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Stop the presses! Blogger reviews books by bloggers!

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Tonight Salon has posted my double review of Glenn Reynolds’ “An Army of Davids” and “Crashing the Gate,” by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong.

It was interesting to me how differently these leading bloggers used the opportunity of a book deal: Reynolds (Instapundit) waxes prophetic about the future of individual empowerment, while Kos and Armstrong narrow their gaze to a tight beam of focus on how the Democrats should proceed if they hope to regain the White House.

In my review, I attempt to relate their blogging styles to their worldviews. As for me, I enjoyed returning to the couple-of-thousand-word Salon format after a year of my own book-length labors, interspersed with short-form blogging here.

Personal bests

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Veteran blogger and writer-about-blogging
Rebecca Blood posted a thoughtful response yesterday following up on my report from the CyberSalon on elitism and blogging. But I confess it left me a little puzzled, because, though she said I “had it wrong,” I’m not sure exactly what she thought I got wrong, since I agree with about three-quarters of what she has to say, and none of what she says seems to contradict what I wrote.

Blood describes a premise that is certainly not mine — in fact, it matches pretty closely the Andrew Keen “Don’t waste my time with your mediocre blogs” position: “The unspoken premise underlying this argument is that books and articles are published commercially because they represent the best writing that is available.” Then she goes on to say, no, really, professional publishing is about “printing books and articles they can sell, nothing more, nothing less.”

Well, sort of. This is part of the picture, I think, but the full picture is a little more complex: Most publications and many publishers have some kind of division of labor between the editorial side and the business side, and the business people are more focused on the selling side of things, while the editorial people tend to concentrate on…editing. Editing means selection, usually according to the tradition of the paper or magazine or house. And that tradition makes assumptions about who the readers are and what they want and expect from the editors. The editors know that if the readers are happy with their choices they’ll keep coming back, and the business will thrive, so there is certainly a business substrate to the whole activity.

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want. Bad editors live in a dream-world; they think they’re serving their readers, but they run in horror from actual contact with actual readers.

So I’d say Blood’s description is oversimplified, incomplete, but not fundamentally wrong. She goes on to write: “Blogs are threatening to a certain type of writer not because they allow mediocre writing to flourish — the commercial market already does that. They are threatening because they unequivocally demonstrate that commercial publishing does not necessarily represent the best writing that is available.”

I think I agree, mostly: it’s great to see how new talent can crawl out of the woodwork on its own today without always having to wait patiently on some gatekeeper’s transom for years, and if that makes some of said gatekeepers uncomfortable, all the better. But I do hear in Blood’s passage a touch of the same absolutism that made Keen’s comments at the CyberSalon so irritating — only inverted. Keen sees mediocrity flourishing in the blogosphere; Blood sees mediocrity flourishing in the professional media.

Well, you know, mediocrity flourishes everywhere! So sayeth Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crud. Further complicating matters, your view of which 10 percent isn’t crud is likely to be different from mine, or Keen’s, or Blood’s. All “bests,” in the end, are subjective. Outside of sports and other scored pursuits, “best” is just another word for “my favorite.”

So the real challenge is to find ways of helping each of us find our way to a higher percentage of the stuff each of us thinks isn’t cruddy. And that’s where I side with Blood and the blogosphere: any new media structure that enables more voices to be heard and found deserves our embrace, because it increases the size of the pool in which we fish for our personal supply of non-crud.

I don’t share Keen’s confidence that we’re already doing such a fantastic job of wheat-from-chaff separating that we can afford to shut our minds to the “anarchy” of the Web. That’s smug and delusional. And I don’t expect to find “bests” — just more “aha”s and “uh-huh”s and “ohhh”s and “wow”s. And that’s more than good enough.

More CyberSalon stuff: Audio from the evening is now posted over at Keen’s AfterTV site.

