I posted this over on my tumblr, marking the 10th anniversary of me3dia.com on January 3.

Ten years ago today, I became me3dia. That’s when my blog went live, first on Blogger, then on Movable Type. When it launched, “me3dia” already existed in Google searches, but only as a typo for “media,” which is how I got me3dia in the first place. I kept accidentally hitting the 3 key along with the e, and I liked how it looked for two reasons: I had dreams of a career doing journalism, PR and advertising copywriting — three forms of media — and I also liked the 3D in there. Media with depth.

Today, me3dia.com is pretty quiet; most of my blogging is happening elsewhere. I blog here on tumblr, on Gapers Block (which launched in 2003, and on which I’ve posted well over 10,000 times), on Twitter and on client sites. (Ironically, my last remaining pro blogging gig just came to an end — though time will tell if I start another one.) My online activities are splintered and spread out, and it’s time to get them back in order.

My goal is to overhaul me3dia and consolidate a lot of that splintered personal output back into this one site in the next couple months. It’s a birthday present to my site, and a good new year’s goal for me personally.

Years ago, I saw a great t-shirt design by Dutch design firm Experimental Jetset. It was super simple, yet sophisticated in that you had to know who John & Paul & Ringo & George are.

That design has inspired dozens more, some better than others. And while I think the concept has run its course, I had one more version I thought needed to be done.

This is Cinnamon and my holiday card this year. And it can be yours, too, if you hurry: I’ve made it available on Etsy for $12 per pack of eight. Order this week and you should still be able to get it in the mail for this Christmas — or hold on to’em for next year.

My senior year in high school, I directed an “experimental,” which was our school’s somewhat odd term for a student-directed short play. They probably got the name because they tended to be less traditional performances — plays written by students, adaptations of material from elsewhere, avant garde one-acts, etc. These shows were always presented in pairs. I recall watching several of my friends act in a ribald collection of Monty Python skits, coupled with a student-written play titled A Brief Nictitation, which bordered on performance art. Fortunately, the truly experimental piece went on first.

My experimental was simply called Dialogues, and it was paired with my friend Kyle’s production of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. It was exactly that: a selection of dialogues pulled from some of my favorite plays. The Question Game from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one from Hamlet (though I don’t remember quite which one now), a scene from On the Open Road (which I’d seen the premier of at the Goodman), and a couple I’d found in a collection of dialogues I’d gotten from Mr. Faust, our theatre teacher. However, the one I was most proud of was one I put together myself. It was a dialogue built out of two monologues — the closing soliloquies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.

I arranged the lines in such a way that Puck and Prospero’s lines wove around each other, alternating every couple verses, so as to highlight the similarities in the speeches. It worked pretty well on paper, and I thought it really worked on stage, performed by my friend Brandon and an enthusiastic freshman named Rashmi. (Brandon, if you’re reading this, do you remember which played whom?) UPDATE: Brandon reminds me that he was Prospero, but really wanted to be Puck.

I thought I’d lost the script, but I found it recently in an old sketchbook. So, here it is, “Puck and Prospero’s Dialogue.”

Prospero: Now, all my charms are o’erthrown and what strength I have’s my own, which is most faint.

Puck: If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.

Prospero: Now, ‘tis true, I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples.

Puck: That you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.

Prospero: Let me not, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver , dwell in this bare island by your spell.

Puck: And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.

Prospero: But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands.

Puck: Gentles, do not reprehend: If you pardon, we will mend.

Prospero: Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails — which was to please.

Puck: And, as I am an honest Puck, if we have unearned luck no to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue.

Prospero: Now, I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant, and my ending is despair — unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assault Mercy itself and frees all faults.

Puck: We will make amends ere long; else the puck a liar call. So goodnight unto you all.

Prospero: As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.

Puck: Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.

Don’t leave Orbit lime-melon gum in your car, unless you want the car to smell like spoiled fruit. This was the unfortunate discovery Cinnamon and I made on our trip to Kansas City for a wedding this past weekend.

