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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
Arnold Kling on Google's acquisition of Blogger: "[Its] cosmic significance eludes me... But then, I could just be slow. I still have not figured out what all the fuss over the AOL-TimeWarner merger was about." |
Will Richardson on the use of blogs in education: "I think more and more people are starting to catch on to the potential... all of our good thinking seems to be gelling together at the right time." |
Tim Bray as he launches his blog: " Dave [Winer] claims to have the oldest blog... well for a few minutes on 2003/02/27, this is the youngest!"
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Steve Jensen, of Blogger: "Our biggest enemy has been a lack of resources; the nemesis of all small underfunded companies. I don't think that's too much of a problem anymore." |
Gartner, which has recently launched a blog initiative, in the officialese of their terms and conditions: "This Weblog is moderated by a Gartner representative who reserves the right to exercise editorial control over posted content. By submitting a comment to the Weblog, you understand and agree that we may post your comment in its entirety, in an edited version, or not at all. Any editing will be done primarily for purposes of clarity, length or deletion of offensive, inappropriate, or potentially defamatory material."
More: "All posted comments become the property of Gartner, Inc. By agreeing to posting your comment on the Weblog, you acknowledge and agree that your comment may be reused by Gartner or quoted in other media and might be attributed to you by name." |
Evan Williams offers up an FAQ on the Blogger acquisition: "Google liked our logo. And we liked their food..." And, quieting speculation about Blogger-favoritism: "The people at Google have done a great job over the years making sure their search results are honest and objective and there's no reason they would change that policy for Blogger or anyone else." |
Jeff Jarvis on the "nuclear" fragmentation of media that's coming given the proliferation of good, cheap content-producing tools: "Because the barrier to entry into media... is collapsing, then anyone can produce media about anything and there can be as many publishers and producers as there are interests. The problem with this is that no one will make money..." |
Rajesh Jain after ten months of blogging: "It is about creating a flow, a conversation... Many of my new ideas and reading [are] driven by comments made by bloggers, as compared to a year ago, when the various news sites and magazines were pretty much the only sources." |
Gendy Alimurung reports on "Live From the Blogosphere": "Before the party is over, strangers who've traded secrets but know each other only by code names will have met in the flesh for the first time, and a young hacker possibly will have become a millionaire." |
Jason Shellen shares an email the Blogger folks have received in the past week that riffs on Ren & Stimpy:
"What rolls down stairs and stimulates hairs
then makes fun of your neighbor's dog
It's great for a snack and fits on your back,
It's Blog Blog Blog..." |
Ross Mayfield says, in a piece on the distribution of influence: "I believe we are on a path towards Emergent Pluralism for no other reason than the tools are being developed."
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JD Lasica says he both agrees and disagrees with Dave Winer's comments about blogs and journalism: "In the years ahead, I think we'll see a richer interaction between the best parts of weblogging and the best parts of traditional news operations. It's been slow in coming, but the evidence is growing by the day that their futures are intertwined." |
Tom Coates enumerates the reasons why mainstream publishers shouldn't get into hosting blogs. Among them: "You run the risk of diluting that image by having your logo or URL associated with content published by members of the general public." Also included: reasons why they should. |
Tim Lutero on RSS: "[It's] convenient for business weblogs, news weblogs and link weblogs. But for personal and media intensive weblogs, I will never be satisfied with a big chunk of posts pushed through an aggregator... I will always prefer a holistic viewing experience whenever the author has carefully prepared the exact way in which he intends me to view his website." |
Jason Sutter, of Blogger, on the move to Google's office: "People come by to say hi. Our little office overflows with new names and interesting projects and directions to other people to talk with. Some don't really know what we do... but would like to. Others fake it. And some are giddy with excitement..." |
John Palfrey of the Berkman Center on the broad employment of blogs by the legal profession: "blogs may offer more to the academic community -- with time at less of a premium -- than to the hyper-pressured legal community." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley in a post about Creative Commons licenses: "Weblogs are a nice way to read small chunks of content—but I wouldn’t pay for them. I might, however, pay for a work deriving from that content..."
