The Daily Whim
My Site, My Whims, Your Consternation
Sun
May
04
2008
This Personal Site
Recently Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about “The vanishing personal site”:
Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.
Sun
Mar
16
2008
Who's Divisive?
In what probably should have been a predicted development, political weblogs are mirroring the campaigns they write about and advocate. In other words, it’s ugly and divisive blue on blue action, and portends what could be coming this fall: no matter who wins, a large portion of the Democratic party may decide to take their ball, go home, and stay there:
Sun
Feb
17
2008
Olympic Blogging Redux
They might be one of the slowest organizations to change with the times, but somehow, after the fiasco of four years ago, the International Olympic Committee is beginning to get a clue:
The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs.
The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed.
Sat
Jan
05
2008
What Color Is Your Mud?
Once upon a time, the image, views, and positions of a political party were transmitted to the public in a limited number of ways, by a limited number of people. The candidates themselves were the primary means. The national party apparatus did their part to help sell the party vision. And a fairly limited number of openly partisan pundits in the media often sang along to the party tune, be it a in newspaper column in the NY Times, or on a talk radio show, or as a talking head on the political TV shows. All of them pretty much “household names” within the world of politics.
It was usually a fairly cohesive, coherent, and compatible set of policies and talking points, and was put forth fairly consistently by a literal handful of public voices.
My, how times have changed.
» Read the Full Article (1741 words) »
Mon
Oct
15
2007
The Long Dark Tunnel of American Politics
Regular readers of this site may recognize this as the beginning of another of my Jeremiads, a screed against partisan jackassery of all colors. Though I must say I’m collecting additional evidence and refining my view quite a bit. Others may bow up at the very term “partisan jackassery,” as it is something they … enjoy. Feel free to move on. But for the two or three of you who fit neither description, as well as to rid this voice from my head, I shall proceed.
» Read the Full Article (1965 words) »
Mon
Aug
06
2007
Isn't Blogger Union An Oxymoron?
After reading this, I quickly scanned my calendar and the article date to make sure neither said “April 1.” They don’t. So this must be for real.
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
Mon
Jul
16
2007
Seven
Seven. No, I’m not the seventh son born on the seventh day (I’m actually the first born on the twentieth, which has no rhythym, so it must be “authentic” white boy blues).
And no, I don’t mean the Seven Deadly Sins.
Or maybe I do. Maybe it’s the unwritten eighth sin (unwritten, because it had to be “published”).
Mon
Apr
02
2007
Rantosphere Misdirection
Political bloggers on both sides of the aisle will tell you they are an antidote to the obviously partisan media. They claim the nature of blogs allows them to update and correct as events develop. And they say blogs are self-correcting due to the fact their readers will point out their errors.
OK. Got one for you.
The claim was posted yesterday around the web that John McCain was heckled by CNN reporter Michael Ware. The original claim came from an anonymously sourced article at the Drudge Report, and then was linked as a fact and further evidence of the partisan media.
Wed
Feb
07
2007
Attack of the Blog Archives
For years now I’ve written my little Jeremiads about the political blogosphere, its harsh and often profane nature, and how ultimately counterproductive it could be. Well, I hate to say I told you so, but…
» Read the Full Article (1116 words) »
Mon
Jan
01
2007
I Insist You Have A Happy 2007
It recently came to my attention that December 29th was National Drunk Blogging Day. Or, was it National Blog Drunk Day. Hell, let me go check the link. OK, it was the former, not the latter. At any rate, no one bothered to send me the memo, so I was distressingly sober that day. So I’m making up for it. Right now.
» Read the Full Article (1234 words) »
Thu
Jul
06
2006
I'm A Bad Blogfather
I’ve recently noticed a few folks reassessing where they are at with regards to their web site (I’m such a trend setter). People who’ve been doing this roughly as long as I have, and whether they realize it or not, people who created a site so affecting that it motivated others to try and create one for themselves.
On the web, there really is no greater or more sincere compliment than that.
And it moved me to take a look at an old site I haven’t seen in ages. A site that once listed blogs that claimed my site inspired them to start blogging, i.e., they claimed me as their blogfather. My blogchildren.
There were once nine of them. Only one has posted in the past month, and most are completely dead. I guess that makes me a Bad Blogfather. Consider this my memorial to them.
» Read the Full Article (1031 words) »
Mon
Jun
12
2006
Not A Blog Anymore
If “blog” is a relatively new term for you, or if you have no knowledge of (or interest in) the “inside baseball” of the Blogosphere (i.e., probably over 90% of visitors to this site), rest assured that nothing is really going to change around here. At least, not any more than it already has this year. This is just me venting. At length. Again.
