Me: You’ve said your advice for entrepreneurs is to avoid venture capital. Can you explain that a bit?

Matt: I have so many friends in the technology industry who are so obsessed with getting funded. And they’re confusing that with getting paid and it being money. People see it as free money, and it’s not. A lot of people obsessed with venture capital see Metafilter as a lifestyle business, but in my mind, it’s a mature business. It works really well and yet nobody aspires to do something like this and I don’t know why. Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.

Don’t take any money, don’t owe anything to anyone, build [your business] how you want instead of constantly being on that treadmill of growth growth growth.

Sood: Conversation with Metafilter Founder Matt Haughey

(via Tomorrow Museum)

“Dangerousmeme is a subversive art project with a coterie of followers on the fringe.”

We are naturally drawn to hyperbole. I take furtive pleasure assuming the role of Cassandra or a ‘ Henny Penny‘. I ask people to question the source of their beliefs. We live in a soundbite-sized world where complex ideas are distilled as reductio ad absurdum. While my overarching themes tend to be dramatic, I also see humor in the outrageous, ominous ideas in our midst. I hope my followers they can muster a smile in the face of this dire information, have a better understanding of when it matters, and formulate their own informed opinions about the true nature of things.

I find irony in the number of people who follow me because they quickly read my tweets and accept them as truth, at face value. This is the tiny conceit in my concept. The net is wide, much greater than it would naturally be if I simply tweeted my own personal beliefs. However, by catching these ideological sleepers and gradually exposing them to a breadth of ideas, I hope I am ultimately not only preaching to the converted.

Globatron: Interview with @dangerousmeme

This sounds a lot like my philosophical approach to Technoccult for a long period of its existence. For various reasons, this has become more and more untenable and I’ve started to editorialized more and more.

What are some of your favorite blogs?

I was just catching up on tweets and learned, via Captain Marrrk, that Mac Tonnies has passed away. I’m in shock. This is just so sad:

Nick just called to tell me that our friend and colleague Mac Tonnies was found in his apartment this (Thursday) afternoon, apparently dead of natural causes. There was no evidence of foul play or suicide according to a close friend.

It is hard to find the right words to describe my feelings at this moment.

The last time we talked was just after his appearance on Coast To Coast on September 28th. He asked if I thought he had done a good job. I said he hit one over the fence. Tentatively, I asked if he would consider collaborating on a fiction project, and he liked the idea. Now, I don’t really know what to do or say.

The manuscript of Mac’s last book was apparently complete and ready to be delivered to the publisher.

Nick will have his feelings and more details to follow, but Mac’s family have been informed, and we wanted to get the news out to people who either knew Mac, or were inspired by his original and highly intelligent contributions to the study of UFOs and other anomalies, as well as many aspects of leading-edge science and technology.

Just an indescribable loss. In the next day or so, perhaps I’ll have more to say.

From: UFO Mystic: Mac Tonnies Gone

Update: Some info about Mac’s heart problems

Dangerous Minds now has a web site, including a group blog.

Dangerous Minds

Once again, speaking in defense of those of us who publish original news in blog format:

Yes, we have cultivated sources. Not “just” the community members who kindly turn to us when they see a crash or a fire or a crime, because they know we will cover it NOW, but also politicians, community leaders, government employees, other ‘insiders’ who know we understand that if they feel something is important enough to check out, chances are it matters to thousands of community members, so off we go to dig in.

And yes, we sit through never-ending community meetings. Almost every night of the week. Some afternoons too. From design review, to Hearing Examiner appeals, to hearings scheduled just as formalities for some ongoing government process – buried in published public notices – and we go to City Hall and the County Council Chambers and the courthouse downtown.

We cover important stories that others don’t bother with. No paper in our area, big or small, saw fit to bother with a murder trial last year that started with a shooting in an area of our neighborhood where “that just doesn’t happen” and led through a story of stalking and self-defense, with the teenage suspect ultimately exonerated after a year behind bars. They all read our work so they knew it was happening and chose to ignore it.

