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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
James Moore, in an essay on distributed activism: "The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action." |
Marc Canter: "As we continue to evolve and define social software, let's keep in mind that we ALSO have to evolve the user experiences and tools that enable people to create and maintain these social networks.'"
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Ross Mayfield suggests the rough economy may be playing a role in the development of social software: "During the downturn connections mattered to companies and the unemployed more than ever... the outcome of this cycle is more people socially engaged on the web as participants." |
Britt Blaser on the innovation explosion in social software: "This flowering wouldn't be possible if the Net hadn't progressed beyond its basic protocols to the point we've reached: a permission-free zone where anybody with an idea can launch a web service without a preliminary buy-in by existing vested interests." |
Jeff Jarvis: "Oh, gawd, I knew we'd regret ever calling this warblogging after 9.11. Now we have ' peaceblogging'... I'm just waiting for somebody to then try to rename warblogging, oh, I dunno... libertyblogging or freedomblogging or some such."
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Michael Tomasky on warblogging: "This war’s Ernie Pyle is embedded not with any Army division but in front of a computer about 7,500 miles from Baghdad." |
Joi Ito shares an email from a friend in media who says it was fair of CNN to pull Kevin Sites' blog: "If we want total 'freedom of speech' to write or say anything, anywhere at any time - especially on the same subjects that we cover as journalists - then we should expect to work for free."
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John Naughton in the Guardian on John Robb, a former Special Ops soldier: "He's not an armchair pundit, in other words, but someone who knows what death is like, close up. The mainstream media has no room - and no appetite - for his views. But thousands of people on the net do." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, RIT professor and proud blogmama to Got Game?: "A colleague once told me that what you want to strive for in your academic successes is inspiring 90% admiration and 10% jealousy... Andy Phelps has managed to accomplish that with me in less than a week of blogging."
Also on Liz's mind - social software: "We’re in the process of retooling our graduate program... and I’d like nothing more than for it to become the premier location for studying social software in all of its forms." |
[For those who tune in to Corante's industry-specific news digests, we've been adding a few new features that should improve usability, readability, scannability, etc.
This one should help those who want to get a quick sense of all our daily coverage - it strips out the headlines of every article we point to and links directly to the particular item. Hopefully makes for a much faster and easier scan of what we're covering on any given day.
Also, each industry digest now features a similar preview of the day's coverage with links to the respective item found below - i.e. Biotechnology, where you'll see links to all the stories for that day.
We're working on a bunch more features, including some for our blogs, that I hope will make Corante more useful. Please send any suggestions you'd like to see, whether for our digests or blogs, my way.
And, if you haven't seen it yet, check out Got Game?: the future of play, a great new blog on gaming from RIT professor Andrew Phelps.
Also not to be missed: Donna's heroic real-time blogging of the Berkman Center's Internet Law Program that just wrapped up and had Jonathan Zittrain, William Fisher III, Larry Lessig, Yochai Benkler, John Perry Barlow, Julian Dibbell and others discussing intellectual property law, spectrum policy, regulatory issues, the digital divide, free speech, ICANN, open source and much, much more.] |
Larry Lessig, as reported by Donna Wentworth, says blogs enable more political dicussion, particularly in the U.S. where it's "bad manners to talk about politics," by doing two extraordinarily important things: 1) They're asynchronous. 2) "It's okay--no, it is proper, to talk about political issues in weblogs." |
Roger Fischer responds to John Palfrey's concern about whether smart people are wasting their time: "Reading blogs and blogging does eat up a lot of time sometimes - yes. On the other hand it helps me crystallize and focalize my own thoughts." |
Steven Levy in an article on warblogging in Newsweek: "While the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It’s a bloggers’ world. We only link to it."
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Arnold Kling commends Gary Hart for joining the blogosphere, notes that there's "a shameful amount of flaming" in the comments and says he's "embarrassed for the Internet community that so many of the comments are mindless and bitter."
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Jeremy Allaire passes along Sergey Brin's comments on Blogger from his interview with Esther Dyson at PC Forum: "There is no master plan... the major focus now is getting Blogger into their infrastructure." |
Gary Hart announces the launch of his blog: "I cannot promise to be as skillful at this as many of those who have made the blogger universe such an important part of the internet. However, I'm committed to using the Internet as a vital tool to engage people on critical policy matters and the future of our country."