After taking off the cellophane, we were taken aback by the pungency of the gum — its melony fruitiness quickly filled the car. That was fine while the car was cool; once it was left in a hot parking garage overnight, we discovered the gum’s dark side. I find the flavor of ripe melon to be just shy of smelling spoiled anyway. Add a citrus note and some heat and you’d have thought we left a slice of cantaloupe under the seat. The smell lingered even after I took the gum out of the car. Only a full change of air — at 70 MPH up I-35 — fully eliminated it.

The gum itself was OK. I was expecting something fruity, so the rather strong undercurrent of mint was unexpected and not particularly welcome. The melon flavor was pretty accurate, but the lime and mint fought each other and the lime lost.

Yesterday afternoon, I was brainstorming short URLs to use for Gapers Block tweets; I was hoping to use http://g✶b.ws, but the unicode character breaks the URL in most Twitter clients. So, I was idly trying stuff in Domai.nr and came across the .ky TLD. Intrigued, I tested stc.ky and found that it was available (st.ky and stic.ky were not).

After digging a little deeper, though, I discovered that to register a .ky domain, you have to be a resident of the Cayman Islands. Many TLDs allow registrations by non-residents, but not this one. So instead I tweeted the idea:

I figured I’d get no response, like usual, but instead I heard from a user named caymaniac expressing interest. He’s a Cayman citizen who runs a site about the Cayman Islands, and he registered stc.ky — and sti.ky for good measure. We traded a few tweets back and forth about how to create an URL shortener; I suggested he look into LESSN, Shaun Inman’s roll-your-own shortener code. I figured that was it for awhile.

This morning I got a tweet from @caymaniac, letting me know Stc.ky is now live. *

It’s not that pretty yet, as he notes, but it’s functional. Links go in, a shorturl comes out. Pretty sweet. And at least for now, the urls are truly short: they’re created sequentially, so the one I created just now for the The Westin Casuarina Resort & Spa, Grand Cayman is stc.ky/6. You can customize the outcome, too, ICANHAZ-style. Hilarity is sure to ensue.

So there you go — from tweet to thing in about 18 hours. How cool is that?

* I’m a little disappointed to see caymaniac trying to limit its use to Cayman-related links only — hopefully he’ll see the light and find other ways to promote the Cayman Islands with the domain. I did create a couple shorturls before the disclaimer went up — one for Gapers Block (stc.ky/GB) and one for me3dia (stc.ky/me). ↑

I’m a White Sox fan. Not a rabid one — I’ll attend a Cubs game once in awhile, and I’ll even enjoy it if it’s a decent game. But my heart belongs to the South Side Hitmen. I have a brick from old Comiskey, and a 28-inch Louisville Slugger that the Tribune bewilderingly gave out as a premium the last season there. (Can you imagine 10,000 bats being given away to fans? I don’t recall there being any beatings reported back then, but holy insurance liability.) My favorite player is Carlton Fisk, and I was elated when the Sox went all the way in 2005.

So when I saw the Cubs’ new slogan, “It’s a way of life,” with Wrigley’s iconic Win flag in place of the W, I knew immediately what I had to do.

You may be interested in this as a t-shirt, or perhaps as a stylish bumper sticker. Go Sox.

I’ve been back from SXSW Interactive for a couple weeks now, which has given me some time to digest the experience. It was very different for me this year compared to years prior.

First off, I had a panel this year, and I was feeling very unsure about it. It was The Online News of Tomorrow, and featured some very talented and knowledgeable* people. However, because we’re all very talented and knowledgeable, we’re also very busy, and so we had very little direct communication before the conference — basically a few emails and one hour-long conference call which Jeff Jarvis wasn’t able to attend. This made me really nervous. What if we suck? What if the questions I pose lead to one- or two-sentence (or word!) answers? What if we can’t fill the hour? It had me distracted for the first couple days of the conference, and kept me from enjoying myself and being fully “there” for the panels I attended.

Fortunately, my concerns were completely unfounded. The conversation flowed nicely, and if anything we could have had more time. We fit well into the thread of discussion in the several media-related panels this year, and the only content-related complaint I saw in the Twitter chatter was that we took too long to get to our thoughts about potential business models.

The biggest non-content complaint was that we were yet another panel of white guys. Cinnamon even alluded to it in her talk. It’s a valid complaint, and one I had tried to address. Next time I do a panel, I promise to be more industrious in my efforts.

