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About this site
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This section's edited by Hylton Jolliffe, the founder, editor and publisher of Corante.
Up for inclusion: anything on the culture, technology, politics, and future of blogs. Please send any tips, suggestions or reactions to Hylton.
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CORANTE ON BLOGGING: In media res
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By Hylton Jolliffe
Paul Holbrook says of hours lost to blog-reading, "Sometimes following other people's blogs is like talking to someone who won't shut up: you ask one question, and you're in for a 15 minute answer." |
Glenn Fleishman tells Mike Cassidy, who wrote about blogging in a Mercury News article last week, to stop "monolithicizing" adding that "saying blogs are uninteresting is like saying people are uninteresting." |
Jacob Weisberg, the relatively new editor of Slate, comments on what makes an online magazine special: "The way the Internet breaks down barriers between professional and amateur journalists is terrific." His idea of a good magazine: "a gathering of people who aren't all the same." |
Jeff Jarvis comments on the gathering of the "blog brain trust" in New York last night: "a blog is a bit like a good party: It is selective; you decide to who to link to just like you decide who to drink with."
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JD Lasica notes, in the Online Journalism Review, the site-registration that's increasingly required of online news readers and the roadblock that may pose to "weblogs, community news sites, discussion boards and e-mail newsletters that point to news articles." |
Halley Suitt, of Halley's Comment, comments, in an interview with Frank Paynter, on Blogsisters and other efforts: "women's sexuality is enormously powerful and very frightening to many men. When more and more women claim it as their own -- all hell will break loose. I happen to think this is what's happening in many blogs..." |
Chris Locke says, in a long interview with George Partington on Cluetrain, micromedia and more, that the ideas he expresses in Gonzo Marketing aren't just the ramblings of "a bunch of net heads who are off in lala land." What's going on, he says, is proof that "people across every spectrum of society and business and institutions and government are dying for something different and more genuine, more authentic, more connected." |
Joe Gregario comments on a recent offline discussion between bloggers and their concern that Google's crush on blogs may wear off and lead the search engine to downgrade their importance in its search algorithms: "Google shouldn't change." Instead, he says, "the Web needs to change to accomodate Google... Let page-rank stand as the carrot and the stick of good web behaviour."
To which Jon Schull responds, registering his fear over "intellectual mob rule ('blog rule'?) : "Are the most frequently cited journal articles, frequently invoked beliefs, and copiously compensated individuals also the most worthy." |
Andrew Sullivan, noting the news of Salon's plunging revenues and uncertain future: "Maybe blogging really is the only viable form of Internet commentary in the future. But I hope not."
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Dale Peskin, in a piece on the future of news for the American Press Institute, says blogging "remains a stealth news-bomber flying under the radar at most news organizations." On the recent explosion of coverage: "Fashionably, or perhaps predictably late, trend stories have just now started to appear in print. The new trend that has been around for years just became too prevalent to ignore." |
Jeff Jarvis on the bottoms-up model of the emerging "citizen press": "blogs and their links live within a system of self-selection in which the cream rises, quality wins." |
Ricardo Vacapinta, commenting on Moveable Type's new TrackBack system, says "this could provide the first topography of the blog universe," a development that "will be able to predict the spread of ideas through the network and also see clearly where the ideas are originating." |
In an ongoing conversation on Blogroots that took Arnold Kling's article on blogging economics as its starting point, Rands says "blogging feels like open source information digestion" that "therefore has higher credibility because it’s not looking to yank dollars from your pocket." |
Corante's own Bob Hiler has a bloggish take on the WorldCom scandal that's remarkably different from the mass media coverage: "accounting fraud is often just the last act of desperation by companies frantic to prop up a collapsing pyramid scheme." Bob's take: focusing on accounting fraud is "missing the point - and dangerously so." |
Steve Outing, in an article from Editor & Publisher, proffers advice on how big media should experiment with blogs instead of, as it has before with other Internet opportunities, do "next to nothing." Steve: "Imagine what a newspaper would be like that not only printed general-interest stories by its reporters, but also published (online, via weblogs) ongoing insider coverage of various topics and beats by those reporters." |
Meg of not.so.soft comments on the marriage of memes and blogs: "We like talking about ourselves. That's what this whole thing is about, really, isn't it? It's all about me. It's all about meme."
