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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
Howard Bashman responds to the news that a Fifth Circuit judge who's a regular reader of his blog stopped by his site the other day, read a post in which Bashman pointed out an error in an opinion he'd just delivered, and issued, the very next day, an amended order correcting the mistake: "An astonishing development, or just a small yet positive benefit of the amazing digital age in which we live?"
Denise Howell weighs in on the development: "[Was I] surprised? Naah, I guess I just assume everyone involved in appellate jurisprudence reads Howard's blog at least as assiduously as I do... Isn't this precisely how the Web is supposed to work?"
Rafe Colburn's take on it: "This astounds me." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley says that "only twice in my life have I had this sense that a technology was about to become really important." But, she worries, "what's going to be the effect on blogging when/if the exponential curve takes its sharp turn upwards?" |
Marc Canter responds to Joi Itoi's post about the term "blog": "What I spend most of my waking life on right now is what ELSE is there and what is THAT called - that's circling or surrounding this publishing/communicating/interacting phenomena." |
Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis on the primary challenge facing traditional media: "Perhaps news media do not see themselves as connectors because they don't understand the network economy they now reside in... [The news media] need to explore not only new models of the newsroom... but also new malleable, flexible organizational structures." |
Jeneane Sessum proposes something others have alluded to: the "anti-blogroll": "I would list all the blogs I recommend avoiding because they spew hate and meaningless muck... The sum total of assholes on our combined anti-blogrolls could compete daily for a spot on anti-daypop, or--for more sizzle--'daypoop.'" |
Dorothea Salo: "I think I was something of a blogger before there were blogs... It’s just writing about stuff. Running off at the keyboard. (B)logorrhea. Nothing new at all. People did write to each other and for each other before there were blogs. Honest." |
Shelley Powers says that while "weblogging can be cathartic... weblogging as therapy isn't for everyone." She expands on the point: "The cathartic experience of writing our fears and troubles to a weblog can be accompanied by an increased vulnerability as we feel the pressure of such public exposure." |
Sheila Lennon, in a post in which she reflects on the junkets extended to some bloggers by Microsoft and the ensuing debate about whether it compromised what bloggers wrote about the company's products: "Blogging is bottom-up journalism. When it comes to reviewing, Microsoft shouldn't control this pipe, the bloggers should. This is how we literally turn the system around." |
Colby Cosh on "InstaPower": "Everybody thinks the amazing thing about Glenn Reynolds is the volume of posting he does, but when you compare it to the amount of reading he must be doing, the actual editing and posting look fairly trivial."
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John Brockman, in an essay from earlier this year, on the new humanists: "The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort—scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers—are at the center of today's intellectual action." |
Toby Mundy, in an article in Prospect Magazine, on book publishing: "The future, it seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will enter the world through proliferating channels." His cautionary words for the industry: "For publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since the 16th century." |
Jerry Kindall explains, in an article by Michelle Delio, just what the blog-spammers are up to: "They're trying to jump-start a meme... If you have a nefarious mind and no consideration for how the Web works socially, it is a fairly clever and original, if evil, idea." |
K. Paul Mallasch offers up a list of various blogger types. The typical post of the "teenie blogger": "So, like today I was in the cafeteria talking about Shelly's stupid blog, ok, and then Josie like totally walked up in my face and said my blog was trash and I was like, noo way, talk to the blog, ya know, cause i'm cool and I don't play that. So anyway, I need to go eat dinner now. I'll blog on it later."
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Christine Boese follows up on One True b!X's criticisms of his article for CNN: "In blogs I saw the thing that was lost in the dot.com feeding frenzy and scammers greed-fest: independent voices outside of corporate journalism. And by golly, the last thing I'd think was needed was for those voices to be noticed by corporate journalism outlets such as I work for now."
Why did he write the original column? "Because I like to get the word out to the folks who get their media from lowest-common-denomonator-land, who are oblivious to the indy voices and undiscovered continent of the REAL Internet..."
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Ed Cone comments on Tara Sue Grubb's candidacy for state representative in North Carolina: "The fact is that for whatever combination of reasons, Tara Grubb's weblog has paid off big as a political tool."
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Cameron Marlow on the release of Blogdex 2.0: "Now that I have an index of all pages related to a given weblog, it's much easier to generate the popularity contest to end all popularity contests." Which would, he says, "be priority one if the users were in control :)"
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Kat Bulkele, who says blogging can make the reporter's "pen and pad look a bit antiquated," on blogging and Wi-Fi: "In terms of content, Wi-Fi networks will be an access method rather than a big driver of new forms of content."
