Last night, I added a comment to a post of yours last week about the 9/11 film on ABC. Thanks to the clumsiness of the blog format, that post has been pushed way down the page… who read it? I noted that ABC, as it turns out, has a blog for the film. By opting out of user registration, they have resorted to moderating (pre-approving) comments, and my deferential comment hasn’t been approved.

Hey, we could celebrate a century of automobiles. But if we knew then what we know now, would we have waited a half-century to make seatbelts standard? Not to mention even longer for the catalytic converter and fuel efficient cars and childseats. There’s no shortage of critics of automobile culture today. But the blog critics are a shrinking group. It’s too easy for for a media publisher to call something a “blog” which completely escapes your noble goals for the medium.

I remember my rhetorical reaction to 9/11 five years ago: questions, doubts, missives, on some alumni mailing lists. Yes, it was nice to have the Internet then. But most of the learning I’ve done since has been has been in the old media: the newspapers, magazines, books. Yes, I tracked down something last month, off a link from BoingBoing to Bruce Schneier to Dave Farber’s post of the email of Perry Metzger (former NetBSD developer now chem grad student) about the viability of a liquid TATP explosive… and the three intermediaries ended up issuing followup clarifications days later. You do have to admit at times that reading blogs often requires vast more time to verify what you’ve read.