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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
Andrew Sullivan on his recent writings about Senator Rick Santorum: "this last week has given me more appreciation for the blogging medium... your responses both informed, chastised, and then uplifted me - in real time. Nothing like this has occurred in the media with such immediacy and speed before." |
Dave Winer on what he calls amateur journalism: "The Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea-change that the big publications face -- how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won't." |
Tiernan Ray in an article on "Why blogs haven't stormed the business world": "the heap of content produced by blogging is not the ideal knowledge store a company might wish to produce as a result of employee participation." |
Jon Udell on how blogs may change the way companies interact with their customers: "Think of an organization as a single-celled animal. Blogs increase the surface area of the cell, help nutrients flow across its membrane, and promote multicellular cooperation." |
Jason DeFillippo, in a comment to a Joi Ito post about trackbacking: "I follow the trends in the adult world fairly closely and they have taken notice of weblogs and will soon be sinking their teeth into the traffic they offer."
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David Weinberger on Andrew Orlowski's coverage of blogs: "[He] seems to be descending through the rings of his own private Inferno column by column." |
Jeff Ward: "I think it was Kenneth Bruffee who said that writing was a public activity performed in private. Increasingly, writing is being transformed into a public activity performed in public through new modes." |
Charles Hudson in discussing why Google bought Blogger: "I enjoy blogging, but I must admit that I haven't heard such grandiose descriptions of how one technology will change the face of the Internet since the first-generation of popular webpage publishing tools such as GeoCities and Angelfire."
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Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media critic: "It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign."
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Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, on Esther Dyson's new blog: "Makes me feel better, like I'm not the last person to just be getting started with a blog." |
Daniel Brandt on in a letter to Dave Winer about Google and blogrolling: "This is a classic spam technique for gaming Google's PageRank. But in the solitary case of the A-list bloggers, Google appears to approve of this effect."
Dave Winer's response: "I don't plan to get rid of my blogroll. The world doesn't revolve around Google, even though sometimes it seems that way."
Dana Blankenhorn follows up: "If someone creates a blog search engine that's truly fair and Clued-in, they're going to get a lot of traffic, and they're going to take it from Google." |
David Hornik: "As much as blogging is a phenomenon that will have long-lasting social ramifications, I've heard a lot of conference attendees expressing the general frustration that blogging does not involve the kind of technical innovation about which they look forward to hearing at O'Reilly's conferences." |
David Galbraith in saying advertising on the Web will happen at the item, rather than page, level: "If there are no permalinks to individual pieces of content, then the advertising model of the web will never be able to fully take advantage of linking. Eventually everthing on the web will have a permalink." |
[Just got an email that the PBS Newshour bit on blogging will air tonight at 29 past the hour - check local listings.] |
William Gibson in an article on why he'll stop blogging soon: "In a peculiar way, it's freed me from feeling dependent on my audience, because it's the largest amount of personal feedback I've had from readers over time."
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Chris Mincher reports that an "increasing numbers of people are [reading] online journals that are written and maintained by celebrities." (Thanks to Bill Hobbs who blogs here) |
Ed Cone on the New York Times piece today on Salon: "When it talks about Slate's failure to find a "killer app" for online journalism... it ignores the fact that weblogs are the bold 2.0 version of journalism. The killer app in online journalism is the people who are freed to produce it. "
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Henry Chesbrough, a Harvard Business School professor and author of a recent book on "open innovation,": "Blogs are a marvelous addition to the Open Innovation landscape, and have already become an important addition to the body of knowledge that is circulating in the natural, physical and social sciences." |
Jonathan Peterson on Andrew Orlowski's coverage of blogging: "Is it just me, or does Andrew sound like some 1950's Bible-belt preacher ranting and raving about how the 'primitive jungle rhythms of rock and roll' were causing depravation among America's youth?"
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Ken Layne comments on the Hartford Courant journalist who's been told to stop blogging: "The corporate mid-sized newspaper editor... is a lifelong fraud, gladhanding the Chamber of Commerce boys and Board of Realtors while occasionally shitting out bogus pronouncements about journalistic integrity and Free Speech and that Pulitzer he bought a dozen years ago. His time is nearly up..." |
Jimmy Guterman in an article on the use of blogs by businesses: "Currently the theoreticians are more excited about internal blogging systems than are the people who actually have to implement them."
