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Meet Joe Blog

Posted by michael on from the ego-stroking dept.

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.

29 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. journalists by mabu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If there were any real legitimate journalists left in the world Bloggers wouldn't matter, but in lieu of the mainstream media and news networks no longer having any journalistic credibility, someone has to do a little research.

    1. Re:journalists by PhxBlue · · Score: 4, Interesting

      After all, who is Joe Public going to trust the most, a fully professional New York Times employed scribe, or "Zergrush_7" ranting on his Livejournal.

      That depends on how often "Zergrush_7" scoops the New York Times. I would err on the side of the professional publication as well, but there're some bloggers out there who might as well be professionals. Matt Drudge comes to mind, though there are probably better examples.

      --
      !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
    2. Re:journalists by jayhawk88 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As opposed to semi-ethical tv news reports and political mouthpieces with agenda's to push?

    3. Re:journalists by MAXOMENOS · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, but as far as the people in power are concerned, the blogs are huge machines for reaching out to their core audience. Atrios and DailyKos are two prime examples of this. In fact, politicians are already trying to appeal to DailyKos's readership in order to get campaign dollars.

      --
      Finding God in a Dog
    4. Re:journalists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hmmm it seems that your OK with the OSS geeks writing your code or patching your bugs, but you can't apply the same principle of open and distributed to your news reporting. Reading the NYT is like running MS Windows, takes a serious dose of Kool-Aid to make do either.

      Except of course unless you can admit to not being for OSS, no that can't be this is /.

    5. Re:journalists by 24-bit+Voxel · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I feel that the state of current media is in such a sorry state that I don't even trust the traffic reporter guy. I agree with grandparent in that there is little remaining journalistic integrity in the field of media. If they can fuck things up this bad, why in the world should we then assume them to be trustworthy at all? At least with blogs you can click the links to check thier sources and decide for yourself. This is in my opinion a hell of a lot better than 'an insider to the Whitehouse reports that...'. So in that particular regard, I would put the college hacks one step above the mainstream media. (New York Times comes immediately to mind.)

      Perhaps he is just a pimply faced boxer wearing college nobody, however, I recall at that time of my life being far more proactive in hunting things down than I am now. He might just have the zeal and time/"nothing to lose" to go for it and find something that the 'mass mediated masses' might have missed.

  2. I suggest... by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... a seperate section on Slashdot for all *blog related articles, to clearly define which articles are about blogs.

    So it's easier for people to ignore it.

    --
    Hate me!
  3. Quote from the article by umrgregg · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with."
    Which is pretty much exactly how I feel about my friends who watch only Fox News. ;) All joking aside, isn't this the direction that most people on the politcal margins are moving towards to get thier news? Supporting their dogma rather than for the enlightenment of facts? Who wants to (or has time to) make an educated decision without input from 'source x' these days anyway? Is it that hard to stay in the center?
    --
    NMG
    1. Re:Quote from the article by jdbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This relates to the (frivolous, IMHO) /. thread regarding shutting down the FCC from last week.

      The FCC used to be one of the major forces behind (reasonably) centrist, balanced news printing and broadcasting. This was accomplished by means of limiting ownership (preventing the sort of mega-and-vertical consolidation we see today) and requiring that opposing viewpoints be heard (on controversional issues, not factual matters as some people mistakenly believe).

      However, due to congressional (primarily large-corporation-funded) lobbying over the the last several decades, these restrictions have been mostly neutered, if not struck down outright.

      The removal of the FCC as a force to be reckoned with has enabled the conversion of cable/network news broadcasts (formerly required by the FCC in exchange for the use of the airwaves) into profit-oriented, and therefore market-oriented "news" dissemination centers

      Genuine investigation and reporting has been severely downplayed in favor of sensationally appealing to the biases (and esp. playing off the fears) of the station's perceived-as-profitable market segment. Broadcasting "news" that contradicts their market segment's biases does not serve their profit goals, and so such news is downplayed (if not outright ignored) whenever possible.