[Also check out the right column - his supporters are following Howard Dean's lead and have a Meetup planned.] |
Jeff Jarvis on how technology is changing news coverage: "...from anywhere to anywhere anytime by anybody... we'll get more news from more sources and more perspectives, more up-to-the-minute with more reality from the scene and more perspective later." |
Tim Porter says that "the number and success of warblogs continues to shock and awe mainstream journalists" but also that some perspective is needed: "The future of news is multi-faceted, multi-platformed and, certainly, multi-voiced..." |
The One True b!X, who covers local issues impacting the city of Portland here, reports on an attempt to commit a random act of journalism that was rebuffed: "before certain observers go hogwild and begin piling on about a wannabe weblog journo whining about being kept out of the media club, let me give some background..." |
John Palfrey of the Berkman Center enumerates some of the concerns he has about blogs. Concern #7: "Can we really make sense of what's happening on a Net that's truly global and unitary... if speech is so fragmented with so many publishers (i.e., does this emerging architecture make sense?)?" |
Dave Winer meets with Google's VP of engineering and reports back: "We reaffirmed the love affair the blogging world has been having with Google." |
Alan Nelson, the creator of Command Post, in the Baltimore Sun: "When we watched the bombing of Baghdad in [1991], we were passive. Now, people are participating in the information much more. They feel engaged in what's happening." |
MC Morgan, via Jill Walker, on a blog-writing assignment given to his students: "The strongest responses - those that did not simply assert a point or position but rolled ideas around - linked out to other places on the web... the strength didn't come simply of the linking... Instead, linking out created an ethos of someone at work on a problem." |
Paul Philp asserts, in his RTW Report, that a "Synaptic Web" is emerging whose "impact on business, society, economics and governments will be radical" and that "blogs are to creativity what spreadsheets were to productivity." |
Tom Coates says, in a discussion of how bloggers should give more thought to those that are stumbling on to their site for the first time: "It's entirely possible that someone might find themselves on a specific internal page without having the slightest idea of the context of a post whatsoever." |
Jonathan Peterson follows up on Jon Udell's piece on project weblogs: "The only question is how much time you're willing to invest to customize tools in order to implement features that are sure to be common place in development tool suites in the near future. |
Jeneane Sessum, in offering advice to Chris Locke's daughter who's just begun blogging: "We don't know what were up to. We're just doing. We're just making music by swapping links instead of parts, jamming with words instead of notes, rapping if you will..." |
Rebecca Blood, in a discussion on Blogroots about how the Heritage Foundation is reaching out to bloggers: "The danger isn't really in webloggers receiving talking points; it's in surreptitiously repeating those talking points." |
Anil Dash revisits points he made at SXSW, saying "I really believe..., despite the fact that nearly everyone who heard it thought I was either being crazy or facetious... that in 2 or 3 years, many of us will be reading 10,000 weblogs."
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Stephen Frank dedicates a ditty (audio included) to Ben & Mena Trott: "It relays the epic saga of a lonely everyblogger who dreams of finding the ultimate link that will catapult his puny blog into the limelight... As far as I know, it's the first, and hopefully the last ever song about weblogging."
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley, who's rightfully feeling like a proud parent about this, on the news that the grant she's applied for is likely to be approved by the NSF: "Wow." No, she continues, not that grant: "That wasn’t submitted until last month, so it will be quite some time before we hear anything on that." |
[Elizabeth Lane Lawley, who kicked it all off by very kindly introducing me to Andrew Phelps, her colleague at RIT, breaks the news that we're launching a blog on gaming. "Got Game?: the future of play" will have Andy, a professor, author and avid practitioner, exploring the rise of games as a medium of popular culture, and perhaps, as he says, a "medium of the times."
Andy, in his super introductory essay in which he articulates what he'll be covering:
If one looks carefully at the breadth and depth that games exhibit today, and combines this with the fact that games are still very much a growing medium that has only blossomed in the last 20 years or so, it is apparent that games are quickly becoming the mass-medium of a new modern culture...
