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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
Cory Doctorow in the press release for "Essential Blogging": "My blog is an outboard brain, a way for me to keep and share notes as I attempt to keep my nose about the crashing ocean of technological and social change. At least half my brain is stored on my blog." |
Phil Wolff advises companies facing a tough economy to take to klogging: "Now is the time to start capture, before you start hiring again... Any sort of KM tool will preserve operating knowledge. Today, klogging is your fastest, cheapest, most accessible KM vehicle. Take it for a spin." |
The Boston Globe, which is planning to launch a blog section in the next few months, asked local students if they would start/maintain a blog. One response: "Probably not, I don't really like computers that much." Another: "I wouldn't put that much time into myself." Yet another: "It's the most popular thing ever! It's easy and everyone has one, including all our friends." |
Tom Matrullo on passion, uniqueness and individuality: "One possible destiny for blogs is to evolve into a warren of Joseph Cornell boxes, each the offspring of some matter and some mind. It would be an error to try to institutionally manage, control, subsume, or view any of these panoptically as "content." They are what they are, the net result of devotion through time." |
Christian Crumlish: "I keep thinking that blogroll links would be more valuable with an explanation of what inspired me to add them."
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Elizabeth Spiers expresses her frustration:
"Evil Blogger software
'Leading tool,' you boast
Yet when I clicked on 'Publish'
You ate my fucking post." |
Dave Copeland, a journalist and blogger: "I see newspapers as giant filters. Any good reporter has a million stories: stuff they've picked up off the record... Yet, through old rules of attribution and standards of what's acceptable, newspapers filter out all of the juicy stories that reporters love to tell, and deliver a neatly packaged, yet boring, look at what's happening in the community. By my estimate, 90 to 95 percent of American newspapers fail to tell the story of the community they cover, yet still bitch about and wonder why people aren't reading them." |
Justin Sodano, who started blogging after 9/11, in a post on why he's taking a break from it: "I have learned so much in the last year... Blogging has done me irreversible good. But I feel that I must at some point move beyond wide-ranging news stories and analysis... I feel the need to do more. I’m not doing enough. Blogging’s not enough." |
Christian Crumlish on his experience consulting on content management systems: "There's a big hole in the middle of the market for CMS framework software that will handle 80% of the needs of most clients... I wonder how many businesses could manage their web and intranet content just fine with affordable tools such as powerful blog systems." |
Andrew Sullivan passes along an email he received: "I should take up smoking ... because every time I finish having sex, I have to read your weblog."
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Andrew Sullivan on a change he claims credit for - getting the Associated Press to issue a correction of its description of Christopher Hitchens: "Ah, the blogosphere!" |
Heather Havrilesky on blog hype: "Everything gets blown out of proportion and then summed up as a stupid trend in the end. Popularity should never be taken too seriously -- the good writing and good art that come out of any given movement is all that anyone focuses on over the long haul."
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Joan Connell announces MSNBC's embrace of blogs: "What had once quietly flourished in the grassroots of cyberspace has now burst into the mainstream, transforming the way Internet news and communities are perceived."
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Glenn Fleishman with his reaction to the transcipt of the panel discussion held last week on blogs at Berkeley: "One of the points that I come away with from this discussion is that the real crux of the difference between journalism and personal blogging is a very fine amount of intermediation. Instead of the heavy intermediation that happens between a newspaper journalist writing and the account that appears in the newspapers, blogging journalism involves fewer people and fewer changes." |
G. Beato weighs in on Google News: "It announces that 'This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.' But that's really the exact opposite of what people want these days. Blogs are popular because they're personal -- readers feel a connection with blog-authors that they don't feel with traditional media." |
The One True b!X on blog-writing: "It's simply an inevitability that anyone who is trying to write truthfully about themselves or about living in the world is, at some point, going to write themselves into an altercation, or right through the center of someone else's sensibilities." He concludes: "People are going to have to learn how to live in a world of honest writers."
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Nick Denton with a prediction on the Tablet PCs on they way: "Tablet users will be lazy bloggers." His take on Google News so far: "[It's] news search engine is very good; but they're no good at picking stories." |
Jim Louderback in USA Today on geeky terminology: "Soon 'blog' will replace 'bloviate' in describing windbags and blowhards. 'Turn the TV off, Marge; we expected a stemwinder, but Bush is just blogging.'"
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Steve Outing in a comment on Google News, the criticism some might levy at it, and indirectly what many think will happen in the blogosphere: "It's not unreasonable to posit that this "collaborative" story placement is a more accurate reflection of the top stories of the day than the placement decisions made at a single media outlet. Google News makes its placement decisions on collective editing intelligence."
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Johan Peter Lindberg on what he means by "cognitive blogging": "I mean that in order to more deeply understand a topic, blogging about it during the course of reading really enhances the understanding." |
Aaron Swartz: "People claim that no one will create if they can't get paid... I'd like to introduce you to free software and just about every weblog on the planet."
