From the category archives:
For anyone planning to come along to the debate, there has been a venue change – the details are below. For anyone wanting to know what I’m going to say in response to the question, the short answer is ‘no, they didn’t.’
WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm
WHERE (note new location!):
Porter’s Dining Saloon
1207 19th St. NW (19th and M Street)
Washington, DC
One of the problems of writing about current affairs is that your claims are often overtaken by events. So it goes for the “article”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/files/story2707.php that Dan Drezner and I have in the current issue of _Foreign Policy_. We said (accurately at the time of writing) that blogs in Iran have provided a partial substitute for reformist newspapers that have been shut down, and that “government efforts to [censor the Internet] have been sporadic and only partially successful.” The Iranian blogosphere is one of the very few inarguable cases of how the Internet can sometimes create more pressure towards democratization. However, almost immediately after our article went to press, hardliners in Iran “began to crack down”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/international/middleeast/08iran.html?ex=1257570000&en=f66adc94fd502c39&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland on reformist websites and blogs. Now that the anti-reformist elements in the government have decided to take action, I suspect that the outlook for political blogs in Iran isn’t very good, although outside protests and negative publicity may help limit the extent of the backlash (it’s “worked”:http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1073610866.php, at least in part, in the past).
After a bitter, polarizing election, the gift of entertainment can be such a comfort. This weekend, Americans of all persuasions are sure to come together at a special film event. I’m talking, of course, about Alfie. Bush’s base can clearly identify with a priapic European in New York, wearing designer clothing and bedding everything in a skirt. And as a temporarily despondent liberal, nothing can lift my spirits like watching the handsome and suave Jude Law pad around for ninety minutes like a fucking gigolo tomcat. Let the healing begin.
Sigh.
Here’s the thread: post a link that makes you laugh. I’ve got a few under the break.
Many thanks to guest poster Bill Gardner for his on-the-ground posts about the scene in Columbus. If the bug hits him and he decides to start blogging on his own, we’d be glad to give it some attention.
For CT readers and others in the DC area …
DID BLOGS TIP ELECTION 2004?
IHS and Reason magazine present Ana Marie Cox, Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Michael Tomasky debating the role of blogs in the election on November 18.
WHAT:
A free-for-all discussion on the role of blogs and politics featuring Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, blogger and University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner, blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell, The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky, moderated by Reason’s Nick Gillespie.
Drinks and hors d’oeuvres to follow remarks and Q&A.
WHEN:
Thursday, November 18
7:30-9:00 pm
WHERE:
Topaz Bar
1733 N Street NW, Washington, DC
“Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/entertainment/profile?fid=5&id=1067031
Space is limited, so please reserve a place by RSVPing to Alina Stefanescu
at astefane@gmu.edu. Free drink tickets will be given to the first 50
respondents!
“Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018780.php and “Roger L. Simon”:http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2004/10/prediction.php tell us that if Kerry wins, it will be the fault of the mainstream media, and that the blogosphere will have its revenge. Simon’s post is especially creepy.
bq. If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently [sic] with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have “plans.”
This is surely the blossoming of blogosphere triumphalism into a fully-fledged pathology. A self-sustaining narrative about the perfidy of Big Media is allowing certain bloggers to “explain” why their preferred candidate might be defeated, without any uncomfortable re-examination of prior beliefs that have turned out to be wrong. As a bonus, this provides them with a sort of tinpot revanchist mythology. If Kerry does indeed win, I’ve no doubt that Reynolds, Simon and company would be able to maintain a Regnery Publications-style alternative narrative about how they were robbed, how the invasion of Iraq really would have been a success if it weren’t for those perfidious newspapers’ insistence on ignoring “adorable little kitten stories”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002273.html etc etc. But given that warbloggers, like the rest of us, aren’t great shakes at going out there and digging up actual new information, the best they can realistically hope for is to become a distributed version of what the Drudge Report was during the Clinton years, dishing out dirt, conspiracy theories and the odd bit of useful information, but fundamentally parasitic on the mainstream media that they claim to despise.