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Arnold Kling offers advice on how one might make money from enterprise-class blogs: "go into it from the training and organizational development angle."
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Ken Layne responds to John Hiler's article on the power of blogware to launch new media properties: "Could we do a professional-looking site with a half-dozen unpaid editors / contributors and no office, no manager and no budget?" Ken's answer: "Yes."
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Shift.com editor-in-chief Neil Morton writes a 1200-word essay on the Heartbreaking Decline of Salon, pointing out that "hard-hitting news and analysis seem to have taken a backseat to sex(y) stories". Neil's coup de grâce: "[T]here's a pile of weblogs -- yes, weblogs -- that are doing a lot more relevant, thought-provoking stuff than the stale Salon." |
James Gleick, author of What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier, comments in Salon on the "amateur hour" he's spoken of before: "Everybody drifts toward winners." The amateur flavor of the minute he cites: blogs. |
Matt Welch responds to Mike Cassidy's Mercury News piece on blogging: "This type of column -- the 'I turned my back on a not-very-new trend of specific interest to my readers, so now, instead of catching up, I’m going to make fun of it' piece -- is a sub-category just dominated by monopolist daily newspapers."
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David Garner says, in a post in a MetaFilter discussion, "I have become convinced that MeFi has some strange power over time, as I have found myself coming to after having spent several hours mesmerised by the site itself and links from it." |
Mike Cassidy of the Mercury News, who's only recently become aware of blogging: "[They] reside at what these days is the busy intersection of technology, voyeurism and self-absorption."
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Meg Hourihan reveals her favorite line from the book on blogging she's racing to finish: "No one is going to participate in a phony weblog full of managerial boosterism." Why? "Because whenever I can work the word phony into anything official-seeming (like a book printed by the Man) I feel like Holden Caulfield." |
Andrea Roceal James says, in response to a question about whether blogging is to journalism as garage bands are to symphony orchestras: "The Smiths' song "Panic" has a line that goes something like: "Burn down the discos/ hang the blessed DJ/ because the music that they constantly play/ says nothing to me about my life." For me, this is the heart of the matter for both journalism and symphonies, blogging and garage-band rock." |
Deborah Gussman reports on a talk given at a recent conference on rhetoric in which one speaker compared personal homepages to blogs, "arguing that weblogs, because of their 'collaborative ethos' are better suited to create wide-spread civic engagement than more static homepages." |
Jacob Shwirtz, of GAZM, reports on meeting Cameron Marlow, of Blogdex, the other night and what they talked about. One of their topics of conversation - the fact that "blogs are influencing the re-emergence of offline friendships... now it is common for bloggers to meet and become real friends." |
The Bloggers Rhapsody, courtesy of Madeleine Begun Kane and set to the tune "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off":
"I praise your good taste
And flatter you posthaste.
You mention my thanks,
Your entry is quote-laced,
Good taste,
Posthaste,
My thanks,
Quote-laced,
Let's call the whole thing off." |
Glenn Fleishman says, in a piece on the pitfalls many of his journalist colleagues fall into when they try to tackle blogging, "[They] see the monolith sending its scary signals into space, and they start smashing heads with thigh bones. You know the bones: Sullivan, Kaus, InstaPundit, etc." The real story, he says:"the interlinkedness of all things on the Net, every day becoming more so, drawing us into a multilithic universe."
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Adam Curry's sister Willow has launched a "kids-friendly" blog. And, if there's interest, she hopes "to offer free Kids' Blog accounts to either kids or parents of small kids so they can easily enter the world of blogging, share stories and pictures with friends, family and the rest of the world." |
Dave Winer, who's recovering from bypass surgery, asks "[could] my software ever save anyone's life?" His conclusion: "There's no doubt... a combination of our stuff and Google's, deployed behind a decent firewall at the FBI or CIA, could solve many of their terrorism information sharing problems."