The rise of games, the stereotypical press coverage, the misunderstandings of their nature, the scapegoat quality that is currently used to explain acts of violence is all similar in nature to the birth of Hollywood and the film industry. If one studies carefully the medium of film and its rise as both an academic endeavor as a technical and artistic discipline, as well as a medium of communication, many of these same issues were (and sometimes still are) very much in the foreground." Up for discussion in his first piece as well as in the blog in general in the coming months: the gaming industry, the rabid and rapidly expanding user base, the specific types of games he's identified, the role of gaming in the entertainment/media spectrum, the technology and standards that undergird today's games, the emerging social phenomena surrounding them, the future of wireless gaming, the study of gaming in academia and much, much more.
It's a fascinating story to watch unfold and one we're thrilled to be able to chronicle here (and one in which I'm particularly interested given I'm a game nut). Andy's already off to an excellent start and has another great piece on the way we'll publish in the next day or two entitled "The death of games through pixel shaders."
Please spread the word to folks who might be interested and thanks again to Liz. Welcome aboard Andy!] |
Matt Haughey weighs in on the institution of Google ads on Metafilter: "The site's definitely turned a corner tonight... I see a lot of open road ahead, instead of the brick wall waiting at the dead end we were heading for." |
Stavros the Wonder Chicken on Metafilter as it approaches its 4th anniversary: "It's like watching someone you've loved with all your heart for years, warts and all, become an incoherent, piss-reeking, crack-addicted ass-peddler..." |
Paul Eng for ABC News: "Blogs and other nontraditional news sites could be gaining ground among digital information seekers because they offer views that are uniquely compelling, personal and sometimes completely overlooked by traditional outlets."
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Peter Merholz, who's just returned to blogging and has set up a blog on the East Bay while he's been away: "I believe that there's a shining future in regional weblogs. They can be an amazing community resource."
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Jeff Jarvis' answer to questions and concerns big media companies may have about instituting blogs: "You're right." But, he continues, "I predict that competition will open this up. If Newsweek blogs, Time will. If FoxNews blogs, CNN will. Give it time." |
Tony Perkins apologizes: "Clearly, i did not invent this new media form... [but] I want to be a part of it, because frankly it is the most fun I have ever had in my professional life." |
Bernie Goldbach in a comment following up on Chris Gulker's remarks: "Now that we can carry information kiosks in our pockets, we will shift more data through the pipes of our information infrastructure." |
Chris Gulker says there's an emergent and profound phemomenon in the making: "In the 21st Century, a very large group of educated people are using an instantaneous and inexpensive global network to exchange ideas. If the effect on society of the Industrial Revolution was any indication, the Information Revolution will likely create change on a scale unprecedented in history." |
Mike Smartt, an editor of BBC News Online, in a long article on blogs in dotJournalism: "They are an interesting phenomenon, but I don't think they will be as talked about in a year's time."
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JD Lasica on the "Is blogging journalism?" debate: "Bloggers are increasingly engaging in random acts of journalism whenever they report on events they witness first-hand or when they offer analysis, background or commentary to a newsworthy topic." |
Patricia Aufderheide in the New York Times: "The backdrop of the popularity of these war blogs is a sense of cynicism and distrust of any kind of gatekept mainstream media... The impression at least is what you've got is one person with integrity sharing what they know."
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Ross Mayfield, in a discussion of social software at PC Forum and as related by Cory Doctorow: "Blogspace may look like a power-law distribution, but it's really driven by little, high-value clusters within it."
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Elizabeth Spiers on Tony Perkins' reaction to criticism of Always-On: "This is how blogs work, Tony. You generate content. Other people comment on it. And you're not always going to like what they say."
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Ben Trott of Moveable Type, courtesy of Alex Golub's Talking with the Trotts: "We never worry about proving its utility, because people are doing that all the time, and in ways we never expected."
[Correction: Thanks to Anil for pointing out this is a hypothetical interview.] |
Mickey Kaus, in pointing to an item on the war he found on a blog: "When I worked at the Washington Monthly in the early 1980s, we were ecstatic when we somehow acquired insider pieces like this. Now they pop up for free in real time!" [no permalink] |
Dan Chan: "Daypop needs your help. The costs of operating Daypop exceed the advertising revenue that our text-based ads bring in..." Support a worthy cause by donating here. |
[Check out the live webcast of JD Lasica and Rusty Foster - 11 EST] |
JB Holston in a piece on business models for nanopublishers: "Demand (I want choice), supply (I want to be a creator), and technology (no cost to create or distribute) make the nano-creation trend inexorable."
