Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon.  Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks:

(1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day?

You, of course, wouldn’t.

But that’s not what Twitter is to most of us.  Despite the query “What are you doing now?” on the posting window, most people that I follow are posting links and commentary on matters of interest to me.    Here’s a screencap of my TweetDeck screen at the moment:

Now, I’m not saying that every single posting there contributes to my net wisdom.  But I get more than enough interesting information to be worth 30-60 minutes of my day scanning, re-tweeting, and posting my own bits.

Lezard seems to think Twitter is mostly about what people are having for lunch and the like.  And for all I know, perhaps it is.  Then again, so is “blogging.”  But just as I don’t read blogs that are mostly about people’s cats or the mundane daily activities of their lives, neither do I actively follow those sorts of Twitter accounts.

Related controversies roiling the blogosphere today point to the dark side of American politics.

First, NewsMax ran an article by a John L. Perry titled “Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention.’” It has apparently been removed from the site (it’s now directing to the home page and isn’t showing along with the author’s other pieces) but the excerpt says “There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’ Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. — America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized.”  TPM has the full text.  Here’s a further taste:

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Then, a Times of London editorial by Gore Vidal predicts “We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Finally, Thomas Friedman points to a Facebook poll that asked, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” Says Friedman:

The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

Now, Friedman is overreacting a touch here to a poll on an Internet site with millions of members who are pretty much free to post anything they want.  Then again, seeing broad trends in a single anecdote is what he does.

But his larger point nonetheless has merit.  The mass political debate, as evidenced by the blogs, talk radio, talk TV, townhall meetings, and various other venues certainly seems to be increasingly vitriolic, ill tempered, and divided.  Gone are the days when those on the other side of a given political dispute were honorable fellow countrymen with different priorities; there are only those who agree and selfish, unpatriotic, evil people.

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions.

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio.

From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plagued anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst, if only fleetingly, onto the national agenda after relentless coverage on Fox News, talk radio and in the blogosphere.

“If it wasn’t for Fox or talk radio, we’d be done as a republic,” Glenn Beck declared Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Beck, who’s aggressively pushed the Van Jones and ACORN stories, told the morning show hosts that he plans to devote his hour-long, top-rated 5 p.m. show to new undercover tapes of ACORN employees.

Last week, Big Government, a site run by conservative Andrew Breitbart, showed videos of undercover stings in three ACORN offices, where journalists posing as pimps and prostitutes were instructed by employees on how to skirt legal restrictions on housing. The tapes got big play on The Drudge Report—where Breitbart has worked—and right-leaning news outlets and commentary shows. But only after the Senate voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN on Monday did the story get more attention in the mainstream media.

ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson seemed caught off guard by the ACORN tapes on Tuesday when he told Chicago radio hosts Don Wade and Roma that he hadn’t heard of them, in a clip flagged by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Gibson added that “maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”

Gibson’s executive producer, Jon Banner, echoes that sentiment: “There’s a tremendous amount of – for lack of a better word – ‘noise’ out there. We’re not in the business of noise.”

And he’s got a point. Heck, I saw a lot of these stories percolating on the blogs and Twitter and didn’t get around to blogging about them until they were pretty developed — if at all.  And I’ve long since stopped trying to cover every major story here, going back to focusing just on topics on which I have something to say.

The problem with Banner’s argument, though, is threefold. First, even in the context of a show that gets 22 minutes to cover all the major news of the day, there’s plenty of fluff.  Usually, a good third of the show is filled with fluffy human interest stories. Second, as Jeffrey Lord notes in a tangentially related piece, there’s a pretty long history of the mainstream media gatekeepers keeping a lid on stories harmful to Democrats while running with rumors harmful to Republicans. (Although, to be fair, there are surely examples of the reverse happening.) Third — and most importantly, perhaps — is that the networks are still operating as if they’re the only game in town.  Given that there is now a reasonably mature alternative media percolating these stories to rather large, if self-selecting, audiences, the judgment as to what constitutes “news” has been democratized.  It’s simply unwise for large media outlets that claim to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print” to ignore big political stories when millions of people are talking about them.