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Arnold Kling compares legacy and Internet media, saying the former has "[business] models for selling atoms that are more well established than the models for selling bits" while the latter offers up "people with a lot of non-monetary motivation." But, he asserts, "folks will figure out a way to make Internet-based distribution commercially viable," pointing to an essay he wrote on the general subject a year ago.
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Brendan O'Neill asks "Have you ever wondered why blogging seems to be a largely right-wing thing?" Brendan's theory: "the right-wing blogging phenomenon is a result of the right's increasing isolation from the mainstream - from mainstream politics, mainstream journalism and mainstream debates."
Steven Chapman responds to Brendan's post: "No, I haven't - and you know why? Because it isn't." Steven says that appearances can be deceiving: "a tiny minority of bloggers have cast blogging in their own image to the point where even a perceptive chappie like Brendan is completely fooled." |
Pundit Andrew Sullivan announces a survey with the "usual male/female/income/location stuff", which he hopes will "give us the extra oomph to get a sponsor". Andrew's also finding out the political inclination of his readers: "we've added a question about politics to find out where on the scale of right to left andrewsulllivan.com readers". |
Blogroots users ponder what the future is for specialized, event-related blogs. Their starting point: a World Cup blog. Says Miguel Cardoso, "What I like about them is the way they marry personal passion and expression with well-defined specialization and classic coverage of print and web sources." Miguel, later in the same post: "It seems there's a possibility of these contextual blogs becoming unbeatable, by offering "participant observation" on a wide, identifiable and knowledgeable scale."
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James Mathewson comments, in a Computer User article on the Web radio story, on the democratization of media in general, or rather the "explosion of the conventional media hegemony": "blogs are causing a shift in the way people think about world events divorced from staid press coverage."
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Doc Searls likes Arnold Kling's piece here on Corante but says it reminds him of something he and Tim O'Reilly were talking about a few years ago. Their conclusion: "We don't just "deliver information" back and forth. We form each other. When I learn something new from you, and what I learn is meaningful... you have literally formed me."
He continues: "It's misleading to conceive information as a substance that we 'deliver' to other human beings. When we do that, we insult the verb at its heart." |
Jenny Levine, aka the Shifted Librarian, says her blogging is, not surprisingly, linked to the weather: "The weather this weekend was very hot... which means we spent a lot of time in the pool. Even with the wireless network, it's difficult to take the laptop in there."
Jenny also updates a story that ran recently on the growing number of bloggers in the Middle East, noting that one blogger in Iran with whom she's be in touch has added English translations of his blogposts and that "though it's double the work for him, he's using it as an opportunity to improve his English." |
Aaron Swartz offers a further OED Update based on email correspondence with an editor there: "They've drafted "blog" (noun and verb), "blogger" and "blogging", all recorded as in use from the summer of 1999." As for "weblog", the OED has the word "dating back to 1993". Aaron explains the seeming anachronism by pointing out that the OED is probably referring to weblog in "the logfile sense" |
Peter Merholz posts on his weblog that Oxford English Dictionary editors "can only cite a print source" when citing a word's first usage, even for the upcoming addition of "blog" to the OED. Peter first coined the word on his blog in May 1999, but that's ok: Rebecca Blood notes that she cites Peter's coinage in print "on page 3 of my upcoming book". |
John Hiler puts on his WebCrimson CEO hat to write about Blogs as Disruptive Tech, predicting that "much like Personal Computers, weblogs are riding a whole new price/performance curve that threatens to move upscale into higher end [content management] solutions." In John's estimation, this makes weblogs a "violently disruptive force in the content management sector". |
Corante's Arnold Kling writes an article asking Is Blogging a Fad? His conclusion: in news-rich niches like local politics, "blogs will prove to be superior mechanism for disseminating news." Arnold's also got some predictions on blogging revenue: "neither the donation model nor the advertising model will prove to be viable". |
LA Times reporter Tim Rutten draws a connection between Ted Turner's "willfully ignorant and wickedly mistaken" comments last week and bloggers, calling their "asymptotic approach to the truth" "an excuse and a scam."
