THE DREAM IN ACTION

This blog post is not meant to be insightful or meant to share an opinion on any particular topics. It’s sole intent is to ask you your opinion. I have a question.

Is the casual style of writing that comes along with blogging a good thing or a bad thing for society?

Some times I still have my parents read over my writing and usually their reaction is that it’s too informal. I write like I speak and often times that means grammatical errors, slang terms, and off the cuff remarks. What’s the big deal? Well, recently there was a phenomenal blog post on the Fake Steve Jobs blog about ‘why mainstream media is dying’.Whoever the fake Steve Jobs is, he wrote…

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.

Part of it is the form of the media itself. If you’re a reporter at the Times, you get one story, and a fixed number of inches, and you’re smothered by layers of editors. At TechCrunch it’s one guy who can get his teeth into something and there’s no limit on how many articles he can do.

I love this. He points out that the agility of the informal publishing platform of a blog is what will allow so many people to eventually make the “standard” journalism world irrelevant. But back to the question, is this casual style bad for the overall reporting of news and how society consumes it?

I think not. I think that a less formal style of writing will eventually be the way that most of us consume the news. Obviously good writing will rise to the top, and that’s why I encourage current newspaper journalists to team up, leave their paper, and start a top notch blog with higher quality writing and coverage. But the print is going to die, it’s just a matter of time, and it would sure scare me to work in a known dying industry. But if that journalist is really good, they readers will come.

Penelope Trunk wrote a great post last month on why the internet has created a generation of great writers. Her last argument, which I really like…

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

In summary, I think that the style of writing that is most affective is changing. It’s more casual but like most successful things these days, it’s more personal, it’s more comfortable, and it’s more fun. Looks like I did end up sharing an opinion. But, like I stated at the start, what I want to know is what do you think? Is this style of writing that I employ and that so many others are beginning to use good or bad for readers?

image via flickr

This weekend @Mollstar and I had a long (relative to the amount of time I can usually get her to talk about the web) conversation about how we don’t really understand who plays all these Facebook games. Other than Poker from Zynga, which I play a decent amount of, I don’t understand who grows virtual farms, zaps their friends with black magic, and others. Then, on Halloween, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch posted a follow up post to his question to Anu Shirkla of OfferPal at the Virtual Good Summit about the ethics of many adverting trends within the virtual currency markets. His post covered examples of these ad schemes and a very entertaining video of classic Arrington antics at the event. You may like him or hate him but you can’t deny he’s kind of a bad ass.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Then the next day on Nov 1, Tech Crunch followed up with quotes from two respected entrepreneurs who admittedly said they’d executed these types of ad strategies in the past and weren’t proud of it. One even said, “I’m surprised it took this many years to be reported by the “media”. These kind of scams have been going on for years…”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/scamville-hotornot-plentyoffish-facebook-myspace/

Then Dennis Yu the CEO of BlitzLocal wrote a very honest post about scamming Facebook and the 3 most common ways to do it: 1) Downloading a spyware tool bar, 2) Tricking users to give up their email using ‘you’ve won a “free” camera, just tell us you email address’, or 3) Getting a users phone number by using ‘thanks for taking that IQ test, give us your phone number so we know where to send it’, which charges a user $20/month.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

The next follow up was from Zynga’s VP of Biz Dev Andrew Trader who stated that about 1/3 of Zynga’s revenue comes from advertising. This is the same advertising that Arrington calls ’scammy’.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/scamville-zynga-says-13-of-revenue-comes-from-lead-gen-and-other-offers/

Next Mark Pincus, who I wrote about last week, responded to Arrington’s claims with a very thoughtful post about the industry and openly admitting that yes, some players on these social media platforms are ‘scammy’ advertisers and they’re creating bad user experiences. He also raised a point I hadn’t thought of; there are many users who don’t have access to online payment methods (broke kids) who are still interested in making in game purchases. So they’re able to take survey’s and perform tasks to earn in-game-currency. Pincus says this about the worst offender:

In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post.

There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun….

As we evolve to a world where people connections are the basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these.

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-zynga-and-cpa-offers.html

Then yesterday Arrington respectfully responded to the Pincus post:

Hats off to Zynga. Flat out admitting that the problem exists and taking early steps to fix it is just something you don’t see from most companies.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/zynga-takes-steps-to-remove-scams-from-games/

I hope that I could catch you up to what’s going on here and make it easier for you to follow than reading every post (although you can of course). As I stated last week in my application economy post I really think that Pincus is a sharp entrepreneur. He understand that you can’t just F’ the user and still build a great business so I’m excited to see how he responds to this in the longer term. I wouldn’t doubt it at all if Pincus were to push Facebook to adopt the standards that Arrington et al. are calling for.

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