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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
Henry Copeland on William Safire: "I wish the usually gem-bright Safire had grokked that blogs are not new; it's what lies between them -- the links -- that make this baby scream."
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Rick Bruner concedes "We bloggers aren't cool, not since the 25th writing of the "blogs are neat" story in the mainstream press." |
Dorothea Salo embraces the"definitional instability" of "blog": "It is a convenient word that underlines a few commonalities in a hugely diverse body of material." Later in the post: "I would be interested in a taxonomy of blogs. I would be interested in lots of taxonomies of blogs. What I’m not at all interested in doing is using the word to discourage people from writing, or from writing their way." |
Yvonne Mints reports on a pseudonymous blog a reporter was keeping in which he commented on, even criticized, items he was also reporting on. Fred Brown Jr., the past president of the Society of Professional Journalists: "You are not supposed to secretly attack the people you are trying to cover in an objective manner. It's not just damaging to the reporter, it's damaging to the newspaper's credibility." |
Dave Winer on why he prefers the errors occasionally made in weblogs to the perhaps-cleaner writing found in big media: "When I see writing that's too polished, where the grammar is too perfect, I am suspicious that at a deeper level it has been sanitized and dumbed-down. I like getting my news and opinion straight from the source without the middleman." |
Howard Kurtz follows John Leo's lead and says it's a mistake for big media to dismiss blogs. Sure, he says, they "often slam each other like pro wrestlers," but, he continues, "They now provide a kind of instant feedback loop." |
Tom Shugart says "It disappoints me when the "personal bloggers" that I love to read somehow get bitten by this bug and venture off into the dismal swamp of warblogging." He continues: "My greatest pleasure occurs when bloggers are writing about themselves and their experience of living their lives--giving us a peek into what it's like to be them--which invariably gives us a peek into ourselves." |
Mike Sanders, on an observation he's made: "One area that I have found blogging useful is in observing the human condition, especially anger."
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Shelley Powers insists her return to occasional posting on her website really isn't a blog. She also asks for patience as she works through some "difficult times": "I have not returned to weblogging, but I haven't exactly left it, either. I've become a ghost in your midst."
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Chad Orzel: "What I'd like to see is more occupational blogging. I'm getting tired or journalists and pundits, and people pretending to be journalists and pundits." What he's looking for: "teachers talking about education, editors talking about editing, caterers talking about catering, detective talking about detecting, garbagemen talking about trash collecting." |
John Leo of U.S. News & World Report, who's written favorably about blogs before: "The established media learned long ago how to marginalize critics and shrug off complaints of bias as the ravings of right-wing fanatics. But the bloggers aren't so easily dismissed. They don't bluster. They deal in specifics and they work quickly, while the stories they target are fresh."
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John Hiler on his ego-surfing: "I love to surf my referer logs and see what people are saying about my articles." On the tone of those comments: "Over time, I've learned to tune out whether or not the review is positive or not. After all, if you get excited by a nice review then you're gonna get bummed by a not-so-nice one..."
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Tom Coates, who's been vocal in his criticism of The Guardian's Best British Blog Contest: "The Guardian has probably done more to encourage people to start their own weblogs than any other organisation in the UK." But, he continues, "I think it has now moved from supporting a grass-roots movement to attempting to appropriate it."
To which The Guardian's Simon Waldman responds: "One of the prime reasons we embarked on the competition was to help start the debate about how a traditional media owner such as ourselves can engage with a movement that is in many ways the very antithesis of traditional media." |
Andrew Sullivan to William Safire: "I know it's tough to have online competition, but hey, you're a libertarian, Bill. Start enjoying it." [scroll down]
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Tom Shugart reports on a trip to his shrink in which they discussed his blog which she'd checked out - she noted "a lot of pride coming through." Shugart on the concept in general: "Every blogger that I enjoy is projecting his or her pride in one way or another. I respect them for it." |
Jeff Jarvis comments on a moment, and thought, he and Nick Denton shared recently: "Nick and I stared at each other with the exact same thought: Blog story!" He continues: "If we'd had Wifi access to the Internet, we'd have raced to post it for real... We were in competition for this little slice of life to put on our blogs." |
Nick Denton on the perils journalists face in covering blogging: "I have a friend who is doing a piece on weblogs for New York Magazine. She's terrified."
