Steve Earle’s John Walker song: Anders Smith Lindall has heard it and reports that “Earle doesn’t pontificate and never breaks character, much less glorify Lindh.”
Archives for July 2002
Links from PeterMe
Peter Merholz offers a great collection of links offering real research into the nature of online relationships.
We know there continues to be some lag time intermittently on the blogs.salon.com server. Working on it!
Around Salon blogs
On Day One of Salon blogs, looks like about 75 people jumped in. Thanks to all. Some interesting stuff:
Chris Malcolm is tracking bizarre news stories, like “Amoebas attack boy’s brain.”
CJ asks how people become cynical.
Pru’s Psychic Spy Training Facility. Yow! Lessons in “Remote Viewing.” I’m not a cynic but I’m very much a skeptic.
An Innocent Abroad. William Thompson’s tales of life on the road — Sicily and beyond.
Rogers Cadenhead is making sure that expelled congressman James Traficant’s Web page does not vanish from the Net.
Blogology
Blogs have become an Internet trend story — probably because there are so few other Internet trends right now, and most of those are too depressing to dwell on. Trend stories work best when reporters can drum up some conflict. Thus we have the War between the Bloggers and the Journalists.
It’s not much of a fight. Proponents of blogging every now and then display some of the old “We will conquer the world” spirit that drove so many Internet visionaries. That presses some journalists’ buttons, and they respond with reflexive dismissal and disdain. It’s like old times!
But aside from the occasional outburst of overheated rhetoric, there is no sensible reason for bloggers and journalists to have any particular animosity towards each other. The two enterprises are complementary.
I don’t believe blogging will kill off old-fashioned journalism any more than the continued success of Time and the New York Times will stop anyone from blogging. A reporter can (under the right circumstances) do things a blogger can’t — like spend months investigating a single story exposing, say, how big media companies got in bed with a bogus anti-drug ad campaign. (There’s nothing to stop a blogger from doing this, but I have yet to see it happen, and it’s unlikely to happen a lot, since most of us need to pay the rent somehow, and long-form investigative journalism takes too much time to do as an on-the-side thing.)
Conversely, bloggers can do things most reporters can’t — like updating at whim around the clock, or sitting in a conference hall posting comments directly to the Web. (Some professional journalists can do that, too.)
Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.
Enter Olbermann
Tonight in Salon: our newest columnist debuts: Keith Olbermann.
Wall Street minute
Bull run: Dow closes up 488 (6.3%), Nasdaq up 60 (5%)… It will take a lot of days like that to put a dent in the last couple month’s losses, of course. But maybe we hit bottom.
Live from OSCon
Doc Searls is blogging live from the O’Reilly Open Source conference. Speeches by Larry Lessig and Richard Stallman. (Footnote: the earlier Doc post commenting on Sun, “Scott vs. Scott,” attributes a Salon article to me that was actually by Michael Thomas.)
Freeform text
By popular demand (well, all right, JD Lasica and a couple of other readers asked) I’ve removed the lines from this page’s style sheet that dictate the body type size. So now the posts should appear, the way Salon’s articles do, at whatever font size you’ve set in your browser.
Andrew Bayer dreaming
Andrew Bayer is dreaming of China and blogging away in memoriam of Red Sox announcer Ned Martin and Leo McKern.
.Net vapors
Two years ago I wrote that Microsoft’s .NET scheme was vaporware. Today Rebecca Buckman in the Wall Street Journal reports that, basically, it still is.