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Dave Winer on the "hype" over social software: "Take something that exists, give it a fancy new name, and then blast at reporters and analysts about it... We don't need this. Weblogs are about punching through the hype machine of idiot analysts and reporters who go for their BS." |
Dana Blankenhorn on the "Is blogging journalism?" question: "Newspapers and the 'journalism profession' are no longer in a position to be judge and jury on who is, and isn't, practicing journalism. It's readers who decide who journalists are, and what journalism is." |
Announcing Corante's new blog!
Many-to-Many: social software
Liz Lawley, our patron saint of late, breaks some very exciting news: "Blogging has been a little light over the past week because I’ve been working with Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, and Jessica Hammer on a brand-new Corante blog on 'social software' called 'Many-to-Many' (which I’ll refer to from now on as M2M, since that’s a lot shorter and easier to type)."
It's true!
As Liz says, it *is* an "amazing and talented group of people with a wide range of views" and we're thrilled that Liz, Clay, Ross, Sébastien and Jessica are going to make a corner of Corante their own. As they'll articulate and illustrate over the coming months and hopefully longer Social Software is a fascinating field whose pieces have perhaps been in place for some time but are only now coalescing into a cohesive, if still fluid, whole.
Up for discussion: blogs, Wikis, online communities, P2P and group-forming technologies, multiplayer games, IM applications, mobile devices, mailing lists, usenet groups, etc. - basically, tools and technologies that allow human beings to communicate, collaborate, meet and form affinity groups.
Please check it out and spread the word:
Many-to-Many: social software
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Adam Greenfield on marginwalker, which he's just announced: "We want the site to serve as a staging area for developing ideas about how best to live in this chaotic century - a kind of dev server to germinate and test concepts before pushing them live in the 'real world,' wherever that is." |
Jonathan Peterson on photoblogging: "The technical complexity of setting up server tools and the usability difficulties inherent in moving images from camera, through PC, touching up, resizing and publishing has kept the number of photoblogs small until recently."
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Joi Ito on his investment in Six Apart, maker of Moveable Type: "This is probably one of the most exciting investments we've made and I particularly like the fact that I started as a user, sponsor, friend and finally an investor." |
JD Lasica on the Hartford Courant's decision to ban a blog by one of its journalists: "I'm often asked at new media conferences why more journalists don't have personal weblogs. Why? Here's a perfect example: the thuggish mindset of the Courant's editor."
Dan Gillmor's comment: "The Tribune Co., which owns the Courant, should think about the messages it's sending, and not just the sheer arrogance of telling staffers that their days and nights are totally owned by the employer (I wonder if the state of Connecticut's labor laws allow this.)"
Derek Willis':"[They] seem to be of the opinion that any sort of writing outside the paper is a threat to the paper and must be quashed. They won't be able to hold that door closed much longer, and the sooner they figure out how to intelligently deal with this issue, the better off we'll all be." |
Ray Ozzie returns to the blogosphere: "Well, I'm back... I do miss being part of this fascinating social fabric... Time to jack back into the conversation, albeit this time as a bit more of an HPB..." |
Tina Brown: "I wonder when Americans will get tired of being told what to do and think. By publicists. By bloggers. By the Pentagon. By talk show hosts... There are media mullahs everywhere you turn." |
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, on the democratization of media, as reported by Jeremy Allaire: "How do we get more useful media? Useful is in the eye of the beholder, and there will be thousands of capabilities." |
Brian Toolan, the Hartford Courant editor, on why he shut down Denis Horgan's blog: "[His] entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant... that makes the paper vulnerable." |
Esther Dyson in Release 4.0: "Well, there's no time to start a blog like when you run into Ev Williams at a conference and he offers to help personally to set you up with your very own blog." (Thanks Doc) |
Sean Voisen touts his Blogshares and discusses this quarter's agenda: "To save on labor costs, all future weblog entries will be written by 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters." |
Anil Dash on the news that he's joining Moveable Type: "I get to work in the medium I know best, doing work I love. It'd be a dream job by anyone's measure. That the realm we're working in might actually turn out to be important makes it even better." |
Shelley Powers, for whom Jonathon Delacour has just set up a fund to help keep her blogging: "When did it become a regular thing to send emails out everytime you post a new weblog posting? Believe me babes, if you write something good, we'll post a link."
