Cit Media

All I can say is I’m glad he’s doing it: The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”

Scott Rosenberg, in “There is no “first blogger,” dismantles the Wall Street Journal’s well-intentioned but surprisingly clueless weekend round-up about the so-called 10th anniversary of blogging. At issue, for many folks, are the Journal’s assertions about who did things first in the weblog world. By general agreement the newspaper got it wrong.

In We the Media I wrote:

Justin Hall was a sophomore at Swarthmore College in 1993 when he heard about the Web. He coded some pages by hand in HTML. His “Justin’s Links from the Underground”15 may well have been the first serious weblog, long before special­ized weblog software tools became available. The first visitor to Hall’s site from outside the university came in 1994.

The Journal does a nice job of getting quotes from a variety of people who read (and in one case don’t read) blogs, capturing some flavor of why the publishing form has become so important.

But the introduction, which misses so much, is what Scot accurately calls the Journal piece a typical example of the

needless effort being dedicated toward a pointless goal — the identification of a “first” that is really only of use to old-fashioned editors eager to fill slow-news days with anniversary features.

Is this a lesson for other journalists? It should be but probably won’t be.

Mark Glaser, at PBS MediaShift, interviews PlaceBlogger founder Lisa Williams: Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation.

Dave Winer says in “What is Web 3.0?” that traditional media organizations will make it through their currently tough times by embracing bloggers and other kinds of new media, “without interpretation by professional reporters.”

I’m cautious about that last bit. Why? Because, slowly but surely, traditional media folks are embracing the audience in ways that would have been unthinkable not very long ago. (We discussed some of those ways in Lisa Williams’ terrific report earlier this year.)

This doesn’t mean that newspapers and broadcasters should try to control everything that they take part in, though lawyers get very hinky when such questions arise. If the choice is between, say, no coverage of a local school board and pointing to bloggers who are covering it in their own ways — including the possibility, or probability, that a local school-board blogger has a stake in the outcome, which can be handled by transparency — then the choice should be some coverage as opposed to none. The news organization can and should help people understand the principles of journalism, meanwhile.

The collaborative potential is what gets me going. We can create new models if we all do this right.

The University of Tennessee is conducting a survey “to examine the uses and users of blogs.” If you want to participate, click here.

Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel, riffing off a New York Times story about literary bloggers that ran several weeks ago, goes berserk in “Not everybody’s a critic,” an LA Times op-ed piece that adds to the amazingly uninformed backlash against citizen media:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Ah, cutting to the chase: Writing critically is an “elite enterprise,” plainly not in the scope of the non-accredited who can only be given permission, apparently, by esteemed publications. Such as Time, a magazine that has gone so far down-market as to be laughable in recent years? Good grief.

Schickel cites famous critics such as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, as if bloggers are actually comparing themselves with such folks (is Schickel?). These were people who

wrote for intelligent readers who emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind. We do not — maybe I ought to make that “should not” — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

Prejudice? There you have it, in spades.

Stupidity? Not quite. Lack of serious reporting is more the issue.

The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum notes, for example, that the NY Times piece is farthest thing imaginable from blogger triumphalism. In fact, the bloggers aren’t comparing themselves with newspaper reviewers (fewer and fewer of whom are staff employees or, in many cases, even paid beyond getting a free copy of the book). They’re doing something different.

Schickel isn’t wrong about several issues, notably one he raises deep in his screed: the modern debasement of damn near everything he finds culturally significant, and the ascendance of people who merely love books (and movies) into the review-writing heights that he and his chosen brethren have managed to scale. Welcome to Earth, 2007.

Oh, it’s not impossible for a blogger to write a serious review, he says. But before he’ll listen to a word anyone says, he demands credentials. Only the anointed — again, by whom? — are invited, or can be taken seriously.

I’m a fan of Schickel’s movie reviews, even though I don’t agree with many of his conclusions. What seems to bother him most is that he and other well-paid critics are losing their oligopoly on publicly available wisdom. Loving something is not the only credential for being a critic. But it’s a hell of a start.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google:

The decision covers a wide-range of online copyright issues from in-line linking to fair use to the DMCA safe harbors and post-Grokster liability. Perfect 10 had sued Google for copyright infringement, claiming that its “Image Search” tool illegally reproduced and displayed P10 photos when it returned thumbnail results and framed third-party websites in response to search terms. It also claimed that Google was liable for contributing to Internet user infringement when users would look at pictures online that they had found via Google Image search.

Law blogger Eric Goldman is less sure of the sweeping nature of the ruling, saying:

It overturns the most pernicious part of the district court opinion holding that Google was directly infringing for displaying thumbnails in its image search. On the other hand, it opens up the possibility of new secondary liability by the search engines. However, on balance, this opinion is much better for the search engines than the lower court opinion, so it’s a mild win for them.

Wall Street Journal: Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown. Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging. Instead, the government is going for the soft approach.

An outbreak of common sense in Beijing’s halls of power…

He explains:

This isn’t just about the demand side getting the power to supply. It’s about moving from use to manufacture, from passivity to engagement.

Dave Winer was one of the first bloggers, and an unquestioned pioneer in developing blog tools and other key technologies we in the “read-write Web” world take for granted today. His blog, Scripting News, is 10 years old today — and he’s put up what looks like the page that graced the site a decade ago.

Here’s a toast to Dave’s great work, and wishes for decades more to come.