Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Unclassifiabilities
Got a nice backblog from Ken Layne, who reports talking about me with Nick Denton, whom I discover has compiled a nice list of liberal weblogs after wondering where they all were. Apparently more went on than that, but I don' thave time to figure it all out.
Anyway, it's interesting to watch the political lines redraw themselves, less as divisions than as lines formed by links. I've been reading David Weinberger's SPLJ, pleased on every page at how he carefully characterizes the Web as a place, rather than a distribution system for the incumbent giants of the content-pumping industries (pathetically, though effectively, seeking regulatory relief from their own markets).
Now, in political terms, I would classify David (as would he, I suspect) as a liberal. But when it comes to protecting the Web, the man is, like the rest of us who live in this place and value its independence, resolutely libertarian. This morning we find him looking for some tea to throw in the bay. Me too.
Makes me think the strangest bedfellows aren't on the Web, but off of it.
Not penny wise, though. More like thirty pieces of silver
The Head Lemur lends his pixels to the worst and best of Knight-Ridder. (About which I've already ranted once today — see below.)
The worst is the "pound foolish" Real Cities, which replaces the K-R's local papers' Web sites with ad-filled noise sheets that reduce each paper's journalistic and community service work to mere eyeball bait.
The best is Dan Gillmor — an opinion the Real Cities people apparently share, since they seem to be giving him star billing at SiliconValley.com. (Even though they snowplow his archives — along with every other journalist's— off their servers after 90 days.)
Wanted: a helping brain
Mary Wehmeier is looking for some help geeking together a forum. If I'm not mistaken, this is a forum already in existence — a real good one — that needs a new home. She's a good egg and it's a good cause. Maybe one of ya'll can spare a few cycles to help her out.
"A very complete unix solution," he calls it.
Dave Ely gives a thumbs up to his new TiBook. Cool: he's an old MORE user too.
Death by content management
OJR takes apart Knight-Ridder's homogenization of their regional Web sites. It's a good piece, and correctly gives K-R's work a thumbs-down; but it fails to give K-R the skewering with a telephone pole that the company deserves. What K-R did to its papers, to those papers' readers, to its local journalists, to the Web environment they all once graced, and finally to itself, was a coast-to-coast fuck-you. Gone or buried are all the local papers' local originalities. They were dispersed, everywhere, in a snowstorm of 404s. Gone are persistent archives. Gone are the paper's names, sections, and local characters. In their place is the same faceless homogeneity — and no doubt the same cost-cutting, advertising-selling and content-managing rationalizations that Clear Channel gave us when they removed all sense of local origination from commercial radio.
Mark my words: this will fail. And so will Clear Channel, by the way. There's a limit to how long a snatched body can live without a soul.
A plague of blogs
Alan, Dan and Glenn are all blogging the CITA conference in Florida. Dan will be at PC Forum in Arizona from Sunday to Wednesday. So will I. Maybe some of the other guys will be there too. FCC Commissioner Michael Powell will be speaking. So will Hillary Rosen of the RIAA. Cory too. The Sputnik guys. It should rock.