Well, it whizzes by pretty fast for a human, but for a new art form . . .

Or communication form . . .

I'd say it officially ended for blogland with the current dispute over Kos accepting money from Dean and other unnamed candidates while writing about them during the last election cycle--about Dean for sure; the others, who knows, hence the problem.

Two good pieces about it from our two best web sources, Salon and Slate (more or less)--Scott Rosenberg  and Chris Suellentrop, respectively.

Have you been following any of this? Man. Quite the eruption of anger, frustration and middle fingers at this pivotal moment in the blog childhood. I certainly understand it. We're essentially facing a call for new rules of some sort, more restrictions, tighter self-policing . . .

Who the hell wants that?

Well . . .

I blog, addictively. I've tried to quit several times, but I just enjoy it too much. I love the freedom I have there -- express myself a lot more loosely than I would in a magazine or newspaper (and in my case, lazily; I don't even proofread for typos there.)

So the last thing I really want is rules. Except . . .

Except come on. Nobody gets away with a blissfully stringless world where can jaunt about all day gushing out art and opinions with never a question raised about the man, woman, family or corporation(s) quietly supplying the money to feed, house and entertain you. Not if you want an audience to actually consume your work.

Even if you're Pablo Picasso, if you were accepting large sums from some predecessor to Amnesty International for six months before you painted Guernica, you can bet you'd have a lot of 'splaining to do. Your admirers and detractors would still be arguing about it 50 years later. With good reason.

It's not pleasant. It's nicer to answer to no one. And for awhile, we could. Blogs were so new, so fragmented, so inconsequential to the larger culture at first, we could do anything we wanted. Infants get away with anything.

But the minute we started having a real impact, we should have seen those days were numbered. Once you DO matter, you enter a vastly different arena, and the rules really are different. I'm certainly not suggesting the same rules as journalists--I love my blog freedom, and I'm not ready to adhere to all the rules of journalism there, but it would be silly an irresponsible to presume that I don't have any rules to live by.

I understand the urge for people like Kos to lift their middle finger. But he’s a smart man, smart enough that he’ll be embarrassed by that response one day.

For the period in question, I think disclosure of the Dean money was fine. I remember thinking about it at the time, and thinking that we’re all muddling along here, he’s putting tremendous time into this blog, and he needs the freedom to pursue an income and pursue this blog. And he’s being up-front about it, so fine.

(Though my inclination is also to agree with Chris Suellentrop that Kos was wrong in refusing to disclose which other candidates he worked for, even while setting up funding drives to support certain candidates. )

But that was 2003-2004. The blogworld changed fast. He ended that election cycle a completely different force than he began it. It would be way, way, way irresponsible to do it in again in 2008, or even 2006.

He did nothing wrong taking money from Dean. But that doesn’t me, he, you, me, or anyone else can get live by those rules in the future.

In Kos' case--or the case of any blog that wants to be taken remotely seriously in the political realm--that means no money from politicians. That's a no-brainer. (I won't repeat those arguments. Check out the Slate piece or any number of others if it seems kind of brainerish to you.)

Other blogs, other choices. We're all starting to face them.

It was never money for me, because nobody ever offered me money for my blog services. The toughest one for me involves my personal life: how much of sordid details can reveal and still be respected as a journalist? But that's a restriction imposed from the other direction. A better example for this discussion is my ability to discuss other artists, writers, reality-show contestants . . . I assumed I could trash anybody out there who I thought deserved it. I was just a speck out in the great void, it's not like I was going to offend them personally.

Then I got an email from a writer asking why I had written about her work so mercilessly. Man. I felt like crap. Never expected her to read it. And when I went back and reread it, I had been pretty careless in dismissing her anyway. It was more a disagreement in taste.

That was the first of tough lessons for me that what I write there can have consequences. Which imposes responsibilities on me, whether I want to acknowledge them or not. I can decide which ones I'm willing to accept, but they're still there.

It seems a little silly that I had to learn that one. I've been a journo for years, and of course I know I have to think through my critique very carefully if I "published" it. But the blog was supposed to be different. I could act a lot looser there, just share my opinions as I might hanging out with a group of friends. Salon was big enough to get noticed, my blog was just a speck, so I could say whatever I wanted.

Not in the age of google. And not with the amount of effort I was putting into the blog at that time. The more energy I devoted to it, the higher my google rank rose, and the more likely people I was writing about would stumble upon themselves there.