And Dave Winer posts his thoughts on the event: It doesn’t have to be adversarial between bloggers and pro journalists, he says; in fact, “it mustn’t be adversarial, between us, because we already have a mutual adversary, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, who would, if they could, completely disempower the press, and control the flow of information to the populace.”

How news moves today

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Today we learned that Windows Vista has slipped, again, and that the new Microsoft operating system won’t be out till January 2007 — despite long-held promises of a 2006 release.

Every new edition of Windows has been late, so, you know, this is predictable news — on the order of “President Bush Declares He Will Stay The Course In Iraq.”

What I found interesting was the 2006-model way in which I discovered this news today. I first found out on Digg, the new-model tech-news aggregator that is rapidly replacing Slashdot on many geek bookmark lists. When I checked out Digg a little before 5 p.m. Pacific Time, the top story, or close to it, was a link to a trade publication’s short piece on the news. It took a couple more hours for the story to show up on Slashdot, which has its own editors picking stories, unlike Digg, which puts all its users to work.

And now, a couple more hours later, around 9 p.m. in California, we can read the canonical big-media piece in the New York Times. It’s fine, and it provides a broader perspective than the trades, as it should.

But once you’ve got the outline of the event clear, it’s far less interesting to hear the excuses of the Microsoft brass, as recited on conference call to the pros, than to read the breast-beating disgust of the anonymous Microsoft employee who blogs under the sobriquet MiniMicrosoft: “Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!” (I don’t even read MiniMicrosoft regularly, but Dave Winer pointed to him, so I found him.)

This is just one little sequence relating to one little news event, but it’s illuminating. As tech news goes today, so ultimately will go the rest of the news. It’s not the death of newspapers or pro journalism, but it’s further evidence that the pros face an extremely tough challenge: they’re rarely going to be first, so they’d damn well better be good. But it’s hard to hire enough good people to be good at everything; a newsroom has only so many seats, and the Web’s supply of amateur experts, anonymous insiders and random kibitzers with an occasional insight is limitless. The pros had better prepare to be outgunned.

This competition will force journalists to stop being lazy and to find and reconnect with what is unique about their work, now that so much of what they used to do is being done for free, and often well, by amateurs. The best response, it seems to me, is what we have tried to do over the years at Salon: put more energy and resources and smart people into real investigative journalism, to find stories that just aren’t being covered elsewhere, and that are less likely to be produced by lone bloggers.

The next phase of the game beyond that, which we’re only beginning to figure out — but then so is everyone else — involves connecting that tradition of professional investigative journalism with the new dynamic of distributed information that the Net creates.

Horn tooting

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Somehow I missed the fact that this humble blog made CNet’s “Top 100” list some time ago, in the “Tech Business” category. Thanks, CNet! I’ll try to live up to the billing. I’ve generally adopted the “blog is a mirror of the blogger” philosophy here; rather than trying to niche-ify the blog as a product (everything you always wanted to know about ROUTERS!), which is certainly a good business strategy, I’ve allowed the blog to reflect my own interests across tech, politics and culture. I can fairly well guarantee you won’t find much sports or celebrity news here — but beyond that, almost anything goes.

I have some new ideas and approaches to the blog that I intend to start experimenting with when work on my book, Dreaming in Code, is done. The handful of you who have been paying attention may recall that I completed a first draft of my manuscript before the holidays. Well, we’re still in the middle of editing, and making progress. I hope to be done soon, and when we are, I’ll be posting a lot more about the book and related subjects (basically, software development and its discontents). For those of you who’ve inquired in e-mail, wondering as to my health, or the health of the project: sorry for the slowness. Publishing, like software, has its own rhythms.

In other news on the “self” front, I am proud to see this site’s homely name over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on a short list of blogs that helped that group with a membership drive last November. It’s fine company to be in. (And if you didn’t join back then, you can still join now.)

Blogs: threat or menace?

