From the calm, unconflicted perspective on this old school blog, we continue to watch in amazement as the world crawls up Mark Zuckerberg's bum. OK, well maybe not so calm.
Naked Capitalism linked today to a new "cool stuff" blog under the Nick Denton/Gawker/Gizmodo brand called "Sploid." Heavy on animated GIFs and meme-hopefuls, it's just one cool thing after another.
Each post has a "join us on Facebook" link. Curious what that offered, other than access for Sploid to the vaunted social graph (you know, kids), we went to the Sploid Facebook page, as it appears to non-Zucks. It's a shortened version of the Sploid blog, but looks worse because it has to conform to Facebook's design scheme, and with new teaser copy that some poor SOB has to write (and no animated GIFs -- apparently Sploid opted not to convert them to Facebook's fake GIF format). The top of each Sploid Facebook post says "SPLOID shared a link," as if Sploid was your friend and wanted you to know about some cool thing, when it fact it's just mirroring its own daily content. There doesn't appear to be a Twitter clone yet.
Of course Denton is horrible and kind of desperate, but I wonder how many other publications have decided their survival depends on having crappier versions of their product surrendered into a competitor's private servers. They would essentially be admitting their work isn't strong enough to lure readers back to the "commons," where they can be found through ordinary search and word of mouth. Does the commons even exist, or is it just spam and crappy old sites -- please don't answer that.
A small anecdote from recent experience. A younger musician, let's call him DankCats, said he would follow my blog more but he can't deal with getting an RSS reader. A mutual friend offered to create a Tumblr that mirrors tommoody.us posts so DankCats could read it. Our editorial board convened and considered a motion that, in order for tommoody.us (and the artist who produces it) to survive as a going concern in the modern world, it was going to need a "tumblr version," a "twitter version," and a "facebook version." The motion failed. There are many ways to look at failure.