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[Be sure to check out Copyfight over the next few days where Donna Wentworth is, as usual, doing some great real-time blogging. This time it's of the Berkman Center's Internet Law Program currently underway in Rio Janeiro. Among those whose remarks she's sharing: Larry Lessig, Yochai Benkler, William Fisher III, Jonathan Zittrain and Charles Nesson.
A sample, from John Perry Barlow: "They keep mistaking the bottle (the CD) for the wine that is in it. We're creating a means of creating an economy around the wine."] |
Glenn Reynolds on warblogs: "The first-hand stuff is great. It's unfiltered and unspun. That doesn't mean it's unbiased. But people feel like they know where the bias is coming from. You don't have to spend a lot of time trying to find a hidden agenda." |
Ross Mayfield, in reacting to an article that dissed social software: "Connections are not being 'forced,' and the rationale is not because of distrust of the way people form relationships, it's the opposite -- believing in citizens and their right to associate..." |
Jason Kottke says it's not unreasonable for CNN to have quieted Kevin Sites' blog but that he hopes they allow him to start it up again: "It would... generate some goodwill among online news readers and [give] an innovative, experienced correspondent a little freedom to explore new methods of war reporting." |
Andrew Sullivan, who believes we're doing the right thing in Iraq, urges those that agree with him to expose what he sees as manipulation and misinformation by those opposed to the war: "Blogs are [a] weapon. We should use them." |
Jonathan Peterson, who helped build its site several jobs ago says he's saddened by their decision to quiet Kevin Sites: "Hopefully CNN will make sure to get the blogging rights locked down for all their correspondents in the future and will find a way to incorporate that content as part of both broadcast and web news."
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Michael Linder, who helped set up a blog to cover the Bosnia civil war and who worries that the personal style of blogs is wrong for war-time coverage: "We continue to ebb away from journalism and more into opinion and punditry. I would advise that bloggers... find a story and cover it well and with integrity.'' |
Tim Bray: "Is the future of journalism no more than putting somebody smart where the action is and letting them post what they see in real time?...Because from where I sit, that's where the present of technology journalism already is." |
Dave Sifry announces his new news tracker for Technorati, saying "Ever since the Google purchase of Blogger, the thing that struck me as the most compelling potential new feature was the combination of Google News with Blogger users' commentary. Perhaps they'll still do it, but I think I just beat them to it." |
Jason Kottke discusses whether the Baghdad blogger is legitimate and how the issue of trust and reliability often becomes an issue when old media talks about blogs: "people gauge the trustworthiness of weblogs... based on what's being said, how it's said, the accuracy of the information compared to other sources, the blogger's track record with similar information, and who else trusts that blogger." |
Zimran Ahmed on an email he received from the Heritage Foundation which indicated they're reaching out to influential bloggers: "Do I want opinions from the Heritage Foundation? No... The idea of broadcasting or picking through policy points with think-tanks frightens me." |
Jeff Jarvis, who's started a warblog here: "I find... that by the time I hear the morning news on TV or radio, I've already read all the stories they read and heard all the news they're reading. One key benefit of weblogs: speed."
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Jason Kottke says the notion that blogs are an antidote to what drives big media just isn't so: "Most webloggers 'covering' the current situation are either peace advocates unwilling to enter into a debate.. or too busy whipping each other into a hawkish frenzy in the pursuit of getting linked, being seen, driving up page views, and trying oh-so-hard to scale Mt. Instapundit." |
Andrew Sullivan, in an article by Tim Rutten in the LA Times on warblogging: "The weekly magazines, and even the op-ed pages, can't keep up with the pace of blogs."