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Jenny Levine on the great RSS debate: "At some point, you have to decide what's more important to you - the style or the substance. In my case, it's the substance." |
Dave Winer: "Not enough people are using RSS aggregators. So far it's mostly been for people with a substantial investment in information, engineers, librarians, lawyers. A lot more people, even people with liberal arts degrees, would use the software, if they knew how valuable it is."
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Denise Howell on the ABA Journal article on blawgers: "[It] captures the excitement and passion I think is familiar to those of us who have drunk the Kool-Aid, and is bound to prompt even more legal types to take up this action-packed extreme sport." |
Alan Meckler, who's recently started blogging and will be putting on a blog trade show this summer: "Wow! I am getting lots of help and suggestions from a variety of bloggers. I am open to improving."
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Meg Hourihan says, in a Salon article on Cyan Pictures' film-blog: "If everything that is interesting about a weblog is stripped away, or put in P.R. speak, there will be anger on the part of webloggers for the commercialization of something they hold pretty dear."
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[We're launching a new blog today I hope you'll give a gander and pass along to folks who might be interested. It's called "Living Code" and will chronicle, through the eyes of Richard Gayle, a senior scientist (and blogger) with more than two decades in the field, the exciting developments happening in biology and biotechnology. In particular he'll be discussing an issue that may be of interest to bloggers: how to handle the reams of data being unleashed by the genomics revolution.
Richard: "Collaboration and openness create knowledge from information and one of the things I'll be doing here is looking at the ways that these principles help us gain a better understanding of the natural world and what we can do to build upon it in constructive and conscientious ways."
I'm thrilled to have Richard aboard - it's part of our expanding effort to enlist voices from the field to track and tell the story of the subjects they care passionately about.
(More are on the way. Think there's a field we should be covering? Privacy? Emergence? Mobile devices? Suggestions are welcome and appreciated!)] |
David Weinberger on the Google/Blogger deal: "Blogger offers such a temptation to go wrong..." But, he continues, "Google's record so far has been great... Let's hope it doesn't give in to the temptation to get stupid now."
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Marc Canter, in a comment about our lack of RSS feeds: "Almost nobody reads blogs anymoe. Everything comes in through RSS."
Evan Williams disagrees: "Actually, a tiny technical elite reads RSS. Everyone else reads on the web." |
Doc Searls: "What I love about blogging is the way we inform each other. As a knowledge-expansion system, it scales like nothing else in the world. But that's not what we always do. Sometimes we flame as hard as any Usenet group."
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Dana Blankenhorn calls the debate over whether blogging can be considered journalism "inane," saying "blogging is a tool, like word processing or HTML... Time will tell what it really is, what it ends up being. But to say it's anything, even journalism (the career I revere) is to limit it." |
Denise Howell, in an article in which she and other prominent 'blawgers' are profiled: "The Web is like a big bomb that’s been dropped into the middle of settled legal issues. It’s a fertile legal playground for lawyers." |
Dave Winer says, in his News.com interview, that the challenges facing Harvard are similar to those faced by businesses: "It's a very big decentralized school with a small core and a whole lot of schools that are part of it... All the things we worry about in the commercial world turn out to be issues here as well." |
Glenn Fleishman: "Journalism is about monolithic ownership these days and monolithic worldviews. Blogs are all about individuals and the millions of separate opinions. In representing blogs to a non-blogging audience, reporters seem drawn to sweep them into a single heap." |
Don Park suggests the San Francisco Examiner, which is in rough shape, should remake itself as a P2P news publication: "I believe Examiner and other fast decaying newspapers can be rebooted with the power generated by ever growing mass of bloggers."
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Bill Hobbs in a longer discussion of the two-way discourse blogging enables between author and reader: "You can't expect most radio, TV or print journalists who have spent their entire career learning, doing and perfecting top-down journalism to grasp the nature of the new grassroots journalism." |
Timothy Burke, who appears to lack permalinks, says that "no matter how much people try to keep fresh blood flowing in, eventually any virtual community gets senescent. Eventually everyone knows what everyone else thinks, and the more you know about how some people think, the less you want to talk to them." |
William Davies: "Recommender systems, reputation systems and blogging networks all demonstrate an American pragmatist approach to truth: most people think x, and the system which consulted them is fair and open, therefore x is true. They suffer from a Pollyanna effect, whereby negative comments play no role; degrees of positive preference determine what's valid."
