Slashdot Mirror
ABC's 'People of the Year' - Bloggers
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "ABC News have declared Bloggers to be their 'People of the Year'. 'A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts. Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year. This week, their influence has become readily apparent.'"
My first award ever! *tears*
"E-mail" is our person of the year!
And I'd like to thank the academy of other folks with too much time on their hands, who've made me what I am today.
'Sparrow.'
Matt Drudge's site could be considered to be a blog... that means bloggers have been influencing news events since at least 1998.
If a blog is updated and nobody reads it, does it actually matter?
Livejournalers, apparently. "Gosh, my parents are so mean! They never let me stay up late!"
Yeah, that kind of thing matters so much we should give it a special kind of award.
Wait a second...
We're just realizing that some guy with a computer and an internet connection is doing our jobs better then we are.
I don't reply to ACs
...it has a good side and a bad side. There's someone on Kuro5hin who's documented the dark side of Movable Type and, subsequently, Xanga weblogs. It turns out that in addition to "empowering" people's abilities to communicate, weblogs can also be used to stifle them, especially in the insidious case of Xanga. We always need to keep in mind how new technological advances have negative side-effects in addition to positive ones.
Face it, 99% of all the blog material out there is shit (my own included). We need better blogging out there, not more of it!
They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")
<John Stewart>
Stop, please stop butchering language. You're hurting our vocabulary and you make yourself sound stupid
</John Stewart>
I mean, yes bloggers have become a trend.... but 99,9% of the blogs I've read are absolutely senseless to anyone who doesn't know the people in question. You might say the same about homepages - 99,9% of those were useless to outsiders as well. And there's no easier to find the people who actually have something sensible to say. I'll just place this under "if you take a big enough sample, someone will have something interesting to say"... which kinda reminds me of slashdot, oh well ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's without a doubt that not all blogs are of the same weight, BUT...
Who or what will determine if your blog does matter? Page hits? Comments? Flames?
I guess it's all a popularity thing to me.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
How about soliders, researchers, volunteers, or teachers?!
This way to the egress...
Before ABC News cleared-up what a "blog" was, I thought it was a medical name for constipation.
Glad they clarified that.
PS: HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Precisely. No talent clowns running software where they haven't the first clue of how it operates so, to camouflage there true scourge to humanity, they invent a hip synonym for "journal."
All those asshats can keep modding me down if they're so insecure but I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I dunno, using the "fuck you" relevance index, GWB comes out on top.
(That's the number of times you say a person's name after "fuck you" during the year, as in "look at this fucking weak dollar. Fuck you, Bush". Or "Damn, Joe's unit got hit by a suicide bomber and Joe's not coming back. Joe was a good guy. Fuck you, Bush.")
"All these people keep bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. If they can't communicate, the least they can do is SHUT UP." -- Tom Lerher
Thanks for defining blog for me. I couldn't figure out what it meant until I went to the homepage of slashdot.
The Television Wiki
I'm getting really sick of searching Google (and other search engines) for stuff only to find nothing but blog hits (usually from some self-glorifying twit with some catchy emo domain name) cluttering up the results.
Even worse is when it's the same "Trackback" crap, and none of the morons have bothered to retain the original article they were linked to, and it's link rotted.
Blogs *are* the most over-rated and overhyped thing of 2004.
According to BlogShares, the number of blogs has grown from 1 million to 2.3 million over the past 6 months. It seems like information overload. It also seems like the number of blogs isn't really relevant - most of the attention ends up being focused on a very few blogs run by people already in the media (like Instapundit).
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
Soldiers, scientists, and other people that are providing services to humanity are probably shaking their heads at this, but meanwhile a thousand camgirl bloggers are saying "OMG Time called me "People of the Year!!" LOL OMG!!!"
A group of linguists declared "blog" to be a word they want stricken from the English language and I couldn't agree more.
:(
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6773907/
Other previous hated words:
metrosexual (2003) -- although it made a funny South Park plot
chad (2001) -- the little piece of paper that chose our President
paradigm (1994) -- sadly, still used in 99% of business presentations
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The Man/Person of the Year is named by influence, not as an endorsement. Hitler, Stalin, and Ayatollah Khomeini all were Man of the Year too.
"Dylan Verdi, an 11-year-old known as the world's youngest videoblogger, says she covers "things that I've seen that I like or that I've heard of, or just anything that happened to me that day that I'm thinking.""
"videoblogger?" great, another buzzword. I wonder what her "videoblog" is about - what 11 year old girls really like? Oh brother, that oughta be a hoot.
A chick named "Dylan?" Now that's a new one!
But *that* is something that Time considered worthy of "People of the Year?" An 11 year old with a video camera talking about what she likes? (they failed to link to the blog, though)
There are so many other people that are far more deserving of the title than effin *Bloggers* - blah.
For a while I thought blogs were stupid, but thats just because I had looked at live journal sites published by 15 year old girls. I like the services that blogger.com offer, and even use textamerica.com for its picture blogging service. I just wish I could have this all on my own domain and not be tied to a company that might not be around in 10 years. Are there any open source packages that I should check out? I've got experience with PHP.
