Ben Parr's Entrepreneurial Musings

Today, I came across an interesting article in my Google Alerts, entitled, “Ben Parr, romantic swing dancer: Google now highlights individual authors in its search returns“.

If an article has your name in it, you’re going to read it, of course. The article is about a new Google Search feature that highlights authors in search results. Soon search results will have the pretty faces of journalists hovering to the right of search.

Megan Garber (the author of the article) uses it as a starting point to discuss the role of personal branding in journalism, something that has increased exponentially as the social web has blossomed. I’ve heard the same things from fellow colleagues, especially more seasoned journalists: the journalist shouldn’t be the story. And personal branding is ALL about you being the story.

I come from a different school though — I studied entrepreneurship, political science and science in human culture at Northwestern, not journalism — and have never felt uncomfortable being part of the story. I personally believe that it actually can improve journalism and storytelling by providing a deeper human connection between you and the reader. I know that my Twitter account has been essential to garnering feedback on my stories and crafting my art, and I know I’m not the only journalist to use it as a tool for crowdsourcing ideas for stories.

The truth though is that it doesn’t matter whether personal branding is helping or hurting journalism, because reputation/personal brands are here to stay in the journalism world. So long as social media proliferates, so will the need for journalists to build a following. The ones who don’t embrace the era of the branded journalist will suddenly find themselves losing out on jobs against social-savvy candidates with bigger followings.

It’s not fair, but that’s one of the consequences of the social web.

From Moconews:

“Everyone was probably hoping that the situation with Lodsys asking app developers for royalty payments on its patents would somehow get diffused over time, but for now it just looks like it is getting messier. On the back of Lodsys last week filing lawsuits against seven developers who make apps for Apple’s App Store, the Cupertino giant has now filed a motion to intervene in that suit.

If granted, the motion—first revealed by patents blogger Florian Mueller—would make Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) an additional defendant in the case being made by Lodsys, which claims that the developers are infringing on patents that it holds on in-app transactions.”

If you haven’t been following this story, here’s a recap: a patent holding company called Lodsys holds some sort of patent for in-app purchasing. Apple licenses this patent for its app stores. Lodsys wants to make more money though, so it sues third-party developers making apps that use Apple’s in-app purchasing system.

How lovely. It’s good to see Apple defending its developers, but the real moral of the story is this: software patent law is utterly broken. Software innovation will come to a standstill at some point if we keep giving patents for every variation of code. It’s just not something the patent was designed to cover when it was first conceived more than a century ago.