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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
Steve Outing: "Last year, I wrote a column... suggesting that many reporters, correspondents, editors, and columnists at newspapers should produce Weblogs. I stand by that advice, but these days I place equal importance on non-staff members producing the content for blogs at news companies." |
Huge congrats to Donna Wentworth who's got some exciting news: "...I am also getting married at the end of August..." |
Elaine Frankonis, in an article in the Chicago Tribune on women and blogging: "From politics to partying, from men to menopause, from feminism to family--women Webloggers seem more comfortable in viewing their personal lives in a larger, cultural context and also in looking at global issues from a very personal point of view."
Katherine Murray, in the same article: "You have the ability to be seen for who you are and have a connection with someone that has nothing to do with the kind of car you drive. It's very freeing." |
[Be sure to check out the guest-blogging of Pat Kane this week on Brain Waves, our blog on neurotechnology that's primarily authored by Zack Lynch. Pat's the first of a handful of excellent commentators Zack has invited to sub in for him while he does the heavy lifting of writing his book over the next month or two. On Pat's mind: his "play ethic" meme as illustrated in his discussion of:
- Athletic specimens whose "ultra-human" play may be "outlining a possible future for us"
- The cognitive delusion of "the pentitent mathematician John Allen Paulos... as he chased his WorldCom stocks up and down the markets, with disastrous personal consequences"
- And whether "carefully-calibrated drugs [may] open new doors of perception" and "enable players to participate in all the ramifying games and strategies of information societies..."
Mind-expanding, as they say...] |
Terry Teachout: " A friend asked me the other night, 'Do you think there are any really important artists who get completely overlooked? And do you think blogging might change that?'... Here’s my short answer: That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog."
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Matt Pfeffer: "Self-publishing is a strange beast. It's an indulgement, but a laborious one; it's self-serving, but only if it also serves an audience. And it is a conceit, to judge your own words, or art, and deem them worthy of others' attention... My conceit seems to have grown..." |
Joi Ito: "Conferences like Brainstorm where 9 out of 10 people ask me, 'what's blogging?' is essential for me to keep my perspective. ;-)"
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Christopher Lydon: "'What beyond blogging do we bloggers care to talk about?' Presumably: everything..."
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Mike Popovic, in an article on moblogging: "Once you start moblogging, you become more attuned and interested in things around you... You're more alert to something that might make you say, 'Now here's something that might be an interesting story here.'" |
Will Richardson: "I'm thinking that this fall when I get my journalism kids back I'm going to have them produce a wiki story or two, collaborative efforts on topics of interest that will eventually be published in the school paper under all of their bylines."
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Mike Gaynor, founder and editor of RedPaper, a new publishing venture that's just launched: "[It] is a combination of eBay and The New York Times." |
Dave Winer with some news: "While I was in California earlier this month, along with business and social duties, I also worked with the production people at RollingStone.Com to get their content flowing through the emerging network of RSS software tools."
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Kevin Holtsberry, whose grandmother died several days ago: "I appreciate everyone's condolences and prayers. It is neat to think about people I feel like I know and trust, and yet have never met, praying for me and my family. That is a part of the blogosphere that is hard to explain to an 'outsider.'" |
Jake Ludington reports that everyone at Gnomedex is talking about RSS and cites what he likes about it but concludes that it's not "the magic bullet to catalyze the Internet to new sales heights." |
Lee Gomes says, in the Wall Street Journal (sub req), that "we'll soon see the end of the social infrastructure that currently exists around trends" and the erosion of the "trend-anointing caste" as "trend-spotting [is] put in the hands of common folk" via blogs and sites like Technorati and Daypop. |
Matt Haughey: "With the advent of features like this at Technorati to tie multiple weblogs to a person, and tools like this to find similar weblogs, why can't these tools say 'you may also enjoy these 5 weblogs' whenever I check for updates?..."
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Larry Weber, the PR exec and entrepreneur, says, in an article pointed to by Anil, that he's thinking about building a new venture that looks to blogs and other new media formats as he builds "the marketing organization of the future." |
Donna Wentworth points, in a discussion of the influence blogs may have on political discourse, to several articles John Hiler published last year and says, "[He] looks at the trees to envision the forest, rather than vice versa--and in so doing, comes as close as anyone has to pinpointing what makes the weblog form/function unique." |
Tom Coates, in suggesting it's time to "balkanise our aggregators": "Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community's activities - they are also one of our community's best mechanisms for news discovery... Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community's agenda." |
John Dvorak on a new bill that's been proposed in Congress: "What is interesting to me is that the blogging community is all over this bill, but doesn't seem to be doing much more than complaining and ridiculing it. Is this a useful exercise in activism or a hint at things to come?"