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Rayne Today provides a little historical context: "Blogging isn’t a new concept. Humans have been chronicling for as long as there has been media to support our need to create, to capture expression... Some efforts were singular, some collaborative - but all gained a larger life through observation and participation." |
Anil Dash on Dave Winer and RSS: "Dave says that RSS is a syndication format, nothing more. And that it has nothing to do with RDF. I am just curious, why does Dave get to make these decisions if these are community standards?"
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Roderick T. Long, a new convert to blogging: "Finding that another blogger (or unblogger) has scooped your site's name is a bit like showing up at a costume ball only to learn that one of the earlier arrivals has anticipated your Giant Carrot costume." |
Tom Shugart: "S/He who blogs makes a conscious choice to accept the risk of going public. It has a profound effect on one's relationship with one's self... One thing that it's allowed me to do is to explore my personal sense of authenticity and to claim my own authority, which was under-developed for many years."
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The New Republic launches a blog: "Our hope is to provide rapid-response, bite-sized commentary with the same critical voice and eye readers have come to expect from TNR."
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Matt Haughey on whether sites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot should be included in Google's new news service: "I thought about asking Google to index MetaFilter as well, but wondered "what news is being covered at blogs, aside from being reflections of news being reported elsewhere?"
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J. Neil Doane in an essay on why he hates blogs: "Clearly weblogs are fucking retarded as a general rule... What can be plainly seen is that most weblog authors need something to push them back into the real world from the self-centered and delusional world they have created for themselves."
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Emily O'Neill, a 16-year-old blogger who maintains three blogs, including one into which she spills "all [her] teen-agerly insecurities,": "Blogging keeps me in contact with my friends, keeps my thoughts in order, and entertains me and the load of guests I get daily... [It's] a pastime of sorts." |
The One True b!X defends meta-blogging (and me): "Without question, blogging about weblogs is a meta-category than can become tedious and somewhat incestuous... The fact that Jolliffe's entry referencing a criticism of his site nicely illustrates a truly open and transparent approach to writing a weblog. Such transparency, of course, is an element of what we argue is necessary for establishing credibility." |
Mike Demaria: "Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can't possibly live up to their potential."
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Madison Slade, aka Moxie, on blog celebrity: "Yesterday afternoon, I was the 'Luckiest Girl in Hollywood.' I got to have lunch with the very charming and svelte Doc Searls."
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Ray Ozzie on implementing pingbacks for blogs: "I don't have a 'discuss' link on this blog for a reason: I think that it's a Good Thing that this blog medium is different than a traditional electronic discussion medium - relying on human mechanisms to 'spread the word' about interesting referrals, rather than technical mechanisms."
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Doc Searls on a conversation he had with a fellow blogger: "We talked about all kinds of stuff, but one item that sticks in my mind was our co-realization that blogging to a huge degree thrives in the Googlesphere."
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JD Lasica provides a transcript of last week's panel discussion on blogs and journalism that was convened by Paul Grabowicz at Berkeley. Among the remarks:
Dan Gillmor on "do-it-yourself" journalism: "Something's going on that's amazing right now, and it's the process of people getting involved in the creation of information that is valuable and often accurate... There's this blurring of lines and I don't know where it's going to come out, but I do know that something major is going on that is bringing journalism from the top down and the bottom up."
JD Lasica: "The most serious challenge facing newsrooms today is that readers think we're largely irrelevant to their lives... Participatory journalism brings them into the news equation." |
Scott Heiferman, the founder of MEETUP: "Today's the day. I'm officially no longer interested in the world of blogs." The cause? Corante on Blogging: "The world of bloggers talking about blogging and other bloggers is boring. This is the page that did me in." |
Amy Langfield reacts to the New York Times article on blogging and whether news sources should have their journalists doing it: "As a former copy editor and desk editor, I want to say Good God, NO!..." Later in the same post: "The reality of it is that many reporters really want to be columnists, and most reporters have harbored thoughts of seeing their editor vaporized – so of course blogs seem like a dream."
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Sheila Lennon of the Providence Journal provides the full text of her interview with David Gallagher, responding to his question about whether she'd recommend blogging to other news sources: "Absolutely. We're educating and involving readers in the decisions that will affect their future. The feedback is instantaneous, and the stories advance cooperatively." |
Dave Winer on the New York Times' apparent deal with Google to index its site: "What are the implications of this? Here's one. Martin Nisenholtz may now have a chance of winning his bet with me." |
Eugene Volokh on "insultblogging" and a specific post he excerpts: "I apologize if I'm sounding schoolmarmish... [but] I feel I have an interest here: I want blogging, public-issue blogging, and centrist/libertarian/free-market/sensibly-pro-war public-issue blogging to succeed... if these smart people just cut back on the insults and focus on the substantive argument our views would be so much likelier to prevail." |
Jeff Jarvis comments on the panel Columbia's convening as it reconsiders the mission of its journalism school: "You will not find any emissaries from the future of any weight, experience, or credibility... I could nominate people who have changed journalism and reporting and commentary using the tools of this new medium and the new relationship with the audience they create, but what's the point."
