Category: Business

— 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.

— Salon.com takes a look at Media Whores Online:

Rabid watchdog
While attacking what it sees as a vast, right-wing media conspiracy, an anonymous Web site has led to a growing media mystery: Who is behind Media Whores Online?

Yes, that right wing bias in the media’s everywhere, isn’t it? According to the easter bunny, anyway.

— The demure Up Yours – And More Helpful Tips announces a new poll:

COMING UP NEXT ANOTHER GREAT POLL – THE BLOGOSPHERE’S MOST SEXIST BLOGGER!!!!

Look, the voting is a mere formality. Just tell me what my prize is going to be so I can sell it on E-bay.

— John McLaughlin, Larry King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Joanne Jacobs figure into this magnificent piece from Soundbitten on Glenn Harlan Roberts’ war with Big Media.

— It’s not often I agree with New Labourite Nick Denton, but these observations are right on the money:

Matt Welch is a friend of mine, so take anything I say with a pinch of salt. That said: take a break from this page and read him. He’s a warblogger, and can bash the Saudis as well as any of that crowd. But at least he’s not predictable. He’ll lay into Bush over trade or coddling of the Saudis. And he even dares give Chomsky some credit, in a recent post. My main complaint against neocon bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, though I read them regularly, is that I know what they’re going to say. Reynolds will never resist a chance to bash a European, academic, or an international organization, and preferably all three together. Sullivan will always find a way to give the benefit of the doubt to Bush; he toes the Republic party line as well as any political operative. That gets tedious. Matt at least surprises me.

I go one step further – if you know what they’re going to say, don’t read them. Life is too short to waste time on pinheads and prima donnas. I know, it’s for the links…

— The Daily Pundit, Bill Quick, has converted his blog to Movable Type and undergone a redesign in the process; temporarily reachable at http://64.247.33.2/~icebergw/ until DNS catches up.

While the new design is more fetching to the eye as an aesthetic object, it’s a step backward in terms of accessibility. There’s a large banner on top which pushes his content lower on the page, and the contrast between foreground and background in the links section is less than it used to be, which makes it harder to read. To compensate for the lack of contrast, the designer uses an extra-large font, which means you have to do more scrolling to read his site than you should. I like Bill’s content because he’s passionate and funny, but the new design doesn’t showcase his writing as much as it showcases the designer’s flawed concept of aesthetics.

Ditch the colors, Bill. The nice thing about Bill’s new blog is that he has an RSS feed, so he’s now included in RoboPundit.

— Berkeley now offers a course on Weblogs:

Weblogs are a new form of online publishing that have rapidly become a popular way of getting news and information on particular topics. Some are run by journalists, while others operate in competition with journalists. In this class students will create a Weblog to explore the subject of “intellectual property” – copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc. News sources will be scanned each day for items of interest to the IP community, the top stories will be selected, and precise summaries of each story will be written, with a unique perspective and voice. The resulting Weblog column will be posted to the school’s Web site and to an email list of interested subscribers. We’ll also be bringing in experts in the Bay Area on intellectual property and copyright issues to become contributors to the Weblog.

In the future, only the educated will be allowed to blog, so get yours while you can.

Link from Scripting News.