. Mummy! Daddy! Stop fighting!
Less is Enough
A fascinating blog from a woman who is trying to eat healthy food on $1 a day for a month -- and against all odds, she's succeeding. Why, if everyone did this, the supermarket industry would need a bailout ...
Break out the (Space) Dustbuster
Not content with fouling up the land and putting vast vortexes of plastic in the oceans, we've just created a 10,000-piece mess in Earth orbit.
Attack of the Giant Trees
Some unexpected good news on the climate change front: trees fed by all that extra carbon dioxide are getting bigger. Big enough, that is, to effectively cancel out the U.S. contribution to CO2 levels. As a good environmentalist, of course, I'm morally obliged to tell you that shouldn't make any difference, and you should still cut down on your energy usage, and we're probably doomed anyway, etc. etc.
