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About this site
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A new section on the emerging blogosphere that's edited by Hylton Jolliffe, the founder, editor and publisher of Corante who believes blogging's more than mere fad and that what will flow from it will have major implications for media, marketing, distributed thinking and business in general.
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
Anil Dash on his belief that the discussion of blogs should focus on the content not the technology: "I am realizing more now how intelligent [Rebecca Blood's] decision [was] to treat technology as fungible [as it] is... Great writing has nothing to do with the fact that it's pounded into an Underwood #20 or carved into a stone tablet."
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Phil Wolff comments on the long discussion that's been playing out at Queso over the past few days, likening it to a Talmudic debate through which bloggers engage in "collective media criticism." It resembles, he says, "a packet of physicists arguing over beer; blending ad hominem, sophistry, and deep insight; all enjoying the experience, the flow, the style and substance, respecting the openness of the place, the medium we call home." |
Glenn Reynolds, who's on vacation, on Eric Alterman turning to Jim Romenesko's letters page to build buzz: "When my absence causes Big Media house bloggers to be reduced to begging on Romenesko's page that's -- well, that's just kind of disturbing."
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Arnold Kling suggests that one way that CEOs might use blogs and strike a balance between being "too impersonal, bland, and corporate-speakish while on the other hand not being to aggressive and domineering" would be to affect "the tone of Winston Churchill's messages to commanders..." |
Paul Holbrook says getting people at his new company to use klogs reminds him of his home life: "[It's] akin to how my wife acts when people we don't know well come to our house. She doesn't want people to see our dirty laundry, so... we rush about cleaning up and pretending that our house isn't really so messy." It's similiar to what he feels about his klog: "Perhaps I should clean up a little bit before I invite others in." |
Anil Dash comments on Dave Winer in a ongoing, ugly, and ultimately tedious debate: "I think that it's odd that an inarguable pioneer in the world of weblogs is so content to distance people who could be advocates for his products."
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Dave Winer: "The greed and intellectual dishonesty in the weblog world is something I'm thinking about a lot while I'm on sabbatical."
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Jenny Berger says Dave Winer's comments "give me the impression that he fancies himself a king among nobles, when he is actually the village blacksmith, albeit a rather talented and groundbreaking one." |
Howard Rheingold, who's got a book coming out on the emergence of "smart mobs," says their leading edge will be pioneered by "wireless community networks, webloggers and buyers and sellers on eBay." He continues: "The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies that are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume." |
Jeff Crooke's objects to the notion that newspapers should empower lots of their journalists to start blogging away: "Reporters are paid to be comprehensive and accurate. I would hope that anything submitted to a blog would also undergo the same thorough craftmanship as an item in the newspaper in terms of writing, background, and fact checking." |
Dave Winer, again: "As long as self-proclaimed historians like Rebecca Blood tell the wrong story, I'm going to keep pushing back." |
John Hiler comments on "the emphasis it puts on our egos," or the dark side of blogging: "If I write something and someone else blogs it on their site... well all of a sudden, I feel validated and great about myself. Same thing goes with press mentions: you read a few articles that mention you by name, and you start feeling like you really are all that."
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Steve Outing urges, in a long and instructive piece, his news media colleagues to embrace blogging, laying out a taxonomy of different types of blogs as well as proffering ideas on ways to put blogging to work on their sites.
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Dorothea Salo on getting compensated (somehow) for blogging: "Another facet of the paid-or-not question is payment vis-a-vis writing quality. Blogs are unpaid writing; are they therefore automatically less good writing than paid writing, because if it were any damn good we’d find a way to be paid for it?"
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Shelley Powers, aka Burningbird, articulates the reasons why she's leaving blogging behind: "My weblog has become more than my avatar, it's become me... And I must stop using this weblog as a surrogate for life and the only way I can do this is to quit cold turkey. Walk away, and not look back." |
Mike Sanders says "a big part of blogging is protesting injustices and sharing our experiences." However, he says, "both of those activies have their pitfalls. Protesting injustices focuses us on the shortcoming of others, often at the expense of focusing on our own. Sharing our experiences can lead to self-centeredness and egocentricity." |
Will Richards, who's employing blogs in the classroom says, "I know as a parent, I would love to be able to take a look at what my child is learning and thinking by accessing his/her weblog. And to be able to contribute to that thinking and learning in some way would be even better. What a cool concept..." |
Steve Hall follows up on Tom Hespos' article: "Out of all the high priced, over featured, so called "content management" software, blogging software is by far the next wave of information transferral." |
Tom Hespos raves about blogging and says his colleagues (advertisers) should start thinking about "what this [could] do to online media planning five or ten years down the road." He continues: "It might be wise to think about what the marketplace might look like if a wave of independent publishers suddenly started entering the game en masse." |
Hassan Masum doesn't mention blogs but might as well in an article in First Monday on distributed editing and thinking, the noosphere and the tools that will some day lead to "the formation of beneficial idea-clusters, self-examination of our aggregate societal mind, and rewarding of generators of farsighted opinions." |
Jim McGee: "One of the distinct pleasures of the blogging world is that even if you miss something, somebody that you trust will catch it eventually and call it to your attention."
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Amazon announces its new Web services offering: "Build an application that searches for prominent keywords in online news articles and weblogs, and automatically finds relevant books in our catalog based on those keywords."
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Frank Paynter offers up yet another interview - this time with Gary Turner who says "[There's] a whole social dimension [that] has been uncovered here that tells me there's more to blogging than just journalism... I feel this is a real social renaissance..." |
Ryan Lawler says, of the inclusion of a MetaTalk discussion in which he participated that was included in We've Got Blog, "To this day still do not understand why, of all the meaningful and insightful conversations about community weblogging, they chose such a stumbling, chortling abortion of a discussion."
