Thursday, March 20, 2003
Take a (down)load off your friends
In a senseless act of generosity (which I covered yesterday), Glenn Fleishman offered his book — still selling for upwards of $30 on Amazon — for $0 in downloadable form. Since it's a heavy pile of bits (like, 32 megs or something), and about 10,000 copies have been downloaded, he's now geting slammed with a huge bandwidth bill. That hugely sucks..
Eat your spinnage
I get the LA Times every day, but I didn't learn about yesterday's Tim Rutten's blog piece by reading the paper. The heads-up came from The Heritage Foundation, which saw the piece as "the latest example of the traditional media's newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America's public policy debates." That line came in a friendly email from the organization, which continued...
Our job at The Heritage Foundation is to provide useful resources - objective data and conservative analysis and commentary - to journalists, analysts and commentators of all stripes. But we aren't quite sure how to do this with the blogger community.
So this email is an invitation for you to participate in an experiment. For the next month, we will periodically email to you short notices about significant Heritage studies, publications and events. At the end of the month, let us know if these notices were helpful. If not, tell us at any time, and you won't get any more. If you find you only want those notices regarding specific issue areas - foreign policy, welfare reform, etc. - we'll limit our future emails to you thusly. If you want to continue receiving all of the notices, let us know that, too.
Regardless of your perspective on the issues of the day, we are confident you will find Heritage materials useful in your effort to provide the kind of incisive, immediate and thoughtful commentary and analysis made possible by blogging.
I wrote back thanking them for their offer, and asking permission to blog it, which they kindly gave. I also suggested they start blogging themselves, much as Jupiter Research does.
This is a first (for me, at least), and I believe The Heritage Foundation deserves kudos for its gracious combination of permission- and gonzo marketing. (Even though this post by Brian Linse shows this was a form letter.)
Not too coincidentally, Heritage is a conservative think tank. On the whole, conservative thinkers are far more clueful about the Web and its authority structure than their liberal counterparts — as both the Rutten piece (which was almost entirely about warbloggers) and this emailing attest.
Liberalism may not be absent from the blogging world, but it's certainly impotent. The only voices on the left with any firepower on Web are Michael Moore and Robert Byrd, and neither one of them blog (though Moore uses the Web quite intentionally, which Byrd does not).
Okay, there's Eric Alterman.
Want to see how little peaceblogging actually counts? Wagging the Tale of War, which I wrote yesterday, got a whopping eight inbound links on Technorati. Total visits for the day were 1908, which is somewhere between half and a third of what I get on the average Wednesday. As a percentage of my Technorati Cosmos (all the inbound links in the last 24 hours or so), my peace post hardly did any better than two other posts — Sixth Column (about blogging itself) and RSS for Webcasts — and lost by one link to Book support.
My point isn't about me. I'm just in a position to witness first-hand the complete absence of a peaceblogging movement. There's no Glenn Reynolds on blogging's left. No Andrew Sullivan or Charles Johnson. Even Brian Linse's Lefty Blogroll is thick with bloggers who not only support the war, but are pro-war in general.
Of course, we're making this assessment at the very moment when the political pendulum has swung about as far as it can in the rightward direction: on the first full day of a war that enjoys full-bore media support and a huge approval rating.
It'll be interesting to see what develops as the war unfolds.
[Later...] Shelley points out that there's lots of peacemongering (including blogging) going on, away from the pulpits and spotlights. I agree. But in this post I'm talking about blogs.
Maybe you can have a movement without leaders. I've been saying for some time that the blogging world is a relatively leaderless place (Clay's power distribution curves withstanding). But social movements, such as the ones for and against war, tend to have leaders. The warbloggers have some. The peacebloggers don't.
Peacemongery is another matter. There's plenty that going on in the world. I like to think that much of the worldwide opposition to this war is an opposition to war itself; though I'm not sure to what degree that's true.
I am sure, however, that if markets are conversations, there isn't a conversation about peace in the blogosphere to equal the conversation about war.
Which of course means there's room for one. Maybe a good place to start is here.
Lots of feed/push back in the Discussions section. Keep checking back. I know one post should be up soon, listing all the influential peacebloggers I've insulted by not including them here.
Eric Norlin has an interesting response, too.
Sheila has a pile of links (scroll up) on all kinds of war/antiwar stuff.
J.D. Lasica weighs in with Portraying the Graphic Face of War, about how bigjo sources are readying their photojournlism battle plans.
Arnold points to Winterspeak's gag response to the Heritage mailing:
And you know what, discussing politics is kinda like a drug habit, it's initially a kick but then you feel tired all the time and you know it's probably not good for you in the long run. Folks from the Heritage have decided to devote a career to this stuff. Do I want opinions from the Heritage Foundation? No, I am very satisfied with my current sources of opinions. The idea of broadcasting or picking through policy points with think-tanks frightens me.
Brian Linse adds a few more words too.
Also Grant Henninger, Dave, David, Jason Kottke, Dr. Frank, Tim Jarrett, Greg Greene, Tom Tomorrow, Dan Gillmor, Bernie Dunham, Chastity Powers, AKMA...
In the fun house
Just noticed the latest Get Your War On. Also Military Promises 'Huge Numbers' for Gulf War II: The Vengeance in The Onion. Oh, and Chastity Powers has joined the Wealth Bondage news team.
Handy
Ming explains Xpertweb. So does Mitch.
Welcome ablog!
Hey: I just discovered my friend George has a blog. I see he's already in the clue-passing spirit, saying Gartner's new corporate blog is "about as relaxed as a starched Oxford shirt."
I see Ted is picking up his blog pace a bit too, lately regretting that his new Nokia 3650 is useless stateside:
...built in camera, takes videos, ships with the real audio player... But so far my carrier here in the US (Cingular) won't let me use GPRS... so even though I have a phone capable of sending data to a website like Blogger, my phone company's network won't let me...