I paid a reporter to cover it daily — it lasted a few weeks — even though at the time I couldn’t really afford it — just knew it had to be done and I couldn’t do a full day of court justice while also managing the rest of the site. Now, months later, we have the revenue to pay more journalists to work with us – freelance for starters but I hope more permanent soon – including two veterans whose jobs were cut at local papers big and small for $ reasons.

So, dear old-media folks who I understand are acting out of pain and fear – I have been through layoffs myself — please stop attacking and dismissing everything with “blog” attached to it – it is only a publishing format. If there is a specific writer you are upset about, call them out by name/site, but get educated and learn that the “blog” world has a surprising amount of REAL JOURNALISM going on, produced by REAL JOURNALISTS, and since some of us small operations seem to be showing signs of sustainability, this just may be the way a lot of REAL JOURNALISM is produced for the foreseeable future – you are welcome to buy a domain, install a CMS, and get after it yourselves, too.

–Tracy Record, editor/co-publisher, West Seattle Blog
(Seattle, WA, 650,000 pageviews/mo., 20,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once weekly)

From: Jay Rosen’s Tumblr

West Seattle Blog

Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner have teamed up to provide users with a new service that gives them access to anonymized content posted through the Tor network.

Although users have always been able to publish content anonymously on Tor, the content has been available only to people who download the Tor software. Swartz wanted to free-up the content to make it available to anyone. The result is tor2web, which is essentially a kind of Google for the hidden “underweb.”

Tor is a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet and with whom a user communicates. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses.

Full Story: Threat Level

Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don’t limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans’ desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

We’re talking about a surprisingly big market. According to Impressions, a clothing industry trade publication, Americans spend around $40 billion a year on decorated apparel. At CafePress, a Web site that lets anyone customize and sell merchandise, users sold more than $100 million in goods in 2007—pocketing $20 million in profits—and overall sales are growing an average of 60 percent a year.

As you might expect, the T-shirt economy is a long tail phenomenon, with comparatively few people making a full-time living while millions earn only a few hundred or thousand bucks a year. On the high revenue end, you’ve got companies like BustedTees—an offshoot of the funny-video portal CollegeHumor—which, with a staff of eight, expects to clear a 20 percent profit on sales of 350,000-plus shirts for 2008. In the middle are outfits like RightWingStuff, which hawks T-shirts mocking the left. And on the far end of the tail are people like David Friedman, a New York photographer who cooks up three or four witty ideas a year—like his series of T-shirts adorned with fictional corporate logos that are blurrily “pixelated,” as if on reality TV—and makes just enough money to cover his hosting fees, plus a bit of pocket change.

Full Story: Wired

Make your own

(via Zenarchery)

Here are the facts as I’ve been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski’s son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let’s translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski’s have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family — pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family’s stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won’t like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: “Hey look,” he says, “look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house.”

I take it anyone would agree that it would outrageous for someone to publish the stuff this disgruntled sort produced. Obviously, within limits: if there were illegal material (child porn, for example), we’d likely ignore the trespass and focus on the crime. But if it is not illegal material, we’d all, I take it, say that the outrage is the trespass, and the idea that anyone would be burdened to defend whatever someone found in one’s house.

Full Story: Lessig Blog

I agree. Although I do think public figures, like judges, should be subject to more public scrutiny, waving some privacy as part of public life, this is absurd. Kozinski has done nothing illegal, nothing hypocritical, and there is no conflict of interest. Should obscenity trials only be tried by prudes who have never looked at porn before?

Also: 10 Zen Monkeys takes a look at the pictures in question

Rose Colored news returns to regular operations

Crime prevention organization making a difference in Chicago

Man grows new finger thanks to ground-up pig bladder

Argentina Decriminalizes Drug Consumption

Alaska: Appeals Court Cracks Down on Coercive Searches

Low cost, small scale wind turbines to power off-grid villages

Gel-like Material Shows Promise As Oral Insulin Pill For Diabetes

Bakeries urge customers to plant wheat in their lawns

Florida: No crime in photo of undercover officer

Four other Big Brothers:

(I started this back when Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo!, but I’ve only just not gotten a chance to finish up).