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Mena and Ben Trott announce some news: "Today, we're announcing the upcoming launch of a new weblog personal publishing service called TypePad... We've also just closed an initial round of financing with Neoteny Co. Ltd.... Finally, we've brought on Anil Dash as our Vice President of Business Development..." |
Denis Horgan, a reporter for the Hartford Courant, reports that he's been told to stop blogging: "Despite the fact that this page is operated on my own time and at my own expense, that it does not compete with the newspaper or draw upon any of its resources, the editor has ruled that its operation is a conflict of interest." |
Xeni Jardin: "Everybody fantasizes about getting into Susannah Breslin's pants. Me, I fantasize about getting into her blog. And this week, she's indulging me..."
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Ray Ozzie: "The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software. That will involve a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections." |
Michael O'Connor Clarke on why he's quit Friendster: "The whole thing was starting to genuinely creep me out... I think I'm getting all the Friend mojo I want through just being online, thanks very much - don't need no aspartame-flavoured Friendster sweetness to help me along here." |
Stuart Henshall in a post about conversational blogging: "I'm really thinking we must look at the 'professional blog' formats really demonstrated by the Radio / MT professionals... versus the 18/24 year old who has a substantially richer feedback environment and are using them not just to 'tell the world.'"
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Tim Bray on RSS: "Increasingly the Web is not a crowd of people randomly or purposefully stumbling from link to link, but instead, those same people sitting back waiting for whatever it is they use to suck to encounter some input and package it up for them."
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Raul Rivero, a Cuban writer and journalist who was recently sentenced to a twenty-year jail term, in commentary that should be of interest to bloggers and emergent democrats: "I have responded to the raised arm of this new law, to the insults from the dark functionaries of official journalism...with the joy of knowing I am free... I am only a man who writes."
[For continuing coverage of the arrest of an Iranian journalist and blogger, see Jeff Jarvis.] |
Steve Himmer on truth in writing: "I don't want writing and/or truth to be a mirror, I want it to be a painting... Find me a writer who writes like a mirror, and maybe you'll start to convince me, but as long as all of the writing I read is done by human beings, I want to keep seeing those brush strokes." |
Anne Galloway: "One of my favourite things about blogging is finding other grad students and being completely taken by what they research and write! And then smiling when you recognise other grad students in their blogroll, and finding still others again. Rhizomatic."
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Doc Searls points to various development efforts under way, including blogging, their apparent convergence in what he's calling a "live" Web, and says "The economy may suck, but there's a pile of interesting shit going on. And hey, maybe having a sucky economy helps." |
Dave Sifry comments on the release of the specs for Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), saying, "We still have the problem of intentional or unintentional misunderstanding and misreading of metadata like categories, which leads me to think that the entire concept of self-categorization is extremely difficult to work on a large scale." |
Donna Wentworth on the first anniversary of Copyfight: "It has changed my life--mainly through exposing me to a community of thinkers from whom I continue to learn on a daily basis." |
Hossein Derakhshan reports that "Sina Motallebi, well-known blogger and journalist was arrested this morning. He is accused of threatening the national security by giving interviews to Persian language radios outside Iran, wrtiting articles both in newspapers and his weblog."
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Mark Bernstein: "It's time for weblogs to grow up, to move beyond their obsession with authenticity and to get over the panic that accompanies any hint that a weblog writer might not be exactly what they say they are. Who is?" |
[FYI to all: Copyfight, which uber-IP blogger Donna may not know celebrates its one-year anniversary in two days, has now got a home all its own, one you should find a bit more mnemonically friendly: http://www.copyfight.org.