Welcome to responsibilityland. Of course I still had the constitutional right to trash anybody I felt like, but I could no longer do it in blissful ignorance that it would never hurt anyone.

I imposed a new set of rules on myself. But I get lots of exceptions. Reality-show contestants, for one. The way I see it, the whole reason for their television existence lies in chiefly in our ability to have fun with them: to pick the ones we like and dislike, the ones we admire and the ones that drive us freaking nuts! That’s what they’re there for, they know that, they buy into that by participating, so they’re really fair game.

(Unlike, say politicians or actors or any forms of artists. Most of them are there for politics or art, and their fame is a byproduct--integral to their reach, but not the goal in itself. Different set of rules, in my book.)

Reality contestants are an easy exception. The rest of my rules get kind of fuzzy sometimes. I'm still working them out, but I've got a pretty good idea in most cases, and I still feel comfy acting a lot looser here than I would "in print." We'll see how long that lasts. Or whether I regret it.

But nothing is nearly as loose as the day I first signed up for this blog 2.5 years ago.

Childhood is over friends. Hope you got in on the fun while we were still kids. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. I know I did.

I have mixed feelings about not applying for blog press credentials. Too much going on in my life this summer. Got to focus. Still, it would have been a blast.

So instead, I direct you to my friend Jeralyn Merritt, who does the TalkLeft blog. She's got three posts up already, and you can really catch the enthusiasm so missing from the newsmodels on TV.

She was featured in the blog stories by both the NYT and W Post today. The Times actually opened with her, and the Post used a picture of her, so you can finally see what she looks like. If I weren't a homo . . .

Really enjoying watching her light up.

Here's a quote from the Post piece:

"I'm committed to seeing Bush out of office in November and want to do what I can to help," says Jeralyn Merritt, a Denver defense lawyer who writes the TalkLeft blog. "To me the purpose of a convention is solidarity and getting strength from each other and renewed commitment to a joint purpose. I am a cheerleader. I am a partisan. I am an advocate. My goal is to get everyone else stirred up."

And lets contrast that to hacknews quote from Newsweek's Howard Fineman:

Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who will be filing online dispatches from his BlackBerry on the convention floor, calls it "a real-time EKG of my response to the convention as a reporter and a yakker. We're all going to spend our time reading each other's blogs and blog our way to oblivion. If there was any real news, we'd all be too busy to blog."

Blech! He really talks that way.

Meanwhile, Salon's Tim Grieve, just posted a great story on the first afternoon:

"That flag is our flag"
Veterans, led by war heroes Wesley Clark and Max Cleland, charge out of the trenches in Boston for John Kerry

Reading the story gave me the shivers. Exactly what this party has needed for 30 years now. The big question in my mind: Why did they relegate it to an afternoon slot? This should have been the main event one night.

Oh well. It's a start.

I barely get enough time to write my damn blog, so I don't know how people ever find the team to read a bunch of them regularly too. I finally got around to checking out one I had heard a lot about -- World O'Crap -- and it made me smile repeatedly.

Great attitude, fun writing style. And lots of insight.

She just wrapped up two days of relentlessly defending the left from rightwing attackdogs trying to make hay out of the fact that we finally tracked down Saddam Hussien -- as if that suddenly justifies the mess we've created over there. I wish I had the strength to do all that. Fun little swipe at the notorious Andrew Sullivan in a post called The Magic Ends Too Soon.

Hopefully the title is enough to give you a taste of her style. It's indicative of the rest to follow. Here's another morsel from a little earlier: 

Now, let's check in with Hannity and Nonentity.  Why, it seems that Sean is asking Al D'Amato and Geraldine Ferraro how the Democratic candidates can be stupid enough to stay in the race, now that 59% of Americans say that we should have gone to war with Iraq.  (Well, it's actually it was 62% on Sunday -- that 3% increase is the big news which Sean is trying to exploit; but we should give him a break, because he was born too early for for Bush's "No Sean Left Behind" program, which would ensure that all Fox hosts learn reading and math.)

I've added her to my blogroll down there on the left, so you can find her later if you forget to bookmark.

Hopefully I won't dig a little deeper and learn she's hopelessly lobbying for John Kerry for president or something.

A great little site called Walter In Denver (great taste in music, among other things) has just begun a nice little weekly feature called Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup.

Believe it or not, there are some really interesting, and/or popular Colorado blogs, including Walter, TalkLeft, WorldWide Rant, VodkaPundit and ResurrectionSong. (I'm forgetting somebody.)