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Arnold Kling disagrees with Donna Wentworth and Dave Winer, arguing that the economic benefit of the democratization of media will accrue to consumers not creators: "Mark my words. Ten years from now, today's musicians will look back on this period as a golden age for compensation."
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Shelley Powers breaks rank from most of the blogosphere and praises the BBC article on Google: "Not only did the writer, Bill Thompson, challenge this continuing nonsense about webloggers 'replacing' mainstream Captital-J Journalism, he also exposed the falsity of the godhood with which Google is treated." |
Britt Blaser, who writes here about how "Peer Brother will makes Big Brother irrelevant and kind of pitiful," prognosticates: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The nail I see everywhere is transparency unfolding where opaqueness has always been the rule." |
Paddy Holahan in a BBC article on moblogging on the Blogger acquisition: "Google's buy is a recognition that the news in future will be reported by ordinary people with their own particular bias on stories."
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Jon Lebkowsky on the 'Is blogging journalism?' debate: "'Official' journalism? Is it a better source of truth than the universe of weblogs? I think not... Those of us who have exposed ourselves to the multiplicity of perspectives offered by bloggers... feel that we have a better sense of what's true, because we view reality from many possible angles." |
Robert Freitas Jr. in commentary on nanomedicine and "dechronification" calls death an "outrage" that robs the world of information equivalent to three Libraries of Congress every year: "Each one of us carries within us a complex universe of knowledge, life experience and human relationships... Almost all of this rich treasury of information is forever lost to mankind when we die." |
John Naughton on Google's acquisition of Blogger: "One can see news editors all over the world summoning reporters shouting 'What the **** is going on? What is this blogging stuff anyway?'" |
Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times on heterarchies: "The Internet has become more than a mere organizing tool; it has changed protests in a more fundamental way, by allowing mobilization to emerge from free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than top-down hierarchical ones."
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Tom Shugart on his first year of blogging: "'Inventing the self' sounds at first blush like an act of vanity and deception--the antithesis of authenticity. I would assert that inventing the self is a supreme act of personal responsibility. You're either creating it and putting it out there or you're operating at default self." |
Jeff Walsh on the 'Is blogging journalism?' debate: "My main issue isn't that people want to adopt the term journalist and apply it to themselves. Hell, I think journalism as a profession is boring as dirt, so feel free. I just think everyone is missing the big picture..."
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Halley Suitt, in a discussion of how blogging has changed the way she writes: "...And then came Blogger... it was light, airy, sans gravity, it was just there, anywhere... and everything I ever learned about writing didn't matter anymore... It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me." |
Tom Coates, who calls the BBC article to which he refers "profoundly stupid," says journalists who get the blog story wrong should stop feeling threatened and rather "should be looking at how hundreds of thousands of... readers have completely shifted from passive reception of news to repurposing it, commenting upon it and - on occasion - challenging it... If they don't do that, if they don't shift from building defences to looking for the opportunities, then they really are going to be put out of a job." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley says the public nature of blogging may be altering academic discourse: "Normally, academics work so much in isolation--guarding their work until it's ready for peer-reviewed publication, trying to 'scoop' each other in the process. But the culture of blogs seems to be enabling a change in that approach." |
Paul Ford on the storytelling he does through his blog: "I want [it to be] flexible: each piece of the story should connect, leading towards some overall effect, and the pieces should rearrange, or rearrange themselves for new effects, like musical motifs. Eventually it should connect with other sites, other places, other voices, once the technology is ready." |
Anne Galloway on blogging: "[It's] weird... Seriously, I'm beginning to think that blogging is only minimally a social activity... The more I think about it, the more insanely bored I get..." |
Joi Ito in his Emergent Democracy paper: "The weblog developer community is developing tools for itself, but is beginning to have a significant impact on mass media, politics, old-school business networking, and Hollywood studios, and gives hope that we may discover a way to scale the weblog network in a way that will allow bloggers to play an increasingly important role in society." |
Marc Canter, in Jonathan Peterson's continuing interview: "5% of the populace (probably even less) can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume. I think one of the destinies of digital technology is to enable the other 95% to express their creativity somehow. That's the gestalt view." |
Rafat Ali reports that Jupiter's going to put on a blog trade show in June - CEO Alan Meckler: "The show we are launching is the first business-oriented show dealing with weblogs. We feel we have a better handle on where weblog business is going, now that we have few of our own."
