Meet Joe Blog 343
theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs.
neato! (Score:5, Funny)
(omgwtfbbq!?fp?)
journalists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Funny)
Re:journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you think bloggers are impartial conveyors of information? If anything, blogs are 1% news items and 99% political commentary.
You just described the three major twenty four hour "news" outlets: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. The only way to get information from them a lot of the time anymore seems to be to put the TV on mute and watch the blurbs scrolling on the bottom of the screen.
The point that the original poster was trying to make was that the media are just a bunch of hyenas looking to further their own careers. If that means slanting stories to the popular opinion - so be it. If that means slanting the stories to incite the TV equivalent of a flamewar - so be it. You touched on Slashdot. Well, /. has ads to sell, so if slanting the stories and having the editors make snide comments keeps people coming back that's what they'll do.
If all of the sources - blogs, journalists, talking heads, etc. are all on the same crappy level, what difference does it make which one you pick? They may all be full of shit, but at least the bloggers are interesting.
you can always get... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, who is Joe Public going to trust the most, a fully professional New York Times employed scribe, or "Zergrush_7" ranting on his Livejournal.
Re:journalists (Score:5, Funny)
Re:journalists (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, who is Joe Public going to trust the most, a fully professional New York Times employed scribe, or "Zergrush_7" ranting on his Livejournal.
That depends on how often "Zergrush_7" scoops the New York Times. I would err on the side of the professional publication as well, but there're some bloggers out there who might as well be professionals. Matt Drudge comes to mind, though there are probably better examples.
Blogs and Interaction v Authoritative Sources (Score:4, Insightful)
The power of the blog comes from the acknowledgement that blogs are openly biased, unedited sources. This invites more interaction and thought than newspapers which try to pose as authoritative sources.
When you look at the way people behave in life, they really don't imbibe a piece of news until they start discussing it. The human infallabiliy of blogs invites such interaction, while the supposed objectivity of journalists repels open interaction.
Of course, we still need quality authoritative sources that produce just facts. Blogs need to co-evolve with unbiased, dry sources of information such as county records, meeting minutes or other dry sources of information.
Re:journalists (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the public trusts the standard news media, is that, in theory, its been verified. They have editors. It may have a slant (defined as any news I disagree with), but at least they have the premise of fact checking.
Re:journalists (Score:5, Funny)
So I, Joe Slashdot, will trust on the comment by mabu.
Re:journalists (Score:5, Funny)
Re:journalists (Score:4, Interesting)
journalistic credibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you seriously suggesting that bloggers have more journalistic "credibility"? Many (not all) blogs I've read tend to be unabashedly biased rants and take extreme positions- or do nothing more than mindlessly link to other stories.
While a few news outlets have credibility problems, they're far from worthless, and there are tens of thousands of excellent reporters who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of reporting, and actually have degrees in journalism. It is almost sickening to hear you equate them with bloggers, who have so little dedication, 95% of them stop blogging after a month or so.
Just because you watch FOX news and read USA Today doesn't mean journalism is dead, and it certainly doesn't mean that we should be turning to bloggers.
Re:journalistic credibility? (Score:3, Interesting)
O'Reilly? WTF? I'll give you the other two, but O'Reilly? He lies almost as much as Limbaugh.
If you listen to Air America radio (biased towards the left obviously) the Al Franken show is pretty much the arch-nemisis of O'Reilly (in fact Al Franken named it the "O'Franken" factor for a while trying to goad O'Reilly in to a lawsuit or something).
Now of course they are biased - but
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Step one to taking back America: No more than one media outlet owned at a time, and "content producers" (ie, cartels) cannot own news outlets.
Re:journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of what's out there is regurgitated AP and Reuters news. It's good stuff, mostly. But it's also very incomplete, and too easily controlled. You can pay for press releases to be put out on the wire, and aren't even directly flagged as such by the time they're posted by many newspapers and news sites.
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you know of the field of journalism? What do you know about writing, freelancing, working for a news company? What do you know of integrity?
The very fact that Jayson Blair (and others like him) are found, fired, and publicly condemned for unethical journalism is proof that the industry does not tolerate such practices.
