Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wow, what an awesome news story, I shall add it to my blog immediately.
(omgwtfbbq!?fp?)
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.
Sounds like a chapter right out of Ender's Game. Damn that Peter Wiggin, err.. Locke! Yea! Damn that Locke!
Now we just need to have a pen based computer for each kid in school. Whoops, that's already happening too.
Is this slashdot.org site any good? and what's the url?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Friendster, Blogging - get on the shelf next to Geocities (everyone will have a webpage by 1998!).
Meet Joe Blog
or
Slashdotting CmdrTaco.
Slashdot just Slashdotted Cmdr Taco's website. I'm not sure how to react...
Most Blogs are uber-forgettable ego stroking crap, but the truth in this statement - "some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician" - can been seen in tons of places. A prime example of the influence a joe-nobody can weild is Harry Knowles. Check him out Here. Maybe not technically a blog, but the concept is the same, and this guy has ended up on the list of the 100 most influential people in Hollywood.
May the person who invented that word have his eyes poked out by an angry swordfish while swimming.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Google cache of main site
Google cache of page on Rob
... 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!
I'm not a blogger, and I don't read any blogs. I don't understand how the blog thing works.
Do people just sit around and read other people's blogs? How do they know which ones to read? If everyone is blogging then it seems like there would be so much useless crap out there that you wouldn't know what to look at. Who would waste time sifting through it all? Doesn't seem very useful to me. Good thoughts would go unnoticed and the sewer would spew forth. There's no focal point.
What am I missing?
The ratio of people to cake is too big
The article's subtitle:
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased
Thanks Time, you've just encouraged a site with more traffic than most others on the internet to keep being more biased, as opposed to just giving the story. Does michael get to post smart-assed statements after an article twice as long as they used to be. Does CmdrTaco get that feeling he does absolutely no wrong even stronger? Does this site continue to get treated like a small site by the people who run it when it should be treated like the big one it is, all because of your little article?
With the site going on such a downward spiral, do they really need their ego stroked? God damn you Time. God damn you.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
NMG
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
It's good that Blogs will get some kind of ranking.
Categories of blogs would be nice, too, so that we're not overwhelmed by Pop Culture, Sports, Movies, One Micron Deep Political Commentary, Etc. We might even divide these categories into groups, something like comp.os.linux.x and so on:)
Popularity might be a good measure of Blog site after it gets discovered and gets a bunch of hits and links to it.
The problem is that brute force popularity metrics will miss new, emerging Blogs that might have high quality writing, insightful analysis, but only a slowly-growing audience.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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!
I know that there are many types of blogging. There's the 'personal' type, where people write about their daily happenings for friends and such to read. My site is one of those. Then there's those (and many, I may add) that focus on a particular area or subject, eg. technical or scientific news (like Slashdot) or certain lawsuits (Groklaw). There has been a trend of the mainstream media citing blogs as sources and reporting on that, and maybe they should search around and be able to present two opposing views, or what not. I read blogs (type two) to learn about things; it's always nice to know both sides of an issue. Many type one blogs center around communities such as Xanga or Blogger. I suppose their goal is to promote the sense of being a community, while also conveniently creating the feeling of exclusiveness by limiting it to members only, even though the service is free... So, can blogging be seen as merely exercising free speech? If "one user in his underwear" can change/skew the media, well, maybe they should do more research first. Too bad the media isn't entirely objective, though. But then again, it's impossible to present everything pertaining to an issue.
Dude, it looks like we just slashdotted CmdrTaco's web site. How's that for irony? :-)
(And now Taco is going to go smack michael upside the head for posting this story. Gotta love it.)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased
Well, then they have one of the three in common with traditional media, and it isn't being either fast or funny.
You are correct. If Time is reporting on it, you can be sure it is a dying fad. Time reports on something at the very top or very bottom.
A good way to invest is to look at the cover of Time magazine, and do the opposite. Time touting record low interest rates? Short bonds. Time lamenting a bear market? Buy! Buy! Buy!