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Jenny Malleron on the occasion of her 33rd birthday: "I remember my first blog post. I remember my first contributions to an emerging community... I remember being surprised, enlightened, fascinated, excited, terrified, and hungry... I remember the bile I was able to expel by the grace of the blogging revolution..." And, she continues, "I remember the future here... I remember being afraid of the future, and how important it is to be anything but silent, invisible." |
Amanda Kooser in a run-of-the-mill article introducing Entrepeneur's readers to blogging: "The elements of interactivity, community and collaboration will be key as growing businesses adopt blogs for customer relations, advertising, promotion and even internal communications."
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Shelagh Garside to dailiee:
dailee, dailee, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for a blog from you...
so please be sweet
and give us a treat
please, please log in to MT, do! |
Jacob Weisberg of Slate on a correction they issued which linked to blogger Eugene Volokh's proper account of the facts: "I'm not sure people are going to click on a correction about a piece they may or may not have read." |
The One True b!X on a CNN story about blogs : "In the never-ending writing and re-writing the mythos of weblog history, let's all try to remember that weblogs were not somehow illegitimate prior to their 'discovery' by the mass media."
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Danah Boyd comments, in her masters thesis, on Blogdex and Netscan, the Usenet tracker: "While these tools fail to make the leap between data and their value, they are particularly noteworthy because they take the first step in making otherwise uncollected data accessible in unique ways." |
David Streitfeld in a profile of Larry Lessig and the proliferation of independent voices he says he's fighting for: "It's already getting hard to remember what it was like before the internet brought a million different voices into your home... the Net was all about experimentation and openness, a place where no one needed a printing press to publish an article."
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Andrew Sullivan: "Funny, isn't it, that the New York Times would run a piece about how weblogs can lead to friction between bloggers and their mainstream media outlets, without mentioning yours truly."
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John Hiler ponders why we are the way we are : "It pains me to witness the destructive power of ego as it lays waste to the blogging countryside. I don't think there's a lot we can do about that, but it's truly shaking my faith in the blogging medium itself."
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Doc Searls on Information Week's recent article on blogging (which he calls a "new low"): "This piece is so relentlessly clueless about blogs that I hardly know where to begin." |
Eric Alterman, in an article in today's Times by David Gallagher, on the blogging MSNBC pays him to do: "I can't imagine a nicer way to make a living. It's therapeutic..."
Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, comments, in the same article, on the use of blogs by traditional news publishers: "If I'm a lawyer advising a news organization, the idea of a weblog like this would just make me break out in hives... the editorial side and the lawyers are going to have a clash." |
Erin Clerico on yesterday's donnybrook over the Weblogger name: "I admit that I was wrong, hasty, a moron, a bully, a low life, a Nazi and all of the other unkind things that the blogging community has said about me and my actions. I'm human, I made a mistake, I admit it and quickly rectified it"
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Phil Wolff on mediablog literacy: "Each medium carries its own vocabularies, grammars, conventions. They play against each other but you have to know what works. Cinema, news, music, journalism, theater, and graphic design have huge legacies and institutions going back hundreds of years. We will pull from each to compose the mediablogging body of knowledge."
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Phil Wolff with some reasons why "Johnny can't klog": "Fear of failure... Fear of criticism... Fear of reprisal... Fear of looking stupid..."
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Ray Ozzie: "[I have] wondered about the challenges that I'd encounter in maintaining an effective blog. Surely time is one issue, but over the past week or two I've also experienced a different form of challenge: passionate distraction... I've been trying to get into a rhythm with the blog, but when my mind is in a different and exciting place, it's challenging to shift gears." |
Dylan Tweney in a post on whether blogging's form or medium: "Is RSS/RDF syndication a medium? I think so. And this syndication is a big part of what makes weblogs so interesting and so powerful."
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John S. Irons on Paul Krugman's surfing habits and his recent citation of blogs in his NY Times op-ed column: "I'm starting to think that bloggers are the subconscious of the web."
Brad DeLong chimes in in the comments: "Krugman says that he has "pretty much" restricted his regular weblog reading to me and Jonathan Micah Marshall." |
Danny Dawson on Rebecca Blood's reaction to the news that Meg Hourihan's readers sometimes send her stuff from her Amazon wish list: "The jealously was so thick you could squish it between your toes."
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Etienne Pelaprat, in a discussion thread on whether blogging can be considered journalism, on how journalists get started: "You begin by writing opinion pieces, by writing reviews and articles on things that matter to YOU." He continues: "Bloggers write about what matters to them, and like journalists they will be biased. These blogs are, for some, the roots of their journalism careers, and I say they are journalists. And furthermore, they are the ones pushing journalism in a new direction." |
Dave Weinberger to InformationWeek's "Secret CIO" on his recent criticism of enterprise blogging: "Even if you were 100% right, you're missing the point... Blogging is happening whether you want it to or not. Your best employees are already setting up weblogs — and mailing lists, and discussion boards, and web pages — to talk about what matters to them, in their own voice."
