Sept. 25, 2003 / 7:49 PM ET
Clearing the air or muddying the waters? The 2000 presidential election may have been the first Internet election but it couldn’t really be called a Weblog election they way 2004 will certainly be. A common complaint from Gore supporters following the 2000 election is that accusations that he lied became common knowledge through perpetuation by the media, without there being an adequate means to refute the charge, counter the spin, and set the record straight.
Not surprisingly, there is already a defense mounting in the blogosphere against smears in the new campaign.
What will be interesting to see is if blogs will be influential enough to keep mainstream media, and American voters by proxy, from falling for political tricks. Or will the diversity of voices on the Web only further muddy the waters and make it harder to know the unspun truth?
Phone home: When your Weblog makes you famous, don’t forget the little people. (No offense G, that’s just an expression. Plus, I’m kidding.)
From the mailbag:
Name: Jim
Hometown: Dallas
Blog by a U.S. Army soldier in Iraq. He recently was shipped home. The archives are online and are quite gripping. A must read.
New tool in the box: From the man who brought you Instant Gratification comes a new tool called Lumberjack that helps bloggers who don’t run their own servers get traffic information on their blogs.
A guy can dream: Folks who work in a windowless warehouse in a New Jersey industrial park might want to save this link in case anyone asks for suggestions one day.
And now the good news:The suggestion that negative coverage of the situation in Iraq by U.S. media is somehow hurting U.S. efforts there has had the blogosphere abuzz for the past few days. Now, some bloggers who agree with that assertion are trying to organize an effort to spread the good news coming out of Iraq.
Quake and Break: The immediacy of Weblogs is often emphasized and it is arguable that blogs could serve a vital function in breaking news. So when I got a news alert that there was a huge earthquake in Japan I went looking for first hand blog accounts.
I came up empty handed for two reasons that I can think of off the top of my head. First, I don’t read Japanese and I’m not particularly familiar with the Japanese blog community, so beyond search engines, I didn’t know where to look. Second, if you’re in the middle of an 8.0 earthquake with a 7 foot tsunami, blogging is probably not your first priority. I checked out bloggers who’d covered past Japanese earthquakes, but they don’t have anything yet (I feel pretty safe that when Glenn says “not much news” you know there’s not much news).
I wasn’t totally unsuccessful however. Joi Ito is a Japan-based blogger with an interesting lesson about how handy blog comments can be.
From the mailbag:
Name: Mike
Hometown: Poughkeepsie, NY
Senator Edwards is posting to his own Weblog in a section called “From the Campaign Trail.” Check it out.
Note from Will: Hopefully he’ll have something more than his travel itinerary to post in the wake of today’s debate.
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 23, 2003 / 8:12 PM ET
“Just the basics, these kids have nothing”: The online journal of Chief Wiggles is soliciting toys for Iraqi children. Pop over there for some toy tips (no violent toys please) and the address to send them to.
On the map: Chicago bloggers have a new index page that includes maps, not unlike the NYC bloggers map. Paul Goyette has taken the city map a step further with a cool mouseover feature.
Case in point: The Washington Post has a story about frustrated residents in the wake of Hurricane Isabel who still don’t have power and can’t get online. I can’t find the blog of the fellow mentioned in the story, but I did come across Meryl Yourish expressing the perspective well. (Her electricity is back now though.)
Sept. 23, 2003 / 1:21 PM ET
Bee in the bonnet: The ombudsman for the Sacramento Bee explained Sunday that a complaint about an item posted by the celebrated Bee blogger Daniel Weintraub has prompted a new policy for the site, requiring the Weintraub to be edited before posting to the public.
Bloggers, to whom editors are tantamount to censors, are naturally upset. Mickey Kaus has quite a bit to say as well as a round-up of some other reactions. (scroll down to “Free Weintraub!”)
Full disclosure: This blog, like others on MSNBC.com, is itself (gasp!) edited.
Busy bees: By the way, in the post that drew the initial complaint, Weintraub credits blogger Tacitus as the first person to push the Cruz Bustamante MEChA story into mainstream attention. If Davis loses the recall and Swartzenegger beats Bustamante, bloggers may have an argument for adding the California election to the list of major accomplishments that include the downfall of Trent Lott.
