Um...this guy is ignoring one very important thing: time. The idea of buying and trading "shares" of content over any significant period of time is absurd, because some types of content (e.g. breaking news stories) devalue incredibly quickly. If, on the other hand, this is meant to work like arbitrage or something, with transactions taking place within tiny, fractional time frames, when exactly would anyone have time to tear themselves away from their "content market tracker" to actually do something with their content, such as—crazy idea here—read it or gaze upon it?

Further, the stock market only works the way it does because it's a closed system—the only way to make an investment in the companies that participate is to buy stock. Whereas my guess would be that not every media company is going to get on board with the idea of selling shares in the "content market"—thus desirable content, including content which "scoops" content market–based creators and distributors, will still be available elsewhere.

Not only that, but why the hell would independents creating their own content want to get involved with this? Without the middleman—the "distributor"—independent content creators could make a whole lot more money. The only reason to get involved with a distributor would be to get your content in front of more eyeballs—but people can already make their content available to the entire Internet via a number of other means.

And guess what—the content that's out there now is already subject to a "market" of sorts, competing with other content for eyeballs. The only thing this model does differently, as far as I can tell, is artificially inflate the role—and the profits—of distributors, regulatory bodies, and market-infrastructure providers.

I don't get it. Why the hell would we "content creators" want more infrastructure in our lives?

(Thanks to King Kaufman for the bizarre link.)

Just ended an IM conversation by saying I had a question "real quick" and, once the question was answered, responding with "sweet."

Immediately afterward, I opened up The Pacer, Parkview Gardens' monthly newsletter, and noticed a column called "Curmudgeon Corner"—and strangely enough, found that the topic concerned none other than the two aforementioned phrases.

"Listen up, whippersnappers," writes the anonymous columnist.

"Young people, I'm not against all your linguistic innovations. For instance, 'sweet' strikes me as a plausible replacement for 'cool,' though I suspect cool will make a comeback. One of your expressions, however, really gets on my nerves.

"It's the adverbial phrase 'real quick,' which is used in asking permission, as in, 'I just want to use your computer real quick.' This is an underhanded way of putting on the pressure. It suggests that the request is so modest you really have to grant it. There's a further suggestion that the speaker is in a hurry, so you should come up with that yes right away.

"In my opinion, 'real quick' does not represent an advance on the words it is replacing—words like 'please' and 'may I.'

"Still, I haven't attained total curmudgeonhood yet, because I can remember being young and asking permission brusquely—I can also remember an occasion when I made an old person angry, and how surprised I was.

"So here's the explanation that I would have benefited from back then. If you have to ask permission, it's counterproductive to do so in a way that annoys the person you're hoping will grant it. Drop that obnoxious 'real quick' from your vocabulary."

I done been told!

In which Warren Ellis name-drops to the point of utter incomprehensibility.

I'm down with his blog and Twitter feed—the latter of which truly is "best of the Web" material—but this had so many proper nouns my eyes were scarcely able to focus on any one phrase, sentence, or paragraph.

Last night's dream: I was set to travel to Germany, only to realize the morning of the trip that

1. I hadn't bought my plane ticket yet (I'd apparently been planning all along to buy it the day of),

2. I hadn't packed yet,

3. I wasn't even sure I had enough money in my bank account to pay for the ticket,

4. I don't speak German, and

5. We were just leaving to drive to the airport (on completely iced-over roads) as of 9:30 a.m., when we already should've been at the airport by then. The flight's departure time was 11 a.m.

Apparently Robert Scoble's Facebook friends objected when he began importing his tweets as status messages. His conclusion? The rejection occurred because "the usage model there is all about talking with small groups of friends" and "chasing the magical experience."

My guess would be that there were other reasons people objected, not least of which would be his nuclear follow cost. (The follow cost metric, the milliscoble, takes its name from him. That alone should tell you something.)

All snark aside, though, I think they most likely objected because the ethos of Facebook is completely different.

Facebook is mainly used for networking with people you already know and showing them what you have become or are becoming, whereas Twitter is largely used for sharing and developing ideas. Both social networking spaces are full of people sharing the latest news, but the idea of what's newsworthy greatly differs between the two. Status updates on Facebook are mostly about personal news and life events, whereas Twitter seems to have developed into a much more entrepreneurial, collaborative space.

I've certainly gotten the "magical experience" Scoble speaks of from Twitter. It just comes about in a different way, through sharing and building on ideas, interesting turns of phrase, and plays on words. Facebook isn't the sort of space where that sort of interaction can take place, in part because it doesn't foreground raw text the way Twitter does. Moreover, an account on Facebook automatically invokes a set of inescapable preconceptions about who you are, in the form of data re: where you come from, where you were educated, where you live now, who you work for, etc.

How did he manage to miss that fundamental difference between the two social networks?

Talk about short-sighted; it's laughable to see The WSJ, an unsustainable old-model media company, suggesting that bloggers, whom it claims are already able to turn a profit by writing, might want to consider further credentialing themselves via formal training and/or unionization. Yes, because those things have done so much for the viability of dead-tree media.

