Are bloggers the heir apparent of the independent weekly? Welch: For all the history made by newspapers between 1960 and 2000, the profession was also busy contracting, standardizing, and homogenizing. Most cities now have their monopolist daily, their alt weekly or two, their business journal. Journalism is done a certain way, by a certain kind of people. Bloggers are basically oblivious to such traditions, so reading the best of them is like receiving a bracing slap in the face. It's a reminder that America is far more diverse and iconoclastic than its newsrooms.
posted by skallas
on Sep 6, 2003 -
4 comments
Dem Blogs This community is filled with bloggers and I wondered if anyone had seen Maureen O'Dowd's take on how the Presidential Candidates are starting to use, for better or worse, "blogging" as a method to get their "message" across. ( Registration required )
posted by RubberHen
on Aug 13, 2003 -
9 comments
Not just another candidate Forget Arnold, let's elect the Mozilla Foundation's very own Asa, he understands the web and technology, and even has a weblog. (Oh, and he works on some browser called Mozilla...)
posted by raster
on Aug 7, 2003 -
4 comments
Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer are fighting, again. It started over a remark
Dave made about various blogging services.
Mark turned around and created a
bot that reads Dave's RSS feed every 5 minutes and spits out the text, annotated to show what's been added/deleted/changed since the last time it ran. Dave's claiming copyright infringement, Mark's claiming fair use. Okay MeFi folks, which side are you on, and why?
posted by tommasz
on Jul 11, 2003 -
60 comments
I've been ping mad all day since I found this neat little utility that can ping multiple hosts. Not very useful to the huge legions of loggers who use
MoveableType, but a boon indeed to those who use homebrewed setups or others like
e107 that currently don't have ping capability.
posted by Fidel
on Jul 6, 2003 -
20 comments
Lego Astrobots Blog From Mars Rovers - The Planetary Society has teamed with NASA to "man" it's two Mars Exploration Rover spacecraft with Lego "Astrobots." The bots, Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust, are
blogging their adventure "to allow kids to vicariously experience life in space, from launch, through the six-month space cruise, to landing and roving on the Martian surface."
posted by tpl1212
on Jun 13, 2003 -
4 comments
Abbie the Cat Abbie the Cat has a posse. One of the few cat-related, non-saccharine weblogs out there. I'm pretty my cat thinks many of these things.
posted by Spezzatura
on Jun 12, 2003 -
6 comments
Blogger moxie.nu acuses another blogger of identity theft . The other blogger,
moxiepop.com, fires back,
saying she got harassed by moxie.nu's readers and that
she had never seen moxie.nu's site before. Another blogger
goes on the offensive and accuses moxiepop of imitating moxie.nu. Comments start flying on moxie.nu and are ultimately closed by the host. Some other blogs step in, supporting moxiepop (
1,
2,
3) and supporting moxie.nu (
1,
2,
3).
Tim Blair chimes in,
Andrea Harris has a few words,
Jim Treacher calls for some Moxie Boxing, and
Kevin Parrott adds Rockem Sockem Moxies. A delightful train wreck for all to see.
posted by jonah
on Jun 12, 2003 -
46 comments
new baghdad blogger Salim Pax's friend G. now has his own blog. The writing isn't nearly as tight, but the one entry so far is intresting
posted by delmoi
on Jun 8, 2003 -
4 comments
Hi! My name is...what? MeFi's own
RJ Reynolds has posted a snippet from his hard-hitting documentary about bloggers. Features heartfelt treatises on the worth of self-publication from unknown bloggers around the world.
Or not.
posted by patricking
on May 22, 2003 -
12 comments
Be heard! A Survey of Blogs and Bloggers. Any opinions regarding
weblogs vs. regular news coverage, or the war in Iraq?