Speaking of getting into trouble at work:Dan Gillmor points to a fellow who got fired from Bloomberg because of his blog. No details on the reason yet.
This is what democracy looks like: So far most of the attention blogs have received in connection with politics has been through cranky punditry, or campaign organizing/publicity. What we haven’t seen much of yet is bloggers involving themselves in the political process -but we’re getting closer. Off The Kuff has assembled a list of advice for the embattled Texas Democrats from Texas bloggers. I don’t know if the politicians are listening, but they should. Another example of helping to keep the wheels of democracy turning is a recent post on The Yin Blog bearing a summary of Wesley Clark’s political positions as expressed in an Iowa campaign appearance. Weblogs are helping citizens escape the distracted, sensationalist mainstream coverage to engage politics on their own terms.
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Blogger: A Santa blog. I can’t quite figure if this blog feels like a sales pitch or if it’s just the sales pitch of Christmas itself that I’m feeling. The blog doesn’t appear to be pushing any products.
The other small screen: Something viewers of Sunday night’s Emmy Awards may not have realized was that there was a blogger in the midst of all that pomp. Writer Michael Oates Palmer was part of that West Wing crowd that gathered on the stage when they won the Best Drama award. Lockhart Steele points him out in the crowd.
Blog use #523:Communicating with kidnappers. (?!?!)
Share your thoughts and links.
Sept. 19, 2003 / 6:32 PM ET
Why else I like blogs: An interesting post on Blogcritics about a band touring Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon elicits a response from a backpacking blogger with more stories of a recent trip to Iraq, and blogspotters world-wide are able to vicariously broaden their horizons.
How many bloggers does it take to make a grilled cheese sandwich?Forty two and counting. (via Anil’s links)
I want a Clark blog:General Clark may be officially in the race, but he doesn’t appear to have his own blog (yet?). That’s not to say that you’ll go hungry if you’re in the mood for Clark blogging. You can pretty much take your pick.
Welcome to the party: The Democrats have a party blog now, but when it comes to partisan politics, some may prefer the three-for-one offerings of Watchblog.
Name that blog: Want to be part of history? Elizabeth Spiers is leaving Gawker to work at New York Magazine where her duties will include writing a new Weblog. The blog’s name? She’s still taking suggestions.
Show a little skin: Sick of your the appearance of your plain old brown bag blog? Blogskins can help you dress it up.
A blog calling card: There is technology out there specifically designed to let fellow bloggers know that you are linking to them or commenting about something they’ve posted, but the most common form of inter-blogger communication is still good old e-mail. Kevin Aylward offers some handy advice on how best to bring your blog to the attention of another blogger. His example is in the context of kissing up to Glenn Reynolds, but the advice is sound for communicating with any fellow blogger.
Schoolhouse blog: Though blogging has evolved to the point where it is being taught in formal settings, something that’s nice about the blogging community is bloggers are always willing to help each other learn how to do it better —like the ten things Kate has learned about blogging and the six more things Sean was able to add.
Share your thoughts and links.
Sept. 16, 2003 / 7:38 PM ET
Fun with math:
or
Why I like blogs: I have no problem saying that I rely heavily on Weblog indexes. I think they’re the most efficient way of looking through a lot (and a variety) of blogs at once and getting a feel for what people are linking to. To my delight I found (via Joi Ito) a new index today called BlogPulse. It looks similar to Daypop, with groupings by phrases, topics, people, and top links.
Most of the headlines on the blogpulse for today were ones that I’d already seen listed on other directories, but way down at number 27 is a link to a Calpundit entry. The context provided includes a sentence that always draws me to a blog: “After reading that I went to the U.S. Department of Education and looked around for the budget data....”
The sentence is from a post by Steve Verdon who tries to find the source for numbers in an essay by David Corn of The Nation in which Corn claims to have caught Bush in a lie about education spending.
In a recent speech at an elementary school, President Bush said, “The budget for next year boosts funding for elementary and secondary education to $53.1 billion. That’s a 26-percent increase since I took office.”
