This blog is now read by more machines than humans: RSS robots, spam-laying insectopoids, echoes of blog-gathering .edu projects. This essentially is the state of affairs that all human activities w
Cleaning Up the Nation
Austin Bay:
If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at
Rank Materialism
Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing some
Fallujah Fonda
Uh-oh. From the Telegraph comes this exciting news:
Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.
Acros
John Pilger: Partner in Terrorism
In an outrageous piece of terrorist propaganda appearing on the cover of today's New Statesman, John Pilger puts the blame for the 7/7 London attacks not on the terrorists, but rather on Tony Blair:
Inflection Point
Wretchard the Cat's got another of his deep thought pieces up, this one about the evolving role of blogs in the world.
Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was inevitable.
But the mainstream media could console itself in one thing. It still controlled the primary newsgathering apparatus. Yet even here the rulebook was changing. The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that in addition to the analysis cells which manifested itself in 'instant punditry', the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills. These came suddenly of age with the December 2004 tsunami story.
As I read that I realized for the first time that at no point in the unfolding tsunami story did I seek out the MSM for information. And it's not that I wasn't following the story- I was following it quite closely. There is plenty of news that the mainstream media dubs a big story that I could care less about. The Peterson murder case being a good recent example. But this isn't like that. No, I was following this alright- I just looked to the internet, and primarily blogs, for new information.
I found video, pictures, first-hand accounts, as well as analysis- all through blogs. And all unmediated by paid professionals. Now there's no doubt that as the proprietor of a small and humble blog, I'm a bit ahead of the curve here, and that you, as a reader of at least one such blog, probably are as well. The point is that there's definitely something going on.
Wretchard's thesis is that with the war in Iraq and the 2004 US election, many of us grew used to getting analysis, opinion, and punditry through this blogosphere. That became normal for many people. Now we're looking to blogs for information- news reporting. This is differerent. Of course this had been going on at some level before, but Wretchard believes that the tsunami disaster story is an inflection point. Well I fit right into that reading.
One opposing factor is that of access and bandwidth. Those videos take up and awful lot of pipeline. I do think that as broadband gets cheaper and more commoditized and more omnipresent, this restraining factor will fade away.
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Brian O'Connell.

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