Marty Kaplan, associate dean of USC's Annenberg School for Communication, in the same piece, on cable TV and blogs: "In both cases, it's an awfully influential audience, and the blogs in particular have helped set the tone for that influential group's response to what's been going on." |
Henry Copeland shares some comments from Tony Perkins in which he defends Always-On and says, "I get the impression that Tony, apparently better at boasting and bashing than listening and learning, isn't yet fully acclimated to blogdom's give and take." |
Adam Greenfield says it's official - he's going to schedule a moblogging confab in Tokyo in early summer: "What we'd like to see is presentations relating to your experiences of mobile publishing, either textual, visual, audial, or a combination of the above."
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Phil Ringnalda: "Every time I read someone saying 'blogging about blogging is just boring' I figure that's one more person leaving the field open for me..."
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Loren Webster: "I consider most of the people I link to 'virtual friends'... I suppose some could argue, then, that my list of links represents my 'community.' I wouldn't, though... That's not who I am, nor who I want to be." |
Steve Himmer comments on the pending war: "Blogs are like fanfiction we write about ourselves! Wars are like fanfiction politicians write about themselves." |
Doc Searls admits he's "flummoxed" by Trackback still: "Seems like we're one or two implementation rounds away from a standard practice here." |
Jim McGee, knowledge management expert, on "sharing knowledge with yourself": "Weblogs put the emphasis where I believe it belongs; on the individual knowledge worker... It helps them realize that they are the problem and the solution." |
Howard Rheingold comments, in an interview in the April issue of Reason, on the bubble and what's happened since: "[It] does not mean that either technological progress or social innovation has stopped. Weblogging pretty much emerged as a social phenomenon after the Internet crash." |
Elizabeth Lane Lawley says, in a discussion of the social software program she's helping to shape at RIT, "blessed are the toolmakers... for they shall help the meek inherit the 'net." |
Chris Pirillo on Jason Cain and GoldBlogger: "Excuse me? Have I been in the dark for the past year? Who is this guy? Is anybody taking him seriously?"
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Jason Cain liberally employs exclamation points and bold tags in saying GoldBlogger can bring riches to many a blogger: "A blog is open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. While you are sleeping or even work another job, your blog is filling a pockets with gold!" |
Dave Sifry on a breakthrough that's improved Technorati's performance: "Even though I had to pull out the enormous bulldozer of the scientific method, wait a week for some decent observations, and spend time pulling my hair out trying to figure it out on my own, my faith is unshaken and I stand victorious." |
Jon Udell on the way we're managing knowledge: "The growing social acceptance of the blogging mode of discourse starts to make it seem more natural to 'post' your contributions rather than 'send' them. And although we're not there yet, I think this defines a compelling use case for audioblogging as well."
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Joe Trippi in announcing Howard Dean's blog, the first for a presidential candidate his supporters think: "We are going to need as much support from the netroots and grassroots as we can possibly get." |
Chris Barton: "Blogs are not just endemic on the web, they're a contagion that cannot be stopped."
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Kevin Sites, who's currently blogging from northern Iraq: "This experience has really made me rethink my rather orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media... The feedback readers are posting motivates me to provide as much as I can for all of these folks hungry for first-hand info." (Thanks Jeppe!) |
Jonathan Peterson points out a problem he sees as our tools and blogs interact and interconnect more: "The distributed, loosely-coupled nature of the web is good, but the dependency on others for correct function is bad." |
Alex Golub compares real-time blogging to a frustration he had in his anthropological research: "I don't want to be rude here [but] I think a lot of the 'this is what I blogged at the conference stuff' reminds me a lot of how not to take ethnographic fieldnotes." |
Brad DeLong asks, in presenting several equations via which one might assess positive-feedback mechanisms: "Is there a danger that we are drifting toward a web of celebrity rather than of information--one in which well-known sites are well-known and prominent because of their well-knownness rather than their quality?" |
A.K.M. Adam on the visit paid by the Trotts of Moveable Type to his seminary: "[It] reached dozens of Chicago-area Blogarians, and made manifest to Seabury the scale of the phenomena with which we’re dabbling..." |
The Gawker crew shares a cease and desist letter they've received from Puma as well as the sentiment of Puma's adman who says that a blog is "not a media outlet" and that "weblog comment is therefore not entitled to the same protection as mainstream media." |
Michael O'Connor Clarke sketches a corolloary between the World of Ends and his still-forming notion of a World of Ands: "This might be little more than neat word play, or it might be something a little bigger – not too sure..."