Corn criticized, “Bush’s proposed elementary and secondary education budget for next year is $34.9 billion, not $53.1 billion, according to his own Department of Education. It’s his total proposed education budget that is $53.1 billion. More importantly, there is no next-year “boost” in this budget. Elementary and secondary education received $35.8 billion in 2003. Bush’s 2004 budget cuts that back nearly a billion dollars, and the overall education spending in his budget is the same as the 2003 level.”
So the challenge is whether we, as bloggers, can reproduce these numbers to get a better understanding of what’s really the case.
In the post linked to above, Steve gives it a shot, but doesn’t match Bush’s numbers or Corn’s numbers. RJ then offers help in the form of another chart with another set of numbers. Still Steve is not getting Corn’s numbers.
Clearly part of the problem is that there are charts everywhere on the Department of Education site, some totaled, some not, and each one is meant to show something other than what we’re looking for.
I think I found Corn’s numbers here or this link for a spreadsheet.
I found this particular set of numbers in the first set of links on the Overview: Budget History Tables page, which I found in the list of links in the black box on the right on the main Education Budget Overview page.
It shows for elementary and secondary ed:
2003: 33,676,616,000 (budget)
2003: 35,797,897,000 (appropriation)
2004: 34,874,488,000 (budget)
(Numbers on the chart are in thousands so I added the zeros here.)
So we’ve found David Corn’s numbers. Of course, by now we’ve all figured out that the $53.1 billion Bush gave is the total for the whole Department of Education (as mentioned in this press release).
Doing a bit of backwards math, a 26% increase that results in $53.1 billion means Bush started with $42.1 billion, which we find on the chart is roughly the total amount appropriated for the entire Department of Education in 2001 (actually $42,061,403,000).
If you clicked over to the comments on Steve Verdon’s site you saw that passions got hot as the info hunt mixed with interpretations of how the president came to say what he did.
I’m not going to play the game of guessing whether it’s a mistake or a lie — that’s a dead horse that certainly won’t benefit from my beating. I do agree that numbers can be twisted to show just about anything, and this kind of double-checking is both worthwhile and interesting. (It’s also interesting that the transcript of the original speech has apparently remained unedited — at least as of when this was posted. Factual errors are routinely edited out of Bush’s speeches on the White House Web site.)
I can’t think of anywhere else that strangers in the public can research, discuss, and analyze information with each other in this way. It is this kind of research and the spirit that drives it that has put blogs on the media map.
A nice memorial:
From the mailbag:
Name: Tom
Hometown: Bloomington, IN
“I wanted to draw your attention to my blog dedicated to the servicemen who lost their lives in Iraq. It has a complete listing of each one killed and a personal story about most. I have tried to keep the political rhetoric to a minimun.”
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 15, 2003 / 6:43 PM ET
Who’s next? Jane Galt raises the question of whether the new attention on online copyright infringement might turn an eye to the blogging world. Reading through the many comments posted in reply, however, the general consensus appears to be that blogs are relatively safe in their obscurity. Looks like the copyright police have bigger fish to fry.
The mobster is in: I thought this was just a joke -it’s a cartoon after all. I guess I was wrong.
Speaking of cartoons: With blogs offering news reporting as well as punditry, what more could you want in a news source? Sunday funnies of course.
Can’t say he didn’t warn you: William Gibson has remained true to his word and stopped blogging last Friday. I wonder if the chapters in his new book will be time stamped. (via Caoine)
Get a blog: Michael Feldman has some advice for the Dalai Lama. (via Scripting News)
God loves bloggers:Bloggy Barry covers the opening of the Harvey Milk school in New York City last week. (via Dong Resin)
Reader Recommendations:
From the mailbag:
Name: Kissy
Hometown: Warren, RI
This one is really good....
Name: Elizabeth
Hometown: Nashville
Check out Busy Mom Blog!
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 11, 2003 / 6:39 PM ET
I have a non-blog piece on the site today over here.
In the beginning:
Jason Kottke with an interesting bit of Weblog history.
Sell your audience?