Please adjust your blogrolls accordingly and let Google work its magic... (The real magic of course: Donna's writing & reporting.)] |
Alec Saunders to a blogger who was gratified he bought up some of her blogshares: "It's only temporary dear :) I'm a 'technical trader', and your numbers were right." But, he adds, his "trading strategy is losing momentum... it's getting tougher to find blogs with a high enough price, enough shares available, and a low enough PE to execute the strategy." |
John Palfrey, who's officially caught the blogbug: "Maybe things won't pan out for this Internet thing or this blogs thing. But man, I'd hate to be anywhere but in this mix, trying to find out." |
Clemens Vasters on the "content pipelines" that might emerge from the marriage of blogs, RSS and web services: "what the system does is to pull content from RSS feeds, from Exchange public folders, websites and others sources..., [and] maps everything into a common representation and flows articles through the pipeline." |
Edward Champion: "I honestly don't see why blogging is any different from how you deport yourself in public. As we all learned in high school, if the jocks don't accept you, you seek out the geeks and have a damn good time." |
Beth Potier on Dave Winer in a profile of the Berkman Center-led blog initiative at Harvard: "He's a preacher with a projection screen, and, in his jeans and sneakers looking more like a software developer than a gospel-sayer."
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Tim Bray: "I think blogging is like poetry; the number who write the stuff probably exceeds the number who read it."
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Rick Klau points to the words of a renowned historian about the pampleteers of the past and says: "What we're now calling warblogs are a continuation of a very American tradition from 250 years ago."
John Palfrey follows up: "Blogs, no doubt, are about the preservation of political liberty in the online environment, in a digital era... It's no time to claim victory, of course, but rather to celebrate a new means of political organizing and figuring out how to put it to yet greater use." |
Stavrosthewonderchicken: "Sometimes I think there's really not much difference between a camgirlwoman and your average blogger." |
Euan Semple, who says he's immediately liked people from his blogroll he's met in person and is tired of those who dismiss this "new way of relating as 'technology'": "It's not about the technology - we could be using bloody semaphore - it's about people having conversations which help shape our own lives, the lives of others and help create a shared experience." |
Gary Turner on the changing nature of friendship: "It seems that there's this relationship middle-ground on the Web just north of 'I know of him' and just south of 'I know him' and certainly several miles away from at least one conventional, physical definition of the word Friend."
David Weinberger agrees, adding: "And yet there are still differences: my interaction with my e-friends tend to be topic-based, more intentional than the rather random RW meetings, intermittent, and, I suspect longer-term because they are not subject to the vagaries of the RW." |
Andrew Orlowski in another article on 'Googlewashing': "We must examine the narcissitic relationship between Google and this tiny handful of weblog lobbyists who form its most devoted admirers ("I'm the fourth best Dave!" ... "I'm the seventh best Dan!"), for it is essentially synthetic." |
Glenn Reynolds comments on an article which mentioned he often gets more than 200,000 hits a day: "Actually, I've only gotten that much traffic a couple of times, way back at the beginning of the war..."
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Laura Melton on truth in blogging: "Fiction isn't less true than non-fiction; you just have to read it with a different set of glasses."
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Steve Himmer continues his discussion of literariness in blogs: "You don't have to try to be literary, because the weblog is inherently a literary form: to call it memoir, or fiction, or novel, or journalism is irrelevant—it is very much its own beast with its own practices and possibilities." |
Shelley Powers: "With other things in my life demanding attention now, and while I work through hosting issues, my site(s) might go dark for a time. Possibly longish time."
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Jeff Jarvis insists that traditional media outlets are, in fact, beginning to embrace blogs: "Big, old, dumb media isn't as dumb as it used to be." |
JD Lasica: "Old media... shows an appalling lack of respect for the millions of people who now rely on weblogs to supplement their media intake. It shows that old media are out of touch with the wishes of millions of news consumers." |
Adam Greenfield explains why he's been writing a lot about emergent democracy and moblogging lately: "What I dearly wish to emerge from all this is the sense that as "users," citizens, and neighbors, we now have the chance to co-design the arrangements we live under, whether technological or social." |
Jon Udell in a piece on the "semantic blog": "My hunch... is that before long I'll be producing, consuming, and storing a small but growing number of XHTML-enhanced blogs. And then, I hope, we'll start to see conventions bubbling up from the grass roots." |
Glenn Reynolds trumpets the intimate and compelling aspect of blog-writing in an article on how traditional news organizations are struggling with what to do about blogs: "Somehow in an evil conspiracy between Strunk and White and corporate management, all the blood and personality has been drained out of newspaper writing."