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I attended a very strange panel talk tonight at the Berkeley CyberSalon on the topic of elitism in media and blogging. Veteran New York Times tech reporter John Markoff was on the panel, along with Steve Gillmor; two of the founders of BlogHer, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins; and Joshua Greenbaum, whose introduction I couldn’t make out (but this seems to be him: programmer, tech trade journalist and enterprise-software consultant).

From the opening question to the panelists — “Is big media elitist?” — moderator Andrew Keen made his own agenda clear. Keen is a podcaster and blogger who has made a stir recently by polemicizing against Web 2.0’s participatory ideal; he sees it as a culture-destroying Marxist delusion. And I’m afraid his determination to tar the blogosphere as a force for anarchy and narcissism warped the evening, turning back the clock on the entire conversation about blogging and journalism that so many thoughtful people — including many in the room tonight — have been advancing for years.

Keen had allies, including Greenbaum, who, as far as I could tell, seemed mostly concerned about the way blogs and the Net have begun to undermine the business model of print journalism. Next to Keen and Greenbaum, Markoff’s quiet skepticism about aspects of the blog-triumphalist position seemed respectful and valuable. Meanwhile, Stone and Des Jardins, with the help of many in the audience, took the blogosphere’s side, arguing the value of letting new voices be heard.

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

“What is the value in sharing experiences?” Keen asked at one point, with a touch of disdain in his voice — as if he wanted to say to the entire universe of millions of bloggers, “I grow weary of your scribblings.” My jaw dropped. Isn’t “sharing experiences” the root of literature, the heart of conversation, a primal impulse of our humanity? Who would sneer at it?

At the heart of Keen’s complaint and others like it is an outmoded habit of thought: an assumption that every blogger seeks and might be owed the same mass-scale readership that old-fashioned media have always commanded. But it just doesn’t work that way. Publishing is no longer a scarce resource (as Tim Bishop well put it). The blogger who is telling the story of her final exam or his fraying marriage or her trouble with her two-year old? None of them cares whether Keen reads them, and they certainly don’t expect him to. Their “shared experiences” don’t diminish the opportunities for the kind of “expert journalism” that Keen values. He can keep patronizing the “elite talents.” I will, too — I want to read John Markoff and bloggers.

A year-and-a-half ago I led a discussion at BloggerCon III about blogging and journalism. I started with the assumption that the “War between Bloggers and Journalists” was over; we were are all — however different our delivery mechanisms and business models — in the same boat, searching for information and voices we can trust, trying to inform and entertain and move the people who read our work, whether it is on paper or screen, whether we’re paid or not, whether we’re read by ten or ten million.

At the end of tonight’s event, Mary Hodder, who was sitting in the row in front of me, turned and asked, in a tone of disbelief,
“Did we just sit through another ‘Bloggers vs. Journalists’ panel?” Somehow, we had.

I’d rather have seen the group take up the provocative challenge from Markoff, who started the evening wondering why the same era that has seen the vast increase in online self-expression has also seen such a vast concentration of wealth. “What’s the relation between everyone having a voice in society and the fact that people don’t participate in the society?,” he asked. Could the blogosphere be a gigantic instance of Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”?

Me, I doubt it. But it’s a far more intriguing and sophisticated critique of bloggers than just sniffing that they’re amateurish and badly written and beneath our notice — but, whoops!, they’re also driving our culture to hell in a handbasket.

Update:More from Tim Bishop and Steve Gillmor.

Red alert — content generator overload

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Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal had a funny piece yesterday about the “content mills” that are, uh, repurposing — read, pirating (or, in the case of Wikipedia and the like, reusing what’s free) — other people’s writing, in order to create pages that can be festooned with Google text ads and turned into cash.

There are different shades of gray on this spectrum. Some companies are building honest businesses by paying all comers small sums for articles that they know, in advance, will generate a certain level of Google-word money. Mesothelioma, anyone? (This rare form of asbestos-caused cancer has long been one of the best-paying Google words, because lawyers who represent asbestos victims are willing to pay big for leads.) Other shyster-entrepreneurs are simply paying writers to massage other people’s words just enough to pretend that the work is original, then reposting it. Gomes hooked up with someone from the latter group, and his account of conscientiously trying to deliver actual original copy to a patron who couldn’t care less makes a diverting farce.