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Denise Howell on blogs and the evolution of law: "What webloggers are doing today, legal researchers may be doing tomorrow... [It] probably won't happen any time soon, but it's not difficult to see how techniques being tested in the weblog arena now may shape the way research is done and laws are made down the road." |
Evan Williams in the discussion prompted by Anil Dash's comments about the security of blogging tools after Blogger was breached on Friday: "For the uninitiated, keeping a service as complex as Blogger secure is a constant struggle." He continues: "I is the nature of small, underfunded business that sometimes mistakes happen. We fucked up. We got beat. We admit that. But the arrogance of all these people who have very little clue what they're talking about is pathetic." |
Tom Coates tries to clarify the comments that have prompted some to criticize him: "Essentially all I'm looking for is a way for a community of individuals to have more influence - more, but equal influence - on each other because I think that there have to be campaigning techniques that operate in addition to argument or debate... I'm not trying to present a fait accompli."
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Steve Himmer on the use of comments in blogs: "[They] are almost a kind of validation, a confirmation—an answering echo to the voice we throw across a dark and quiet chasm. Even bad comments... mean you're reaching someone somehow."
On the other hand, he continues: "I wouldn't want a bunch of yes-bloggers congratulating me on every word, nor would I want my comments to become a haven for opinions and aggressions far removed from my own—a cracker barrel for bigots, if you will." |
Steven Den Beste on the first wave of bloggers and how the differences some of them are having with the warbloggers: "They think they created this medium (a claim open to severe doubt) and somehow feel as if everyone who followed them had a moral obligation to not only use the form, but also to stay true to the philosophy of content. But it doesn't work that way." |
Kevin Holtsberry: "It is odd just how involved one's emotions and ego can get in blogging."
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Jeff Jarvis: "If we are not careful, weblogs will turn into catalogues of 'What I think about...' When people could publish their own web pages, they too quickly became catalogues of "my CD collection." |
Tom Coates says he's realizing how he can express opinion through linking... or not: "I now believe that as an individual operating responsibly in this sphere, I have to be aware of any and all potential abilities I have to legitimately exert whatsoever influence I might have in order to stop what I perceive to be morally wrong, corrupt politics, cheap argument and potentially warmongering." |
Tim Erickson of Politalk in an interview about political discourse on the Internet: "US citizens are way ahead of other countries in terms of using the internet to communicate with each other and the government on the issues that concern them the most." The reasons: "the history of grassroots public participation that we have in this country and the higher level of connectivity that we have over most European countries." |
J.D. Lasica asked a handful of PopTech's attendees last week where they get their news. Their general answer: increasingly it's blogs and alternative media. Lasica: "If the digerati gathered here represent the leading edge of the Internet Age, reflecting where our wired society may be headed a few years hence, then online news publications have their work cut out." |
Anil Dash says he's putting an end to his tiff with fabs of Little Green Footballs: "I've learned a lot and am quite pleased overall with the end results of what's transpired... I think I've had a chance to talk to people on all sides of this issue, and it's been engaging, illuminating and educational."
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Andrew Orlowski on the reaction to his parody of Beth Goza's blog last week: "What's strange is when an attack on one blogger is perceived as an attack on blogging in general. That implies that there can't possibly be a quality threshold in blogdom, and confirms John Dvorak's worst fears about groupthink. This is an unnecessarily defensive reaction and quite wrong." |
Denis Dutton announces that Arts & Letters Daily is back: "A little early in the day here for champagne, but the news seemed to make my coffee taste better than ever."
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Dave Winer: "Someday, not very long from now, we'll argue over bragging rights for who has the first All-Web-Services-Authored weblog. For the record, that's this site, Scripting News."
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Anil Dash on the security breach that seems to have occurred at Blogger: "There hasn't been a seriousness about the responsibility of developing [secure] applications as weblogs move to being a critical communication tool for people. This is one of the reasons that weblogs aren't generally taken seriously as business tools."
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Chris Locke, in thanking a long list of bloggers for keeping him alive: "The tenaciously popular notion that the Internet is somehow located on the other side of the tracks from the purported Real World is the by-product of limp intellects inhabiting substandard physical vehicles they have repossessed via Tantric Tapdancing, Esoteric Echolalia, and the ingestion of one too many Echinacea cheeseballs... Anyone who whines about the Internet undermining intimacy has clearly never blogged." |
Tom Coates again: "BLOGGER HAS BEEN HACKED... SOMEONE WAKE UP EV?!"
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Tom Coates says "this is a difficult post to write" before laying out his objections to warblogging and what it's wrought: "Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging."
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Jim McGee, who's teaching blogging in the classroom, on k-logging: "One of the lasting lessons of electronic commerce is that organizational boundaries are best when they are very porous. Too much of systems development and too much of business process reengineering tries to pretend that you can draw a neat line around the edge of the organization.... This reality of connectivity across organizations is even more true for knowledge work than it is for the routine processes of organizations." |
Rebecca Blood weighs in on the Anil Dash/Little Green Footballs controversy, saying, "I have made it a policy here not to comment on the various weblog controversies that arise in the community from time to time. Mostly they are stupid and unpleasant." Of Anil she says: "I'm proud that he's my friend, and I'm grateful that he's part of the weblog community." |
Tom Shugart: "When I blog, I do so, among other reasons, with the intent of giving my spirits a boost upward. The mere act of communicating with others—even virtually—often provides a needed lift in and of itself."