Related to the third, because there are alternative media for the left and right, it’s now incumbent on the mainstream press to investigate the big stories that percolate in those venues to ensure that they’re shared outside of self-selected cliques and to present the story in proper context, not just the cherry picked facts touted by the partisans.  Is there more to Van Jones than youthful sympathy with Communists and having put his weight behind the Truther movement?  Is ACORN corrupt at its core or is it merely mismanaged, with a shoddy business model that invites corruption?  Are the Tea Party protesters racist yahoos marching to the tune of Glenn Beck and Freedom Works, a diverse grass roots movement, or what?  The partisan media generally lack both the resources and incentives to report these things.

Update (Alex Knapp):The Daily Show took a look at this last night, and it was both funny and took the media to task on the story:

Update 2 (Alex Knapp): For the record, it appears that at least one of the ACORN workers “caught” in this video was just playing along because she thought it was funny:

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

“They were clearly playing with me,” she said “I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

[...]

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke’s former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

Heh, yeah. I would say that talking with someone is generally a good indication that they weren’t murdered.

And of course, as always, there’s some question over whether the videos were themselves selectively edited to make ACORN look bad:

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN’s office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the “whole thing was a preposterous production.”

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn’t believe the people wanted to propose such a “ludicrous enterprise,” but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

In the video, the filmmakers claim they would bring underage prostitutes from overseas

Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn’t help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

I have to admit, if I saw two people dressed up in ludicrous costumes asking outrageous questions, I might play along for the fun of it, too, at least just to see where it was going.

Update 3 (Alex Knapp): Whew! After reading a few other stories, it looks like Tresa Kaelke is something of a nutjob. Additionally, and just for clarification, I’m not saying that the ACORN workers in these videos are all playing along or anything like that. Just that they have a side of the story, too. I’m generally inclined towards the more conventional interpretation of the videos (as noted in the Stewart clip above.)

A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead.

A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it in the future.  Then again, as Paul Banas noted, “If I were to survey US consumers right after World War II on whether they think they would use a television, and for those who don’t, do they think they would in the future, I’d probably get roughly the same data back as Forrester got on RSS.” Indeed, recall Ken Olsen’s classic 1977 statement that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

The more recent evolution of the debate is not so much about widespread adoption but that power users find RSS inefficient, preferring instead Twitter or various aggregators like Memeorandum or Techmeme.  Steve Gillmor proclaimed in May that “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.

But, as Dave Winer retorted, it’s rather silly to proclaim the death of RSS while instead using technologies that rely on RSS!

Sam Diaz revived the argument this week saying “Once a big advocate for Google Reader, I have to admit that I haven’t logged in in weeks, maybe months.”

I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my browser tabs so I can keep a pulse on what others in my industry are talking about. And then there are Twitter and Facebook. I actually pick up a lot of interesting reading material from people I’m following on Twitter and some friends on Facebook, with some of it becoming fodder for blog posts here.

The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago.

Although, again, YahooNews, GoogleNews, and Techmeme all merely aggregate information pushed through RSS.  Proclaiming RSS dead because you’re using it downstream is rather like proclaiming television dead because you never watch it anymore — you just TiVo everything.

Further, as Patricio Robles observes, “RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook, but who says it has to be? Twitter and Facebook are great for content discovery; RSS is one of a number of tools that can be used for content aggregation. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges.”

Steve Rubel takes that to the next level: “Think RSS is dead? Think it’s too slow for the age of streams? Perhaps that’s true for news. But have you ever considered using Google Reader as a private database? In this screencast I will show you how I do just that.”

Which is pretty much how I’m using Google Reader these days.  There’s a ton of information out there and trying to tab through and skim every post on every blog and newspaper that I want to follow simply takes too much time and energy.   So I rely in various aggregators, aggregate my own content feeds via the Firefox Feedly plugin, keep an eye on Twitter, and use Google Reader as a research tool for fleshing out posts once I’ve come up with ideas.

Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this:

Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should ask them when you play-test your site.

Having invested in the Thesis theme for Manzine, I’m seriously considering porting OTB and some of my other sites over at some point.  Manzine’s thumbnail-for-every-article format is too labor intensive for OTB but I like the idea of a featured post or posts followed by headlines and excerpts for older entries.

What say you?  Do you like “magazine” formats on blogs like Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, TPM, and Lifehacker?  Or do you prefer the standard blog format such as OTB now uses?  Or does it matter at all?