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Andrew Orlowski: "Critics who like to complain about the dearth of good writing on the Internet in general, and in blogland in particular might be missing the point. Perhaps we just need better readers, and there's no better reader Jorn Baeger." |
John Hiler, in a post about the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto and his critics: "Many warbloggers are taking advantage of the War on Terrorism to attack all Muslims... If James' opinons are really that deplorable, how about starting a pro-Palestine weblog with the rest of the story? I would love to see more Muslim and Arab voices reflected in the Blogosphere..."
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Jeff Jarvis comments on a milestone in the recognition of blogs: William Safire's attention in New York Times Magazine: "We've all been saying we want to join the mainstream, the big time. But are you truly ready? For the mainstream is by definition, no longer cool. And bloggers love being cool." |
Paul Ford writes, from the future, on how Google beat out Amazon and eBay to the semantic Web: "All of a sudden centralized databases - and Amazon and Ebay were prime examples of centralized databases with millions of items each - could suddenly be spread out through the entire web. Everyone could own their little piece of the database, their own part of the puzzle. It was easy to publish the stuff. But the problem was that there was no good way to bring it all together."
Later in the piece: "Google was a natural to put it all together. Google already searched the entire Web. Google already had a distributed framework with thousands of independent machines. Google already looked for the links between pages, the way they fit together, in order to build its index." |
William Safire, in New York Times Magazine's "On Language," introduces his audience to "blog." His take on whether or not blogs will replace old media: "No; gossips like an old-fashioned party line, but most information seekers and opinion junkies will go for reliable old media in zingy new digital clothes." |
Shelley Powers of Burningbird checks in from beyond the blog-grave with some follow up thoughts on her choice to put her blogging behind her: "No one owns weblogging... Each new person that starts a weblog invents weblogging anew because they add their own uniqueness to the mix." |
John Hiler says he feels something akin to post-partum depression every time he publishes an article, conceding that he doesn't think his "prolactin, estrogen or progesterone levels are impacted by blogging." It's significant enough though, he says, that he's "starting to factor the post-partum blues into my writing schedule." |
Marc Weisblott says of Salon's Scott Rosenberg: "[He] is convinced that he can follow the lead of Glenn Reynolds and effectively start up his own blogosphere, and be the puppeteer of a cast of characters." Which is, continues Weisblott, "as cloying as the process of casting a knock-off of the show Friends, with the inevitable lack of chemistry or charm." |
Andrew Sullivan states his correction policy: "There's nothing nefarious here - just an attempt to get things right and transparent in a medium that's instant and personal." |
Steve Outing ponders, in a comment on Salon's blogs, the challenge facing media companies that would set up blog networks: "How much latitude do you give the bloggers who decide to use your hosting service in terms of controversial content?"
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Andrew Sullivan, who's written for some of the most respected newspapers and magazines and reports he's been booted from New York Times Magazine because of critical comments he's made in his blog of the paper, makes an appearance on its op-ed page today in a piece from Paul Krugman who refers to him as an "online pundit." |
Mark Bernstein reviews Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook, calling it an "an inexorably romantic guide to building and cultivating a weblog." Bernstein expands on his point: "Weblogs take on aspects of both fiction and performance, but the romantic approach leaves little room for either."
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Frank Paynter interviews Annie Mason in his ongoing series. Mason, on her involvement in Blog Sisters: "We have been more of a coffee klatch than a forum." It's similar, she says, to the "tattoo forum I used to keep up with. We posted lots of jokes and pictures, but we also traded a lot of worries, support, encouragement, suggestions, and listening ears." |
Tom Shugart: "Let's face it folks, I'm in the middle of a serious bout of 'blogger's block.' I'm not going to dignify it by calling it 'writer's block.'" |
Scott Rosenberg, who says 75 people signed up for Salon blogs on the first day: "Aside from the occasional outburst of overheated rhetoric, there is no sensible reason for bloggers and journalists to have any particular animosity towards each other. The two enterprises are complementary." |
Evan Williams, who concedes that his own blog goes quiet at times: "Like anything worthwhile, it takes an investment. Sometimes I don't feel I have the time to make that investment. Or, more accurately, other commitments/investments are more important to me at the moment."
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John Hiler on the fervent reactions his articles sometimes elicit: "I am finding it helpful to think about each flavor of blogware as a separate religion faith." You are, he says, "either a believer... or a heretic condemned to blogging hell."
