blogs are out of beta...

...the blog is at a critical stage in its evolution. Blogs are out of beta. Blogs are the new normal. Everything is a blog. So what's next? Well, the format will indeed evolve into something new. I believe it will be the stream.

From the Steve Rubel lifestream.... And some tips from Problogger, here's one:

Don’t be Precious about your ‘Blog’ and be open to change - there’s no one ‘right’ way to blog. Blogs can have comments or not have comments, have full RSS feeds or partial ones, look like a traditional blog or act and look more like a lifestream or portal. The key is to know what you want to achieve and let that shape what you do with your blog.

One person's decline in "belief in the message" is another's "democratisation of doubt"

The new nihilism? Or something more Promethian?


Thanks to Tony Curzon Price for this by Geert Lovink.

We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurrences can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis, and gender perspectives. However, blogging arises against this kind of political analysis, through which a lot can no longer be said.

Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage, and back to everyday boredom.

There's much here to consider.

So how do blogs relate to independent investigative journalism? At first glance, they look like oppositional, or potentially supplementary practices. Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.

UK Parliament and Bloggers: a change is gonna come?

After initial scepticism at Westminster, the view now seems to be that e-journalism is here to stay and these bloggers should have passes, even though the print journalists take a broadly sniffy attitude to the likes of the Mole, while being happy enough to follow his lead.

Back to the green paper. It is likely it will make it easier for people to sue for libel by slashing the disproportionate costs of legal action, possibly by establishing a small claims court for libel.

More on small claims libel cases and a possible "blogger clamp down" here. From The Mole.

Arianna says let them eat blog

“You lost your job — you have time to blog.”
— Arianna Huffington, on The Daily Show.

Like we said, the meltdown will be blogged. By you.

Thank you.

To share your stories, your tips, your fears, or your ideas with us, click here and fill out the simple form.

From the Huff Po.

How Many Levels of 'Unknowns' does it take to make History?

Great blog on one of those Front Page of History Scenes that probably didn't happen...

Henry Morton Stanley pretended to have written something in his diary on November 23rd, 1871. Perhaps he did, though the pages in his diary are torn out, so we can’t know for sure. The event he claimed to have recorded — but probably didn’t — also probably didn’t happen, or at least not the way it’s usually “remembered.” He most likely didn’t say “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on meeting the older doctor (Tim Jeal says so in his new biography), and he didn’t even meet him in the jungle at all. He met him in a town...

From the Edge of the American West blog.


And here is an interesting take on the above from the Nieman Journalism blog.

The value of unmediated information, direct from the source closest to the scene, versus the value of an older tradition that filters that information through the methods and mores of a profession? Substitute “those bloggers” for Stanley and “the mainstream media” for the Royal Geographic Society....

Is it just speed we're talking about...?

Slow Blogging Day, Week or Month

So little time and so little to do. Oscar Levant

Slow blogging is something of a philosophical rebuttal to this dynamic. While some bloggers may just be naturally slow — think of the daydreaming schoolmate who used to take forever to get the assignment done — others are more emphatic about the purpose of taking their time.

From the NYT.


Mentioned in the piece, the ultimate answer to Twitter.

Can US Right Learn How to Investigate Online?

"You'll see a lot more traffic on conservative blogs now that they're playing offense," said Owens, who also writes for PBS' Media Shift and on his own Bloggasm.com. "This may be the turning point for conservative blogs but they're lacking the investigative side or that community-organizing side. They're much more insular in their self-linking. The liberals are better at using other things online to help promote their causes. It's just a matter of older people coming online, with Facebook opening up beyond college students, etc."

Andrew Ratner in the Baltimore Sun.

Blogging at risk from Twitter?

From Evan Williams, the boss at Twitter, formerly the co-founder of Blogger.

I still blog on occasion when I have something I can’t squeeze into 140 characters, but that’s rare, and for many people Twitter (or something else) will suffice nicely on its own. However, does that mean they’re not blogging? We’ve never labeled Twitter a “micro-blogging” service, but that’s certainly one of the primary use cases.

All from Andreas Kluth's Hanibal blog.

The Economist Gets Soppy and Romantic

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

I've missed that old "content management system" talk. Content is King, gentlemen?

Nihilism or Not? The Guy Fawkes Kid Goes Prosey and Self Justifying

Everything all right at home? Though this is interesting in an interpretive way...

Asking political bloggers to "add value" is to misunderstand the relationship between a free press and politicians. Take a memo Ms Blears, we are not here to "add value", or do what politicians want, Guido has his own values and aims to hit back at political hypocrisy and lies. Politicians make laws, so they should be held to account, to a higher standard. The Nick Robinsons, Peter Riddells, Michael Whites and Steve Richardsons of the world don't do investigative digging, they report back their impressions from their lunch meetings. They re-package and interpret spin from the party machines. That is how they "add value". They are what Peter Oborne memorably described as the "client media".