      The result has been the rise of deliberately (if not always overtly) biased news media, for whom formerly prized journalistic standards are at best a secondary concern, if they are a consideration at all.

      Note that the above is a natural outcome of a market-oriented news media, versus a news media who is made to see itself as ultimately answerable to the public as a whole.

      Government regulation was good for the media, at least insofar as new boradcasting was concerned - it enabled the sustenance of a news media that at least tried to get the facts behind the story. The failures of the past system are nothing compared to the failures of today's system.

    2. Re:Quote from the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I'm reading a book that argues groups are smarter than individuals, as long as 1) you have a wide variety of individuals, making choices independently, and 2) you have some way of aggregating those individual choices. Examples include the stock market, and sports betting - most "experts" underperform the market, and sports odds hold up remarkably well.

      So it seems to me that a democracy will make intelligent choices, if there are a lot of people with very diverse opinions, even (and maybe especially) if they don't communicate that much with people they disagree with.

      These choices are liable to be much more intelligent, than a population which gets all its information and arguments from a concentrated source like mass media. There just isn't enough diversity of opinion there to aggregate into intelligent group decisions.

      The most remarkable example of group decisionmaking...in 1968 the Navy lost a submarine (the U.S.S. Scorpion). It sank somewhere in a 20 mile area, but that's all they knew...not even why it sank. One officer, John Craven, gathered a group of people of varied disciplines (salvage, submarines, physics, etc), and made a betting market for various factors: reason for sinking, descent rate, etc. He ran all the bets through some bayesian math and picked a spot.

      The Navy told him he was nuts. They had a couple experts who suggested an entirely different area. After five months of searching, they ordered the ship home. Captain said, "Uh, I gotta calibrate my equipment." Went to the spot Craven's group picked, and found the ship 220 yards off the exact point. Every individual pick was significantly farther off.

      They found a lost H-Bomb the same way.

  4. The Great Blog Myth by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician.

    The great blog myth exposed: There are more people contributing to blogs than actually

    Care
    or

    Can do anyting about it

    What it all boils down to is like giving the AM radio dial a spin, through all those talk shows. Lotsa blather, all given with about the same amount of passion and nothing much coming of it all.

    Just go out and ride yer bike, you'll get more done.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  5. Convergence of Blogging Sites by frekydeaky · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Seems to me that there are a few different sites that are just waiting to be converged. While some of us are aspiring writers, much fewer of us have the writing skill to keep an anonymous audience enthralled. A different subset perhaps doesn't use the written word eloquently at all, and prefers to share his/her life through pictures.

    What all these sites are nibbling around the edges of, is that people want to communicate more effectively. In the last 20 years we've seen two major advancements in communication: the web-based message board (like slashdot), and instant messenger. More recently some social networking sites have come close, but none have succeeded in that perfect combination of being able to easily share your thoughts, words, and photos with everyone you care about (and everyone they care about).

    The only site I've seen that even comes close is called Multiply, and even that needs some work before it's truly powerful (I'd like to see more integration with existing communication tools, for instance).

    The next few years are going to bring some dramatic change to the way we communicate -- that's for sure. Wonder which direction we'll be taken; let's just hope it's not an "embrace and extend" strategy by Microsoft!

  6. Japanese I-Novel by nilspace · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What I recently discovered was that this form of autobiographical 'drivel' is by no means a new form of literary expression.

    Taken from Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity
    The term I-novel started to be used in literary circles (called bundan) around the mid-1920s. Originally it meant contemporary autobiographical sketches whose authors appeared to write directly about their personal lives for a closed circle of fellow writers.
    So yeah, the weblog is really nothing new, just a much easier form of distribution.
  7. Re:Signal to noise ratio plan. by blowdart · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Google started guess at RSS feed URLs, I noticed it (and blogged it, heh) on Sunday.