But you, the random nobody on someone else's blog site, happen to know the dark and dirty secrets of journalism. You don't need the facts -- you have the truth! All journalists suck because they're biased! Just like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore and Gordon Liddy and Ken Brown and Darl McBride and Al Franken know the truth in spite of the facts. Journalists, despite your bleak and uneducated assessment, are people obsessed with the facts regardless of what the drooling, feebly tutored folk-minds believe based on their faiths and fantasies.
Is your life so boring that you need to invent conspiracy theories to make it more interesting? Why don't you try using your imagination for more active purposes?
-Jem
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that it took so long to find him out shows that the industry's editors believe anything and aren't doing their jobs.
However, we're not talking about people falsifying reports. The inability to use logic and accurately report multiple sides of the story are characteristic of modern journalism (if you've researched multiple sides of the story, you'll almost always find that one of them is horribly misrepresented every time - which side it is varies by the journalist).
Re:journalists (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, it's always worked for me. Did you hear the New York Times is secretly owned by the Church of Scientology, who channels the profits into providing arms and electric back massagers for the Flemish Independence Front? See, that was way more fun than flaming people on slashdot.
Re:journalists (Score:3, Insightful)
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times, has secretly been selling shares of the legendary newspaper to unknown persons believed to be associated with the Church of Scientology. Being
Re:journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
Since I was 8 years old, it's been obvious to me that an "iceberg principle" is at work in all corners of life. What percentage of rapes go unreported? How many reported felonies result in a conviction? If J Blair was caught, how much of this happens that we don't know about?
The scary thing is, the tip of the iceberg is, oh... let's say 10%. And with as many political scandals as there are in any given month, think of how many slipped through! (Assuming that political scandals also obey such a principle).
Re:journalists (Score:3, Insightful)
Bull. Shit.
Facts are the last things journalists care about. They care about deadlines. They care about making their editors happy. They care about their paychecks. As long as those three things are satisfactory, the facts can be included in the story -- if they feel like it.
Every single time I've seen or
Re:journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we're making general statements here, I'd say that his experience as a subject of journalism counts for more than yours does as a reporter.
What he said is absolutely true in my experience. Whenever I've been personally involved with the subject of a news or magazine story -- whether it's an event, a person of note, or a technical topic reported in the lay press -- the "facts" as related by the journalist rarely bear a resemblance to my own experience. (Well, OK, the Antlers American captioned one of my science-fair award photos correctly back in the eighth grade, but that's about it.)
The truth is that reality is boring most of the time, and boring doesn't sell soap. (The other, complementary side of that particular truth is that most journalists don't want to be Edward R. Murrow when they grow up... they want to be Tom Clancy.)
I am a journalist, and there IS no story if the facts are wrong. Anyone who publishes a story they know to be false or even have doubts about is behaving unethically and this sort of practice is not the rule but the exception in the industry.
Sorry, but my experience as both a consumer of, and participant in, journalism is completely contrary to that.
Perhaps you haven't been around long enough to make that call on behalf of your entire industry. I'm afraid that I have been.
Re:journalists (Score:3, Insightful)
Today is no different than yesterday - or yesteryear for that matter. Our perceptions of journalistic integrity is a myth.
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
haha - yeah because the left wing media never does that. Oh wait, there is no left wing media, they are the mainsteam because they're entirely truthful and righteous. They would never do something like plug a left wing attack book disguised as a hard hitting interview *cough* 60 Minutes *cough*
Here is a news flash - the media, be they liberal or conservative, are all corporatist whores. That's why Fox TV shows can be completely sex and scandal driven, while their news side can be so conservative. They do whatever sells.
Just like that fatass Limbaugh - he's an infotainer. He'll probably be on decrying gay marriage a day after he announced his own third divorce. And Michael Moore and the liberals are no different - Mike is out to make a buck. Period. That fatass rides around in SUVs and flies on nice private jets all they time. You are dumb as hell if you take any of those infotainers on either side seriously - they say what their audience wants to hear.
What We're All Missing -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Also blame lazy readers/listeners/viewers who don't actually read enough to distinguish between rubbish and truth. e.g. When Richard Clarke, the gut at the hub of the CSG wheel, says the Whitehouse flubbed the war on terror, are you going to believe him or some hack who says Clarke lacks any credibility because he as an axe to grind?