From Guido Fawkes' blog, on his birthday as it were.

Peer Review to Solve Credit Crunch?

Over time, and through much argument, a rough consensus emerged that recapitalizing the banks was ultimately the most likely approach to work. And sure enough, that's what ended up happening. Now, there is no clear paper trail linking the econoblogosphere to Hank Paulson's change of heart, but it would be foolish to argue that his or Ben Bernanke's economic pronouncements did not receive withering peer review.

From Salon.

It used to be an Englishman that takes his time, now it's a feature writer/blogger

Unlike some of the journalists for not only the daily papers but for networks, who have to constantly blog as well as file stories, I could be a little more leisurely, and beyond that, maintain a big-picture perspective. And frankly, the McCain campaign was much more responsive to that approach. They’ve come to be rather disdainful of the hyper-blogging that takes place on the press bus, and they think it has increased this mind-set of “gotcha” journalism, where every time John McCain would say something, instead of asking a follow-up question, people would go scurry off to their laptops and post to their blogs. And the McCain campaign believes that’s not what journalism ought to be. I’m not positing myself as some kind of superior journalist, it’s just that the format of long-form journalism allows me to be a little more leisurely, allows me to look at the longer view of things, and allows me two-and-a-half months on a single story.

GQ's Robert Draper on the pleasures of taking it slow.


WWD.com interviews Draper.

Get your Huff on: Ariana on blogging

In one particularly revealing moment, Ariana talked about how journalism should not be an exercise in covering all sides of a story, but an investigative search for the truth - which is usually on one side or another.

More tips here.

Blog Action Day, tomorrow

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty



There's radio too.

Why humans link better

That’s why link bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, and Matt Drudge have become such a powerful force on the web. They understood, even where traditional news orgs did not, the value of bringing their unique perspectives to filtering the web, of having a “linking voice.” They understood the editorial power of the link.

Here's another semantic web test, surely? Perhaps the new Turing Test should be called something like the Bob Woodward Cup.


Publishing 2.0 asks: Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obselete?
And answers: Not If Journalists Collaborate

Tina Brown & the Daily Beast

There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
--

Tina Brown - the ex-queen of the newsstands - is back, this time on the Web.

Her new venture, Daily Beast, which sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture, is set to debut today.

Says the Post.


--
Here it is.


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The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad."

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop.
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"I have been here before," I said.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited.
--

“If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.”

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
--

Life in what the Reader's Digest calls These United States has become a Good News/Bad News joke, only minus the Good News. There must be something, other than O.J.'s impending immuration. Isn't Donald Trump's casino operation tanking? That would be good news. And Kim Jong-Il, Dear Leader—God I love that man—didn't he just have a stroke? But before we start clog-dancing for joy, this just in: North Korea is facing another record disastrous harvest. What's more, high level voices caution that Kim Jong-Il may be followed by someone even worse. Worsethan Kim Jong-Il? Is that even scientifically possible?

What Fresh Hell Is This? By Christopher Buckley in today's Daily Beast.


This is a good question.
--

"You don't know how it killed me not to be up during the primaries," she said. "It may be a horrible economic time, but it's a wonderful journalistic time."

Tina Brown to the FT...


--
And the Washington Post explains everything, with Tina Brown.

The name: It's an inside joke for the lit set familiar with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Do people get it? Brown: "Some people get it and some people don't but that was the whole point. I realized when I chose it, it was a little bit of an in joke to the few members of the literary circle who would remember that novel ..,. but at the same time, it also has a lot of vigor and energy to it, which is what I liked,"

--

"I am sure it is not your fault & that you are being bothered by some boss in the United States. Take heart; he has forgotten about it already. I was once a journalist for seven weeks & I know about bosses. They are volatile creatures.

Evelyn Waugh letter to John Osborne of Life magazine, 1946.

Link missing at moment surprisingly...

Peter Preston, for many years the editor of The Guardian newspaper, and these days a "media" expert on the Observer wrote this yeterday in his Observer page (14):

Crucially, isn't press and broadcasting coverage getting more like blogging and less like conventional journalism? Blogging, after all, whirls on 24/7. Three in the morning, three in the afternoon. It doesn't worry much about fact checks. It exists in a tumult of constant outrage. It doesn't care what 'My View' was yesterday or last year. and to be sure, there is something of a plot there; a plot against ordinary understanding.

His story uses as a news peg of the comments of former Labour Deputy Leader (when Labour was Labour, not New Labour) Roy Hattersley, who claimed recently that political journalism here in the UK was now the "worst in the world."

For some strange reason there is no online version of Preston's article.

Yet.


There we go.