— The New York Times story on the fight between Blogistan and Blogtopia is up, at A Rift Among Bloggers
This time it is happening to Weblogs. Five years ago a few programmers pioneered this form of hyperlinked online journal, posting their thoughts on technology matters and personal musings. Later they built Weblog publishing tools for nontechies, and a vast spectrum of Weblogs — blogs for short — quietly bloomed.
As regular readers of this blog, Ken Layne’s blog, and most other popular warblogs know, the weblog was not invented by a few web elves in Frisco five years ago, it’s a form that’s as old as the web itself, if not older. What the Frisco elves created was the name “weblog” and some scripts that made archiving old updates easier. I’d hate to have to hang my technical hat on such a thin contribution, but it that’s all you’ve got, you’ve got to make the most of it.
Now that Dave Winer has drunk the Kool-Aid, he insists that there’s no rumble between elves and pundits, but rather there’s a big showdown between amateur writers and professionals. I don’t buy this polarization either, since most of the blogs I enjoy reading are written by people who have, at one time or another, been paid for their writing. That doesn’t make these people (and I’m one of them, marginally) Big Media or some such capitalistic cabal, because they’re mainly free-lancers, but it does mean that they’re able to express their ideas coherently. Dave’s Kool-Aid inspired rant against Dan Gillmor is an embarrassment to Dave’s mama, it’s so lame. And no, Mickey Kaus didn’t suddenly become a piece of dried doggy poo just because he moved his blog to somewhere within MSN. Some jealous competitors just need to get over themselves and celebrate the man’s success.
UPDATE: Gallagher wasn’t talking about Dr. Frank, but about Max Power, whose real last name is Frank. Ken thinks the Gallagher article was pretty good, even though the dude largely ignored what Ken told him over the phone and went with some more inflammatory comments from Ken’s blog a while back. It seems odd that Gallagher didn’t get the fact that the root of the conflict between Blogtopia and Blogistan is political.
Blogtopians, to the extent that they have politics, are left-wingers, generally subscribing to a doctrine of anti-Americanism that’s not far from Chomsky — fear of large businesses, belief that Colonialism caused all the Third World’s problems, distrust of the Right-Wing bias they believe is inherent in media, and belief that we have to understand the Root Causes of terrorism (American wealth and power) before we defend ourselves. The pride of ownership issue is a smokescreen, and it’s not even factually grounded. It’s a shame that Gallagher didn’t pick up on this, but he was writing for the NY Times, so he may not have been allowed to discuss it.
huh huh, you said ‘pole,’ kinda.