To see how that might work out, one need look no further than the farce that is our own local bloggers' guild. The bloggers most up in arms about "protecting their content" are quite often those whose content is the least worth protecting—and those most concerned with establishing themselves as authorities possessing specialized knowledge of the "rules."

The whole point of blogs is that anyone is qualified to write one. Not only members of a guild or press corps. And there are no rules, only recommended practices. The whole enterprise is meant to be democratizing. Further, those who want to raise the bar to entry have failed to notice something crucial: The psychological bar to entry for blogging is already incredibly high.

The most interesting thing about this recent TechCrunch article, for instance, was its use of the phrase "formal blog post." A blog is far too much responsibility for most people, who continually apologize to their audience for not having enough to say until, two to three months later, they finally throw in the towel. When even sending an entire email or typing up a coherent argument now strikes many as too stiff and formal, where exactly would we find warm bodies to man a credentialed "blogger corps"?

Why are those left aboard the ship seemingly incapable of thinking beyond the whole "send 'em off to school and slap a label on 'em" model? If it works, it works—no need for credentials.

"I am pressed, printed, stomped, and strategically removed—I am everybody. Insane without innocence; I am trapped, tricked, packaged, and shipped out. I am produced. (Pressed, printed, stomped, tripped, trapped, tricked, packaged, shipped...)"

The other day at lunch, a colleague asked an interesting question: "If you could be any writer, who would you want to be?" Everyone else at the table quickly rattled off a list of names of magazine columnists, essayists, and writers they admired—but I was honestly kind of stumped. Disconcerted, I've been turning the question around in my head ever since.

I mean, I'm a magazine editor. I read stacks and stacks of magazines growing up, was greatly inspired by a handful of book authors in my teens, and got into a bunch of comics writers and artists in college—but I'd be hard-pressed to list off many dead-tree magazine or newspaper writers I particularly care about. I know along the way I've liked certain writers' styles, and saved copies of certain columns for my files, and I'm sure I've picked up tricks here and there from a number of them—but for the life of me I can't remember most of their names!

But yesterday, it finally occurred to me: If you flipped the question to ask me about my favorite Internet writers and essayists, I could rattle off a full complement. Paul Graham. Jessamyn West. Matt Haughey. Alex Zola. Orson Scott Card. Andrew Baio. Bill Keaggy. King Kaufman. Nate Silver. The writers of n+1 mag. The McSweeney's crowd, for starting down that path in the first place. And a bunch of people whose real names I don't know, like dirtynumbangelboy, jonmc, grumblebee, and ikkyu2.

I'm suppose I'm not bereft of inspiration after all.

Re: these tea parties, it's like the conservative establishment suddenly said, "The people like grassroots? We'll give 'em grassroots!" And then proceeded to enact some bizarre facsimile of what they think grassroots organizing means. What they failed to note is that the left only made progress once they quit wearing Technicolor costumes, bringing stilts to rallies, and screaming on the podium. Obama's victory was a victory of image control and talking points—of superior rhetoric, in short. He made it clear early on that he would disassociate himself from anyone who started spouting off in inappropriate ways—even, as you may recall, his own pastor.

The conservative establishment has its own top-down talking-point distribution system—but where the Obama team emphasized decorum and patient discourse, these clowns are injecting angry displays of power and tone-deaf, ill-conceived spectacle. Guess which one earns people's respect?

Then again, I guess that's the point: These people aren't interested in earning our respect. They're trying to start a civil war.

Hey min? I think "Top 5 Worst Mag Title Names Ever" might be the worst story title ever. What are "mag title names"? Have you ever heard of synecdoche? Or synonyms? What were you thinking? Better would have been "Top 5 Worst Magazine Names Ever."

Also, in this article about layoffs at TheStreet.com, you said the company estimates laying off 18 people will save the company $2.4 million. Does that mean those people were seriously earning an average of $133,000 apiece? Or is there some other explanation you neglected to print?

Finally, the title of the email I received from you today was more than a bit creepy. Seriously: "we can make your phone ring"? All lowercase? I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop: "we can make your phone ring...with our minds!" Or something. Because otherwise, your claim fails to excite; anyone who knows my phone number can make my phone ring.

Thanks for thinking of me, though.

Edit: Half an hour after I commented on that top story, the title was changed to "Top 5 Worst Mag Names Ever." Good deal.

Allan Britnell, a Canadian freelance writer and fact-checker, suggests that magazines' superior fact-checking should be advertised and used as a marketing tool. "I would argue that substantively checking all editorial content should be the benchmark," he says, intimating that some sort of "certified," logo-bearing standard for fact-checking could in some way save magazine journalism.

That's all well and good, but here's what I think: The argument fails unless you actually define what constitutes a "substantive" fact-check, as opposed to what Britnell calls "double-checking the spelling of source names and spot-checking the odd factoid." Define your terms or go home, buddy. You're talking to fact-checkers here.

For my part, I do what I consider to be a pretty rigorous fact-check on every piece that comes across my desk, and it would be awesome if that work were recognized in some sort of visible way, but calling for standards without even trying to define those standards always bothers me.

Talk about an argument lacking substance.

Yours truly,
The Fact-Checking Dept.