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Kevin Werbach says nice things about Corante, calling us "a happy medium between professional journalism and personal blogging. I just hope it works as a business." Agreed. |
Arnold Kling, blog advocate, in pointing to the reporting of blogger James Grimmelman: "We win... Next time some clown says that traditional journalism is superior, email the link and then ask that clown to show you something of that caliber done by a professional journalist."
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Sébastian Paquet, in saying he'd like to see people putting more metadata on their content: "If something like this were to become successful it would compete with a host of commercially led user-contributed databases such as Amazon's review database."
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Elizabeth Lane Lawley on the news that her graduate students have taken an interest in blog-related projects: "It is incredibly exciting to have students who want to work on the things I really care about... we have an incredible opportunity to turn them loose on the LazyWeb and have what they do help the larger social software community." |
Walt Mossberg says there's lots of upside but also a downside to personal publishing: "[Bloggers don't] benefit from the professional editing and fact-checking that a first-class newspaper or magazine provides for its reporters... So, a blog is only as good as the blogger."
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Micah Alpern, in introducing his RSS search tool: "If Googling my weblog is like searching by backup brain, then searching all sites in my RSS news aggregator is like searching the brains of people I respect and find interesting."
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Jeff Jarvis, self-described Big Media guy, on whether blogging's the "antithesis of traditional media": "It's not the antithesis. It's the future...The wise media entity -- newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station -- will use it to listen to that audience, to find out what they care about and what matters to them and what they have to say." |
Chris Locke goes Wi-Fi at Starbucks: "I'm OUTSIDE, which means I can, you know, SMOKE!!! So you can bet I'll be drinking a lot more espresso. And what does this mean for you, Valued Reader? More quality hi-test blogging, that's what!" |
Arnold Kling says, in a Tech Central Station response to the Weinberger/Searls manifesto, that he largely agrees with them but takes issue on a few points. Among them: "[Contrary to their point] the low cost of producing on computers and distributing over the Internet means that filtering by intermediaries becomes even more important." |
Mark Glaser, in a discussion of big and small media's coverage of the war: "What gives the Net its edge, its cachet, its juice, is that it's a medium sprung from discussion boards and fueled by e-mail and instant messaging. In short, it's where we kvetch about everything, whether it's a defective kitchen appliance or an oppressive government." |
JD Lasica shares his SXSW speech on the changing face of journalism: "We need to get away from the notion that journalism is a priesthood that’s inaccessible to the masses. The No. 1 rule of journalism, really, is simply this: Tell the truth. Report something as accurately and faithfully as possible. Can bloggers tell the truth? I suspect so." |
John Perry Barlow on Big Media: "They want to turn it into a one-way flow that they have entirely monetized. I look at the collective human mind as a kind of ecosystem. They want to clear cut it. They want to go into the rainforest of human thought and mow the thing down." |
Henry Copeland on the Always-On Network: "Perkins "next level" looks a lot like the "last level"... a curious recursion to the ancien regime." |
Howard Rheingold addresses, in commentary on emergent democracy, those taking advantage of the democratization of media: "To the generation that is finding its voice: Don't be afraid to deliberate, to think about what you are doing, to argue about it."
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Paul Bausch, via Renee, who provides a wrap on SXSW even though she wasn't there: "We need a way to get a sense of how ideas evolve and how memes move throughout communities. Before Web logs put that structure into the Web, there was no shared time. Web logs provide that."
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[New and exciting from Corante: Open Mind, a blog on open source I hope you'll check out and alert others to. It's edited by Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, who already edits our Law & Policy section but who more importantly has covered open source for years for the likes of Linux Magazine, UnixReview.com and Sys Admin and has co-authored several books on the general subject.
Joe will be tracking the latest developments in open source, commenting on the people and companies charting its course as well as keeping an eye on those who wish it ill. It's a super and important addition to our bevy of blogs and one we hope you'll let others know about. Also, please send comments, suggestions and tips Joe's way - he's eager to hear from people.]