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Brent Cunningham touches, in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review on the shifting role of objectivity in journalism, on what may be a critical aspect of nanomedia's appeal: "It is perhaps important to note that one of the original forces behind the shift to objectivity in the nineteenth century was economic. To appeal to as broad an audience as possible, first the penny press and later the new wire services gradually stripped news of 'partisan' context." [Not so for blogs of course...]
Later in the same piece: "Journalists must acknowledge, humbly and publicly, that what we do is far more subjective and far less detached than the aura of objectivity implies... If we stop claiming to be mere objective observers, it will not end the charges of bias but will allow us to defend what we do from a more realistic, less hypocritical position." |
Cameron Marlow says he's revising his previously stated estimate of 500,000 active bloggers... down: "I now think that the number is much, much smaller." |
Henry Copeland on the news that Time Out New York has placed ads on New York-based blogs Blogads represents: "This is our first metro-specific order. Expect lots more..."
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Dana Blankenhorn points to an article by Howard Kurtz on a blog on Howard Dean, notes its mistakes and says, "This is a tipping point... When you're accustomed to seeing things in one way, it may be impossible to change your worldview. This is why you need turnover in newsrooms."
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Denise Howell on an article in the ABA Journal eReport: "To the extent the article suggests a blogging lawyer must dissimulate and dissemble to avoid alienating clients, it perpetuates insular thinking and ignores the realities of the modern business world." |
Margaret McCabe Elenko in an article in the Boston Globe on a homeless woman's blogging: "I find it interesting that she makes the time almost every day to update the journal. You start to realize everyone has a story behind them."
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Joseph Duemer: "Among literary genres, weblogs are uniquely stream of consciousness, moving from conception to publication more quickly & freely than any other kind of writing. This is the glory of weblogs, but it doesn't need to become a fetish."
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Tim Porter on Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Weintraub's newly launched California Insider: "Good move by Weintraub to move into the blogosphere. Politics should not be left to the thumbsuckers." |
Stacy Cowley on Blogathon: "This year, 545 participants have enlisted, with US$56,000 pledged so far. At 6 a.m. Pacific time Saturday, they'll embark upon 24 hours of blogging..." |
Eric Sink: "When I search Google for the terms "product positioning", the number one result is my article on the subject... That seems ridiculously unfair." |
Glenn Reynolds in a long profile of him in the Yale Law Report: "I would like to see the world of weblogs and alternative web media move to the point where InstaPundit is a drop in the bucket.... I will be happy when, if I disappear, it will merit one of those ‘Where are they now?’ stories and not much else.'" [PDF]
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Tim Bray: "I just got a call from Paul Festa of C|Net, who’s working on a story about Pie/Echo/Atom. He tried, several times, to get me to say something nasty about Dave Winer, coming at it from two or three different directions. I wouldn’t bite..."
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Christopher Lydon in introducing his interview with Dave Sifry: "Technorati is for me the simplest clearest sketch we have of the coming wonderworld..." |
Evan Williams on the notion that blogs are tripping up Google: "I doubt this really comes up as much as bloggers—and blog haters—would like to think."
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Simon Waldman on nanomedia: "The revenue model on this sort of publishing seems slightly scary. Yep, the costs are micro...but I'm slightly sceptical about how much advertising money there is coming in..."
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Arnold Kling, whose Club vs. Silo piece was one of the first essays of his that I read, on the launch of a new content venture: "Online zines and would-be professional bloggers should hope that the KeepMedia model catches on. I think that it is the best hope for us..." |
David Galbraith in a comment on RSS: "If everything on the web were published using the emerging weblog method then the web would be searchable like a database and return anything as soon as it was available."
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Jock Gill, in a front page article in the Boston Globe on how blogs are reshaping political discourse: "''This is just the tip of the change. We're never going back to broadcast politics."
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Dave Pollard on what blogging will look like in 2010: "[It's] going to get easier, more interesting, and more ubiquitous. But it will still be lonely, and hard to become popular. Some things never change."
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B.O. Blivion, in an essay on blogging: "I look to the Internet not for the friendships I lack in real life, but for conversation on topics that interest me, the lack of which in everyday life being what draws me into these things." |
Adrian Holovaty explains a new feature on his site - reserved comment names: "Every time you see a comment by 'Adrian,' you can be assured that I wrote it. Why? Because, simply, I'm the only person who can post comments with that name."
