Richard Bennett

At least they know what’s really important

— This puts some of this mania in perspective (Korea Herald Infotech): According to Yahoo! Korea, Korean Internet users are crowding message boards and breaking Web traffic records. Its Kim Dong-sung message board surpassed the daily page view figure of 10 million. Yahoo! said the popularity of the Kim Dong-sung message board is unprecedented. Even … Continue reading “At least they know what’s really important”

— This puts some of this mania in perspective (Korea Herald Infotech):

According to Yahoo! Korea, Korean Internet users are crowding message boards and breaking Web traffic records. Its Kim Dong-sung message board surpassed the daily page view figure of 10 million.

Yahoo! said the popularity of the Kim Dong-sung message board is unprecedented. Even the message board about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. stopped short of 3 million daily page views, it said.

That’s OK, we’ve got Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit.

Dog-eat-dog Olympics

— From Korea Herald National: [Jay Leno] said the Korean player must have been angry enough to have kicked and eaten a dog when he returned home. Leno’s remarks were broadcast on SBS, one of South Korea’s major TV network, on Saturday, and immediately prompted angry reactions from South Korean’s viewers. But they do eat … Continue reading “Dog-eat-dog Olympics”

— From Korea Herald National:

[Jay Leno] said the Korean player must have been angry enough to have kicked and eaten a dog when he returned home.

Leno’s remarks were broadcast on SBS, one of South Korea’s major TV network, on Saturday, and immediately prompted angry reactions from South Korean’s viewers.

But they do eat dog:

A group of 100 dogmeat restaurant owners will set up a nationwide federation next Monday in a city on the outskirts of Seoul to outline plans to promote the meat to foreign tourists before and during the World Cup period.

So where’s the beef?

Amazing development in Silicon Valley

— Curling is taking-off in the land of the cube rats (New fans get swept up in curling): Forget figure skating, snowboarding and moguls. From coast to coast, young and not so young are suddenly clamoring to learn about curling — not hair, but stones. There may be hope for this stinky place after all.

— Curling is taking-off in the land of the cube rats (New fans get swept up in curling):

Forget figure skating, snowboarding and moguls. From coast to coast, young and not so young are suddenly clamoring to learn about curling — not hair, but stones.

There may be hope for this stinky place after all.

Athens 2004

— A prediction: the Athens Olympics in 2004 will be a total disaster. The Mrs. and I visited Greece last October, and just getting around Athens is a major nightmare. The Grecians are trying to upgrade their Metro, but they’re way behind schedule. Similarly, all the upgrades and construction to the venues are behind, and the IOC has admonished the Grecians on several occasions to get their act together. The Games will have to be scaled-back considerably if they’re to take place at all. Modern Greece doesn’t know how to get things done. The Parthenon was built in 30 years with hand tools, but 30 years of renovations with high-tech equipment have succeeded only in keeping it from crumbling, not in restoring it to its former glory.

That being said, Greece is a fun place if you don’t have much to do. While most of it’s falling down, the locals still know how to have a good time, especially if there’s a bunch of drunken Japanese tourists to be entertained.

Perfectly innocent

This is getting a little stale, but just for the record, here’s a nice picture that illustrates the Korean Kamikaze in action. If this isn’t a deliberate take-down, I’ve never seen one.

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This is getting a little stale, but just for the record, here’s a nice picture that illustrates the Korean Kamikaze in action. If this isn’t a deliberate take-down, I’ve never seen one.

Arab tribalism

— A lot the the discussion about America’s enemies in the Middle East since 9/11 has revolved around Islam, and whether it’s an inherently defective religion or not. Since most of the hatred comes from Arab countries, and isn’t evenly distributed around the Islamic world (most Muslims are not Arabs), it’s occurred to me that the problem isn’t Islam or anti-Zionism as much as it’s Arab Tribalism. Islam adapts itself to local beliefs and mythology. One of the people Tom Friedman talked to on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia echoes this notion (
A Traveler to Saudi Arabia)

“The tribal mentality here is very strong, and in the desert, when the tribe is attacked, you’d better stick together or you’re dead. People know there are problems with our [Islamic] education system, and part of them is glad you’re raising it. But they feel under attack, so they won’t talk frankly to you [or want to be seen as making] changes because you demand them. The real problem is not the books, but the preachers who use their Friday sermons to tell [young] people that America wants to destroy Islam.

This link came from the VodkaPundit.

A new form of journalism?

— Writing in The Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan describes blogs to his readers as a new form of journalism: Blogging is the first journalistic model that harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and … Continue reading “A new form of journalism?”

— Writing in The Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan describes blogs to his readers as a new form of journalism:

Blogging is the first journalistic model that harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder

This isn’t surprising given that Sullivan is himself a journalist, and he writes a personal story highlighting the Enron/punditgate story with which he was so obsessed for so long. The blogger/journalist connection is also a given for anyone whose knowledge of blogs is limited to the selection of new voices promoted by Fox News this past week.

But I think this misses the point. As the Far Eastern Economic Review points out in a piece quoted by Sullivan, blogs are an evolution of the Internet, not of the newspaper:

?Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the internet.?

For every journalist, former journalist, or free-lancer with a blog, there are hundreds of civilians. And while journalists delight in the freedom to express without the mediation of the tyrannical editor, civilians delight in the ability to reach an audience without the space and content constraints of the Letters to the Editor section, as well as the ability to get the inside dope on any manner of things straight from an insider without the mediation of an enterprise whose primary skills are sentence structure and ad sales.

If many blog postings are stimulated by news and opinion features in the press, the better ones go far beyond the superficial and provide insider’s perspective and detail, without the space constraints and mannerly concerns that govern all journalistic enterprises, in print or on the Internet.

The Internet’s first applications enabled engineering researchers to communicate with each other about matters of common interest, typically their work on government contracts. With the advent of the accessible blog, we’re finding it enables citizens to communicate with each other regarding larger matters of common interest: our culture, our politics, and our government. This is way beyond free-lance journalists with computers.

Before everybody who’s ever had a drink with a reporter jumps up and screams that I’m being mean to journalists, let me just toss out this observation: the journalist as we know him today is a creation of a certain form of technology, a generalist with an ability to quickly ferret out information using a limited set of tools (a telephone and a Rolodex,) made necessary because high-speed web printing presses are a scarce commodity to which only a few have access. Now that every computer is a press capable of reaching more people than the New York Times dreams of on their best day, journalists will have to reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant. Blogging, to be sure, is part of that process, but it’s also much more than that. And as a non-journalist who’s had plenty of contact with political reporters for several years, it’s the “much more” that interests me.