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Meet Joe Blog
theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs.
Kathleen's site seems like it has also been slashdotted. Google cache
I'm not sure how to express why I think it's so odd that Time featured that piece, so let me spit out the background of what's got me thinking about it:
Sometime in early 2003 a journalist goes to to northern Iraq ("Iraqi Kurdistan") working for Time. He doesn't seem to get anything published. He asks for and apparently receives permission from his editors to leave things on his blog, which he then sets up and starts contributing to. Somebody in the mainstream press discovers it (Boston Globe?), thinks it's interesting and reports on it, and the guys at Time say 'holy shit, quit posting'.
This seems a very different situation than Time would have us believe from the Andrew Sullivan quote in the piece:"Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating." Unless, I guess, your boss tells you to lay off entirely.
I also wonder why they might publish such a 'little guys push big media' article without examining _at all_ what media giants do to control that area, particularly in light of the above.
This whole blogging thing reminds me very much of Orson Scott Card's future in "Ender's Game." A subplot of the book follows Ender's siblings, two teenagers who shake up the global political climate by posing as adults named Demosethenes and Locke and posting inflamatory columns on what he called "the 'nets." When I first read it I thought of newsgroups, but with a much wider audience. Now I'm thinking that the blog model fits that 'future' better. (If you haven't read "Ender's Game," shame on you and make haste to Amazon or to your local book store.)
I'm not a blogger, and I don't read any blogs. I don't understand how the blog thing works.
My God. I don't understand why this concept is so difficult. You just posted to a blog. At its most basic all that's required is the notion that the posts are chronological.
Blog = Web Log = Chronologically arranged web site = Slashdot.org.
You will find, however, that blogging (as a medium) is particlarly good for certain subjects and they share certain qualities. These are not mandatory to be called a blog, but they are common. For example, blogs are frequently 1) narrowly focused on a single topic (i.e. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters") or person (i.e. a personal journal). They also often tend to be opinionated and have a strong "voice." Finally, many, but not all allow comments as Slashdot does.
How do they know which ones to read?
And not to be mean spirited, but wow you did it again. Your logic could easily (and frequently is) used on web sites, but I'm going to presume you've found good web sites.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Fake "news" videos produced by the government using actors instead. Much more credible then "real" people actually reporting stuff. Nope, the US government doesn't "embed" propoganda, it's all those other furrin countries that have funny sounding names who are slap fulla "tarists" that do that.
You do not need to be aware of any information sources not sanctioned by Big Media
Just had to get that off my chest.
And boy, did you ever...
It was great invective, too bad there wasn't an ounce of truth in it. I started on the Internet as an undergrad at University of Michigan, when it was mostly UM-Merit and connected only to other universities. In those days, the VAX had BBS system, quite crude. Later, I had an account of GEnie, General Electric's version of Compuserve. And I started pretty early on Usenet. Every one of those forums had much more "lite" talk than tech talk.
All this talk of PHP and XML and such are the technologies that keep providing new and fresh ways to interact. To a increasingly multimedia-centric populace. But let me tell you, in all of those old systems, the political and mundane poetry and off-topic crap DOMINATED the landscape in ALL of the aforementioned forums. For every forum on C programming, there were 25 on cooking, poetry, drinking beer - whatever. It was just that they had all the sophistication of Gopher. Actually, that's giving them too much credit, gopher uses the curses system within telnet for formatting, these didn't even have that. Oh yeah, we had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow, and we liked it that way.
Just because Slashdot has a lot of technical articles on it, doesn't make it true of the net. In fact, I'd really suggest you find another forum to post to, since you don't seem to like much of what Slashdot is about. There are plenty of web boards out there, slashdot even has slashcode so you can go build a system like this one to discuss cutlery or art history or whatever tickles the fancy of what you perceive to be the Internet's true value.
I think I just achieved a whole new level of "weird" here on Slashdot.
If by "weird", you mean "hypocritical and idiotic", then yes, you have.