Researchers at the
U of Tennessee would like to know. Would you read something that has lots of in-depth information, even if it's not particularly fair, accurate, or believable? Even if you disagree with it? Does the stuff you run across online influence your opinions, or are you more interested in entertainment / finding something to talk about with people? Do you like the standard commercial media, or do you put more stock in instant messaging, group weblogs, and (yikes) real live humans?
posted by sheauga
on May 8, 2003 -
17 comments
The First Democratic Debates were last night, but you wouldn't know it from the media's coverage. Barely a story on CNN. Howard Dean stole the night, with over a hundred screaming supporters outside the debates. The only person there with supporters was the
blogging Presidential Candidate. There were students there from U.C. Berkley, Washinton, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. All thanks to the power of blogspot, and
meetup. Whether or not Dean gets the nomination, this will be a campaign for the history books.
They'll be on c-span all day today.
posted by cjoh
on May 4, 2003 -
67 comments
William Gibson now on William Gibson then. Yep, that is indeed me, though nothing I'm saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine. They were offering $500 for someone to monologue about the summer of lurve, etc., and I was (1) somewhat articulate, and (2) wanted desperately to get my ass out of Yorkville ... $500 was serious money
posted by delmoi
on May 1, 2003 -
10 comments
Where is Raed Salam Pax? Writing under the pseudonym 'Salam Pax' (words meaning 'peace', in both Arabic and Latin), a Baghdad resident provided a personal point of view on what was going on. However, the blog hasn't been updated since March 24th. Has the worst happened?
posted by robzster1977
on Apr 19, 2003 -
29 comments
A solid sense of identity. A small but interesting essay that is ostensibly about blogging, but instead really about the core problem of personal identity.
"Maintaining a successful blog requires a solid sense of identity.
...A blog's stickiness, or that quality that turns us into its regular readers -- comes not so much from the blog's informative value in content or through the network of links it provides as it comes from the blogger's authority... Teen blogs are boring because what permeates them mostly is a heightened sense of anxiety about one's place in the scheme of things. Having lost that sense of invincibility that comes from being a young adult, the over-forty is thrown in that same breath-choking cold current of doubts that he or she navigated as a teen. That is why a middle-aged woman's blog description of getting a haircut sounds the same as a teenage girl's account of the same event."
posted by namespan
on Apr 2, 2003 -
14 comments
Superseding the mainstream media, or "quirky parasites"? Less of interest here than the IraqFilter context itself - which amounts to the question "Is blogging to Gulf II what TV was to Vietnam and cable was to Gulf I?" - is an established medium caught in the act of visibly sizing up this comer, this new kid on the block, this parvenu we know as "blogging."
Is it a valid new medium of reportage, fit to take its place alongside print and broadcast? Or is it merely parasitic, interstitial, even marginal? Inquiring minds want to know. (Note O'Donnell's hedges and his final & bizarrely misplaced condescension: "Maybe Allbritton will start a trend - bloggers no longer dependent on the mainstream for their material." WTF?)
posted by adamgreenfield
on Apr 1, 2003 -
12 comments
Washington Post gives a warblog round up. The timing of the blogging going mainstream vs. Iraq war couldn't be more ironic and oddly appropriate. Washington Post provides an interesting war blog roundup that includes the usual suspects: Vodka Pundit, Instapundit, Kuro5hin and others. Are there some notable blogs they overlooked?
posted by cpfeifer
on Mar 31, 2003 -
7 comments
ABC's blog "The Note" suspends operations, citing lack of resources needed for war coverage, the blog's humorous style not being "the right national tonic," and this shocker: "We suspect that the amount of strictly political news — the kind of stuff that is the meat and starch of The Note — is likely to dramatically decrease in the coming days."