[And another neat new blog we rolled out yesterday: Brain Waves. It's authored by Zack Lynch, who blogs here and is writing a book on the subject, and will cover the general field of "neurotechnology," an exciting field of science that sits at the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and the cognitive sciences and could prove to be one of the more interesting and important stories of the coming decades. Please check it out and alert others who might be interested. Thanks to Ross Mayfield for introducing us.] |
Dee Hock says, in a response to Joi Ito, that he doesn't understand blogging but that Joi's paper on emergent democracy triggered a thought: "I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success."
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Jason Kottke pulls together various lists of the top blogs, finds them wildly divergent and concludes that "the rich [the most popular] seem disproportionally richer because the network is being measured from their perspective."
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Clay Shirky, in his latest essay, on the still-primitive state of social software: "The last time there was this much foment around the idea of software to be used by groups was in the late 70s, when usenet, group chat, and MUDs were all invented in the space of 18 months. Now we've got blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Trackback, XML-over-IM and all sorts of IM- and mail-bots..." |
Arianna Huffington, via Jeff Jarvis who says she should be crowned the "fairy godmother of bloggers," in a debate about media: "It was not the mainstream media that got rid of Henry Kissinger. It was the bloggers... It was not the mainstream media that got rid of Trent Lott as majority leader -- it was the bloggers that kept the drumbeat on." |
Ton Zijlstra, in a discussion of blogs and knowledge sharing, says that "on the face of it, it takes a lot of effort to sustain a dialogue through blogs. But as that effort has the form of a tour of discovery it is also a source of fun and satisfaction."
On the blogosphere in general: "... it's a cloud, not a hierarchy or a necessity of consensus on content, like forums, or congresses. There is no centralized push, you experience only push as far as there are pulls within you to accept it." |
Kevin Poulsen reports in Business Week that Google's closed security holes in Blogger: "A hacker could simply change the name in the form field to the name of an existing weblog to create a new journal that would supercede the legitimate one."
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Nick Denton on the AP story which cites Always-On Network and the Raging Cow blog campaign as illustrative of the mainstreaming of blogging: "Here the emblems of the new wave of internet media: a cheesy marketing gimmick and a mediocre Silicon Valley retread. Remind me to shoot myself." |
The Associated Press, in an article on the mainstreaming of blogs: "As more people have embraced the concept, what once seemed like a passing fancy has morphed into a cutting-edge phenomenon that may provide the platform for the Internet's next wave of innovation and moneymaking opportunities." |
Dave Green: "It's getting so easy to update a weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities... It is like one of those terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single day of the year." |
James D. Miller comments, in Tech Central Station, on brand and trust in media: "You don't get any more pleasure, per se, from reading an article in the Times than our anonymous blog; it's just that there is a higher probability of you liking the Times's article. This advantage causes quality writers to want to publish in the Times, which further strengthens the Times's brand name. If, however, some search engine found the articles you would like regardless of publication place, it would no longer matter to reader or writer where an article appeared."
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Doc Searls and David Weinberger in the "World of Ends" essay to which everyone's pointing: "Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all."
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Dan Shafer, a professional writer/journalist for more than 30 years, agrees with Vint Cerf's comment on blogging: "I try to convince myself that... the bloom is off the rose of seeing my name in print or having readers tell me they like my stuff... Clearly, it isn't." |
Glenn Fleishman in pointing to a new blog at the Seattle Times: "As breezy as bloggers like me like to be, or as rigorous as I fact check my own material, the gap between my Wi-Fi Networking News blog and a Seattle Times blog is liability, authoritativeness, and...liability."
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Dave Green in the Guardian on blogging: "Over the past year, I've watched my friends succumb to the cult, one by inevitable one. They seem different now, somehow changed - communicating to each other in a secret, silent language I cannot understand..."
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Steven Johnson references Vannevar Bush's seminal essay in the Atlantic and suggests it may hint at why Google acquired Blogger: "Right now Google is a kind of information detective, and a brilliant one at that. But it could be something more: an extension of your memory." |
Bill Hobbs, a senior editor for us who blogs on his own site about local Tennessee politics, provides a case study on how bloggers dug deep into a story, fleshing out the details, exploring its implications and debunking an AP report on the issue: "That, my friends, is how the blogosphere works." |
Vint Cerf on the popularity of blogging: "We would collectively and individually like our lives to 'count' somehow and if someone finds our blogs of interest, it is confirmation that our lives and opinions are making a difference to someone."
