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| Friday, October 28, 2005 |
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How can one not love... 
Attention podcasters
| | It's officially my last day at the BBC today, but with the permission of my outgoing boss Mr Daniel Hill I'm going to make the very best use of it by talking about a project that we've been working on for the last few weeks. I consider it one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so. |
Read on
| | It concerns hurricanes, and how they've beat the crap out of everything in the Caribbean and adjacent lands. Including Cozumel and other places, which Wilma trashed not long after we vistited them. Here's one of the reports that are starting to finally come in. |
Or at least I'm free to be
| | Seems I'm a socially permissive economic conservative. |
I'll drink to that
The Blogosmear
| | PR folks get at least as much flack (or flak) as they give. But the good ones are on the same side as their markets: journalists and the public. |
| | Back in August, I got a call from a couple PR people I know, warning me that Dan Lyons of Forbes wanted to speak to me. They weren't sure what he was after, but they were sure it was hostile to blogging, and possibly to me personally. I barely knew Dan Lyons, but I'm always ready to talk to press people, being one myself. |
| | I spoke to Dan a couple times (as I recall... may have been once, may have been more than twice... phone tag was involved). It was a friendly and informative conversation, as I recall, mostly about potential conflicts of interest and the need to disclose them. |
| | The gist of Lyons' soon-to-be maligned story is that blogs are ³the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.² |
| | If that's not bad enough they also squarely put the blame here on Google and Yahoo as our "potent allies." It's so ridiculous that two companies that have done so much to democratize media are being chastised for it. |
| | Then he addresses Forbes in the second person: |
| | Forbes, I am very disappointed that you chose to take such an unbalanced POV when BusinessWeek and Fortune told us both sides of the story. With all respect to Lyons and the magazine's editors, bloggers are not Corporate America's Boogeyman. They can be a company's greatest allies and evangelists if AND only IF we take the time to take them seriously and engage them in dialogue. Instead of telling us about both opportunities and threats, you paint the blogosphere as the Wicked Witch of the West. With a a few hours of reading excerpts of the forthcoming book on business blogging, Naked Conversations, you would have seen both sides of the story. |
| | The piece is actually about unsubstantiated attack and libel, and conditions that allow attackers to enjoy the protection of relative anonymity and obscurity. Lyons portrays the blogosphere as a virtual Fallujah: a lawless haven for cyberterrorists: |
| | Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat. |
| | He has a case. And some useful intelligence for the rest of us, too. For example: |
| | "Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high," says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy." |
| | Until now, I didn't know exactly what Blogpulse was about. Now I do. It's the consumer-facing side of an outsourced corporate CIA. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. In fact, I think it's a good business to be in. (I'd just like somebody to sell the same services to individual bloggers. Blogpulse gives some away, but it would be nice to have the chance to pay for more.) |
| | The problem I have with Lyons' piece is bad synecdoche, the latter word meaning a part representing the whole. "Attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere," Lyons writes, otherwise ignoring or discrediting the non-sliver blogging constituency throughout his report. For example, these two paragraphs... |
| | Even mighty Microsoft, for all its billions, dares not defy the blogosphere. In April gay bloggers attacked Microsoft over its failure to support a gay-rights bill in Washington State (the company is based near Seattle). "Dear Microsoft, You messed with the wrong faggots," wrote John Aravosis, publisher of AmericaBlog, which threatened to oppose Microsoft's plans for a big campus expansion unless the company caved in. Microsoft reversed itself two weeks later, saying it supports gay-rights legislation after all. It says pressure from its own employees, not from bloggers, caused the change of heart. |
| | Microsoft's p.r. people have added blog-monitoring to their list of duties. The company also fields its own blog posse. Some 2,000 Microsofties publish individual blogs, adding a Microsoft voice to the town square. The company also treats some bloggers like bona fide journalists, giving Gizmodo.com and Engadget.com interviews with BillGates. |
| | ... are followed by this one: |
| | But if blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair. Many repeat things without bothering to check on whether they are true, a penchant political operatives have been quick to exploit. "Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won't print. So they'll give those stories to the blogs," says Christian Grantham, a Democratic consultant in Washington who also blogs. He cites the phony John Kerry/secret girlfriend story spread by bloggers in the 2004 primaries. The story was bogus, but no blogger got fired for printing the lie. "It's not like journalism, where your reputation is ruined if you get something wrong. In the blogosphere people just move on. It's scurrilous," Grantham says. |
