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Friday, September 28, 2001
What's right with this picture? 
| | Just getting off on Bad Publicity. My fave: Jerry Lewis. "Believe it or not, this picture was taken in France, thereby completing the cliché," the caption notes. |
From the front, wherever it is
| | Sam Sloan was, up until some point before September 11, the most prolific and hard-to-pidgeonhole source on the subject of Afghanistan (also chess, tennis, kidnapping, Thomas Jefferson and other sometimes related subjects). His medium is Ishipress, and it is back on the Web. |
I see what he means
| | USS Clueless explains why here. |
Not me, the other guy
| | We're taking Op-Ed to a whole new level here. |
The alternative to the alternative
| | My friend Steve, a deeply peace-loving guy who disagrees with my pacifist position on this war we don't seem to be having yet (he thinks it kinda doesn't help), sent along a link to a terrific piece by Nannerl O. Keohane that ran in the narrowly circulated Duke University News. A sample: |
| | I am sadly convinced that if we refrain from ANY use of force, the inevitable consequence will be more and more terrorist attacks on our nation and around the world. I have not yet heard a strategy for how peaceful responses might render future attacks of this sort unlikely; I look forward to hearing this part of the argument articulated more fully in the coming days. |
Beyond the grave
| | Susan, whose blog is the fortuitously named 2020 Hindsight, has an amazing collection of links to sites celebrating or observing the all-too-real world site of the late World Trade Center. It's awful to realize that the beautiful before panorama here is taken, literally, from what we now call Ground Zero. It lies under fifteen stories of rubble containing the buried remains of more than 6500 people. |
Frontiers of distraction
| | I was reading Deborah's long, funny and (as usual) excellent piece a couple minutes ago, and ran across the word "launchpad." But I thought what I read was "lunchpad," and laughed. Then I thought... Lunchpad. Is that taken? |
| | So I typed "www.lunchpad.com" in the location bar of the browser, hit Return and discovered that yes, there is a Luncpad.com. It has almost no content (or even a point to make), but I did get a kick of of the Really Deep Philosophical Insights page. |
Amateur rules
| | By lowering the threshold for participation, the Web has not only brought companies and customers together, but amateurs and professionals as well. We call authoritative customers "connoisseurs." But we lack a word for authoritative amateurs. |
| | This problem became apparent to me during Wednesday's panel at Seybold (which Scoble technographed live on a blog). There was lots of talk about bloggers vs. what Dave calls BigPubs, especially the New York Times. (Why couldn't the Times be fast as a blog? Why couldn't blogs be as ponderous as the Times? Why weren't the answers totally fucking obvious?) |
| | It's only natural to look at all this in competitive terms, but what actually worked for readers was AND logic, not OR. A few years ago most of us got most of our news from a few major media. If we had a problem with The System, we wrote letters to editors or made our self irritants in some other way. Now we blog and voila! — we're part of the solution. Or of the new system Dan Gillmor calls Journalism 3.0. We all help solve the same problems in our own personal ways. The whole becomes more than the sum of the parts. (That there are a shitload of parts is another problem we'll work together to solve — although if Dr. Weinberger is right, unmanageability is more solution than problem.) The BigPubs that contribute and adapt to J3 (as does the San Jose Mercury-News) will make the most of it — and so will the readers. |
| | On the same panel we also talked about the "role of amateurs," a subject Dave visits on his blog this morning. I agree with what he says, but I think there's a nomenclature problem, because so many of us aren't amateurs. Dave's byline has been in many BigPubs and on many BigPub sites. So has mine. Dan and Deborah write for BigPubs full-time. Glenn freelances for lots of them. J.D. bridges academic journalism as well. Dean, Ev and Craig are all amateurs (well, some have professional creds) performing as (not just "like") professionals. Susan is a book author and lecturer. I'm a professional journalist who has been at it for more than thirty years; but most of that time I freelanced as a writer while my day job was doing something else. I don't get paid to blog, but some of us do. It's so hard to tell who "really" does what that it's hardly worth bothering. |
| | The French gave us connoisseur, amateur and entrepreneur. So tell us, you Francophones out there, what's French word for authoritative amateur? Or what do you call a person whose interest and work fits them in the space between professional and amateur in the same way as, say, connoisseur fits between customer and vendor? |
| | [Later... one Francophone says the closest translation he can think of is "amateur éclairé," or "enlightened amateur." To the average reader of English the de-accented French would probably come off as "bad pastry."] |
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