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| Monday, February 18, 2002 |
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Kinda self defeating 
Hm.
O Bitchuary
Model H
| | Howard K. Smith died on Friday. He was among the best of a very small breed: network anchors who hold contrarian opinions and fearlessly speak their minds. I'd like to say he'll be missed, but he's been out of circulation for years to no effect. |
Discredit where undue
| | Farhad Manjoo has a piece in Wired News today — Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog — that serves as yet another square peg in the square hole of mainstream Blog Phenomenon coverage. It's about as even-handed as a sucker punch. As with John Dvorak's recent piece, emphasis falls not on the worthwhile creations that might not otherwise grace the world, but on the abundance of dreck. The majority defines the entirety. |
| | But the Net doesn't work that way, and neither do blogs. The Web is an assortment of documents connected by hyperlinks to and from the document we're viewing right now. What we don't care about intrudes remarkably little on what we do care about. If it's a fact that most blogs suck, it is neither a useful nor an interesting one. Unless, of course, you're writing a story about why blogs suck. |
| | It's ironic that Manjoo opened his piece by referring to a thoughtful, positive commentary on National Public Radio by David Weinberger. (Here's the RealAudio link.) Manjoo's take-away: |
| | There's perhaps no better proof that an idea has gained the attention of the mainstream than a mention on National Public Radio. |
| | For blogging, that happened Wednesday -- and NPR's three-minute piece on how weblogging is transforming journalism was just one more sign that blogging has outgrown its underground trendiness. |
| | Note the dismissive adverb "just." What mattered wasn't what David said, nor the fact that he is one of the leading thinkers and writers (not to mention commentators) on the subject. What mattered was that NPR (not David) said anything about blogs. |
| | In a recent New Yorker John Updike reviewed a biography of Sinclair Lewis, comparing it to another from the turn of the Sixties that suffered a bit from "Fifties mandarinism." It made me think about the a dismissive hauteur that has always characterized elites. |
| | And that's what we have here. Journalism as Usual is threatened by the blogging movement because blogging enlarges the circle that defines journalism and redistributes power outside the old center. Suddenly almost anybody with a blog is in a position to know, to inform and to influence. And, in the Southern parlance I miss out here on the Left Coast, to "call bullshit" on errors when they occur. |
| | To Manjoo's credit, he quotes Ev, Dave and others at relative length. But from the way Dave called bullshit on the story, it's clear that the quotes served a dismissive agenda. |
| | But y'know, it's just power to the people. And that's always been scary. |
C'mon, it's not too cold for Prince
| | Want a job? Check "Interactive Producer" here. |
One revolutionary's opinion
| | Eric Norlin: if the crowd is anticipating the revolution, it can't be the revolution. |
Grrrr
| | I have way too much to do this week, at the end of which I hit the road for pretty much the next month. Meanwhile I have to finish fixing what isn't working about the TiBook, which started to suck early last week (the last time I hit the road). |
| | I think I finally have Eudora straighted out. Some email was lost and a lot is scrambled, but I might be able to find most of it with a search, anyway. But if you sent me something I probably have it. Somewhere. |
| | But the real problem, apparently, is Palm Desktop, which is betaware. Eudora is betaware, too, but it's well-behaved. Palm creates two login files (what they used to call startup files, in System 9). One has to do with the desktop. The other has to do with hotsync. Whatever, the machine works fine without them. With them, it fails. Eventually. |
| | So now my whole calendar is on my Handspring Visor, with no backup. And I have no way to sync the Handspring with anything on OS X. (Yes, I know Entourage is supposed to be good, but I'm concerned about ever being able to export mail back out of it once it gets in there — witness Dan's problems.) |
Perspective Day
| | Young girls in the western part of war-torn Afghanistan are on sale for a 100 kilo bag of wheat, reported the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC). The IFRC observers said that war and drought had left people so destitute that girls as young as 10 were being offered as brides for a bag of flour in parts of Heart and Farah provinces. Most of the family had already sold off their livestock and had no seeds for planting. --The News International, Karachi, Pakistan, Feb. 9 |
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