Gomes concludes that the real villain here is Google itself: He blames the search engine for inspiring a flood of bogus content.

  In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world’s “information.” Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations.

But Google the search engine is not the culprit; Google the ad machine is. The shysters wouldn’t be cranking out the HTML if it weren’t for AdSense, the Google text ads that publishers can plaster over their pseudocontent. Though AdWords — the keyword-based text ads that appear on Google’s own search results — are subject to a limited amount of gaming and manipulation (that Google is always trying to defeat or limit), the level of crap surrounding AdSense is far greater.

So blame Google — it deserves some. But keep the focus clear: A terrific search engine alone doesn’t make people publish acres of garbage.But put a few dollars in play and some “content providers” will do the most embarrassing things.

What journalists can learn from software developers

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One result of the whole Washington Post comments debacle is that, as Jay Rosen puts it, “We’re going backwards in our ability to have a conversation with the Washington Post.” The Post circles its wagons against the barbarians; its online readers and critics storm off, convinced more than ever that the newspaper “doesn’t get it.”

The word “conversation” is at the heart of the ideals that so many of the brightest lights and most ambitious prophets of blog-era journalism embrace. It began this trajectory in the hands of the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s authors; today it represents the hope for a new kind of post-media world in which a vastly broader spectrum of voices can speak and be heard.

Observers for whom “blog” is synonymous with “political blog” are often skeptical of this vision, because the conversations in the political blogosphere have become so closed-ended, repetitive and intramural. Political blogging in the rigid partisan landscape of 2006 too often resembles the parallel enforcement of party discipline. (Yes, there are many exceptions, but it is sad that they are exceptions.)

But you can find exchanges today that model the possibilities of a post-media conversation — where the actors in a field talk directly to each other, engaging and challenging and correcting each other. One place you can find them is the software world. It certainly has its feuds and its entrenched patterns of provocative trolling (just drop an anti-Macintosh comment and watch the group-mind hive buzz on cue). But, in following this field, I’m amazed, day after day, to see rivals and competitors lace their barbs with friendly banter and honest efforts at persuasion, or to watch critics and their subjects take on the awkward but fruitful back-and-forth that can actually move readers a few notches closer toward the truth.

One little example from this past week: As the Post was shutting down its comments, a tech-industry blogger named Mike Arrington, whose TechCrunch has become a hot water-cooler for the Web 2.0 crowd, was posting a critique of Ning — the roll-your-own Web application factory backed by Marc Andreessen that launched in October. Arrington wrote, in Ning — RIP?: “The reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.”

Diego Doval is a developer for Ning. Yesterday he responded to Arrington (I found the link via Dave Winer). The gist of his post is that Arrington basically got it all wrong — the facts and the spin. But Doval didn’t flame his critic; he just patiently walked through his points and thanked Arrington for inadvertently showing him and his company how much better a job it needs to do to get the word out about its product. Scroll down to the comments on Doval’s retort and the first one is from Arrington — thanking Doval for the great post.

Now just imagine how this sort of conflict would have played out if we were dealing with, say, a liberal blogger who mangled some facts and a conservative critic (or vice versa).

Of course, the emotions engendered by political debate are of a different order from those inspired by software development. But, you know, they’re not that different — there’s pride and ego and anger and passion about the future in both realms. What the software universe lacks (except, perhaps, on some old-line corporate campuses, in certain corners of the open source world, or in the extremes of Mac fandom) is the emerging tribal behavior patterns of the political blogosphere’s ideological camps. It’s a lot easier to have a real conversation when you aren’t looking over your shoulder at a crowd that expects you to toe a particular line.