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Mitchell Stephens, in an article from two years ago that's been reprinted, on the raging debate about the role of journalism schools: "Let students explore. No major newspaper in the country restricts itself to the inverted pyramid, and news, as we've noticed, is now also being communicated by media other than newspapers... Why can't students be asked to experiment with a variety of other writing styles: not just features but essays, first-person narratives, opinion pieces, cinema-vérité reportage, fast-cut images, and multimedia and interactive forms?"
Orville Schell comments, in the same piece, on new forms they're playing with at Berkeley's journalism school: "Not having come from the world of journalism education I sometimes find my ignorance has served me well. You don't even know you¹re stepping over the line. What makes sense to me is to be out there on the raggedy raggedy, trying things." |
Jay Small in an article about building the right weblog architecture: "You may not always agree with Dave Winer, Dan Gillmor or Doc Searls, but they say things that get people's attention. They're oft-quoted because they're so quotable." |
Adrian Holovaty comments on Google's evolving news search capability: "Some -- likely those with backgrounds in editing -- will decry the lack of human judgment in the site's story selection... But deep inside, operators of news websites will panic. If you listen closely, you just might start hearing the screams." |
Jeff Jarvis announces his candidacy for the presidency (via Fox's just-announced new reality show): "I've decided to run for your support as the candidate of the Blogosphere."
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JD Lasica on a sentiment he and Dan Gillmor share: "Dan and I took a different view, that while most webloggers aren't journalists, we're at the beginning of a greatly expanded media ecosystem in which gifted amateurs, niche experts and eyewitnesses giving first-hand accounts are all engaging in a form of journalism."
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Nick Sweeney: "If you're getting your knickers in a twist because someone won't link to you, you really do need to subject yourself to the cold shower of priorities."
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Kevin Barbieux, aka The Homeless Guy, who says he really is homeless and blogs from public libraries thanks to Bill Gates: "I am a bit confused as to why there is a difference between my blog and others. On other sites the PayPal donation button is considered a tip jar, but on my site it's considered panhandling?" |
Tim Ireland proffers advice on how companies might employ blogs as part of their marketing efforts: "What you really need to do is mingle. Listen to the conversation, find out where you fit in and come back to us when you're ready... We'll still be here and willing to listen, but try not to fuck up the party for the rest of us." |
The One True b!X: "It occurs to us... that we may at times be making out weblog writing to be somehow a rather plodding thing... Where's the fucking joy, for crying out loud?" |
Christian Crumlish, again, comments on the various blogbooks he's reading and We've Got Blog in particular: "I've never objected to collecting online material in book form and don't understand people who object to it on principle... What an impoverished media landscape we'd live in if the lines between one medium and the next were rigid." |
Christian Crumlish on the blogging vs. journalism debate: "We are all writing each other. Pros and amateurs. This is powerful. In the written world, language is magic and power expresses itself."
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Stavros the Wonder Chicken: "I have a feeling that attempts to use bizblogs to take over some of the internal functions at which Notes/Domino systems have so often miserably failed is a case of everything looking like a nail because the tool you're holding is a hammer." |
[Corante plug: We're excited to announce the launch of a new weblog column. It's called Moore's Lore (think Moore's Law) and is authored by Dana Blankenhorn, a long-time business and technology journalist. Subtitled "the pace of progress," the section will be examining the applicability of the premise first articulated by Intel's Gordon Moore - not just to computer processing power but also to telephony, particular fields of science and a host of other technologies. Check it out and pass it along if you know people who'd find it interesting. Dana's also looking for reactions and suggestions and would welcome any feedback from the blogosphere. Thanks much, Hylton] |
Rick Klau comments on his site, its growth since it launched, and how Google "learns": "Traffic to my site grew incrementally, but Google was still hanging out on the sidelines waiting to see if this site was for real." He continues: "Google is a good barometer of what other Internet users find useful about a particular term. If anything, blogs increase Google's democratic leanings..." |
Justin Hall on meeting significant others via blogs: "I would recommend this to anyone -- if you see someone who you like through the smoke and noise online, and you can saunter over and stand at a slight distance and watch them to see how they carry themselves, to read their tone of voice, to observe their links and interests. In a way, personal websites are like personal advertisements, or a way to circumvent the matchmaker... except you hear it from the girl herself." |
Peter Merholz on last night's panel discussion at Berkeley on blogs: "The panel was Okay. Really hadn't said much that hadn't been said before in similar contexts... The person who got it most, in my mind, was Scott Rosenberg... Scott pointed out how weblogs are something that, simply, couldn't appear in any other medium, and that's what makes them special." |
Herbert W. Lovelace cautions companies against the broad employment of blogs: "According to leading-edge articles, Weblogs, or blogs for short, are the wave of the future for enhancing the dissemination of company knowledge and fulfilling the potential of the Internet... However, if technology history is any guide, take the hype with a grain of salt." |
The One True b!X on the hype over blogs: "Most of [it] (note that we say "most" not "all") doesn't come from weblog quarters, but from the press which has had a long-standing habit of either demonizing or hyping each new facet of the Web to come along in any given year." |
Nick Denton, who says of all the squabbling going on between bloggers: "Is this how Usenet died?," on blogroll ettiquette: " |
Mark Pilgrim on the "b-link": "It’s set apart from the main content; it’s its own thing really. A blog within a blog... It reminds me of [the b-side] —the A-side is the hit, the song you bought the record for... The B-side is a throwaway, or an experiment, or a mystery, or a goof."