The right wing media has been taking advantadge of lazy journalists for years. For those of you who don't know, the "right wing media" -- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, 700 Club, Hanity & Colms, Ann Coulter etc -- What they do is come up with terribly biased or completely false stories supporting the conservative agenda (status quo) and of course everybody dismisses the stories because the source is biased media! But lazy copy writers for legit news orgs pick up the stories, don't research them, and run with them! Then they *BECOME* "true".
Also refered to as Factoids by someone in the past, "Factoid: Something repeated often enough it becomes accepted as true."
A trained mind, skilled in critical thinking is harder for propaganda to overcome. This is why it's important to read as much about history as you can, starting with an open mind and questioning the veracity of everything you read. (This included!)
Re:journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yes, and the left-wing media never does any of that! What they say is all 100% God-given truth with no bias, hidden agendas, or outright lies at all!
The beginning of political maturity is realizing that some people you disagree with lie. The middle is realizing that some people you agree with lie too. I'll let you know what the end is when I get there.
Two words: "Jason Blair". (And mind you, that's just one convenient high-profile example, not the sum total of my point.) "Your" "side" has lazy people who like comfortable lies, too, and you're a chump or a useful idiot if you think otherwise. (And if you insist on measuring the positions based on those people, you won't mind that I return the favor, right?)
Correction: JaYson Blair (Score:3, Interesting)
(Never trust anyone who won't 'fess up to mistakes, and weaseling doesn't count. Again, there are people on all sides that are too busy being perfect and standing behind increasingly discredited opinions to be worth listening to. If you haven't changed any of your opinions in the last couple of years, you're neither as sophisticated nor as informed as you think you are.)
Blogs taking down Politicians? (Score:5, Funny)
Now we just need to have a pen based computer for each kid in school. Whoops, that's already happening too.
Blogs revealing the character of small fry (Score:3, Funny)
What's that you say, Rob? Working on your bachelor's degree was the best 12 years of your life?
In the beginning there was USENET and it was good...
Anyone know? (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Signal to noise ratio plan. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good that Blogs will get some kind of ranking.
Categories of blogs would be nice, too, so that we're not overwhelmed by Pop Culture, Sports, Movies, One Micron Deep Political Commentary, Etc. We might even divide these categories into groups, something like comp.os.linux.x and so on:)
Popularity might be a good measure of Blog site after it gets discovered and gets a bunch of hits and links to it.
The problem is that brute force popularity metrics will miss new, emerging Blogs that might have high quality writing, insightful analysis, but only a slowly-growing audience.
The sound of one hand clapping... (Score:5, Insightful)
Friendster, Blogging - get on the shelf next to Geocities (everyone will have a webpage by 1998!).
Re:The sound of one hand clapping... (Score:3, Insightful)
(1) there is no contradiction. when people expose themselves BY EXPLICIT CHOICE is a completely different animal from governments and corporations snooping
(2) blogging is often paid for by the user
(3) wtf does friendster have to do with this?
Re:The sound of one hand clapping... (Score:4, Funny)
Finally, now I know Sid's [userfriendly.org] slashdot ID!
Whaddya mean he's not a real person ??
Blog technical tools are coming along... (Score:3, Insightful)
RubLog [rubyforge.org] - Dave Thomas
bloged [java.net] - James Gosling
Alternate title (Score:5, Funny)
or
Slashdotting CmdrTaco.
Nexus of universe collapsing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nexus of universe collapsing... (Score:4, Funny)
Prime example (Score:5, Insightful)
ugh, BLOG (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ugh, BLOG (Score:5, Funny)
That seems rather cruel. What did the poor swordfish do to deserve the the eye juice of the moron who coined "blog" all over his stately horn?
cmdrtaco.net (Score:4, Funny)
Google cache of main site [64.233.167.104]
Google cache of page on Rob [64.233.167.104]
Re:cmdrtaco.net (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest... (Score:5, Interesting)
... a seperate section on Slashdot for all *blog related articles, to clearly define which articles are about blogs.
So it's easier for people to ignore it.
and as its symbol (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I suggest... (Score:5, Insightful)
This
Re:I suggest... (Score:3, Informative)
If by "weird", you mean "hypocritical and idiotic", then yes, you have.
Personal Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
Will politicians use lawyers to stop these blogs? I know I am very fearful of that.