We all know about the potential “Big Brother”hood of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. Here are four other organizations with massive databases or the potential to collect extensive personal data.

Amazon, the other data hoarders – Amazon has perhaps the most complete database of the web outside of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. They own Alexa, which keeps detailed statistics on web traffic of the entire web. Alexa helps maintain archive.org, which includes an extensive backup of as much of the web as possible. They also have their own Google-based search engine a9 and host database apps. And all of this is just gravy for their extensive consumer data from amazon.com.

eBay, merchant monopoly – So far the government has resisted Internet sales tax. But eBay’s cut of their auctions and Paypal transactions almost constitutes a sales tax in and of itself considering the number of transactions that use these services. Also, they own what amounts to the biggest Internet telco, Skype. They have (or have the potential to collect) data on who buys what, who pays who what, and who calls who. To top it all off, they own an approximate 25% share in Craig’s List (and they own a Craig’s List competitor, Kijiji).

Wikipedia Foundation, truth and authority incorporated – Wikipedia is on its way to “owning” truth. We all probably know better, but we’ll all still trust Wikipedia entries without checking references more often than we should. In many cases, I search Wikipedia on a subject before I search Google – and more often than not, a Wikipedia entry is the top listing for a topic on Google. Often I’ll never even end up looking at a Google search for a subject because I’ll just look at the references and external links from a Wikipedia article. I believe Wales’s side of this story, but the potential for conflict of interest at Wikipedia is huge. The transparency and “crowd sourced” accountability temper this, but to what extent? It’s worth noting they now have a private wing – Wikia, which has started a search engine service.

IAC/Interactive Corp , or: who? – This huge company owns dozens of recognizable Internet brands, but hardly anyone has heard of them. If they started pooling all their data and mining it, what could they do? They’ve got one of the “other” big search engines, ask.com. They’ve got huge reserves of data for potential mining of social information from sites like match.com and evites, which could give them data on par with Myspace or Facebook. They’ve got a popular web based RSS reader, Bloglines. They could mine all sorts of consumer preference data from sites like Citysearch, Lending Tree, and the home shopping network. One of their businesses already attracted criticism years ago and remains a juggernaut in its niche: Ticketmaster.

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, “Oops!!!”, which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he’d been shut down for “suspicious activity.”

Full Story: Wired.

Radley Balko sums it up nicely:

So even as police departments across the country are setting up sex offender registries, drug offender registries, and posting the mugs and names of suspected johns online, they also took a great deal umbrage early this month when Gino Sesto set up a site called RateMyCop.com.

I’ve been thinking about moving to a new web host, and had been considering GoDaddy. Well forget that. And I was just getting to the point where I was willing to forgive this.

Wikia Search launched today. So far it’s nothing much, but the plan is to grow the product over the coming years. Jimmy Wales said in a comment on TechCrunch:

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So far there doesn’t seem to be a lot for users to do with the site, but presumably as the alpha release comes along there will be more. It reminds me of Opencola which I played with a little back in 2002, but seems to have never taken off. I think Opencola was really onto something back in the day, so I have high hopes for this.

Meanwhile, Goolgle is presumably hard at work on their Wikipedia competitor, Knols.

So what we’re seeing is a head-to-head competition between Wikimedia/Wikia’s transparency model and Google’s secrecy model.

Also of note, The New Yorker has a long article on Google’s lobbying.

Since I tend to post a flood of links both here and at Technoccult, some of wich I haven’t even read, I thought it might be useful both for readers and for myself to offer a list of the very best things I read each week.

Brother Theodore is Dead, a Brother Theodore obituary by Nick Mamatus.