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Doc Searls: "If you asked me to name the hottest future levers in election campaigning (and governing as well), I'd have said The Net' in general and weblogs in particular."
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Arnold Kling objects to Dan Gillmor's contention that big media is killing diversity of opinion: "I am tired of populist-poseurs who assure us that They are taking over, our freedom is going away, our choices are disappearing, and so forth. It's just not true."
He continues: " I am opposed to some of the same legal proposals to which Gillmor objects. But I don't try to distort reality to try to appeal to some adolescent fantasy that we are the anointed underground revolutionaries who are freedom's last hope." |
Tom Coates on the recent debate over whether there's sexism in the blogosphere: "If you're really looking for a lesson to learn from all of this, then could I suggest is that we should all keep aware of how easy it is to be parochial when you're writing about your life." |
Ian Betteridge on Apple's iCal: "[It's] the flipside of blogging: whereas a blog addresses the past, iCal addresses the future."
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Jeff Jarvis on media: "[Study it and] you will get to the very core of democracy and how we as a nation come to decisions... You will understand the very essence of commerce and capitalism and how we make choices and calculate value... You will get a new window on our society and its every aspect... "All this was true before, but it is truer now with the Internet. For now, at last, the audience itself has a medium and a voice." |
An un-attributed post in Andrew Sullivan's letters page in which the author reacted to William Safire's explanation of blogging: "Bloggers are not the Internet's answer to the New York Times. We're the Internet's answer to Bill Safire... If Safire wants to compare apples and apples he should be comparing the blogosphere to the old-media punditocracy." |
Andrew Sullivan in a short post pointing his readers to reactions to his blog-writing: "Welcome to the most masochistic letters page on the Web."
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Sandra Baron, in an article by Rod Dreher on the general subject of whether the writings of bloggers could be found libelous: "It's obvious that individuals are unaware of the risks of libel and invasion of privacy, and don't realize that what they're saying on these websites could set themselves up for libel lawsuits from individuals and entities from around the world." |
Doc Searls on the changes Daniel Brandt would like to see implemented at Google: "For one thing, none of us here in the blogworld would get rich so fast — rich in fortunate Google PageRanks, that is." |
Orrin Judd in a response to Jonah Goldberg's piece: "Many folks ask why we do such a thing as blog... It's because we're pedants, of course... And if, mirabile dictu, an opinion breaks through and has an influence, however small, in how at least this one community (of blogs, bloggers, and readers) perceives an issue, that can give you a real feeling of accomplishment."
He continues: "Perhaps it's too grandiose for some, but I'd like to think these are genuinely democratic moments, the type of moments that our Founders must look down upon and say: 'Yes, our experiment, though much different than we ever imagined, is still working. The opinions of the lowly can contend with those of the high and mighty.'" |
Jonah Goldberg in the American Enterprise: "The only thing growing faster than blogs is the hype over blogs... what many of the blogger-revolutionaries don’t understand is that while blogging may be big news, bloggers probably won’t be." |
Eugene Volokh addresses the issue of how the law would view libel in blogs: "The best bet for getting protection for blogs, I think, isn't a constitutional defense but a claim that blogs literally fit within the statutory text."
Update: Eugene has written in to clarify the context of the above comment: "[I] was discussing *special statutes that give protection beyond what the First Amendment provides* -- for instance, statutes that provide immunity if a retraction is printed... Outside the scope of these special statutes, blogs are treated pretty much the same as other media, and are just as entitled to a constitutional defense (and the standard libel law defenses) as the mass media are. [Apologies and hope that's more clear.] |
Larry Lessig on the recent debates he's touched off in the blogosphere and his need to focus on other things at the moment: "Back soon, I promise, to debates that in their civility and seriousness show the best of what this space can be." |
David Docherty of the Guardian: "You know that moment when you reach down to a child with a smile on your face and praise on your lips and stand up with vomited multi-coloured remnants of Alphabetti Spaghetti over your Armani trousers? I suffered a similar fate in my last column in which I praised the fast developing and fascinating world of bloggers."