Happy New Year
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
"But for Verdi, it is the simple pleasure of knowing that someone is listening that makes blogging worthwhile.
"On my blog it allows people to post comments, and I have gotten comment upon comment upon comment," she said. "It makes me feel really good that somebody else cares about what I have to say."
"
That pretty much sums it up - blogging for a feeling of self importance. Blogging turns people into serious attention whores. People start getting upset when nobody comments on their blog.
No wonder we're now seeing t-shirts that say "Go cry about it in your Livejournal."
A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts.
Did we really need 'blog' defined in the blurb? This is Slashdot after all...
~Lake
It's significant that, out of a mountain of garbage, there are a few rare gems. Statistically, that will happen. It still doesn't change the reality of blogs. Like everything else in our society, blogs have been co-opted by the system. When a dork like Chris Matthews becomes a "hard" blogger, the party is over.
Laws are for people with no friends.
When the Web was introduced to the masses, everyone down to the last AOLer talked about building their own websites. But up until now many of those sites have been poorly updated piles of rubbish, a far cry from the web of individual voices and opinions around the world that many people thought the Web would bring.
So here we are in 2004, where blogers are now "people of the year" and when we look back at what's changed, it's almost nothing except for one thing: content management systems. You give people Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and they'll put out a poorly done site that's too complex for them to convienently update, but all of a sudden the simple blog-style of content management is introduced, and all of a sudden that vision of voices around the world is coming true. Was this the only thing we were missing the whole damn time?
I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.
The most important blog this year, bar none, was http://www.kevinsites.net/. You can't top it.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
...Is the fact that politically-conservative blogs made a huge difference in the 2004 US Presidential campaign.
I cite two reasons for this:
1. Conservative blogs spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "527" group far beyond what was possible in the past. I mean let's face it: because most media outlets ignored this 527 group, it took the power of conservative blogs to spread the message, along with conservative radio talk shows and the Fox News Channel. Of course, it didn't help the Kerry campaign that Senator Kerry reacted woefully too slowly to the charges of this group.
2. Conservative blogs in a matter of a few hours revealed that the Texas Air National Guard memos supposedly critical of President Bush's Texas ANG service that CBS News used were fraudulent. And it also made people much less trusting of the mainstream press and also why it may have hastened the decision of CBS News anchor Dan Rather to retire one year earlier than he originally planned.
So many people here seem to want to reiterate that this is a site for "nerds". That we're supposed to make a difference. But in the same breath, they bash others for using "l33tsp34k" or net abbreviations. They'll bash a teen LJ user for posting their virtual diary, but put forth the fury of crap on their own site and tout it as a masterpiece. What's crap to you isn't crap to others.
/. used to have a pretty decent sense of community. About the only time you see people being a group is to bash M$ or team up for the new dsitributed.net project. Yes, we've always disagreed... that's part of a community. But either I've grown very old very quickly, the /. populace has becoem extremely immature, or the community has just broken down for no apparent reason.
As for blogging in and of itself, why could it be considered bad? If Xanga allows for these types of issues, perhaps the creators of Xanga need to be blamed, not the trend of blogging. Blogging can be such an interesting look into the lives of others. Some of you are so far into nerddom that you are antisocial and don't care what others think. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But those of us that are curious about other people, or... God forbid... outgoing or extroverted, blogs let us see what's on the other side... the other side of the bridge, the city, the state or the world. How can this ever be a bad thing?
Yes, yes... almost everyone that comes to this site knows what a blog is. Maybe somebody doesn't. Maybe they are a neo-nerd, fresh to the community. Are you ACTUALLY offended that the term was described in a quote on the front page? Seriously... some people need to get over themselves. There are plenty of things that occur, are said or are shown on the internet that I feel are ignorant or ill-advised. But generally (this post, of course, being an exception), I just let it go.
It's sad really...
Bloggers can do good work, but there is no institutional/programatic/architectural assurance that they're telling the truth.
.max
Bloggers can post anything they want, w/o refutation, or consequence (barring libel suit, natch)-- there's no way to proximally refute a blog's BS. Journalists, at least, are held to some standard, and their outlets -- papers, magazines, networks, have to at least occasionally genuflect at the altar of veracity. A journalist who lies and is caught becomes unemployed; not so the blogger, who can spew and rave unchallenged.
A much better modality than blogging is usenet news.
Translation:
My personal agenda hasn't gained ground. Therefore blogs aren't working.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
142 comments and no mention of blogger's biggest kill- perhaps when their importance was proven beyond a doubt.
I'm sure you'll all remember that a week or two before the election, Dan Rather went on 60 minutes with a story about how Bush allegedly got special treatment when he was in the air national guard. To prove this, CBS posted PDF's of supporting memos, 'from' the 70's, on their website.
Within hours, someone mentioned on freerepublic that the documents looked like they came from microsoft word.
Over the 12 hours, Littlegreenfootballs.com , with the help of powerlineblog.com blew the lid off the story.
