In his reaction to fellow blogger Billmon's assertion (originally published in the L.A. Times) that the blog world is selling out, Atrios gives his take on the history of blogging, along with a little advice on writing a well-read blog. I wouldn’t worry about the commercialization of a few blogs. Commercial blogs represent a small fraction of what’s out there. And I don’t even think that all commercial bloggers are shills for The Man. Besides, there are many more blogs out there that contribute to our collective knowledge and make blogging worthwhile. You get to see others’ points of view and may pick up some new tidbits of information that can help strengthen your own opinions or make you realize that your opinions are ill-founded. Even if a blog doesn’t have any readers, the act of writing (reacting to events and things read, thinking about those reactions, and organizing thoughts into a logical argument) helps the blogger become a more thoughtful, confident, articulate person. [Link][comments?][Karma: 4 ( + / - )]
Tom Tomorrow has a funnier take on the power bloggers had (for good or bad) on the press during CBS's trip up. [Link][comments?][Karma: 12 ( + / - )]
Joanne Jacobs at sfgate.com explains here how bloggers helped discredit CBS's story about the George W. Bush Air National Guard memos. [Link][comments?][Karma: 15 ( + / - )]
Found this site via Slashdot: the I Found Some of Your Life blog. The blogger found a memory card with a year’s worth of someone’s digital pictures in a New York City taxicab. The blogger tries to reconstruct who the owner is by posting one picture a day and writing up a little narrative based on what’s in the pictures. [Link][2 comments][Karma: 17 ( + / - )]
As detailed in this NY Times article, IBM is releasing some of its speech recognition software to the open source community. IBM says that they're doing this to speed up the development process. Voice recognition is becoming the next big thing - letting it loose will hopefully create a more innovative product in addition to a quickly developed one. At the end of the article, the usual Microsoft FUD against IBM and, I infer, open source. Pish-posh, I say! [Link][comments?][Karma: 7 ( + / - )]
Red Herring has an interview with Joyce Park, who was recently fired from Friendster for blogging. [Link][comments?][Karma: 9 ( + / - )]
Parents have replaced their paper baby books and created blogs about their babies, as discussed in this article in the Arizona Republic online. Not only family and friends log in, but parents from all over the world join in on the conversation to share stories and advice. [Link][comments?][Karma: 14 ( + / - )]
Blogs are great democratic tool to use to discuss information - one blogger posts an observation, her readers, which could number in the thousands, see it, comment on it, and blog it themselves or talk about it off line. Which is important because today's traditional media is overrun with a small amount of people controlling most of the access to it. Republicans use it quite effectively to spread their messages through multiple news outlets like Rush Limbaugh and Fox news. Traditional media is one-way and the audience cannot question the messenger. That's what journalists are for. If journalists don't question the messenger and verify his claims, then the message gets transmitted without filter to the audience. I understand that the media is afraid of being biased, but isn't it biased to allow claims and accusations to be broadcast unverified? Why have journalists in the first place? Why not just rebroadcast the press secretary's daily briefing over and over? The audience needs a way to fact check and analyze what people say. Blogs empower the audience to do this by either providing a direct link to the author or a means to publish their own analysis cheaply and easily. [Link][comments?][Karma: 16 ( + / - )]
Salon's Mark Follman reviews bloggers' coverage of the RNC convention. Many criticized the DNC bloggers for not reporting enough serious, newsworthy items and it looks like the RNC bloggers are also realizing that reporting off-the-cuff yet in-depth isn't all that easy. While I appreciate the bloggers being there and attempting to cover the convention from a non-traditional point of view, I think it's clear that really worthwhile analysis can only be attained when the writer has time to sit and mull things over. Otherwise, the blog becomes more of a chat room. |
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