Dapper Disputes: The Declaration of Internet Freedom
Dapper Disputes is a feature where editors at The Airspace debate the merits and purpose of relevant issues in culture, technology, and scholarship.
Tapes Didn’t Go Away, You Did: Pitchfork Music Festival and Challenging Independent Identity
What the hell, everybody likes a good promotion and a new iPad.
Here’s the deal, If the Airspace receives 5000 new likes on Facebook in the next 5 days, we will give away a new iPad to one of our Facebook fans.
Window closes on Tuesday, March 27th. So, what have you got to lose.
Check out the Airspace and our review of the new iPad.
Giveaway: Win Your Favorite TV Show — The Airspace
“A Letter From Mark” — 0 to 1193 in 60 minutes
The Airspace is still a very young site, so each spike in traffic is noticeable and exciting. Due to our small footprint, a change from 5 concurrents to 50 concurrents is a huge deal.
Today, Facebook filed their S-1 registration. I took all of 5 minutes to scan the document, found an inspiring letter from Mark Zuckerberg to investors (it wasn’t hiding, it’s clearly labeled in the table of contents) and pasted the full text into an Airspace Ticker article. I added a short intro (which mainly exists so there is an excerpt in the Ticker feed) and published the article. The whole process took about 7 minutes.
The web was buzzing with news around the Facebook filing so I dropped off the link at some appropriate places and one hour later, the page had registered 1193 pageviews from our on site popularity monitor.*
Page views are good. There’s nothing like getting the brand out to the public but pageviews that only exist because the current of the Internet is flowing a certain way feels cheap. I’m grateful for the pageviews but not entirely proud. We put articles on The Airspace that are the culmination of days of research, edits, and rewrites. I’d prefer that those pieces—the ones of real and calculable substance—receive the spotlight.
*The on screen page monitor lowballs views by about 40%
Lest I come off as petulant, I want to let it be clear that nobody else can do what The Airspace does and plans to do in the future. I am confident of this for a couple of reasons.
Ideas are ultimately awe-inspiring and worthless. There are buildings filled with people who have ideas—and I mean great ideas that could change the course of human kind forever. But, these ideas will likely never come to fruition because the originators of such ideas lack the gumption, resources, or mindset to call them into action. Just the same, there are warehouses filled with godawful ideas. The power in creating something like The Airspace does not come from the concept of wanting to start something. The power lies in the ability to address or create a need that people need satisfied and that only The Airspace can do. On the Colophon page, we list all the technology put into the system. Just because I say the website runs on a LAMP stack on cloud servers doesn’t mean everybody can implement the same and to the same success.
As of late, I have been doing an obscene amount of writing and reading with little reflection or contemplation in between. It has been a bit over a month since the idea of a podcast turned into a website called The Airspace. That span of time, roughly 40 days has contained some of the most confusing and doubtful periods I’ve experienced yet.
The modern and social Internet is still a young beast but there already are giants that exist. AOL properties like Huffington Post, Tech Crunch and Engadget compete other modern towers like Gawker. Old media beasts like The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal are constantly capturing the most vibrant and professionally vetted stories. New players with massive funding, like the Verge and PandoDaily, also have a place. But, for the little guys with no real training in journalism, no genuine expertise in web development, essentially no funding, and very few contacts to boot, entering into media is a daunting thing.
I’ve been negligent to all readers of BlaBeat for about a month now. But, there is a reason why.
I’ve been developing The Airspace, an up-and-coming site-of-reference for the best in culture.
From the About page…
Founded in 2011, The Airspace is an independent online publication staffed with relentless editors, thoughtful contributors, and vagabond managers from colleges and universities across the United States. The Airspace represents scholarship for the sake of culture and intends to uphold that promise in all content we produce.
Our mission is to bring our readers the most comprehensive narratives around emerging trends and ideas in culture. The articles on The Airspace incorporate rich media like video, audio, photography, to bring the stories to life.
The Airspace is vetted, highly edited, and entirely transparent. Culture is the medium through which we see ourselves and the people and things we interact with. But, culture itself is ever-morphing, reiterating and evolving. We approach everything we write, record, and produce as an ongoing conversation between our readers and our writers. Every content page is outfitted with advanced real-time commenting systems to encourage all our visitors to join the dialogue.