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David Weinberger: "I'd love to read blogs by people who are doing the work of helping — someone scooping rice from a sack, someone scratching innoculations into a long queue of people, someone getting a water purification system up and running. You know, the actual heroes."
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Henry Copeland on the Google/Blogger deal: "Was trading a few Google shares for Blogger the fastest way to improve Noogle? (Or to block Microsoft from acquiring Pyra and quietly reducing Blogger's Google-friendliness?)"
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley on how blogging helps her clarify her thoughts: "[Blogs] bridge the gap between private notes and publication, providing a structured but still malleable environment for idea forming." |
Mike Sanders insists: "I am still not blogging. This is not a blog entry. Don't be fooled..."
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Glenn Reynolds in the Guardian on his blogposts: "The notion that they might be read by people at the White House is odd. On the other hand, the often poor quality of commentary in traditional media provides some reassurance." |
Katie Allison Granju on the phenomenon that is Instapundit: "In his freewheeling, self-deprecating, cleverly anti-authoritarian mischief making, he sometimes comes across as an Abbie Hoffmanesque cyber-Yippie for the information age." |
Dave Winer, in a DaveNet essay: "Blogging is growing up, and when we look back, the Google-Blogger deal will probably be seen as an inflection point, perhaps *the* moment when it all changed."
He continues: "The Blogger-Google deal may signal a change possibly as deep as the personal computer revolution, where huge glass palaces controlled by technologists were routed around, by software and hardware that did the same thing, for a fraction of the cost." |
Ernie Svenson on a friend who's gone through the "three stages of blog-awareness" and has now started his own blog: "Looks like another one has been assimilated."
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Jimmy Guterman on the Google/Blogger deal: "A a time when all our inboxes are stuffed with spam, blogging may become a more compelling way to communicate than e-mail."
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Henry Copeland continues his vicious campaign to get me to actually express myself: "I just wish he'd tell us what he thinks about it all." [Soon, I swear. For now it'll be through pushing Corante through toddlerhood, the strongest statement I can make about what I think's happening to media.]
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Shelley Powers on all the post-Google/Blogger speculation: "Perhaps we webloggers also need to remember that though it seems crowded out here on the boards, we are but a speck in the world." |
Joi Ito discusses, in the South China Morning Post (reg req), Japan's ailing economy, its resistance to change and what emergent forces of democracy may be able to do about it: "The Internet, and the blogs in particular, provide opportunities for the passive Japanese public to wake up before the catastrophe. The Internet is also a way to enable the youth of Japan, currently silenced by the older generation and destined to get stuck with supporting them, to speak up and organise themselves before it is too late." |
Anil Dash concludes his follow-up comments on the Google/Blogger deal: "[It] seems like we're finally ready to take the next step, and we've reached the end of the beginning of weblogs..." |
Will Richardson, who blogs extensively here on the subject, on the use of blogs in his classroom: "My kids are more aware of what they're writing and of the potential audience they're writing for." |
Samuel R. Smith, in an essay in intelligent agent on the death of Postmodernism, and the decentralized, distributed, and networked nature of the future: "If we think about our lives here in the early moments of the 3rd Millennium, we can probably see any number of ways in which we're part of an emerging networked social order, and the network itself serves as the best metaphor I can think of for where we are and where we're going now that the big deconstruction is behind us."
"Humans are" he continues, "organizational creatures, and it seems unlikely that 'tear-down' phases such as the Postmodern can ever be anything more than brief, transitional blips on the chart of social evolution." |
Meg Hourihan cautions "beware the false blog software" on the Microsoft Watch report that Microsoft's trying to position one of its products as a blogtool: "Ask yourself when looking at 'blogging' software: Was it designed with weblogging in mind... or has the label "blogging" been slapped onto an existing publishing system designed?" |
Dennis Jerz says, in an article on Google, blogs, and Vannevar Bush's memex, that "weblogs are part of the great paradigm shift in textual culture, which eradicates restrictive print-based terms such as center and margin, and advances post-structuralist concepts such as network and connection."