Update: see “here”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_31_fafblog_archive.html#109935816604258290 for the unmissable Giblets remix.
As Chris said, with respect to the Lancet study on excess Iraqi deaths, “I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study”. Score several Cassandra points for Chris, they weren’t slow in coming. You can have the know-nothing rightwing flack variety or the handwringing liberal variety. And to be honest, the standard of critique is enough to make you weep.
Let me intoduce myself. I am Bill Gardner and I live in Columbus, Ohio. I asked the Crooked Timber folks if I could guest blog on the election. I am a new Ohio voter, having just moved to the Ohio State University faculty last year. It’s possible that Ohio could prove to be the Gettysburg of the 2004 vote. If so, Columbus would be Cemetery Ridge. I’ll try to tell you what it looks like from here.
I don’t have any qualifications for this, other than being fascinated by this place and time. I’m a quantitative psychologist doing medical research in the OSU Pediatrics Department. I don’t know anything about philosophy, economics, or political theory (or cold temperature physics, or…). I’m such a dork that when I had the chance as a college freshman to take a class on The theory of justice from Rawls his own self, I passed because I thought his voice would put me to sleep. If only that was the worst educational choice I ever made.
Somehow I missed this, but “Jason Kottke”:http://www.kottke.org made an “interesting observation”:http://www.kottke.org/04/10/weblog-advertising about popular blogs a few days ago:
Out of Technorati’s top 100 most-linked weblogs**, only 16 don’t feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial:
Scripting News / Doc Searls / kottke.org / Jeffrey Zeldman / The Volokh Conspiracy / Scobleizer / Lileks / Joel on Software / Rather Good / Joi Ito’s Web / RonOnline / USS Clueless / BuzzMachine / Vodkapundit / Baghdad Burning / Crooked Timber
Lots of interesting observations to be made about the commercialization of weblogs…the quick uptake of advertising on blogs, the increasingly false perception of blogs as inherently unbiased by commercial interests (and therefore preferable to “big media”), the continuing shift from blogging as a hobby to blogging for a variety of reasons, the number of weblogs launching lately that have ads from day one, the demographic difference between the typical circa-2002 blogger and the blogger of today, etc.
There’s more discussion about this “at his site”:http://www.kottke.org/04/10/weblog-advertising. I’d also note that of the Top 100, and particularly those in the Top 50, there’s a lot of heterogeneity. Some are run by single individuals (like “Kottke.org”:http://www.kottke.org), some are group blogs (“Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com, “Crooked Timber”:https://www.crookedtimber.org), some large communities (“Metafilter”:http://www.metafilter.com/) or social movements (“Common Dreams”:http://www.commondreams.org/), while others are commercial enterprises (“Wonkette”:http://wonkette.com/ and the other Nick Denton Mini-Empire[1] sites), and so on. Beyond that, the mix of technology, culture and politics would be worth a closer look, too. I also wonder whether Technorati have changed their criteria a bit: I remember the last time I looked closely at the Top 100 list (a few months ago) the top sites were all from the Suicide Girls porn outfit, but they seem to have largely disappeared from the listing. The presence of sites written in languages other than English, like “this one”:http://nikki-k.jp/n.k/cyber_nyo and “this one”:http://www.interney.net/, seems like a new development as well.
To forestall pointless arguments, I should say that I don’t think taking advertising means your content automatically suffers or your character is corrupted by money or whatnot.[2] But there’s a story here about viable organizational models for blogging. I sometimes think CT is just under a daily-visitor threshold that would change the character of the site. It’s not so much bandwidth costs as our relationship to commenters and so on. The software runs at a just-about-acceptable pace, and the comments threads are generally very good. But more visitors would put extra pressure on all of that. We’re still growing, so maybe we’ll see these changes whether we want to or not. Look out for our crossover deal with Burger King. I’m thinking Whoppers flame-grilled on crooked timbers, with Kids’ Meals containing small plastic effigies of Isaiah Berlin and copies of ‘What is Enlightenment?’
fn1. World’s smallest empire?
fn2. Though I do think your _layout_ does: most of the drop-in advertising methods I’ve seen look like crap.