I was also interviewed in the conference’s Studio SX. It was only a 10 minute thing, and it felt like it went by in half that time. I felt it went OK, but we ended up starting at such a remedial level (one of the first questions was “what’s the difference between an online magazine and a blog?”) that we didn’t get very deep into the supposed topic of the future of online news. Though honestly, I could be wrong — it was over so fast and so very casual that I’ve forgotten most of what I said. The audience seemed OK with it. Hopefully SXSW will post the video somewhere so I can see for myself how it went.

“Content isn’t free to make. There’s a whole iceberg of work involved in creating content.” —Erin Kissane on the New Publishing & Web Content

Despite the self-distraction, I did have a good time. Break Bread with Brad, the memorial party held in honor of our dearly departed friend, Brad Graham, went well. I have a couple hundred buttons left over — 500 was probably more than absolutely necessary. I plan on donating most of them to the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, where Brad worked, for their fundraising use. If you’d like one, please get in touch.

The only official after hours events I attended this year were Happy Cog’aoke, Fray Cafe and 20×2 — and I helped out behind the scenes with 20×2. Otherwise, I spent most nights out with friends at one of the non-event bars — usually the Ginger Man. That’s been the trend for me for the past several years. The official parties tend to be ridiculously packed and kind of lame as a result; it’s hard to have a very good time when it takes forever to get a drink, movement is limited by the crush of bodies, and it’s so loud you end up hoarse trying to talk to your friends. This year’s crop of parties was apparently also marred by “VIP” sections that sometimes separated friends with a chain-link fence.

One of the things I missed about “the old South-by” was the serendipity. The chance encounter that led to an unexpected experience with people you barely know. I had one of those for the first time in awhile this year. Cinnamon had planned to meet up with Lauren Bacon, Alex Beauchamp, Jenny Hart and Vickie Howell at the Hotel San Jose, and I was invited to tag along (Lauren’s boyfriend David did, too). It was a group of amazing people I otherwise probably never would have gotten to spend time with, and it was one of the highlights of my trip. I don’t think I really realized how much I missed it till I had it again; next year, I’ll seek it out.

Then again, there’s always the tug of catching up with friends I only get to see in person at SXSW. That list gets longer every year, and the
refor makes it harder to make room for the unexpected. As much as I hope to break away from my circle of friends and mingle with other groups, it’s hard to do when you’re in the moment.

The second big difference between this year and years previous was the marketing. Yes, attendance was up 30-40 percent this year, but I don’t think I would have noticed that so much if it weren’t for the hordes of marketers — literal packs of people there solely to promote some service or product. It was nearly impossible to walk in or near the conference center without being accosted by a pretty young thing trying to get you to go to a marketing plug or sign up for a contest or hand you a tchotchke. It was obnoxious, and nearly ruined SXSWi for me. If SXSW Interactive is to remain a great conference, that’s going to have to be reined in.

SitBy.Us was a fantastic success, by the way. With nearly 900 panels and events listed on the official schedule, having some way to quickly and easily sort through everything was greatly appreciated by attendees. We got tons of great feedback on improvements for the future, and we’ll be sharing some post-show data and thoughts over on the Weightshift blog once we’re out from under a couple client projects.

I came home with a sinus infection again this year. I wouldn’t blame it on SXSW SARS, though: I think it was the water at the Hampton Inn. I use a neti pot, and I noticed that the water smelled strongly of mildew on the first couple nights we were there. I think I basically inoculated myself with mildew as I tried to keep my sinuses clear. Next year, I’ll use filtered water or something.

Cinnamon and I spent Tuesday night at Alison and Brendan’s place, where we watched Deathbed: The Bed That Eats and scratched Maude’s head. Wednesday morning we went to Gourdough’s for breakfast and enjoyed insane donuts before heading to the airport. Best way to end SXSW yet!

*Boy, “knowledgeable” is a really weird looking word. It’s all sorts of strange letter combos and atypical construction, isn’t it?

It’s been a busy… well, I was going to say week or month, but really it’s been busy all year so far. But the past month has been particularly busy.

I’ve had a big freelance project finish and a new one begin, with a planned deadline of the day before I leave for SXSW Interactive — which is today. (It’s mostly hitting deadline.) Gapers Block is still going strong, and we launched a grant-funded original feature reporting program in January that’s added a bit more to my workload.