This link and the one above are past their expiration date in my notebook, so out they go! I was initially inspired to write something about this post from Mitch Kapor because the idea of selling one’s blog audience seemed novel. Then I realized that’s what advertising is. The post still marks an interesting development in blog evolution though.
Blogging how-to:
Dave Pollard offers handy notes on how to keep a blog. These aren’t requirements, of course, but they will make your blog more readable.
Birthing a star:
When I wrote last week about bloggers looking for the next big thing, I hadn’t considered that blogs would actually produce the next big star.
The big blogroll in the sky:
Is your blog will in order?
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 8, 2003 / 8:17 PM ET
I’m out of the office (meaning, not sitting in front of a computer all day) for most of this week, but I’m going to try to point to some interesting blogs when I can. Here are a few from today:
“The worst storm to hit Bermuda for the last 50 years:” Hurricane Fabian: the story and photos.
You have extra time, right? Via The Morning News, Puzzles Collected at Random and Scrabblog, two game blogs to keep you buys. The latter posts a new set of scrabble letters every day for commenters to compete on finding the word with the highest score.
Why did my wife spend Sunday afternoon screaming at the TV? Oh, football season must have started. Meanwhile, for the folks whose football tastes run in the collegiate vein, there’s Fanblogs.
Don’t bite the tongue that feeds you: Don’t look now, it’s the 27th edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. “What’s that,” you ask?
“A collection of the week’s best posts from the Indian blog world.”
Funny that at one point there was discussion of discontinuing it because of lack of interest and now it’s made the Daypop list (sort of).
Let the music play: Kuro5hin tells you where to find tens of thousands of songs to download legally, and then explains why you should.
To Iraq and back: Former British environment minister, Michael Meacher, is grabbing a lot of linklines with an essay calling the war on terrorism “bogus.”
Without getting entangled in the debate itself, I was impressed to see the efforts of Kriselda at Different Strings, who tried to find the online sources of Meacher’s citations.
Kriselda is no fan of President Bush, but is that why she’s undertaken this task? No:
“As with anything that tends to get into conspiracy theory territory, I like to try and at least verify the information being provided and a sense of the context it was initially presented in, so I figured I should start checking what I could of the references he gave - and since I was going to do all that for myself, I figured I might as well provide some of what I find to you as well.”
This is what Jeff Jarvis is talking about when he says that online content, though not edited in the traditional way, is often “fact-checked to hell and back by its own audience.”
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 5, 2003 / 7:25 PM ET
From the mailbag:
Name: Max
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
I looked around for a while for a blog about books, and I was never able to find one that I really liked, so I created my own. It’s called The Millions. I work at a bookstore, so I spend a lot of time around books. About half of my posts are about all the good stuff that’s out there. I also have created the “Ask a Book Question” feature, where people can write in with questions about books and get an answer from me and my readers. It’s fun! Enjoy.
Will replies and then mumbles to no one in particular: Thanks Max. For some reason I feel like I was just reading about a bookstore blog. Could it have been this one?
Hold still: Via Max’s The Millions, an earthquake blog? Not really, even though it has links and time stamps and is updated frequently. Looking at how often there are earthquakes, it’s a wonder we ever use the expression “solid ground.”
Random recommendation: I’ve been enjoying Good Morning Silicon Valley lately.
Don’t campaign without it:John Edwards gets a blog rolling. I’d rather see him blog about what he’s doing in the Senate to give some real insight and transparency to government. One step at a time I guess. Does anyone have the full candidates’ blogs list?
We the people: Doc provides a nice collection of links exploring how the Internet and online community tools integrate with, improve, and foster democracy.
Looking for the next big thing: Perhaps the greatest legend in the blogosphere is the story of the take-down of then Senate majority leader Trent Lott by the Weblog community. The story, in short, is that the mainstream media gave light treatment to a story that bloggers figured out had deeper roots and longer legs than the mainstream had realized. Credit is generally spread broadly around the blogosphere for keeping the story alive, but it is also widely understood that Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo led the charge.
