Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Air out

Been listening (RealAudio required) to Air America shake out its first-day jitters. Lots of mistakes and miscues, but professional none the less.

Also partisan, which I find tiresome from any direction.

Anyway, Atrios will be on Majority Report, the show going on right now with Janeane Garafolo. I'll miss it cuz I gotta do some errands and the network has no over-the-air signals here.

Turning the tables

I really like the idea of the rooms being the "real panels" at conferences. I also like what Jay Rosen is doing to get his own panel's act together in advance of Bloggercon.

My fave line so far:

By "journalism" we ought to mean the practice of it, not the profession of it.

Read the comments. They're excellent.

Guest from the past

I just ran across a short essay about talk radio by Kathy Dunn, a co-worker from WDBS in Durham, back in the mid-70s. It's from 1996 — eight years ago. Her morning show with Ken Ross on 'DBS is one of the best I've ever heard. I see she's still working with Wisconsin Public Radio. No idea whatever happened to Ken. Last I heard, about 25 years ago, he was writing jokes for Steve Martin or something.

On the ancient crafts of blogging and wikiing

Netcraft, the peerless Web server research outfit, has a thoughtful piece on blogs and wikis. An excerpt:

One of the best examples of this classic blog is also one of the earliest. Dave Winer, a software industry veteran and co-developer of one of the first blogging software tools, has been producing his blog Scripting News since April 1997. Another of his sites shows new blogs, but the number is now so great that its simple listing is no longer useful. Today there are as many blogs as there were Web pages a few years ago; this has led to the rise of a range of blog search engines.

One of the best is Technorati, which keeps tabs on nearly 2 million blogs. Useful features include NewsTalk, the news items currently being talked about in blogs (a similar service is provided by Blogdex) and a list of the top 100 blogs based on cross- references - a kind of Google for blogs. Such links - formalised as blogrolling - have become one of the defining features of current blogs, to the extent that the entire blogosphere is becoming dangerously self-referential.

In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki - a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete - could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open source is to proprietary software: a communal effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's fiat determine the end-result.