But what ate up a lot of my time was SitBy.Us, a web app that helps SXSW Interactive attendees figure out their schedule and share where they’re sitting with their Twitter friends. (More about it here and here.) It’s really taken off — as of right now, we have 1633 registered users, which is probably around 15 percent of this year’s attendees. We’re hoping to see that rise to around 2000-2500 once the conference has begun.

I’m moderating a panel this year: The Online News of Tomorrow, featuring Jeff Jarvis of CUNY, Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock, Jeremy Zilar of NYTimes.com, and Brad Flora of WindyCitizen in addition to me. Should be a good discussion; whether it’s exactly what we planned it to be, about may be an entirely different matter. Keep your eye out for coverage — and also for my Studio SX interview , on the same subject, with the LA Times’ Mark Milian. Both are this Sunday.

In addition to that, I’m helping out with the Break Bread for Brad memorial celebration Friday night, and with 20×2 on Monday. And who knows what else in the interim.

I’m not the only one in the family speaking this year, though. Cinnamon has a panel of her own, and it’s arguably harder than either of mine. She’s doing a “Future 15” solo talk titled “You Win When They Call You a Bitch,” about fighting sexism with social media. She’s going to be awesome.

So, yeah, a week in Austin at “spring break for nerds.” It’s going to be great. Exhausting, but great.

We had a brief debate about who was Generation X, Generation Y and Millennial Generation. There seem to be varying starting points and cut-offs for each (Gen-X being the closest to settled at this point), and depending on where you look Gen-Y and Millennials may be the same generation. So I thought I’d put some numbers on a chart to show just how much overlap there is. The ranges for Generation X and Generation Y are from Wikipedia — which considers Millennial Generation another name for Gen-Y — while the start date for the Millennial Generation (which may or may not still be gaining members — has anyone named the “Post-Millennials” yet?) comes from MillennialGeneration.org, a project of Futurist.com.

Just reading the Gen-Y/Millennial Gen Wikipedia page gives you an idea of how much controversy there is over when this generation begins and ends, and whether it’s one or two or multiple generations. On the chart, Gen-X ends in 1981 and Millennials pick up in 1982, which makes sense. So why does Gen-Y start in 1976?

What are your thoughts on where one generation ends and the next begins? And what do we call kids born after 2000?

In 1993, for the end of my senior year in high school and the beginning of my freshman year in college, I kept an open journal in a blank datebook from 1954. I found it in a used bookstore in Stratford, Ontario, in 1991, and realized that the days of the week would correctly match up with the dates in 1993 — so I held onto it for more than a year before writing in it. It became one of my most treasured objects, not only as a peek into my experiences during that awful and wonderful transition period from high school to college, but also for its glimpses into the lives and thoughts of so many friends, acquaintances and strangers. Whenever I’ve come across it in the past 17 years, it’s been impossible to resist looking up what happened on that day, what I or somebody else was writing about or experiencing.

That magical alignment of dates and days of the week occurs again this year, so I’ve begun a yearlong project of posting scans of the book on the web and writing about each day. Reflections, explanations, the rest of the story… you’ll find them in 1954.

Brad passed away this past weekend, too young at 41. He is memorialized, among other places, here.

If it weren’t 3 in the morning, I’d probably be more eloquent, but I can’t sleep, so I’m just going to write.

Brad Graham was among the first bloggers I got to know online — which makes sense, since he was one of the first bloggers, period. The guy gave the blogosphere its name, for godsakes. Through his blog, comments on mine and other blogs, and frequent postings on MetaFilter, I became acquaintances with Brad, and met him for the first time at a blogger meetup of some sort. But it wasn’t until 2004 that he became a friend.

My first trip to SXSW Interactive (“summer camp for web nerds, it’s been described) was in 2004. Alison and I were in search of the evening’s events after she picked me up from the airport, and came across Brad and Nikolai in the Omni Hotel lobby. As the four of us talked and then headed to The Paradise to meet up with others, Brad and I hit it off famously as he told stories and shared advice about attending the conference. I saw a lot of him over the next few days, including hearing him tell one of his amazing stories at Fray Cafe, about picking up a bulk order of condoms (for a theatre production) at an STD clinic. Brad was one of the people I most looked forward to seeing when SXSWi 2005 rolled around. And it was at Break Bread with Brad that following year that I knew I was back among friends. “TheBrad” was once again being his funny old self, introducing people to their new closest friends and making sure nobody felt left out.

