1971 is the name of the year and an Apple TV+ documentary series billed as The Year That Music Changed Everything. It’s also the number of hours the former president kept up his blog “From the Desk Of.” No, that’s not true. But it is satisfactual. The thesis of the movie 1971 is that music suddenly came into its own a year and a half past the Beatles’ sell date. In fact, the filmmakers make a very good case for this, with lots of studio footage of Elton John, Isaac Hayes, Andy Warhol and the Loud family, and the Osmond Family. I know this sounds like I’m being sarcastic. I would have been more onboard if there had been a little less of Keith Richards zombied out in the south of France and a tad more of the incredible Tapestry sessions that made the earth move under our feet and the sky come tumbling down, but by the end of the year the music apparently survived, I bought the bit.

2021 could use a little of this treatment. On “Gray’s Anatomy,” which has been time delayed eight or so months back to the height of the pandemic, the season finale sped up the clock to sync up mostly with the present. “This Is Us” started in the present, then flashed forward four years to a point midway between now and a previous flash forward so far in the future that apparently household appliances and haircut styles seemed to have stalled (Read more...)

Somehow it’s Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday this week. Some of you may not think that’s a big deal, but I do. The fact of his talent pretty much drowns out most other ideas of what to write about, but here’s to the birthday boy. Keep up the good work.

Back then, we wondered why Dylan kept changing, refusing to be pinned down, going electric, photographed at the Wailing Wall, you name it. We sure were hungry for direction, it seemed. Growing up in the Sixties, everything was possible. After Trump, we’re rethinking that. Crypto is a grift, better than gold, down 50%, up a third. If I wanted to throw money away, just stand on the corner and hand out NFTs.

As much as this stuff makes my head hurt, it does make it easier to second guess the Discovery/WarnerMedia and Amazon MGM deals. In a nutshell, streaming has shaken the media world into a massive upheaval. The linear TV big three — NBC, CBS and ABC — have lost control of our TV sets. Netflix has replaced the idea of advertising-supported product (Gray’s Anatomy, This Is Us) with binge drop shows about chess. No advertising, a monthly subscription fee and oh, by the way, free shipping. That last one is Amazon Prime, which throws in a version of Netflix with everything we get delivered during the pandemic, which is everything. When we get to the vaccinated New Normal, it will still mean everything.

Many acronyms later, the cable networks (Read more...)

In the early days of social media, all things seemed possible. Twitter was this weird reboot of blogs, with a social layer atop an RSS feed that gave authority to last in/first out musings by providing data not just about read or unread but shared by who. You could take that authority data and rank posts by who shared them and who followed those people and what they in turn recommended. Although this was mostly ignored at the time by vendors and writers looking for a viral eyeball payoff, for those looking to support new talent there was something more valuable than reach.

Something like that could happen with Clubhouse and newsletters. On this week’s edition of the Gillmor Gang, recorded just over a week ago, we talk about Clubhouse, the Facebook advisory board and its siderstep of the Trump deplatforming, and early stuff I can never quite remember because the show always takes a bit too long to fully get up to speed. I’d apologize for this, but the apology would take too long to reach sincerity sufficient to not make things worse. This by the way is why newsletters exist — to save time scouring the web and cable news for a sufficient return on investment, as in “well there’s another [duration] I’ll never get back.”

Temporal time displacement suffered a serious blow at the hands of HBO Max and its strategy of releasing theater-less blockbusters on the streaming network in 2021 but only intermittently moving forward. As (Read more...)

I use Feedly to work my way through each day’s stream of politics, tech and media stories. Today, I am greeted with a picture of something called Feedly Cloud and the following message:

Scheduled Maintenance Feedly will be back in less than 30 minutes.

Sixty minutes later, it still says that. Feedly is built on RSS aggregation of my favorite news sources, things like The New York Times, Washington Post, TechCrunch, Protocol, Deadline and Techmeme, and writers like Om Malik and Benedict Evans. Notice that very few newsletter authors make this list, mostly because they push via email. I wonder if that is because vendors like Substack and Revue want to promote their subscription model, but if so that is shortsighted. It’s not about the subscription, it’s about the relationship.