Later in the piece: "the future of intellectual life, as mediated by hypertext, may well be defined by collaborative, member-driven 'writerly' communities such as Slashdot... or Wikipedia." |
Will Knight reports on Cornell computer scientist Jon Kleinberg and the research he's conducting on how "word bursts" might hint at new trends or ideas: "identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze." [Renee for more.] |
Arik Hesseldahl in an article in Forbes on Google's acquisition of Blogger and the mainstreaming of blogs: "along with nearly everything else about the Internet, the mild cachet that came with being among the first to publish a blog will quickly evaporate with the mass stampede that follows." |
Evan Williams: "I'm a little busy right now, retooling for a different life. So I've taken the blog offline to clear my head..."
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley, in reflecting on the 'blog happening' that Joi Ito organized last week: "Bloggers who spend a lot of time "metablogging" tend to get flak about it from readers--but in an environment as fluid as the blogosphere, those reflections on practice and participants are incredibly powerful in shaping the environment. To dismiss them as 'naval-gazing' is short-sighted." |
Flemming Funch on the broad collaborative filtering blogs will surely play a role in: "I want the best choices by people I know, like, respect or trust, or by the people that they again know, like, respect or trust. And I want a similar, complicated huge matrix calculation that adds all of that up, just for me. And for you."
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Suzannah Breslin a few days after Live from the Blogosphere: "i don't want to say the word 'blog' again for awhile. i am rather burned out on it. it won't last, but, for now, that is how it is..." |
Tom Shugart, who says he's been in a blogging funk, on others he's watched reassess their relationship with blogging and even quit: "In every case that I’ve seen—bingo--they’re back in the blogging game." |
Marc Canter, in an ongoing interview with Jonathan Peterson, on old media: "It's not that the broadcast biz is going to distribute our content - it's whether or not the broadcast biz is going to enable, help, prevent, fund, or stand in the way of self published content." |
Evan Williams, last but not least: "It's been an interesting ride. I have a feeling it's about to get moreso..."
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Ed Cone reports that local Congressman Howard Coble has again run afoul of bloggers: "[It] highlights a unique power of weblogs: the ability for people with specific expertise to bring that expertise to bear quickly and in depth when circumstances push their chosen subject into the limelight."
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Dan Gillmor broke the story that's got everyone talking today: Google buys Pyra. "Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear."
Reactions: Tony Pierce, Azeem Azhar, Anil Dash, Shelley Powers, Ken Layne, Henry Copeland, Mitch Ratcliffe, Matt Webb, Nick Denton, Rick Bruner, Jeff Jarvis, Jonathan Peterson, Dave Winer, Meg Hourihan, Jason Kottke, Metafilter, Slashdot, Cory Doctorow, Matt Haughey. |
Eric Norlin on Per Bak's Power Law: "[It] states emphatically that ALL networks reach a point wherein their *fundamental* state changes to something new. That is the unavoidable outcome... Even the Internet will change its stripes." |
[Tune in to the videostream of "Live from the Blogosphere" tonight with Mark Frauenfelder, Heather Havrilesky, Evan Williams, Susannah Breslin, Doc Searls, Tony Pierce. Hosted by Xeni Jardin.] |
Jeff Jarvis on Clay Shirky, power laws and nichification: "Mass media are fading. Sure, there still are and always will be networks. There always will be stars. But they are dimming like bulbs strung to old batteries..." |
Madeleine Begun Kane with an ode to Weblogs.com: "It don't mean a thing if you don't click that ping. Please don't post a thing with no update notice ping..." |
Mellouki Cadat, a local councillor who says he's been named the 'Most Digital Dutch Local Politician of the Year 2003' and reveals that four out of the eight finalists maintain blogs: "Let's say it: [the] weblog is *in* in e-democracy!" |
Deb Coates on Harvard's fuzzily defined blog effort: "What I'd like to see with Weblogs at Harvard is what they appear to be doing, going forward, implementing things, letting it disrupt and adjusting as it does." |
Meg Hourihan on the Lafayette Project she and Nick Denton are developing: "We want to help readers browse weblogs when they *don't* know what they're looking for. A best-of-the-blogs show, if you like." |
Alan Meckler dips his toe into the blogosphere: "This is a bold experiment! For sure it is the first Blog written by a CEO of a media company." |
Neal Pollack, who blogs himself, on bloggers: "They're just kind of lunatic pamphleteers shouting into the wind."
