Broadcasting Brain

Catch the Brainwaves is our ongoing series of interviews with a variety of folks participating in blogging and social media. I ask them ten questions and they respond with their brilliant answers and insights! Today we have a special Q&A session where we are featuring Toronto Globe and Mail technology writer and blogger extraordinaire Mathew Ingram.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin!

1. What kinds of changes have you observed in a journalist’s work during the past five years?

I’ve noticed a lot of changes as a result of the Web. What used to be a newspaper’s normal flow, with stories written in the afternoon and filed in the early evening, has become a 24/7 stream (or close to it), much more like what a wire service does. Stories begin on the Web and in many cases are updated and end on the Web, and in between they are packaged and printed in the paper. I’ve also noticed an increasing amount of feedback between the Web and the paper, with readers comments and the popularity of stories helping to change the perception of those stories within the paper and occasionally adding value to them as well.

2. Do you see any potential conflict of interest if a professional journalist has an active social news or social bookmarking user profile (e.g. Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc.) where they are actively submitting, voting, or commenting on stories?

I don’t really see that as a conflict at all. Bloggers do it, so I don’t see why a professional journalist shouldn’t do it. Provided that they are actually trying to be part of the community, and aren’t just submitting and voting on their own stories then I think it’s fine.

3. Do social media make any aspects of your life easier? Harder?

Social media make many aspects of my life easier — particularly the part that has to do with generating story ideas and tracking the development of issues within the Web and new media. I guess the only thing they make harder is sorting through all the content that’s out there, since Twitter and RSS and so on can produce a pretty gigantic stream of stuff on a daily basis.

4. Is it difficult to turn work “off” these days, when the world seems to follow us wherever we go?

It is difficult, but in part I think that has to do with the fact that for me it’s not just work. I write about the Web and technology and social media because it interests me, not just because it’s my job — and so I am pretty much always connected and reading and looking around for things, and responding to comments and so on, regardless of what my “work” hours are.

5. In your opinion, is privacy really dead or seriously compromised with the multitude of ways that people can find out information about us?

I’m not sure it’s dead really — but I would say that privacy seems to be much more of a continuum than it used to be, where people are comfortable opening up their lives in certain ways to certain friends or family or co-workers or whatever, depending on which social networks they’re using. It’s when those different groups collide that I think there can be problems, and when people use information they find on a given network for other purposes.

6. Do you have any concerns about the mutations of the English language to include LOLspeak, 133t speak, and the rise of the letter “Z” as a catch-all consonant? (And do you pronounce it “zee” or “zed”?)

I still pronounce it “zed” because I’m old I’m not really that troubled by those sorts of things, to tell you the truth. I think language continually evolves, and there are idiosyncracies that emerge at various times that may become popular with a certain group but overall things still change relatively slowly — and some of those changes become so useful that we don’t even notice them. If you think about it, the language itself is a kind of social network, like Wikipedia; people are voting all the time on the type of language they want, and eventually the culture as a whole decides.

7. Are today’s more popular blogging platforms (Wordpress in particular) needlessly complex or cumbersome? Or are they just fine? Should we strive for simpler and easier self-publishing?

I think things can always be easier — and there are some Ajax-powered Wiki services that make editing and publishing pretty simple, not to mention things like Tumblr. But that said, I’m a big fan of Wordpress — it is extremely easy to use, and yet is almost infinitely flexible as well, which is a rare combination.

8. Would you say that the blogging A-list (i.e. the Technorati Top 100) is an anomaly or will those voices remain strong as the blogosphere (or the Web, perhaps) segments over time the way that television audiences now divide their video watching time between the big networks, cable, satellite, DVD/downloaded video, YouTube, and purely Web-hosted video?

I think the “A-list” is probably something that will change over time, and become less of an influence — in a lot of ways the blogosphere is still a little like the early days of television, when there were only a couple of dozen influential people. But I think the early pioneers always have influence, simply because they’ve been around so long.

9. Pretend the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next morning?

I guess I would start hunting for a newspaper

10. What one piece of knowledge, advice, or wisdom do you have to share with our readers?

As much as possible, do whatever it is that makes you happy. Passion makes up for a lack of money a lot better than money makes up for a lack of passion.

Thanks to Mathew Ingram for sharing his brainwaves!

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Catch the brainwaves with George Mantey
• Catch the brainwaves with Patrick Bisaillon
• Catch the brainwaves of Patricia Mayo
• Catch the brainwaves of the Incredible Help
• Catch the brainwaves of Tamar Weinberg