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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
[OK, I'm off for the Thanksgiving weekend sans computer and connection but wanted to let people know that come early December we'll be kicking off the relaunch of our books section with coverage of Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs. Howard's agreed to an interview with the Corante crew but says he's also up for answering questions from our readers over the course of a week or two. So, if you haven't read the book, buy it, and join us in a few weeks for what I hope will be a neat discussion. Have a great and safe Thanksgiving!] |
Malcolm Gladwell, in a book review entitled Group Think, describes the thesis of one author: "[His] point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction—conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity..." |
Shelley Powers chimes in on a debate Halley Suitt's post kicked off: "Why are more women's voices not heard in technology? Because men control technology's voice. I guess the same could be said for weblogging."
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Tom Shugart: "I find myself resenting the departure of the chunk of my consciousness that blogging seems to have appropriated."
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Susannah Breslin, aka the Reverse Cowgirl, announces she's landed a TV development deal via her blog: "Not so very long ago, a producer from a cable-TV network... wrote me an email, asking me if i was at all interested in the idea of turning the RCB into a TV show..." |
Fred Graver, a producer of TV shows, on why he likes thin media: "In comedy writing, we always know that OBSESSION is funny... so, if someone is going to reveal themselves via any kind of media, stretching themselves thin, limiting the focus of what they talk about, [they] will be enormously entertaining JUST BECAUSE they've turned themselves inside out..."
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Josh Marshall, who spoke at Friday's blog conference, shares a thread about blog triumphalism from his conversation later that night: "As Mickey Kaus said at dinner... it's easy when you're writing one of these things to start thinking that you rule the world." |
Howard Rheingold on mobile blogging, or moblogging: "Who knows what kind of nutty stuff people will come up with when sufficient numbers have their hands on many-to-many mobile media?"
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Jonathan Peterson, in a long and impressive articulation of what ails big media: "At a very fundamental level, the Big Content companies don't understand the revolution that is happening in the digital media realm... They really don't seem to understand that the reason we are buying PCs, video cameras, digital cameras, broadband connections and the like is that we want to create and share our creations." |
Stuart Henshall, who's been writing about file-sharing and smart mobs of late: "The last year has been big for blogs. The next year will be bigger." |
Halley Suitt catalogs the various opinions on what blogs are. #10: "A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device -- everyone else's brain and the whole net connected..."
#4: "[Blogs are] telepathic training wheels... [they are] a very early stage on the way to the REALLY big next big thing -- brain-to-brain telepathic transfer. Bye bye telephone, bye bye writing, bye bye fortune cookies, bye bye every other way you used to communicate." |
David Gallagher, Derek Lowe, David Pinto, Glenn Reynolds, Henry Copeland, John Hiler, Donna Wentworth, Jenny Levine, Jeff Jarvis, Joshua Micah Reynolds, the Kitchen Crew, Seth Shoen, Denise Howell, Tim Schnabel,
From the outside looking in: Renee Hopkins. |
[I'm off to New Haven for what should be a fun and stimulating day of blogtalk... reports to follow.] |
Justin Hall suggests that human beings, connected by their blogs and mobile devices, are becoming the nodes of a global network, and that the blogs "in the future, on our phones, might not exist in a form we recognize them - discreet publications, edited by one discreet group of people. Rather they might be something more organic..." |
Henry Copeland provides some connectivity details on tomorrow's blog conference in what looks like it's shaping up to be a real-time blogfest, or as he puts it, some "competitive conference blogging."
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The Kitchen Cabinet crew, who promise to real-time blog the event, on tomorrow's Yale Law School conference on blogging: "[We aim] to be to the Revenge of the Blog conference what People is to the Oscars. What will Kaus wear for his 3:00 address? Is Glenn Reynolds really as dreamy as he looks in his picture?..." |
Jeff Jarvis counters a publishing executive's aversion to calling newspapers 'products': "Media properties are products that are answerable to their customers and their owners and those who forget that inevitably lose touch with their audiences, their audiences' needs, and their real mission." |
Linda Seebach says that blogging is "Reader's Digest on Internet time, instant, interactive, uncensored access to a dazzle of events and ideas," and that it's "going to be as important a political force as talk radio." |
Dave Weinberger in a post on 'blogiquette': "Where's our aptly-named Emily Post?"
