The Devil's excrement (on Salon) posts from Venezuela. That's a start.
Tom modestly doesn't mention he posts from Paris. I'm posting from Ireland. And, of course, the Admirably Polylinguistic Michel Vuijlsteke's Weblog gives us that Dutch feel. We'll never get to meet Scott Rosenberg in the flesh, but who knows— Salon might start using us as foreign correspondents.
5:58:41 PM 
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Apparently joueb is beating out blogue, with webillard used for a filter-type weblog?
Follow the discussion at Blogroots.
categories: metablog
4:44:30 PM say what []
From left to right: Scott Rosenberg, Rebecca Blood, Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, Meg Hourihan, Paul Grabowicz
The leftmore photo above links to a much higher-quality image.
Most of the photos came out blurry. All the ones of the informal schmoozing afterward are. One or two were so blurry that I couldn't use them. The rest I think convey an idea of the hub bub that ensued:
categories: metablog
2:27:46 PM say what []
Referrer rankings for RSS referrers hosted at radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic:
categories: metablog
1:33:52 PM say what []
In petermemes, Peter Merholz captures his impressions of the panel and dinner afterward, finding much of the discussion old hat and the journalists jaded about their own profession, except for Rosenberg:
He was possibly the first "journalist" to write about weblogs, and definitely the first to do so intelligently. Scott "gets" the formal quality of weblogs, which surprisingly few do.I'm trying not nitpick, but I do disagree with some of the specifics of peterme's comments and I detect a touch of world-weariness, along the lines of "Haven't we been through all this before?" Well, of course you have o pioneer of this sub-new-mid-early-late-new medium, but the greater polis is still just getting up to speed on the conversation. So a few comments
Best part of the entry, a must-read clarification of types:
In these kinds of discussions, the question, "Are weblogs journalism?" inevitably comes up, demonstrating how people confuse form and content. Weblogs are a form (not a medium... the Web is a medium), and journalism is a practice. Journalism can be practiced in many media and forms. The two are, at best orthogonal. One definitely doesn't replace the other.Bravo!
But the idea of firsties is slippery:
Scott pointed out how weblogs are something that, simply, couldn't appear in any other medium, and that's what makes them special. Andrew Dillon posited that home pages were the first uniquely digital genre, and I would argue that weblogs are the second.I guess if you narrowly constrain the idea of first to mean first widely practiced and understood digital to also mean internetworked and interactive, then yes home pages were the first, and weblogs the second, more or less. I think after the precision about, peterme should have stuck to "form" and eschewed "genre,' but that is nitpicking.
I absolutely agee with:
I find discussions of the "impact" of weblogs on journalism kind of non-starters. There's inevitably a tension or dichotomy set up that I don't believe is really there.
Merholz tars the professional journalists as bitter apparently because they do not see journalism as out of reach of most webloggers and do not limit their idea of journalism to its late 20th century mass-broadcast media form. I'm not sure this is fair. Perhaps they are less romantic about their own profession (and more romantic about weblogs) than the webloggers are?
I've noticed more discussion lately of early newspapers and how they were often run by one person, or published by someone on the side because they owned a printing business, with parallels to early webloggers being web-design/publishing/hosting literate.
Also lost in the entry is the journalist's awareness of the idea that webloggers en masse contribute to a media soup or compost, not necessarily any diagreement about the role of blogger and journo being about to be conflated in anybody's mind.
The feeling that someone is pissing in your pool could occur to journalists seeing a new tinge to their media broth or to webloggers seeing journalists step in and try to define something that they may or may not understand. (By way of analogy, read jazz musicians all last century complaining about journalists giving their music names like jazz, and even then you don't have the closeness of two activies involving writing).
We are all writing each other. Pros and amateurs. This is powerful. In the written world, language is magic and power expresses itself. Many journalists have been able to import a readership into the blogosphere that dwarfs what a good-to-middlin' blog can accumulate from the ground up.
When professional journalists chatted about blogs in Slate a few weeks ago they said most of the same things most people in or on the edges of blogistan say and have said. Mostly nothing new. But still a lot of webloggers felt annoyed that their chitchat was given the imprimatur of "what to think about blogs" by the fame, media, corporate, publishing, capitalist, democratic, whatever world we live in.
