Blogging

I was just in gmail reading some emails from John and Daniel which mention some technical questions about choice under uncertainty and, in the rh pane, there appears under “sponsored links” an advertisment for Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ — “The greatest econ blog on the web! Insightful & interesting every day.” Well, often, I’ll give them that. Are many bloggers paying google to advertise their on-line scribblings?

My former student Colin Farrelly (now Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo) has started a blog — “In Search of Enlightenment”:http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/ — go visit!

Brian’s post raises the question of blogs turning into books, and commenters give lots of examples. However, any addition to the supply of books generated in this way needs to be offset by the books that would have been written if their potential authors weren’t writing blogs instead.

Update Sarah Hepola makes exactly the same point, announcing in Slate that she is shutting down her blog to write a book. Coincidence, or the mysterious workings of the BlogGeist?

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Language Log is having a book published of their best posts for the last few years. Although there won’t be anything new in this, it should be a fun record of what has long been to my mind one of the best academic blogs around.

I’m sure there are other examples of blogs turning into books, though I think this is the first time it’s happened to a blog that I read regularly. To be honest, it’s hard to think of many other blogs I read that would be even suitable for this treatment. (Perhaps CT is the only one, though not for my contributions!) Most political blogs are too focussed on the day to day aspects for there to be much value in a print publication. And most philosophy blogs tend to publish snippets, thoughts in progress and the like, which need a lot of polishing before they are ready for print. When I started blogging it was with the hope that it would genuinely be an alternative publishing source. That is, it would be a place where I put things that were finished pieces, but which wouldn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t end up in traditional print journals. But in fact it has turned into a repository for transient thoughts, not a publishing place. Language Log has, to a large extent, gone the other way.

Which other blogs do people think are worthy of commemoration in dead-tree format?

“David Glenn”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=Tsn9wGvrwwPrW9T4xKVWW3z8dDHH5f4Q has an article in the _Chronicle_ about Carol Darr, and the howls of outrage she provokes among both left wing and right wing bloggers.

bq. There is not much love lost between the liberal activists who blog at Daily Kos and their conservative counterparts at RedState.org. One entry at Daily Kos last month was titled “RedState Runs From Their Own Idiocy.” The same week, a commenter at RedState wrote, “I don’t visit Kos, because I am not enamored with wading through sewage.” Last spring, however, the two blogs found a common enemy: a “clueless embarrassment” (in the words of Daily Kos) who was peddling a “cheesecloth-flimsy” argument (RedState). The object of their ire was Carol C. Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, which is affiliated with George Washington University. Someone in her position, the bloggers believed, ought to be an enthusiastic defender of online politicking in all its forms. Instead she was urging the Federal Election Commission — where she had worked as a staff lawyer in the 1970s — to bring certain kinds of blogging under the umbrella of campaign-finance law.

Carol is a colleague of mine, and I’ve been getting increasingly pissed off at the abuse she’s receiving from prominent bloggers. It’s not Carol who’s the clueless embarrasment here. Take, as Exhibit One, this “post”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/11/93226/8476 by Adam B at Daily Kos, which Duncan Black “approvingly linked to”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_09_atrios_archive.html#114476270876442021 last week. For Adam B and Duncan, the argument that blogs are going to make Swiftboating easier is a version of “the Commies sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, [and] they’re going to take over our blogs.” Come off it. I don’t seriously believe that Duncan wasn’t paying attention to the ways in which right wing blogs served as amplifiers for the original Swiftboating exercise (a feat afterwards “celebrated”:http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/517dhjcp.asp?pg=1 in the Weekly Standard). And if you don’t think that there are going to be John Thune style “astroturf blogs galore”:https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20050314&s=crowley031405 in the ’06 and ’08 elections, then God bless your naivete. Carol’s making a legitimate argument which is highly uncomfortable for bloggers – that blogs, as they exist today, are wide open to abuse, and specifically to becoming channels for the systematic spread of disinformation. It deserves a hearing – and a more serious response than puerile name-calling and appeals to the numinous self-correcting power of the blogosphere.