    Despite the files not existing, and of course, no links to them, google tried to read

    • atom.xml
    • rss.xml
    • index.rdf

    So, why? Are they going to adjust ranking on sites that are obviously blogs because they have feeds?

  8. Re:Bloggers? by mcwop · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Some blogs are good. I find them by reading or hearing about good one. Example: Forbes listed 5 good ecomnomics blogs.

    There are blogs I read regularly, and they are in some ways similar to slashdot. The blog points out things of interest, and sometimes allow comments.

    Some interetsting Blogs: Seth Godin's Blog

    Poor and Stupid

    Marginal Revolution

    EconLog

    --

    "I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX

  9. Publicity of blog entries by dabadab · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think that factor that you miss is that the content on the blogs can (and WILL) be spread easily if there is something worth noticing.
    So if Joe writes something interesting, then in a few hours Mary and Bob will link to him in their blogs and in the next day you will receive the entry (or just a link to it) via email from Suzy because she saw it linked on Bob's blog and thinks that all her friends just have to read it.

    --
    Real life is overrated.
  10. Re:Prime example by cardshark2001 · · Score: 1, Interesting
    and this guy has ended up on the list of the 100 most influential people in Hollywood.

    Yeah, because (sorry Harry, you live in my town and are good friends with one of my good friends, but) he likes EVERY DAMN MOVIE.

    That is only a slight exaggeration. Of course you can become influential in Hollywood if you cover their latest crap-fest in icing and candy sprinkles. I even read aintitcool sometimes, but not for serious critique.

    I've met Harry, and I think he genuinely does like a lot of movies, I don't think he's selling out to corporations or anything, he was doing this long before he got noticed. To put it kindly, though, his tastes are a bit, shall we say, broad?

    --
    WWJD? JWRTFA!
  11. Similar to Reality TV by irikar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see Blogs as an extention of reality TV. Your average Joe wants his share of fame while, in some cases, lacking the necessary talent to earn it. So he starts a blog and measures his popularity by the number of hits to his site.

    Mind you, unlike reality shows, the blogs are not controlled (yet?) by big production corporations and blog's primary goal isn't to make money, so at least there could be a certain sense of 'integrity' in blogs that's painfully lacking in reality shows.

  12. TechnoAntiBlogDystopia by ryantate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this and this), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."

    Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM .NET blah blah blah ... Webmonkey stuff.

    Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!

    My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.

    And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.

    Just had to get that off my chest.

    1. Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would boil my boring post down as, "I am sick of the engineers who run the Internet judging and bitching about how I am using this fabulous network infrastructure they have built, when they're not exactly writing universally fascinating stuff."

      I don't think it's exactly unexpected.

      If you go to a forum on a particular topic, the people there will tend to be, y'know, interested in that topic, and probably there's a general feeling that that topic is more interesting than other topics.

      Go to a dog-breeding forum and see whether they might be a bit scornful of people that, oh, I don't know, waste time talking about "other things" and don't appreciate the love and companionship that a dog will give you.

      Is Slashdot a blog, anyway? It's not really what I think of when I think of a blog.

      --
      May we never see th
  13. Could be a good thing by Gatton · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I like the idea of blogging even though I don't blog myself. I do wonder though if all these blogs might be valuable in the future. Consider Samuel Pepy's Diary. It provides an invaluable look at what life was like in the 17th century.

    I imagine that while a majority of blogs are from angsty self important whiners it's when significant events happen that it's interesting to go back and read people's take on it. I don't know about anyone else but I've often clicked on the Hall of Fame section and read comments from some of the most replied to stories. It's fascinating (well to some) to see what people thought and said during significant events. Assuming that many blogs will still be around thanks to sites like The Internet Archive it could be a valuable reference and research tool for future generations. And then again maybe only the bad blogs will survive. The ones that proclaim Lemmy is god and George W. is teh suck.

  14. Re:Signal to noise ratio plan. by wo1verin3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just a guess...

    When I find a site on google and it has the links below it for 'cached' and 'similar pages'... I'd be more then happy to see an 'rss feed' link.

