All Blog Posts from Public Eye

There's a picture over at Wired that you really have to see.

It's of Jorn Barger, the first person to use the word "weblog." Barger coined the term, which has been shortened to the now-ubiquitous "blog," ten years ago yesterday. He used it "to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that 'logged' his internet wanderings," as Wired puts it.

In the picture, Barger, clad in a blue t-shirt, doesn't exactly look like your office IT geek. He's got a long, scraggly beard, and long tufts of hair shoot out from beneath his ratty "Google" cap. Barger looks like he was working the land in remote mountains somewhere until he gave it all up to get his startup off the ground.

And in terms of a representative of the blogging phenomenon – not to mention the whole internet, really – you couldn't ask for much more.

Think about it: Ten years ago, the truly industrious folks who wanted to share opinions or interesting articles might have had a newsletter. Today, thanks to the drastically reduced barriers to entry that the internet has provided, blogs have taken their place – there are 100 million of them at the moment, according to Technorati, and that number is growing.

Thanks to blogs, no matter how remote you might be, you're now easily interconnected. They've given us windows into warzones, shown us the minds of foreign leaders, and offered insights into everything from tort reform to gay square dancing, to mention just a tiny fraction of the total picture.

The Wired article features plenty of quotes about What It All Means, and you can head over there for the full treatment. One could write a book about how much blogs mean – in fact, folks have – but on the 10-year anniversary of the medium, this particular blog, a tiny voice in the cacophany, simply wanted to simply pay its respects. Blogs can be monumental or inconsequential, insular or wide open, enlightening or enraging. They have made the whole spectrum of human thought available, in all its messy glory, in the click of a button. And what's more revolutionary than that?

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. Unless you’re a magazine publisher, apparently.

When it comes to ‘the media,’ is there a certain genre that’s more vulnerable to blog competition than others? Blogs have long been seen as a threat to ‘traditional media’ for quite awhile now. But as much as we like to use the word ‘media,’ it’s a rather large concept. There’s TV, obviously. And papers. And what about books? Do they count?

But as far as what media genre is sweating the most, the San Francisco Chronicle chimes in today, with a word of warning to magazines.

The blogging industry is coming to resemble the magazine world, with multiple sites for every taste in politics, entertainment, business, technology and any other imaginable field.

"The ones that have become very strong small businesses have a niche market that's big enough to attract advertisers," [think tanker Steve] King said. "In most categories, a few blogs tend to dominate."

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I’ve discussed in this space – though in the light and frothy context of inappropriate photos posted online – how once something is on the Internet, it’s in the public domain.

The same goes for legal rulings.

In a fascinating instance, a court’s opinion regarding torture and a coerced confession was posted online at a legal blog. According to ABAJournal.com:

A federal appeals court quickly withdrew an opinion issued yesterday in a case filed by a Sept. 11 detainee because of concerns it contained information filed under seal.

The opinion by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit by Egyptian student Abdullah Higazy who was detained after the attacks. Higazy claimed an FBI agent had coerced him to make a false confession.

The court was not quick enough for the blog How Appealing, which posted the opinion after a reader sent it along by e-mail. A clerk later called blog author Howard Bashman to ask him to take it down, but he has not complied.

In a conversation with the ABA website, Bashman defended himself, saying “In my role as a member of the news media, I determined that it would be inappropriate to take down my posting of the decision based on a general claim that the opinion, issued earlier in the day to the public over the Internet, referred to information contained in an appendix whose contents remained under seal."

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Another battle in the old media vs. new media war is underway, according to a recent news report, and it’s over the squishy word “reliability.”

According to an Australian report of a Technorati poll, most web news consumers don’t see a difference between the reliability of traditional media information and blogs. A news article out of Australia reports an official stating as much:

Consumers who get their news from the internet are likely to trust a blog for reliability as much as a mainstream media site, the competition watchdog said today…

"User-testing in early 2007 indicated to those carrying out Technorati's survey that audiences are less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com or other mainstream media sites," [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Graeme Samuel] said.

"For a growing base of users, these are all equally valid sources of news, information, entertainment and gossip, and users are not necessarily discriminating between traditional and new sources."

Wow. That’s saying something. So there’s no difference in the eyes of the web news consumer? A blog equals Salon/Slate/HuffingtonPost equals the Washington Post? Really?

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The revolution will not be televised.

It won't be available online, either.

Last week, there was a lot of media attention paid to Myanmar/Burma, where the military government was cracking down on an uprising. Pictures of slain monks brought the drama home. According to last week’s AP story:

Myanmar's military government flooded the main city of Yangon with troops, swelling their numbers to about 20,000 by Sunday and ensuring that almost all demonstrators would remain off the streets, a diplomat said…

Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N.'s special envoy to Myanmar, was sent to the country to try to persuade the notoriously unyielding military junta to halt its crackdown. Soldiers have shot and killed protesters, ransacked Buddhist monasteries, beaten monks and dissidents and arrested an estimated 1,000 people in the last week alone.

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Remember “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?”

(On the map of Oprah pop culture references, it was a little past “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and a bit before “He’s Just Not That Into You.”)

Could it be that the Mars/Venus thing exists in cyberspace as well as outer space?