Tim adds that blogging is just "old wine in new skins": "bloggers are basically a narcissistic throwback to an easily recognizable American type, the 19th century cranks who turned out mountains of self-published pamphlets." |
John Rhodes of Webword interviews John Hiler of Microcontent News about the Blogosphere. John Hiler points out that "Blogging can be like pouring gasoline on the fire of someone's ego" and warns of a potential "mid-life crisis in the life of your blog". John also announces the launch of his own web-based blogware, with free hosting for "blogs at Crimsonblog.com and zines at Crimsonzine.com" |
Meg of not.so.soft asks Google to define blogging. A few of the first 55 answers it offers up: blogs are "the new Borg"; "journalism for the future"; "'useful' because, among other things, they enable a new information sorting and distribution mechanism." But they also "may contain profanity." |
Developer Maciej Ceglowski has launched Semant-O-Matic, an "experimental blog search engine" that "indexes the contents of eleven weblogs over the period March - June 2002 (a total of 1440 posts)," including blogging celebs Meg Hourihan, Jason Kottke, and Dave Winer.
The beta search engine not only searches on a per-post basis, it also uses "latent semantic indexing" that allows Semant-O-Matic to "return relevant results for a search query even if the document returned does not contain the keyword or phrase." Maciej's project is being "done under the auspices of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education." |
NPR has revised their "No linking" policy in response to blogger outrage. NPR claims their original policy was partly in response to "issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause."
NPR's solution: an admission that "the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement" and a promise to revisit their policy soon. |
Uber-blogger Dave Winer explains the reason behind his trip to the hospital: "I did not have a heart attack, but it was close. I had bypass surgery." Dave also explains why he's quitting smoking: "The numbers are good if I quit smoking. If I don't the numbers are totally awful." |
The UK's Nick Denton files his own minority report, citing "black moviegoers, and their incredibly irritating call-and-response to Minority Report last night." New Yorker Anil Dash explains to Nick how movie segregation works in America, offering a recommendation: "Matrix 2? Chris Tucker flick? Go to a black theater. You've Got Mail 2? Judi Dench? Merchant Ivory period piece costume drama? White makes right!"
Nick counterblogs, asking a favor: "[S]ince all the locals obviously know how movie segregation works, what about some signs for the clueless foreigners?" |
Doc Searls on what users want, in response to an analysis of the Internet radio ruling: "After a two-century hiatus, the Age of Enlightenment picks up where it left off." Says Doc: "We're in the Information Revolution now, and The People have a shitload more power, especially to inform themselves and each other."
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Midge cautions blog readers to, among other things, not "delude yourself into thinking that you will be as important to the writer as he/she is to you." Remember, she says, "you are peering in on their life... and though they may become quite special to you, you remain a mystery to them."
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Cameron Marlow, Blogdex guru, says "I get just as convinced that something is amiss when Blogdex is inordinantly good as when it's surprisingly bad . Some of the more interesting items Blogdex was picking up: "semen as anti-depressant... and tooth phones."