But for those of you who know your Technorati from your Elbowroni, this site is not a blog anymore. At least not in any current sense of what blogs are, or most especially, what blogs commonly aspire to be. I’m reverting to what this site was prior to July of 2000 when I first started using a piece of web-ware called Blogger … a personal web site.
Well, it will still be a series of individual articles. Posted in reverse chronological order. With comments. But semantics aside…
I hereby secede from the blogosphere as it is known today.
» Read the Full Article (4782 words) »
Wed
Jan
04
2006
First Reports Almost Always Wrong
The first reports on 9/11 said a twin engine prop plane had accidently hit one of the Trade Towers (soon thereafter, we also heard about the bombing of the State Department in DC). On Election Day 2004, the first reports of exit polls said Kerry was winning. The first reports after Katrina were that the levees in New Orleans had held. And back in October, there was a terrorist attack at Georgia Tech (or maybe it was just a blogger).
Thu
Dec
15
2005
The Year in 12 Sentences
“So this meme is going around, where you’re supposed to pull a line out of one of your entries for each month of the year.” Sort of “my year in 12 copy-and-paste sentences.” OK, let’s play!
Sat
Nov
26
2005
Blogging For All The Wrong Reasons
A couple of recent “events” in the blog world emphasize to me that despite all the hype, [1] blogs cannot be forced into an effective collective, that’s something that has to happen naturally, as they are the sites of individuals who might happen to agree on an issue … and not much else. [2], though it happens for a few, blogs are not a means for making money, they are a medium for self expression available to all. [3], blogs cannot be conglomerated and rebranded in a Time-Warner-AOL like manner. And [4], 21.8 million blogs cannot be lined up in any particular order. Not without raising a big stink.
Obviously, most of those points come from the learning experience known as Open Source Media, or Pajamas Media, depending on the day you check. If you want, you can skip down to that. But let’s start with “the ordering of the blogs.”
» Read the Full Article (3744 words) »
Thu
Nov
17
2005
A New Blog Conglomeration
Whether you heard about the launch of Open Source Media yesterday probably says more about you than it does about them. If you haven’t a clue what or who they are, that means you’re a normal American not obsessed with something called the Blogosphere. Congratulations.
Thu
Nov
03
2005
East of Eden
There are days that I really need a good story. A hopeful development. If not a happy ending, at least the end of a sad beginning. Yesterday, I got one.
Wed
Sep
28
2005
Operation Eden: The Good Son
Over the past year or so, I’ve become quite cynical about the world of web logs and what it has become. Of course, there’s as much diversity as their is in humanity, but the trend I see is a lot like Reality TV; “I’ll do considerably degrading and disgusting things, because I want to be on TV!” And since I’ve decried the ugly, I feel an obligation to also point you to its plain and sparkling opposite. Because the other day I stumbled across a blog that simply stunned me, and actually made me think “this is why blogs were invented.”
Sat
Jul
16
2005
Five Years
Though I’ve been “on the web” since early ‘96, it was five years ago today that I first posted something on this web site via this little application called “Blogger” (notably, the first link I made is now dead, but I’m still here, and so is Blogger).
Five years is a fairly long time in Real Life, but on the Internet, it’s an eternity. Or a significant percentage of one. Because I wasn’t a part of the First Wave of blogs, many hundreds had preceded me. I was, at best, a Second Waver, a web geek drawn in at first by the application, Blogger, but soon absorbed in the process, blogging.
The explosion in weblogs since then has been amazing to watch. It hasn’t all been good. There are many who are still far too dismissive of blogs. But there’s at least an equal number (and likely more) who take blogging far far too seriously.
» Read the Full Article (2226 words) »
Fri
May
06
2005
Hey, Have You Heard of 'Blogs'?
There’s an article that “made the rounds” earlier in the week, and from what I can tell, a lot of people got all a-twitter over it. One might almost say, “pleasurably engorged.” But to me, the article sounds a bit like a rookie reporter showing up at Super Bowl XXVIII, and detailing the future of Super Bowls based on that one game, with no knowledge of the 27 that preceded it.
reidstott: Feeling burned out today. Too much Independence, I guess.