François Nonnenmacher's follow-up: "I would like to see such a tool that allows me to claim the comments I make on others’ sites. How can we trust identities in an exceedingly digital world?" |
Doc Searls follows up on a comment he made in his interview with Christopher Lydon: "Blogging is a terrific way for people with an interest in a changing subject... to grow a fresh understanding around it. This involves a locus of concern in the future rather than the present or the past."
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Jacob Shwirtz: "I started a web-journal in January 2002 with a commitment to daily updates. My life has since changed and I'm resolved to spending as much time outside as possible..." |
Joi Ito in commentary on microcontent, metadata and trends: "Organizing your network of friends and your network of trust become more important, so that you publish to the people you wish to hear you and you are able to sort information which is relevant to you." |
Jim Coudal: "We have not built a web site in the last year for a client that in some way did not incorporate blogging technology."
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Jason Fried: "We’re teaming up with our friends at Coudal Partners to offer BloggingWorks — full-day workshops on the rapidly growing Web trend of business blogging..." |
Jonathan Peterson: "The same tools and technologies that are empowering Amateur content creation are also empowering the next generation of entrepeneurs."
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Tim Porter, on the blog of the Dallas Morning News' editorial board: "It takes the decision-making out of the room and into the public... Smart move. I'll expect other papers will follow suit." |
Zack Lynch, in noting he's taking a break and has invited a number of excellent guest-bloggers to cover him while he's gone: "Like other authors, I have found it relatively difficult to write an interesting daily blog while simultaneously write a engaging, well researched book."
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Cameron Marlow: "When I start to read another person's weblog, it's just like getting to know someone in an informal context... It's a natural way of finding new friends."
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Terry Teachout, as he enters his second week of blogging at ArtsJournal: "I took a nap the other day and dreamed about posting links to other sites."
Also: "Your response has been phenomenal and gratifying. I didn’t realize there would be so many people out there who were looking for a site like this." |
John Robb, in his new blog: "NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don't control." |
Dan Gillmor on his new AOL blog: "I don't see a lot of customization potential (though I haven't drilled in very far), but there are some very smart touches."
Jeff Jarvis on his: "AOL: We need to be able to change the logo and the top of the design on the AOL blogs or they won't feel personal; they'll all look the same; they'll telegraph boredom when they should shout personality..." |
The Hasidic Rebel, who blogs anonymously about subjects ranging from "musings about the Hasidic lifestyle to stinging indictments of the community," in the Village Voice: "I received e-mails from people who tell me they are Hasidic and they're struggling with the same problems and the same issues... I never had the faintest idea that these people existed."
He writes, in his blog, on the criticism he's received after the article was published: "I tell it like it is, and of course, some will be outraged. That's the way of modern society, and I'm proud to be part of it." |
John Palfrey on why the Berkman's becoming the steward of the RSS 2.0 specification: "We decided that serving as a holder, in essence as a trustee, of the specification... and releasing the document via a public-spirited license, we could help at the margins in the development of important technologies." |
Arnold Kling says he was reading "Battle of the Atlantic" about World War II while he was on vacation and that "if the Battle against Big Media were like the Battle of the Atlantic, it's late 1942. We've won, but most people don't know it yet." |
Dave Winer, with big news: "On Tuesday, July 15, UserLand Software transferred its copyright in the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School..." |
Rafat Ali on nanopublishing in an interview of him in Wired News: "The great thing about doing everything so lean is that you are very flexible and fast, so you can mold your site to whatever trends are emerging."
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Hugh Hewitt on newspapers : "[They] refuse to read the map that is in front of their noses. … The wise editor would instead allow the battle of the blogs to throw up champions and then ink them to multiyear commentary deals."
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Shelley Powers, in discussing the quarrel between Dave Winer and Mark Pilgrim: "What others say can and will be used against you, also, and therein lies the most dangerous aspect of weblogging -- therein lies the accountability." |
Matt Haughey: "Thanks to a combination of over-inflated Google pagerank of blogs and article after article extolling the virtues of weblogs, I've been getting email and snail mail from a steady stream of hucksters..."
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Biz Stone reports that he got an email from someone who wrote to say, "I am interested in buying [a] text link promoting my internet pharmacy off of your website... I am not looking for traffic from your site. I am looking to increase my PageRank in Google." Says Biz: "Paying for Googlebombs, the next wave of grassroots marketing?" |
The Curmudgeonly Clerk, in reporting that the federal government is apparently in the process of quashing the blogs of its employees: "the curtailment of blogging by those affiliated with the government is more likely to assure that the views of those familiar with and sympathetic to the government are absent than to achieve any other aim." |
David Galbraith on Technorati's new feature: "Over the longer term, this is perhaps as ground breaking as what weblogs have done for web publishing and ultimately will leverage the weblog model to its full potential..." |
Marc Canter on AOL's blog format: "I've been waiting for this for a LONG time! Please notice that there's a clear place - on the main journal page - which describes: Name, Occupation, Location. Thus is Digital Identity born..." |
Meg Hourihan: "Consider this an experiment in weblogs-as-PR machine, or weblogs-as-journalism... if you, or any one you know, could get me access to a press screening [of Seabiscuit], or some other showing, I'd super appreciate it."
