cheese it, the cops!

maybe now drunk cyclist will think again about his life of petty crime.

yo the great adam is blogging up a storm. check it out. i'm learning something every few minutes.

i've been working on the blogroll (all the livelong day) which has been screwed up due to my incompetence with typepad. anyway, if anyone out there who knows what i do is aware of blogs i should roll, let me know. i'm particularly interested in blogs that have some kind of bent political position, that are neither left or right in the conventional senses. that seems sadly rare, though perhaps i haven't landed in the right zone.

just blogrolled ace of spades. reactionary pig. but a hilarious reactionary pig. plus he has the world's coolest logo.

do you know how hard it would be today not to pay taxes? when thoreau didn't want to support the mexican-american war, he simply did not hand over the $6 poll tax to the town collector. now it requires an profound transformation of one's way of life. david gross is doing this because of iraq, and blogging it on "the picket line" . he himself, i should mention, says it's not as hard as it's made out to be. heroes always say that.

great blog debate (crispy)

well i'd repeat that mainstream news organizations are creating news in blog form. with remarkable speed it's changing the actual format of news on the web in mainstream outlets. in a way this is a key moment because the blog is a web-based and web-appropriate form, and rather than merely presenting print content on the web.

then also it has driven mainstream news organizations to cover certain stories in certain ways. that's a major effect, and i suspect will be much more pronounced as time goes on. one model might be open-source software. if you've got thousands of people working on something, you can get better results. wikipedia  is also a good model: it has already far surpassed britannica in content because it has thousands of voluntary contributors.

of course it doesn't work quite that well with blogs maybe, cause you're going to have to wade through worlds of potential crap. but also the blogosphere has directionality, etc, movement toward or away from particular treatments of particular topics.

The great weblog debate part II

as crispin mentioned earlier, i'm on a panel dedicated to blogs' impact on news. i write for the austin american-statesman, and in my admittedly biased position I see virtually no impact on news from blogs.

more than anything, it seems blogs have become watchdogs for the media (and corporate america, for that matter). ask dan rather whether he thinks someone was watching over his shoulder. that doesn't change how i do my job, and it really shouldn't change how any other journalist does, either. hell, after jayson blair i'd like to hope reporters are taking their responsibilities a bit more seriously (though i know the writers that don't remain).

to a lesser degree, i see blogs shaping news by shaping consumer demand. the impact of this has been slight at best. people still go to established brands (e.g. NYTimes) and portals that carry established brands (e.g. Yahoo!) for their dose of news.

other than those two purposes, i see blogs having virtually no impact on mainstream news. i read blogs and consider them as any other source: personal; one-sided; and in need of confirmation and context. but that's the beauty of blogs: that they are personal and instantaneous, and confirmation, context and the other side grow organically in blog-world. that growth is far too early on the evolutionary chain to be taken seriously as news.

i'm certain others disagree. tell me why i'm wrong.

also, check out crispin's intial great weblog debate post and the subsequent comments.

z

the great weblog debate

i'm going to start a conversation on blogs in relation to mainstream media on this page with dan zehr. dan's an old student of mine from  penn state harrisburg and a reporter at the austin american-statesman. he's participating in a panel on blogging on mar 4 and thought maybe an actual blog would be a good place to think about this.

here's a question that's been nibbling at me. virtually every newspaper and magazine site has blogs. in fact, they're obviously trying to shift some of their operations into the blogosphere as they feel for where the money and the readership may eventually be. this seems only responsible, and some of these (the national review corner  springs to mind) are very widely read and pretty damn good. but i personally don't think it's a worthwhile or honest practice, overall. what i like about blogs is precisely the fact that it's someone talking, unedited, in her own voice on her own behalf. to me a blog edited by the washpost editorial staff isn't a blog at all but a simulation. and i think that in the long run what people like about blogs will draw them away from these sites. the national review is one thing. but the "blogs" of the washpost or time magazine or whatver in the long run will be exactly as safe as the publications themselves. they *are* the publications themselves, i.e. not blogs.

gay access

american coprophagia has been doing good work on the jeff gannon/guckert story. i admit that i'm maybe less freaked out than most lefty bloggers: he didn't hardly pretend not be a shill, did he? and ask me if i care whether some idiot has access to the white house press room.  anyway, i do like the "gay escort" angle. and if the question is: how does someone like this get access to the white house?, dude. gay male escorts have blanket access to all conservative institutions and events.

ritter and al-jazeera

michelle malkin, reporterette and others are ridiculing both scott ritter and al-jazeera for his contribution to it. this seems a bit much. i guess that they are pissed off because they were oh so wrong about iraq every which way and scott ritter was right. so anyway, maybe the idea is that reporting things accurately is tantamount to treason. al-jazeera has been more accurate on civilian casualties, american abuse of prisoners, and many other stories than many american news outlets, to say nothing of the official spokesliars of the dod etc. the deeply sad fact is that as a matter of fact, as "treason" is defined by these vicious chumps, the truth is indeed treason.

hey any feedback on design would be appreciated.

camelsback has a nice post on the impressive development of the american police state.

i'm not sure anything has ever rocked so rockingly as farm accident digest . where else can you find the truth about death by sherry enema or police shooting fugitive cows ?

hey if you don't know the lefty blog waveflux , you ought to. in yesterday's outstanding crop of posts was this on the big voter turnout in south vietnam in 1967.

few webprose stylists achieve the excellence displayed by the amazing american cop .

continuing on the right-wing obsession with cbs. they're right and all. but lord it's just a bit hard to care. i think it's been a good twenty years since i actually sat through the cbs evening news. but i guess all these folks watch it religiously. or know someone who does.

hey

i'm not exactly getting killed by hits over here. if anyone out there knows any bloggers, tell them to link me up, dammit. i don't think i've ever gotten a single hit referred from any blog except drunk cyclist . course i've only been doing this a few weeks.

cbs

the right wing of the blogosphere - which seems like most of it (is that true? : if anyone has a good way to tell, i'd like to know) - is completely obsessed by the cbs story.  it's all : i *told* you there was such a thing as the left-wing media. well, true, true. but i gotta say: a few people got fired. it was a bad story, dumb move, forged documents, anti-bush producer. but it's just one of a thousand scandals in journalistic ethics or whatever. get over it and move on to something else. i promise after i kill armstrong williams and anyone who ever agreed with him about anything in my creators column this week, i will move on to something else. christ, you people have a longer attention span than me if you're really going to read hundreds of pages of investigation so you can blog at it sentence by sentence. turn your infinite time and energy to an analysis of the teax code or something.

blogging and freedom

my creators column on blogging and freedom is in the philly inquirer this morning.