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Jeff Jarvis to Tony Perkins and Always-On's PR flack: "People will link to you IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING WORTHWHILE TO SAY. That's how this weblog thing works; in fact, that is what makes it work: quality rises because it deserves to."
Liz Spiers on the same subject: "This is first time I've ever seen a blogger hire an actual PR firm to solicit links from other bloggers... it seems a bit like having your mom run around the playground, asking all the other kids to be your friend." |
Phil Ringnalda says bloggers should provide descriptions of how their comment systems work: "Not telling people what the rules are until after they break them is as bad as not allowing shoes in the house, but not telling your guests until after they've tromped all over your white carpet in their muddy boots." |
Edward Champion, in urging bloggers to write what they feel at any given moment in spite of the fact that those remarks can't be stricken from the public record: "It's a riskier proposition, but it's a more than a whit better than confining yourself to an oblique future, in which you're too frightened about what people will think about your words." |
Jill Walker: "Exhibitionism and mental masturbation? Nonsense. Blogging is about hiding. It's about partial truths and a voice that is binding as well as freeing."
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Sebastien Paquet shares the results of his "weblogs and knowledge sharing" survey (don't miss it) and says what he finds most interesting is the data suggesting "that weblogs provide a unique opportunity to create meaningful links between people in different fields." |
JD Lasica reports that he and Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin have both been contacted by PR reps of Always-On. Rusty's take: "This is exactly why they suck. Who the hell does 'link exchanges' with a PR agency in 2003? Who even hires a PR agency for a weblog?" |
Bill Turner: "Wouldn’t TrackBack be a wonderful way of tracing the original source of a link/story/meme?... Instead of the flat list of links that Blogdex shows, you could have a massive, almost fractal tree of links showing the progress of who linked to that story, and who linked to them, and so on."
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Jason Calcanis, in responding to a report on the sale of Rising Tide Studios: "In my mind blogs have killed the newsletter business. You can't be just a newsletter any more because some talented and ambitious fellow who has been laid off will spend $99 to host a blog to kill his former boss." |
Arnold Kling points to an article on the success independent artists are reporting and disagrees with Larry Lessig and others who assert Big Media's winning: "They need to look at reality..." |
Dan Gillmor comments on the feedback he's gotten to his call for input on his forthcoming book: "I've already received a tremendous number of responses... I think this process is going to work..." |
Stuart Hughes, the BBC producer who lost his foot to a mine in Iraq, on his blog: "It has no connection with, and is not funded by, the BBC... the fact that so many people have discovered it is a fortuitous accident but it’s certainly totally separate from my 'real' job." |
Andrew Sullivan on his self-imposed vacation: "I'm taking a breather... after round-the-clock blogging since the new year, it's time for a break." |
Laurence Simon: "Collaborative blogs are the future... it takes more than one for magic to happen."
Glenn Reynold's response: "InstaPundit was originally going to be a group blog, but I couldn't get anyone interested at the time..." (Thanks, Denise) |
Witold Riedel on why he advertises for his blog: "We are in a place in time where individuals can use channels of communication formerly only available to large corporations. It is possible for me, as a private person to use very targeted online (and offline) advertising to help you find me."
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Bo Leuf, in an interview with David Mattison, on blogging: "[It] isn't about any particular technology, it's a form of expression... I rather doubt the average blogger really cares about the underlying technology."
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Tom Shugart makes a connection between his political leanings, his opposition to the war and his efforts to overcome his current blogfunk: "Allowing myself to be incapacitated from blogging because of the war [is] a capitulation to the Bushman. It’s tantamount to saying that he wins."