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John Hiler of Corante's Microcontent News says that Bloggers may be the "the Hopis of online community", comparing keeping a blog with having next-door neighbors in a pueblo village. John's take: "I think the fact that we all live next door to each other is a factor in the general civility in the blogosphere." |
Molly Wood of CNET comments on Kuro5hin's recent fundraiser and their move to non-profit status., finding it an "intriguing, left-of-center solution" in sharp contrast to Slashdot's recent move towards "larger banner ads". |
Userland's Dave Winer is back from the hospital, without a lot of memories: "I was heavily sedated much of the time and am rapidly forgetting the rest of it". One clear memory from the experience: "I am now an ex-smoker." |
In the wake of the NPR flap over deep-linking, David Rothman urges its ombudsman Jeffrey Dworkin to start his own blog, saying "I'm just across the Potomac River from you and would be delighted to drop by and offer some free advice on a Dvorkin-NPR blog." |
Matt Welch says, in a discussion of LA Examiner, that "the way the better weblogs are devoted to rationalism but don't take themselves too seriously at the same time is something I think people like and you don't find on op-ed pages too much. It's still this crossfire, column left-column right bullshit." |
Heath Row reveals he's "shelf-publishing" or rather "editing an anthology for Capstone-Wiley in the UK tentatively entitled Off Message: Voices from the Business Underground. It'll be a collection of 30-40 essays, articles, excerpts, and comics gleaned from books, magazines, newsletters, Web sites, speech transcripts, email forwards, found text, zines, and minicomics." |
Dave's back, saying "This was probably the toughest week I've ever had. I came through it stronger, but changed. Not sure how much I want to write about it, but I did want to acknowledge, as soon as I possibly could, that it meant a lot to have so much support."
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Doc Searls comments, in Wired, that "Kuro5hin is about Rusty Foster the same way Slashdot is about Rob Malda. He's a wise young man in the literal sense of the word. He's a programmer, but from a different variety -- more intellectual, and less focused on technology."
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Rusty reports his current fund-raising drive is over and that he's putting Kuro5hin on a path to nonprofit-dom: "We should all be accustomed, by now, to doing things that conventional wisdom says can't be done, and would be crazy to try. This is yet another example, and a new stage in the life of this improbable community. Several of you have said that since contributing, you feel a much stronger sense of ownership and commitment to the community. I hope you hold on to that feeling, because we're going to need it."
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Wallys Conhaim says that by: "leading people to important information, bloggers are exercising a new and perhaps very effective form of non-hierarchical, 21st century leadership. In that sense, perhaps they are part of the answer all of us seek." |
MetaFilter's been trademarked... but not by Matt: "The 'METAFILTER' trademark was filed in 1946, and was last renewed in 1988."
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Alex Golub relates his time spent doing research in a small village in Papua New Guinea to blogging: "Being one's self, identity, personhood, and authenticity are all topics that seem to be forever on the web and all get discussed in, to be frank, unbelievably white ways. There is a rush for a true relationship with one's self, a totaly authentic transparency to others, a hankering for a wholeness and integrity. Blogs are like villages this way, I think: sometimes the most authentic way to experience our own is alienated. And that, it seems to me, is OK."
He's also got a a new take on Dune with the parts all played by bloggers including Meg Hourihan, Will Wheaton and Heather Champ. |
Rusty Foster declares the Kuro5hin fundraiser over: "I think that the goal today will be $35,000 and at that point, we are going to call this fundraiser over so we can go back to doing what we're here to do." As of 6:47 pm, the tally is at $34,637.50, giving Rusty "at least six months (and I'm sure I can make it last longer), to get my ducks in a row". |
Farhad Manjoo of Wired News reports on NPR's "No Linking or Framing" Policy, picking up a story that has swept the Blogosphere. According to Farhad, "by Wednesday afternoon, the NPR link form was the No. 1 item on Daypop, which ranks the popularity of items in weblogs." NPR spokesperson Jeffrey Dvorkin explains their logic: "What if you're an advocate for left-handed socialist diabetics? We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups." |
Rick Bruner blogs a "list of links to stories about blogging in the mainstream and off-beat press that I've captured in the last couple of months". Rick also has a message for friend Sam Loewenberg: "Sam, you are fat and you run like a girl!" |
Nick Denton blogs a link to the London Bloggers Tube Map , pointing out that while "New York's map of blogs by subway stop came out" earlier, the "the underlying London tube map has always been much more elegant." Nick's tally: "Highbury & Islington is top with five blogs, so far. Farringdon, my old stomping ground, and London's dotcom nexus, has only two." |
Riffola on Metafilter asks if anyone is up for MeFi Swap II, a followup to a popular "CD mix swapping program" where "everyone was supposed to send out 5 CDs to 5 people picked randomly from the list of participants, and in turn receive 5 CDs from 5 random senders." Dobbs has a suggestion for round 2: "make it a SWAP. ie, if i am sending a cd to crash davis, he should be sending one to me." |
John Robb (formerly of Gomez) suggests that "the best way to build a research company now would be to start a weblog on the topic and sell research direct". How would analysts make money? Based on a "percentage of sales" and phone-based consulting "charged via a site like Keen.com on a per minute basis." |
Rick Klau reviews Radio Userland for LLRX (Law Library Resource Xchange), focusing on "weblogs as Knowledge Management tools". His take: Radio is "the best $40 I've ever spent on software," although "Radio by itself won't get you to KM nirvana". Rick's final recommendation: if you "learn its strengths, I'm certain that you'll be better off than you are without it." |
Daniel Cody of Five2one.org comments on Kuro5hin's PBS-style fundraiser, advising founder Rusty Foster to have "at least have a similance of a plan in place before you jump out of the plane" by quitting the day job. Rusty responds that he didn't quit until "K5 was making enough in ad revenue to support me doing so full-time (February, 2001)."
