One of the first Weblog-like journalists to get some attention was Matt Drudge, with his coyote-date ugly webpage. Quite the media darling, he sort of carved out the whole Internet Journalist thing and yesterday I see at Metafilter that he's hit the one billion page-hit mark so far this year. I recall visiting the Drudge Report quite a long time ago—last century, in fact—and not only was his page unbearably disorganized and stupid-looking, but several of the links on it either didn't work or led to incorrect or just-plain false information. So there's some discussion of this over at Metafilter and the comments fall into two main camps: Some people opine that his site sucks, and that he posts crap. Others say that he's always on the cutting edge and gives you the hot, breaking, insider scoop long before anybody else does.

Well, his leading story yesterday (and it's still front and center today, too), is a bit titled, "OUTRAGE GROWS OVER PENTAGON PLAN: SUPER DATABASE WILL TRACK CITIZENS." Interesting.

The story leads with a black-and-white version of this logo, which was sent to me on Sunday, October 27, by a publisher who wanted a translation of the Latin ("knowledge is power"), and salonblogger Kriselda at Different Strings mentioned this story last Saturday. Last night, she linked to the same William Safire article that Drudge is running, which is also Metafilter's lead story today. Where am I going with all this? Several things. First, your salonblog news team is obviously way ahead of the pack. People like Kriselda, Andrew Bayer, Jan Haugland, and most of the people on my Navlist are staying on top of things and ensuring that if you give them a look you'll be way ahead of the power curve. Second, we're all digging deeper than the standard headlines and ferreting out Things of Exceptional Interest that Might Be Overlooked, and I would like to personally thank everyone for not letting salonblogs become a sort of Romeneskian "News of the Weird" kind of site.

Some of us do mention the bizarre from time to time, but that isn't our focus—nor should it be. A gazillion other pages out there are doing that already. The perspectives expressed here are consistently far more insightful and relevant than that, and I've also noticed that our collective style has a helluva lot more wit than I'm seeing elsewhere. Most importantly, we've got better standards. Notice that Drudge's post is wrong. All he linked to was Safire's article—there is no "growing outrage," whereas Kriselda's page breaks it down and she's got a tool on her page that lets you get the address of your congressdroid so you can directly express your outrage if you're so inclined. Less hype, and more power to the reader. That's why we kick ass.

I'm feeling very good about our collective zine and think that it rips the tits off publications like Esquire, Utne Reader, and Rolling Stone. We've got fiction, music, world affairs, cuisine, experimental stuff nobody's ever seen before, sex, alternative, tech news, and it's all being updated at least once a day. (If I didn't mention your page above, it's because there's too much good stuff here to be exhaustive and I'm just illustrating our range.) And lest we forget: Xian set up a discussion area at Salonika and his how-to guide is a work of art; give this some serious thought if you haven't joined yet.

Intermission

The Raven takes a break for some business travel and he don't lug a powerbook. We're going to check out the Palm Beach scene and see if there's anything to report on there. We'll be back Sunday.

9:28:14 AM