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Elizabeth Spiers in a profile of her on MediaBistro: "I use a bit of an alter-ego on Gawker... I was always the kid in high school sitting in the back of the room saying nothing. I was always thinking of smart-ass comments, but I'd never actually say them." |
Danah Boyd outlines her blogging practices, i.e. "I don't even mention friends' names," and says, "what humors me the most is that those growing up blogging and journaling will take this all for granted and think it to be natural, rather than my panicked uncertainty of what's appropriate." |
Erin Malone on playing a role in the design of AOL's blog offering: "We have been equally excited about designing a product we will actually use and terrified that the rest of the blogging world will trash the product up one side and another."
More: "Some of the neat things that will be in the release: integrated photo albums with our YGP (You've Got Pictures) product, ability to send a blog entry to your blog via an AIM bot and the ability to leave a blog entry via AOLbyPhone which shows up as a little sound file. And of course the blogs will show up in Search."
Sound & Fury (an AOL blog that showed up in our logs): "...this will be a pretty boring post, but I must say that this is a watershed moment for the blogosphere as the corporate deathstar AOL officially crashes the party... the bloggerati has been hit over the head by a trailerpark and [they don't] even know it yet..." |
Don Park: "[The] business market, particularly the small business market, is where most of the action and the money will be in the future, not personal blogs."
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Dave Winer: "I like weblog writing, rough and rambly, even angry and reckless... I think people expressing themselves honestly is where beauty comes from."
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Ethan Diamond on Oddpost's blog: "The blogging community deeply appreciates the concept of reading as an activity you perform when you have absolutely nothing better to do, and our subject matter fits that bill perfectly..."
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Joel Biroco on Anil Dash and what constitutes a true blog: "I sense it's time for a greater force in blogging: the rise of the Outsider." |
Mark Siegel, who says he's "something of a novelty in the blogosphere" given he's got spinal muscular atrophy and blogs "with a headset that emulates a mouse": "In a life where I have to depend on others for everything from turning the page in a book to taking a piss, writing is one thing that I can do independently... Blogging can be a way to fight the loneliness that plagues every human being, not just those with disabilities." (Thanks, Susannah) |
Shelley Powers: "If I have learned one thing in my 2+ years of weblogging [it is that] if you want to get a response from a weblogger, ask the question in their comments."
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Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, says that the architecture of blogs conforms to the way we organize things and that email clients will follow blogs' lead: "Imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you’ve got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time." |
Jonathan Peterson on the buzz over Howard Dean's use of the Internet: "Bloggers have been long on publishing manifestos and short on moving money or votes."
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Stu Schneider reports that Foxsports.com, which recently laid off its writing staff, is auctioning off, via Ebay, the chance to be Foxsports.com's NASCAR columnist and says: "If this is a success... I'm sure we can all imagine the ramifications. The fine folks at the Medills of the world can just pack up their stuff..."
Dan Gillmor's response: "When we sell space in our newspaper, we call it 'advertising.'" |
Arthur Silber in saying he's stepping away from his blogging: "One thing is very clear to me: for the moment, this has become a source of greater pain and unhappiness than pleasure."
More, in a previous post about an essay he blog-published which he spent close to a week writing: "When I pour my heart and soul into the writing here, and when I receive close to zero feedback, and when something like that essay appears to largely fall through the cracks of the blogosphere... well, I am close to not giving a damn about any of it any longer." |
Larry Page, as reported by Chris Gulker, says he's intrigued by blogs and thinks they "will turn established media on its head."
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Chad Dickerson, in raving about blogs: "The flow of RSS content into my newsreader each day has become as important to my personal information flow as e-mail."
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Terry Teachout, the arts critic who's just started blogging for ArtsJournal, responds to a letter from a correspondent who says ""Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?": "That's what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas." |
Steve Gillmor: "Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent technology."