Bloggers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do people just sit around and read other people's blogs? How do they know which ones to read? If everyone is blogging then it seems like there would be so much useless crap out there that you wouldn't know what to look at. Who would waste time sifting through it all? Doesn't seem very useful to me. Good thoughts would go unnoticed and the sewer would spew forth. There's no focal point.
What am I missing?
Re:Bloggers? (Score:3, Funny)
then again, why the hell are you browisng slashdot?
Re:Bloggers? (Score:5, Funny)
If everyone is blogging then it seems like there would be so much useless crap out there that you wouldn't know what to look at
Um... I don't know how to break this to you, but...
Re:Bloggers? (Score:5, Insightful)
What am I missing?
If you take ten thousand web logs, approximately 9954 of those are exactly what you think they are. The other 46 are made by people who are actually capable of creating something special. Finding real news, writing well, or just being amazingly ridiculous. Those are the ones that become popular.
Re:Bloggers? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are blogs I read regularly, and they are in some ways similar to slashdot. The blog points out things of interest, and sometimes allow comments.
Some interetsting Blogs: Seth Godin's Blog [typepad.com]
Poor and Stupid [poorandstupid.com]
Marginal Revolution [marginalrevolution.com]
EconLog [econlib.org]
Publicity of blog entries (Score:3, Interesting)
So if Joe writes something interesting, then in a few hours Mary and Bob will link to him in their blogs and in the next day you will receive the entry (or just a link to it) via email from Suzy because she saw it linked on Bob's blog and thinks that all her friends just have to read it.
Re:Bloggers? (Score:3, Informative)
My God. I don't understand why this concept is so difficult. You just posted to a blog. At its most basic all that's required is the notion that the posts are chronological.
Blog = Web Log = Chronologically arranged web site = Slashdot.org.
You will find, however, that blogging (as a medium) is particlarly good for certain subjects and they share certain qualities. These are not mandatory to be called a blog, but
Time Unleashed a New Beast (Score:4, Funny)
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased
Thanks Time, you've just encouraged a site with more traffic than most others on the internet to keep being more biased, as opposed to just giving the story. Does michael get to post smart-assed statements after an article twice as long as they used to be. Does CmdrTaco get that feeling he does absolutely no wrong even stronger? Does this site continue to get treated like a small site by the people who run it when it should be treated like the big one it is, all because of your little article?
With the site going on such a downward spiral, do they really need their ego stroked? God damn you Time. God damn you.
Re:Time Unleashed a New Beast (Score:3, Insightful)
They're not.
The biggest bias in modern media, is the fairness bias. In essense, they take all claims, regardless of any sort of factual truth to them, as being equally valid. That's the bias that these blogs tend to throw right out. And by doing so, they often times come up with analysis that is way above what mainstream pundits are doing.
Quote from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quote from the article (Score:3, Interesting)
The FCC used to be one of the major forces behind (reasonably) centrist, balanced news printing and broadcasting. This was accomplished by means of limiting ownership (preventing the sort of mega-and-vertical consolidation we see today) and requiring that opposing viewpoints be heard (on controversional issues, not factual matters as some people mistakenly believe).
However, due to congressional (primarily large
Re:Quote from the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Constructive criticism should be informed by context.
The soviet union was a totalitarian state with no concept of freedom of the press - Pravda was an organ of state propaganda.
The U.S. is a democratic republic with a legislated tradition of freedom of the press.
Therefore, comparisons between the FCC-constrained media outlets and the USSR's Pravda are strained, at best.
Please try again.
Re:Quote from the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Hannity and Colmes is a *JOKE*. They have a strong overriding conservative, and a timid, meek, vacuous "liberal" who doesnm't challenge any of the outrageous bullshit Hannity says. Read the chapter on them in this book [amazon.com] if you'd like some terrible details, and I mean terrible.
Re:Quote from the article (Score:3, Insightful)
It's disgraceful that anybody thinks *that* is what liberal pe
The Great Blog Myth (Score:4, Interesting)
The great blog myth exposed: There are more people contributing to blogs than actually
Care
or
Can do anyting about it
What it all boils down to is like giving the AM radio dial a spin, through all those talk shows. Lotsa blather, all given with about the same amount of passion and nothing much coming of it all.
Just go out and ride yer bike, you'll get more done.