Are you seriously suggesting that bloggers have more journalistic "credibility"? Many (not all) blogs I've read tend to be unabashedly biased rants and take extreme positions- or do nothing more than mindlessly link to other stories.
While a few news outlets have credibility problems, they're far from worthless, and there are tens of thousands of excellent reporters who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of reporting, and actually have degrees in journalism. It is almost sickening to hear you equate them with bloggers, who have so little dedication, 95% of them stop blogging after a month or so.
Just because you watch FOX news and read USA Today doesn't mean journalism is dead, and it certainly doesn't mean that we should be turning to bloggers.
Please help metamoderate.
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 ModernitySo yeah, the weblog is really nothing new, just a much easier form of distribution.
What's that you say, Rob? Working on your bachelor's degree was the best 12 years of your life?
In the beginning there was USENET and it was good...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As someone who writes for 7+ blogs, I certainly don't want to sound as if I'm putting down the trend of self-publishing. But it's hard for people who make little or nothing from blogging to have the time or resources to deliver good reliable news and analysis over a period of time. True, adsense/google ads provide some sort of revenue for A-list bloggers, but that's more the exception rather than the rule. Full time writers may have corporate responsibilities/biases, but at least they have more time to do what they love doing.
One heartening trend is that big media is now adding blogs to their websites (and are presumably paying these writers to blog). It would be nice if employers could recognize the value of blogging so that blogging wouldn't have to be done so surreptitiously.
The biggest worry I have is that the Time's and New York Times will start casting off full time journalists and switch to the slashdot/ALD format that basically poaches off the content from other publications.
To repeat: bloggers do good important work. But at some point writers need resources and infrastructure and collaborators (and a paycheck) to do a good job consistently.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Although its true that blogs can be very biased, so can mainstream TV news services. Fortunately, we have the same option with a blog as we have with TV, whereas you can choose NOT to turn on a certain news channel, or don't view a certain blog.
It seems to me that this is an example of what people are talking about when they start to wax poetic about the power of "what the Internet could be".
We live in a world where the land, money, and power are becoming more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The evening news only reports on stories and opinions that have pre-approved by corporate-mentality politically-correct editors, who only hire corporate mentality politically-correct writers and reporters in the first place.
Part of the reason behind the Internet's popularity and open-source fanaticism is the fact that it puts small amounts of power back in the hands of individuals. People can distribute thoughts, information, and opinions to millions of people, unstoppably, without the possibility of censorship, with virtually no cost.
The general absence of publishers and editors means an absence of filters. It may allow amateurish writing to make it to your browser, but it also allows you to read the views that the New York Times won't print merely because it's against the owners' political views or economic interest.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to put on my tin-foil hat.
But I bet we can finish off that stuck-up Alicia Watkins who thinks she's all that because Brad who sits behind that chinese kid in chemistry bought her that tacky bracelet from Zales. Anyway I heard from Jennifers sister who works at the DMV that she heard from her friend Christine that the real reason Alicia missed the class trip to Fun Mountain was because she has herpes. I SWEAR TO GOD I am not making this up LOL.
Anyway Brad can't you see that I'm the one who really loves you? Doesn't that mix tape I left in your locker mean anything to you?
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.
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.
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.
Well, I don't think blogging is going to replace Time magazine, CBS nightly news or the New York Times next week, but it DOES impact these institutions. Specifically, it raises the bar substantially on what readers will PAY for in their reading habits.
I used to get a daily paper, subscribe to several news magazines and watch the nightly news, well, nightly.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form. I know this by talking to non-internet news junkies. They'll start by saying "Did you hear about Bush falling off his bike..." and I'll interrupt to tell them more than they already know on the subject. Print media won't die next week, but the Internet has done much more to hurt print media than television ever did. There really is very little reason for printed publications these days other than those people who still don't use the Internet regularly, and I suspect the ratios will eventually put many of the print -only publication out of business unless they adapt to the Internet.