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Heiko Hebig after witnessing a "lively conversation" between Steve Gillmor and Ethan Diamond of Oddpost: "I will throw in my 2 cents by expressing a gut feeling that Ethan will cook up something fancy rather soon." |
Chris Lydon: "Blog world has the crackle and pop that traditional media conspicuously do not these days... The adrenal elite is here." |
Harry Hatchet in the Guardian: "It was a Norwegian Maoist who first pointed me towards the online world of weblogs, and after six months of linking and commenting, a group of ultra-Thatcherite libertarians invited me to a bloggers' dinner party. Such are the people you bump into in the blogosphere..." |
Andrew Sullivan on the blogathon held yesterday at the British parliament: "...so the tectonic plates of media and political power slowly shift."
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Stuart Henshall: "Corporate Blogging is just the edge of a revolution that will harness the collective intelligence of organizations in new ways."
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Phil Wolff, in predicting the syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds over the next three years: "I assume AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Terra will turn on blogging tools in the next 18 months, and 10% of the online community (70 million people) become bloggers." |
Matt Welch on Glenn Reynolds: "Though he obviously leans toward linking to people whose ideas and interests are similar to his own (just like 100% of the rest of us do), he probably does more than any busy writer I know to consciously seek out and popularize new bloggers..." |
Liz Lawley: "For all the talk of exposing ourselves electronically, of taking risks in our blogs, the text and the screen provide a buffer, a layer of protection. But I think that for these technologies to reach their greatest potential, they have to become integrated into our real lives, not kept scrupulously separate."
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Nick Denton, in sharing news of a book deal for Salam Pax: "The publishing industry treats weblogs, quite sensibly, as just another talent pool. And that makes the conservatism of American newspapers all the more remarkable."
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Terry Teachout on the launch of ArtsJournal's new blogs [Be sure to check them out - they just launched today]: " Here I am, finally. I’ve been talking about starting an arts blog for the past couple of years, but I never got up the nerve to do the dirty work... So when artsjournal.com kindly offered to do it for me, it took me about three seconds to say yes."
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Jeneane Sessum in a post entitled "Fuck Emerson": "Why don't I entirely agree that anyone before blogging can be classified as a blogger? Because blogging is new. Story telling is old. Linkage and networks matter and make blogging different..." |
Andrew Odlyzko in an article on the changing nature of the peer review process: "With the development of more flexible communication systems, especially the Internet, we are moving towards a continuum of publication."
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Don Park: "I don't know how many blogrolls I am on, but I do appreciate everyone of them because I enjoy deluding myself that blogrolls are friendships."
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Robert Scoble: " Don Park says that blogs will fade away within two years. Heh... Sorry, you're off by quite a bit. They won't fade away for at least five, and maybe 10 years."
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Chris Locke, in marshalling support for Ann Craig: "I have personally seen pure concentrated freak power save a life, and there are enough freaks who will see this -- please make sure it travels -- to do it again."
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Adam Greenfield in his wrap-up on the moblogging conference held in Tokyo recently: "I know in my bones that the act of self-publishing material from mobile to devices to a shared global network, and retrieving similarly user-generated material, is going to be one of the defining cultural features of the next few years."
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Jason Kottke: "Movable Type is the new way to do absolutely everything, BTW.... It checks my vision, does root canals, makes my travel plans, transports me back in time, and balances my checkbook. Even expensive hookers are a thing of the past with Movable Type..."
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Tom Matrullo: "Bloggging can give us access to portions of what lies beyond what we believe we already know... It's the possibility of Keats' snailhorn sensibility, probing with finesse, what the juggernauts of media crush before they convey."
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Kathleen Parker: "The best bloggers... are like smart, hip gunslingers come to make trouble for the local good ol' boys. The heat they pack includes an arsenal of intellectual artillery, crisp prose, sharp insights and a gimlet eye for mainstream media's flaws." (Thanks, Ryan) |
Andrew Orlowski: "A few people staying indoors a bit longer, bashing away solipsisms at their expensive computers - does not make for a social revolution."
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Anil Dash to IDG on its decision to ban deeplinking: "It's well within your rights to ask people not to link to your stuff, or to do so conditionally. But it reflects a grave misunderstanding of the market you're in. Learn from iTunes, not from the RIAA..."
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Mena Trott on AOL's blog offering: "This isn't just some message board with a blogging label slapped on -- the AOL Journals team is taking the time and effort to get this right and that's highly commendable."
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[I'm off - making my way to the wedding of a good friend... Have a great weekend!
Also, check out Donna's exciting news...] |
Justin Hall, in reporting on the First International Moblogging Conference held in Tokyo the other day: "All the fun of posting pictures from phones is a polite rehearsal for the incredible social upheaval that moblogging could bring or join." |
Brian Montopoli says in Slate that "blog maps" provide "a sense of the city beneath the postcard images hawked on downtown street corners" and "an alternative city guide that enables a little point-and-click sightseeing."