Convergence of Blogging Sites (Score:5, Interesting)
What all these sites are nibbling around the edges of, is that people want to communicate more effectively. In the last 20 years we've seen two major advancements in communication: the web-based message board (like slashdot), and instant messenger. More recently some social networking sites have come close, but none have succeeded in that perfect combination of being able to easily share your thoughts, words, and photos with everyone you care about (and everyone they care about).
The only site I've seen that even comes close is called Multiply [multiply.com], and even that needs some work before it's truly powerful (I'd like to see more integration with existing communication tools, for instance).
The next few years are going to bring some dramatic change to the way we communicate -- that's for sure. Wonder which direction we'll be taken; let's just hope it's not an "embrace and extend" strategy by Microsoft!
Is blogging all that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
/.ed Taco? (Score:4, Funny)
(And now Taco is going to go smack michael upside the head for posting this story. Gotta love it.)
traditional media (Score:4, Funny)
Well, then they have one of the three in common with traditional media, and it isn't being either fast or funny.
Japanese I-Novel (Score:3, Interesting)
What I recently discovered was that this form of autobiographical 'drivel' is by no means a new form of literary expression.
Taken from Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity [psu.edu]So yeah, the weblog is really nothing new, just a much easier form of distribution.
blogs not all they're cracked up to be (Score:5, Insightful)
One heartening trend is that big media is now adding blogs to their websites (and are presumably paying these writers to blog). It would be nice if employers could recognize the value of blogging so that blogging wouldn't have to be done so surreptitiously.
The biggest worry I have is that the Time's and New York Times will start casting off full time journalists and switch to the slashdot/ALD format that basically poaches off the content from other publications.
To repeat: bloggers do good important work. But at some point writers need resources and infrastructure and collaborators (and a paycheck) to do a good job consistently.
Some guy in his skivvies? Rupert Murdoch? Bill C? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I don't think this is quite true. It's not the case that an isolated blog is capable of single-handedly taking down an administration. They can maybe be a spark, or at most kindling, for that fire. It still has to get into "legit" big media right now in order to do someone in.
Blogs are the sort of "echo chamber" that right wing radio has been -- they try to punch a story up, and media organizations catch onto some stuff. The blogs alone wouldn't do it though.
A classic example is the Trent Lott thing. For days after he made his comments about how we'd have been so much better off electing Strom Thurmond back when he was a segregationist, the mainstream media ignored it. A bunch of incredulous blog writers wrote harangues about how people were ignoring it, and eventually it did catch on with the big news sources.
The papers vetted the Lott story, made sure the details of the story hung together, in a way I wouldn't trust any Blog to do. Not that papers are pure truth or anything, but a Blogger can claim anything without answering to the editors and the owner and the public at all. At least with a news source you know they have something to lose if they're wrong.
This is a sort of creative tension, though, that we haven't had. That's completely true. Some guy in his skivvies is helping to set the news agenda, and that can't be all that bad.
How to handle bias ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this the dream of the Internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that this is an example of what people are talking about when they start to wax poetic about the power of "what the Internet could be".
We live in a world where the land, money, and power are becoming more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The evening news only reports on stories and opinions that have pre-approved by corporate-mentality politically-correct editors, who only hire corporate mentality politically-correct writers and reporters in the first place.
Part of the reason behind the Internet's popularity and open-source fanaticism is the fact that it puts small amounts of power back in the hands of individuals. People can distribute thoughts, information, and opinions to millions of people, unstoppably, without the possibility of censorship, with virtually no cost.
The general absence of publishers and editors means an absence of filters. It may allow amateurish writing to make it to your browser, but it also allows you to read the views that the New York Times won't print merely because it's against the owners' political views or economic interest.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to put on my tin-foil hat.
Re:Isn't this the dream of the Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't we just say "it's a bit difficult to find intelligent content on the web"? Maybe I have you wrong, but it seems like you're trying to say that right-wingers are inherently stupid, while intelligence on the left wing is merely "hard to find", as though it's all ove
We can't take down Washington politicians (Score:5, Funny)
But I bet we can finish off that stuck-up Alicia Watkins who thinks she's all that because Brad who sits behind that chinese kid in chemistry bought her that tacky bracelet from Zales. Anyway I heard from Jennifers sister who works at the DMV that she heard from her friend Christine that the real reason Alicia missed the class trip to Fun Mountain was because she has herpes. I SWEAR TO GOD I am not making this up LOL.
