Who, exactly, represents the left extreme in the establishment blogosphere? You'd likely hear names like Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald. But these examples are instructive. Is Hamsher a socialist? A revolutionary anti-capitalist? In any historical or international context-- in the context of a country that once had a robust socialist left, and in a world where there are straightforwardly socialist parties in almost every other democracy-- is Hamsher particularly left-wing? Not at all. It's only because her rhetoric is rather inflamed that she is seen as particularly far to the left.
Freddie De Boer on the
lack of left wing discourse in the blogosphere.
[more inside]
posted by ennui.bz
on Jan 18, 2011 -
84 comments
The Early Days of Blogging - Presented at the 2009 HyperText conference, this paper is an extensively cited and well-researched narrative of the blogosphere's formative period. It delves deep into the involvement of Jorn Barger, Dave Winer, and other A-list luminaries.
posted by SpecialK
on Jul 6, 2009 -
36 comments
Instructables.com moves to a "pay to see" model Instructables, the community craft blog of the handy set, has moved to a closed pay-only model, and the timer is ticking for legacy accounts. After 90 days from implementation rollover, people who do not pay for an Instructables "Pro" account will have their accounts "crippled". Non-paying accounts will no longer be able to view entire instructables at once, print out projects or get a PDF, have a "favorites" list, and most perniciously, people
won't be able to view "secondary" images in instructable steps that have multiple images. (Even if you happen to be the person that created it.)
[more inside]
posted by dejah420
on Jun 17, 2009 -
61 comments
Paglia's back. "I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix." If you like that sentence, you'll love the
return of Camille Paglia to Salon.com.
posted by staggernation
on Feb 14, 2007 -
61 comments
Senator John McCain (R. - AZ) has
introduced legislation [PDF] that would hold blogs responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles.
Provisions of the proposed bill include: (1) commercial websites and personal blogs "would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000," (2) bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs, and (3) any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender. "Because 'social-networking site' isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites." The list could include any site that allows comments, authot and personal profiles. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that this proposal may be based more "
on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts." "McCain’s legislation could deal a serious blow to the blogosphere. Lacking resources to police their sites, many individual blogs may have to shut down open discussion."
*
posted by ericb
on Dec 14, 2006 -
141 comments
Remember when folks were "up-in-arms" after learning that the Bush administration
paid prominent political commentator
Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote 'No Child Left Behind' legislation? It turns out that a handful of liberal bloggers
pulled in some decent cash this past year from various political campaigns as consultants, while maintaining their "independent" blogs. Case in point:
Jerome Armstrong (
MyDD) made $115,000+ from Sherrod Brown (over 15 months) and $65,000 from Mark Warner (over 12 months). Turns out Armstrong
admitted this week that he has been writing on his blog under various aliases -- including 'Scott Shields.' 'Shields'
received payments from the Robert Menendez campaign.
posted by ericb
on Dec 8, 2006 -
57 comments
Polluting the blogosphere businessweek is writing about a new company that is basically paying bloggers to write about products --- disclosure is optional...
congratulations marketers --- you ruin everything
posted by bliss322
on Jun 30, 2006 -
44 comments
The (Broken) Triangle: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness. The
Huffington Post's Peter Daou, whose
dour forecast of how Bush and lazy media would spin away the
NSA scandal proved prescient, on why "netroots activists" can't get traction: "It's slow-motion-car-wreck painful, and most certainly NOT where the left's triangle should be a half decade into the new millennium, as the Bush-propping machine hums and whirrs, poll numbers rise and fall, Iraq bleeds, scandal dissolves into scandal, terror speech blends into terror speech. The landscape is there for everyone to see, to analyze. Enough time has elapsed to make the system transparent. It is dismaying for netroots activists to see the same mistakes repeated..."
posted by digaman
on Jan 13, 2006 -
19 comments
Penisblog Ben Brown did it ages ago, staking out the avant-garde as usual. Now the meme gets its own site. Can you match the member to the bloggeur?
(Extra credit for spinning the project into a discursion on openness and self-revelation online.)
Not, as they say, work-safe.
posted by joeclark
on Apr 16, 2003 -
64 comments
42 days to a Googlewash. The Register comes out all guns firing at the blogging community's apparent "redefinition" of a term, calling it Orwellian doublespeak. Is it true that a small coterie of A-list bloggers is able to change the way we (for we: read Google users) define a phrase? Or is there really
something bigger going on?
posted by cbrody
on Apr 3, 2003 -
65 comments
3 Feb '03 Word of the Day: Blog.
Pronunciation: [blahg]
Definition 1: A clipping of "weblog," blog is internet jargon for what is basically an online journal or diary. Yes, blogs are going mainstream. Will
businesses discover uses for blogs & blog software?
Will (mobile-phone) "moblogging" catch on?
This link says ...the first Web logs consisted largely of links to sites on the Internet that the author found interesting. Early bloggers were presurfing the Web for people, in a sense [sound familiar?].
About 1999, as free software came on the scene -- making it easy to create Web logs -- the content began to shift. Blogs became more personal, less link-driven. But what is a blog
to you? And what is the future of the "blogosphere"?
posted by Shane
on Feb 3, 2003 -
25 comments
At large in the blogosphere And yet another analysis of the world of blogging. Does this one, by a decent literary and cultural critic, present blogs and blogging in a better light than many earlier ones? note: NY Times free reg reqd.
posted by Postroad
on May 5, 2002 -
43 comments
proposes a new term-
"Bioblog - weblog-type sites in which the primary (but not necessarily exclusive) focus is on its author instead of the web or other external media, but which, of course, is still more aligned in spirit and form to weblogs rather than traditional online journals."
posted by TuxHeDoh
on Feb 23, 2001 -
58 comments