The Big Shill. Harvey Pekar’s account and analysis of his final appearance on Letterman.

Three skeptical takes on Lisi’s e8 theory of everything.

Charles Schulz slideshow/bio.

The Liberal Candidate, Dave Weigel on Rudy Giuliani.

Naomi Wolf connects several dots and argues that we’re in the late stages of a fascist shift.

I’m currently available for the following:

Articles:
Web 2.0
Technology
Culture
Politics
Occult

Marketing Communications:
Press releases
Copy writing
Web sites
Blog templates
Newsletters
Brochures
Etc.

Speaking:
Web 2.0
Blogging for businesses
New media
Magick 101
Organizing for alternative communities

E-mail klint at klintron dot com

1. I’ve been using Yahoo! a lot longer and don’t want to change my e-mail address. The reason I signed up for Yahoo! Mail in the first place was that I was tired of changing my e-mail address and just wanted one address that I could rely on forever (and Yahoo! was better than Hotmail). So I’ve never been thrilled about making the jump to another e-mail service.

2. I can drag and drop messages between folders in Yahoo! Mail. Just one of those small conveniences that can really make a difference. The “label” and “search, don’t sort” motto of gmail doesn’t really work that well for me. I’d rather be able to quickly drag an e-mail into a container (reply, todo, save, etc) rather than type a label on it and let everything pile up.

3. Yahoo! Mail now offers unlimited storage. After Gmail started offering 1 gig of storage space, Yahoo! quickly moved to 2 gigs (or at least they did for premium users, I forgot what they offered for free). Yahoo!’s managed to stay ahead in the storage game, and now it’s unlimited for everyone.

4. My Yahoo! Premium account has no ads. My premium account only costs $20 a year. Originally I shelled it out for the extra storage (no longer an issue, see above) but I’ve gotten used to not having ads on my e-mail, and:

5. My Yahoo! Premium account as a “archive” feature that lets me back-up my mail and attachments. I can back everything up, maintaining my folder structure. You can grab all your Gmail with POP or IMAP but then you’ll lose all your labels.

Abe says, in reference to this:

It’s funny to read the tech types on this stuff cause they just don’t get culture. Sure the Facebook app platform is light years ahead of what MySpace is doing, but it doesn’t exactly help you promote your band or your photo studio or your art does it? I’m actually more optimistic about MySpace’s long term relevance now than I’ve ever been. That doesn’t mean what Facebook is doing isn’t cool and potentially important, it’s just a big fork in the paths these companies are taking.

I can’t help but think though that what Abe sees as Myspace’s strength – promoting your band or photo studio or whatever – is actually its weakness. Myspace is basically a big spam machine. Although I still spend more time on Myspace, as that’s where most of my friends are, I’ve been spending less and less time on it and so has everyone else I know. My Facebook network, meanwhile, is continuing to grow. The thing is, Facebook is designed to actually facilitate communication between users. Myspace is designed to get people to accept spam.

If Myspace continues to wall its gates, it becomes even less useful. Doing even the most basic tasks in Myspace – from sending messages to uploading pictures – is painfully slow and unreliable. A flood of bulletins from bands and businesses and never ceasing friend requests from cam girls have no real value to me. Putting a funny You Tube video or Photobucket pic on a friend’s comments is one of the fun things about Myspace, and if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?

The esteemed Nicholas J. Pell has launched a blog covering the 2008 election from his non-Euclidean political perspective:

Giuliani was on the offensive, repeating what will likely be his mantra for the upcoming election, that social issues don’t matter. The Big G still leads in key states in all early polling, and I still maintain that he’s going to name Gingrich as his running mate long before the primary season even begins to wash away his sins. Specifically, his (alleged) socially permissive politics and being from “Nooo Yawrk Citaaay?!” The Manhattan Mussolini once again reiterated his opposition to more government spending on anything other than putting black ski masked thugs on every street corner in America. Internal security and intelligence services on a scale grander than the German Democratic Republic are a great idea but single-payer health care? That’s socialism! He also stated unequivocally that the other Republican candidates are better than Clinton, Obama and Edwards. One can only assume that proto-fascist Tom Tancredo and reanimated corpse Tommy Thompson are included in this assessment.