I’ve thought about doing this for awhile but have resisted partly because I think most people read blogs, as I do, via their RSS reader rather than directly.  But that may just be idiosyncratic to those of us who peruse a hundred or more blogs.

A Vogue cover model of whom I’d never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet.

A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.

In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.  A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.

Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.  “I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the blogger “Anonymous” wrote in one posting. The blog, since removed, ridiculed the former Australian Vogue covergirl as a “40-something” who “may have been hot 10 years ago”, when she was actually 36.

Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger’s claim that the blogs “serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting”, and should not be treated as factual assertions.

The model was looking forward last night to discovering the identity of the alleged acquaintance who insulted her. “Everybody is waiting to see who this coward is,” Steven Wagner, her lawyer, said.

While I absolutely believe that bloggers should be held just as liable as anyone else for defamation — even if that requires forcing the disclousure of their identity to the alleged victim — it’s hard to see how voicing the opinion that someone is the “skankiest in NYC” even comes close to defamation.  There is no factual assertion being made, given that there would seem to be no universal standard of measurement for such condition.

A second report at the NY Post (via Tom Maguire) however, reveals something that might rise to the level of defamation:

A Manhattan judge ruled yesterday that a blogger can’t hide behind a web of anonymity while flinging the ugly words “skank” and “ho” at somebody online.

The sternly worded ruling orders Google to give up the identity of an anonymous blogger-assailant who inexplicably devoted an entire blog — titled “Skanks in NYC” — to maligning beautiful blond model Liskula Cohen.  [Apparently the view of reporter Laura Italiano, who editorializes throughout. - ed]

Once she learns her attacker’s name — possibly as early as today — the model can serve the anonymous blogger with a defamation lawsuit.

The blog, which was posted through Google’s “Blogger.com” subsidiary last year, had included sexy fashion shots of Cohen with captions using the words “skank,” “ho” and “whoring.”

The thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden wrote in her decision. That included references to Cohen as “whoring” and “ready to engage in oral sexual activity.”  As such, the international cover girl is entitled to insist in a defamation lawsuit that the blogger’s statements are false and damaging — and to get from Google the blogger’s name she needs in order to do so, the judge ruled.

Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he hopes the decision sends a message to bloggers, Twitterers, and whoever else would use the anonymity of the Internet for cowardly defamations. ”The rules for defamation on the Web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same,” Wagner said. “The Internet is not a free-for-all.”

Well, it pretty much has been for going on two decades now.  But, again, I agree that people should be held liable for their actions on the Web. Indeed, spreading false rumors on the Web is far more damaging than simply stating them in words somewhere, given the much larger audience.

I’m not sure what the rules of discovery are in such cases. Presumably, the blogger isn’t entitled to a fishing expedition through Cohen’s sex life to see whether there is any truth to the descriptors he applied.

One imagines that the burden here is high, though.  The word “whore” has been transformed in the popular culture into a meaning well beyond traditional prostitution.  And I’m not sure that insinuating that an adult engages in oral sex with other adults, especially of the opposite sex, can even still be considered defamatory.

UPDATE:  My wife informs me that the identity of the blogger has already been revealed.  Gawker (Warning: NSFW) has a good roundup, including a link to a new story at NY Post.

The anonymous cyber-bully who harassed and belittled Manhattan model Liskula Cohen with insulting terms like “skank,” “ho” and “old hag” on a mean-spirited blog was a female acquaintance of hers.

[...]

The model said she’s still mystified about why the woman went after her so viciously. “I have no idea. She doesn’t have a lot going on and she’s jealous,” she said. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

[...]

She “was an irrelevant person” whom she’d bump into at events and restaurants around town, Cohen said. “She was always around.”

Cohen said they exchanged pleasantries when she called her on Tuesday night. Then Cohen confronted her when the woman asked, “How are you?” “I’m sure you know exactly how I am right now,” Cohen told her — and then astonished the backstabber by apologizing to her. She told her, “If I’ve ever done anything to you to actually deserve this, then I’m really very sorry.”

The stammering blogger responded, “We shouldn’t be talking . . . We should talk with the lawyers.” Cohen stopped her in her tracks. “I said, ‘No more lawyers. It’s OK. I said I forgive you. It doesn’t matter anymore,’ ” Cohen told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Except that she’s still suing for defamation.

Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition.

Michael Crowley is enthusiastic:

Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.

Matt Yglesias, however, injects a note of sober economic analysis:

A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world?

[...]

Note that BBC News runs the world’s second-best international news website and they don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge. That’s not the kind of firm you want to compete against.

Quite right. Charging for access to generic, perishable content is a sure way to ensure its irrelevancy.  The only way NYT could get away with it would be to band together with all the other quality news providers and form some sort of cabal that all charged for access.   And even then, I’m not sure we wouldn’t get around it.

I’d gladly pay $5 a month to have the NYT delivered to me via the magic of the Internet.  If this were 1995.  Back then, the prospect of getting “the best newspaper in the world” delivered to my house and office in an electronic format that I could easily save and share would have been exciting. Fast forward a few years, though, and there’s an amazing array of great content available for free on the Web. The only limitation is my ability to find and read it all.

In early 2003, when I started this blog, I used to read the NYT, WaPo, Slate, RealClearPolitics, and several other sites every day.  Soon, I was also checking out 40 or more blogs a day via my blogroll.   Somewhere along the way, however, I quit doing that.  Because of various aggregation techniques that I employ, virtually everything I read online is at the individual page level and it’s generally irrelevant to me which organization produced the news.  That is to say, I read content, not newspapers.

Contrary to the views of many of my brethren on the right, I continue to think NYT is a superb paper that produces an extraordinary amount of outstanding content on a daily basis along with the occasional dreck.  But it’s not indispensable. There’s just too much great content out there, even if others produce it in smaller amounts and ratios.  Indeed, I wouldn’t much notice if it were gone.

Copyblogger’s Brian Clark has noticed a distinction developing between blogs on the one hand and “social media” on the other.  He rightly notes that “blogs were the first modern form of social media” and thus the distinction is artificial.

My sense is that, blogs are indeed social media, they’re definitely of a different piece than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatnot. The “new” social media are generally more interactive but less driven by original content.

Most blogs have evolved beyond being literal logs of what we see on the Web (InstaPundit is one of the few of those that have remained wildly popular and, ironically, Glenn closed off comments years ago) and are essentially self-published magazines or columns.  Indeed, while commenting and cross-blog discussion remain part of the blog experience, it’s not always clear that they’re “social” in any sense other than ordinary folks being able to publish their ideas without clearance from gatekeepers.

Conversely, Twitter is mostly a platform for passing along links to other content — including blogs — as well as snappy observations. Facebook is about messaging people in one’s network, organizing gatherings, and finding amusements in such things as zombie wars and movie quizzes. I’m not sure what MySpace is about; as best I can gather, it’s an homage to the Web circa 1997, with garish designs, music that blares as soon as one enters the page, and other annoyances that the rest of the Internet has thankfully left behind.

Over at his other digs, Dave Schuler muses,

Is it my imagination or do things become very, very quiet on Fridays these days? I know that traffic at this blog drops sharply on Fridays which suggests to me that a lot of people read blogs from work and that they aren’t at work on Fridays.

In the DC area, at least, it’s not uncommon to have flex schedules.  Some work 10 hour days four days a week and takeMondays or Fridays off.  Others put in 9 hour days and take every other Monday or Friday off.  And a bold few work 8 hour days while claiming 10.

Beyond that, people tend to treat Fridays more casually, both in their attire and their pace of work, often skipping out quite early.

My blog traffic tends to go down to weekend levels by early afternoon and has for years.

Photo by Flickr user slworking2 under Creative Commons license.

Bernard Finel has been trying this blogging thing for a while and finds that it’s harder than it looks.  He notes that even very short posts require quite a bit of effort.

Even short posts take me forever. Not writing the text, per se, but I think most posts are useful if you include a couple or three links to relevant other pieces, quote sections of text, comment on them, etc. And that is where I think I must be missing something. For me, each time I want to link and quote, it means I have to

1. Open the other blog post/news story on a separate tab.
2. It means clicking over, copying the headline of the blog.
3. Click back and paste in headline.
4. Fix formating of the headline to remove stray/excess html.
5. Click back to post I am commenting on.
6. Copy url.
7. Click back to my entry.
8. Highlight the headline from the post I am commenting, and link the url.
9. Click back to the other post.
10. Copy a suitable section of text.
11. Click back to my entry.
12. Paste it… strip out stray HTML… format it as a quote.