Since that incident, I try to keep an eye out for the next big blog story. Certainly since then, and even before then, Weblogs highlighted facts and perspectives that had been glossed over or missed by mainstream news media. Coverage of the war in Iraq is pretty much one big example of that. But as far as a single story that came from the blogosphere and blew the top off the TV, we haven’t yet seen a repeat.
There was some debate about whether bloggers deserve credit for bringing about the editorial change at the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, but regardless of where you fall in that argument, it’s clear that the roll of blogs in that case was not the same as with the Lott situation.
This theme came to mind again following a recent post by Mark Kleiman who highlighted a further development in the case of the “outing” of Joseph Wilson’s wife. You may recall that Joseph Wilson is the ambassador who helped fuel the fire over the line in President Bush’s State of the Union speech that pertained to Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger. Toward the end of that story’s life in the public eye, it was suggested that the White House had deliberately revealed that Wilson’s wife is a CIA agent, as a way of punishing Wilson for speaking out against the Bush administration.
That part of the story never quite took off, but here it was being brought back by Kleiman and other bloggers, this time with a link to video (not anymore, but the transcript lives) of Wilson essentially accusing Karl Rove specifically.
Perhaps it was the long Labor Day weekend, but even with video to use and mental image of Rove being “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs,” the mainstream media didn’t pick it up.
A few days later, another story popped up that I thought for sure would make news, but didn’t, and then it was picked up by bloggers, but still didn’t get anywhere. This time it was again Marshall who picked up on it: an early August AP story that Iraq’s WMDs might have been nothing but a big bluff that backfired. It didn’t seem to make many waves then, and even Marshall moved on to other things. Then, almost a month later, an LA Times story with a headline on the same subject rose up the Blogdex rankings. Then Labor Day weekend happened and I haven’t heard anyone mention it.
Still more recently, colleague Jonathan Dube points out that Mickey Kaus indirectly broke the Arnold Swartzenegger “Oui” interview. While that certainly got a lot of attention, the impact of that story isn’t yet clear. Swartzenegger doesn’t appear to have been damaged by it.
Today Dave Winer announced that a famous company may be making a “new and exciting” announcement at an upcoming blogger convention, suggesting the possibility that bloggers will be on the front lines to break some news.
I started writing this entry more than a week ago, and with every day that passes, I find a new item to add that hints at something bloggers are about to push into the mainstream spotlight. There is no question that this is one reason why following blogs is an exciting endeavor. In the spirit of “post ‘em if you got ‘em,” I’m putting up what has been building in my notebook, and we’ll see if there’s anything to follow-up on or if it just disappears into the archives.
What blogs have you spotted?
Sept. 4, 2003 / 7:14 PM ET
Why didn’t I think of that? An idea blog (I lost my note on where I found this. Tip of the hat to the blogosphere.)
Not a lightbulb joke: What do you call more than one blogger?
Retroblog:Eric Alterman called this a blog the other day. I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll go along since that means I can point it out in this space. As a timeline or chronology, it makes for an interesting read to put some aspects of our turbulent times into context. Partisans will no doubt find flaws one way or other, but what struck me was the sheer irony of so many of the events that set the stage for Sept. 11.
You bought it but you don’t own it?A month ago we saw David Galbraith wonder if MP3s could be sold used like used records.
Yesterday, Georgy Hotelling tried to do it and blogged his progress and his reasoning.
Don’t fall behind the times: Folks on the New York City Flashmob notification list recently got news that next week’s mob (#8) will be the last one. Elsewhere in the world, Weblogs are being used to organize flashes of a different kind.
But good humor prevails: Proving Funny Valentine’s point from the other day that nothing in blogs is a secret, Kirchmeier gets caught name calling. D’oh!
Share your thoughts and links.
Sept. 2, 2003 / 6:43 PM ET
Flash blog follow-up:
Several useful replies, better explaining flashblogging, arrived in the mailbag over the weekend.