| | There's lots more in the report about "the blog mob" and "the blog hordes," or just "the bloggers." Hence one sliver becomes a damning cover headline smearing all of blogging in 90-point type. |
| | Google and other carriers shut down purveyors of child porn, spam and viruses, and they help police track down offenders.So why don't they delete material that defames individuals? Why don't they help victims identify their attackers? Because they are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which frees a neutral carrier of Internet content from any liability for anything said online. |
| | "Blogging is still in its infancy. Imposing regulations would create a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, until recently a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends anonymous attackers. The anonymous assault has a long tradition in American political discourse, recognized by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission in 1995 and in a recent decision by the Delaware Supreme Court refusing to force an Internet service provider to disclose who called a small-town politician inept. |
| | But even the Constitution doesn't give a citizen the right to unjustly call his neighbor a child molester. Google and the like argue they bear no more responsibility for content than a phone company does for slander over its wires. But Google's blog business looks less like a phone company and more like a mix of reality TV and an online magazine. Bloggers provide the fare, and Google maintains it for them free of charge, sometimes selling ads. |
| | The concluding story, about a libel victim's atttempts to bring his attacker to justice, makes Dan's case for legislative relief against Bad Bloggers. Here's the last paragraph of the report: |
| | Halpern has had less luck getting anyone inCongress to listen to his plaint. He says that may change if a few politicians get a taste of what he has gone through. "Wait until the next election rolls around and these bloggers start smearing people who are up for reelection,"Halpern says. "Maybe then things will start to happen." |
| | Thus sensationalism, which attracts readers and sells magazines, wins a small victory over publisher Steve Forbes' own free-market politics. |
| | I agree with what I hope would be Steve's own position on this thing: it's a problem for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and bloggers and others to solve within the reach of existing laws, in the free and open marketplace — rough as that environment may sometimes be. |
| | Google and Yahoo clearly both have problems staying on top of Bad Behavior in their own (large) private corners of the marketplace. Libel is one problem. Splogs are another. Stories about these blights on journalism and the Web are good to have. We (including the Big Boys) need more of them. |
| | Meanwhile, I'd like to ask Dan — and others who damn all bloggers for the sins of the few — how they'd like to read a report that calls supermarket tabloids "the newspapers" or hate sheets "the magazines." Because that's what happened to bloggers in this piece. |
| | Unrelated... The Forbes website, even for subscribers (which I am.... that's how I got inside the paywall for those excerpts), is slow beyond endurance. I don't know if publishers (Forbes is hardly alone in this regard) think overcomplicating their pages with a zillion promos and javascript out the wazoo actually attracts (much less retains) readers. Do they ever try to open these pages themselves? Good lordy, it's an awful "experience" (as the site designers like to call it). Get over it, guys. |
| | [Later...] More from Mike Sanders, Dan Gillmor, Xeni Jardin, B.L. Ochman, TechDirt, Ed Cone, Glenn Reynolds, Gothamist, Bluto, Ben Poole, Tama Leaver, Rick Sheaves, Sean Coon, Evelyn Rodriguez (on a related topic, but worth reading because it applies) Owen Barder, Robert Scoble, JD Lasica, Nathan Weinberg, blogs4god, La Shawn Barber... |
Worth the price of submission
| | These were not cheap leather pants. They are Donna Karan leather pants. They¹re for men. Brave men, I would think. Perhaps tattooed, pierced men. In fact, I'lbogl go so far as to say you either have to be very tough, very gay, or very famous to wear these pants and get away with it. |
YaWhere?
| | The results are so different that I don't see how anybody can call RSS (or Live Web) search "commoditized". |
Journal journey
| | Somehow, even though it's still Thursday as I write this (out here in what they call the South part of the West Coast), I missed Thursday on the blog here, which is on Greenland time, I think. |
| | Anyway, I've been busy figuring what do do with my new blogging powers at Linux Journal. My first post there is a bit odd-looking next to the rest of the posts there. I need to figure out how to fit the format better (among other things of the technical sort that I'm remarkably slow at understanding, since I'm a lot less technical than many of ya'll might think). |
| | Anyway, it's great to finally have a work-related place where I can post stuff about Linux, open source, free software and related issues I've avoided covering here because this is my non-job blog. |
| | Oh, and to de-confuzz things a bit, IT Garage is for stuff related to vendor-independent and DIY IT. As with Linux Journal, I'm not the only one writing there. Look for improvements (mostly around the UI) over there, too. |
discuss
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