Update: I’ve received several comments along the lines of “you are being dishonest because Atrios is attacking hypocrites who say that bloggers should be regulated but not the mainstream press.” This doesn’t fly, since that has never been Carol’s position; in the piece linked to above, she makes that explicit. If someone can find a public statement where she says something different, I’ll happily eat crow. I’ve also changed the above link as the old link had stopped working.

Update 2: See “here”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2006/04/doom/ for a transcript of Carol Darr’s symposium at the _Chronicle_ and “here”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_16_atrios_archive.html#114555521401044797 and “here”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/20/153456/129 for responses from Atrios and Adam Bonin respectively. I should also say at this point that my original post was much snarkier than it should have been – while I stand by the basic claim that Carol Darr doesn’t deserve some of the nasty things that have been said about her – I used more intemperate language than I should have. For which, apologies.

Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.

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Over at the Guardian Blog, “Daniel looks to see”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/04/university_colours.html what percentage of the 300 “Comment is Free” contributors mentioned in their profile that they went to university, and of those what percentage went to Oxford or Cambridge. Answer: 20 percent mentioned a university, and 85 percent of the time it was Oxford or Cambridge. This reminds me of a line, which you still sometimes see in obituaries or profiles, that goes something like, “Educated at Eton and Oxford, he then [or “also”] attended Harvard.” There’s also that episode of _Inspector Morse_ where the Chancellor, played by John Gielgud, is asked by some toady how many honorary degrees he has. “Oh, fifteen,” he says blandly, “Sixteen, if you count Yale.”

From Erving Goffman to Jim Henley and his commenters.

Over the next hour or so, I’ll be in a debate with Jerome Armstrong, Dan Drezner and Stefan Sharkansky on Puget Sound “public radio”:http://www.kuow.org/weekday.asp – Seattle area readers should feel free to chime in.

Shorter Volokh Conspiracy today: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”

Until recently, I thought that famous quote about the king and the priests and the entrails and the running and the explosions and the monkeys was from Professor Frink Diderot. I learn now that the source of the quote was Jean Meslier, whose bloody aspirations ran as follows: “Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.” Worse, the form of the Diderot quote I had in mind was wrong. Diderot actually had this to say, in Les Éleuthéromanes, “Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre/Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” In a move reminiscent of a young Ben Domenech, however, one dastardly Jean-François de La Harpe attributed to Diderot the following version in his Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne: “Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre/Serrons le cou du dernier roi.” Due to a distinct lack of blogswarms in the 1840’s, the error was never uncovered. I hope that after a sufficient period of contrition, perhaps involving live-cam self-flagellation, you all will someday be able to give my judgments about wankery the respect they deserve. In the meantime, Hitchens is still a wanker.

The “Ben Domenech”:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/redamerica/ plagiarism trainwreck is summarized nicely by “hilzoy”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/03/plagiarism.html at Obsidian Wings. (The discovery of an “entire column ripped out of a PJ O’Rourke book”:http://yourlogohere.blogspot.com/2006/03/nail-meet-coffin.html is the icing on the cake.) The two most entertaining things written about it so far are, first, the “in-the-bunker”:http://redstate.org/print/2006/3/23/22434/5436 “defences”:http://redstate.org/story/2006/3/24/03958/4019 being rolled out at RedState, and second, “this comment”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html#comment-130231 at “Sadly No!”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html

bq. No matter how brief Ben’s Post gig was, it’s still going to look good on his (Ctrl)C (Ctrl)V …

A “couple of years ago”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/05/08/copycats I wrote a post about kinds of plagiarism by college students:

Like hepatitis, plagiarism comes in several varieties.

# Google Plagiarism. Find a paper or discussion online. Pros: Copy. Paste. Done! Cons: Professor may also know about Google.

Sadly for Ben, the “may also know about Google” problem goes for thousands of bloggers as well. Never mind the joys of Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, which allowed for the lift from O’Rourke to be confirmed.

Via “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_03_19_atrios_archive.html#114289859293528974, this “Chris Bowers post”:http://mydd.com/story/2006/3/20/181248/239, which I want to take issue with.

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He’s far too shy to announce it over here, but Daniel has “a piece”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/03/defining_protectionism_down.html about the shifting meaning of “protectionism” over at the new Guardian “Comment is Free” pseudo-blog.