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Jeneane Sessum processes Clay Shirky's recent piece on blogging, says it's depressing, and draws a comparison: "I have seen this parallel within the music business... these same passionate... amateurs play for free... They clog up club after club, event after event, venue after venue. Some are good, some are not. Most will remain amateurs." |
Rebecca Blood, who says she's "somehow entered the food chain" after receiving a copy of Howard Rheingold's new book Smart Mobs, theorizes: "[It is] perhaps the first non-weblog book (though it mentions weblogs) to try to use weblogs to generate word-of-mouth." |
Anil Dash, in a long response to the Little Green Footballs controversy, comments on intimidation, bigotry and responsiblity in the blogosphere: "It's been a moderate surprise to see that a community that would rally to support various other political causes in esoteric realms ignore false attacks by the worst elements of the weblog world." |
Adina Levin, who says tech innovation's far from dead: "In the version of the semantic web exemplified by AllConsuming, Daypop and Google News, the nodes of the network are people. The links of the network are relationships among people; who are reading books, selecting stories to publish, selecting sites to link... The semantic web doesn't replace human intelligence, it multiplies it by connecting people."
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Tom Shugart: "It’s been my experience that blogging sharpens my ability to hear my inner voices. Sometimes those voices are just meaningless noise. At other times, they can be very instructive--like now, when I’m in a slump."
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Dan Chan: "Daypop will go offline starting Oct. 25 for a couple weeks."
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John Hiler says he's "starting to get really excited about blogging again," with the "whole blogs-as-media question... becoming increasingly interesting." |
Dana Blankenhorn, a long-time tech journalist (and a recent addition to Corante's roster of bloggers) who says blogging's "a new form of art in many ways," reflects on the a distinction he's noted between blogging and more traditional writing: "A column can be the perfect chocolate truffle. A blog entry can be an M&M. A column stands on its own [whereas] blogs are absorbed en masse, creating a pattern in the reader's mind."
But he also insists that unless "good bloggers make money... [blogging] willl remain a spelling bee, a stunt that's fun to watch, but ultimately irrelevant to real life." |
Mena Trott in an interview in which she discusses Moveable Type and blogging in general: "On a cultural level, I think the perception of weblogging as hobby will certainly shift as more people realize that weblogging serves as a powerful news and marketing tool... I think that there will be some sort of fork between weblogging and personal publishing." |
Disenchanted in an article on Google, Alexandria's Great Library and "standards of truth": "If facts can be established by having access to enough testimony in one place, then it gives you an idea of what modern search engines—a far faster, accessible, and friendlier resource for the layman than a library—are doing for everyday critical thinking."
From its concluding paragraph: "Google satisfies the current perception of truth by finding authorities, but by doing so it may cause that perception to change. It'll spoil us commoners the same way scholars have been spoiled since ancient Greece, because while we won't totally abandon our respect for authorities, we will at least lose our reservations against questioning them." |
Phil Windley on transparency: "Part of my belief in blogging stems from a belief that people ought to know what I'm thinking on issues, even when its not popular." |
Jim McGee, who's teaching MBAs to blog: "There are four hurdles to pass to move from willing volunteer to competent blogger: learning the technology environment, developing an initial view of blogging, plugging into the conversation, and developing a voice. These are not so much discrete phases as they are parallel tracks that can be managed." |
Kevin Holtsberry on why he's taking a break: "If blogging is a conversation, I feel as if I have been talking to myself too much lately." |
David Lyttle: "Blogging gives us an opportunity to make jokes, to make pertinent statements of fact, to expose weaknesses, to inform, to say thanks, to make valid points, to tell a story, to aggregate information, to share a verse of poetry, to put forth ideas and certainly to voice opinions but to make money?... I don't think so."
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Tom Shugart acknowledges he's had a tough time blogging of late: "I’ll dust myself off and try to keep going--even though I don’t have a clue as to what I want to write about next. I guess that’s part of the adventure of being a blogger. Adventure—reason enough, I suppose, to struggle with keeping a blog."
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Josh Trevino calls it quits: "It has become impossible to reconcile the demands of work and the weblog -- which is not to say that I lack time for both, but that the one may lead to ethical conflicts with the other. And in cases like that, it's the avocation that must bow to the vocation." |
Dorothea Salo: "What does it say about the blogsphere that I have felt compelled to create an entire freaking category about sexism?" It could, she says, "be a good thing. It could be an indication that there’s a mature, honest, respectful dialogue going on." |
Glenn Reynolds makes a comparison: "Blogs are good at puncturing pretension. Kind of like Doonesbury used to be."