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley on an observation she's made of late of the blogosphere: "On the one hand, I love that... ideas seem to emerge simultaneously from multiple sources... On the other hand, I hate that I seem unable to produce an original thought... "
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Halley Suitt on Doc Searls and the possible reason for his recent weight loss: "Blogeremia has now been identified as a serious eating disorder where one vomits so many words on their blog, that they can lose as much as 25 pounds within a very short time."
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Steven Nieker of the Waypath Project: "Weblogs represent the apex (or abyss, depending on your perspective) of the information revolution catalyzed by the Web. Weblogs take the news 'authority' away from the news syndicates and give a voice to the people affected by the news." |
Madeleine Kane on Baldur Bjarnason's disdain for the word "blog": "So I'm guessing he wouldn't approve of Skippy's "Blogtopia" or my word for the world of Progressive bloggers -- 'Progblogtopia.'" |
Baldur Bjarnason: "I think that the word 'blog' is an abuse of the English language and displays most native speakers' utter disregard for the health and beauty of the English language." |
Phil Wolff on where blogging's headed: "I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later."
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Mike Golby on why he's taking a break from blogging: "I cannot use the language of 'my' blog any longer. It meets obduracy with obduracy because to the subject of my intransigence, I do not exist." |
David Gallagher in Slate: "Photologs are a powerful idea in their own right—they combine some of the best aspects of weblogs, such as instantaneous self-publishing, with a big dose of visual stimuli." |
Fabio Sergio in an essay on swarms, smart mobs, and 'Connectedland': "The medium is finally starting to reveal the message. Or, I am tempted to say, the message is emerging from the medium."
We're evolving, he continues, from a "world where people's main issue has been managing information" into one "where problems will also come from managing interaction. A world where fluidity of interaction with information will be at least as important as information itself." |
Joshua Micah Marshall disputes, in a Wall Street Journal article (sub req), the notion that the Web parochializes people in political discussions: "I think the opposite is true -- it lets you talk to people from a much broader array of political views [and] puts you in touch [with people] who really follow and care about the political news of the day."
Andrew Sullivan, in the same article on another aspect of blogs: "You can also keep up the pressure on someone's argument by hammering the same point for days at a time until you force them to respond. You can't do that so easily in other media." |
Dave Winer: "The next big innovation will be blog-browsers, native apps that browse archives of weblogs outside the limits of Web browsers."
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Shelley Powers expresses frustration with the way some dialogues play out in the blogosphere: "It is too easy in weblogging to reduce each other... To easy to ignore that which we just don't want to hear, and manipulate that which we don't want to ignore." |
Doc Searls dismisses one company's description of what blogs are: "If that was the kind of stuff we do here, our asses would have been bored off three years ago."
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Geoffrey Fowler in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req) on how to find a blog that suits your interest: "Where's Melvil Dewey when we need him? The 19th-century creator of the Dewey decimal system has helped generations navigate libraries. If only he could do the same for one of the 21st century's burgeoning media." |
Ray Ozzie: "I'm learning that travel 7 of 9 weeks isn't conducive to the blogging state of mind, regardless of technology."
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Evan Williams' take on Kelly's Weblog, a promotional tool for Fox's Firefly show: "[It] is surprisingly well done... Not what you'd expect from a major media company trying to 'cash in on the blog thing.'" |
Brad Wellington's first blog entry: "I must confess that I feel I'm opening a pandora's box, I can picture myself already sitting at home on Sunday night losing sleep trying to come up with something pithy." |
Chris Kovacs, whose blog tracked the fate of his friend who was wounded in the Bali terrorist attack, and later died as a result of his injuries, on why he's quitting blogging for now: "Life itself seems a great deal more important to me at the moment than the world-wide circlejerk that is blogging."