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Dave Winer continues his thoughts on blogging and journalism: "If there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a weblog. It's just a format. Nothing more. It's really not a mystery in 2002."
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Glenn Fleishman says, in a post indicating that he'll be setting up a blog-related nonprofit site for those suffering from serious diseases, "I wouldn't want this to become a wailing wall of death and dying; rather, I'd hope that people could use the creative energy that's available to them to share their thoughts about themselves or about those they care about."
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Jeneane Sessum comments on the disenchantment some encounter in their blogging: "You come to weblogging... and you're screaming out your window, into the wind, "LOOK AT ME GO--I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY! YIPEE FOR ME!" " But then, she continues, "like any good day, the wind dies down, and you hear something like this: ______wooosh______..."
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Anil Dash, who was one of the first to start using it, articulates the difficulty he had in leaving behind Blogger for new blogware: "Blogger was, and is, a great product made by talented people whom I like and respect... but my needs have changed, and my programming skills have improved, and it's time to use a new tool so I can do the things I want to add to this site."
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George Parthington says, in a self-interview, on why he's taking a break from blogging: "It felt like talking to a psychiatrist that didn’t get it, or worse, didn’t care."
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John Garside compares the political power of blogs to that of its progenitors - the UK's Labour Press and independent radio: "They're under little pressure to make any pretence at objectivity, bow to fears of threats from owners, advertisers, libel and other forms of 'flak' and are svelte, lithe and sexy... History indicates that the power elite will not ignore the blogging activists." |
Jason Levine says, in a threaded discussion he kicked off, "It's amazing to me that a man can still be so embittered by the fact that [ Rebecca Blood] didn't give him enough credit in her essay on the history of weblogs." To which Jason Kottke responds, "As much as Dave [Winer] drives me nuts, he deserves consideration as the Johnny Appleseed (if not the Gutenburg) of weblogs."
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Matt Mower: "The books about blogging need to be there. We're in a pretty self-congratulatory medium here. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that an inaccurate book is better than no book."
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Terry Frazier says, in a post about the criticism of blogbooks, "I still have trouble getting anyone I know to understand that blogging is not just a trifle suited only to the feckless and unemployed."
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B!X, who's credited with scooping the Salon/Userland blogdeal, says that if it's Salon hosting its readers' weblogs "it could be an interesting experiment of sorts, and perhaps could help push other media sources -- such as newspapers -- to start offering the same sort of thing through their own websites to readers in their geographical area." |
Andrew Sullivan in an interview in Time Out New York: "If you're all uptight and trying to send down tablets of stone from your op-ed column, you're not going to be good at blogging. It's thinking aloud in real time, which means you're going to screw up, you're going to say things that are foolish." |
Analee Newitz says, in a post about a possible hole in reputation systems, "Sometimes we need to listen to people who have bad reputations. Often they are the critics, the people with a talent for seeing flaws and problems none of us wants to face."
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Hugh Pyle looks back at an old article by JD Lasica and says, "Isn't is strange: in the 'push' bubble, all the talk was of how this changed delivery options for Big Media, but most missed the real game: in reducing the cost of publication to zero, 'narrowcasting' means your daily news choices come from a million opinionated webloggers."
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Dave Winer follows up on his comments the other day about books on blogging: "It's my opinion that anyone who attempts to write a book about weblogs will miss the point... Perhaps it's the impossibility of writing a book about it that makes the medium so interesting."
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Mark Baard explains, in Wired, how people with Alzheimer's are reportedly using blogging to their benefit: "Bloggers say their journals have greatly improved their quality of life, by helping them to recall tasks completed and milestones passed." |
Jenny Berger comments on Brendan O'Neill's article: "I like that someone has the balls to say that blog writing (the kind that actually *wants* to be read, as well as gain the author that elusive cachet of being considered a global SME -- at least online) could stand some improvement."
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Paolo Valdemarin comments on the three and a half months since he started blogging on his company's website: "[It's] changed the way I work in many significant ways... [The] time for anonymous companies is over, we have all had enough."
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Brian O'Neill comments on what he sees as an irony bloggers are missing: "Many in the Blogosphere claim they are doing something new and distinctive in modern journalism. In fact, blogging is the logical conclusion of some of the worst trends in modern journalism." |
Dave Winer again on blogging software and any similarities they share: "Today I think that all that blogs have in common is the reverse chronologic structure, with a calendar; links and comments. It's a structure to hang ideas on."
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Dave Winer weighs in with his thoughts on two books on blogging that have recently been published. On Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook: "I found little that I agree with... she still doesn't understand the medium, or even tell the story of how weblogs came to be with any accuracy."
On We've got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture: "Just a slice through the story and community, an arbitrary starting point, and some cute stuff, some interesting stuff, but mostly they miss what's going on now." |
Virginia Postrel on the break from blogging she's taking this summer: "It's way too easy to convince myself that I'm "working" when I'm just reading other blogs and writing responses to the news."
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Laurence Jarvik reports on last month's gathering of leading bloggers at the National Press Club. His definitition of the blogosphere: "self-referential, self-reflexive, self-analytical, self-correcting, universal, instaneous, decentralized, emotional, rational, and available for continuous updating, response, and review."
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Doc Searls says, of a party in LA hosted by Brian Linse at which a bunch of bloggers convened, "It was as if we had come to Earth for the first time, amazed to find everybody looking and sounding like flesh-and-clothes human beings." |
John Hiler comments on one aspect of blogging he doesn't like - the "ex factor": "Now you can not only find out what I'm up to, but you can see what I'm doing that day."
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Copyright 2002 Corante. All rights reserved. Terms of use
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