Anyway Brad can't you see that I'm the one who really loves you? Doesn't that mix tape I left in your locker mean anything to you?
Similar to Reality TV (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you, unlike reality shows, the blogs are not controlled (yet?) by big production corporations and blog's primary goal isn't to make money, so at least there could be a certain sense of 'integrity' in blogs that's painfully lacking in reality shows.
TechnoAntiBlogDystopia (Score:5, Interesting)
I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this [kuro5hin.org] and this [indstate.edu]), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."
Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM .NET blah blah blah ... Webmonkey stuff.
Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!
My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.
And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.
Just had to get that off my chest.
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia (Score:3, Insightful)
Done venting? Good. Now, get over it.
All that "CSS this, or XML that," RPC, SOAP, etc., is writing. It's not creative writing, granted; but technical writing has just as much of a place on the internet as yet another LOTR slash-fic, insightful political commentary, or anything in-between. The web is just another medium. What writers choose to write is their business; and what you choose to read is yours. But don't try to pretend that you, or your chosen style of writing, has any sort of exclusive ri
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying "ban things I find boring from the Internet." Otherwise all my own pap would be banned, because it is boring as hell, including the post in question.
I'm saying what you're saying. This is an Internet for all of us. I am not a second class citizen because I write something silly about cheese and you write something boring abou
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think it's exactly unexpected.
If you go to a forum on a particular topic, the people there will tend to be, y'know, interested in that topic, and probably there's a general feeling that that topic is more interesting than other topics.
Go to a dog-breedin
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia (Score:3, Informative)
And boy, did you ever...
It was great invective, too bad there wasn't an ounce of truth in it. I started on the Internet as an undergrad at University of Michigan, when it was mostly UM-Merit and connected only to other universities. In those days, the VAX had BBS system, quite crude. Later, I had an account of GEnie, General Electric's version of Compuserve. And I started pretty early on Usenet. Every one of those forums had much more "lite" talk than tech talk.
Al
Time magazine and blogs (Score:5, Informative)
Sometime in early 2003 a journalist goes to to northern Iraq ("Iraqi Kurdistan") working for Time. He doesn't seem to get anything published. He asks for and apparently receives permission from his editors to leave things on his blog [serendipit-e.com], which he then sets up and starts contributing to. Somebody in the mainstream press discovers it (Boston Globe?), thinks it's interesting and reports on it, and the guys at Time say 'holy shit, quit posting'.
This seems a very different situation than Time would have us believe from the Andrew Sullivan quote in the piece:"Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating." Unless, I guess, your boss tells you to lay off entirely.
I also wonder why they might publish such a 'little guys push big media' article without examining _at all_ what media giants do to control that area, particularly in light of the above.
I think the Time article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to get a daily paper, subscribe to several news magazines and watch the nightly news, well, nightly.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form. I know this by talking to non-internet news junkies. They'll start by saying "Did you hear about Bush falling off his bike..." and I'll interrupt to tell them more than they already know on the subject. Print media won't die next week, but the Internet has done much more to hurt print media than television ever did. There really is very little reason for printed publications these days other than those people who still don't use the Internet regularly, and I suspect the ratios will eventually put many of the print -only publication out of business unless they adapt to the Internet.
Getting the story first will still be important for news publications, including TV based ones. But the story they will drive to get first will be the one that breaks on the Net, while they will strive to offer more in-depth coverage than their competitors for the print edition (while it exists).
More importantly, blogging "commoditizes" opinion. Who needs Andy Rooney when there are thousands of bloggers our there that are just as funny, and in many cases more insightful too? News anchor people might eventually learn that we are not interested in the "spin" they put on stories. When you can read entire transcripts of hearing, do string searches, or even view almost all of the world in action Dan Rather and the like can't afford to spin so much or they lose their credibility (well they already have for me at least). C-SPAN started this trend, and watching our government in action taught me how bad the reporting really was. Getting news on the Net has multipled that affect many times over and I think that as a new Net savvy generation takes over there will be fewer and fewer "media giants" who can manipulate the news for their own agenda.
Getting there will be good. The ride will be bumpy though.