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Anil Dash, in announcing a new initiative: "The tendency to take big, important ideas and make them 'graduate' to newspapers or books means that the weblog realm will always have an artificial ceiling, and that's a barrier I'd like to overcome." |
Mitch Kapor joins the ranks of those blogging: "This is my first foray into blogging; please bear with me as I learn how to add the more sophisticated capabilities bloggers are now using."
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Rick Klau on his appearance at the Law Firm Executive Director & CFO Forum: "Interesting... Four different people commented on my blog... What's cool is that I hadn't told any of them about it... the concept is getting out there."
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Ken Layne, in an article by Noah Shachtman on the rampant speculation about the DC-area sniper taking place in blogs: "Are blogs adding to the noise? Sure... But when I read a story in The Washington Post about how boring it is for reporters to hang around the police headquarters, I'm thankful to have some intelligent bloggers closely watching the story for me."
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John Hiler relays the agenda for the upcoming discussion of blogs at Yale Law School: "During the third half, the unofficial buzz is that we'll be exploring the relationship between Blogs and Beer. This may be the most intractable problem of all, so I'm prepared to spend some serious time trying to solve it." |
A.K.M. Adam on the discussion raised by Microsoft's courting of bloggers: "We do no one favors by protecting the moral purity of the poor by denying them the wealth that brings with it the chance of corruption. We don’t uphold integrity when we deny bloggers the opportunity to demonstrate their probity by biting hands that have fed them." |
Dave Weinberger on why he real-time blogs conferences: "Since conferences insist on maintaining a distinction between 'panelist' and 'audience member,' blogging lets me participate. Best of all, I always get the last word." But, he acknowledges, "real-time blogging is better for me but worse for my readers." |
Pejman Yousefzadeh in an essay on the impact of blogging on the political discourse: "One of the palliative effects of blogging... is that it has fomented greater (and more civil) interaction among conservative bloggers and blog readers, and their libertarian counterparts. Indeed, blogging may very well cause conservatives and libertarians to realize that their mutual interests may outweigh whatever specific policy differences exist between them."
He finishes: "Blogging will not achieve any sort of monopoly on public opinion... But if blogging continues to grow as an activity, and if conservative and libertarian blogs continue to see their already considerable prominence and popularity increase, the prospect of a reborn conservative/libertarian alliance - fostered by members of Blogosphere and congealing around new issues in a post Cold War world - may not be so easy to dismiss." |
David Galbraith: "I find it depressing that there is an overwhelming bias to the right amongst bloggers. People like wit and levity and left wing writing has a tendency to appear whiny and over sincere."
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Dorothea Salo with more on the blogging for money debate: "It’s not impossible to create a dishonest prize, just a lot harder than making a backroom deal for dishonestly laudatory press. Is that, then, a more appropriate way to fund blogging, if fund blogging we must? I think so... I’d rather see compensation predicated on a blogger’s past than on his/her future." |
T.D. Wilson, in a long essay on the folly of knowledge management within companies: "[It] is predicated upon a Utopian idea of organizational culture in which the benefits of information exchange are shared by all, where individuals are given autonomy in the development of their expertise, and where 'communities' within the organization can determine how that expertise will be used. Sadly, we are a long way removed from that Utopia." |
Jonathan Delacour on how blogging redeemed him: "Day by day, writing post after post to this weblog, I discovered my own voice. Or, to be more accurate, I gained a clearer sense of how it might develop—given time, commitment, and practice..." |
A.K.M. Adam on blog ethics and potential conflicts of interest: "Lack of sponsorship doesn’t constitute a warrant for greater credibility. We’re thrown back on the uncomfortable challenge of discerning on whom we can rely in any case. Personal interest — whether it be sponsorship, or employment, or stock interest, or ownership... — enters into our assay of how reliable a blog might be, but it’s not, can’t be, a binary criterion." |
Dorothea Salo weighs in on blogging for money: "I mean, it’s nice to think about getting paid to blog. Unexamined in that daydream, however, lies the assumption '…and I wouldn’t have to change a thing.' Do I really need to point out how dangerously unlikely that assumption is?"
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Henry Copeland on the economics of blogging and the threat it poses to Big Media: "Thin media's competitive advantages -- low overheads, deep commitment to the beat and personal rapport with readers -- are finally being unleashed by fissioning weblog networks. The distribution dam has broken; news can flood anywhere gravity takes it." |
Doc Searls on the work in progress that is blogging: "This is a social place, a public market, full of gossip and noise and the sounds of vendors selling, customers arguing and the various breeds of Socrates and Pythagoras, teaching."
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Bryan Field-Elliot with some proverbs for bloggers: "Blog today what you will forget tomorrow... Blogs of a feather link together... Googliness is next to Godliness." And: "You get what you pay for." |
Doc Searls' "unpaid, unsolicited advice to Bill, Steve and the rest of the company," i.e. Microsoft: "encourage everybody in the whole place to blog all they want... It'll be the best PR the company ever had."
