Category: Media

— Somebody tell Ken and Matt to come back out and play, real soon now. Blogistan may never recover from losing them, even though LA sure needs the paper.

— Some people have real problems:

You gotta know it’s tempting to just tell the story, but there’s a problem, I don’t remember most of it. I was heavily sedated much of the time and am rapidly forgetting the rest of it.

That’s Dave Winer blogging about heart bypass surgery and nicotine withdrawal. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.

for all the kind words. The cast I’m getting Monday will allow me to type, but VR is a good idea, esp. for programmers.

Saturday, so blogging will be light for the next few weeks. Check the linked blogs for your reading fix.

— In the last few days, I’ve seen quite a bit of crossover blogging: Dan Gillmor writing about civil liberties in connection with Abdullah al-Muhajir and about the estate tax, elf Dave Winer trying, unsuccessfully, to write about journalistic ethics, Doc Searls linking Susanna Cornett as Blog of the Day, warblogger Jeff Jarvis commenting on elf content on his World War III blog, and even Glenn Harlan making a Winerian attempt at getting technical in connection with the WiFi LAN he’s trying to set up in and around his house in Tennessee.

This is a reaction to the New York Times article on the supposed rift between warbloggers and techbloggers, of course, and a testament to the independence of bloggers which makes us unwilling to be pigeon-holed.

So just when it’s looking like peace and harmony is about to break in the Blogosphere, along comes Megnut with What We’re Doing When We Blog and slaps warbloggers in the face with a large and nasty dose of elf condescension, sparked by what was actually quite an excellent article on blogging by Cathy Seipp:

Rather than rant that Catherine just “doesn’t get it,” it seems to me that her article, and others that are similar, are perfect opportunities for the blogging community to talk about our own evolution

Seipp doesn’t “get it,” according to Megnut, because she doesn’t wax technical about hyperlinks, timestamps, reverse-chronological sequences, and that all-important elfin sacred construct, “community.” With apologies to Werner Erhard, I have to say that it’s Megnut who doesn’t “get it.”

The Blog form, as we all know by now, is as old the web, complete with reverse-chronologically-time-stamped-hyperlinked-articles, but nobody paid any attention to them (except for few programmers) until Sept. 11. So the form isn’t responsible for the recent explosion of interest. We could make a half-hearted argument that the new easy-to-use tools are important, but that doesn’t really explain all of what’s going on now either, although they helped.

Warblogs broke down a barrier that existed between the media and the legion of informed and concerned citizens who had a desperate need to understand a new set of issues related to war, politics, culture, and religion that hadn’t been handled without spin for two generations. So blogs became interesting and relevant because interesting and relevant people started blogging. The form of the blog is less important than the content, and the “community,” if there is one, is everybody.

So it’s not the technology, it’s the people, and “what we’re doing when we blog” is the same thing we do at cocktail parties, except that with blogs we provide evidence; which was Cathy’s point, after all.

Bloggers have made the media more honest, and we’ve made it more relevant to people’s lives. We applied technology to a real human need, and we’d best be paying more attention, as technologists, to how the technology is being used, and as citizens to what we’re able to learn through this medium about the world we live in. The medium itself is not the message, never was, and never will be.

— Trying to throw us off-guard, Matthew Engel of the commie Guardian Unlimited lists Fifty ways to love America

But, in the interests of balance and to avoid future difficulties with the immigration service, here are some reasons why the US is wonderful.

Stuff like green suburbs, more wonderful race relations than Europe has, and “ever-open shops” that aren’t possible in socialist countries. I’m surprised he didn’t list our soccer football team, which actually scores a gooooooooooaaaaallllllll occasionally.

— Dan Gillmor responds to Winer’s bizarre criticisms of him at Silicon Valley | 06/08/2002 | The 404 Saga: My Response

Here’s my response to the continuing broadsides against me you may have read in the past few days.

I say bizarre because Winer’s mainly upset that Gillmor stopped using Winer’s software, and he covers that by claiming Dan’s not a Real Journalist because he didn’t criticize his employer. Thing is, Dan did criticize Knight-Ridder, and in fact he’s done so much more conscientiously than Winer’s criticized his, who happens to be himself.

— | KEN . LAYNE . DOT . CON | said today:

I’m also jealous. I got invited to this cool Blogging Panel Deal at the National Press Club in D.C., but I had to say no. Can’t afford the plane ticket this month.

This would be a good time to hit Ken’s tip jar if you haven’t done it lately — I’d like to see him on the panel, for the greater glory of Blogistan.

— There’s been a lot of exceptionally crappy writing in the Blogosphere lately, so I’m going to do my little bit toward improving the quality of expression by reminding my peers of one simple little principle that will help you make your musings more palatable to others: keep it brief.

Sound ideas don’t need 1000 words to say what 100 say just as well; crappy ideas can’t hide behind lush undergrowth of indirection and irrelevent detail, and extremely stupid ideas couched in terms that waste the reader’s time don’t endear you to anybody.

Follow the example of the professional writers — there’s a reason they get paid for doing this stuff and you pay to do it.

— Implicit in the shrill anti-blog essays from Alex Beam and others in the Media Establishment is the sense that journalism is losing mindshare to blogs and other forms of new media. This isn’t just because blogs, the web, and high-tech are so all-fired wonderful. No, the backstory is the decline of journalism under MBA control, as Kathleen Parker explains in her column at

OrlandoSentinel.com: Opinion

Thanks in part to human resources personnel — those well-meaning, misguided individuals who view writers and editors as cogs in a well-oiled machine — newsrooms have lost their souls.

Parker writes from her home in South Carolina, so for her the newsroom is already a thing of the past. So don’t get the big-head, bloggers, it’s not so much that we’re winning as that the other side has given-up and is in full retreat. And what are they afraid of? Fun, mostly.