Matt Haughey chimes in during a related Metafilter thread, pointing out that Kuro5hin "gets closer to true collaborative writing / reporting / whatever than a typical community site" and offering Rusty kudos for "sticking to his guns and following his dreams." Meanwhile, Kuro5hin's fundraiser is slowing down: today's overall target has been revised down to $35,000. As of 7:38 am EST, the total raised stands at $32,127. |
Kim Campbell of the Christian Science Monitor introduces blogging to her readers with a warning: "Don't read this column unless you have a lot of time to kill." Rebecca Blood in the piece: ""It's big fun, and you should join us." |
Matt Welch notes that "blogs, and a busy life, have cut most drastically into my magazine consumption." His conclusion: "If I was a smarter person, I’d cancel everything except the New Yorker and The Economist (closet elitist that I am)." |
Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine points out that since he's become "addicted to reading the weblogs of so many good writers", he's had "less patience for authors in the oldest medium". His new preference: "books exhaust me more now" while "weblogs get to the point a lot faster". |
Chris Pirillo caches two recent Zits cartoons (1 and 2) that show a teenager complaining that "these morons never update their sites". His logic? Despite the fact that the sites are free, "they owe it to me". |
The Oxford English Dictionary is adding the word blog to its fabled dictionary, along with other "high-profile new words that are so often of American origin". Also up for inclusion: "tipping point, gentleman's C, weaponize, collateral damage, skeevy, and perp walk." |
Rebecca Blood links to Jon Katz's recent Wired article about Thomas Paine and why he should be "resurrected as the moral father of the Internet". Her take: "I've been saying since 1999 that the webloggers are the new pamphleteers", noting that "many of our experiences repeat those of the pioneers who, not too many years ago, forged this ground". |
Corante editor Dominic Basulto writes an article for Tech Central Station asking if weblogs can "save Wall Street research" in this post-Enron age. His conclusion: with blog's focus on "everyday language and a tell it like it is approach, they certainly would make an interesting addition to the Wall Street research debate." |
Elizabeth Spiers of Capital Influx points out that blogging "isn't weird to me" because she remembers a time when "Silicon Alley had this odd, narcissistic, and horrifically incestuous startup culture that was very similar." Her take on the key difference? Most bloggers tend to "have interesting lives outside of their blogs" making them "part-time revolutionaries." |
Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin offers an update on his fundraiser: 721 subscribers paying $28,702.03, getting closer to his goal of breaking $40,000 today. |
Fishrush in a A Postbloggerist's Pronunciamento: "Blog - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story." |
Alfred Hermida of the BBC News notes a big jump in the number of Persian weblogs run by women. One of the first women in Iran to set up a blog: "I could talk very freely and very frankly about things I could never talk about in any other place, about subjects that are banned." |
The Blogger Manifesto from Prandial Post and Ben Hammersley - the "new, improved terms and conditions of both Blogger and Blogspot, as part of the campaign to improve the quality of the internet." A sample excerpt: "If any of my links are also in the Daypop Top 40, that does not prove that I have my 'finger on the pulse'. It means that I am two days behind."
