Category: Business

— 9014 hits in one day’s a lot, right? I’m gonna have to look at the logs and see what’s going on.

— John Hiler’s piece on the interactions between blogs and traditional journalism (Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem – How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News) is the best thing I’ve seen so far on this subject. I was particularly struck by his account of the speed at which the false rumor propagated through the blogs about an ugly new EU flag that looked something like a bar code. 50 blogs picked up the story, but when it was exposed as a fiction, only 5 published corrections. The new flag design was simply a concept, and not one that anybody saluted.

Of course, we see that sort of thing all the time, and while we like to tell ourselves that blogs correct their errors faster and better than journalism, this doesn’t really happen. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on new blogging technologies (“Is Instapundit Over?“) which was reported by Instapundit himself as charging that he was indeed over. His claim was picked up by a dozen or so blogs, and when I challenged them one by one to show me where I’d said that, none of them could.

In a second episode of deception by the same person, now with a chip on his shoulder, an angry libertarian posted this comment on Ben Domenich’s blog in connection with a discussion of the teen sex epidemic: “Ben feels left out when people talk about teen sex, cause he wasn’t getting any!” As the misanthropic libber had been egged-on by Glenn Reynolds comparing himself to Clarence Thomas, I reacted with this play on his name: “‘DS’ apparently stands for “dumb shit”, given the nature of that last comment. Is Glenn Reynolds in favor of teen sex because he gets a lot of it?” Reynolds reported my remark out-of-context from the one I was reacting to, and even out-of-context from his own self-serving and inflammatory comment.

So now the rumor is wildly circulating among Instapundit-fed blogs that I’m saying poor, put-upon Glenn has a sexual fixation on teenagers, and that I hate breastfeeding and lesbians, beat my wife, shoot heroin, and all sorts of other things. Lies get out of hand easily, especially in Blogistan, but there’s generally a malignant force behind them grinding an axe of some sort. But back to the future, our topic.

Hiler believes the Blogoshpere will grow in influence as if becomes more automated:

The Blogosphere isn’t perfect, but it’s the most robust and diverse Media Ecosystem we have. As the mechanisms tying it together grow more and more automated, its collective power and influence will start to approach that of any single newspaper or magazine.

I have to agree with him, and toward that end I put the RoboPundit demonstration on this blog, in the left column. The stories in RoboPundit are harvested automatically from a variety of blogs with different slants, and presented without much editing. This technology lends itself to selection, comparison, cross-linking, and a variety of other forms of sifting that are no longer practical without automation. And these very refinements, which are beyond the scope of traditional journalism, will make blogs the premier vehicle for news and opinion in years to come.

Technology naturally scares those who have a vested interest in the status quo, but one way or another, it always wins out. While it’s been interesting to see traditional journos scream like stuck pigs over the advent of blogging, in the weeks and months to come we’re going to see traditional bloggers scream about the new technology as they sense their impending irrelevance. In fact, we already have.

— Biddle tells me he writes for Fortune magazine. I’d like to suggest that Red Herring would be a good market for his style of reasoning, given this definition:

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.

Another example: Person A makes a claim about unwed births. Person B says person A has the facts wrong, and introduces data including marital births, independent of rate to make his case. When person A points out the fallacy in person B’s response, person B calls person A a “hair-splitter.”

Red Herring is the place for you, RiShawn.

— Don’t visit The Truth Laid Bear; the dude is suffering from Link Withdrawl ’cause he didn’t know the first one’s free.

Instead, go see this wacko, or The Fat Guy, who’s Not-A-Pundit: just a guy writing about food, music, books, and tractors. They make ’em weird down in Texas, which is why I had to leave – no way to stand out.

— Matt Welch has issued a call for blogger assistance with a worthwhile project:

A Call for Blogger Assistance: I am writing a book review of Noam Chomsky’s 9-11, and the lefty collection September 11 and the U.S. War: Behind the Curtain of Smoke. One of my sub-themes, especially as regards the latter collection (filled as it is with the work of Ted Rall, Marc Herold, Robert Fisk, Arundhati Roy and Barbara Kingsolver), is the extent to which many of these writings were debunked or challenged (on weblogs and elsewhere) before these books even went to press.

See what you can do.

— O’Reilly Network: Essential Blogging Public Review [May 24, 2002]

Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that’s not really useful? Our goal isn’t to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

O’Reilly’s blogging book is available for public review. It looks reasonably good at first impression: two full chapters on Movable Type.

— Virginia Postrel, the Dallas architecture critic who aspires to be the second coming of Ayn Rand, devotes her blog to slogging blogs today:

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn’t anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey’s book? Why hasn’t it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn’t Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven’t Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn’t even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

And in the course of her march to the sea, she trashes Sullivan and Reynolds, and touts her blog hit counts, which aren’t at all impressive (lower than mine, for example.) So why does the poor dear have a burr in her blanket, trashing the blogs and announcing a summer hiatus while she writes her Very Important Book about Aesthetics?

Beats me, but it looks like she’s coming unglued. She’s always struck me as a snob, mainly because of her practice of separating links to “pro” journalists from “merely amateur” bloggers. In the Blogosphere, nobody knows you’re a celebrity, Virginia, we only care about the content of your content. And if yours sucks because you’re busily writing books, that doesn’t make you better than the dude whose blog sucks because he’s mediocre, trendoid and derivative. Write a blog with insight, clarity, effervescence, and wit, and the people will come; beat the same dead horse day after day, and they’ll check out.

The free market of ideas is a harsh mistress, isn’t she?

Editor’s note: As much as Postrel annoys me, I have to admit that she’ no more an elitist, or a dead-horse whipper, than Sullivan; her obsession with cloning and Sullivan’s with Krugman are of a piece. Maybe OCD blogging is a hazard for all Mac fanatics. But maybe not.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen writes a love-letter to Postrel.

— Andrew Sullivan takes Eric to the woodshed and gives him a mighty whooping today (In “The Frightening Reynolds”) for his various criticisms:

By the way, the tedious Eric Olsen has been whining that I’m not a blogging team player by responding to his every email (they come almost every other day and I got exhausted responding, especially when they keep having URGENT in the contents line). Memo to Eric: reprint any 1000 words you like from my blog for your warblog book. Good luck with the project. Now please stop spamming my email tray. But can I say a word about the notion of a “blogging community” to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey.

Worst of all, there’s no link to Eric’s blog. That makes Sully a BlogHole, one who witholds links. First rule of the Blogophere: you can trash anybody anytime, fairly or not, as long as you get the URL right. These pro journalists are so hard to housebreak.

— When I checked my site this morning, I discovered RoboPundit had added a dozen new stories automatically, just like it’s supposed to. I like it when this stuff actually works. The top stories in the WarbloggerSphere this morning are cleary the Instapundit redesign and rehost, and the ban on guns for pilots. See the RoboPundit section for the stories and links. Some twit at trek30.sv.av.com also tried to hack RoboPundit, if you can believe that. What a sad little bastard.

— Kevin Hoover’s police blotter in the Arcata Eye is really one of the best examples of good, local, journalism in existence, and the story of how the Eye came into existence is a model of entrepreneurial excellence. But even Hoover has his critics, as we learn from this story in the Frisco Comical today:

“He makes up little poems and little sarcastic remarks about the common folks, street people and traveling kids who are the most common targets of the Arcata police state,” Wakan said. “Hoover . . . encourages the people of Arcata to laugh off oppression as they go about their middle- to upper-class day.”

The Comical is jealous, of course.