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Dorothea Salo on the pot she's stirred of late: "I am touched by the Cluetrainers’ belief that real people always speak in real voices. It isn’t so, though I wish it were and I envy the Cluetrainers their belief." Later in the same post: "Blogging threatens families for the same reasons it threatens PR-dependent corporations. It threatens the fiction, the public façade of perfection, the private walls around anger and pain and disagreement and error."
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Jenny Levine on the computer problems that have kept her from blogging in the past month: "You know that phrase "one thing after another," well I'm going to have it inscribed on my tombstone. If one more thing goes wrong, I'm probably moving in with the Amish." Her advice: "I suggest you go out and buy some flowers and chocolate for your computer and talk nicely to it." |
Tony Pierce on his blog-writing: "I don't care who gets hurt, I don't care what happens to me, I don't care how out of control it looks, I don't care. I have a real job to get back to and be slightly better than mediocre at. Here is one of the few places where i feel like I have the freedom to be completely mediocre."
On his simmering anger about that recent LA Times piece: "My slop is in a blog. I get paid zilch for it. Their slop is on newsprint. The Times gets paid zillions for it. Huge difference." |
Jeff Jarvis on Eric Olsen: "The bad news: Eric is abandoning his other blog because he has a life; the good news: he's now devoting his considerable energies to Blogcritics." |
John Robb on the possible future of blogs: "What happens when the walls and barriers to information fall? What happens when individuals can publish what they find, with analysis, to a global audience? What if people find this low cost advice and information actually is good or at least 90% of what they need."
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Quinquereme on the Guardian's best British blog contest and sentiments that it may help validate blogs: "[It's] indicative of the incredible distance the print media has managed to travel up its own arse... you've totally missed the point. You're not validating us, we're invalidating you." |
Judy Hourihan on a point made by her daughter Meg and her coauthors - "that blogging exposes a different side of a person from other types of contact" - in We Blog: "All along I've felt that daily reading of megnut provided me with more insights into her life than sharing the same house ever did, but who knew I was doing the same thing with heyjud." |
Anil Dash in a debate over sexism in blogging: "I find it reassuring the the earliest weblog communities were almost always very gender integrated, if not completely gender-neutral. One of the upsides of that is that lots of the early bloggers have paired off and found people."
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Matt Welch on the LA Times blog story: "This article is embarrassing. It fails, utterly, to identify a Los Angeles angle (beyond talking to a bunch of folks from USC), and it drips with the usual condescension."
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A. K. M. Adam on the bloggers he's been spending time with offline: "Did someone ever suggest that blogging might put a crimp in your social life?" |
The One True b!X on the snobbery of some bloggers: "For nearly a decade now we've been online, and it never ceases to amaze us the degree of elitism and holier-than-thou-ness to which various subcultures here often seem so determined to stoop." |
Clay Shirky in commentary about community: "We have had the necessary technology to build weblogs since 1994, but weblogs themselves didn't take off until 5 years later, not because the deep technology wasn't there, but because the shallow technology wasn't. Weblogs are primarily innovations in interface, and, as importantly, innovations in the attitudes of the users."
But, he adds, "don't kid yourself into believing that giving reporters weblogs and calling the reader comments 'community' is the same as the real thing. Weblogs operate on a spectrum from media outlet (e.g. InstaPundit) to communal conversation (e.g. LiveJournal), but most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast." |
Greg Beato: "Blogs offer freedom [to writers], but if blogs don't also provide some kind of income, they'll never be any writer's first priority. And as long as that's the case, the Web will continue to function as it has for the last eight years or so: as a worldwide, around-the-clock open mike night."
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Henry Copeland on the traffic some blogs are seeing: "Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online."
He continues: "Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe's law, which states that the usefulness of a network equals the square of its user count. Here's the Copeland corollary: site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links... all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web." |
Tony Pierce comments on the LA times story: "Your writer did a shitty ass job.... keep shooting yourselves in the foot by this sort of sloppy reporting and your enemies and critics will just have to sit back and enjoy the spectacle." |
Jonathan Peterson takes a cue from John Hiler's comments comparing the early days of blogs to those of comics: "If anyone really wants to dig into the history of comics as a future map for the direction of blogs, they should buy copies of "Understanding Comics" and "Reinventing Comics" by Scott McCloud... I will be revisiting them for that reason myself, thanks to John's suggestion." |
Dave Weinberger on the best thing about the LA Times article on blogging (which he liked): "Not a word about 'teenagers writing about what they had for breakfast.'"
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Alex Halavais on the blogs that proliferated after 9/11 last year in an article in the LA Times on the great blog/journalism debate: "Many of these accounts do not follow the canons in fact checking, seeking out alternative or opposing views, or attempted impartiality. They are necessarily more socially constructed, and read more like rumors." |
Chris, better known as Stavros the Wonder Chicken, on the vacation from blogging he's taking: "I need a break, I think, from approval-seeking, to try and find something that's a little...meatier... to which I should devote my primary attention." |
Jennifer Balderama: "Some would say the "real" work is more valid and more important than the stuff we create for our blogs. But for some people, these blogs hold more import than those critical readers realize... a blog is all of it: an exercise, a motivation, a distraction, a venue for 'serious' work, a venue for play, a way to connect, to share the venom or the love."
