“I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.”
—Pete Seeger, 1955, during U.S. Congressional hearing about communist and un-american activities, as reported in AP story about his death.
Pete Seeger died in his sleep last night six months after his wife passed.
“… some of the people whom I respect and admire the most — didn’t know a little bit about everything there was available in their field.
They knew a lot about a little bit, and that took them very far.”
—Tom McFarlin, Developers Must Know Everything, Or I’m Out of a Job
This article mentions the cliche, “jack of all trades, master of none” which I was called once by someone who I managed to convince that I knew a lot about everything. I didn’t.
“Loading WordPress in our new unconventional way lets us work with other teams and other code seamlessly. I don’t need to include the masthead/navigation markup in my theme. I don’t even need to know how it works. We can focus on making blogs work, and inherit the rest.”
— Rethinking Blogs at the New York Times, by Scott Taylor, who helped make it happen
This article makes my head hurt – but proves it’s hard work when you take legacy systems and create new forward-thinking ways of doing things.
The real power of influence occurs when you influence people who don’t even realize that they’ve been influenced by you. They may not even know who you are. This mainly happens when your art is so deeply embedded with love and your desire to see change in the world that the message becomes detached from the author and travels on its own. From heart to heart. We felt Amiri Baraka. I wasn’t even born yet and I felt him.
—Saul Williams, writing about Amiri Baraka, who died at 79 on Jan 9, 2014.
Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2014/01/09/amiri-baraka-poet-laureate/#ixzz2q4FdkYSi
“… its days as the digital Breakfast Club — where cool kids come together and come of age — are gone.”
— “Facebook without the cool kids,” Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch, Jan. 5, 2014
Recently I’ve been exploring the idea of no-content marketing, which is what I think will come after the content marketing gold rush — when abundance becomes surfeit.
…
So whatever marketing content you produce had better be useful.
Longer term, though, even that won’t be enough. Much marketing will need to stop being content at all.
— Spencer Critchley, “Make Yourself Useful: Create Marketing People Actually Want,” Huffington Post, Dec. 6, 2013.
Content marketing is all the rage right now. But in the information age — when the answer is just a search away — can those who provide the answers become the brands we love and trust?
Or is it just more bullshit?
As people, can we stop loving and trusting brands? As brands, can we stop trying to make them?
Jeremy aka Adactio has a great all-inclusive article about the recent web posts amongst independent online publishers (bloggers?) who are pondering the future of the medium. Namely Jason Kottke who said the blog is dead.
http://adactio.com/journal/6620/
For myself, looking at the year-over-year data for my own personal website brandonmoeller.com, even though I likely created more posts here than ever this year, my readership hasn’t significantly increased.
But surely, if this really mattered to me, I would have strived more often to write content that would appeal to a larger audience … For the most part, I’ve been busier with more important things. Read: Baby.
But I don’t care if the audience is in the silos … More and more I find myself not inclined to share my posts from this outlet in the social media circus that I consume more of than participate in. I enjoy the control over my content that the other sites will never allow; my key target audiences of relatives and my own selfish self are happy … Who cares?