News Virus 2008.

Remember the story about the blogger who received misogynistic death threats a couple weeks ago? Kos has chimed in with a post I hope he finds utterly embarrassing. He says “Most of the time, said ‘death threats’ don’t even exist — evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said “death threats.’” Actually, Kos, Kathy Sierra did provide the death threats.

“fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob”

“the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.”

There were also Photoshopped images of her head in a noose, among other images which are no long available. Someone in the comments on her post described it:

In the pic she’s being gagged/suffocated like in a horror movie, and at first glance it looks like her head is being split open (before you see it’s panties–and I’m not the only one to do a double-take). Does that not look deeply wrong to you?

This is a bit different from “AIDS will be killing more and more of you liberals every year.” It’s personal, and someone took the time to create detailed Photoshopped images of her.

That said, I’m not sure a blogger code of conduct will solve these sorts of problems. But Kos should have gotten the facts straight before he started shooting his mouth about how Sierra was just a whiney blogger who needs to grow some thicker skin. To quote Adam Greenfield, “If you don’t get why even sophomoric Photoshoppings have to be taken seriously as same in the context of a continued campaign of harrassment and intimidation, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Update: Here’s a more eloquent post about this subject from Bruce Godfrey.

Update 2: FWIW, Daily Kos contributing editor MissLaura gets it right:

Bloggers tend to talk a lot about thick skin, and to pride ourselves on it. But I think maybe we’ve kind of elevated this to a form of machismo – because you have to have a thick skin to deal with the legitimate critiques you face as a blogger, somehow it’s become A Thing that you also have to accept the illegitimate personal ones as well.

Celebrity, misogyny, machismo, the anonymity of online discourse. There are a lot of possible explanations for this crap, and probably each is relevant at certain moments. What do you think, not just about what explains it but about what to do about it? How much do we tolerate? When do we get to point the finger and say ‘this is not merely dislike of someone else but misogyny’?

Update 3: Kos issues a “clarification” (aka non-apology).

Ethan Zuckerman:

My friend Jon Lebkowsky put together a really excellent group for our panel at SXSW. The panel focused on the challenges of blogging in countries where there’s no reasonable expectation of freedom of speech. On stage, we had Shava Nerad from Tor, Rob Faris from the Open Net Initiative, Shahed Amanullah of altmuslim.com, and Jasmina TeÅ¡anović, a Serbian journalist and blogger – a great range of speakers from experts on technical constraints on speech to people who’ve written and spoken from very difficult countries.

Rob Faris opens by suggesting that the cyberutopian fantasies of the Internet as an open, special place beyond national boundaries, is being dismissed as a fantasy. At least two dozen countries are filtering in the Internet and there are others ONI is watching closely – there’s a concentration of countries that filter the Internet in the Middle East and in East Asia. In many cases, filtering doesn’t just block sex or drug content, but prevents people from accessing political content. Filtering is messy and incomplete – Rob suggests we take a moment and have some sympathy for the poor censors, who are taking on an impossible task, as it’s very difficult to block any content without collateral damage. (His tongue is firmly in cheek.)

Full Story: …My Heart’s in Accra.

The new issue of Reconstruction is on blogging. I’m featured in the “Why Blog” section along with bloggers from all over the world, from Montana to Iran. Douglas Rushkoff, Mickey Z, and Rebecca Blood are some of the bigger names featured.

Reconstruction 6.4: Theories/Practices of Blogging.

When I first started this blog, I wrote a post called “What is This Journal For?”” I tossed around a few ideas – mainly the “outboard brain” idea from Cory Doctorow, which remains the operative metaphor for this blog. But I never really found a satisfactory answer, and concluded: “I’m still not sure what this journal is for.”