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Evan Williams notes a discrepancy at Tony Perkin's new blog-based AlwaysOn venture between its privacy policy and its practice: "It sounds... like a blatant violation. What's up, Tony?" |
Paul Hammond on his evolving thoughts on why he keeps a linkblog: "I’ve realised that the real reason I keep my linkblog going is the effect it has on my main weblog. By moving the links somewhere else, my weblog becomes much less about what other people are saying, and much more about what I am thinking and doing." |
Anil Dash on the real reason many are interested in the power law discussion: "Really the question that motivates everyone to read and write about such things is, 'How can my site (and therefore, I) become more popular?'"
On his own popularity: "Basically, it's because I'm smarter than you, I work harder than you, and I'm more attractive than you are." |
Mitch Ratcliffe discusses a radio show idea on which he's working: "The best bloggers on any subject have already identified themselves as thoughtful and clever people, so it follows they can probably carry a conversation, or be taught to, in front of a microphone."
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David Sifry on the work he's been doing of late to address the concerns raised in the power law discussion: "The most satisfying thing about it is that I've found a way to identify interesting new writers and add them to my blogroll - people who I would have never had found out about otherwise."
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Joi Ito reports on a conference call of bloggers he hastily brought together: "Happenings should happen when some blog meme starts to pick up speed and reaches escape velocity."
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Michael Joseph on why blog tools may be appearing and evolving so quickly: "The users are the developers. That's the key. The users can specify what they want by building a prototype and showing it to colleagues. The idea is then improved until it's 'good enough' and it ships." |
Arnold Kling, in urging the Council of Economic Advisers to set up "The Economic Blog of the President," says that "maybe the president himself should use the weblog medium -- just as previous presidents have adopted radio and television as they emerged as media."
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[For extensive coverage of the Dave Winer-led discussion held at Harvard Law School last night tune in to Donna. I'll be pointing to related blogposts about the event throughout the day. Please send any my way.
Other accounts: Dan Cederholm, Dan Bricklin (pictures too), Bob Frankston, Frank Field, Derek Slater, Daniel Berlinger, Aaron Johnson, Adam Medros, Adam Gaffin, Dave Winer, Henry Copeland, Peter Rukavina, John Robb, Dann Sheridan, Michael Joseph ...] |
Glenn Reynolds: "Just over 120,000 pageviews yesterday. Jeez... It figures that I would get in on the one Internet boom that offers no prospect whatsoever of riches."
[An interesting stat from the logs he points to: the average visit length is 15 seconds.] |
Steven Johnson, who says he may agree with Clay Shirky: "The most interesting thing to me about Clay's essay -- and the subsequent response -- is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that."
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Dann Sheridan after reflecting on last night's conversation: "The 'blogging community,' is far too concerned with itself. I am interested in using the underlying technologies of blogging to connect with people like me, make my time more productive, and ultimately make my life more efficient and meaningful." |
Phil Ringnalda on whether blogging's journalism: "Hell yes, blogs are journalism... a journalistic blog means getting to do all the good parts of every job in journalism, without any of the nasty annoying parts."
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Peter Rukavina, who's keeping a blog so his young son can later learn about his life, on one of the reasons he made the trek to Cambridge: "...I was also curious, to be honest, to see what 'webloggers' look like." |
Henry Copeland on Dave Winer after seeing him in action last night: "Dave is as pugnacious in person as he is in pixels. He exhudes relish at his potential role as a blogging Socrates inside the crimson polis along the Charles River."
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Kevin Werbach on the power law distribution debate: "People seem to be talking about different things here... Blogs are different than the earlier generation of Websites and portals, in that they allow dense, multidirectional connections between sites. But they are similar in the way bottom-up user behavior sorts out popular sites and creates inequality of traffic."
