Lots of things that once seemed immutable are changing fast in 2008, but many of the people who are reshaping America’s economy, technology, laws and culture remain unknown to all but a few million participants in the emerging networked culture.
The July 11 print edition gives you short capsules on the five we picked. Read on for more... and to find out some of the names that almost made the cut...
Robert Scoble
Journalist/tech-evangelist
Scoble’s odd background (a mix of computer science, journalism, personal charm and hobnobbing Silicon Valley intrigue) makes him an unlikely but highly influential 21st century Everyman.
He first gained wide notoriety as the in-house blogging voice of Microsoft (2003-06), but his roving coverage of the tech industry (much of it delivered via live, streaming cell-phone video) is so closely watched by insiders that Scoble’s attention can make or break a start-up.
His latest trick? Turning social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) into his personal broadcast channel.
Seth Godin
Marketer
How have humans adapted to our media-saturated environment? By filtering out advertising that doesn’t pertain to them.
Godin says this development broke “the TV-Industrial Complex,” the 20th century system of designing and marketing average products for average people. You put money in one end (advertising), harvest predictable profits on the other, then re-invest a portion of those profits into more advertising to continue growing. This system fell apart when people became overwhelmed by the media messages being targeted to them and began ignoring everything that wasn't personally communicated to them.
His alternatives — explained in 11 books, frequent talks and a popular blog — include “permission-based marketing,” “idea viruses” and an emphasis on “Purple Cows” (remarkable products that stand out from the crowd and generate person-to-person buzz).
Godin considers remarkability an essential trait in modern business. Remarkably, pop-culture novelty toymaker Archie McPhee released a "Seth Godin Marketing Guru Action Figure" earlier this year.
VIDEO: Seth Godin's classic 17-minute TED Talk on marketing and the original reaction to sliced bread, etc. From 2003.
David Pescovitz, Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctrow and Mark Frauenfelder
Arbiters of geek-chic
Conventional wisdom about blogs (pick a topic and stick to it) doesn’t apply to Boing Boing, the insanely popular (7.6 million hits per month) “Directory of Wonderful Things.”
Its topics are a mishmash of tech news, gadgets, “Steampunk,” science fiction, politics, “copyfights” and, strangely enough, Disney.
What do these items have in common? Either Doctrow, Frauenfelder, Jardin or Pescovitz thought they were cool.
The D.I.Y.-geek ethos that spawned Boing Boing's sensibilities struggles with conventional ideas about coolness, and certainly wrestles with the dilemmas of authorities on coolness. Yet there is an undeniable sense that the writers on Boing Boing are simply having more fun than most people, and even the geeks who've sworn off the site publicly still seem to surprisingly aware of the topics that receive its attention.
Boing Boing (which began as a print fanzine before the rise of the Internet) has grown into a network of sites, including a video channel, and occasionally threatens to break out into mainstream acknowledgment. While that's probably unlikely, Boing Boing remains the tastemaker to an influential subculture.
Lawrence Lessig
Legal scholar
Law professors seldom rise to any level of fame, but Lessig’s star may be only beginning its assent. His interest in cyberspace law (four books) put him front-and-center during early debates about privacy and intellectual property and led to his founding of the Creative Commons citizen copyright project.
His “free culture talks” at Stanford University (2002-2008) influenced a generation of thinkers, but Lessig announced in January that copyright reform must wait on bipartisan congressional ethics reform — his latest cause. Lessig actually toyed with the idea of running for Congress himself for a few days earlier this year, but backed out to devote all his attention to his Change Congress campaign.
Lessig's future may include less free-form activism. He's been mentioned as a likely federal appellate court appointee.
Jay Rosen
New Media visionary
He doesn’t have an A-List website and he didn’t have to worry about being stopped on the street by fans during his most recent Lowcountry vacation, but New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is one of the few figures to straddle the divide between professional newsrooms and their new “citizen-journalist” competitors.
An early proponent of the controversial concept of civic journalism in the 1990s, Rosen headed in a new direction with the launch his influential PressThink blog in 2003. In 2004-2005, Rosen's PressThink posts helped re-frame debates over the role of the press, the relationship between the press and the government, and the relationship between the press and what Rosen termed "the people formerly known as the audience."
In 2006, Rosen began to move more seriously toward projects that would test and explore the citizen journalism and crowd-sourcing concepts developed on PressThink and elsewhere. His highly experimental NewAssignment site drew early buzz, but Off The Bus, his Huffington Post cit-j political collaboration made big headlines in 2008 — forcing politicians, readers and journalists to reconsider some basic assumptions.
OTHER NAMES TO KNOW
Craig Newmark
Non-profit entrepreneur
With 9 billion page views per month, Newmark’s Craigslist site
is more than just the world’s leading source for free classified ads:
It’s a cultural ideal that Newmark — perhaps the most personally
unassuming entrepreneur in America — is leveraging into larger spheres.
From Newmark's perspective, the site represents new ideals about communications, community and commerce. Craigslist began as a bulletin board for Newmark's friends, and despite its massive traffic employs a staff of only about 25 people.
He isn't without his critics. Corporate media, which has been hard hit by Craiglist's free classifieds, says Newmark's practices are unfair and damaging to the mainstream journalism that paid classifieds once funded. Craigslist's personal ads, which include sexual content and posts from obvious prostitutes, have drawn complaints from law enforcement and pro-family groups.
Newmark's typical response to criticism is decidedly geeky, considering points with a computer programmer's practical mindset and seldom showing much in the way of pique. He's compromised on some big points (Craigslist began charging for certain types of ads in certain areas, based on the way the ads were being used and their effects)
Over the past two years Newmark has turned his attention to media and politics, proposing democratic-minded reforms that reflect his menschy sensibilities.
Newmark’s Craigslist title? Chief Customer Service Representative. And yes, he takes random customer complaint calls — sometimes in the middle of speaking engagements.
Josh Marshall
Digger
Marshall's Talking Points Memo is, in some respects, just another popular online news site, digesting the daily political feed from a liberal/netroots perspective. But if you really want to see what sets the TPM network it apart, watch what happens when a government agency reluctantly releases a massive document late on a Friday afternoon.
Traditional news organizations assign several of their best reporters and editors to plow through such material, looking for significance that's often buried in obscure line items. Marshall's TPM site TPM Muckraker simply hosts the document online, divides it into sections, and then invites readers to pitch in on the joint task of interpreting the government "data dump." The Muckraker staff reassembles their research, and viola: TPM readers get the information first -- literally.
That creative combination of community involvement and professional attention earned TPM a 2008 Polk Award for its coverage of the U.S. Attorney Generals firing story.
Clay Shirkey
Group spokesman
If you haven't heard of Shirkey's 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, put it on your list. In describing the ways people have adapted new-media and informational tools to work together on subjects of common interest, Shirkey laid out a course of study for everyone from grassroots activists to national politicians to corporate managers.
GRAPHICS by Dan Conover. SOURCE IMAGES: Robert Scoble by Thomas Hawk; Lawrence Lessig by Robert Scoble; Craig Newmark by Simon Phipps; Boing Boing editors by Dave Bullock; licensed via Creative Commons. Seth Godin photo provided via Wikimedia Commons GNU Free Documentation License.
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