Category: Blogging

Unfortunately, the governor doesn’t seem to have elaborated for whom taxpayers’ dollars should be used to purchase sexual performance drugs.

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, today:

Sometimes this job is too easy. That whooshing noise you heard Tuesday was every pundit north of St. Louis lunging for a keyboard to heap ridicule on Gov. Blagojevich for his “testicular virility” quip.

But what about Aaron? He’s not north of St. Louis. Perhaps Steinberg doesn’t think Aaron is a pundit like he (Steinberg) is.

Lileks today:

“You have FOUR STAR WARS?” Gnat asked. “Wow.”

There are actually five – well, six. But I sold the first one.

“Why?”

“Because it was an embarrassing piece of tripe.”

“What’s tripe?”

“It’s a kind of fish.”

Everyone except Lileks, and now his daughter, knows that tripe is cattle guts.

I’m not too proud to LOUDLY CORRECT MISINFORMATION IN THE MAINSTREAMISH MEDIA! I am a BLOGGER! It’s what I do to feel better about myself!

I’ve been skimming David Greenberg’s rather disagreeable posts at Daniel Drezner.com and quietly disagreed them. Little did I realize that Greenberg’s excursion into the blogosphere was an anthropoorelitist study where he was Dian Fossey and we were the gorillas. He’s published his findings in the peer-reviewed New York Times:

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn’t need only new information. I needed a gimmick – a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

And:

It’s not that the readers were dim. Some forced me to refine or clarify my arguments. But the responses certainly got reductive, very quickly. And for all the individuality that blogs are supposed to offer, there was an amazing amount of groupthink – since some of them were getting their talking points from … other blogs.

By the end of the week, with other deadlines looming and my patience exhausted, I began to post less and less. There was a piece for Slate due, a book chapter to finish, my baby boy, Leo, to entertain and a piece to write for the Week in Review.

So you see, while he enjoyed his trips to the darkest underbelly of commentary, he had real work to do, and with regret could no longer post to the low quality standards he’d set for himself and the presumably knuckle-dragging readership and commentariat.

Nothing like a little slumming to shore up your liberal cred. Oh, I know, it’s under the guise of broadening your horizons or trying something new. If you perform the task with the idea that it will confirm your preconceptions, though, you’re probably right–but your horizons are no more broad, and you’ve really only tried the same old thing.

More at:

• Outside the Beltway
• Pejmanesque
• Patterico’s Pontifications

All right, have at it, gentle reader, but understand that I can and will arbitrarily remove comments for any reason I want.

Because that’s my name at the top of the page.

1. Content not locked behind subscription/ads.

As is often the case, I follow a day featuring an Instalanche with a day of nothing, just so I can sqander those residual hitz on emptiness.

Still, you could always click over to Draft Matt Blunt 2008 to see some of the reasons why Missouri Governor Matt Blunt would make a good president in 2008. Here are two to start:

1. He’s not Rod Blagojevich.
2. He’s not Jim Doyle.

Happy Star Wars Day from Michele Catalano.

I don’t normally read left-of-center blogs, but I find Blame Bush! oddly compelling….

Tomorrow will mark the beginning of my third year with this blog.

Here’s the first post as proof.

Two years of thoughtful commentary, witty insight, and modesty, and still the same eight readers.

Thanks, guys.

Looks like John Cole isn’t on Hewitt’s side either.

I might describe this as a conservative crack-up, but I’m not a professional radio host.

Apparently, Instapundit is not on Hugh Hewitt’s side.

Let’s settle this like Floridians; one gets a box cutter, the other gets a gun store.

The first weekly Carnival of the Honkers is up at angelweave.

Hurry, for this will probably be the only Carnival of the Honkers, which makes it a blogosphere collectible.

So as I monitored my daily hits, I could have wondered why I was not getting any hits from my trackback to a VodkaPundit post in this post yesterday defending Kansas and attacking those who would attack Kansas. As Matt at Overtaken by Events discovered, the guest blogging author of the original post closed comments and eliminated all trackbacks.

Poor form, Peter.

Both Richard Roeper and Neil Steinberg spend some of their columns today pooh-poohing blogs.

Roeper:

And of course, blogs. By law, every story about the news business must include mention of the blog as the way of the future.

The media landscape is changing, and that’s a positive thing. We’re supposed to be living in a democracy in which all voices have an equal opportunity to be heard. The more platforms in the public square, the better.

Still, we need to keep a sense of perspective. The new media doesn’t yet have a fraction of the clout, power, success and influence still enjoyed by the old media.

Steinberg:

On Feb. 14, 1978, President Jimmy Carter and his guests spent an evening in the White House watching “Citizens Band,” a movie about a CB vigilante named Spider who roams the airwaves pouring abuse on those whose conduct falls short of his lofty standards of radio etiquette.

I thought of the CB craze while watching an excruciating CNN “Inside the Blogs” report on a blogger — someone who keeps an online diary — who was accredited and given access to a White House press conference, making him “perhaps the first blogger to cover the daily press briefings.”

Yowza. Though they also let in a turkey at Thanksgiving, CNN found this particular entrance highly significant, perhaps some kind of turning point, and as the protracted, painful segment unfolded, the reporter tried to present the usual piranha frenzy in the so-called “blogosphere” by actually scrolling down, on air, blocks of verbiage on her computer screen. “It’s hard to read,” she said as the text flew by.

Is it ever. So why was CNN fooled? I know producers have time to fill, but they stumbled onto a common misperception that deserves note. Stuck as always in the jail of the present moment, we mistake White House or presidential involvement for a sign of importance or respectability.

Wow, the blogs as citizen’s band radio. I posted a comment of that stripe years ago one some blog, but it’s lost to the ether. A little Google searching shows that a high number of other people have had the same insight. On the other hand, not many of us have twice-a-week columns for a major metro tabloid.

CNet reports: Spyware infiltrates blogs:

Hackers are using blogs to infect computers with spyware, exposing serious security flaws in self-publishing tools used by millions of people on the Web.

The problem involves the use of JavaScript and ActiveX, two common methods used to launch programs on a Web page. Security experts said malicious programmers can use JavaScript and ActiveX to automatically deliver spyware from a blog to people who visit the site with a vulnerable Web browser.

Spyware tools also have been hidden inside JavaScript programs that are offered freely on the Web for bloggers to use to enhance their sites with new features such as music. As a result, bloggers who use infected tools could unwittingly turn their sites into a delivery platform for spyware.

Well, when you’re not technical and you’re cutting and pasting code from unknown Web sites into your blog templates, you’re assuming that the code’s author hasn’t put a little something extra in it.

This is not new; remember when I uncovered that Bravenet counters were delivering pop-up ads when used on blogs?

No? My moment in the investigative sun, and there was a solar eclipse that day.

Lileks today:

Wednesday will have a special surprise, and yes, I know I’m sounding like a grade school teacher.

Exclusive speculation: THE BLEAT IS GOING GROUP BLOG.

You read this groundless speculation here first.