GUH? Aren't blogs now more important than ever? Aren't
politics now more important than ever? What message is being sent by the mainstream media here? (Via the indispensable
Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post.)
posted by PrinceValium
on Mar 11, 2003 -
10 comments
The
inventor of the term blog is giving up his verb. "I've gotta do something else with this site," says
Peter Merholz, who began one of the first 25 weblogs in May 1998. "More essays. No blogging."
posted by rcade
on Feb 3, 2003 -
25 comments
Du-blog-ious Achievement Awards Marc Weisblott cannot even keep from slagging
himself: “Maintained a personal blog without permalinks, archives, or even dates on the posts, thus preventing the sort of critical scrutiny he performs on others. Barely earned more money at age thirty-one than he did at twenty-one. And – oh, yes – enough of a coward to not be able to compile a Worst Blogs of 2002 list without attaching himself to the end of the list. Or is that just unadulterated self-loathing?”
posted by joeclark
on Dec 26, 2002 -
8 comments
Treetop Bloggers Protest Logging A group of anti-logging activists are now ready to maintain
their own blog 130 feet up in an ancient redwood. I've considered
tree sitting, but find myself much more inclined to do so if I could continue working (or reading MeFi, as the case may be). Interesting intersection of technology and activism. Doncha think? (via
/.)
posted by maniactown
on Dec 13, 2002 -
6 comments
"The Blog Twinning Project asks people to tell it which blogs they consider to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are declared 'twinned'."
Not a bad way to discover new reading material.
posted by Scottk
on Oct 30, 2002 -
5 comments
Blawgs: Blogs from the legal world.
Lessig is not the only lawyer sharing his expertise in the blog format. Blawgs range from individual lawyers (
Ernie the Attorney) to entire firms using a collaborative format to focus on a single practice area (such as the
Supreme Court). "Almost every law firm is trying to build a
knowledge management system for itself to take advantage of the expertise within the firm," Svenson says. "But with blawgs, it happens organically. If you gave your lawyers their own blawgs, pretty soon everyone within the firm could see who knows the most about different topics." Are knowledge management systems feasible
or practical yet?
posted by ajr
on Oct 11, 2002 -
12 comments
pickupyourowndamnsocks.com. What would you do if you found out that your significant other was keeping an anonymous, but very public, journal of things about you that drive them crazy?
posted by jonah
on Oct 7, 2002 -
150 comments
Blog baiting. This content-free Salon article is pointed to by News.com and chances are it will be picked up by tech weblogs within a couple of hours. Notice the presence of popular (in blogland) underdog in the title (Mozilla). The many blog references in the article body, including a gratuitious reference to the
arch-tech-weblog that presumes knowledge of said blog's moderation system. The meta implications of web media composing content so that it may be picked up by weblogs are interesting --and yes, the irony of a MeFi FPP is painfully obvious. What next?
posted by costas
on Sep 10, 2002 -
25 comments
Tangent.cx is now online.
Endquote first came up with a concept for automating self-linking within his own blog. Now he's expanded the idea so that you can build a network of content-driven-sites that auto-link their content with your own. The niftiest part, to me, is his new link pop-up menus, so that one word can link to articles from multiple sites.
posted by nomisxid
on Aug 1, 2002 -
12 comments
Today we'll be discussing Jason,
Slashdot's Commander, and
Ernie. Apparently there's going to be a class in blogging taught to journalism grad students. Do you rail against this at all? Is it because most students won't get it and eff up blogging as a whole, or is it because this means that the blog has Sold Out To The Man?
usual "I searched and couldn't find this" disclaimers apply.
posted by verso
on Jul 22, 2002 -
25 comments
Best British Blog. The Guardian has launched a competition to find the best British weblog. Is this another case of the mainstream media not really understanding what blogging is all about?
posted by crayfish
on Jul 18, 2002 -
18 comments
Auto-organic backlinking in Blogspace Jon Udell has an intriguing article describing the automatic backlinking used by Disenchanted and other sites. For example, if you link to a
Disenchanted article, it automatically links back to you. Udell writes:
More than economy is at work here, though. Offering backlinks is a strategy that furthers the ambition of every blogger to engage other minds. It does so by enlarging the surface area and altering the shape of the posted article, which is the unit of information currency in blogspace.
What a groovin' idea. I like that the backlinking is automated, essentially creating new networks of knowledge with every post. Is anyone else doing this? It seems that if this "feature" were included in existing blogging engines, it could change the shape of the net.
--------------------
Link courtesy of
Kairos News
posted by mecran01
on Jun 25, 2002 -
22 comments
