Ernest Svenson: Weblogs & Journalism

The New York Times Story You've Been Waiting For...

A Rift Among Bloggers. Five years ago, programmers pioneered Weblogs, or blogs. These days, many consider Weblogs to be inherently political, something that has angered Weblog veterans. By David F. Gallagher. [New York Times: Technology]

Apparently, there is no rift. At least not between Instapundit and Dave Winer. Ah...peace in the valley.

More on the Warbloggers vs Techbloggers from Doc Searls...

Dean Peters: A house divided cannot blog. He's worried that the big media putting a vs. between techbloggers and warbloggers will turn us all into Sharks and Jets. Or something like that. [Doc Searls Weblog]

More on Blogging...

From InstaPundit: "CATHERINE SEIPP has a great article on weblogs at the American Journalism Review. I like the Dennis the Menace analogy."

Basically bloggers are like Dennis with his slingshot looking to pop Mr. Wilson's fat behind whenever he can. Guess who represents Mr. Wilson?

News Aggregators & Bloggers = Human Routers?

From Jon Udell: "the raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe."

A great article on the emerging use of news aggregators, which lists some free aggregators that the non-Radio folks can use. And winds up with a good summary quote from "jenny".

First Look at Blogging Book - O'Reilly Blog Book Is Online

" 'Essential Blogging,' the O'Reilly blog-book for which I wrote the first chapter, is online as a series of PDFs for public review -- g'head and download a copy and let me know how badly I screwed up. Seriously, I think this is going to be a swell book." [bOing bOing]

Will Blogs Change the Web?

Read three different opinions on the impact of blogs on the Web. [TVC Alert]

Eric Alterman starts a weblog on MSNBC. Not that long ago his colleague Marty Wolk did an article about weblogs (in which I was mentioned). [Story via Scripting News]

Blog Notes 4: Categories

No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce. XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like:

If I put this piece in several categories, does that reduce the meaning of each category?
If the piece is on the home page and in a category, why would anyone ever go to both?
If the piece is only in a category and not on the home page, how does anyone know?
If the piece is only on the home page, what are categories for?

In other words, the use of xml/categories forces every Weblog Author or Editor (perhaps the word is Author) to consider the audience from a structural perspective each time a piece is developed, particularly in the early weeks of the development of the blog's basic style.

Categories are extremely useful for knowledge-management applications. They give an 'Author' the ability to tell a specific group of readers that all of X sort of material will appear in x section thus allowing the development of discrete conversations about subsets of the overall architecture.

XML creates the opportunity to keep that question open for a while as the blogger develops a real time feel for audience structure and composition. via [5th Constituency]

It's the Links Stupid!

Doc: "What do you call a blogger who won't link?" via [Scripting News]

Ed Cone is a Professional writer, and now....a blogger.

"As someone who gets paid to write, the idea of writing for free seemed counterintuitive at first. But in my experience, writing more has made me a better writer. Meanwhile, the blog lets me publish work that might otherwise go unwritten." [Story Link] Via [Scripting News]

Yep. And if blogs mean that professional writers will write things that they might not have written, then it is even more so for the average person. This blog revolution has just started. Wait until, say, twenty years from now when some blogger dies and it is discovered that the person had kept detailed online notes (some visible and some not) of basically their entire (post-cognitive) life. Sort of like the Truman show, except with blogs.

Blogging Books for Summer 2002

From Phil Wolffe

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood. What's In Rebecca's Pocket? is her blog and its on my regular reading list. I haven't read it yet, but Handbook may wind up as a bulk purchase, giving out copies to friends and family for the holidays, and passing them around at work. At 144 pages, it is slim, hallmark of something people will read!

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture by same editors with an intro by Rebecca Blood. Sociology, speculation, mediacrit. Should be good for a laugh.

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone. The book's home page and Stone's blog.

Via [a klog apart]

From Scott Rosenberg's Much ado about blogging, in Salon: [Doc Searls Weblog]

Rageboy on Marketplace radio

Christopher Locke on blogs; requires RealPlayer to listen to Via [Doc Searls Weblog]