Re:I think the Time article misses the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. I still get a dead tree paper because it's the best way for me to get local news. The local TV news only reports on a few top stories and the paper's web site doesn't include everything from the print version. If I want to know exactly what's going on in my county, city, and neighborhood, from what the governor's up to down to who bought the house for sale down the stree
Could be a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine that while a majority of blogs are from angsty self important whiners it's when significant events happen that it's interesting to go back and read people's take on it. I don't know about anyone else but I've often clicked on the Hall of Fame [slashdot.org] section and read comments from some of the most replied to stories. It's fascinating (well to some) to see what people thought and said during significant events. Assuming that many blogs will still be around thanks to sites like The Internet Archive [archive.org] it could be a valuable reference and research tool for future generations. And then again maybe only the bad blogs will survive. The ones that proclaim Lemmy is god and George W. is teh suck.
Problem: Newspapers need to discover the hyperlink (Score:5, Insightful)
My blog exists for one simple reason: websites don't hyperlink.
I started it two years ago because rense.com [rense.com] had interesting stories, about half of which are verifiable (i.e. about 80% of the non-UFO stories). The problem is it took quite a bit of time for me to research Rense's stories to figure out which ones were true. And to not let that go to waste, I started dumping my results into a blog -- all with hyperlinks to either mainstream news sites or to "original" web documents from government, scholastic, or non-profit organization websites.
In the meantime, providing such links became de rigueur for the myriad of blogs that have popped up over the past two years -- in order to provide credibility. The result is that Rense.com now provides hyperlinks a lot more frequently now due to the new competition.
Rense.com has changed its ways, but newspaper sites still have not yet clued into the mystery of Tim Berners-Lee. Newspaper websites currently just duplicate the newsprint onto the computer screen. They refer to pending legislation without linking to the legislation. They refer to charters, press releases, products, budgets, etc. without linking to them. Or, sure, some have some newspapaper site have software that automatically goes through and creates links for popular keywords such as company names and people's names, but that's about it. Blogs, such as mine, provide deep links directly to the crucial material at hand, so that readers can assess the original material for themselves.
Sites like wired.com and salon.com are a bit more with it. Sites run by "Old Print" are going to have to adapt or die.
When we start seeing mainstream popular news sites with deep links to relevant material -- i.e. when newspapers embrace the web -- then maybe I can retire my website.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Arrogant media (Score:3)
FAST:
If I want yesterday's news, I'll read a paper. If you read a blog, it's often the news that appeared in yesterday's newspaper.
As for the time I spend reading
FUNNY:
Imagine a beowulf cluster in russia... well, ok, sometimes they're funny. Sure as hell is funnier than all the idiotic talking heads and pseudo-intellectual writings of Time. So I'll concede blogs as funnier than mainstream media.
TOTALLY BIASED:
Russ Kick is biased if he shows photos of coffins but mainstream media's silence is a sign of impartiality? Pot, meet kettle
So the author gets a 1/3 in the byline. Some of the arguments in the article are shoddy too, but perhaps the most surreal thing was reading that "the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think." Is that condescension masquerading as humility?
Avert your eyes, Citizen!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is anyone here surprised?
This article is from exactly the same mindset that Microsoft displays when they tell us that Windows is cheaper and better than Linux.
Fact is, many in the media realize they have a serious trust [instapundit.com] problem, but things will get much worse before they get better.
Blogs are a huge potential threat to the media establishment, and the best ones provide information which BigMedia wishes to see suppressed, such as the UN Oil for Dictators program known as UNSCAM [instapundit.com]
There will be lots of loud and shrill posts in this thread reminding YOU, Citizen, that blogs are bad for you, boring, and will make your palms hairy.
Certainly, if you agree that your betters at BigMedia are best qualified to tell you what to think about, carry on as you are.
I mean, BigMedia has YOUR best interests in mind right? Right? It's not as if they are trying to sell you something.
Your master's voice says: (Score:4, Informative)
Blogs are definitely impacting society... (Score:3, Interesting)
So yes, clearly blogs are helping a bunch of retards spread an urban legend around to the point where letters are written to Congress, all because bloggers can't be bothered to check a few facts.
As an era, this is like a return to the 1800s (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another one bites the dust (Score:3, Funny)
quick! everyone click reload on slashdot right.... NOW!
Re:Golden age... (Score:3, Insightful)
A good way to invest is to look at the cover of Time magazine, and do the opposite. Time touting record low interest rates? Short bonds. Time lamenting a bear market? Buy! Buy! Buy!