He also reports on a recent dinner with Denise Howell: "Although my experience is limited, what it tells me so far is that conversing with bloggers—the ones on my blogroll anyway—is a delightful experience. And why wouldn’t it be?" |
David Mattison, in a near-book on the subject, on wikis and blogs: "While both wikis and blogs are extensible to the point that they become indistinguishable, the general design principles of wikis and blogs remain unchanged: wikis promote content over form, blogs promote form (temporal organization) over content."
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Daiji Hirata comments, in an article on blogging in Japan, on an aspect of Japanese culture that may be impacting blog-adoption: "To become journalism, first many Japanese have to change their minds and publish their own thoughts. Most Japanese are still too shy to go public." |
John Palfrey notes the response Philip Greenspun has gotten to his post about the U.S. education system and wonders: "If we just say outrageous things in blogs... don't we risk the technology being seen as frivolous?" |
David Carraher on the use of blogs in education: "Researchers would find a treasure trove of things to study in weblogs and online discussions. They wouldn't have to physically enter classrooms and disrupt ongoing discussions..."
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Dana Blankenhorn, who says that "just because the blogosphere has no business model doesn't mean it's not subject to market forces," weighs in on the Agonist's plagiarism: "hand-wringing moralism (of the type engaged in here) isn't the test... What matters isn't the 'profession'... but the market." |
Sheila Lennon says Sean Paul Kelley's crime is more piracy than plagiarism: "Rebroadcasting information available only by subscription is a commercial crime, like ripping a CD and putting it on a file-sharing network." |
Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer who just lost his foot to a landmine and has been keeping a blog since early in the war: "I’m steeling myself for what’s to come and hoping I have the inner strength to deal with it... there’s the issue of learning to walk again, drive a car, stupid bureaucratic things like compensation. Just writing this helps."
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Dan Gillmor's looking for help for a Japanese journalist who says: "I'd really like to meet engineers that use Weblogs as news sources rather than the 'traditional' news websites and/or engineers who utilize Weblogs to help them with their work."
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Robert Paterson compares boats to blogs in a discussion of transformative technologies and whether blogging will catch on in the workplace: "We won't sell KM or blogging etc. as a stand alone artifact. What is needed as a driver is a new doctrine." |
Charles Murtaugh, who's seeing an "increasingly commissarish attitude... in the liberal blogosphere", says, "Now that the blog has become another mass medium, I guess it's inevitable that it should revert to the level of crap you see on O'Reilly or Matthews, but I don't have to like it. Blogging used to be a really interesting dinner party, and it's increasingly becoming a political convention." |
Dave Sifry: "Wow, it's only been a month since Technorati reached the 100,000 blogs tracked milestone, and today we tracked our 200,000th blog... that makes over 13.2 Million active links in the database, a more than doubling of the database size."
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Kevin Barbieux, "the homeless guy," on technical hiccups his blog software was having: "What would I be without all the emails of support, discussions on the 'legitimacy' of homelessness, and the sense of being needed? The thought of it was more than scary." |
David Weinberger criticizes Andrew Orlowski's criticism of James Moore's Second Superpower essay: "To compare 'A-List' bloggers to a totalitarian government is ridiculous given the shamefully narrow range of opinion in the mainstream media."
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Stavrosthewonderchicken takes issue with those who say they're tired of speaking out against the war in their blogs: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm thinking you can go fuck yourselves... Grab some anger and ride it into the dirt, or step the fuck back." |
Stewart Butterfield points to several of the features they've developed for Game Neverending in a follow-up to comments made by Andy Phelps the other day about wanting to see blogs incorporated into virtual worlds: "[It] is just a drop in the bucket and fairly trivial first steps, but it points to where we want to go." |
Liz Lawley in a post about "living on the edge" and getting comfortable with her Gladwellian maven status: "I don’t just collect information. I evaluate it, I synthesize it, I integrate it... I can view things from the margins, and write the annotations." |
John Palfrey ponders the copyright implications of widespread aggregator and RSS usage: "Let's say publishing through blogs really hits the mainstream... Bloggers in today's world, who trusted one another to play by understood rules, are now outflanked by the masses." |
Dave Winer previews remarks he'll be making this afternoon on the marriage of Napster and blogs: "One day, and that day is coming soon, a creative artist will use the weblog world to distribute a musical meme, good music, a catchy tune, and then sell a CD with a high-res scan of the same music, and that will undermine the smelly assholes and their cronies, forever."