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Brian Carnell on Dave Winer: "Most companies would look at the numerous Radio and Manila blogs that say something like "We've had it with Dave, we're moving our blog to Movable Type" and step back to try to figure out what they're doing to drive people away. But Winer simply chalks it up to abusive people who just hate him because he's a rock star." |
Andrew Huff says, in a Blogroots discussion that touches on the URLs that those who sign up for Salon's blogs are given, "Of all places you'd think Salon would make users feel they're not just another number." He continues: "I'd love to see some more differentiation among the blogs. [They] all looked basically the same, which along with the numerical addresses does not bode well for audience building." |
NZ Bear on Salon's blog network: "I think we can safely assume this is not the giant revenue-generating plan we've been waiting for to save Salon." But, he adds, "This is a good thing... think of all the thousands upon thousands of daily readers of online mags like Salon who aren't in the habit of reading weblogs... those are your future readers --- and Salon just created a massive free advertising campaign for all of us." |
Dave Winer in a post about the deal UserLand's struck with Salon: "Writing about weblogs is and probably always will be a good way to get flow."
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Lloyd Nebres on a graphic system he's devised to help him reflect on the quality of his posts: "The thermal pattern may in fact map to the waxing and waning of my moods or psycho-social temperature... Or not. It may be just a random picture." |
Phil Jache, who says he was the "guy that paid for Frontier 1" and was the first to commercially apply XML-PRC: "I have had enough of Dave Winer. This is the first day of my weblog without Manila." |
Mike McBride, in a sentiment shared by others, on the recent spat that played out on Queso: "I guess arguing about the technology and who came up with what idea first and who's not getting enough credit is going to make people take the medium seriously, isn't it?"
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Dan Hersam on a MeetUp of bloggers in Salt Lake City: "One of the best things of the evening was that it was the first time I was able to mention my blog without having to answer the question: "What's a blog?"
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Dave Winer responds to his critics: "I edit in public. You may catch me saying something that I change my mind about later. You may not like this... but (key point) that won't change the way I write."
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Anil Dash on the Queso dustup: "There are people to whom all of these technical arguments are as irrelevant to their expression as technically correct mandates like XHTML and CSS positioning are to some of the creators of publishing tools." "And those people," he continues, "are the overwhelming majority of the online community. We're screaming and pushing our way into irrelevance." |
Nick Denton on the flamewar involving Dave Winer, Jason Levine, Jason Kottke, Rebecca Blood and others: |
Dave Winer disses both John Hiler's article on blogware - "I suspect there are (many) other factual errors in this very long piece" - and Rebecca Blood's book - "We're going to be fixing her bugs for years to come it seems" - in the same post.
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Ken Layne riffs: "Next time I'm interviewed for one of those blogging stories, I think I'll grab a random bunch of sites off Blogger's home page and claim they're the most famous... 'You haven't seen Chistopher Hitchens' site? It's great, goddamned great...'"
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Dawn Olsen explains the form of blogging that suits her best and asks of those who leave harsh remarks in her comments section: "[Is it] just to insult me? I have professional trolls for that. If you would like to become a professional troll for this site you will have to fill out an application, talk to my lawyer, go through a series of interviews and have an intense, security filled background check done." |
Glenn Reynolds, better known to some as Instapundit, in the aforementioned San Francisco Chronicle article: "Bloggers aren't just cutting [newspapers] out, they're replacing them..." Says Reynolds: "It's like discovering you can hit a baseball as well as Sammy Sosa: empowering for the discoverer, not so good for newspapers."
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Doc Searls comments on the San Francisco Chronicle article: " The Web, where blogs are published, is a public place. It's in the public domain. As a form of journalism native to that public place, blogs are not like desktop publishing. They are a form of public publishing. Like public radio and television, recipients can pay for it if they like, but the goods are free for the taking." On the "Joe Schmoes" the article refers to bloggers as: "Are they all Schmoes? Is anybody really a Schmoe?"
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Cameron Barrett on the increasingly small world that blogging's becoming: "Riding the C Train from work on Friday evening, I was headed home to change and then meet Rael Dornfest for dinner and who do I run into on the subway but Cameron Marlow, the guy behind Blogdex."
