“John Battelle”:http://www.battellemedia.com/ is a noted “author”:http://www.battellemedia.com/archives/001194.php, “event organizer”:http://www.web2con.com/, “columnist”:http://www.battellemedia.com/archives/cat_columns.php, and “entrepreneur”:http://www.fmpub.net. In his spare time he acts as “Ruben Kincaid”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/22/battelle_looks_back_.html to the “Partridge Family of the Internet”:http://www.boingboing.net/ (“Xeni”:http://xeni.net/ even says they’ve got the web equivalent of “bubblegum cards”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/11/john_battelle_interv.html).
Interestingly, John’s brevity leaves us with a 305 word interview that is 57% questions and 43% answers – a ratio only slightly better than if I’d asked “boxers or briefs” and he’d answered “briefs”.
*One Degree: Your “endemic advertising post”:http://battellemedia.com/archives/000678.php was a big part of the inspiration for One Degree. Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by endemic advertising and why you think it is a natural match for blogs?*
Publications are conversations between three parties – authors, audience, and advertiser. I believe that advertising works best when the advertiser is also a conversant – someone who naturally belongs in the conversation. My term for that kind of an advertiser is “endemic.” You see a lot of them on boingboing.net, for example.
*One Degree: I’ve been assuming that your new venture FM Publishing would be modelled around endemic advertising. Is this the case?*
Category: Blogs
In 1999, very few people knew what the long term significance of the Internet would be on ‘business-as-usual’. Many were designing corporate websites like brochures and thinking of these websites as just another extension of a company brand. The Internet was largely thought of as a medium that carried unreliable information. Intranets were where corporations posted company policies and business forms. Although most recognized that having a website was crucial for a business’s legitimacy, the implications of how crucial this was for the future of business were not well-known.
There was one particular group of visionaries that knew the significance of the online revolution. This group included “Doc Searls”:http://www.searls.com, “Chris Locke”:http://www.rageboy.com/index2.html and “David Weinberger”:http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/.
Rick Mercer “blogs”:http://rickmercer.blogspot.com/. How cool is that?
His “hello world”:http://rickmercer.blogspot.com/2005/06/you-always-remember-your-first.html post Monday morning showed he intended to hit the ground running,
And by Tuesday afternoon he already had my undying respect as a master of buzz.
Check out “Jason Kenney: Marxist Leninist.”:http://rickmercer.blogspot.com/2005/06/jason-kenney-marxist-leninist.html wherein Mercer explains: