After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

'While “self-styled” seems mostly a put-down, it is a notably weak one. The user of this phrase notes that someone claims something, but lacks an official credential, or strong consensus, supporting this claim. But we the reader can also note that this speaker offers no stronger criticism, and is not willing to directly contradict the offending claim. After all, instead of calling someone a “self-styled visionary,” you might say “he calls himself a visionary, but he’s not; he hasn’t has a vision in years.”'

"Another clear case on how anonymity leads to platform decay"

"Each of the presenters gave a nice, thoughtful, 5-minute talk about their views on the issue, but what everyone was waiting for was the fireworks when open discussion began. For a while the discussion was tame enough, with everyone exchanging platitudes about how they view the issues. But then things got a LOT more heated...."

"Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would've just turned everyone's content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what's going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they'll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can't be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people's content out there who I'm pretty certain don't think that I can."

"Lawyers representing Demi Moore sent a threatening letter to Boing Boing over the holidays which demanded that we remove a post I published in November, or face legal consequences. In the referenced Boing Boing post, I published photographer Anthony Citrano's speculation that a recent W Magazine cover image of the actress may have been crudely manipulated by magazine staff to alter her hip, and appear thinner."

New blog post: Is a personal brand more than just a social media profile?

Sarah Lacy is writing the best and most informative material about people building brands online. Today she profiles a classic musician who's doing well.

"I just read the most plausible of law review papers suggesting the potential for protection of a private space within social network sites (SNS). Fellow UNC grad student Woodrow Hartzog proposes the use of Promissory Estoppel as a means to protect self-disclosure in online communities. It would create a type of contract or agreement between users of a site whereby a protection would exist for information disclosed in that community or site. If someone else shares the disclosed, private information, with a few caveats, they can be held accountable."

"you are a company of one. If you are in any type of marketing, your best case study and perhaps most valuable use of your skills is figuring out a way to successfully market yourself."

"Come on people, don't believe that you can create a world where the bits in the system are a perfect mirror of who you are. Individual identities are not something that can be reduced to microformats. I can change my mind, and not have to go back and update a zillion web pages to reflect that change of mind. Whatever you are calling "identity" here is emphatically not what human beings think of as their identity; perhaps if you replaced it with "dossier" the nature of the data gathering would be more clear in a historical context (think Stasi, for instance, instead of Facebook)."

Fascinating -- Sarah Lacy ruminates on building her brand and how difficult it's been to cross-link people ("synergize") from one channel to another. Is it really worth it to have 10 channels? Which really makes money? Etc. Perils on spending time doing worthless stuff.

"You might think that with the economy crashing, the free-labor business model would be crashing, too. Will people continue to invest in their personal brands during hard times? Gould is betting they will. Between investor visits during a late November trip to New York, he sips a soy latte and speculates. During the downturn, he says, firings are sapping loyalty to companies and steering people toward goals of self-sufficiency. In Gould's acerbic phrasing: "The only person I can rely on not to screw me—hopefully—is myself."

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others."

"With the retrenching in Web 2.0 properties - either sites getting bought up and closed down, abandoned by their new owners, orphaned, or mutated beyond recognition in the search for profit, it's time to start looking closely at what kinds of remnant "internet presence" I have lurking on the internets and see about turning off anything that's no longer relevant or up to date. Here's a list of sorts of long-forgotten enthusiasms that should be mercifully excised or republished in some current format."

Please, entrepreneurial startuppy convocations of the movers-and-shakers of local human-scale community-supported life with programming and Your Very Important Book: watch and hear. Watch. Hear.

"people living for revenge get to walk slow-motion in front of more explosions that heartless plutocrats do"