July 23, 2001

8:59 AM

Seventh seal opened, nytimes.com has a web log
Or is it...? This list of links in a section entitled "According to the Times" is a "Web-only feature highlighting facts and figures culled from the week's news. It appears every Wednesday." It seems to be a scanner of news stories by the NYT, not offsite. I used to think they were cool, but this dogged resistence to trends is making them seem aloof, no? (well, more so than usual...) I miss CC...
posted by rschram (5 comments total)

I don't think it's a weblog when you only link to yourself.

Then again, maybe it's the perfection of the form.
posted by rcade at 11:13 AM on July 23, 2001

I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps they'll get the hang of it and eventually start to link off-site.
posted by megnut at 11:51 AM on July 23, 2001

Then again, maybe it's the perfection of the form. My theory is that weblogs exist for their authors to read them--a solipsitic inversion of Bishop Berkeley. If so, then self-linking is indeed the highest form of web log.
posted by rschram at 12:40 PM on July 23, 2001

I used to think they were cool, but this dogged resistence to trends

Oh my.

Since when is a "dogged resistance to trends" a bad thing? The cool kid was the one who did his own thing. The Times is cool because it's a good read, because you get more good articles there than in any other publication in the world (especially when you pick up the New York Times Magazine) and because it has staunchly kept to its own agenda. Not because it's "trendy."

And perhaps one of the reasons few news outlets have weblogs is because they're too busy cranking out their own proprietary coverage of a topic to bother ferreting out their competitors' coverage and encouraging you to go there instead, hm?
posted by werty at 11:16 AM on July 24, 2001

"dogged resistance to trends" Bad choice of words on my part. How's this? "I used to think their dogged resistence to trends made the nytimes.com web site cool, but now I see it as veiled intransigence."
posted by rschram at 12:59 PM on July 24, 2001