"I'm happy to have been able to do something that was actually important with this weblog over the last month or so, though I curse the events that enabled me to do so. There are literally thousands of people out there who know and love my friend Rick now, people who didn't even know that he existed before that fucking bomb went off. There are people for whom the evil that is afoot in the world has been personalized." |
Freeman Dyson praises, in a review of a new book on astronomy, amateurs: "When we look at the wider society outside the domain of science, we see amateurs playing essential roles in almost every field of human activity... In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate." |
Josh Newman of Cyan Pictures shares their First Rule of Movie-Blogging: "At any given point, a producer's ability to blog is inversely proportional to readers' interest in hearing about what the producer is doing at that point."
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Jenny Berger's not a fan of the blogger yearbooks idea put forward by Jeneane Sessum the other day: "Truth is, the only easy way to make one of these annuals is to do it slipshod. And if you're going to do it that way, then why do it at all?"
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Rudy Grahn, a Jupiter analyst, in an article in today's Globe and Mail on the use of blogs as marketing vehicles: "In almost every case, individual organic phenomena are eventually co-opted into bigger mass market vehicles." |
AKM Adam, who says he now sees the Web as a vast MUD: "The more [that] people play massively multi-player online games, the more that people get accustomed to being able to leave comments, the less 'special' and 'different' the online environment begins to feel, then the more people will bring their physical-environment habits and expectations to online interactions. And interesting as things are now, that time is when they really begin to take off." |
Bryan Pfaffenberger, who sees "teaching as a bottom-up software development process," reports on Wiki research papers he gave to his class at UVA: "[It] raised a series of very deep and often quite disturbing questions about the nature of authorship, professionalism, creativity, and ownership." |
Matt Jones, of BlackBeltJones, in an interview with Rusty Foster: "We've gone some way to creating a new journalism based on the fundamental strengths of new media -- but we're only starting to feel the edges of genuinely new forms."
He continues: "As issues get bigger, they get more diverse and more interconnected. Notions of 'closure' and manufacturing more 'understanding' rather than more 'content' are going to be vital." |
Halley Suitt: "I suppose it's a compliment, but people who know me often say how much they like my blog, because they can find out how I am, WITHOUT BOTHERING TO CALL, EMAIL OR WRITE ME."
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Gary Turner on the occasion of his blog's one year birthday: "I've managed to haul in over 100,000 uniquely sad bastards and over 200,000 page views. From zero. You are a seriously sad bunch of losers."
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Bret Fausett, who blogs about ICANN, is all for the institution of a .blog domain: "'blog' is a word that grew up on the Internet... It's a distinct, global identifier that's the same in English, Japanese, German and every other language on earth." |
Steven Johnson notes the #4 position the launch of his blog has attained on Blogdex: "[It's] rapidly gaining on the Iraq story, which just goes to show you that the blogosphere has its priorities in order."
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The Raven on "extreme blogging": "We're blogging naked! We're wearing cammo warpaint and listening to Morphine bootlegged CDs and we're ripping and burning more online..."
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Eric Snowdeal shares his experience evangelizing blogging to his colleagues: "It's a real eye-opener that will level-set any delusions that blogging will revolutionize knowledge sharing... you can lower the barriers to entry to near-zero and find that most people simply don't want to share for all the usual mundane, institutionalized reasons." |
Ken Layne: "Rumors of my death have been blogilly exaggerated, as they say."
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Jeff Jarvis comments on the Hiptop blog: "This is a glance of the future... this is just what all such interactive media are in infancy: the gee-whiz-I-have-nothing-to-say-but-I'll-say-it-anyway-because-this-is-so-frigging-cool content we saw on the first usenet posts, web pages, and forum posts." |
Clive Thompson says that for some "blogs function almost like long, trailing maps of their brains," adding that "even though I've only been at this for a few months, I can already see how useful this might be a year from now. I'll be able to look backwards through time and see how various manias and obessions play themselves out through my thinking." |
Steven Johnson launches his own blog: "I may have the highest ratio of words-written-about-blogs to actual-blog-entries-published on record. In fact, until yesterday, the ratio was basically infinite."