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John Hiler reveals why he's been quiet of late: "On June 13th, I got attacked while walking home... It's been, a frustrating summer: I've had so many projects and articles that I've had to put on hold because of this attack."
But now, he says, "I think I'm finally at the point where I can write again... Each blog takes a lot more out of me than before, but then again I get a lot more out of them now: blogging is part of my cognitive rehab." |
John Palfrey of Harvard's Berkman Center on the aftermath of Eldred v. Ashcroft: "The campaign to bring Eldred to the Supreme Court--and to some corners of the global consciousness--demonstrated that those so inclined can get broadcast and then amplify and re-amplify a message. The blogs... for instance, that tell the Eldred story have exploded over the past few days... [and] the mainstream media have picked up the scent of the fight."
He continues: "In another sense, a growing subset of the Net community at large is making the Eldred case plain--and plainer by the day... The promise of the Internet makes that voice more urgent, and makes the voice easier to amplify... It is exactly this civic energy - potentially global in scope - that the early Net promised to unleash." |
Matt Welch on "fashioning blog-finance models out of partisan bitch-slaps": "I think the time is ripe for Targeted Blogger Fundraising (TBF). Create a hyper-specific project that the kids want to see, for a set price, and I think you can fund a new kind of something-or-other." |
Larry Lessig, in The Feature, on the vast distribution of content that he thinks is in our future: "Emerging wireless technologies are giving us an extraordinary opportunity to shift power away from the core, back to the edge." Or, as the article puts it: "Citizens [will] have a chance to watch the watchmen... with camera-phones and their descendent technologies, we can transmit images of social unrest, balancing professionally marketed broadcasts with hand-crafted peer-to-peer news." |
Glenn Reynolds shares the comments of a reader of his recent article on blogging: "Bloggers serve as a negative feedback loop for the bias, incompetence and dishonesty of an agenda driven mainstream news media. The monopoly of punditry by the mainstream media has been broken by first talk radio and second by the Internet and bloggers in particular." |
Shelley Powers comments, in a post about a blog that's keeping people up to date on a friend injured in the terrorist attack in Bali, on another aspect of blogs - the proximity they afford: "[He] becomes someone we know. He's isn't faceless. There is no insulation from the pain and the horror... through emotionless news broadcasts, and political speeches." |
Glenn Reynolds on big media: "The don't-offend mindset that always goes along with corporate life, doesn't make for interesting commentary. Amateurs, under no such constraints, can do better and already often do."
The economic upshot of that: "Big publications like the New York Times will feel competitive pressure to do more of what they do best: reporting actual news from around the world. Meanwhile the buzzing, humming, done-for-love-and-not-for-money Blogosphere will provide an increasing share of the analysis and criticism." |
Jeneane Sessum exhorts Dave Weinberger, Halley Suitt and Chris Locke to add comments to their sites: "Threaded discussions and the like are essential for this blogging exercise we're involved in to work... New friends, new twists in the conversation, new wrinkles, new ideas, spark to flame, pop pop pop, the loosely joined become tighter and more loose all at once." |
Adam Felber on Robert Corr's Bias in the blogosphere piece: "Basically, it looks to me that much of the 'bias' that's being identified here is a function of the historical moment rather than some immutable Chomsky-posited principle." |
Dave Weinberger's turn to weigh in on his blog ethics: "I will not anticipate and reply to every objection: Punctilliousness in pursuit of the appearance of propriety kills voice."
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Silflay Hraka in his introduction to this week's Carnival of the Vanities: "I think one of the hardest things to do in the blogosphere is to learn the equivalent of hitting singles day after day, especially when it seems like everyone else in the blogosphere is knocking them over the fence." The best you can do, he concedes: "make contact, keep the ball in play, advance the runner, keep on keeping on." |
Mike Golby, again, on why he's changed his mind and now accepts that blogging is journalism, just in a different form: "It's simply a matter of what one does and is not influenced by our preconceived notions of what constitutes writing or journalism or journaling or scribbling or whatever."
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[Check out WBUR show The Connection today for an hour long program on online political discourse in which blogs merit significant mention.] |
A.K.M. Adam weighs in on Mitch Ratcliffe's comments with a sentiment on how bloggers earn trust and the corrective nature of the blogosphere: "My confidence in Doc [Searls'] integrity comes largely from the online persona he has written into existence... Now, he (or Microsoft) could be taking advantage of that circumstance, but it would be both highly unethical and a grossly misguided short-term strategy... Doc’s name would be Mud."