This feature picks the best post of the week from each, so have yourself a little sample. I chose a dark one.

Be careful. I just typed in littletinypenis.com and got a porn site, by mistake. I meant tinylittlepenis.com, which is the fun little url for The Rabbit Blog. Man, she must have started that thing ages ago to edge out all the pornsters buying up all those urls. And she later bought http://www.rabbitblog.com/ and redirects to it, so you don't have to worry about your work thinking you're a weird freak into small dicks.

Hennyway, mainly writing to say how much I've been henjoying her little blog lately. She's doing the love-counselor thing at the moment, responding to letters, and something about the freakishness of a few of the letters and her picking just the right tone to respond that made me feel better this weekend when I was wallowing in my own crap.

And it's written by Heather Havrilesky, who Salon's wonderful TV critic, Most Gifted Writer of the moment, and  finalist for Most Gifted Writer Ever there, in a dead heat with her good friend and predecessor in the position,  Carina Chocano, who opened up the position by moving to Entertainment Weekly (a year ago?), but has just moved on/up to the LA Times, as their TV critic. In Heather's words:

Now Carina will be taking Howard Rosenberg's place, substituting his rather straightforward reviews with her sharp, funny, imaginative writing.

Check them both out. And be prepared to snicker.

Those would include blogging.

Please remind me never to blog after ten or more drinks.

No matter how much of it I have danced off.

Luckily I have the power to delete it. I try to avoid using that power very often, but I think we're all better off without the retarded post that once sat here.

Man, if you had any doubts about the integrity of the Bush presidency, just check out his blog.

Everybody is going to do some spinning of their news, but his blog is just one gross distortion after another. His people just have no integrity whatsoever, do they?

Today's swill:

A piece titled "Return of power brightens Iraqis" summarizes a USA Today piece as a gleefull story about the lights coming on in Iraq, saying how great things are now compared to pre-war Iraq.

What a crock! I guess they assume their readers are all lemmings and won't actually follow the link.

The actual story paints a much bleaker picture, with people pissed as hell that we threw the country into darkness for six straight months, and relieved that it's finally back on. The Bush blog segues into the story this way:

Written from Baghdad, a piece in today’s USA Today captures the people’s excitement as the lights come back on and the positive effects their newfound power is having on Iraq’s burgeoning economy.

But conveniently leaves out passages from the piece like this:

The lack of electricity has angered Iraqis and created problems for the U.S.-led coalition.

As for the blog spin that Iraqis are rejoicing about being better off than before, that's just pure bull. The piece actually quotes megawatt figures in question:

Power output reached 4,461 megawatts this week, exceeding the prewar level of 4,107 megawatts in February. A year ago it was 4,867 megawatts. But electricity demand is down now because many factories and businesses are closed.

So they're ahead of the period where both countries were preparing for war, but still not up to levels before it all began. All in all, pretty close, but hardly any great improvement.

And of course, the little downside: the power matters less because the economy has ground to a halt. Factories are not running, businesses shut down . . . That sounds promising.

Those Bushies. Liars, liars, liars. Yes, things apparently are starting to improve a bit--from the fire back up to the frying pan, perhaps--but this rosy picture of the country back on its feet and people dancing in the streets . . . Why don't they just level with people and admit how long it's going to take, and how damn slow and painful it's going to be.

---

On a smaller front, here's the opening of his latest post:

Markets React to Jobless Claims

CBS Marketwatch is reporting that U.S. stock indexes have surged to new yearly highs after a fall in jobless claims released this morning suggest a strengthening economic recovery and better than expected third-quarter growth.

Here's the actual sentence from CBS Marketwatch: "The major U.S. stock indexes surged to new yearly highs after a fall in initial unemployment claims suggested the economic recovery may no longer be jobless and Yahoo's better than expected third-quarter report emboldened buyers."

If you know anything about the stock market, you know that earnings reports from key companies like Yahoo move the markets in big ways. That may well have had the great impact. (And the next sentence added a third reason (though it was also related to the economy).

Reminds me of the movie quote-ads, that will take a statement like, ". . . in a truly dreadful year, this is perhaps the best movie of the summer so far," and run an ad with a banner head saying, "Roger Ebert raves, 'best movie of the summer!'

At least they didn't completely distort this one. It was half true. But only half. I guess that's above average in the World of Immorality where the conservatives reside.