I pay a monthly fee to Feedly, and I get a piece of the Web I can call my own. If I see something I want to find later, I put it in the read later “folder.” If I think I might want to refer to it in the newsletter, I push it to a Feedly board that I can import into Revue along the right side of the screen. If I want to push a story live to the Telegram stream, I drop it on a board where a series of bots posts it to a chain of locations ending with the @gillmorgang Twitter identity. If I click the Feedly icon, it’s now less than 90 minutes ’til Feedly (Read more...)

Of all the gin joints etc. etc. Clubhouse continues to confound those who don’t believe in the restorative powers of the Next Big Thing. It doesn’t make sense, they say, that an audio service based on live podcasts will change the course of human history. And they are right. Social computing is in the doghouse in the wake of January 6 and the former president. But the folks behind Clubhouse have gotten a few key things right.

The main thing is that in the beginning of the return to some rational possibility for the suppression of COVID, we’re opening our hearts to the hope we’ve abandoned for more than a year. Our children are crying at the prospects of returning to school, to the classroom, to the hallway rendezvous with friends, to the safety of the arc of life translating across generations and family stories. We’re tentatively daring to believe in things we took for granted even as we rebelled against them in our youthful exploration of the world we were on the cusp of creating.

Social was never about challenging the existing world, the stagnant media, the secret passageways to our own version of new history. It was about creating a storyline for our generation that we could invest in. And the fuel we sought was trust. If we work backwards from the current reigning media, it’s easy to see when trust was discounted. Some call this partisanship, but it’s deeper than that.

As we choose our guiding voices, (Read more...)

It turns out the most important decision made was not the vote to choose (and remove) in the election but Twitter’s permanent banning of the former president from the social network. Suddenly the temperature cooled, the new administration engaged with the details of vaccine rollout, and the second impeachment trial ended with an expected outcome. Twitter’s move was bipartisan if the trial was not.

Twitter’s other big move was the acquisition of Revue, a Substack competitor we’re moving to in production of the Gillmor Gang newsletter. It features tools to drag and drop articles from Twitter, Feedly and other newsletters, but crucially the ability to reorganize these chunks as the writing develops. It’s my bet that the newsletter container will absorb blogs, podcasts and streaming into a reorganized media platform available to creators small and large.

This kind of organic process development meshes well with the newsletter model. It encourages more timely releases, and an editorial feel that prizes quality over quantity. As newsletters proliferate, an evaluation of time over volume becomes most significant. It’s less an eyeballs pattern than a prioritization of what is not chosen and then what is, consumed or annotated with social recommendations. As with the Gang’s Frank Radice Nuzzel newsletter, the focus becomes less flow and more authority or resonance.

Daily Commentary

I have made the decision to cover the media exclusively in “The Radice Files.” There are plenty of general news aggregators out there, and I for one, am just tired of those stories. (Read more...)

No sooner did we start developing a newsletter, the newsletter industry exploded. Twitter jumped in with a purchase of Revue, Facebook was rumored to be investigating the platform, and each new day brought further experiments. You could blame it on the post-Trump lifting of the fog of despair. The pandemic continued apace, with new variants spurring distribution of vaccines and a transparency in communications with the new president and his team.

After years of social mining of our behavior, interests and transactions, inference has been replaced by direct evidence. The politics of data pressure mandate that we expect free software bundled with increasingly powerful hardware. The core utility of a phone culture shifted as people kept to their homes and mostly used the televisions for entertainment and news, and the phones as notifications consumers. The desktop remained the creation engine for business documents, analytics and information triage.

One year after the pandemic took hold, the outlines of the recovery are becoming visible. Because so much of our transaction history is funneled through the phone, we have left less need or incentive for teasing out indirect data and making inferences on it. Netflix is a honeypot for direct recording of choices, tagged along each customer’s timeline with the minute-by-minute social characteristics of the groups they participate in.

The resulting data type is beyond the bifurcation of product in the Apple hardware sense and the user as product in the Google or Facebook sense, Netflix creates a kind of social signal out (Read more...)