Among the measures he advocates: "If we keep in touch with one another, if we cultivate trust among disinterested correspondents, we may just build the resources to resist, if never finally to escape, the risks of which Mitch warns us." |
Mike Golby: "We bring others to our blogs. And when we leave our blogs, we run into the walls of their perceptions of what we have written and who we are. Rather than bang my head to mush against such walls, perhaps it would be better if I kept quiet, walked around them, and found another form of expression..."
Later in the same post: "While polished essays make for profound statement, blogging is communication. People who do not blog cannot understand that this does not constitute interaction with others in a meat-world sense." |
Gretchen Pirillo defends her husband Chris against charges that his blog-writing has been compromised: "He's not a "blogger" in the wide-eyed, bumpkin, "Hey maw, I gots to go see dat Microsoft place!" sense that Mr. Ratcliffe seems to be implying with his terminology.... yeah... he happens to have a blog. But... he's not simply a blogger." |
Jenny Berger on the ongoing discussion about how bloggers are ever going to make any money at it: "I guess I'm the odd man out because I'm getting progressively sicker every time I see another Big Blog Dog worrying the 'will-blog-for-green' bone." |
Andrew Sullivan laments, but not really, his experience blogging over the past two years: "Whatever else it is, this isn't much of a business model... In fact, I wonder if there's ever been a technological innovation that has combined such extraordinary new power with such dramatically poor financial rewards."
But, he insists, "I have to say I've never enjoyed myself as much as a journalist, had as much impact with my writing, or had as much sheer fun as a commentator on things large and small." And: "The joy of it is that we still don't know where it's headed; but we're absolutely intent on enjoying the ride." |
Dan Gillmor, in a post about how journalists attending Agenda 2003 were banned from direct reporting of the conference while attendees, i.e. potential bloggers, in this case John Patrick, were not: "Again, the lines are blurring between the journalists and the 'former audience' -- and this time the journalists are at a disadvantage."
(Among J. Bradford Delong's qualifying attributes listed in Agenda's agenda: "formerly of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, now of UC Berkeley, acknowledged expert on productivity and growth - and a prolific blogger to boot.") |
[A brief Corante plug: We've launched a new section on creativity I hope you'll check out. It's called IdeaFlow and is authored by Renee Hopkins, who previously edited our now-quiet Vital Stats section. In it she'll be exploring the "discipline" of innovation and how individuals and companies can aggressively pursue the development of groundbreaking new products, technologies and applications. She'll be ranging far in her discussion - into business, organizational, and academic theory - and would greatly appreciate any feedback. Please do check it out and alert friends or colleagues who'd find it interesting to its existence. Thanks, Hylton.] |
Krishna Bharat, the project manager for Google's news portal, comments on his company's approach: "We like to say that we have thousands of editors. We look at their collected wisdom and how much time and space they invest in a certain topic." |
Chris Pirillo responds to Mitch Ratcliffe's post about Microsoft's blog junket: "I have no problem telling you that I saw cool stuff this weekend... I have no problem telling you that I told Microsoft where they were messing up... More companies should treat their enthusiasts / evangelists the way Beth Goza treated us... Markets are still conversations... Nobody pays me to say anything I don't want to say."
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Tom Matrullo on the topic of the day: "Right now, blogs might be open to various criticisms, but most of them aren't designed to be making any money for their authors. And it's worth pausing before discarding that little halo."
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Dave Winer on the mea culpa into which he helped prod Doc Searls about revealing what readers might perceive as a conflict of interest: "Doc acted for the benefit of the jungle, paid a small price (not really) and gained a deeper respect from his readers." |
Mitch Ratcliffe follows up on the discussion on blog ethics he kicked off yesterday with a comparison of old and new media practices: "Don't hold up the old fish, tell me it stinks and then offer me a fish that stinks just as much. I want fresh, good fish." |
Doc Searls follows up on his earlier thoughts about the integrity of bloggers: "We use each other's blogs — as we also use trusted print and broadcast journals — to help scaffold and build our understanding of the world." He concludes: "The best we can do, when we know many others trust us to help build their own structures in the world, is reveal those inner cracks and faults, even when they don't compromise our competence." |
John Patrick on the role blogs will play in the mediasphere: "[They] will encroach on the time we spend on newspapers and trade journals -- especially the latter. Important developments will show up in a lot of places and many of us will turn to the blog of a respected blogger to get a point of view."
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Kevin Werbach: "Blogs are hitting the mainstream in the way the Web did in 1994-95. It's a different economic environment, so we're not going to see a rush a blog vendor IPOs. But don't ignore what's going on because of that." |
Nick Denton responds to Mitch Ratcliffe's comments on the conflicts of interest that may arise as companies look to bloggers to build buzz for their products: "The notion that weblogs are any less upright than established media: that's a joke, and betrays a lack of knowledge of the corruption endemic in mainstream business and consumer media." |
Doc Searls, in a post in which he says he'll reveal any potential conflicts of interest in the future: "One of the things I've liked about blogging is that I've never felt the need to qualify and disclaim the shit out of everything... But it's clear to me now that we need to keep applying the principles and practices of the old Journalistic form while we figure out what the new form is all about." |
Meg Hourihan, from an interview in Shift, on one of her frustrations with the blogosphere: "There seems to be an obsession within parts of the community for taking credit for weblogs -- from who coined the terms we use to who had the first one and invented the first tools to do it."