Anyway.
categories: memewatch metablog
12:38:54 PM say what []
My referrer log today shows about 20 hits from variations on people searching for Véronique de Cock, a spillover from my metacommentary on Michel's rise in the Salon rankings. Michel is now posting occasionally in English, something I selfishly am glad to see.
Of course I'm not completely monolingual. Everyone speaks different dialects. Maybe I should do some posts in neurotic passive-aggressive stylee?
More mentions on other people's weblogs ... there must be more mentions, because apparently I have been in the top 100 links from weblogs.... On the other hand: it looks as if the storm is slowly but surely dying down. Phew.
11:53:15 AM say what []
By the way, I'd love to run some comparisons of Slash, Scoop, and Nuke sometime but I don't have the expertise or experience to do it myself. I've worked with a PHP-Nuke installation, but I still don't have total mastery of it, and I've never worked with Slash or Scoop.
If anyone wants to do such comparisons and let me know I'd be happy to link to it or add the content here. I've been thinking lately of some ways to open up this blog to other contributors, maybe by setting aside a special guest channel and then aggregating posts into it.
categories: memewatch metablog
10:18:24 AM say what []
I read most of the handbook that night. It's brief but packed with information and advice. I will write up a formal review after I'm done writing about the panel. I would consider it to be in the lineage of other writing and style guides. Interactive writing in a community of reader/writers is a new branch of the writing medium and it demands its own handbooks to help newbies get up to speed and to help experienced people improve their work and notice their blind spots.
We've Got Blog was a fun read. I skimmed over half of it. I've never objected to collecting online material in book form and don't understand people who object to it on principle. Yes, some content native to the web would not work or would not make any sense or would lose most of its charm in a book, but the idea that things can not be adapted from one medium to another does not convince me. What an impoverished media landscape we'd live in if the lines between one medium and the next were rigid and did not permit crossing over.
I do think the subtitle (how weblogs are changing our culture) does the book a disservice. I recognize the publisher's desire to make a bold statement, and it is catchier than "a bunch of earlier web writing and blog posts about blogging," if less accurate.
I'm still looking forward to reading We Blog to see what pb, Meg, and Matt have to say about this phenomenon. Both Meg and Rebecca told me the other night that they had been approached out of the blue by their publishers, and since Wiley specializes in technical and business topics, apparently there was some tension around the book's approach or coverage: namely, how technical to be.
These technology/culture innovations give rise both to think-pieces about what does it all mean (which are fun to write but sometimes difficult to sell) as well as more mundane books about how to use the new techne (which are often not as fun to write even if they do have a little perspective and advice folded in, but can be easier to sell). I'm not sure if We Blog tries to do both. When I read it, I'll report back.
As for the other usual suspects, I gather that Blogging: has more to do with using a weblog CMS to add daily or frequently updated content to a commercial website (a good angle), and Blog On is a curiosity, seeming to lump together blogs and discussion boards in larger set of features to add to web sites to facilitate community. Everyone I've discussed this book with wants to know where Todd Stauffer's (the author's) weblog is.
(Of course Rebecca, the contributors to We've Got, pb, Meg, and Matt are all well known bloggers and Biz Stone is from Xanga and presumably has a blog.)
The two O'Reilly books, naturally, are more about how to implement the technology. People keep citing the Running Weblogs with Slash book even as the debate about whether group/collaborative weblogs (such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin) should be considered blogs at all. (That is, are "blogs" weblogs run by individuals, or is that not part of the definition? Rebecca actually uses blog in her book to mean a more personal/diary type weblog, so these terms are definitely still in flux.)
The other O'Reilly book, Essential Blogging boasts a long author list packed with well known bloggers and stands out as the first general introduction to blogging technology out there. I reviewed the book in galleys after expressing some interest in contributing back when I pitched a blog book ideas myself to O'Reilly a few months ago, and I recall that it packed a wide range of coverage into a fairly short page count, but that it wasn't able to delve too deeply into any one software approach. It may suffer from being too hardcore techie for rank beginners and too broad and general for hardcore techies.
Of course, there are more books on the way.
categories: metablog
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