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No, wait…Bill Whittle has been an internet video pundit for more than a decade, makes his living at it, and pays a small staff as well. Do you have what it takes to be like Bill? If this video word-slinger’s 7 tips to rocket you to the top don’t utterly transform your life, our lawyers say that Bill cannot be held personally responsible.
Bill Whittle Now with Scott Ott is a production of our Members, to whom we owe all of the glory of these years as internet pundits. Join us now.
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Bill Whittle Network · How to Be an Internet Pundit: Video Word-Slinger's 7 Tips to Rocket You to the Top
26 replies on “How to Be an Internet Pundit: Video Word-Slinger’s 7 Tips to Rocket You to the Top”
at 17:30 Bill’s advice is Don’t be like anybody else.
Interestingly, my advice to my daughter and her friends at the frequent gatherings at our house. Be yourself. It is already hard enough to just be yourself. Don’t make it harder by trying to be somebody else.
You’re so right, Bill about the brain being wired to give more credence to the one negative comment vs. the thousand great comments. I recommend the book The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister.
Bill’s mention at the end of an Instalanche I remember taking some web sites off line as the traffic overwhelmed their limits for the day/week/month. Slashdot had a similar effect on some articles written on small platforms they linked.
I think it was the goth, or maybe emo, look that would occasionally have the quip “I’m wearing black to stand out, just like everyone else” or something to that effect. The idea of doing your own thing, but not really doing your own thing, as you were just doing what a bunch of other people were doing, until it became mainstream.
There is something to be said for just being yourself, as weird or quirky as that might be. Catch phrases seem to be one of the things commenters like and gives them something to play with.
As the shepherd waiting for zues to come down for our daily argument about the weather, i think bill would like Mauler on YouTube, he rips into bad stories/movies but his videos are about 1 hour to 23 years long most of the time.
So, like a typical TSL length? Cool
You’re Lord Zeus from Mount Olympus. Right?
I prefer to be called Jupiter, thank you.
“… If they do so with even a modicum of civility …”
Therein lies the whole essence of internet forums.
I’ve been on digital media posting comments and discussing issues since the BBS days of CompuServe and AOL before AOL became a service provider. I remember going to computer swap meets where people wore T-Shirts that said “I surfed the World Wide Web” … It was a big deal to be able to do that back then. That was in the early/mid-90’s and this kind of thing has devolved dramatically since those days.
That devolution has caused a marked alteration in the character of my comments in online forums. I have gone from the “good old days” of serious and interesting discussions to mostly just fighting with people … Who are uncivil to me. I give as good as I get or better in what Scott Ott calls “the cesspool of social media”.
I confess, I like a good fight and most of the people who I fight with are genuine dimwits. I never fight with anyone who didn’t pick a fight with me in the first place, I’m trying very hard not to be one of the dimwits I argue with. I’m looking for that lost civility and that’s why I came here and paid for a membership. My thinking is that if such is to be found anywhere anymore, it will be here. I have to remind myself in here that this is not YouTube and that I’m interacting with people who are at least politically more like me than not.
In here I try to temper what I say with a reasonable degree of civility and I confess too, that is no longer my default. So I have to try to restrain that tendency to take offense and remind myself that all of you are friends I just haven’t met yet.
I just got here a couple weeks ago and I’m a work in progress as far as my posts on this forum are concerned. While I work on that please bear in mind that I’m not intentionally being prickly. I paid for a year and I’ll try to get better. I genuinely mean no offense to any of you and I’m genuinely working at being civil and appreciating all of you. Thanks for your forbearance as I work through this.
I find that I am much like you describe. It seems that you’ve found kindred spirits from the “World Wide Web” of lore.
Welcome to our collective, digital therapy.
Thank you.
It predated me just a little bit, but flame wars on Usenet were still burning by the time I got online. I wasn’t on Usenet much then as the www was starting.. I think around 93 or 94.
I think this is one of those “remembering the good times, forgetting the horrible” that people tend to do when looking at so called Golden Years.
