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(via Corante on Blogging / Blogging News), it appears that Andrew Sullivan is now exhibiting classic blogger behavior, citing an article in the mainstream media and complaining about how it didn't mention him:

Andrew Sullivan: "Funny, isn't it, that the New York Times would run a piece about how weblogs can lead to friction between bloggers and their mainstream media outlets, without mentioning yours truly."

Today our Pinocchio is a real boy!

categories: metablog

6:04:53 PM    say what []

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Bite Media: [from cjf-forshac-the foreign desk-chris forshay]: the [uk] observer, 2/17/02: Terry Jones

To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before. It's so simple. [more]

categories: x-pollen

5:17:26 PM    say what []

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Well, that little thing I blogged over the weekend about being motivated by orgasms, praise, and money (not necessarily in that order) got picked up by Dave Winer on a slow news day and drove a bunch more traffic my way. I fixed some typos but only after the first few hundred had already read what was a fairly frank and unguarded (if also somewhat silly) post.

I still haven't fixed the typos here at Bodega, though. This is one problem of my sprawling unsolved content-management apparati. I sort of envy Scot Hacker his recent move from LJ to MT, though he does miss some things about LJ. Consolidation will come but for now there's no time.

But back on the subject of motivation, I dug out a Richard Brautigan poem that was tugging on a neuron:

Hey! This is What It's All About

for Jeff Sheppard

No publication
No money
No star
No fuck

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A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked me to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (Delacorte Press)
[bodega]

categories: x-pollen

2:17:56 PM    say what []

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Last week Jonathan Delacour removed the calendar from his weblog and explained why in Say goodbye to useless calendars:

it occurs to me that I never use the monthly calendar to access previous posts on my own site or any other site I visit. And, a quick check of my blogroll revealed that only a third of the sites displayed the standard weblog calendar on their main page. Those who don't have a monthly calendar include links to either monthly (the majority) or weekly archives.

He goes on to complain about weekly archives and their effects on google searches, and he points to a full-screen calendar with post titles and a photo randomizer for a possible replacement tenant for the screen real estate vacated by the calendar.

categories: metablog

2:05:52 PM    say what []

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I meant to blog this when Moxie first posted it. It cracked me up:

Who needs the Men of Enron? These men are hot!

Plus, any babe who knows when to use "complementary" instead of "complimentary" warms the cockles of whatever an old copyeditor like myself has that passes for a heart.

categories: metablog

1:50:13 PM    say what []

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In an entry called Candid Camera Raven discussed the Irish Traveller background of the caught-on-video daughter-beater named Toogood.

This entry of his shows up on the first page of results of a Google search for Irish Travellers and the like. Hits ensue.

Quoth the Raven:

The coverage over at ABC news and also at CNN both featured the department store video clip (viewable provided you subscribe to their video feeds), which raises the question of whether it is ethical to provide a streaming movie of a mother abusing her daughter.

categories: salonika memewatch

12:24:09 PM    say what []

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So Essential Blogging has cats on the cover, eh? Is this that the cat meme again? I've been trying to note when I see that meme in use these days. In print it's hard to capture, but I have snagged these arbitrary online appearances of the cat meme:

• The Blog Phenomenon (PC Mag):

  The vanity page is dead; long live the Blog. The vanity Web page has lost momentum. People who posted one have already done so, and the growth has slowed. Most are uninteresting and uninspired. Cat pictures dominate too many of them.

• Backup Brain:

  Many people say that the Web is all about people posting pictures of their cats. And some people say it as if that's a bad thing. This site is for just those people.

• A BurningBird comment that is unavailable as that site converts to YA content management system.
• Movable Type's Standalone Trackback documentation:

  For example, if you run a site about cats, and want to have a way for users to ping your site with entries they write about their own cats, you could set up a TrackBack URL like http://www.foo.com/bar/tb.cgi?tb_id=cats, then give that URL out on your site. End users could then associate this URL with a Cats category in their own blog, and ping you whenever they wrote about cats.

• My own recent tutorial at the Screen Savers site:

  Dreamweaver MX is the latest version of Macromedia's Web-design program. It's used by everyone from beginners putting up pictures of their cats to professionals coding dynamic database-backed Web applications.

• A post by Reverend Mykeru to a thread at Metafilter:

  I wish I remember who said it, but "The invention of the printing press made control of information difficult. The net made it impossible". Sure, most of what gets published is pictures of people's cat, but it is the idea of cheap self publishing, that can potentially have a huge readership—if that's your bag, baby—is still the most appealing thing about the net, and blogging, and the most cause in some people's minds for suspicion.

• A post Mark Bernstein made to his blog's Home Page category:

  Weblogs are simply a natural outgrowth of the old home page. David Siegel's popular Killer Web Sites book, way back in 1996, popularized the notion that frequent updates were important and that it made no sense to waste all your most-visible screen space on corporate logos or pictures of your cat.

Most of these citations deal with blogs partly because that's the kind of info I trawl the net for these days and partly because blogs are memetically related to home pages and thus cat pictures.

categories: memewatch x-pollen

12:15:54 PM    say what []

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Next in the stack of noneasy stuff to do for this blog, after finishing the panel write-up, comes writing more considered reviews of The Weblog Handbook and We've Got Blog, which I bought the night of the panel and read (somewhere between devoured and skimmed) that night. I posted some initial impressions the next day but that is no substitute for a more thorough review, so those are still to come.

Nat Torkington from O'Reilly then asked if I'd like to review Essential Blogging and of course I said yes, please send me a copy. It arrived today, so that goes next in the stack.

categories: metablog

12:13:01 PM    say what []

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Internet Time Blog has a section devoted to blogging and recently ran a summary of a lot of the questions and choice quotations from last week's Berkeley J-school panel. (The one about each blog being a single neuron in the global brain was me talking from the audience, I believe.)

categories: metablog

10:46:15 AM    say what []

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A tip of the cap to Michel Vuijlsteke for spotting this line in Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon. Tomorrow is himself a webblogger, of course, blogging at This Modern World.

categories: salonika metablog

10:07:27 AM    say what []

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In the business section of today's New York Times there's an article about journalistic weblogs and issues of independence, editorial oversight, and legal liability.

They talk to many of the usual suspects, such as Eric Alterman, whose pro blog is one of seven at MSNBC:

"I can't imagine a nicer way to make a living," said Mr. Alterman, who is paid by MSNBC to write about politics, the media and culture in his Web log. "It's therapeutic, and you get things off your chest. I can write whatever I want." [I notice Jrobb pulled this same quotation]

They also quote Dan Gillmor and discuss the "Steve Olafson fired by the Houston Chronicle" story.

Commenting on the same article, Dylan Tweney writes in tweneyblog, "Thought experiment: What will happen to the free-and-easy culture of the blogosphere after the first weblogger (journalist or otherwise) gets sued for libel?"

(And, yes, I am still working on my full write-up of the panel at the Berkeley J-school last week.)

Strangely, the Times used "web logs" (two words) in its headline but 'Blogs' in the sidebar blurb on the front page of the business section.

categories: metablog

9:06:17 AM    say what []

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