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Mickey Kaus with some blog gossip: "Tapped, the much admired blog [from The American Prospect], is [rumored to be] slated for extinction, the victim of editor Robert Kuttner's instinctive urge to squash anything interesting."
Glenn Reynolds on the news: "I think that TAPPED's crew should start a blog of their own. My guess is that it'll outdraw -- and outlast -- the magazine." |
Nick Denton on a coup for Gizmodo, the "experiment in commercial blogging" he launched in August: "Within three weeks, Microsoft had Gizmodo down on their list of online influencers, pinged Pete, and invited him over to Redmond." |
Halley Suitt sounds a sentiment shared by many these days: "There has to be a way for bloggers to have sponsors, make money, share a percentage of that money with the people who build the blogging platforms, fully disclose who's paying whom AND keep their editorial integrity." |
John Schwartz profiles Slashdot in the New York Times, asking "Could it be that this is the 21st-century model for Internet publishing?"
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Larry Lessig in a call to the blogosphere in the wake of Eldred v. Ashcroft: "Please, in the spirit of the best of this sphere, carry these arguments along, and correct the many mistakes I have made." |
Mitch Ratcliffe worries about the news that Microsoft is treating bloggers to junkets: "Are bloggers ready for and aware of the potential influence of the gift of a trip, the thrill of hanging with the inventors of the technology they care about, the recurring calls they'll receive after the trip to reinforce the marketing messaging they were exposed to in Redmond?" |
Mary Brown Malouf, in an explanation of what blogging is in the Salt Lake Tribune: "Blogs are the latest manifestation of the Internet's irrepressibility, the exhilarating feeling that the Internet is the great equalizer, that it belongs to everyone." |
Sarah Lohnes shares some text from an article proposal she and her colleagues at Middlebury College put together about the use of blogs in education that's been accepted for publication: "Members of weblog communities enter into apprenticeships with one another that constantly enhance intelligence in knowledge spaces because the guiding principle is that we don't know everything so we are looking to 'the other' to complete us, and therefore complete the community." |
Donna Wentworth on the news that a domain name registry is bundling free blogging software into its service: "[It's]sorta like when you sign up for a checking account at Fleet bank, and they give you a foam-insulated travel mug." |
John Hiler on a panel discussion he and several other prominent bloggers spoke at that was attended by media execs: "[It] was a bit like having a bunch of hippies drive straight from Woodstock to Armonk - to address a bunch of executives at IBM. It was a pretty big culture clash... and us hippies didn't have a lot of useful case studies of how our peace-and-love blogging could help the Big Media Cos make money (while avoiding the much-dreaded libel lawsuits)." |
Peter Shoemaker on the future of business: "20th century business was about mass; 21st century business will be about micros... Some industries like entertainment, publishing, and financial services will be hit first, but eventually nearly every consumer-oriented business will have a clear and unwavering focus on the micros."
He concludes: "The micros are not optional, and can not be legislated into submission or ignored. The good news is they are derivatives of our history and our economy, and as such can be identified, channeled, and ultimately exploited." |
Donna Wentworth on the frisson over Larry Lessig's appearance yesterday in front of the Supremes: "The Berkman Center crew... is excited about all of the blog commentary flowing from the Eldred hearing."
She continues: "Charlie Nesson just walked into my office and we spoke for a bit about blogs and the Eldred case... Charlie suggested that one way of demonstrating to the Justices that the nature of publishing has changed is to engage in a debate of the big questions of this case within the online environment itself... [He] also thinks that blogs are key to keeping the copyfight conversation/debate alive beyond the hearing--beyond this single 'coalescing event.'" |
Glenn Reynolds on an important aspect of blogs: "I get the occasional complaint from old-line journalists about my 'bias' in the way I characterize something I link to." But there's a material difference, he notes: "Unlike old media, I link to it. Readers don't have to take my word. They can make up their own minds." |
Robert Corr analyzes, in a long essay, the issue of bias in the blogosphere, concluding that in spite of its seeming samizdat roots, it still manages to marginalize dissenting voices: "Blogging requires relatively little capital and is therefore not owned by a powerful few. Nonetheless, capital requirements exist and marginalise many groups. Furthermore, because blogging is almost entirely unprofitable, bloggers rely on power from other sources to support their activities. The result is a similar concentration of control."