Since that time I’ve added at least one major function: making money.  Actually, when I started my longest running blog Technoccult, money was a motivator.  That was just around the time of the dot com crash, and the idea that a hobby site could make money from advertising still seemed valid.  The idea quickly fizzled, and for years I ran Technoccult, and later this blog, without ads or any intention of ever making money off of them.  Even if I never made another cent off my blogs, I’d keep doing them.

So, if the blog doesn’t have a particular function, then why blog?  Perhaps it has something in common with the reasons I write in general.

Peter David had this to say about writers:

I also write novels, and if I tell a stranger this– on an airplane, for example– it almost always gets the same response. The person will say, “Oh, you know, I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” or “I know someone who’s working on one and is looking for a publisher.” Impressed? Very rarely.

Tell people you’re an artist, they’ll want you to do them a sketch of Spider-Man. Tell them you’re a writer, and they’ll say, “That’s nice.” What are they supposed to say? “Ooooh, ooooh, write me a paragraph! Bang me out a word balloon!”

[…]

I hear this over and over again. “I have an idea I’ve been wanting to do.” “I have a book I’ve always wanted to write.” But they’re too busy. Too busy earning a real living in a real world. “Something always comes up and I never have the time.”

So a writer, by implication, is someone who has nothing better to do. Being a writer is something frivolous, something that the ordinary person could do in his or her spare time while making a genuine living. Try to explain to these people that writing is something you do because it’s impossible not to, and you get blank stares.

This has always resonated with me. I’m not a disciplined writer. I don’t write every day. I’ve had some articles published here and there, but I’m far from being a professional writer. Sometimes I think about quitting writing forever. Sometimes I’ll go months without writing. But somehow it always creeps back in, something will creep into my head and I’ll have to write it down. It may be a few paragraphs or a few pages, but every so often it happens and I can’t really help it.

I suppose, ultimately, the same is true of blogging. There are a number of reasons to blog, but probably an equal number of reasons not to.  Sometimes I think about shutting ‘em all down, selling my domain names, and finding a more productive hobby.  I did sell one of my blogs, but I don’t have any intention of giving up any of the others, and even if I did, I’d probably just keep blogging somewhere else. 

The truth is, I blog because I just can’t help it.

Attensa (my employers) are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 at Syndicate today (see the announcement here). I’ve been testing 1.5 and I have to say, it’s really cool. The AttentionStream™ technology is still young, so don’t expect miracles, but I’m already finding it useful. In the mean time, there’s 1.2 which we’ve also put a lot of work into. It has no AttentionStream™ component, but it synchronizes with our (free) web and wireless clients.

We’ve also announced our partnership with Six Apart on our web site:

Six Apart and Attensa are working together to help businesses use RSS and collaborative publishing to

create strategic advantages

accelerate project execution

make the most of fleeting market opportunities

and get the right information to the right people at the right time.

From John Shirley’s blog… I’m quoting the whole thing because he doesn’t have permalinks:

A guest blog by JB

One interesting thing I just realized is that the traditional press claims that *they* expertly edit and winnow the news for us, and that blogs don’t provide that service, so they are full of noise, you can’t trust them.

I find it’s the opposite. I come to C&L or RawStory or wherever, *because* I know I am going to get a certain type of story and that they won’t miss anything important in the type of stories that each particular blog covers. I’m just not going to take the time to watch
CSPAN, but if something good happens on it, I *know* I will see it on Crooksandliars.com.

So quite opposite to what the op ed people say, quality blogs provide me with a *value added* that I don’t get from the undifferentiated mishmash of local/national/international news I get from the newspaper.

Newspapers are still stuck in the paradigm of international section, national section, local section, sports section, entertainment section, etc., where as blogs are in effect “tagged” — I go to one blog for right-winger hyporcrites caught on tape, another for media criticism,
another for stories about civil liberties issues, etc.