Then… finally… I can add my 2 cents.

If I want to comment on a debate in 2-3 other blogs, it is upwards of 30 steps just to produce a couple of snippets of text to frame my comments.

Then I need to proof. Choose categories. Decide on tags. And finally publish.

What am I missing? Is there some magic piece of software that would somehow simplify this process?

Not really, unfortunately.  There are plugins that suggest tags and whatnot that save a little bit of time but, basically, this is all work that has to be done. There are various software applications that will create blog-like posts, either by stealing posts wholesale from other blogs’ RSS feeds or by generating spammy links based on keywords.

But real blogging, especially the kind Bernard and I both prefer that includes multiple links, winds up being a lot more work than it would appear at casual glance.   In addition to the steps above, for example, I tend to search for photos or other art to illustrate my posts; that can add 10-15 minutes to the process.  And that’s to say nothing of the vast amount of material one has to read to find the things one wants to blog on.  Or half-written posts that, upon reflection, aren’t really worth publishing at all.  Not to mention various administrative work associated with keeping the site up and running.

Like most anything else, though, it gets easier with practice.  I can do most of the steps Bernard outlines in my sleep at this point, having written thousands and thousands of posts over the last seven years (19,212 at OTB alone).

One “trick” that I’ve adopted in the last year and a half or so that has really helped:  Getting a second monitor.  It’s much easier to compose a post on one monitor with the various pages that one wishes to link and/or quote in another.

Aaron Brazell argues that, with the advent of instant-reporting of rumor via Twitter and other social media, the mainstream press has fallen behind.  He cites yesterday’s Steve McNair murder, the false rumors that Jeff Goldblum had died, and Michael Jackson’s death.

He laments that, while the McNair news broke on two Nashville stations but “It was a long time (30 minutes or so) before national media picked it up. ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports by their own slogan, didn’t have it. No one did. We were left gasping for more. Is the rumor true? Can anyone confirm? Can police confirm?”

Major media got a little jittery in the past. After 9/11. With other reports that turned into an overcompensation. Fact is, major media can safely report on a rumor as long as it is billed as such. No one has to say that this is confirmed. But people want to know. We get our news on the internet.

We find out about things happening in Iran via Twitter. We find out about Michael Jackson dying… on Twitter. We read blogs that deal with Sarah Palin’s awkwardly bizarre resignation at Alaska governor. We’re not watching your TV stations. We’re not in Nashville. Welcome to the global economy.

Report the damn news and report it as a rumor to hedge your bets. But report the news.

Because I was out and about with the family yesterday, I first saw the news of McNair’s death at YahooNews a half hour or so after it broke nationally and blogged my instant reaction immediately.

I saw reports that Michael Jackson died on Twitter and frantically searched for confirmation.  I did a Breaking News blog post reporting that 1) LA Times had Jackson hospitalized and that 2) several reports that he was dead, all sourced to TMZ, were out.  I updated it shortly thereafter with news that multiple legitimate sources were confirming.

(I saw the reports of Goldblum’s death on Twitter, too, but they were debunked in near-real-time.)

With rare exception, I prefer that the mainstream press report known facts rather than rumors.

People seeing rumors of Jackson’s death on Twitter or TMZ who much cared were presumably searching for confirmation on their own just as I was.  Otherwise, I’m not sure what harm is done to the collective pool of knowledge by having it reported that Jackson was rushed to the hospital — a known fact — and waiting 30 minutes or an hour or so to report that he was dead once that was confirmed.  Conversely, falsely reporting that someone has died has serious consequences.

The McNair story is slowly unfolding as a bizarre soap opera, with alternate reports of murder-suicide and double homicide.  While McNair was undoubtedly an important figure in the world of sports and his murder in the prime of life constitutes breaking news in Nashville and Baltimore (where he played professionally) and for sports pages, I’m not sure what harm there is in taking 30 minutes to gather facts on such a sensitive story.

Indeed, the Goldblum rumor provides a classic cautionary tale.  I for one am rather glad that false reports of Goldblum’s death weren’t flashed on the crawl of every TV show in America.