  15. Avert your eyes, Citizen!!! by deacon · · Score: 3, Interesting
    In other news, huge corporations that control most print and all television media hate and fear competition, and are trying to ram home the message that only BigMedia (TM) is worthy of the eyeballs and dollars of CONSUMERS.

    Is anyone here surprised?

    This article is from exactly the same mindset that Microsoft displays when they tell us that Windows is cheaper and better than Linux.

    Fact is, many in the media realize they have a serious trust problem, but things will get much worse before they get better.

    Blogs are a huge potential threat to the media establishment, and the best ones provide information which BigMedia wishes to see suppressed, such as the UN Oil for Dictators program known as UNSCAM

    There will be lots of loud and shrill posts in this thread reminding YOU, Citizen, that blogs are bad for you, boring, and will make your palms hairy.

    Certainly, if you agree that your betters at BigMedia are best qualified to tell you what to think about, carry on as you are.

    I mean, BigMedia has YOUR best interests in mind right? Right? It's not as if they are trying to sell you something.

  16. Correction: JaYson Blair by Jerf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Mea culpa.

    (Never trust anyone who won't 'fess up to mistakes, and weaseling doesn't count. Again, there are people on all sides that are too busy being perfect and standing behind increasingly discredited opinions to be worth listening to. If you haven't changed any of your opinions in the last couple of years, you're neither as sophisticated nor as informed as you think you are.)

  17. Re:journalistic credibility? by valkraider · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's three guys that I think have much less BS than anyone, and they are John Stewart, Dennis Miller, and O'Reilly.

    O'Reilly? WTF? I'll give you the other two, but O'Reilly? He lies almost as much as Limbaugh.

    If you listen to Air America radio (biased towards the left obviously) the Al Franken show is pretty much the arch-nemisis of O'Reilly (in fact Al Franken named it the "O'Franken" factor for a while trying to goad O'Reilly in to a lawsuit or something).

    Now of course they are biased - but I like how the Al Franken show works. They do basically little commentary of their own, but they focus on debunking the right-wing shows commentary. One of the best things they do is catch the right's lies. They will have actual tapes of, say, O'Reilly saying one thing one day, and then the opposite the next. Or they will have tapes of O'Reilly commenting on something incorrectly, and then play the thing it was O'Reilly was commenting on to show the error...

    O'Reilly is as bad as they come, and anyone - conservative or not - should be worried about how much the media gets away with passing off as truth...

  18. Re:The sound of one hand clapping... by Moofie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I shouldn't have to explain to you that there are some things a person might write about on the Internet, and some things that they might not. It's absurd to think that anybody who writes a blog should not also like to have privacy about things they don't write about.

    There are good blogs, and bad blogs. Sturgeon's Law still applies.

    --
    Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
  19. Blogs are definitely impacting society... by Dimensio · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the past week I've seen a number of calls go out for people to contact Congress and ask to have the World War II memorial monument changed to add in the removed "so help us God". This has been spreading thanks in large part to web blogs hosting this information, which people then email out to friends and family.

    So yes, clearly blogs are helping a bunch of retards spread an urban legend around to the point where letters are written to Congress, all because bloggers can't be bothered to check a few facts.

    --
    STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
  20. Re:Bloggers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Before all the LiveJournal stuff came about, Slashdot was considered a "weblog".

    You have to remember that all the fancy comment mode, article submission, and karma crap came after the basic concept of Taco posting links that he was interested in.

  21. As an era, this is like a return to the 1800s by stgabriel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There was a time when many intellectuals started private journals and newspapers. The net is giving people the opportunity to start newspapers, like www.brainsnap.com or www.theonion.com. Fifteen years ago, starting an independent press would be expensive and have an incredibly small circulation for many years. This can potentially over throw the largest brokers of news, but on the other hand, they do still have all the money. Marketing is everything in this world today.