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Anil Dash on his belief that the discussion of blogs should focus on the content not the technology: "I am realizing more now how intelligent [Rebecca Blood's] decision [was] to treat technology as fungible [as it] is... Great writing has nothing to do with the fact that it's pounded into an Underwood #20 or carved into a stone tablet."
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Phil Wolff comments on the long discussion that's been playing out at Queso over the past few days, likening it to a Talmudic debate through which bloggers engage in "collective media criticism." It resembles, he says, "a packet of physicists arguing over beer; blending ad hominem, sophistry, and deep insight; all enjoying the experience, the flow, the style and substance, respecting the openness of the place, the medium we call home." |
Glenn Reynolds, who's on vacation, on Eric Alterman turning to Jim Romenesko's letters page to build buzz: "When my absence causes Big Media house bloggers to be reduced to begging on Romenesko's page that's -- well, that's just kind of disturbing."
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Arnold Kling suggests that one way that CEOs might use blogs and strike a balance between being "too impersonal, bland, and corporate-speakish while on the other hand not being to aggressive and domineering" would be to affect "the tone of Winston Churchill's messages to commanders..." |
Paul Holbrook says getting people at his new company to use klogs reminds him of his home life: "[It's] akin to how my wife acts when people we don't know well come to our house. She doesn't want people to see our dirty laundry, so... we rush about cleaning up and pretending that our house isn't really so messy." It's similiar to what he feels about his klog: "Perhaps I should clean up a little bit before I invite others in." |
Anil Dash comments on Dave Winer in a ongoing, ugly, and ultimately tedious debate: "I think that it's odd that an inarguable pioneer in the world of weblogs is so content to distance people who could be advocates for his products."
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Dave Winer: "The greed and intellectual dishonesty in the weblog world is something I'm thinking about a lot while I'm on sabbatical."
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Jenny Berger says Dave Winer's comments "give me the impression that he fancies himself a king among nobles, when he is actually the village blacksmith, albeit a rather talented and groundbreaking one." |
Howard Rheingold, who's got a book coming out on the emergence of "smart mobs," says their leading edge will be pioneered by "wireless community networks, webloggers and buyers and sellers on eBay." He continues: "The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies that are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume." |
Jeff Crooke's objects to the notion that newspapers should empower lots of their journalists to start blogging away: "Reporters are paid to be comprehensive and accurate. I would hope that anything submitted to a blog would also undergo the same thorough craftmanship as an item in the newspaper in terms of writing, background, and fact checking." |
Dave Winer, again: "As long as self-proclaimed historians like Rebecca Blood tell the wrong story, I'm going to keep pushing back." |
John Hiler comments on "the emphasis it puts on our egos," or the dark side of blogging: "If I write something and someone else blogs it on their site... well all of a sudden, I feel validated and great about myself. Same thing goes with press mentions: you read a few articles that mention you by name, and you start feeling like you really are all that."
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Steve Outing urges, in a long and instructive piece, his news media colleagues to embrace blogging, laying out a taxonomy of different types of blogs as well as proffering ideas on ways to put blogging to work on their sites.
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Dorothea Salo on getting compensated (somehow) for blogging: "Another facet of the paid-or-not question is payment vis-a-vis writing quality. Blogs are unpaid writing; are they therefore automatically less good writing than paid writing, because if it were any damn good we’d find a way to be paid for it?"
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Shelley Powers, aka Burningbird, articulates the reasons why she's leaving blogging behind: "My weblog has become more than my avatar, it's become me... And I must stop using this weblog as a surrogate for life and the only way I can do this is to quit cold turkey. Walk away, and not look back." |
Mike Sanders says "a big part of blogging is protesting injustices and sharing our experiences." However, he says, "both of those activies have their pitfalls. Protesting injustices focuses us on the shortcoming of others, often at the expense of focusing on our own. Sharing our experiences can lead to self-centeredness and egocentricity." |
Will Richards, who's employing blogs in the classroom says, "I know as a parent, I would love to be able to take a look at what my child is learning and thinking by accessing his/her weblog. And to be able to contribute to that thinking and learning in some way would be even better. What a cool concept..." |
Steve Hall follows up on Tom Hespos' article: "Out of all the high priced, over featured, so called "content management" software, blogging software is by far the next wave of information transferral." |
Tom Hespos raves about blogging and says his colleagues (advertisers) should start thinking about "what this [could] do to online media planning five or ten years down the road." He continues: "It might be wise to think about what the marketplace might look like if a wave of independent publishers suddenly started entering the game en masse." |
Hassan Masum doesn't mention blogs but might as well in an article in First Monday on distributed editing and thinking, the noosphere and the tools that will some day lead to "the formation of beneficial idea-clusters, self-examination of our aggregate societal mind, and rewarding of generators of farsighted opinions." |
Jim McGee: "One of the distinct pleasures of the blogging world is that even if you miss something, somebody that you trust will catch it eventually and call it to your attention."