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Mitch Ratcliffe on Dan Gillmor's piece on nano-publishing and the general "porosity of the barriers to media success": "The opportunities across all media are proliferating rapidly and there is more to the nano-media than just publishing." |
Doc Searls: "It occurred to me this morning that I don't listen to NPR much any more.When I'm making my morning coffee in the kitchen, I'd rather listen to an audio reading off any number of blogs."
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Renee Hopkins on the real-time blogging she did last week: "Even the slower pace at which I was blogging CPSI last week is a much quicker turnaround of ideas and opinions about the proceedings than was available in pre-blogging days." |
Frank Field, who sat across the room from me and says that "Dave's going to have an interesting time learning about the dynamics of the academic environment," on where blogs may add value to the university experience: "[They] can help to foster the digital equivalent of the late-night dorm bullsh*t sessions where much of the true benefit of the college experience comes - campus-wide!" |
[If you're in the Boston area, drop by the blog confab going on this evening at Harvard Law School courtesy of the Berkman Center and Dave Winer. For details and real-time coverage tonight tune in to Donna.] |
Marc Canter on audioblogging: "It never really is integrated into the blog data structure, blog tool or archival notion of blogging. There needs to be 'media objects' in blogging." |
Henry Copeland on what differentiates blogs: "[They] have shorter life-cycles, smaller metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit new media challenges." |
Clay Shirky, who's updated his article on power law distribution in the blogosphere: "It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year." |
Robert Scoble reports that Microsoft's got blog community envy and that it's not likely to succeed when it does launch product-specific blogs: "Microsoft: get a clue! We'll support you. Just unleash us. Support us. And stop trying to control what the community says about your products." |
Dan Gillmor on the news that the BBC's embracing the reporting power of its readers: "The BBC may be taking this notion further than anyone else today... News organizations around the world should be paying attention."
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Joi Ito on the power law distribution that Clay Shirky, Dave Winer, Ross Mayfield and others are discussing: "Although there is a power law of sorts with respect to blogs that get a lot of attention, there are many local peaks. I think it looks much more like clusters of blogs with interconnections between communities." |
Donna Wentworth on Harvard's burgeoning blog effort: "I don't think I can express how excited [it] makes me... what we do when we link to others "in-the-know" (e.g., blogroll) is engage in a self-directed, modern-day apprenticeship." |
Stanton Finley on January 29: "I don’t know for sure yet, but I may have just entered the post-postmodern, postblogger world." On February 1: "Okay, maybe not. The compulsion to blog is surprisingly strong once you’ve begun." |
Jonathan Peterson: "Those who get captured by blogging often find it a great place to 'be themselves,' but why be limited to reality?... What could be more interactive than creating a persona, a rough plot outline and then creating the fiction in "real-time" with audience interaction."
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John Palfrey says that blogs may be the "next big step forward" for Harvard: "We're convinced that blogging... can help spread the wealth of knowledge from school to school; from student to student; and from elsewhere into Harvard and vice-versa." |
Nick Denton on the nanopublishing ventures he's pursuing: "It's about time people started looking again at online media. So long as everyone realizes that these are businesses with, at least for the moment, the turnover of a lemonade stand."
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Doc Searls follows up on the Washington Post article on blogging: "As long as the papers continue to see yesterday's news as a vital revenue stream rather than a way to expose their knowledge and authority (that all-important 'record') on the Web, they'll continue to get waxed (a bit worse every day) by blogs in subject searches." |
[We interupt this message to alert you to the blogging of two of our contributors:
Zack Lynch, who's writing a book on the impact neurotechnology will have on society and will soon be blogging in depth about it on Corante, is reporting on goings-on at an important conference at UCLA on the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and the cognitive sciences. Neat stuff.
And Renee Hopkins who's at the Creative Problem Solving Institute's Winterfest in San Diego to learn more about the creative process and, apparently, how to dance.] |
Dana Blankenhorn notes that PR flacks are beginning to realize that blogs are an avenue through which they can advance their side of a story. On the fact that he's beginning to hear from them: "I love it." |
Steve Safran, a professional newsman who calls himself a "convergence journalist," says his role has changed and that he's no longer a "tap dancer" in the news-gathering process thanks to the proliferation of information sources including blogs. |
Joi Ito declares he's had a "cluetrain moment": "[The] combination of Google and blogs may create an opinion management and cluetrain manifesto sort of human conversation about products in a much less centralized method than some of the earlier models."