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Carl Steadman of Plastic announces PlasticMail: "you can sign up for your very own Plastic.com email address, complete with webmail, POP3/IMAP support, spam filtering, virus scanning, and more". Total cost for a PlasticMail account? "Plasticmail is yours for US$30 for six months of service, which works out to US $5 a month, 17 cents a day, a mere rounding error by the hour." |
O'Reilly's blogging book Essential Blogging Selecting and Using Weblog Tools is up on O'Reilly's website. According to the publisher: "written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom." |
NPR has become the latest media company to ban the "linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR", prompting numerous calls for a boycott - including this post by Heath Row of Fast Company: "My solution? Boycott. If I can't link directly to a Web site I'm interested in sharing with people, I'm not going to link at all. I encourage you to do the same."
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John Rhodes of Webword interviews Kevin Hemenway (creator of AmphetaDesk) about his "syndicated news reader - it can display the news and content from thousands of websites in a single, customizable page, saving the end-user the hassle of visiting each site manually and slogging through advertisements and confusing navigation." Kevin confesses that "the only reason AmphetaDesk exists is because there were annoying little negatives in Radio Userland's aggregator." |
What the heck is a Blogathon? "Remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Well a Blogathon is an event for charity that lasts 24 hours. Each participant finds sponsors who can either donate a flat amount for the entire event, or an amount per hour. Once you sign up, you blog for 24 hours on the day of the event and raise money for charity."
So far, "68 Participants with 112 sponsors, donating a total of $2168.00" are participating, blogging during the "24- hour period beginning on July 27, 2002, at 0600 Pacific Time" |
Matt Haughey reports on Blogroots that Enetation "is the latest to enter the weblog comment system fray." As Matt points out, "with several comment services closed to new users and others implementing limits, the question for any of these free services may be: will it be able to stick around and scale up?" Evan Williams of Blogger responds that ads won't pay the bandwidth bills: "ad banners don't come close to covering the cost of Blog*Spot (let alone, making it "thrive")." |
Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine raves that The Week - Maxim publisher's Felix Dennis latest print pub - has much the same appeal as weblogs: "These people read the news, all the news, from all over the world, so I don't have to. They find the best. They discover the things I didn't discover. They give it to me in quick, witty, pithy bits." Jeff concludes: The Week "is a magazine a blogger should like."
See also: this scathing NY Press expose of Dennis' other media property, Maxim Magazine. |
Out of ideas to blog? Kate Zernike of the New York Times reports that Cliffs Notes guides are being released for "contemporary titles like 'All the Pretty Horses,' 'Snow Falling on Cedars,' 'Angela's Ashes' and 'Cold Mountain.'"
Blame Oprah's book club for the trend: according to Kate, the guides are targeted at "people who want to brush up before their book club, keep up in conversations with colleagues or at cocktail parties, or read the book — at least, some version of it — before they see the movie." Or perhaps people are just looking for something to blog about? |
Village Voice cartoonist Ward Sutton inks a strip called Meet the Bloggers. Sample panel: his "uncompromising alterna-journalist" confesses that "I prefer to write without the meddling interference of editors, proof-readers, and fact-checkers." (link via Anil Dash) |
According to Olivier Travers, "someone is spamming Blogdex". Olivier suggests that "a manual process based on user warnings might be the least costly solution to implement." |
From a press release: "The Idler, A Web Periodical announces 'Inside The Blogosphere: The Weblog Phenomenon,' a panel discussion at the National Press Club, John Peter Zenger Room, on Friday June 28th, from 12 noon - 3 p.m."