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Amazon announces its new Web services offering: "Build an application that searches for prominent keywords in online news articles and weblogs, and automatically finds relevant books in our catalog based on those keywords."
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Frank Paynter offers up yet another interview - this time with Gary Turner who says "[There's] a whole social dimension [that] has been uncovered here that tells me there's more to blogging than just journalism... I feel this is a real social renaissance..." |
Ryan Lawler says, of the inclusion of a MetaTalk discussion in which he participated that was included in We've Got Blog, "To this day still do not understand why, of all the meaningful and insightful conversations about community weblogging, they chose such a stumbling, chortling abortion of a discussion."
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Dave Winer continues his thoughts on blogging and journalism: "If there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a weblog. It's just a format. Nothing more. It's really not a mystery in 2002."
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Glenn Fleishman says, in a post indicating that he'll be setting up a blog-related nonprofit site for those suffering from serious diseases, "I wouldn't want this to become a wailing wall of death and dying; rather, I'd hope that people could use the creative energy that's available to them to share their thoughts about themselves or about those they care about."
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Jeneane Sessum comments on the disenchantment some encounter in their blogging: "You come to weblogging... and you're screaming out your window, into the wind, "LOOK AT ME GO--I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY! YIPEE FOR ME!" " But then, she continues, "like any good day, the wind dies down, and you hear something like this: ______wooosh______..."
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Anil Dash, who was one of the first to start using it, articulates the difficulty he had in leaving behind Blogger for new blogware: "Blogger was, and is, a great product made by talented people whom I like and respect... but my needs have changed, and my programming skills have improved, and it's time to use a new tool so I can do the things I want to add to this site."
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George Parthington says, in a self-interview, on why he's taking a break from blogging: "It felt like talking to a psychiatrist that didn’t get it, or worse, didn’t care."
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John Garside compares the political power of blogs to that of its progenitors - the UK's Labour Press and independent radio: "They're under little pressure to make any pretence at objectivity, bow to fears of threats from owners, advertisers, libel and other forms of 'flak' and are svelte, lithe and sexy... History indicates that the power elite will not ignore the blogging activists." |
Jason Levine says, in a threaded discussion he kicked off, "It's amazing to me that a man can still be so embittered by the fact that [ Rebecca Blood] didn't give him enough credit in her essay on the history of weblogs." To which Jason Kottke responds, "As much as Dave [Winer] drives me nuts, he deserves consideration as the Johnny Appleseed (if not the Gutenburg) of weblogs."
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Matt Mower: "The books about blogging need to be there. We're in a pretty self-congratulatory medium here. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that an inaccurate book is better than no book."
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Terry Frazier says, in a post about the criticism of blogbooks, "I still have trouble getting anyone I know to understand that blogging is not just a trifle suited only to the feckless and unemployed."
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B!X, who's credited with scooping the Salon/Userland blogdeal, says that if it's Salon hosting its readers' weblogs "it could be an interesting experiment of sorts, and perhaps could help push other media sources -- such as newspapers -- to start offering the same sort of thing through their own websites to readers in their geographical area." |
Andrew Sullivan in an interview in Time Out New York: "If you're all uptight and trying to send down tablets of stone from your op-ed column, you're not going to be good at blogging. It's thinking aloud in real time, which means you're going to screw up, you're going to say things that are foolish." |
Analee Newitz says, in a post about a possible hole in reputation systems, "Sometimes we need to listen to people who have bad reputations. Often they are the critics, the people with a talent for seeing flaws and problems none of us wants to face."
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Hugh Pyle looks back at an old article by JD Lasica and says, "Isn't is strange: in the 'push' bubble, all the talk was of how this changed delivery options for Big Media, but most missed the real game: in reducing the cost of publication to zero, 'narrowcasting' means your daily news choices come from a million opinionated webloggers."