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Bill Mitchell announces that the Poynter Institute's reworking its site, including Jim Romenesko's Media News, and adding several blog-like columns: "At the risk of messing with a good thing, we're going for a better thing."
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Ross Mayfield again, in a post comparing aspects of blogging and the networking site Ryze: "Both Ryze and Blogs require you to share part of yourself in return for exchange... What is facinating from a social network perspective is the intersection that is the tribe and the potential convergence of convenience." |
Ross Mayfield says that "for blogging to cross the proverbial chasm, the whole product needs to support the needs of business users with leaky pipes in information management." |
Rick Klau on his company's month-long experiment with using blogs as a knowledge management tool: "It's not a slam dunk... But this was... a good first step to better understanding how weblogs might make us smarter."
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[Check out the new page for Revenge of the Blogs, the Yale Law School event at which various leading bloggers will be speaking.] |
Dorothea Salo on the "play" that some bloggers say they're engaging in when they write controversial things: "I am often utterly wogboggled at what some bloggers manage to get away with now."
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Jeneane Sessum proposes an idea - "blog yearbooks": "[We] could press a button or two and have a year's worth of posts (pictures and all) generated into a pdf or some other printable format... I'd pay up to $10 a piece for my favorite bloggers' year books."
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Gary Turner ponders whether blogs are helping to give the Web a collective memory, saying "What on earth are we creating?" His thesis: "[Bloggers] are slavishly punching away every minute of the day, creating a massive database of memories, experiences, thoughts and emotions." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley on the trimming of her blogroll: "My bottom line seems to be whether I can imagine myself actually enjoying a conversation with the writer, based on what they've posted publicly." |
Joi Ito: "I wonder which is worse, getting really negative people writing comments in your blog, being ripped apart in a mailing list, or having to hunt down negative comments." |
Oliver Thylmann on wireless blogging and the role it may play in the future of journalism: "In a few years, millions of people will have mobile phones with high-quality integrated digital cameras. Whenever something happens anywhere in the world... journalists will rush to the scene to get the scoop - but the scoop will already be long gone." |
Biz Stone, in a brief interview on his publisher's website, on good blogging practice: "Economy. Both of words and visuals... Good blog posts have an economy of language, the posts are succinct and the words are well chosen." |
Elaine Kalilily on the playfulness of male bloggers: "Boys tend to love rough and tumble, sucker punches, messy wrestle on the ground get dirt in your mouth play. These male bloggers are playing like that metaphorically."
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Zed Lopez: "The unblogged life may not be worth living but the unlived life is not worth blogging."
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Mitch Ratcliffe says he's troubled by the "glint of power gleaming in the irises of a lot of folks on the Web and in the Blogosphere," adding that "we are too eager to imagine ourselves larger because of our technology, and that I am reacting against." |
Michael Fox, a lawyer, draws a comparison to what he does via his blog: "When I was growing up, a lawyer might have a coffee at the local drugstore each morning. This is really the same thing as those lawyers did then." |
Arthur Silber again, after two months of two months of blogging: "I have to say something I've said before: I really didn't know it would be this much fun. I'm having a grand time."
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Arthur Silber on the attention that the Diana Hsieh story has received from bloggers: "I think the exposure of this information on such a wide scale may well bring a very early end to this unfortunate business, and I think that would be an absolutely wonderful result." |
John Hiler on the evolving story about Diana Hsieh being sued: "If you really want to ensure headlines: make sure to have the gun camp sue the blogger." |
Howard Rheingold says, in an article in the Washington Times, that "putting cameras and high-speed Net connections into telephones" will help move "blogging to the streets," leading to "self-made journalist/bloggers [that create] information outside government and media sources." |
John Corker, an Australian attorney, on blogs and the law: "More and more we see courts are ready to assert their jurisdiction as far as possible, so there's inevitably an increased risk of legal action being taken for all content on the Web." |
Doc Searls notes, in a post about how much consideration Google News should pay to blogs, that blogs aren't outlets like traditional publications. Rather they're "subject to subsequent editing and re-editing,... welcome edits by others [and] are alive in the sense that they are, like their authors, unfinished." |
Chris Locke, with one of the five mistakes bloggers can make in tough economic times: "Trying to bulletproof your blog by moving into recession-resistant rhetoric."