We developed a playful undercurrent of flirtation and innuendo (then again, everything was an innuendo with Brad) over the years; he’d casually hit on me, and I’d play the tease right back. Even Cinnamon got in the act.

You could always count on Brad for a joke or a story, but I also cherished the quiet moments talking with him in the hallways at South-By, and the few times we got to hang out back in Chicago on one of his visits up from St. Louis. I once spent several hours at SideTracks on Musical Night just to hang out with him — that’s how great a guy he was.

I’ve always held storytellers in the highest regard, and Brad was one of the best I’ve ever known, able to reel you in and deliver the punchline — whether funny or poignant — with perfect timing. I’ll never forget his story of taking George Clooney to a gay bar, and so many other bon mots over the years.

When we were down in St. Louis the weekend before Christmas to visit with Naz and Jen, I considered getting in touch to see if we could meet up, but we were only there for a short while, and besides, I’d see him in March, right? I’m kicking myself now for not calling him, although if he was sick he probably wouldn’t have come out. It would have been nice to have talked to him one last time, though. I feel like I barely saw him at SXSWi 2009, and now I wont have another chance.

It’s going to be weird not seeing him at SXSWi this year. Plans are afoot to organize a Break Bread for Brad to memorialize him; I hope to be a part of it in some way. If he were able to attend himself, he’d be telling us not to be sad, so I hope that whatever comes to pass has more in common with an Irish wake than an Italian one, and friends come together to tell stories and celebrate his life.

I’ll miss you, Brad. I feel lucky to have been counted as your friend.

Sadly, me3dia.com is going through a fallow period once again. It’s due for a makeover into something a bit more suitable to my needs, which I’ll hopefully have time to work on in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, my tumblr, also called me3dia, is a good spot to watch the detritus of my web wanderings go by.

My proposed panel for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference is live today on the SXSW Panel Picker. Here’s the summary:

The Online News of Tomorrow

Description:
Whether newspapers are dead or not, the media is innovating online. Rather than debate journalism’s future, let’s look at where we’re headed, and what the online news sources of tomorrow might look like. This panel will survey some of the most exciting experiments and propose some interesting new directions.

Questions posed:

• How are news organizations rethinking the web?
  
• What’s working in terms of content strategy?
  
• What design innovations are being tried with news websites?
  
• Are the lines between print and broadcast journalism blurring online?
  
• How will social media and social networking be integrated into news websites?
  
• Can citizen journalism succeed?
  
• What new business models are being attempted, and are any working?
  
• Are we likely to see subscription-based sites proliferate?
  
• What innovations are occurring in online advertising?
  
• What might the ideal news website look like?

Proposed panelists:
Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock.com; Khoi Vinh, NYTimes.com; Bill Adee, Chicago Tribune (Note that these are proposed panelists — I have no guarantee that Adrian, Khoi or Bill will be able to participate.)

Like what you see? Then vote for it by following the log-in directions on the page. Thanks!

I’d like these new earbuds I got for the office a lot better if every little rustling of the cord didn’t sound like somebody plucking high tension wires underwater.

(Name redacted to protect the idiot.)

Please, If you post anything about [Our Band], do NOT post about who we’ve played with. We don’t want to come off as cocky, or that we have had anything handed to us. We really want to forward our career, and feel like it would come off bad or unprofessional in a write up. We would really appreciate everyone giving us a chance and a plug, but please don’t talk about who we’ve played with. Thanks for your time.

Wow. I’d never heard of this band, let alone who they’ve played with. Who the hell are they to dictate what gets included in their coverage? If they don’t want to “come off as cocky,” they should start by not ordering critics around. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two writers they sent this email to (a long CCed list, by the way — not BCCed) decide to respond by listing as many of the bands they’ve played with as possible.

Cinnamon and I recently visited New York for our friends Dan & Kathryn’s wedding. As usual when we visit NYC, it was a trip filled with food.