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Jeneane Sessum on men expressing themselves: "To a great extent, that's what I think many men are doing through weblogging. The brave ones. You guys ARE the counter-culture movement among men." She continues: "Men are connecting in ways that are rare and special and human." |
Katherine Olson on the blog for the new Fox series Firefly: "I found my eyes glazing over as I skimmed through the gushing. I think this might hit the nail on the head for the problems inherent in commercial blogging." |
John Hiler with more on the similarities he's seen between the early days of blogging and those of comics: "Both new media formats have a common origin: they came of age during a time of war, as the world united to fight Evil."
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James Lileks in a comment about newspaper columnists: "Most good blogs I read display no sense of limitation; they’re not constrained by the need to be Important every time they approach the mike, so they develop a sense of personality much quicker than a newspaper columnist ever can." |
Sally Mercer on the blogging she's just begun: "I can sense that this blogging lark may become addictive... Think of this blog as the very first series of Sex in the City; appalling at first glance but a slow grower." |
Tom Shugart on his return from a few-week vacation: "Blogging has become so much a part of me, I can barely remember not having been a blogger." On blogging: "It's an opportunity--an opportunity to be more than I would otherwise be." |
Jim McGee on the potential of k-logs for companies: "A loose network of knowledge workers maintaining weblogs represents that early warning system for an organization. Weblogs applied to organizational knowledge problems provide an outlet for picking up early signals of the unexpected and amplifying them so they can be better heard." |
Beth Goza, who's been blogging for a few weeks, on blog envy: "Spend any amount of time reading lots of blogs and it becomes very clear - some of us are just spectators." |
Brendan O'Neill says of Israpundit, the pro-Israeli groupblog that launched recently: "This might just be one little blog, but it captures what the once-mighty pro-Israel lobby has been reduced to."
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Donna Wentworth comments on a clarification that just came her way: "That was the quickest fact check the blogosphere has yet afforded me. Amazing."
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Dan Hartung asks, of "link and think" campaigns: "Is this a valid way for individual blogger voices to combine, or will it all just get lost in the noise?" |
Paul Boutin on Burning Man: "I think this is the year that blogging from Black Rock City becomes a cliche." |
Jamie Jackson on her blogging: "It's a very strange, strange thing... I think it's more a form of therapy than anything else." |
Doc Searls on the economics of his blogging: "Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I've ever done."
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Henry Copeland on the approach employed by those in "thin media" small, profit-seeking editorial and linking endeavors: "My favorite style would mix them all depending on post and then occasionally add some well-flagged editorializing. I can't think of anyone publishing in just that style, actually."
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Howard Owens quibbles with Reynolds' point, saying it's the news not the press the public cares about: "Bloggers tend to be much more concerned about real news, real issues, such as Iraq, or what the EU is up to, or what’s in the water we’re drinking or whether there’s life on Mars. We don’t spend a lot of time debating the relevance of how many miles George Bush jogs each morning."
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Glenn Reynolds, in commenting on an article about the public's seeming disdain for the press: "My advice to those who read this article and want to know how to improve the press's image: read a lot of weblogs. Because webloggers don't hate the press as such... you become a weblogger because, fundamentally, you think the press is important, and you love what it does enough to hate to see sloppy and biased work." |
Paul Grabowicz in Darwin on the class he's teaching with John Battelle this fall at Berkeley: "If there’s anything a journalism school should be doing, [it] is, one, turn out people that can report and write and have ethical bearing and, two, that we experiment and push and take risks and let everybody else in on what the results are." |
Andrew Sullivan, who people keep citing as evidence there's money to be made from blogging, on John Scalzi's conclusion that it's likely to be a loss-leader: "I fear I agree with him."
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Johan Bollen in the Washington Post on the "hive mind" or "global brain" that some believe may one day emerge, perhaps with some help from blogs: "It's about helping people find the connections between information... What I'm talking about is a Web that bends itself to the actions of its users." |
John Scalzi, who believes blogging's unlikely to "ever be a profitable endeavor in itself": "Amateur -- in the classical sense of someone who does something out of love -- is not at all a dirty word, and financial success is almost certainly the wrong metric by which to judge the success of blogging as a medium." |
John Hiler on similarities he sees between blogging and Michael Chabon's account of the early days of comics in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: "What really got me was the sense of shame and embarrassment that comic book artists felt at the comparison to their newspaper counterparts. Sound familiar?" |
Dylan Tweney on the knowledge management potential of blogs: "I think that the corporate world is only starting to scratch the surface of how business blogs can be used... I suspect that the "blogosphere" is gradually turning into [Doug Engelbart's] Augment system."