Oh, I dunno about that. I remember plenty of flame wars, “don’t feed the trolls” and all the rest of it. It’s not my point that everything was sunshine and roses “back when” and you’ll notice that I put “good old days” in quotes. Meaning I wasn’t really saying that everything was rainbows and iridescent unicorn road apples — It’s just that it’s gotten so much worse now. Back then you had to deal with condescending eggheads who were actually fairly bright but had zero social skills and tended to snipe from cover. Now it’s ubiquitous.
For instance … Over the last several years I’ve noted the rise of the “gotcha pounce”, wherein one might post something wholly reasonable and reasonably intelligent and some “person” comes along, ignores your point(s) completely and refuses to discuss the issues at hand. Then takes what you said out of context and “corrects” you for what you didn’t even say. Often this is done by completely re-framing the conversation to highlight something that I (you, we, whatever) never mentioned but that the person doing the pouncing wants very badly to talk about. Usually this is an attempt to demonstrate intellectual superiority and that’s what makes it laughable. It has exactly the opposite effect.
N’cest pas?
Yup, often the larger you puff yourself up the more of a target you make of yourself. Maybe that should be “they” instead.
Speaking more generally, a lot today seem to think that the internet was simpler in the wild wild west days and that social media has turned everything toxic when it is more a matter that with more online, you just have a larger number of the population able to be magnified by the infinite reach of the internet. With society seeming nihilist at times, the crazy and mean is enough different that it draws attention and the attention seekers and cravers go foul mouthed just for the attention it seems, like a 5 year old (or a cat knocking things down to get attention like mine did this morning, waking me up way too early)..
I was there too! I remember seeing a presentation at a conference about gopher and being astonished. I wrote my first “home page” in VM and subscribed to Bitnet mailing lists and Usenet and all that was at school where I was supposed to be studying and then I went back to my room and dialed up BBSes with my screamin 1200 baud modem and played “war” which was a particular kind of pointless and endless argument. Dang but those were the daze!
Wow, I hadn’t even thought about gopher protocol in, well probably decades now. It was developed at the University of Minnesota, my son’s Alma Mater and the State in which I was born. I was overseas during some of that era, when I got home my first computer was an Epson (not printer, computer) that ran CPM/TPM III and had a Titan DOS emulator board in it so it could run MS-DOS too. It had, I think, an IBM 8088 processor and I remember saving up my money to buy a math co-processor …
I shouldn’t really say this to a lady and forgive me for being forward but there must be a slug of us old geezers in here, present company excepted of course. I’m absolutely certain I’ve never met a geezer named “Laura”, I’d remember something like that. 🙂
Heh. My first computer was a Kaypro II running CP/M when I was in junior high. It has two (!) 360k floppy drives and 64k of memory, which my dad gave us a mini-lecture about because when he was developing the computer system for PACFLEET in the late 60s, they had a computer that took up a whole room that had 64k. And now it fit into this little box.
Always great work!!!
Critical Drinker is great and has taken the Youtube world by storm. Much like Red Letter Media did back w/ their Phantom Menace review.
Interesting thing is to go back to the Drinker’s old videos. The analysis is there but he hadn’t created the Drinker character and his catch-phrase. And so the videos are just kinda, meh. Another YT movie reviewer like the thousands others.
Swear to Odin, I was reading “Eject Eject Eject” back in ’99.
Me too, Fluffy!
Would be interesting to see how many of you are here.
I missed the actual EEE time, but I read them all later. I think I probably first saw Bill on Red Eye, but maybe it was Firewall.
The first time I ever saw Bill Whittle it was on a site with a rather large page of videos by him and Andrew Klavan. Klavan was more fun, Bill was more professional and informative. I wasn’t really paying attention but I think that was PJ Media.
P. J. Media used to have a show called, “Kalvan and Whittle.” It was just Bill and Andrew sitting across from each other and discussing an issue. Was one the THE best shows on P.J.
I loved that show. Too bad their on different networks now.
There is a running gag that you will hear eventually when Scott or someone else brings up Klavan, and Bill will call him he who shall not be named. That was an excellent show.
I recall finding Bill through the Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiller. Anyone remember that guy?