Noises off

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In turning off comments on a blog that it had recently opened as a channel for dialogue with its readers, the Washington Post today followed the same road that the L.A. Times went down last year when it shut down an experiment with wiki-based editorial reviews. Instead of grappling with the flood of input from their customers, these institutions are throwing up their hands and reasserting the one authority that they are most comfortable with — control of the mike.

The Post had been trying to contain a brewing controversy over a piece by its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, which enraged many readers by stating (incorrectly, as Howell eventually admitted) that Democrats as well as Republicans had received contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (It’s Abramoff’s clients that directed some portion of their cash toward Democrats, though the lion’s share seems to have wound up in Republican pockets.)

Post readers thronged the paper’s blog with complaining comments. Unfortunately, we can’t read those comments now and decide for ourselves whether the Post was right to turn them off — the paper didn’t just block further comments, it effaced the entire body of reader contributions.

CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs reports that the many comments he read were angry or disrespectful and many called for Howell’s head, but they weren’t “hate speech” or explicitly personal attacks. Of course, maybe we never saw those: A “late update” to Post Web editor Jim Brady’s discussion of the decision suggests that Post editors were already pounding the “delete” key like mad, and getting tired.

What’s obvious is that, like the L.A. Times before it, the Post was sadly clueless about how to deal with the situation. If, in 2006, you’re an iconic media institution that’s seeking to give the public a platform to vent its disagreements and complaints, you should plan for a certain volume of problems. You should expect some disrespect. You should state what standards you intend to enforce, and you should have a plan for how you expect to enforce them.

Instead, we have the repeat spectacle of newspapers naively opening their doors — imagining, it seems, that they are going to have a little tea party with their readers — and then, shocked at the volume and the vitriol, slamming the same door shut again.

Ververs tries to lay some of the blame for the Post’s abrupt retreat at the users’ feet: “More than that, the news audience has been terribly served by a few loudmouths incapable of having a rational discussion….Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street.”

I don’t doubt that there were a lot of obnoxious loudmouths posting screeds on the Post blog. But that’s a given, an inevitability. Hosting any kind of forum means taking measures to keep the loudmouths from swamping the rest of the speakers.

I wouldn’t expect newspaper editors to start out as experts in that difficult art. But it’s not too much to expect them to try to learn it — or simply to acknowledge that, if they want to host a dialogue, it’s part of their job.

Storyville

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Earlier this year I ripped out a clip from the Times that I meant to quote. It’s economist Robert Frank, writing about teaching economics by asking students to apply the abstract principles they’re learning to some specific interesting question they’ve personally encountered in daily life.

It’s also a great piece about why we spend so much energy writing stories and telling tales.

  The initiative was inspired by the discovery that there is no better way to master an idea than to write about it. Although the human brain is remarkably flexible, learning theorists now recognize that it is far better able to absorb information in some forms than others. Thus, according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, children “turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection.” He went on, “If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.” Even well into adulthood, we find it easier to process information in narrative form than in more abstract forms like equations and graphs. Most effective of all are narratives that we construct ourselves.

If this is true — and, based on my own experience, I believe it is — then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

Technorati’s tortoise

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I like Technorati, the blog-based search engine. I’ve been a user since the early days, I know people who work there, and I put in some time to add Technorati links to Salon’s pages. I’ve read Dave Sifry‘s honest admissions of the company’s scaling problems and the efforts they’ve made to improve the response speed and up-time of their service. The Technorati site indeed seems to work a lot better these days.

But I’m still finding that, for my blog at least, it’s simply not doing a very timely job, and “real-time search” is what Technorati is supposed to be all about. For instance, right now it’s reporting that I haven’t updated for three days, even while it lists several links to my newer posts. And the RSS feed for the search on links to my blog — which I subscribed to many moons ago — has been broken for ages; the search you do on Technorati proper returns plenty of results, but the feed almost never includes what’s in the site search. Have they given up on RSS? Is Technorati still hobbling? Is there something I should be doing that I’m not? What’s the deal?