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Clay Shirky, in a story by David Gallagher, on the self-organizing clusters that make up the core of Brad Fitzpatrick's LiveJournal: "Most people's lives are boring to anyone outside of a small circle of friends... We all understand how you can have an intimate dinner party for 6 but not for 60." |
Andrew Sullivan rhetorically asks, in his ongoing exchange on Slate with Kurt Andersen: "Will bloggers actually deeply undermine editorial and corporate power in the media?" His answer: "No. Blogs aren't replacing mainstream media; they're infiltrating, supplementing, and buttressing it."
Kurt Andersen, rhetorically: "Are blogs ever going to drive a transformation of the press as significant as, say, cable TV news has?" His answer: "Nahhh. Providing a self-publishing outlet for professional journalists' rejected print pieces isn't exactly, as we used to say, not so far back in the day, a killer app."
Andersen on talent: "As we've learned in every digital realm, the proliferation of groovy new tools to make and distribute media (music, movies, bloggers' pensées, whatever) does not expand the more or less fixed pool of genuine talent in the world." |
Neal Pollack, tongue firmly in cheek, on Andrew Sullivan's comments about Iran's disdain for Americans: "I think he's slightly off-base. America is hated, world-wide, because we have superior bloggers, and they know it. They can't stand the fact that our opinions are sharper and better-informed."
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Ken Layne on the continuing reports of late that young Iranian women are taking to blogging: "Ain't no regime in the world strong enough to deal with an army of pissed-off teen-aged blogger girls."
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Glenn Reynolds: "Only in a weblog would you hear someone sound even faintly guilty about not responding to an op-ed by the afternoon of the day it was published!"
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Andrew Sullivan, in an email exchange with Kurt Andersen about whether "blogs are changing our culture": "The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don't have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void... You just say what the hell you want. No wonder ornery libertarian types enjoy it so much."
Later in the same post on blogging: "It's serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness... It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain."
Kurt Andersen: "As much as I enjoy and even depend on several blogs, that incestuous, smug-but-needy, seaside-resort-full-timer sensibility is a besetting sin of the genre—as it always has been, indeed, of Internet pioneers as a species." |
Christopher Kanis, whose blog Glenn Reynolds pointed to a few months ago, sending, in the process, his future wife his way: "Thank you Professor Reynolds -- for helping to bring us together."
Joanne Jacobs, in the comments section of the post: "May your permalink last forever." |
Stefan Sharkansky says he wishes him luck but doubts Bill Quick's BloggingNetwork idea will fly, comparing blogging to open source in which there is a "decentralized, self-organizing, and self-correcting "volunteer army" of passionate, creative and obsessive geeks," the qualities, he says, that "turn the best output of the blogosphere into an increasingly important link in the media value chain."
He continues: "Bloggers will never replace the New York Times, just as free software will never replace a lot of the enterprise software that's too boring for Linux hackers to write out of love. But both phenonmena make their respective ecosystems more robust. And just as cheap Linux has put severe pricing pressure on commercial operating systems, the ever ready army of volunteer bloggers will ruthlessly conspire to drive the margins of the paid bloggers to 0." |
Dorothea Salo on a post she made in anger: "I won’t pull the post—not because I’m particularly proud of it, or because I stand unequivocally behind what I said, but because I believe in warts-and-all self-presentation. And that was a wart." |
Ed Cone on how his blogging informs his career: "If journalism is the first draft of history, then blogging is sometimes the first draft of journalism." |
Ray Ozzie comments on the sharing of information, personal publishing and the pace of change: "No, Jeff Immelt and Karol Wojtyla and Trent Lott and Tom Ridge as leaders may never have direct personal conversations on the Internet, but they won't have to... their direct staffs and trusted advisors will grow to understand the power of emergent Internet-based communications channels."
Ozzie concludes: "Transformations don't happen prescriptively. They happen disruptively, or they "creep in" at a grassroots level, from the edge. It's only just begun." |
Andrew Sullivan, of the bloggers he likes: "It just goes to show that pleasurable and informative surfing is now possible completely outside the established media. Together, these blogs rival any op-ed page in the country. And they're all free."
To which Jonah Goldberg responds: "Blogophilia can be annoying enough, but let’s not fall into the trap of saying that since some mavericks are bloggers, all bloggers are mavericks."
To which Sullivan responds: "It's hard not to be accused of either a) ignoring small up-and-coming blogs or b) being pretentiously blogophilic." |
Glenn Reynolds on a profile of him that calls him "blogger royalty": "Nobody surpasses me in thinking that weblogs are cool, but they're a pretty small part of the world, all things considered."
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Tim Judah reports on the growing voice of Iranian youths: "A lot of what they're doing, it turns out, is blogging." He continues: "Bloggers and runaways, rock bands, prostitutes and girls who just want to have fun are all part of the picture of a young, changing Iran..." |
Mark Halperin notes the success of ABC News' blog on the daily machinations of Washington: "The popularity of this proves the oldest rule of media -- content is king." Says Halperin of The Note: ""People take us seriously, they'll talk to us. That's a great plus for ABC News. There are spillover benefits to our political coverage in general." |
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