Like Aaron, I’m a news junkie.  I want my information now.  But unconfirmed rumor is not news; it’s gossip.  If TMZ is wrong about Jackson’s death, nobody will much care; it’s a gossip rag.  If the LAT gets it wrong, though, it loses credibility as a news organization.

There are certainly times when reporting speculation is required.  If, for example, there were reports about an attempt on the life of the president, it’s a national crisis that demands instant reporting.  There were all manner of false reports, for example, when President Reagan was shot, notably the reporting that James Brady had been killed when it turned out he was just horribly wounded.  Similarly, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks demanded 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage and reporting of “facts” as they came in.

Rumors that pop singers and retired athletes have died, however, can go unreported for a few minutes while reporters do some rudimentary fact checking.

Photo by Flickr user Joost Strootman under Creative Commons license.

Quite a kerfuffle has broken out in the blogs and on Twitter over President Obama’s calling on HuffPo’s Nico Pitney to ask a pre-screened question in yesterday’s press conference.  Politico’s Michael Calderone broke the story:

In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney near the start of his press conference and requested a question directly about Iran.  “Nico, I know you and all across the Internet, we’ve been seeing a lot of reports coming out of Iran,” Obama said, addressing Pitney.  “I know there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”

Pitney, as if ignoring what Obama had just said, said: “I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian.”  He then noted that the site had solicited questions from people in the country “who were still courageous enough to be communicating online.” “Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Reporters typically don’t coordinate their questions for the president before press conferences, so it seemed odd that Obama might have an idea what the question would be. Also, it was a departure from White House protocol by calling on The Huffington Post second, in between the AP and Reuters.  CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller, a veteran White House correspondent, said over Twitter it was “very unusual that Obama called on Huffington Post second, appearing to know the issue the reporter would ask about.”

According to POLITICO’s Carol Lee, The Huffington Post reporter was brought out of lower press by deputy press secretary Josh Earnest and placed just inside the barricade for reporters a few minutes before the start of the press conference.

Here’s a video of the exchange:

HuffPo founder Ariana Huffington writes a characteristically snippy post defending Pitney and Obama, saying this is just a case of MSM reporters getting their noses out of joint at a mere blogger getting such prominent placement.  She also defends the site from charges that it is “left-leaning” and being used by the Obama administration in much the way its predecessors employed Fox News.

My concern in  this case is quite narrow.  I have no real problem with Pitney getting the spotlight.  Despite the fact that he’s a left-leaning activist by profession, he’s done exemplary journalism on Iran.  Nor do I particularly object to Obama’s using Pitney’s aggregation of Iranian responses as a jumping off point.  I am, however, worried about the precedent of a president pre-screening the questions at supposed press conferences.

Had Obama said, in his prepared remarks, something to the effect that “Nico Pitney of Huffington Post has done an extraordinary job of engaging Iranian public opinion and this question in particular deserves an answer,” I would be fine with it.  Instead, though, Obama essentially set up a canned question and gave the impression to a casual observer that it was a tough question from the floor.

If this is a one-off because of the unusual circumstances of in Iran, it’s not a big deal.  But journalists are right to insist that this sort of thing not become the norm.  If the White House is going to pre-select questions, they’re not “press conferences” at all; they’re one-act plays.  And reporters ought not participate in the sham.

AP Photo/Fionn Kidney

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.  They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia. “I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin. “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

This was something of a perfect storm:  The sudden death of a notable but relatively obscure figure combined with a superbly crafted quote.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh says, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”  That’s generally been my practice.   Trouble is, once a quote is out there, it quickly loses its Wikipedia moorings.   My guess is that many of those who used the quote found it at The Guardian or elsewhere.   Yes, journalists use Wikipedia without attribution.   Even more lift quotes and story ideas from other journalists, with or without attribution.

I’ve been quoted or asked for interviews many times based on blog posts that were mostly excerpts of media stories or others’ blog posts.  Given the formatting of this site — which has long used very well marked blockquotes and which highlights the name of the source being quoted — that would seem rather obvious.  But those searching for information stumble on the site via Google search, where we tend to rank well, and see an authoritative byline and go with it.