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Kevin Marks' form of protest - a Raging Cow riff that's "dedicated to parodying the bovine flatulence that DPSU created when they named a drink after Bovine Spongiform Encepalopathy."
Link to it, says David Weinberger, to knock the "dumb ass milk-like drink... off the #1 perch for 'raging cow' at Google." |
Dave Winer on a betrayal he's feeling: "I've seen Blogger as a respected competitor for almost four years. I've seen Google as a valuable utility, but never as a competitor. I have no words from Google to explain how they want me to understand that." |
Marc Andreessen in response to the question 'do you blog?': "No. I have a day job. I don't have the time or ego need."
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Allison Kaplan Sommer, an American in Israel: "I've been reading so many blogs, I had to get in on the fun, even though there is little time between working, parenting, and redecorating my sealed bomb shelter." |
Tony Emond: "We can all argue until we're blue in the face that all blogs should be as pure as a certain unnamed soap bar, but then all this will succeed in doing is restrict the "legitimate" blogger market to upper-class folks who have both time AND money." |
Stavrosthewonderchicken on the Raging Cow campaign: "This sort of thing is going to get more sophisticated, mark my words, brothers and sisters, and more insidious. The marketrons will continue to colonize the new frontier." |
Tom Coates in a post about how marketers may increasingly use blogs to spread word of new products: "Weblogs are becoming the natural meme ecology... They are public opinion made manifest." |
Ross Mayfield on influence: "One thing that's unique about blogs and other emerging tools is the density of feedback loops between participants. These tools not only amplify memes but [also] create a competition of ideas -- leveraging nested feedback loops with varying degrees of intensity." |
Sebastian Pacquet comments on the accounts of the party Joi Ito threw last week: "Humility, usefulness, and blogs. A revolutionary combination. Image might still be everything, but the images have gotten much richer." |
Phil Ringnalda: "I've been feeling a touch of what it's going to be like when practically everyone with something interesting to say has a weblog to say it in, and me oh my..." |
Jerry Michalski says he's "turning the volume up" on his enthusiasm for wikis: "Wikis are the ultimate social software. They don't work because of the software, they work because the participants figure out how to participate." |
Tim Oren in a post about emergent democracy: "While I've no illusion that we are going to abolish [mass] media now or ever, I give a hearty cheer every time we tear a bleeding chunk off their hide by extending the power law curve to more creators and more readers." |
Renee Hopkins, who says she worked with Todd Copilevitz ten years ago, on the Dr. Pepper campaign: "Top-down marketing, when corporations orchestrate a conversation in the blogosphere about their product, is no real conversation at all." Renee also points to a "Full Disclosure" XML tag. |
Lee Gomes, in a post that generally sings the praises of the Internet, in the Wall Street Journal (sub req): "This boon in information has its risks... there is the chance that in an age of blogs, political discourse will grow even more hyberbolic and overheated, as folks try to stake out differentiated positions in an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas." |
Todd Copilevitz, via Christopher Filkins, who's part of the team behind the Dr. Pepper blog campaign, says of the young bloggers they approached: "The guiding principle was to respect what they've created. In simplest terms, we give them the product. If they like it, they'll say so. If they don't, I'm sure they'll say that too. But, we have no role in what they say or how they say it." |
Christopher Filkins speculates on Dr. Pepper's blog initiative: "One way in which this initiative makes sense is that by seeding the web with a small network like this before launching the product the search engines, mainly Google, will have time to fill their indexes with the marketing vehicle at the center of the scheme." |
Ross Mayfield on the party thrown by Joi Ito the other night: "The buzz was certainly reminiscient of the days of yore. The difference is humility, an interest in making things people actually use and that nametags have blogs behind them."
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Dorian Benkoil in an article on how technology will alter journalism: "Journalists may even be in for a sea change... Digital technology may revamp what the public thinks of as 'news' just as television and radio remade what had been a world ruled by print."
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Jenny Levine says she doesn't mind ads coming in via her aggregator but concedes that "if every channel did that, it would get overwhelming and defeat the point... Perhaps we'll look back on this time as the golden age of RSS aggregators." |
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