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Dave Winer follows up on his comments the other day about books on blogging: "It's my opinion that anyone who attempts to write a book about weblogs will miss the point... Perhaps it's the impossibility of writing a book about it that makes the medium so interesting."
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Mark Baard explains, in Wired, how people with Alzheimer's are reportedly using blogging to their benefit: "Bloggers say their journals have greatly improved their quality of life, by helping them to recall tasks completed and milestones passed." |
Jenny Berger comments on Brendan O'Neill's article: "I like that someone has the balls to say that blog writing (the kind that actually *wants* to be read, as well as gain the author that elusive cachet of being considered a global SME -- at least online) could stand some improvement."
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Paolo Valdemarin comments on the three and a half months since he started blogging on his company's website: "[It's] changed the way I work in many significant ways... [The] time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough."
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Brian O'Neill comments on what he sees as an irony bloggers are missing: "Many in the Blogosphere claim they are doing something new and distinctive in modern journalism. In fact, blogging is the logical conclusion of some of the worst trends in modern journalism." |
Dave Winer again on blogging software and any similarities they share: "Today I think that all that blogs have in common is the reverse chronologic structure, with a calendar; links and comments. It's a structure to hang ideas on."
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Dave Winer weighs in with his thoughts on two books on blogging that have recently been published. On Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook: "I found little that I agree with... she still doesn't understand the medium, or even tell the story of how weblogs came to be with any accuracy."
On We've got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture: "Just a slice through the story and community, an arbitrary starting point, and some cute stuff, some interesting stuff, but mostly they miss what's going on now." |
Virginia Postrel on the break from blogging she's taking this summer: "It's way too easy to convince myself that I'm "working" when I'm just reading other blogs and writing responses to the news."
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Laurence Jarvik reports on last month's gathering of leading bloggers at the National Press Club. His definitition of the blogosphere: "self-referential, self-reflexive, self-analytical, self-correcting, universal, instaneous, decentralized, emotional, rational, and available for continuous updating, response, and review."
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Doc Searls says, of a party in LA hosted by Brian Linse at which a bunch of bloggers convened, "It was as if we had come to Earth for the first time, amazed to find everybody looking and sounding like flesh-and-clothes human beings." |
John Hiler comments on one aspect of blogging he doesn't like - the "ex factor": "Now you can not only find out what I'm up to, but you can see what I'm doing that day."
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N.Z. Bear follows up on John Weidner's call for a blogburst to try to influence US policy on Iran with the proposed text he and John have agreed upon: "Get as many blogs as possible to post a copy of an open letter (in English and Farsi) on an agreed-upon date."
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Empty Bottle says, in a long lament about the decline of MetaFilter, "Some days it feels as if my love is turning into common street trash before my eyes, and no matter how well-documented my weaknesses for common street trash, that's just not the girl I fell in love with."
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Graham Leuschke lists a number of blogs with the same names, saying "There's a lot of brand dilution going on in the weblog world lately." |
Rick Bruner, he of the "uncontrollable blogging jones," says his least favorite topic these days is "explaining to incredulous new friends what the hell blogs are." His answer to their questions: "Heard about the recession? Lots of smart people have more time on their hands these days..."
On being recognized by an author offline he'd tweaked online: "Rude shock to have meatspace and blogosphere collide unexpectedly like that." |
Elizabeth Spiers on her blogging: "When this stops being fun, I'll stop doing it. I will take my disturbed self and find something else into which my disturbed energies will be channelled." |
A pleased Andrew Sullivan trumpets his success in getting the New York Times to print a correction: "Score one for the blogosphere. Here in cyber-space, we also correct our errors promptly." |
Tom Shugart reflects further on the great blogroll debate: "Should one limit one's blogroll to a certain length? If so, when does it become too long? Is there such a thing as a blogroll being too long?"
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John Hiler says, in a post explaining why he's scrapping a roundup of blogware for a second cut at it, "Can you believe it?! TWENTY FIVE separate pieces of blogware. Good lord, that's a lot of blogging software."