Dan at Contrapositive has written up a very cool hour-by-hour guide to election night- what to expect, when not to panic, and what each Presidential candidate needs, as the night passes, to stay viable.
And McSweeney’s has a very funny little piece on history’s notable films:
The Terminator
According to The Terminator, in the future, time travel will be perfected, but it will only work on humans or flesh-covered appliances; fabric is out of the question. As interesting as the Terminators are, I would almost prefer to see a movie about the invention of this time-travel device, because I imagine it would feature a lot of lines like, “Well, the good news is, the flesh-covered toaster made it. The bad news is, the khakis didn’t.”
Signs
If I understand things correctly, Mel Gibson is a cleric who regains his faith in God after he realizes that his wife, in her dying moments, gave him a message that was too cryptic and oblique to save the lives of millions of people during an alien attack, but was just specific enough to save his son. This may be the most narrow definition of a miracle, ever.
Back in January, about a decade ago in Internet time, Kieran announced
This week at Crooked Timber, at the suggestion of Daniel, some of us will be discussing Doug Henwood’s new book, After the New Economy.
Henry followed up and Daniel gave us a series of Real Soon Now posts, which I suppose constitutes as good a representation of the New Economy as any.
At the time, I had a pretty good excuse for not joining in – the book hadn’t gone on sale in Australia. Brad de Long kindly sent me a copy, and, a mere eight months later, my review is done, at least in draft form. Comments much appreciated.
The discussion on this post was still going on as it slipped off the page, so I’ve picked up some thoughts from the comments thread, and from earlier CT posts on this topic. I’ll begin with Eszter’s observation that comments are the democratic component of blogging . For me, comments are an essential part of blogs, and I rarely read blogs that don’t allow them.
For a while now I’ve been wondering about whether it’s a good idea to blog about one’s travels ahead of time. There are clear advantages (the opportunity to meet up with people one otherwise would not contact), but there are potential downsides as well. Ever since my parents’ place was badly burglarized a few years ago, I have been more sensitive about the issue. And now I see Allison wondering whether a blogged trip lead to a break-in at her home. Of course, the chances are pretty small that potential thieves are reading our blogs and they also would not know in most cases whether and to what extent others sharing the household, housesitters or security systems would stand in their way (thieves take note: in my case it is usually two out of three:). Nonetheless, I have been wondering whether it is best to be less open about some of our travel plans. This would be one of those issues with which anonymous bloggers likely don’t have to deal.
So don’t expect up-to-the-minute travel info from me, but I thought I would mention where I am headed in the next month or so in case paths cross with people I did not think to contact (I have a hard time keeping track of who is where). I’ll be giving a talk at Penn soon followed by a quick visit to Princeton and one night in New York City; I’ll be attending a workshop in the Bay area and giving a talk at Yahoo!; I’m going to a conference in Atlanta; and I’ll be giving a talk at my alma mater Smith College. I’ll likely stay put for a while thereafter, which will be necessary to gather energy for an even crazier Spring travel schedule.
Simple genius over at The Poor Man. I can feel my heart growing three sizes this day.
While I was thinking about the role of blogs, I came across an observation (which I can’t locate again), that many Internet users may read blogs from time to time but don’t distinguish them from other kinds of websites. This was certainly true for me – it was only after I started blogging that I realised that kausfiles and Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, which I had visited quite a few times, were blogs and (at least in Brad’s case) part of a much larger blogosphere.
The experience of reading these sites is different for me as a result. I wonder if others have had similar experiences? And I’d be interested to hear about the relationship, if any, between the way in which people find their way around the Internet and the way that they use and interpret the sites they visit. For example, does a site reached through a portal appear different from the same site found through Google? I imagine Eszter will have something to say about this.