Its true, he’s changing the format of his blogs so that rather than riff on existing content (as I do), he is exploring actual reporting; he is scheduling posts around particular time tables; he is going to include a splashier home page;  and he’s going o try and separate certain kinds of content.

But is this really “beyond” blogging?  He’s still, for the most part, displaying articles in a reverse chronological order, isn’t he?  And he’s still probably playing fast and loose with the facts with an eye to churn and speed isn’t he?  And he surely has some kind of ongoing mechanism to interact on a post-by-post basis with his audience, right?

Goodness … from the wrong perspective, its almost like Nick Denton wants to draw attention to how he’s moving away from Kubrick to some other fancy theme, with a bit of  an editorial redirection.

Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and other celebrities have joined a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Keys’ charity, Keep a Child Alive. The entertainers plan to sign off of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday, which is World AIDS Day. The participants will sign back on when the charity raises $1 million.

“It’s really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on,” Keys said in a phone interview from New York last week.

For the campaign — which also includes Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz — celebrities have filmed “last tweet and testament” videos and will appear in ads showing them lying in coffins to represent what the campaign calls their digital deaths.

Raising money for children? Good thing.  Raising it on World AIDS day for a charity devoted to providing anti-retrovirals to HIV positive children?  I like it.

Getting celebrities to sign off Twitter and to film them in coffins as  a “last tweet and testament?” Wow.  Words fail me as to exactly how … tacky and tasteless this exercise is.  Don’t believe me?  Head over to the site to see for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a great cause.  I just question this marketing effort behind it.  It goes without saying that HIV is a deadly disease which causes incredible hardship, suffering, and death around the world.  But, having celebrities “play dead” in coffins just seems to trivialize it all.

And besides, with a strictly “negative” appeal by celebrities to not sign back on until $1M is raised, isn’t that just begging some cynics to appeal to everyone to *not* donate any money?

And when will we begin to see others publicly acclaim that some celebrities are better off “in coffins” than they are alive?  (not that I am, of course — but you can bet some smart aleck will)

Man, I’d love to hear a professional marketer’s opinion on this.  I’ll bet there’s going to be a lot of noise, but not a lot of signal on this one — which is a shame, because I think direct appeals in a tasteful way could just as easily raise the money that they’re looking for.

Less one believe I’m totally into the Kool-Aid of “Information Wants to Be Free,” I do believe there are paid content opportunities for newspapers in the digital world, but re-shoveling prnt to Web to tablet and smart phone isn’t among them.

Jack Lail nails it.  I wonder if he means something specific, like this?

Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

All true sentiments, of course.  I think the bigger epiphany for me at this stage, however, isn’t how email is declining as a defining medium of the web, but how, for a short time, there was a movement that enabled people to create and participate in an exchange of ideas in the wild.  ”Blogging”, you might call it.  Now, so much activity happens behind closed walls, and even if it isn’t, so much of it is shortened to 140 characters or less, that it isn’t private discourse one should be worried about, its the public one, shouldn’t it?