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Anil Dash on his tooling around with Moveable Type's TrackBack feature: "It's great, but it's got almost too much potential." |
Anita Roddick, of the Body Shop, in an interview with the Guardian says of her website, "The most satisfying revelation has been the weblog community - such a vibrant group of thoughtful people and such an amazing way to share wisdom, outrage and information."
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Doc Searls says, of the flurry of real-time blog efforts in recent weeks: "[I t's] a terrific new sport."
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Brian Linse on an observation he's made lately: "I've been pleased to note that the number of interesting liberal blogs has been growing."
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Charles Kuffner on his long blogroll: "There was a time (you know, back in the Good Old Days of blogging) when you could read just about anyone who was worth your time to read. Anyone who tries to do that now is either unemployed or soon to become unemployed." |
David Gammel on the use of blogs in knowledge management: "The catch-22 I keep finding myself in is trying to encourage the grass-roots development of KM tools and sharing while simultaneously crafting an organized taxonomy for our klog network."
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Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, comments on the ways in which blogging has allowed her to promote herself and her interests: "I've unintentionally become a multi-faceted brand." [Scroll down for her article.]
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Chloe of Watermelon Punch comments, in a Blogroots discussion, on the Guardian's recently released list of notable blogs: "I [wasn't] arguing with the idea of the Guardian list... But perhaps it will be months or years before the blog you've been waiting for all your life makes it onto one of those lists."
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N.Z. Bear on Mickey Kaus' blog at Slate: "I think we can now declare Microsoft Blog ready to ship as R1.0... Sure, MSBlog will be DRM-hardwired to prevent deep-linking (to limit legal liability), but everything interesting is always on the front page anyway, right?"
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Patrick Ruffini says, of the many bloggers who've gone on vacation of late, "By taking long walks on the beach or having a life for one second more than is necessary, we expose our soft underbelly and fall victim to just the sort of complacency that could cause the whole blogging trend to peter out in its infancy."
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Anil Dash offers up his own review of friend Rebecca Blood's blogbook: "Fortunately absent is any significant attention to the loud but worthless in-fighting that plagues a few small clusters of the weblog community. There's a healthy respect for the fact that these never affect the other 99% of the weblog world."
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Mike Sanders says, in a post about terrorism, "My life and blogging experience has informed me never to have trust in 'the life of the mind.' Intellectual capacity is no match for bias and hatred of the heart."
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Jeremy Wagstaff suggests, in an article in today's Wall Street Journal on setting up a blog, that "one day your grandchildren are going to sit on your lap and ask you, 'Grandpa/Grandma/Generic Grandparental Figure, what did you do during the Great Blogging Revolution?'" He continues: "OK, so they might not." [subscription required]
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Donna Wentworth on the week she spent real-time blogging the Berkman Center's ILAW program: "I'll be honest: it took stamina." On writing a wrap-up: "How do I make this stuff comprehensible to those who, in the interests of balance and good health, didn't spend every waking minute last week reading along as I wrote?"
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Glenn Reynolds gives his feedback on Rebecca Blood's blogbook: "I can't help but feel that the publication of a how-to book about blogging marks an important milestone in the Blogosphere's development, though I'm not sure exactly what it means, for good or ill."
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Rich Gordon, in E-Media Tidbits, on the value blogs/digests may provide for news consumers: "I just had an experience that, to me, came close to the way paid content could or should work on the Web... An editor scanning many information sources pointed me to content I was willing to pay for." [Disclosure: Corante's mentioned] |
Steve Outing follows up on his article last week: "Not surprisingly, most of the bloggers approved of my ideas; I've also received quite a bit of criticism, but most of it seems to be from more "traditional" journalists." |
Tim Drake comments, in an article from early June, on the reason blogging's "currently undergoing an explosion among Catholics": "Many think the clergy sex abuse scandal is a primary factor contributing to the increase in Catholic blogs and has contributed to the majority of the Catholic blog chatter."
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Denise Howell, who's just started reading Rebecca Blood's new book, draws an analogy to blogging without some initial instruction: "Sure, you can swerve onto the freeway without driver's training, but it's not the greatest idea - you could do unnecessary harm to yourself and others."
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Arnold Kling invokes blogs and the "phenomenon of distributed editing" as one of the reasons the newspaper business will be dead in 20 years: "It does not work exactly like traditional centralized editing, but the end result is that people are finding help in sorting out fact from rumor and what's important from what's trivial."