Later, in concluding that it's no surprise that the general politics of the blogosphere skew to the right: "This new medium is the domain of white, middle-class American men, and severe structural barriers restrict access by other groups. Those that adhere to the dominant ideology of the warbloggers are rewarded with larger audiences and higher rankings in search engines. Those that challenge the mainstream must face substantial flak." |
James Lileks, who works for a newspaper and likens the blogosphere to "a coffeeshop stocked with every periodical in the world," comments on a realization he had recently after access to the Web went down at his office: "I’ve come to depend on the krill-filtering mechanisms of blogs and news sites, because they’re far more interesting than the wire feeds... a wire story consists of one voice pitched low and calm and full of institutional gravitas, blissfully unaware of its own biases or the gaping lacunae in its knowledge."
His conclusion: "I'm serious. I was sitting at a terminal at a major American daily, and I thought: I feel so uninformed!" |
J.D. Lasica on the new technologies and devices that are enabling the proliferation of personal storytelling: "People from all walks of life are now picking up the tools and telling their own stories." The simple premise of the Center for Digital Storytelling he profiles: "We all have a powerful story to tell." |
Bryan Alexander, of the Smart Mobs team, on those blogging Eldred v. Ashcroft: "Although Court tradition prohibits live notetaking, this is as close as we can get to the experience itself." |
Peter Drayton, in commenting on an experiment involving blogs and Groove: "While tools such as weblogs are OK for simple collaborations, they aren't as great for more focused, interactive discussions. In fact their permanence can even be a disadvantage."
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Phil Wolff on the developments in Google's new news service that will likely come: "Google News is crawling only 4000 news sources. No reason not to crawl 4 million. With scale comes the ability to narrowcast." So, he advises, "Stake out your niche now, learn to cover it, and blog on. Google is waiting."
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Matt Cutz, a Google engineer, on its tweaking of its search algorithms: "[We love] the weblogging community, because it creates useful content and helps us categorize the web. Webloggers produce great content." Another comment worth noting: "We're always looking to find a better trust metric." |
Evan Williams on news aggregators: "I'm starting to get interested in this category of software again... we have something in the works that should address that need."
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Phil Wolff in advocating k-logs: "Blogging as you learn reinforces what you know, builds a record for later reference, and shares the wealth."
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Sgt. Stryker in a post about why bloggers are laregely preaching to the choir and unlikely to sway opinion: "Basically, I'm that guy at the end of the bar who keeps going on and on about shit and who you wish would just shut the fuck up, already. Unsurprisingly, that's a true description of most of the blogosphere."
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Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis: "It is too easy for media folk to dismiss something called a 'blog.' Can you blame them? Many of today's discussions around blogging and journalism chase the red herring of the form rather than the function." |
Chuq Von Rospach on the death of the newspaper: "When you combine [the ease of publishing afforded by blogs] with things like RSS aggregators and Google News, what you're really doing is not putting editors out of business, but breaking down the hegemony of the copy desk."
What blogging does, he continues, is "start to break down the barriers that prevent valuable material from being found. It re-enables, in a big way, word of mouth. it democratizes the way quality is discovered, taking it out of the hands of the few in power (the record exec, the acquisition editor, the copy desk editor, the radio station program director) and brings that process back towards the people." |
Richard Poe on why blog-politics may skew to the right: "Talk radio, webzines, list servers, message boards, and now blog sites have one thing in common. They are interactive." Meaning, he continues, "it is physically impossible for new media to do what old media did--that is, to shove unpopular ideas down peoples' throats..." |
Rickard Linde, in an essay on the evolution of "transparent commerce": "A couple of years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto outlined a strategy of openness and a vision for business in the twentyfirst century... The authors got it right but implementation has been slow, so very slow... except for one growing corner of the web, the blogosphere." |
Arnold Kling agrees with Clay Shirky: ""In the world of mass media, Britney Spears or Paul Krugman can achieve market shares and compensation relative to amateurs that far exceed the differences, if any, in talent and ability. As the Internet takes over, the huge concentration of rewards relative to abilities probably will disappear." |
Shelley Powers on her nostalgia for the earlier days of blogging: "Too many weblogs I've visited recently haven't updated in days, weeks, even months. Perhaps we're going through a maturation process -- posting less frequently, but with more care. Or perhaps, we're all burning out."
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Mike Golby on a sentiment others are sharing about their blog-fatigue: "We work [for that is what it is] from within a rigid framework. Blogging is subject to perhaps more devices, conventions, artifices, and rules than I at first imagined. It is an enormously restrictive medium."
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Tom Shugart: "I'm constantly reassessing my relationship with blogging. It's kind of like being a lovesick teenager. One day it's exhilarating. The next I'm nearly bent over with the pain of doubt, insufficiency, and abandonment."
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Jack Shafer in commentary in Slate on the value of journalism schools: "What say the professors to my observation that the very best, most ethical, most philosophically and historically minded journalists I know have no formal training in these subjects?" His answer: "You become a journalist the same way you become a surgeon—you probe, you extemporize, you cut, and you paste."
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