The New York Times asked the question yesterday:

Are more men engaged in politics online than women, and if so, why? These aren’t just idle questions…

We know that women slightly outnumber men online. But at least anecdotally, it seems as if more men are on the political blogs, writing specifically about politics, reading about politics and putting in their two cents in the comments sections. Did you notice how many more men compared to women submitted videos for the Democratic YouTube debate in July? The pool of videos for the upcoming Republican YouTube debate is similarly stocked with more men.

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I’ve always known I have an old soul. Watching old Chaplin flicks, hanging on to those vinyl records, calling cars ‘tin lizzies.’ (Okay, maybe not that last one.) But this week’s PR Week piece suggesting that editorials were going the way of the dinosaur had me grumbling like Grampa Simpson.

The piece opens like this:

Simply put, talk is cheap these days. The advent of cable news lowered the bar of entry into the public discussion; the Internet has almost totally obliterated it.

It then adds some grudging “well, maybe editorials still matter” testimonials before ending with this dirge-like kicker:

As the masses realize they can participate in the public discourse without a third party, newspaper editorials may slowly become - like copyboys and typewriters - a quaint tradition.

No doubt. Talk is cheap nowadays. And the public can participate in the public discourse. But far from being a techno-utopia, today’s spicy media jambalaya of blogs, cable news debates and talk radio shows doesn’t always lend itself to reasoned, step-by-step political and cultural discussion. And that’s part of their appeal.

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Not So Dapper Don: The weekend doesn't seem to have dampened criticism of Don Imus, the radio host under fire for referring to Rutgers University women's basketball players as "nappy headed ho's." Imus has apologized and said he is "not a racist;" he is scheduled to appear on Al Sharpton's radio show today. (Said Sharpton Saturday: "I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation.") In the New York Times, David Carr points out that Imus continues to book big name guests from the political and media world, and notes that he "generously provides airtime to those parts of the news media and political apparatus that would generally be expected to bring him to account." Imus' show appears on WFAN, the parent company of which is CBS Radio.

I Got Your Blog Post Right Here: "Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?" wonders the New York Times. ("Yes," responds Public Eye.) The Times writes up an effort to create a blogger code of conduct, which could call on bloggers to ban anonymous comments and delete comments that constitute threat or libel. It's not censorship, says Tim O'Reilly, who is working on the guidelines. He argues that “[f]ree speech is enhanced by civility."

Expert Witness: As Sinbad fans well know, Wikipedia's open-source nature can mean inaccuracies. Citizendium wants to change that – it's meant to be "a smarter, kinder Wikipedia [in which] experts approve all articles posted on the site," as the Los Angeles Times notes. Sounds great, right? Too bad exacting standards mean a whole new set of problems. After six months, "editors have approved only nine of the roughly 1,000 articles that volunteers have written." And the experts may not have the same interests as the unwashed masses: "According to a chart on Wikipedia compiled by one of its contributors, the 20 most-viewed articles in February included 'Anna Nicole Smith,' 'Sex,' 'List of sex positions' and 'World War II.'"

Yes, it's a storyline you've likely read more than once (probably way more) in the past year: The Internet is going to have a bigger influence than ever on the 2008 presidential campaign.

The hoopla surrounding two bloggers hired by John Edwards' campaign – Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan – ushered in yet another chapter to that story. And today offers another volume: one of the bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, has resigned.

After a firestorm erupted over the bloggers' respective "cyber trails" of incendiary remarks – specifically, some anti-Catholic ones – some critics were calling for their removal from the Edwards campaign.

Ultimately, Edwards decided last week to keep the bloggers on staff, while distancing himself from some of their comments. The bloggers also offered apologies.

But Marcotte has resigned anyway, the Washington Post reports today, blaming Bill Donohoe, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and one of her loudest critics.

According to the Post, she wrote on her blog yesterday that Donohoe "and his calvacade of right wing shills don't respect that a mere woman like me could be hired for my skills, and pretended that John Edwards had to be held accountable for some of my personal, non-mainstream views on religious influence on politics," which Marcotte described as being "anti-theocracy."

The whole situation is, of course, a microcosm of the conflict that candidates now face as the blogosphere comes to play a bigger role in the campaign media game.

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Ratings Up For Bush: Well, President Bush's numbers are up somewhere. The AP reports that viewership for the speech was up by 9 percent since last year. Who else saw a bump? "American Idol," whose numbers were up by 8 percent. The Bush speech – running on nine different networks – drew more viewers (about 45.5 million) than "Idol," which, on a single network, clocked in at about 32.6 million. As for Fox's airing of the Bush speech, 8.4 million people tuned in. But NBC won the day with 9.3 million viewers according to Nielsen research.

Rumble In The Situation Room: Another big public appearance from the Bush administration is eating up headlines: Vice President Dick Cheney's appearance on CNN's "The Situation Room." The interview was "turned increasingly contentious as it wore on," writes the Post in a front pager. (Wonkette's description: "In Which Dick Cheney Nearly Kills Wolf Blitzer With His Bare Hands.") Either way, check out the interview. Here's a media related snippet:

Wolf Blitzer: His number two, Ayman al Zawahiri is –

Vice President Dick Cheney: Zawahiri is much, much more visible. Yes.

Blitzer: I mean, he’s on television almost as much as I am.

Cheney: Well, I don’t know if anybody is on as much as you are, Wolf …

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