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Elwyn Jenkins: "Link farms are the true culprits of distorting the web -- bloggers provide the glue to know how to interpret the web." |
Simon Waldman in the Economist: "Traditional publishing is about putting on a show; building a network of weblogs is like hosting a party."
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[So, playing with Google's AdSense program on various pages of Corante to get a better sense of how it works and whether it's effective. Comments and suggestions on appearance, content, etc. are needed and appreciated - please send any my way.] |
Mark Glaser: "Putting a word such as 'Weblog,' 'blog' or 'blogger' into your news story's headline seems to do strange things to people. First, every Weblog known to humanity has to link to your story. Then, you find your story atop the Popdex popularity index. Finally, you have people drawing conclusions that have nothing to do with your story."
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Howard Rheingold on the emergence of moblogging: "I love watching a preposterous prediction materialize with baffling swiftness, especially when I was the fool who put the forecast in writing in the first place."
And: "For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting. The petitions, letters to the editor, pamphleteering that preceded the American and French revolutions were essential enabling institutions for the experiments in self-government that followed." |
John Dowdell follows up on Dave Winer's comments about overactive aggregators: "If every web user has their own aggregator, then by default they're making many many net requests that they will never use, and the actual people who [cause] these extra costs will not be the people who pay the cost."
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The Guardian cites the generic blogger as one of the 100 most influential voices in media in the UK: "Underestimate their power at your peril. Just ask former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines... Expect more scalps to follow." |
David Galbraith: " RSS content is so unnormalized as to be almost useless for commercial applications."
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Will Femia passes along the sentiment of someone who wrote in to MSNBC to criticize bloggers: "You will all look like the 1999-2004 equivalent of polyester leisure suited disco ducks yelling in harmony, 'Breaker one nine, breaker one nine.' ...You are going to be so humilliated in a few years." |
Chris Locke, who we miss, in an extensive analysis of the difference between narcissists and bloggers: "There are plenty of narcissistic bloggers... Curiously, however, there are very few genuine narcissists who blog... they give up on it pretty quickly when they realize that their every post will not go to Number 1 on Daypop, Technorati and Blogdex." |
Simon Phipps' response, as reported by David Weinberger, to Dan Gillmor's question "What are the unitended consequences of weblogging?": "I know everything bad Dave Winer has ever said about anyone." |
Adam Curry, who reveals a former contribution to Userland, with a bribe: "I'm invoking an age olde american tradition of letting my wallet do the talking. I will again invest $10k in aggregator default placements this year, but I will spread it around, to all developers who adhere to RSS2.0. Include (N)echo and you're out of luck."
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The Crooked Timber crew: "The bringing of a new blog before the public is a practice now so common as scarce to need an apology. Nevertheless, such lists, assemblages, diaries, complaints, lamentations, polemics and records of triumph and disaster are now so common and so diverse that new entrants into the field must perforce struggle to be noticed. " |
Pointer: Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times Magazine's weekly column "The Ethicist," weighs in on blog-reading etiquette on NPR. (His daughter keeps a blog.)
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JD Lasica: "The generosity of bloggers never fails to astound me, and God knows, I often need your help..."
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Clay Shirky spells out the possible scenarios that may stem from AOL's entree into the blogosphere and offers a prediction: "Displacement but not disruption... with less popularity for the bloggers-blogging-about-blogging, and more for the InstaPundits and Talking Points of the world." |
A.K.M Adam on blogging, misunderstanding and clergy: "It makes us more accountable for what we say, and I’m inclined to think that’s good."
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Jason Shellen, from vacation: "I talked to Ev the night before I left and he said 'Try not to think about blogging for a few days.' and here I am off to a horrible start, still blogging..." |
Mitch Ratcliffe on media consumption: "We own our attention, but we contribute to a rich fabric of stuff--some content, some conversation, some conflagration and flame-fest. And, amazingly, we have a voice as large as any media company..."
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James Lileks on the donations people are sending his way: "I have no idea what I did to deserve this, and I am absolutely stunned at your generosity."
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Vernon Chee shares, in a USA Today piece on blogs, an anecdote about how his mother began tuning in to his blog and called him to say, "Your entries just brought back a lot of memories — a lot of good memories, some bad memories. I'm learning a lot more about you than what I knew before."
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Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby) advises "BLOGGIN' AND LOVIN' IT IN NEW JERSEY" on best practices: "It's important that a person carefully consider what he or she is posting before making it public. I cannot urge people strongly enough to remember that on the Internet there is no such thing as an eraser."
