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Sunday, December 28, 2003
Then blogs are programs? Bloggers are channels? 
| | Last June, Simon Dumenco wrote American Idle, a piece that blamed both blogs and TiVo for second-hand opinion manufacture: |
| | It¹s important to know what you¹re supposed to know—but you don¹t actually have to know it firsthand... |
| | I¹d argue that certain information-delivering technologies‹like TiVo and blogs‹up the ante so dramatically, and so seamlessly, that they create an entirely different sort of interpassive lifestyle, one that¹s, well, hyperpassive. |
| | A home video library, or a physical collection of information of any sort, exists. The pleasure derives from the ownership of objects, but those objects—the piles of unread papers and magazines and books, the stacks of unwatched videotapes—also constantly taunt you, reminding you of their presence. |
| | A machine removes that punishing presence. A blog, for instance, constantly pushes even slightly stale talking points to the margins (or the bottom of the homepage, or the archive). And while in hope-springs-eternal obliviousness you can always think, in the back of your mind, Oh, I¹ll go back and catch up on what I missed or I¹ll go back and read the article that was linked to, chances are it¹s not going to happen because there won¹t be any tangible evidence of your failure to do so. |
| | What¹s more, a machine erases not only physical boundaries (the information object vanishes) but psychological boundaries as well. The point where you begin and where the machine-generated awareness ends begins to blur. (I¹m starting to feel like I really have watched Tina and Clay.) |
| | The blog reader isn¹t thinking, Jim Romenesko is smart about media for me or Elizabeth Spiers is drolly engaged in Manhattanism for me. The reader is thinking, I¹m smart about media and I¹m drolly engaged in Manhattanism. |
| | And I really hate to do this, but I can¹t help but bring up that kid, Jayson what¹s-his-name, at the Times, who sat in his apartment with a laptop and a cell phone, collected all manner of information from disparate sources, and said to himself not only I am knowledgeable but I am a reporter. |
| | For him, firsthand experience was secondary: Life was blog, blog was life. |
| | I wrote this (among other things) in response to that: |
| | Wtf? Let's get this straight: A TiVo is a machine. A blog is a journal. Like comparing apples and noises. |
| | Newsreaders like NewzCrawler and Radio UserLand do TiVo things. Time shifting. Easier, more complete channel and program selection.Season pass for your favorite shows. Record in the background while playing in the foreground. Save a post to your blog instead of to your VCR. |
| | TiVo needs blogspace community tools: add social filtering (recommendations), feedback, and threads of commentary. |
| | In our habitat, the one that lives on the Net, we have NewsCrawler, Radio Userland, NetNewsWire Technorati, Blogdex, Daypop and all those other commercial conveniences (among the most inventive of which are commercial entities)l because they build on an underlying environment that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Hence all the invention and innovation. |
| | The consumer electronics habitat, largely defined by cable, broadcasting and entertainment conglomerates and the regulatory agencies they essentially govern, broook no invention or innovation that doesn't come from inside their own labs, from their own engineers, for their own purposes as suppliers, distributors and facilitators of "content." |
| | The fact that TiVo came out of Silicon Valley rather than Japan doesn't make it any less a creature of its category. Nor does the fact that it clearly threatens the business models (e.g. TV advertising) of many of its fellow market inhabitants. |
| | But Phil's metaphor didn't die. Just two days ago, Suman wrote this in response to Phil's post: |
| | And now I want functions in RSS aggregators to record between dates. Record Jon's Radio from December 22nd till today and cache the referred pages so that I can take it on my laptop and read it offline. Or, I will leave my workstation running during holidays and please record all channels that mention the word "HyperChip". |
| | Well, well, we are getting there. With blog recording, page caching and text filtering at our fingertips, the day is not far when we will finally be able to take long holidays and not worry about what we are missing. |
| | The implication: that blogs are indeed media of some kind, and not just journals. |
| | I've always believed that journals were not inside the media circle. There was something about them that was outside, looking in. That they were exceptional, somehow, to the Great Media Machinery by which stuff is pumped from a few producers to a zillion consumers. That the whole producer/consumer industrial model didn't apply. Or at least applied with a degree of conditionality. Now I wonder. |
| | Gotta think about this some more. Meantime I gotta go make breakfast. |
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