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Quotes & Links
“For whatever reason, Real Life seems more pressing and important now. There’s yardwork to be done, house maintenance to perform, paying work to be attended to, computer languages to learn, etc., and they all seem far more important now than the urge to Find Someone On The Internet Who Is Wrong, And Correct Them, delightful as that often is.” David Fleck
Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe’s The Big Picture — Here’s the power of wonderful photography presented wonderfully: “The blog really launched on June 1st (I had a few earlier posts, but hadn’t opened it up yet). In its first 20 days of existence, it’s almost reached 1.5 million pageviews and over 1,500 comments for just 20 entries.” See for yourself: The Big Picture.
“Internet fame is like regular fame only without all the annoying ‘money’ and ‘power.’” Michael Ian Black
Exposed — “The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.”
Trashing the Greatest Generation — Veteran of WWII gets trashed on a right wing blog simply because he didn’t want to play their reindeer games and give them the partisan answer they insisted they had the right to get. Very nice, guys, I’m sure your mother would be proud of the way you treated a veteran who did far more for his country in a real war than you ever will in some silly blog war.
Textism: Alright — And on the fourth day of the fourth month, he reappeared, and spake: “Money, when it travels at a certain trajectory and speed, can make anyone into an asshole.”
Blogging Kills? — “Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.” If you are experiencing “nonstop strain,” I’d say you’re not blogging. You’re working. And it sounds like a bad gig. You should quit. Because typing your thoughts does not cause heart attacks, but other things do.
Graphic Annotation of Comments — Nicely done. The only slight improvement would be an if/then statement, like “if” douchebag, “then” show IP number, as “lives at”. Later: Perhaps this could be automated, with the annotation applied to those who are caught by the forthcoming Stupid Filter.
“It’s one thing for a blogger to help try to kill a health-care program because he or she believes that it is an end run toward national health care, or for any number of sound if arguable reasons. But that does not excuse piling on a defenseless 12-year-old and further discredits the blogosphere as a place where wingnuttery of the most malicious kind is encouraged and celebrated.” Shaun Mullen
You’re not in junior high anymore. You’re just acting like it. — Hey. Stop picking on a 12 year old in the name of your politics, left or right. I’ve never seen such an embarassing cacophony by people who actually think they’re changing minds with such juvenile crap! Those involved should go get their junior high yearbook, and find their 8th grade photo. Yeah, right now, you look just that dorky.
“Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life. She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people. It’s good she’s in D.C. and I’m in New York. I’d spit on her if I saw her.” Geraldo Rivera
“we used to gaze deep into our own navels and find something of substance. now it’s just pictures of food, rss feeds and aggregated links, in 140 characters or less.” alison
“There is a genuine and growing belief, as demonstrated by the continuing boom in sales of books like Patterson’s and Moore’s, that people on the other side of the political aisle are not simply in disagreement or misguided or wrong but genuinely bad people. That notion is more dangerous to the country than all our external enemies combined.” James Joyner
Senseless Partisan Quote of The Day — “I don’t think that the left wants to lose the war on terror, exactly — they just want Bush to lose the war on terror. I suspect, however, that Patterson’s theme is one that we’ll hear more in the future, especially if things go badly in Iraq.” “If” things go badly? Where have you been the past four Republican dominated years? For someone who consistently claims not to be a Republican, Glenn sure regularly regurgitates plenty of their left-bashing talking points.
“So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you’re coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shout the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell.” Dave “Mudcat Got No Irony” Saunders
“We’re all just driving in our cars, flipping each other off and cussing each other out when we get cut off. Imagine doing that to someone in the grocery store, or at work. The Internet hides us just like our cars, and it helps keep us detached from the fact that there are real people on the other end, not the morons or villains it’s convenient for us in our outrage to invent.” Wilson Miner
“Wordpress is the Windows XP of blogging tools. There. I said it.” N. Caldwell
Media Idiot Hotlinks Image, Not Once, But Twice, Then Blames … Hackers! — Max Blumenthal hallucinates, “Tony Perkins has orchestrated the hacking of this post [...] The photo of Christopher Hitchens posing with the Family Research Council’s Witherspoon Fellows was scrubbed from FRC’s site today out of fear that I would link to it again.” No, they were blocking your hotlinking. Learn about web etiquette, indeed, how the whole web works, before you look even more foolish. If that’s possible.
Textpattern CS Pricing — I can’t believe they are charging for Textpattern now. I thought I was part of the “team,” but this is the first I’ve heard about it. Maybe it’s time for me to just write my own dang CMS.
Call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct — This is an April Fool’s joke, right? You can’t put the worms back in the can, they’ve been out and multiplying for so long that they won’t even fit in a 50 gallon drum.