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John Hiler says of his blogging slump, "I'm not sure what's up - somehow I'm not having as much fun with it lately."
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Glenn Reynolds comments on Blogger: "I've scrupulously avoided criticizing Blogger, since it's free and it led to the Blogosphere explosion. But it seems to get less, not more, reliable as time goes by."
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Glenn Reynolds, reacting to James Lilek's post, on his blogging: "A lot of the blogger-critics seem to forget that blogs aren't bigshot media operations that claim to cover all the news that's fit to print and to do so (chortle) in an unbiased fashion, but rather personal operations run in someone's spare time, by people who have an axe to grind and plenty of fury to turn the wheel." |
James Lileks says "I’ve always thought that the phrase "blogging will be light today" is akin to saying "the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today." It’s still free ice cream."
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Jon Udell comments on Jeffrey Shell's blogposts on Zope: "I find his thinking-out-loud process incredibly valuable. Writing is a way to clarify thinking. Doing such writing on a weblog is the primal act of knowledge management."
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Bill Taylor evangelizes the use of blogs by executives: "Sometimes executive staff can become isolated from their members. Blogs could be a great way to help members feel more involved, because they are being given more frequent updates from upper management." |
David Gammel comments on the team klogs he and his colleagues are employing "The first thing I did yesterday [after a week on vacation] was fire up our team klog and read what had been going on while I was out last week... It really took my breath away how effective it was for quickly getting me back up to speed." |
Glenn Reynolds: "I'm a bit troubled by [Clay Shirky's] suggestion that my proposal for open traffic counters will accelerate the separation of the Blogosphere into non-egalitarian spheres... I don't really see that it follows." |
Kevin Holtsberry interviews Australia's Martin Roth who says he sees no signs that his blog has helped him sell books or land writing gigs: "If the best bloggers don't somehow start making
money from their efforts I wonder how long they'll keep at it." |
Martin Devon, who's been called a top "link slut" by N.Z. Bear: "I'm actually far more of a link slut than he realizes. I can live with that."
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Jim McGee is advocating an experiment for academia: encourage graduate students to set up their own blogs and use them "as a lab notebook of their developing intellectual capital... Where do you think these students will be after several years of sustained and steady writing? How many will have already started to establish reputations as serious thinkers?"
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Steven Garrity says, in a discussion about fame and celebrity and whether it can be achieved online, "When you are dealing with few-to-many medium (TV, radio, print), you get a few people known by many: fame. When you are dealing with a many-to-many medium (the web), you get smaller groups of people who are known by each other." |
Doc Searls: "I think I know 10x the bloggers I knew only six months ago. And the number of interesting items that flow through all their blogs, and all the emails we all toss to each other, is up by about the same multiple."
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AKMA comments on the friendships he's forged online: "I still resist the dichotomy between 'real life' or 'real friends' and 'virtual life' or 'cyberspace friends.' Interactions that involve physical proximity differ from interactions that don’t, yes. That doesn’t make physical interactions more real than epistolary interactions, telephonic interactions, and hyperlinked interactions."
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Frank Paynter, the "Mike Wallace of bloggerdom," interviews Tom Shugart who says he's enamored of blogging but thinks it may have "some built-in limitations." He continues: "Blogging--blogging, that is, that amounts to anything--requires commitment. I really think you have to enjoy writing or you're just not going to get into it... and you have to be willing to expose yourself to a certain degree." |
Dan Gillmor reports on Yochai Benkler's remarks at ILAW: "[We're] moving toward melding of production and consumption goods. For both purposes. Base stations to transceivers. Broadcast to blogs."
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Michael Geist says in an email to Donna Wentworth and Dan Gillmor on their real-time blogging of ILAW: "Viewing the course through your eyes (and fingers) has provided a terrific perspective on both the high level of discussion and the tremendous potential for blogging in the classroom."
To which Donna replies: "Today is the last day of live blogging. My fingers will thank me, but I will miss the rush." |
Larry Lessig to the attendees of the Berkman Center's ILAW program that's just wrapped: "If I walked in here with a dress on and Dan [Gillmor] blogged it, I'd be history, wouldn't I?"
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Ernie the Attorney says, of Rick Klau's efforts to "make Radio, and blogging in general, work better,": "I think that the Userland guys should have monthly awards for non-employee of the month, and this month I nominate Rick." |
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