Getting the story first will still be important for news publications, including TV based ones. But the story they will drive to get first will be the one that breaks on the Net, while they will strive to offer more in-depth coverage than their competitors for the print edition (while it exists).
More importantly, blogging "commoditizes" opinion. Who needs Andy Rooney when there are thousands of bloggers our there that are just as funny, and in many cases more insightful too? News anchor people might eventually learn that we are not interested in the "spin" they put on stories. When you can read entire transcripts of hearing, do string searches, or even view almost all of the world in action Dan Rather and the like can't afford to spin so much or they lose their credibility (well they already have for me at least). C-SPAN started this trend, and watching our government in action taught me how bad the reporting really was. Getting news on the Net has multipled that affect many times over and I think that as a new Net savvy generation takes over there will be fewer and fewer "media giants" who can manipulate the news for their own agenda.
Getting there will be good. The ride will be bumpy though.
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.
Also blame lazy readers/listeners/viewers who don't actually read enough to distinguish between rubbish and truth. e.g. When Richard Clarke, the gut at the hub of the CSG wheel, says the Whitehouse flubbed the war on terror, are you going to believe him or some hack who says Clarke lacks any credibility because he as an axe to grind?
The right wing media has been taking advantadge of lazy journalists for years. For those of you who don't know, the "right wing media" -- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, 700 Club, Hanity & Colms, Ann Coulter etc -- What they do is come up with terribly biased or completely false stories supporting the conservative agenda (status quo) and of course everybody dismisses the stories because the source is biased media! But lazy copy writers for legit news orgs pick up the stories, don't research them, and run with them! Then they *BECOME* "true".
Also refered to as Factoids by someone in the past, "Factoid: Something repeated often enough it becomes accepted as true."
A trained mind, skilled in critical thinking is harder for propaganda to overcome. This is why it's important to read as much about history as you can, starting with an open mind and questioning the veracity of everything you read. (This included!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and as its symbol a steaming pile of crap with a single golden kernal of corn
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
My blog exists for one simple reason: websites don't hyperlink.
I started it two years ago because rense.com had interesting stories, about half of which are verifiable (i.e. about 80% of the non-UFO stories). The problem is it took quite a bit of time for me to research Rense's stories to figure out which ones were true. And to not let that go to waste, I started dumping my results into a blog -- all with hyperlinks to either mainstream news sites or to "original" web documents from government, scholastic, or non-profit organization websites.
In the meantime, providing such links became de rigueur for the myriad of blogs that have popped up over the past two years -- in order to provide credibility. The result is that Rense.com now provides hyperlinks a lot more frequently now due to the new competition.
Rense.com has changed its ways, but newspaper sites still have not yet clued into the mystery of Tim Berners-Lee. Newspaper websites currently just duplicate the newsprint onto the computer screen. They refer to pending legislation without linking to the legislation. They refer to charters, press releases, products, budgets, etc. without linking to them. Or, sure, some have some newspapaper site have software that automatically goes through and creates links for popular keywords such as company names and people's names, but that's about it. Blogs, such as mine, provide deep links directly to the crucial material at hand, so that readers can assess the original material for themselves.
Sites like wired.com and salon.com are a bit more with it. Sites run by "Old Print" are going to have to adapt or die.
When we start seeing mainstream popular news sites with deep links to relevant material -- i.e. when newspapers embrace the web -- then maybe I can retire my website.
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.
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.
The power of the blog comes from the acknowledgement that blogs are openly biased, unedited sources. This invites more interaction and thought than newspapers which try to pose as authoritative sources.
When you look at the way people behave in life, they really don't imbibe a piece of news until they start discussing it. The human infallabiliy of blogs invites such interaction, while the supposed objectivity of journalists repels open interaction.
Of course, we still need quality authoritative sources that produce just facts. Blogs need to co-evolve with unbiased, dry sources of information such as county records, meeting minutes or other dry sources of information.
You do not need to be aware of any information sources not sanctioned by Big Media
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.