PaulFord

It took about two months to put it all together. Well, holy shit, I thought. That’s not how it happens. Somehow in the writer’s lottery, I had come up with a winning number.

And that is the story of how Gary Benchley, Rock Star came to be.

Later, the story became something different. I grew fond of Gary Benchley and his bandmates, and I spent less time mocking my protagonist and more time trying to capture that sense of being young, stupid, and in love with New York City that I remembered from my own experiences. Like Gary, I washed up on the East River shore at 22. I was hopeful, wandering through the East Village with friends, staying out all night and talking about how I could make it as a writer. In my book it takes Gary less than a year to get a band together; that’s fiction. It took me eight years to be able to look someone in the eye and tell them I was a writer without feeling like I was lying

And so the joke, created after one night’s frustration in Williamsburg, became my first novel (Plume Books, $14). I hope Gary’s fans find that to be a fitting punchline

In response, I decided to try to write a book that honors the reader’s faith in Gary Benchley, even if I myself am a reprehensible hoaxster

Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued.

Wolfram Alpha is purely about curating data sources and then calculating atop the restructured data.

Everything is being knit together in all sorts of ways. User-generated content is still king,

"the Barnes & Noble problem."

It's just not doing the job;

Eventually they had less and less of what I wanted.

The web is just too big,

It's not anybody's fault. It's a hard, hard problem.

Dealing with the glut—and we must deal with this glut, because what is more important than sorting all human endeavor into folders?—will require all manner of editing, writing, commissioning, contextualizing, and searching.

The Semantic Web is basically the edited web, for some very nerdy take on editing.

And people agree that big orgs, even if they now have content problems, won't hire editors, or enough editors, to manage their content.

But to summarize: Good conversation between Taylor and Johnson. Editors ship. There's no place to hire the nerdier ones because the Awl won't set up a job board. That's sad. The web is changing and it needs more editors. Do not dispute me. I love you. Goodbye.