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Peter Lindbergh says blogging "is about posting thoughts and ideas, gaining understanding by expressing them in text, eventually (I hope) reaching a point where the ideas mature and stabilize." |
Scott Loftesness says he wants to see more from Google on the blog front and that perhaps it's time for a new "movement" - the Weblog Search Services Protocol: "Let's face reality: in the weblog community, search is much more important than identity." |
Dave Weinberger quibbles with how some define 'information,' asserting that it's the contextual information that matters most: "Things only are what they are in context. Meaning is emergent and irreducible." |
Christian Crumlish is wondering if "the libertarian-right pundit sector of the blogosphere is to this year's elections as the dittohead talk-radio shows were to those of 1994." |
Dorothea Salo defends the word "blog": "I like it because of the many clever neologisms it has spawned—even the not-so-clever ones [and] I frankly find its ugliness endearing, a vast improvement over language polished out of all interest."
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Claire Harrison comments, in a long and interesting piece for First Monday, on the inherently idiosyncratic nature of links: "No hypertext - whether static or dynamic, explicit or implicit, and strongly or weakly authored - can be divorced from the subjectivity of human choice." |
Dave Winer says Scot Hacker's going about the set-up of the Berkeley J-school school blogs foolishly: "Go with the grain of the tool. The hacks Scot describes are wrong, they go against the grain of the product he's using."
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Jeff Sonstein on the simplicity afforded by blogs: "When the tools the user uses on each of the machines are easy to learn and when the interconnectivity systems are simple to use, then the distributed system-of-systems as a whole is attractive to end-users."
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Dave Rogers worries that the attention one can get for more controversial blogposts is altering what people write: "We're all parts of various social organisms [and] social organisms don't have principles. They have beliefs that they interchange and revise as necessary in order to compete with other social organism, and the way they do that is through attention." |
Doc Searls shares the advice he says he gave yet "another polymath with a polyspecialized background, now sidetracked at midlife without any obvious career track" - start a blog. "You can be the pinball or you can be the pinball machine. With a blog you can create your own machine."
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Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley professor, dismisses blogs in a discussion of how the voting public is engaging in the political discourse: "Like talk radio and cable TV, certain Web sites find a niche of people who want to hear things that they already believe. That just reinforces the prejudices of certain people." |
Andrew Hinton, in one of his 25 theses of information architecture he's laid out for the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture: "There is already too much information for us to comprehend easily. And each day there will only be more of it, not less. Inexorably, information drowns in its own mass. It needs to breathe, and the air it needs is relevance." |
Mark Hurst, who's been blogging for three years, says "the blog has limited value as a business tool," the "reality doesn't match the recent hype," and "there's nothing inherent in blog technology that will transform a business." |
Adrian Miles on "nomadic writing" (he's blogging from an airport): "Writing as a social and public practice now inserts itself into the world in dramatically different ways... it is a writing that is always, courtesy of the blog, public, and its location is now public." |
Mike Axelrod, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in his first blogpost: "The first big aha of the internet was really a convergence of technologies... now I'm looking about and I see signs of convergence again. The trackback, the ping, the post and counter post and the centralization and searchability of personal writing."
His conclusion: "The problem in the past has been that we haven't always known 'who wants to listen.' Today the tools of communication are getting a lot more focused on enabling the 'who''s out there to easily find the 'what"s. This is getting good. I think I like it." |
Clay Shirky, in Boing Boing's guestblog, on what he's working on at the moment: ""Particularly interesting is the way the blogosphere is becoming an inside-out usenet, with the content centralized and the namespace distributed, instead of the other way around." |
James Grimmelmann comments on the much-reported discovery by spammers of blogs: " It seems reasonable to expect that the pros will move in soon... If comments on blogs are going to survive, something is going to have to be done."