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[We've launched a new blog in the past day I hope you'll check out and alert interested friends and colleagues to. In the Pipeline will have Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist, delving deep into issues related to drug discovery.
Derek graduated from Hendrix College, got his doctorate at Duke and spent time in Germany on a Humboldt fellowship before going on to work for several major pharmaceutical companies on drug discovery projects for schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases. Just as important, he's no stranger to blogging as he's been at it for more than a year at Lagniappe.
If you know his writing expect no great change. For those that don't Derek makes accessible the fascinating but perhaps intimidating world of drug discovery. Up for discussion: how biotechs and pharmaceutical companies conduct research, identify drug targets, turn ideas into practical therapeutics, navigate a tricky regulatory and legal landscape, make money and more. Also likely to make an appearance, says Derek: occasional digressions into useful topics like which lab reagents smell the worst and how fun and rewarding research can be.
In the Pipeline's a great read on its own but makes for a super complement to two other blogs we've launched recently: Living Code by Richard Gayle on the intersection of biology and information, and Brain Waves by Zack Lynch on the convergence of biotech, nanotech, infotech and the cognitive sciences.] |
Sean Paul Kelly, author of the Agonist: "What I did was inexcusable and for many readers may be unforgivable. I understand that and am willing to accept the consequences of my actions."
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Ken Layne on The Agonist's plagiarism: "I don't think there's a way up from this hole. Retire that "Agonist" from your bookmarks and stick to something like the Command Post."
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Colby Cosh on why his readers should care about The Agonist's plagiarism: "Presumably you care because your traffic was rewarding the sneak thief and failing to reward the folks who were doing the actual work. Is that an incentive structure we want to implement knowingly?"
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Eszter Hargittai shares some numbers she gathered on how often "blogs" and "weblogs" got mentioned in the mainstream press: "It was interesting to see how news coverage of blogs has changed over the years in the more traditional media outlets." |
Sean Paul Kelley: "The Agonist makes the front page of Wired and learns several very valuable lessons of which I will write about later."
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Daniel Forbes reports on plagiarism at Agonist.com: "In a series of interviews with Wired News, [Sean Paul] Kelley changed his story several times... Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor's intelligence as information he had uncovered himself..."
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Adam Greenfield acknowledges the appeal of Peter Merholz's call to silence, notes "I'll be silent when I'm dead, I'll be dead forever and that's a mighty long time" and says "now, if ever, is the time to make some noise."
Adam also reports that the "First International Moblogging Conference" now has a date and location: "Those interested in presenting should email their proposals to the program committee care of this site." |
Steve Outing reports: "The most-read content at Lawrence.com? Believe it or not, it's currently the city site's weblogs... See, weblogs do hold some serious potential for media companies."
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Phil Ringnalda on Blogshares: "One of the best ways you can make money at BlogShares is to find unknown but interesting blogs, buy them up, and then link to them, get other people to start reading them and linking to them, and then move on to the next unknown but interesting blog."
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McGregor McCance: "While blogs are cool and often interesting, entertaining and frequently informative, this movement is mostly just trendy. In a few years, blogs or collaborative publishing won't be around." |
Meg Hourihan: "Over the past four years, I've had such a range of emotions about Blogger and Pyra, many of which revolved around bitterness, anger, and disappointment.... I realize now, more than ever, it was all worth it."
