According to a recent report by Mathew Honan in Wired magazine, product placement in blogs can be ethical, progressive and lucrative. Well, not all that lucrative. Herewith a stab at what William Wordsworth might have written, had he lived in our benighted times.
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
By William Wordsworth (1770-1850) & Andrew Goodwin (1956-)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
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8 comments:
O.k. Maybe just one too many links!
T.
Hyperlinking one's way to contextual density? I'm all for it. I love a bit of slow sculpture...even if it occasionally leads an Ikea couch.
That's not actually your couch, is it?
I am between couches right now. However, I do sometimes purchase Milky Ways.
Leather couches = here be heartbreak
And a Steely Dan soundtrack
Professor,
If we're reading the same Honan article, he specifically reported it was a negative experience.
There's nothing ethical about 'pay to post' garbage. I'd like to think that people value integrity more than 300 word posts for 'get cash NOW!!!' scams. I'd like to think that. Of course, I'd be wrong.
Frankly, 'democratizing the Web,' i.e. providing easier access to digital media to more people, has
done little more than dump litter on what few good Web sites remain. Because of the 'tards who slap up spam blogs and 'get rich quick' scams, it's harder to find quality content via search engines. 'Easier access' is not a good thing. Barriers (no, we're not talking about gatekeepers, we're talking about knowledge barriers) serve a purpose. They make people work. They make people earn it. They keep out the lazy and unimaginative.
Whoop, I've gone slightly rantish on you. Take care.
Dave
from Maximum Awesome
Very clever, droll and witty. Quite quintessentially ironic. Dare I say it: Very English
Dave -- I looked at that Wired piece again and I see what you mean. It's a bit ambivalent, I feel. He does make the arguments I attribute to him, and I was careful to check that before posting because I felt that the article was so poorly edited it was difficult to understand -- rather like the entire magazine, in my view. But yes he does eventually seem disillusioned, so I see your point. Thanks for the rant!
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