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Adam Greenfield on "moblogging": "[It] is what happens when you fuse digital cameras and text-entry functionality with a way to publish it to the Web, for better and worse... I see breasts - inevitably - but I also see some interesting documentation of spaces, lives and places happening." |
Evan Williams announces a contest for a redesign of Blogger: "We're getting ready to release some major changes and improvements to the Blogger application, and we think the occasion calls for a long-overdue update to the Blogger.com site design."
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Fishrush offers up a "field guide" for understanding Chris Locke's writings: "For many of us, the desire to follow the crowd comes before the desire to know the truth. Rageboy shows us that he who lives well, prays well and studies well will lose everything through intellectual pride." |
JD Lasica on the news that it's the first anniversary of the Persian blogging movement: "[It] is outstanding, and powerfully demonstrates that grassroots power of the Internet is taking shape around the globe." |
Dave Winer says there's "an idea in the air in blogging land" - "a global identity system so you don't have to re-enter your name, email address and weblog url in every comment system you visit. Of course the idea has been around for a while, but perhaps there's a will to implement it now."
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William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, to his colleagues in the news industry: "The reality is that we no longer are the only game in town... we now compete in ways and in places that in some cases are still new to us... much has changed... from our readers... to their choices... to the new technologies we use to connect with them." |
Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis share an email from Philip Meyer, who recently penned a piece in USA Today on conflicts of interest in the news industry: "In an economic climate where globalization is making everything a commodity, maybe even news, it gets harder to find ways to add value. But one good that is still scarce in the information age is trust. Newspapers — or whatever replaces them — might prosper if they can corner the market on trust." |
Lactose Incompetent: "Weblogging is a narcissistic pastime, to be sure. We put our thoughts, opinions, emotions on the line out here, on the assumption that they're worthy of public consumption, that we have something sage, timeless, or even passingly interesting to say. Our egos determine that our prose is worth reading, and so we take the plunge and indulge." |
Michael Finley in Computer User: "I see that online news organizations have recently turned not to 'yet-another-columnist' for provocative comments but to bloggers..." His counsel for companies considering blogs as a marketing vehicle: "Match a well-heeled cause with an energetic ringmaster like [Jim] Romenesko, and you'll really have something." |
Greg Notess on RSS: "For every blogger out there, there are probably a dozen or more others who prefer reading to writing. With the explosion of Weblogs come new ways of reading them."
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Dan Gillmor sounds, in a Slashdot interview on the state of the tech industry, his oft-repeated mantra about the new form of journalism that's emerging: "I assume that my readers know more than I do. I also think that's a great opportunity, not a threat to my journalism. When we're in this together, we get better results."
He continues: It'll be interesting to see how tomorrow's audience and journalists handle this evolution. My sense is that the combination of traditional journalism, tech-savvy reporters, weblogs, etc., will lead to a wider understanding of the issues." |
Dave Winer on the news that Robert Scoble's getting married tomorrow: "Everyone wants to know if the chapel will have 802.11, and is anyone blogging it? What about the reception? How about the honeymoon suite?"
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Cory Doctorow, in a Wired News article on the correction Howard Bashman's blog entry prompted: "There's a sense, a myth, that weblogging is entirely navel-gazing, inward-focusing activity... The idea that there's a federal judge reading weblogs so he can understand cases makes a lot of people feel like weblogs are not a niche phenomenon." |
Nick Denton says he's tired of the way the left hides behind language: "Complain all you like about the crudity of so-called warbloggers: at least most express themselves with Anglo-Saxon directness. They indulge in selective quotation, which is inevitable when their opponents offer so much waffle to choose from. But it's usually left-wing political writing which requires tedious textual analysis to extract the point." |
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