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Paolo Valdemarin: "We are working on a draft of an RSS namespace which would allow authors to specify how they would allow others to use their content and also an easy way to pay for it."
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Andrew Sullivan, in criticizing Ann Coulter: "In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas - in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news - it's increasingly hard to stand out."
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Jeff Jarvis: "I think I speak for many (read: most) bloggers when I say that we don't really give a shit about the RSS v. Echo wars."
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Jim McGee: "The simplicity of weblogs is the central reason for their success and their promise as a tool for making knowledge work easier. That same simplicity also makes weblogs (and wikis for that matter) a hard sell into organizational settings..."
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Dave Winer: "Some news: John Robb is leaving UserLand... Thanks John for all your help, and best wishes to you and your family for much continued success." |
Adam Greenfield in his wrap-up of the moblogging conference the other day in Tokyo on the impact moblogging may have on city life and planning: "If for three thousand years we've relied on rumor and reputation, custom and external data stores and never least explicit signage to organize our urban experiences, the advent of latent, user-generated, unedited, location-based content is something that has the potential to change the way humans do cities, change it utterly and in short order." |
Dave Sifry: "This weekend, I had a few hours of free time and I whipped a new feature with two interfaces: It is a standard XML-RPC ping server... that you can add to your weblog software configuration... that will immediately add your weblog into a special high-priority queue for Technorati's indexing runs." |
Chuq Von Rospach discusses his responsibility to his employer as a blogger: "Apple's got a business to run, and I have no right to go blabbing about that... If I want my employer to respect my right to go 'outside the wall' without a keeper, I have to respect their needs, also." |
Jack Balkin clarifies what the recent Ninth Circuit decision means for bloggers: "[It] does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from libels published in their comments section because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published." |
Alan Reiter says many people are missing an important aspect of AOL's blog effort and the ability to post via an IM client: "It means you don't have to be held hostage by your wireless operator. Since many of these new services are/will be operator-independent, it won't matter if your cellular operator doesn't offer a wireless Weblog service." |
Cameron Marlow: "In early March, 2003, I received a shocking email from Jimmy Wales. Jimmy was the former owner of blogdex.com, blogdex.net and blogdex.org, and emailed to offer them to MIT since he had no further use for them. No solicitation, no intent to sell, just the simple offer to move them over to MIT's control..."
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Clay Shirky reports on the preview of AOL's blogging tools he and a few others got on Thursday: "What happens at launch, and how the product develops over the first couple of iterations, could have a profound effect on how weblogging is used and perceived."
Jeff Jarvis: "Before we go any farther, allow me a moment to dare to lecture the blogging community: For us to be successful, we also need AOL's blogs to be part of our world. I don't want to hear us get snotty and snippy about AOL's entry into the blogosphere." |
Ray Ozzie: "One thing seems certain... discovery and innovation in mobility and interpersonal productivity & communications - in 'relationship superconductivity' - is being driven primarily from "the edge."
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Arnold Kling: "A story goes that Hell was created when God took Satan to see Heaven. 'It's beautiful,' Satan said, appreciatively. 'Here--let me organize it for you.'... In that spirit, we have the idea of organizing blogs by topic or by location."
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Torill Mortensen, in expressing her feeling that blogging's being taken too seriously by some: "I am concerned about the focus being too much turned to the form itself. As if the fact that a message is communicated by way of a blog is more important than the message." |
Dave Winer, discussing Echo: "Imagine a railroad company that decided that the old railroad tracks had to be ripped up and rail laid on a different route. What about the towns that had grown up on the original route? Too bad so sad."
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Ben Hammersly: "I spent much of last year immersed in the RSS world, and have been trying to withdraw ever since. Life is too short and summer is too precious to spend it inside dealing with a development community quite so socially dysfunctional."
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Brent Simmons: "I’m spending too much time on Echo, and I’m disappointed with it. The momentum is definitely with people who think of weblog syndication and editing as a blank slate. That’s okay, I guess, but it’s a bad use of my time." |
Neil McIntosh, in the Guardian, on the use of blogs by political candidates: "America - and its media - is beginning to see how weblogs, and the ease with which they make it possible to reach an online audience, might change things."
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Dong Resin (yep):"Weblogs are like a Fisher Price My First Media toy, only with nearly unlimited global reach."
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From Samizdata.net's blog glossary: "Hitnosis - noun. Being unable to stop yourself constantly refreshing your browser to see if your hit counter or comments section has increased since the last time you did it (i.e. about 1 minute ago)..."
