Category: Media

— Now that Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles blog has moved to Slate, his traffic will go up and he’ll be linked by more sites, increasing his relevance in the Blogosphere from 247,000th (kausfiles.com’s Alexa ranking) to 2,845th (Slate’s Alexa ranking). This puts him ahead of the leading blogs, NRO (11,066), Arts & Letters Daily (18,337), Sullivan (49,465), Dave Winer (57,381), and Instapundit (68,172).

As the sixth-leading blog, Instapundit isn’t exactly the king maker he was when he was the second-leading linker last November, and people are starting to notice that an Instapundit link isn’t the avalanche of hits it used to be (in some cases it’s not even noticeable.) The blogosphere is now so large that nobody can manually index it every day, so visitors to Reynolds’ site read the summaries and rarely click-through, realizing that he’s just got the tip of the top of one of the flotilla of icebergs. More and more, we’re relying on automation to sift and filter and find the cool stories in the Blogosphere, which means more Daypop and Blogdex, and less Professor Reynolds, Dave Winer, and similar manual link-makers.

Steven Johnson speculates on the next evolution of the Blogosphere in a Salon article referencing old-school blogger Jason Kottke and others of the manual search bent, contrasting blogs with journalism:

But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they’re not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan’s wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won’t be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.

More in this vein in Wired and at Nick Denton, who’s building a next-generation blog company. Johnson and Kottke are too hung-up on the details of how the existing web might transition to the Semantic Web, probably because they don’t have the background in textual analysis, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to catch on to methods that are outside the scope of HTML, XML, SOAP, or any of today’s web-building techniques.

Here’s what’s going to happen: in a few months, you’ll be able to build a blog, or more precisely, a dynamic web site, with content largely selected for you by a search robot that understands what you like, who you like, and where the stuff you like is found. You’ll edit a selection of stories found and presented to you by your search robot, and you’ll comment if you please on the stuff you decide to include in your own Daily Dish.

The collective choices of you and others like you will be refined story-by-story, topic-by-topic, and day-by-day until a Best of the Web that reflects your own tastes and values, and those of people you trust, will be your guide to the Blogosphere. And when that happens, Reynolds, Steven Johnson, and the other beacons of the Blogosphere can get to doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, namely analyzing, opining, theorizing, and creating content (or thinking, as we used to say when I was a philosophy student,) instead of vainly trying to direct traffic. And it will be a better web, and a better blogosphere, and a better Noosphere than we have now:

“No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.”

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
(The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)

The techniques and methods of this emerging web were all described in a theoretical way by Vannevar Bush, the first blogger, in his seminal 1945 article, As We May Think:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

That’s where we’re going; how we get there won’t matter to most people.

Update: See Jeff Jarvis, Reed Stott, Henry Copeland and Eric Olsen for reflections on this theme, courtesy of Matt Welch. Glenn unfortunately believes this post was about him, and not about the web, human knowledge and civilization, and technology. Sorry folks, but the Instapundit stuff was just the hook, not the story.

— Go to lgf: don’t panic right away to read LGF for the next few days, until DNS propagation catches up with reality.

— Last night it was my pleasure to meet the distinguished French journalist Emmanuelle Richard (no relation), the wife of Matt Welch. I discovered, much to my surprise, that Matt and Emmanuelle have only one pair of glasses between them, which they apparently share. So please go to Matt’s Tip Jar and make a contribution to help them buy a second pair of glasses. Thank you.

— InstaPundit.Com had one of his better days Wednesday.

— PatrickRuffini wrote a nice letter to NBC News’ Brian Williams about their biased coverage of Fortuyn, to whit:

Once again, webloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher of National Review Online savored the hard political “facts of the case” … within an hour of hearing of Fortuyn’s murder, and hours before NBC News reported otherwise. And those facts all indicated that Fortuyn was no Le Pen. Whereas Le Pen had spent years directing his anger to all manner of social and political groupings — immigrants, Jews, the political class, the European Union, and the United States — Fortuyn’s only real “right-wing” plank was to cut foreign immigration by 75%.

By the NBC standard, the Sierra Club is a right-wing extremist organization, because they too are opposed to immigration.

— Edward Boyd at zonitics.com has done a follow-up on the Nunberg study alleging that Bernard Goldberg was wrong about media labeling of politicians, and finds Goldberg was right and Nunberg wrong. Boyd corrected Nunberg’s denominator and looked for labeling on a story-by-story basis, concluding:

Overall – and subject to some interpretation – conservatives were 30% more likely to be labeled than liberals.

It’s unlikely that liberal media outlets who’ve touted Nunberg’s claim will issue retractions, since they’re busy labeling slain Dutch politician a right-wing extremist and covering-up the similarity between Al Gore’s views on the environment with those of confessed pipe-bomber Luke Helder:

Helder, an art student from Minnesota…sent a rambling letter to the University of Wisconsin student newspaper expressing his radical environmental views and wish to legalize marijuana. Sounding like Al Gore or John Kerry, he whines that “the icebergs are melting, and precious earth is heating up.”

The Big Lie – it’s everywhere you want to be.

— The Texan girl with the weird name lives, and she’s updating dropscan digest again:

HELLO, I’M STILL ALIVE!
But barely. Been working like a dog on the very large paper. At last my labor has borne fruit and I sent off a couple of meaty chapters to the Reader last night. So why not blog?

Born-again bloggers are a large group now: Dan Hartung, Moira Breen, and now Shiloh Bucher. The latter has a nice little piece of on-the-spot reporting from one of Austin’s outdoor torture centers.

But what the hell’s happeing with Ken Layne, off-line for days now. I hope he’s just making deals in smoke-filled rooms and not sick or something.

— The Frisco Comical carries pro and con opinion columns on the media’s liberal bias today. The bias denier is Stephanie Salter, the Bay Area’s leading narcissist, who relies heavily in emotion, anecdote, and the discredited Nunberg study to make her point (that the media are servants of their capitalist masters,) while liberal bias critic Debra Saunders, the Bay Area’s Token Conservative (really more a libertarian than a conservative,) lays out an argument based on fact, evidence, and logic.

— This JD Lasica character has got some negative feedback on Wired West.

Getting some very interesting feedback on my article that posted yesterday on OJR: Why the Wired West still matters. The vast majority have been kudos, but those aren’t the interesting ones, so I’ll print the critics’ views here.

If you care about all the East v. West, Blog v. Media stuff, this is for you, but it’s pretty lame — JD’s a Wellbert.

— Why a Sullivan, of course. Check What Blogging Archetype Are You Most Like? Find out with GAZM.org!.

You are an Andrew Sullivan.
You are not afraid to share your political views with everyone in candid and clear ways.
You may also be making some money… one day.
Take the What Blogging Archetype Are You test at GAZM.org

Most of the blog archetypes who’ve taken the test, like Searls and AKMA, are somebody else.