Excerpts from an e-mail exchange with Funny Valentine of Curitiba, Brazil:
“The purpose is to show up at an specific day at one weblog and post a lot of comments. There’s no specific goal other than have a big “party” at the chosen blog. What determines which blog will be “attacked” is simple: the person whose blog was chosen chooses the next one, and so on. The first Flash Mob was Tuesday, the 26th, at Angela’s blog. The second one will be in my blog, this Sunday the 31st. And the person who came up with this idea is our great friend Matusca, and he chose Angela’s to be the first blog to be the target of the first Flash Blog.”
“One of the “rules” of the Flash Blog is that the person has to reply each and every comment! And the comments are very funny, everyone asks a lot of questions, it’s the best part!”
In answer to my asking if they’d ever bombard someone who didn’t speak Portuguese or who didn’t have any idea about flash blogs:
“There isn’t an effort to pick a blogger who doesn’t know. Actually, as you know, they just did the first flash blog, so I really don’t know how things will work from now on. But I think it would be very hard to keep a secret in the blogs. If you post announcing the flash blog you have no control about who is reading what you wrote, right?”
Will replies: Good point, Funny. Thanks for all of your help.
Name: Colin
Hometown: Brooklyn
“In its infancy, flash blogging seems to be a bit like Christmas caroling, as the Hairy Eyeball notes, and not yet the eerie coordination of total strangers, run by autonomous software agents over wireless networks, envisioned in Bruce Sterling’s story “Maneki Neko” (from A Good Old Fashioned Future).”
Name: Duncan Riley
Hometown: Eaton, Western Australia
“Just a short note on the Flash Blogging in Brazil: I have recently posted an article to my Blog on the subject that may be of interest.”
Will adds: It bears pointing out that the flashbloggers described in the Blog Herald link above are not the same as the Brazilian flash blog activity enjoyed by Funny Valentine, top, so it’s reasonable to guess that lots of different people are coming up with this idea at the same time.
Aug. 27, 2003 / 11:47 PM ET
Flash blogs? Can someone who reads Portuguese explain this to me (in English)? The Babelfish translation isn’t helping much. What I gather is that bloggers in Brazil are following the flash mob model by all showing up at one blog at the same time and posting comments on one entry. If there’s a goal it would appear to be to score high placement on the Toplinks list, but like flash mobs it doesn’t appear to be about any real goal other than to do it.
The Funny Valentine blog translates pretty well with Babelfish, but I still feel like I’m missing the details. What determines the focus of the mob each time?
Maybe it’ll get a mention on the always interesting Blogalization.
Take this blog and shove it: We’ve seen people fired for blogging at work and we’ve seen people fired for what they blog about work and we’ve seen people fired for blogging at all because it conflicts with work interests and we’ve even seen bloggers in flame wars try to get each other fired. But as far as I know, this is the first time someone’s been fired for just reading a blog. (via Kottke)
Court blognographer: While some trials are mired in debates over whether to allow cameras in the courtroom, blogs are proving to be a handy tool for trial reporting. Sarah Stewart from NBC affiliate KFOR in Oklahoma City is filing hourly reports on the trial of Jim Pavatt, accused of killing Oklahoma City advertising executive Rob Andrew. Stewart is writing essentially a trial blog.
Entering post-blog? I found the above item by way of the fine folks at Poynter Online. At the end of the entry they make the final note that, “KFOR isn’t calling this a ‘blog,’ but that’s basically what it is.” In yesterday’s post, below, we saw Cory Doctorow pointing out another example of blogging that isn’t labeled as such: “This is blogging, plain and simple.”
I’m wondering if these are indications that we are entering the post-blog period. It wasn’t long ago that blog proliferation was the story. Any article to mention blogs was usually about blogs, and started with an explanation of what they are and how the name comes from contracting Web and log. But lately we see the word blog tossed around in common use. Blog even made it to the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Now it seems like the format is secondary to what’s being done with it, how it’s being applied. I don’t think this is a sign that the fad is passing, I think it’s a sign of mainstream acceptance.
259 pages and they’re all numbered “1” And speaking of yesterday’s item about TV folks highlighting stories in newspapers, today Ben at Magnetbox shows us ”Today’s Front Pages: 259 front pages of newspapers from 34 countries, updated every day. Fascinating.”
Share your thoughts and links.
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