Similarly, the Atlantic Council put out a report on Afghanistan in January 2008 which began, “Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.”  A subsequent edition of the report two months later changed that to, “Make no mistake: The international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”  It has thus been more than a year since the original quote appeared on the Council website or was available in a fresh print copy.  I still see the original version with some frequency.   It’s the quote that’s being quoted, not the report.

Indeed, were this report on the fake quote written differently, I’d expect that people would have used this report of the fake quote — and reports on the reports on the fake quote like this one — as a source of the quote. I’m not sure if AP’s Shawn Pogatchnik, whose report I quote above, intentionally broke up the fake quote with the phrase “Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read” to forestall that happening or whether it’s a happy accident.   I have had enough blog comments and emails resulting from blog posts to know that quite a few people will mistake, say, a commentary about Jesse Jackson as a posting by Jesse Jackson.  People doing Internet searches will glom onto a single sentence and ignore everything else on the page.

Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere.

He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (”How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system.  While pretty much every blogger who wrote about this idea at the time scoffed at it, Craig observes, “That seems like a pipe dream today, but who knows about tomorrow? Television was once free, but now the average American spends hundreds of dollars each year for his cable or satellite subscription.”  That’s a good point, actually.

But what pay television offered that the free version didn’t was variety.  In the old days, most of us had the three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), plus PBS and a couple of local independents to choose from.  Adding just ESPN and CNN was a huge advance and the availability of movie channels like HBO and Showtime was just remarkable.   I’m not sure what the online news equivalent of this would be.

The second suggestion, via Mark Potts (”Editors as Curators: What’s Taking So Long?) is that editors could repackage their skills and rethink online newspapers as smart aggregators.

[N]ewspaper and TV sites still generally are trapped in their walled gardens, putting together their daily reports only from the sources they pay for: their own reporters, maybe some wire and syndicated copy and photos, and that’s about it.

On the Web, you’re not limited only to the content you own. You can create a rich, deep package for your readers on any subject by linking to outside sources—background, context, documents, data, video, discussions, blogs, user-generated content, etc. Even, shudder, good stuff from competitors. But with very few exceptions, this is done only tentatively, if at all, at the vast majority of news sites.

Craig calls this “a really smart idea/model” and wonders, “Can the culture of the newsroom support it? Or does a version of the Not Invented (Created) Here syndrome work against it?”

I’d argue, though, that bloggers are pretty much doing this already and for free.  It’s Glenn Reynolds‘ bread and butter, of course, but even bloggers that aren’t primarily linkers tend to serve as aggregators.  Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and other general interest bloggers provide links to dozens of stories of interest to their readers a day and niche blogs like Small Wars Journal are, in additional to a source of original commentary and analysis, smart aggregators of the most important articles and discussions on their topics taking place elsewhere.

So, yes, this is a good model for attracting eyeballs on the Web.   But, since thousands of people are doing it for free — and hundreds are doing it well — I’m not sure how that translates into an effective business model for saving newspapers.

Photo by Flickr user Annie Mole under Creative Commons license.

Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame.

In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What’s happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:

• Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
• Blogging, at least in the “bleeding edge” technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there’s certainly some circumstanstial evidence – just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 – there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
• Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.

They offer a bit of data to support their thesis but admit that it’s rough.

Based on my own observations — and I’m only casually involved with Twitter, Facebook, and other non-blog social media outlets — the first of these bullets strikes me as more plausible than the others.

The professionalization of blogging and the rise of automatic aggregators has shaken out the pocket-Glenn Reynolds types, leaving essayists and discussion leaders in the ascendency.  Most of the “serious” blogs now create quasi-unique content and/or (as this post is attempting to do) bring attention to content from outside their niche into a wider discussion.

The hundreds of blogs that once existed mostly as true web logs — i.e., mostly just pointing to content elsewhere that the proprietor finds interesting — have mostly withered away. There’s just not a market for them (perhaps because the professional bloggers are cranking out too much content and people don’t have time to read anything else.)  It’s quite plausible that those folks have moved in to Twitter.

The second part of that first bullet is right, too.  The linking culture that still persists on political blogs is much less common in other niches.  Although I’m no longer actively posting, I own celebrity and sports blogs and there’s virtually no tradition of source acknowledgment in those sub-spheres.  Celebrity blogs in particular generally pass off cut-and-paste content from elsewhere as their own.

Photo by Flickr user HGruber, used under Creative Commons license.