Continue reading »

If it seems like I’ve had journalism and the future of media on the brain lately, there’s a good reason: it’s all a lot of folks are talking about these days, and I keep getting asked what I think. In fact, I’m going to be a panelist on two upcoming conferences dealing with the future of journalism.

The first is this weekend: The Chicago Media Future Conference, June 13 from 1:30pm to 5pm at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th Floor. I’ll be part of the first panel, entitled “How do people consume the news, and what do they do with it?” My fellow panelists will be Rich Gordon, Medill Readership Institute and the Medill School at Northwestern; Amanda Maurer, social media producer at Chicago Tribune; Daniel X. O’Neil, Everyblock‘s “people person”; and Hilary Sizemore, interactive content manager at Barrington Broadcasting Group, and the moderator will be Dan Sinker, founder of Punk Planet and current journalism faculty at Columbia College.

The other panel is titled “How do you make money selling the news and who is willing to pay for it?” and features Eric Easter, chief of digital strategy for Johnson Publishing; Brad Flora, publisher of The Windy Citizen; Tom Lynch, director of Client Satisfaction at IMP!; Steve Rhodes, Founder of The Beachwood Reporter; and Patrick Spain, CEO of Newser. The moderator is Barbara Iverson, Columbia College professor and co-publisher of ChicagoTalks.

The idea is to continue the discussion started at the Chicago Journalism Town Hall — but rather than continue to dwell on how newspapers are dying, actually talk about solutions for moving forward. You should come. It’s free.

The second talk is Thursday, June 18, at 6:30pm at the Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson Blvd. It’s sponsored by the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association, and here’s how it’s being pitched:

For more than a century, Chicago has reigned as perhaps the most vibrant news town in America. But with both major newspapers in the city in bankruptcy, the fate of the reporting trade is murky, here and throughout America. Join some of Chicago’s most prominent reporters, editors and columnists on Thursday, June 18th for a discussion on the fast-changing state of the profession – and the strategies for survival – sponsored by the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association.

I’ll be on the panel along with Mark Brown, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times; Ray Long, investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune; Eileen Brown, innovations editor at the Daily Herald; Monroe Anderson, blogger and columnist for EbonyJet; and Tom McNamee, editorial page editor for the Chicago Sun-Times. Dirk Johnson, former bureau chief for The New York Times and Newsweek magazine and lecturer at Northern Illinois University, moderates. Hopefully they don’t all gang up on me at once.

It’s also free, but seating is limited. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP by June 15 to Dirk Johnson at dejohnson@niu.edu or 815-761-6579.

At the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, a micropayment service called Kachingle was brought up as a novel way to pay for online content. (The Reader’s Michael Miner really dug it.) More recently, ForgottenChicago signed on with Contenture.

Not surprisingly, Kachingle has gone back to the drawing board with its concept. I haven’t heard of Contenture before, but I doubt it’ll have much momentum. And that’s the problem with these and every other micropayment system along their lines: inertia.

Instead of a traditional ad model, wherein a visitor views an ad and the publisher makes a little money off that view (or possibly only when a visitor clicks), the micropayment model requires several additional steps. The visitor must go to some other site, decide to create an account, and either add money to it or associate it with a money account such as PayPal. That’s three extra steps to expect visitors to complete, any of which may be a deal-breaker that disconnects the pay model. Kachingle adds yet another step — requiring visitors to not just sign up with their system but actively click a button on participating sites. Even if readers are engaged, making sure they remember to click a button somewhere on the page would be difficult without being intrusive.

Research finds that nearly 60% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase is completed — and that’s for actual products they’re interested in buying, not websites that would otherwise be free and hassle-free. Imagine what the abandonment rate would be for a system in which people are billed for something they once got for free, and in most cases still will since micropayment is generally not used as a subscription service but rather as a voluntary payment. And when it has been used as a subscription service, it still failed.

The micropayment model has been tried several times over the past 10 or 12 years. It has never developed into something substantial and successful, even when Amazon did it. As Clay Shirky says:

The threat from micropayments isn’t that they will come to pass. The threat is that talking about them will waste our time, and now is not the time to be wasting time. The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.

All this and more will no doubt be discussed at the Chicago Media Future Conference, which is coming up on June 13 and which I will be speaking at (though not on this topic). Come on out and join the conversation.