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Chris Gulker says that blogs and their related tools "have fundamentally changed authorship... pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks." |
Dave Winer criticizes today's Washington Post article and its traditional vs. blog media angle: "If the pros are so good at 'established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth' why do they get the facts wrong, and skim the surface and repeat what has already been said so many times?"
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Stefano Mazzocchi: "I'm more and more heading myself into the concept of 'data emergence' where you don't go around bothering people to markup their data as *you* like it, but *you* make an effort to collect their data and make a sense out of it."
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Chris Mooney: "[I] have gone from occasionally distrusting blogging, to being enraptured by it, to participating in it but trying to make sure it doesn't take over my life."
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Doc Searls on "branches of egality": "Blogs are branchy. They fan out toward everyone else's light. No one blog shades any other." |
Media Minded reports that the Atlantic Monthly's March issue makes frequent mention of blogs: "I'll resist the urge to lapse into 'blogger triumphalism' and just say [it] is a nice bit of blog plugola from one of the nation's most respected magazines." |
Phil Ringnalda, who says he "mostly ignore[s] the various Corante 'weblog like content products,'" notes an ironic oversight we will correct shortly: "[It] really brings the whole Copyfight thing home, to have your left and right columns duelling over the center column's license."
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Marc Canter in an article by David Speakman: "[The] blog is the modern day financial newsletter... if you get the right people to listen to you, you can move a mountain." |
Jenny Levine comments on, um, us: "The Corante crew just doesn't want to give up the RSS feeds, so I don't read a single Corante blog. Which is a real shame..." |
Heather Havrilesky on the skill on which she would rely should the economy head a lot further south and we return to an agrarian society... "I think you all know where this ends... a blog!" |
Steve Himmer continues his discussion of blog stratification, A-listers and traffic: "Real influence, genuine power is tied up in the ability to make meanings and direct the meaning-making of others far more than in raw numbers and visibility."
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Jeff Jarvis, who's just begun using an aggregator, says that "unless I'm missing something -- which, if I am, I know it will be pointed out to me in 10,9,8... -- it's neat but it's not yet the Next Big Thing. Emphasis on 'yet.'"
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Meg Hourihan on the early days of Blogger: "We had dreams about its potential, we just didn't know how it all would play out. I'm not sure how one could be certain of blogging's role when there were at most a few thousand people doing it at the time." |
Joi Ito after getting a look at the Croquet OS: "I think we are mastering the art of micro content journalism. What Croquet made me imagine was some sort of object oriented journalism with smarter micro content which had behaviors and attributes." |
A.K.M. Adam, in a discussion of Sebastion Paquet's essay on personal KM, says of the blogosphere that if this "is a peer-review system, it’s a distinctly populist system, with all the strengths (open, unruly, anti-elitist) and weaknessses (low-common-denominator, unexamined criteria, nouvelle-elite) of that approach." |
Sam Ruby on the the development of better comment features for blogs: "How I chose to update my weblog is of an academic interest to most, but the ability to author new content is of a much wider interest."
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Doc Searls compares the essays of a prominent think tank to those of the blogosphere, "link farmers who think publicly in a new kind of tank." |
Rajesh Jain: "There is so much more which needs to be done to make authoring and sharing of ideas and information easier." The first step, he says: blogs. |
Clay Shirky in the comments that follow Tom Coates' post: "Mainstream media is not the way it is because it's run by dolts. It's the way it is because as audiences scale up, center-to-edge connections continue to rise, but edge-to-center and edge-to-edge connections don't (and can't). This is happening, today, to blogs." |
Tom Coates, in an ongoing discussion of A-listers: "This is not a medium that's been built to make some famous and keep others down. The technology defies that kind of elitism." |
Ad Explanation
Greetings... So, playing with Google's AdSense offering in various places on Corante to see how it works, if it's effective, etc. If you've got any comments, complaints or suggestions please send them my way.
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