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Dave Winer on the news that Microsoft's now supporting RSS: "A thing of beauty.... a BigCo that's not throwing it's weight around, for now -- letting the independent developers lead... Thank you Microsoft." |
Dan Gillmor comments on how smart mobbers alerted each other by SMS to the spread of SARS in Hong Kong: "It's a lesson in how news and information are changing -- how the world will look fairly soon." |
Jim McGee on knowledge management and the use of blogs by individuals within organizations: "One of the central things that occurs... is that you have to start learning how to think in public." |
Renee Hopkins follows up on a Liz Lawley post in discussing the style of blogging she prefers: "I always feel like I've cheated my readers if I do too much drive-by posting and not enough commenting." |
A CNN spokesperson in the OJR article on Kevin Sites: "We do not blog. CNN.com will continue to provide photo galleries, video clips, breaking stories and interactive modules as ways to involve readers in learning about the war." |
Kevin Marks on Andrew Orlowski's piece on the 'Googlewashing' of 'second superpower': "Perhaps what [he] is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally." |
Liz Lawley points to the growing discusion of social software, shares the remarks of an excited colleague and says "I’m feeling it more and more these days… We’re right at the tipping point. Heading towards escape velocity. Can you feel it?" |
Mick O'Donnell says, in Australia's 7:30 Report, that bloggers are "the umpires of the net, blowing the whistle on media complacency." |
Andrew Orlowski on emergent democracy, the power of A-list bloggers to tip memes, Googlewashing, and more: "Google is being 'gamed' - and the language perverted - by what in statistical terms in an extremely small fraction indeed."
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The Washington Post spots Josh Marshall, the "editor" of Talking Points Memo, at a local Starbucks where he says he's spending a few hours a day on their Wi-Fi service. His stats for March: "visitors 183,775, visits 495,507, and page views 1,411,073. As always, many thanks to everyone who visited the site last month." |
Douglas Rushkoff follows up on his piece from the other day in The Feature: "Bottom-up media, fueled by the proliferation of personal wireless technology, is the only media worthy of today's renaissance society." |
Geoff Keighley in a report on the secrets of Matt Drudge's micropublishing success: "He [brings] in almost $5,000 in revenue on a good day. Back out a few expenses... and the rest is gravy." |
Jim McGee: "Given the match between weblogs and [the] broader trend toward decentralized and distributed solutions, the lameness of 'blog' as a term might actually be one of its primary strengths. It reflects that weblogs are tools coming into organizations from the grassroots, not something imposed from a central source."
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Rick Klau with some Aprilfoolery: "In a move that surprised citizens throughout Blogistan, Google continued its acquisition spree today. Spokesmen for Google confirmed the acquisitions of Seven Together (makers of the popular weblog application Movable Type) and Userland (creator of Radio Userland)...
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Denise Howell flexes her legalese in trying to wrestle with a hostile takeover bid of her blog on Blogshares: "The board is seeking to ensure that any takeover bid made to Bag and Baggage shareholders is subject to conditions which are clear, certain and legitimate, including that immediate shareholder dividends involve a Ferrari 360 Spider." |
Phil Carter concedes he may be suffering from the need for yet another hit, otherwise known as a 'blogger's affliction': "Once again, I renew my pledge to slow down the blogging..." |
Esther Dyson: "I think blogging is neat stuff, but it is not the same as journalism and will not displace it. It is simply another format (an important one, for sure)."
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Anil Dash in a discussion of the personal panopticon that's edging closer to reality: "given that the key to maintaining privacy is going to be by choosing which parts of one's identity to expose, it's time that our personal publishing tools start to allow us to manage all of our information."
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Jon Lebkowsky follows up on points made by Ross Mayfield, saying "I don't want to get into a 'been there, done that' rant, because the new thinking and innovation around blogs is great, but the point is that there's already a body of experience and documentation around social networks, and these are worth studying." |
Tim Bray says there's still a very real need for the investigative journalism that costs money and requires dedication but that for "real-time news, as in war-watching, the battle's over, the bloggers won." |
Joi Ito reports he had lunch with Aaron Swartz and says of RSS, "lets get on with it and just make it all work... [It's] hot right now and wide adoption could revolutionize everything from digital cameras to DRM." |
Peter Merholz in a post on Quakerism, his absence from the blogosphere and the power of silence: "A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it's deafening." |
Torill Mortensen references her family's oral traditions in following up on a point made by Jill Walker and says that "once in a while perhaps we find blogs where the art of telling stories has been preserved to the point that it approaches the skill of the sami story-tellers, but those people don't tell stories like that because they are blogging... the blog just happens to be useful." |
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