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?
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...
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.
... 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!
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 find it equally interesting that Time Magazine is Karma Whoring ...
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.
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 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.
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
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.