Michael Ferguson

“You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.” This from longtime and widely respected, digital publisher, Om Malik in his newsletter this week.  I’ve been thinking again about the word “content” as it refers to what we do as people – our art, our work. “Content” seems an ill-chosen word for all net publishing. Do we call an artist’s work, content? A musician’s? An author’s? A columnist’s? A reporter’s? A lawyer’s brief or memorandum their content filed with the court? To refer to this work as content cheapens the person’s work.  Om’s right: “My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.”” When I starte...

What can legal bloggers and other professionals learn from a 97-year old retired nurse who recently took up blogging? Plenty. After leaving the UW School of Nursing, Doris Carnevali, wanted to share what she was learning about aging. Rather than aging being a bad thing, she found it to be a learning experience, and a time for growth. “I had been ranting about the fact that I thought aging had gotten a rotten deal. That it was much more pleasant, exciting, and challenging than I had been led to believe.” The Dean of the UW medical school told her rather than to hold back on what she had to share, she ought to write about aging. Her granddaughter suggested blogging and set up Carnevali on WordPress. Almost two years later, ‘ Engaging With Aging ’ has over 70 posts. Some may call the blog more of a diary, but by sharing her experiences and what’s she learning Carnevali is publishing a lot of useful information for others. Inspiration as well.  “ My hands don’t pick up things th...

A number of legal professionals use the on-line publishing platform, Medium , for the publishing of their articles. Many are attracted by the distrubution of their content to other relevant Medium users. Plus this ditribution and the platform was free. No more. Medium has shifted from a free and open publishing platform and community, to a paywall model where the content of publishers on Medium is only distributed to those who are paid subscribers to Medium. Quincy Larson , founder of the web development community, freeCodeCamp , and one of the most-followed authors on Medium, with 158,000 followers,  reports that Medium barely shows his articles to anyone. How so? “Medium has shifted to a paywall model where they mainly recommend paywalled articles, then encourage visitors to pay to get around their paywall.” Checking Medium’s front page, Larson found three of four trending articles were paywalled. Non-paywalled articles no longer get recommended.  “…[N]ot much of th...