No write ansur

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1. The year when blogging tools part ways with blogging religion for good, for good and bad. There will be publications built on blog tools (call the “blublications” or “blubs”) that start to earn real money and audio/video will become the canvas for self-produced news and commentary if someone can organize the many choices into something comprehensible and manageable, which is simply a problem to be solved with some sweat and cash combined in the right measure.

The old order has come apart and new orders are struggling to take control (“meet the new boss, same as the old boss”), though plenty of people will simply go their own way, some thriving and others burning out like the screen stars of the 1950s. There are no correct definitions of behavior, only the raw material for debates about ethics, business models and editorial/creative process.
Umberto Eco wrote in 1983:

Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media.

Well, it’s all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what’s going on.

Some of my notes in the margin after reading that last night: Beware rebels bearing manifestoes and the sleek taboos of trendsetters. Eat the dead, if their bodies aren’t too putrid, to learn from the lessons coursing through their veins. Start no religions except those you are willing to mock mercilessly. Trust experience without regard to the grammars available from local professional societies. Live and let live, else you will find yourself roasting on the spit of your own dogma. Create to be free, consume to die to yourself.]]>