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Mark Pilgrim on Echo: "I want to do all sorts of fancy things that RSS doesn’t allow for. Sure, I could shoehorn a bunch of stuff into namespaces and call it RSS, and it would be, technically; I’ve been doing that for months now. But that’s fundamentally the wrong approach; I see that now."
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Kurt Starsinic takes issue with Doc Searls' comments yesterday about centralization: "What exactly is the danger here? That everyone will be able to blog? This is precisely what the Web needs--a democratizing influence that allows anybody, not just the technically proficient, to be able to publish his ideas."
Parenthetically: "I'd love to be able to keep people without ideas from blogging, but that's a topic for another day." |
Robert Scoble: "I'm judging a moblog contest by Text America. Check it out, and I do accept bribes. Only big ones, though."
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Howard Sherman: "About.com, a network of more than 400 sites and one of the largest producers of original content on the Web, just relaunched those sites as Weblogs... There will be some, undoubtedly, who will look upon it as another attempt by big media to co-opt the best form of individual expression on the Web..." |
Jill Walker shares her 500-word definition of the 'weblog' for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory: "I think I've got the most important things in, though I'm aching to write much more about lots of it..." |
Joel Spolsky: "I thought I'd create an experimental Echo feed, in hopes of officially being the first publisher on earth to use the new format, along with all the celebrity and fanfare that should entail..."
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Evan Williams on Echo: "Our goal is to make it as painless as possible to develop neat stuff that plugs into Blogger, and we feel we are very close to having the best direction for that to happen."
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Jonathan Peterson notes the comments of professional bloviator Bill O'Reilly on independent publishers - "The reason these net people get away with all kinds of stuff is that they work for no one. They put stuff up with no restraints. This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming." - and says: "Sounds like free speech to me. It's amazing how quickly people with large entrenched audiences rail against anything that allows more democracy of expression."
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Tom Coates: "I'll tell you something for nothing. I'm beginning not to care who's right about this whole bloody RSS thing. Is it Dave? Is it Mark? Is it the Penry the mild-mannered janitor?..."
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Shelley Powers: "I'm getting a bit burned out on tech at the moment... but I did want to take a moment to say that I think the wiki combined with weblog approach is very sexy."
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Joi Ito reports that a Japanese company has filed for a trademark on 'blog': "Some people have doubts as to whether they will be granted the trademark, but stranger things have happened in Japan... Anyway, I'm glad SixApart and MovableType don't include the word 'blog' in the tradename." |
Adam Greenfield: "Is the planet as a whole detectably better-off in the wake of a decade of decentralized, low-cost-of-entry information availability?... I think an honest appraisal would have to conclude that the answer [is] 'no.'"
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Doc Searls in saying he fears blogging risks centralization: "Don't think that other companies with an interest in blogs, such as Google and IBM, won't find their own ways to defeat interoperation for both competitive and idealistic reasons..." |
Paul Philp on Echo: "The irony... is that it began as an effort to block Microsoft’s predictable 'Embrace, Extend, Eliminate' strategy. In fact, the factions in this debate have created exactly the circumstances to ensure that Microsoft will attempt and likely succeed in taking over the RSS standard."
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Clay Shirky, in his latest essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": "I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology..."
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Colby Cosh: "As a service to general economic knowledge about weblogs, and in order that potential donors can make an informed decision, I am obliged to mention that my 'pledge drive' has raised about a thousand U.S. dollars so far."
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Walter Isaacson, in a profile of Benjamin Franklin in Time, on America and its free press: "The nations that have thrived, economically and politically, have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that come from robust discourse."
Benjamin Franklin: "[Publishers] are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter." |
Sarah Lai Stirland expresses skepticism about the ability of blogs to affect debate: "Blogs just don't do the job. They're the digital equivalent of standing around a bar trying to explain something while the listener just tunes you out and regurgitates their own boiler-plate political views."
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Clay Shirky on the structure of the blogosphere: "[The] 'author-first' organization gives the weblog world a huge boost, as the 'Who said what' reputation system we all carry around in our head is a fantastic tool for organizing what we read, as well as acting as a kind of latent bozo filter."
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David Hornik, who's attending ILAW and relates a conversation about blogs: "Many bloggers... report on highly specialized fields, so while they may not appeal as broadly as a New York Times, they have the potential of providing much more granular information."
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Brian Flemming on Howard Dean's fundraising efforts of late: "This is amazing... His blog turned into a telethon (blogathon?) yesterday, and reading it is like reading an exciting new page in history."
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Ad Explanation
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