Been awhile. Lots going on. Here’re some recent happenings.

1.

I was interviewed by Jason Pettus for his Chicago Center for Literature and Photography podcast earlier this month. We cover everything from college to my years in PR to Gapers Block, Out of 5, SXSW and more.

2.
Cinnamon and I helped Naz and Jen move out to San Francisco earlier this month, too. Cinnamon and Jen drove across the country with Shaun the Dog™ in our car, which Naz and I flew with his two cats, Monty and Loki. We all met at their new apartment on Saturday, and Cin and I helped them traipse around town picking up the essentials while we waited for their stuff to show up on the ABF shared semi trailer on Tuesday. We helped them unload the truck, had lunch and took off, to finally arrive on Friday back in Chicago. Much more about the whole excursion shortly, once I’ve got the multitude of photos uploaded and sorted.

3.
On Saturday, Cinnamon and I both appeared on a panel at the Pilcrow Lit Fest: “Niches, Tech Writing and Event Coverage.” Cinnamon was a panelist, along with David Barringer, Theresa Carter, Lynn Haller, Tim Jahn, Sarah Stanley and Kate Zimmer; I was the moderator. We didn’t have a huge audience — we were up against the sex in writing panel — but it was a good conversation I was glad to be a part of.

4.
Lastly, my profile of Adrian Holovaty and EveryBlock is now out in the June issue of Chicago Magazine, in the Arena section up front. Unfortunately, it’s not online yet — I plan to post more of the interview here on me3dia once it is, to help fill out the story a bit further.

I’ll be participating in a discussion of social media, blogs, online news, Twitter, etc. and how they affect the lives of individuals and businesses on Wed., April 29 at North Pond Cafe, 2610 N. Cannon Dr. in Chicago — and you’re invited. Here’s the invitation copy:

Please join us on Wednesday, April 29 for another unique event.
Become a Fan/Follower/Friend of the all-star panel gathering here to discuss this social mediathing.

After a nationally-networked, regionally-inspired dinner, join:
Andrew Huff – Editor and Publisher, Gapers Block online magazine
David Huffaker – Ph.D. Candidate, Media, Technology and Society; Northwestern University
Darrell Jursa – Vice-President, Interpublic Group of Companies; Non-Traditional Marketer
Akili Lee – Director, Digital Youth Network, University of Chicago

for a fascinating, tweeted “conversation” with the evening’s guests.

Seating at 6 P.M., we’ll be serving:
Midwestern Beer, Smoked Sausage, Cheese, Pickles
New England Seafood Chowder, Guanciale, “Oyster Crackers”
Pacific Northwest Alaskan Halibut Gravlax, Asparagus Vinaigrette, Wild Greens
Southwest Hardwood-Grilled Pork, Fruit Salsa, Beans, Chiles
Gulf Coast Key Lime Sabayon, Strawberries, Toasted Oats, Almonds

$59 per person
(exclusive of additional beverages, tax, tip)

There were still reservations available as of this writing — call 773-477-5845 to save your seat.

UPDATE: You may need to leave a message; someone should get back to you to confirm.

I turned 34 not too long ago, and on that day my driver’s license expired. But because I haven’t gotten in any accidents and haven’t had more than a parking ticket in the past few years, I qualified for renewal by mail instead of having to go to the DMV to get a new license. What that means is, I sent them $10 and I got a fancy sticker to put on the back of my license.

There’s a holographic watermark on the sticker, which I imagine is also tamperproof in some way, but it’s otherwise incredibly low-tech. It just says that the card expires four years from now — not a specific date, so you have to look back on the front for when that would be — and it’s just Times New Roman in upper and lower case and two colors. There’s a basic knock-out dot pattern background. Were it not for the hologram, it’d be a cinch to fake. (The digital hologram would be pretty easy to fake, too, if you had the equipment.) It’s a little surprising that the state would use such basic technology to update IDs by mail — and that this is even an option at all.

And for the next four years (or until I decide to get a new license before then) I’ll be putting up with bouncers who aren’t familiar with this sort of thing. Probably going to be worst in other states, but I’m sure it’ll come up with increasing regularity the more time passes.