Speakers at the DC event include: Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Instapundit.com, Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles.com, James Lileks, Lileks.com, and James Taranto, "Best of the Web," OpinionJournal.com, as well as Corante's own John Hiler of Microcontent News. The event is free but seating is limited to 30 people, with room for 20 more to stand. First come, first served.
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Donna L. Goodison of the Boston Business Journal reports that despite "Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus's" claims that "The American Prospect is in financial trouble", "founder and co-editor Robert Kuttner says the magazine is doing just fine, thank you."
Kuttner describes the magazine as aimed at "'sensible liberals' who want authoritative articles on major policy issues." After $11 million dollars in grants from the Schumann Foundation (planned over several years), the magazine will be mostly self-sufficient once "other foundations and endowments pick up the slack". Kuttner points out that "The Nation and The New Republic, also left-leaning publications, also fail to break even." |
Dave Winer of Userland explains that when a reporter "asked if weblogs spelled the end of newspapers," he answered: "They didn't have to, if the professional news organizations adopted the technology." Dave's prediction: "My bet is that the community starts generating good news reports, on things like school boards, and city council meetings, the stuff that the organizations no longer cover." |
Fara Warner of Fast Company reports that Google is using bloggish knowledgement management. "Using a program called Sparrow, even Google employees without Internet savvy ( there are a few ) can create a page of ideas. That enables the company to cast its net across its 300-plus employees." How does Google sift through these ideas? Product manager Melissa Mayer "combs the site daily, searching for relevant ideas. She digs out the ones that generate the most comments and that seem the most doable." |
Fortune names Blogger.com (and parent company Pyra) as the Coolest Media Company of 2002. Evan Williams explains in an interview that he's "still in my home, but we have four other people now. One, an administrative assistant, is in my kitchen." Why did he start Pyra? "The whole reason that I started a company was to build cool s--t that matters. I'd like to be a player in how the Web is evolving." |
John Robb of Userland Software gives an update on boss Dave Winer's health: "He just gave me a call. He sounds great but hoarse. Very upbeat. He was overwhelmed by the wonderful outpouring of support for his recovery. I expect that he will be back online this weekend."
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Jonathan Delacour reacts to Meg Hourihan's article on What We're Doing When We Blog. "Meg Hourihan's explanation of blogging left me ... aghast," says Jonathan. "[W]e are offered a constrained model that, by focusing on the inessentials, drains weblogging of its poetry and promise. It's dispiriting that one of blogging's leading lights should have such an arid view of its future."
Meg responds in the comments, pointing out that "what I was trying to do in my article was simply point out that we can't define this thing based on the content we're outputting, just like you can't define photography based on the photos of one brilliant photographer."
Stavros the Wonder Chicken agrees with Jonathan, saying: "How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)?" Stavros proceeds to condemn the article as "soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it."
Metafilter founder Matt Haughey comes to Meg's defense in the comments: "[I]t looks abundantly clear that Meg didn't write the article for anyone here that has read it. She wrote it for the great unwashed masses that go out there and write one terrible copycat article after another."
Jeff of Visible Darkness builds on Meg's thoughts, saying "what she's looking at is the grammar of blogging." Jeff points that this "grammar of blogging is perhaps instrumental for the practical development of a completely new grammar of thought." Meg explains that "what Jeff describes is very much what I was trying to get at, only I don't have the experience and knowledge he does to frame the discussion the way he has." |
Rusty Foster says that "as of today I'm committed to making [collaborative media site Kuro5hin.org] a non-profit entity". His pitch should sound familiar to fans of PBS or NPR: "It is a long-established tradition that public media is primarily member-supported, and from time to time has to take a week or two and essentially beg you for money to keep going. Well, welcome to our beg-a-thon. :-) Between now and Wednesday, June 26th, I aim to plead, wheedle, and cajole you into contributing a total of $70,000." As of 12:35 am EST, Kuroshin has already raised $22,546.12 towards that goal. |
Ad Explanation
Greetings... So, playing with Google's AdSense offering in various places on Corante to see how it works, if it's effective, etc. If you've got any comments, complaints or suggestions please send them my way.
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