Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room
Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room moves to new digs on Typepad.
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kottke.org posts about weblogs
Excerpt of The Washingtonienne’s self-titled novel
Excerpt of The Washingtonienne’s self-titled novel. Wow, that’s bad. She should have kept her day job.
The blog for Me and You and
The blog for Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July’s acclaimed new movie. The most recent entries are about the film’s win at Cannes.
Man supposedly caught cheating with Cameron Diaz
Man supposedly caught cheating with Cameron Diaz responds to the press coverage on his weblog. “I told my wife, ‘One of the reasons this is so stupid is because you know that if I was hooking up with [Cameron Diaz] you’d have been the first one I high-fived.’”
Internal NY Times report recommends the creation
Internal NY Times report recommends the creation of a NY Times blog.
Matt’s moblogging the birth of his daughter
Matt’s moblogging the birth of his daughter. We’ll soon see the heir to the MetaFilter empire.
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials. Wait, doesn’t the NY Times have a web site?
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links)
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links) with their offline circulation. The Christian Science Monitor had the highest ratio by far, with the Wall Street Journal being almost invisible on the web (which will eventually affect their influence, I think).
“Get over yourself and drop the ‘MSM’ bullshit, please”
“Get over yourself and drop the ‘MSM’ bullshit, please”. “If you use the term ‘MSM’ in a unironic way to denote the ‘Mainstream Media’ I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.”
Interface Culture
How well does the 6 year-old analysis of how we use and will use information technology contained in the pages of Interface Culture hold up? Not too bad, actually. Consider the following paragraph from the “Windows” chapter on what metaforms the Web might be capable of supporting (paragraph breaks and links mine):
Over the next decade, this stitching together of different news and opinion sources will slowly become a type of journalism in its own right, a new form of reporting that synthesizes and digests the great mass of information disseminated online everyday. (Clipping services have occupied a comparable niche for years, though their use is largely limited to corporate executives and other journalists.)
Total News gives us a glimpse of what these new information filters will look like, but the site neglects the defining element of a successful metaform, which is an actual editorial or evaluative sensibility. Total News simply repackages the major online news services indiscriminately; it may be a more convenient format, but it adds nothing to the actual content of the information. More advanced news “browsers” will include a genuine critical temperament, a perspective on the world, an editorial sensibility that governs the decisions about which stories to repackage. The possibilities are endless: a filter for left-leaning economic and political stories; a filter for sports coverage that emphasizes the psychological dimension of professional athletics; a filter that focuses exclusively on independent film news and commentary.
The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn’t require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day’s news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.
When the whole blog thing blew up huge and then people like Rafat Ali, Andrew Sullivan, and Nick Denton started making money off of them, Johnson must have danced around the apartment in his underpants (perhaps like Tom Cruise in Risky Business) shouting, “I told you so, I told you so, I called the hell out of that one! In your face!”
Road Trip ‘01
Road Trip ‘01 (9 days, 10 teams, 7 games, 6 stadiums, 2 buddies, 1 truck) is the perfect use of the weblog format…not to mention a great way to see the country. The road trip version of the famous map of Napolean’s 1812 Russian campaign by Charles Joseph Minard is great too. (Also, they need gas. Fill ‘em up.)
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