Cost Of Living Now Outweighs Benefits

The Onion

Best headline ever.

Members - The Vancouver Weblogger Meetup Group - Meetup.com

Members - The Vancouver Weblogger Meetup Group - Meetup.com

Douglas Rushkoff: Get Back in the Box

Get Back in the Box | MetaFilter

blogging is still a bit foreign to most

As someone who blogs, I read a lot about the medium. I hear how much the blogosphere is exploding, and I stay up-to-date with the latest innovations and changes to the media landscape. I find it exciting as hell, and it's easy to get carried away and think that life doesn't exist beyond the internet.

But for most people, life is pretty much the same as it was before the "blog revolution", and the effects of blogging are mostly invisible. Blogging is getting a fair amount of attention in the media, but it's still very possible to go through your days without worrying about the blogosphere. It is reminiscent of the early days of email, when you would struggle to explain to non-users why you might want to send somebody an "electronic note". Why wouldn't you just pick up the phone, they'd say. To non-bloggers, the idea of publishing your thoughts online is even more foreign. Keeping your favourite links on your blog? Why not just use bookmarks? They work just fine.

When email first came around, I was the first of my group of friends to have an address. And for a brief time, before absolutely EVERYBODY jumped on board, there was a perception that email was a bit dorky. It was hard to understand why you'd want to write letters to friends that you probably talk regularly already. Email retrieved the letter, long obsolesced by the telephone, and it made people uncomfortable for a while.

And now blogging is retrieving the town crier, the speaker's corner, the letter to the editor, the pamplet. All of these things are even more foreign to people today than the letter was in the 90s. So understandably, it may take a while for the masses to get on board the blogtrain.

Blogging Heads?

Mark Federman asks which will be more influential, the TV version or the blog version, if news anchors start blogging.

It reminds me of a thought I had the other day about the debate over "blogger ethics". One part of the debate suggests that bloggers need to follow more strict journalistic standards, and need to be held accountable for their statements. This brings to light the fact that many "real journalists" fail miserably to follow any sort of standards themselves, and recent cases make this plain. Blogging has made it apparent that ALL of our media have inherent biases, including the network news, despite their best efforts to maintain an appearance of impartiality.

So it seems to me that attempting to adopt the failing journalistic standards of the old media is completely backwards. Bloggers would do well to focus more on developing their voice and point of view rather than attempting to remain impartial. Blogs develop context over time, through archives of articles, links, and design choices, as well as the communities that develop around them. Readers are able to discern the point of view of the blogger to help interpret their articles. This is not possible with the traditional media, where biases are intentionally hidden from view. Given that choice, it is no surprise that people would choose blogs over the networks to get their news.

So rather than copying the traditional media by attempting to hide their biases (which is ultimately impossible) bloggers should expose their point of view as much as they can. This lowers the threshold for new readers, allowing them to make quick judgments about articles. I predict that it will be less and less common for popular blogs to be hosted by mysterious pseudonyms, and more bloggers taking the bold step of "outing" themselves into the new electronic world.

Confessions of an EBay Opium Addict

News&features - March 31, 2005

A great read by a guy who got hooked on home-made opium tea supplied by EBay. He's got a lot of other articles too.

Attention and the Political Divide

In this hyper-accelerated world of information bombardment, our most scarce resource has become attention.

Our time-saving devices haven't given us more free-time, but instead allowed us to fill every last second of our lives with attention-demanding activity. Our nervous systems are maxed out. Advertisers feel the crunch, having to fight harder every year to get us to focus on their message, seeking out new methods and places to grab our precious attention. Meanwhile, power has been given to consumers to choose what messages they will pay attention to, with scores of TV channels, satellite radio, portable music players, internet news and entertainment, etc., all dividing our days into a thousand fleeting moments of attentiveness.

So when the political world heats up, and debate occurs over serious and contentious issues, the divide betweent the right and left is widened, because each side is paying attention to different things.

We have the choice of whether to watch Fox News or CNN, or PBS. Or we can skip TV altogether, and just read newspapers. And then we can choose to read only the sports section. We can choose to read trashy gossip magazines or we can read the Economist. We can choose to listen to Rush Limbaugh, or we can listen to NPR. And we are what we eat.

But our ability to choose our information diet is only part of the problem that has led to the deep political divide in America.

The other part is that none of us have enough time to be sufficiently exposed to the other side. Limitless choice has led to the "end of downtime"-- where we rarely reflect, ponder, or just let our minds rest. We have become accustomed to being bombarded with information, so instead of just tuning out, we just tune into the stations we like. Our attention is so precious, why waste it being enraged by people we can't stand?

Our information diets have become unbalanced.

the south has risen

So trying to contextualize all the changes happening in the US right now, it seems to me that how the Bush-Cheney junta, the neo-con project, the "religious right" have all come together so nicely is evidence that the South has finally risen to avenge the Civil War. And we now have 4 more years to feel the pain.

The Constitution Restoration Act

ZNet |Criminal Justice System | Introducing The Constitution Restoration Act

And off the rails we go...

BP profits on track as oil price surges on

Scotsman.com Business - Top Stories - BP profits on track as oil price surges on

Is there something wrong when companies stand to profit from accidents that happen at their plants? How nice that BP will be able to count on high oil prices right when a disastrous explosion killed 15 at their Texas City facility. If I'm not mistaken, accidents like this actually affect the price of oil.