Here's a detailed analysis later put together by a guy who pretty much wrote the book on computer typesetting: Dr. Newcomer
Bloggers showed that CBS had aired a story based on piss-poor forgeries made with MS Word 2003 default settings within hours, and then let so many people know about it so rapidly that there was no turning back for Rather and 60 minutes. His retirement this spring was announced within a month of this fiasco, IIRC.
Now, regardless of what you happen to think of Bush (Dr. Newcomer was a Kerry fan), basing a story on fabricated evidence is inexcusable. Basing it on such obvious forgeries is beyond inexcusable, and reaches into incredibly stupidity.
Bloggers busted 60 minutes on this. Huge story. And I'm suprised I'm the first one posting it.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Congratulations to Hindrocket, The Big Trunk, and Deacon for producing such an excellent blog.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Now, here are the givens that too many Slashdotters won't admit to:
You want to tell me you popped out of your mother's womb and started coding Perl before you could crawl? Please. We have all ascended a tech learning curve -- and the smart ones are continually looking for new ones to climb. Blogging is in its infancy in terms of both form and tools -- it will evolve for the same reasons you're not still coding COBOL -- people, left to themselves, will find increasinly efficient ways to communicate and transmit information.
But you know what? That big issue of finding a community of one's own isn't limited to geeks -- it's indicative of the prevasive loneliness that may be one of the most dominant characteristics of modern, first-world society.
And blogs have had a huge impact on that.
Today, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of interconnected online communities centered around blogs. No, they're not running FUDforum or other bulletin board software, but they still fit the core definitions of a community, whether online or off. Millions of people are learning more about how the internet works and information that was isolated is increasingly communal and (wait for it, RMS...) free.How can that be a bad thing?
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
As Homer J would say, it must have been a pretty slow year!
Here in Brazil, people tend to shorten "fotolog" or "photolog" as... "flog". It is fair to suppose 99.5 percent of them have no idea of what it means in english. X_X
Circumcision is child abuse.
I enjoy some blogs, although I have to admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. Here's a few which I personally find interesting and read regularly. I'm a neuro, space, and robotics geek, so the list is biased as such.
* Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) News: The most thorough spaceflight blog around, focusing on reusable systems.
* NASA Watch: A well-known site with regular critiques of NASA.
* Free Republic: Like slashdot, but for ultra-conservatives. I sometimes like to go there to get a better understanding of what goes through the heads of people who think differently from me.
* Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: "Quantum fluctuations in space, science, and exploration"
* Democratic Underground: The extreme left's version of Free Republic.
* Instapundit: The slashdot-equivalent of political weblogging, with a somewhat libertarian slant. Known for causing "Instalanches" on innocent web servers, analogous to "Slashdottings."
* Daily Kos: Probably the most influential liberal blog.
* Transterrestrial Musings: a libertarian space analyst who helped me understand why it's possible to be intelligent and support the war in Iraq at the same time. He sometimes posts some fantastic satires.
* theferrett's livejournal: sometimes writes some very insightful and well-composed essays
* spacexploration livejournal community: Space-related miscellany and discussion.
* politicsforum livejournal community: Sometimes has some pretty intelligent political discussion.
* robots.net: Robotics news
* Space Politics: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway"
* Rocket Man Blog: Rarely updated, but has very insightful and informed analysis of spaceflight and rocketry.
* Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nanotechnology news and commentary
How about "web log"?
Not every word needs an abbreviation.
Although "abbreviation" could sure use one.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
And all bloggers ought to thank Jerry Pournelle for starting the original blog, although back then he called it a daybook. His site still has his original content going back many many years.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/#blog
Nonsense.
Deliberate lies, misrepresentation and lies by omission happen every single day all throughout the Big Media without penalty. --The most effective lies being those which the journalists have themselves been sold on. There is a LOT of state mind-control and propaganda going on. Most of what people see in Big Media is designed to manipulate and control and weave falsehoods.
Now, it is of course true, as you point out, that no single source on the web can be automatically trusted. However. . , an individual with information is able to post without restriction, through blogs or other means. And when the reader takes the responsibility of cross-referencing information and above all, THINKING for his or herself, then a picture of the true objective reality can begin to emerge where blind faith in Big Media makes such a thing much, much less likely.
-FL
The whole thing stunk to high heaven and nearly everybody bought it because they had been trained to believe that the talking heads on TV were smart and wise and good rather than being a bunch of state-owned propaganda dupes. -Amazingly, this was all largely done in the same style of tactical manipulation employed by other great psychopathic power mongers throughout history.
And the Big Media pushed and sold this bullshit. 'Freedom Fries', anybody? (Does everybody still hate the French for not being as gullible? Nobody likes to be shown up as stupid after the fact, so I bet most people do still hate the French.)
Anyway, my point is. .
The ONLY place I was seeing the opposing message in any force during those horrible 'watching a train-wreck in slow-motion' days was on the Web, --primarily through individuals posting their views and research on simple web-pages and discussion groups. Like Slashdot.
-FL