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Read this great piece from Wired about over-reaction to the Virginia Tech killings. In light of the recent Blog Day Afternoon over Bullard, this sentence did catch my eye:
A high school student was suspended for customizing a first-person shooter game with a map of his school.
Just the kind of geek that … ?
A person who acts as the political commissar of the blogisphere and takes it upon themselves to define and enforce the blogma* and to sift out the ”true” blogs and bloggers from the false prophets.
* See earlier entry
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper has started offering blogging. On the first day, 500 bloggers took up the offer … Take a look at the registration gateway page and the terms and conditions, which include:
5.1.5. you warrant that the material you submit is not: obscene, threatening, menacing, offensive, defamatory, abusive, likely to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety, in breach of confidence, in breach of any intellectual property right (including, without limitation, copyright) or otherwise in breach of or violates any applicable law or regulation or code; and
5.1.6. you acknowledge that any breach of the warranties set out in sections 5.1.4 or 5.1.5 above may cause us damage or loss and you agree to indemnify us in full and permanently on demand against any third party liabilities, claims, costs, loss or damage we incur as a result of publishing material you submit to us, including consequential losses.
5.1.7. you waive any moral rights in all material you submit
5.2. Whilst you acknowledge that we do not necessarily pre-screen any material that you have submitted to the Site, we reserve the right to remove, at any time and without reason or prior notice or any liability to you, any material that you have submitted. (My bold)
Why the waiver of moral rights, I wonder …
The old/new media thing has taken a new twist in Boston where a newspaper has started publishing blog posts, reports the New York Times. Quote:
Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Mr. Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.
Now is Boston Now’s publishing move old media or new media or more evidence that the two mediums will find a way to leverage off each other?
Check out the blogger interface here.
A fake blog. As in, they all thought they were reading the faith healer’s darkest secrets, but it turned out the whole thing was being written by a team from big pharma.
Poynter online, which claims to be cultivating a “better journalist” has published a piece by Amy Gahran on the Bullard issue in which she remarks:
Looking over Bullard’s grossly misinformed generalizations and borderline hate speech, I’ve got to wonder: Exactly which “newsprint rules” applied at the Sunday Times in deciding whether to run this particular column?
Great, Amy. Just a pity that you only linked to and reflected ONE SIDE of the Bullard discussion – the side you clearly advocate throughout the article. Isn’t the first rule of reporting to give both sides of the story?
A person who achieves reknown for a sensational act in cyberspace. As in: Suddenly it dawned on the angry bloggers that they had turned David Bullard into a Cewebrity.
Something remarkable happened yesterday. The power of the synergy between print and web publishing was revealed as bloggers climbed into (or defended with varying degrees of conviction) David Bullard’s somewhat over-the-top column on blogging in the Sunday Times. (See the Amatomu stats here)
What yesterday showed was that the two mediums are greater than the sum of their parts, the philosophy which underpins (SHAMELESS PUNT WARNING) the launch of The Times in June as a fully digitally integrated national newspaper. Even though the Bullard column carried no “push” signals, it did push bloggers to write in their droves. The bloggers then pushed traffic through to the online version of the column by linking and (perhaps against their better judgement) adding to the hype. That the topic of discussion which drove this blogging frenzy was blogging and not crime, Zimbabwe or sex is in itself remarkable, showing that there is high degree of self-awareness/self-criticism in the blogging community. Bloggers are thinking about their medium which bodes well. Self-criticism is the key that unlocks the growth and development of a relatively new medium.
The “old” media still has the punching power (and the readership, in the case of the Sunday Times) to drive an agenda in a way in which web plays can’t. Will this all change as broadband rolls out? Maybe, maybe not. What is clear is that a strategic partnership between print and online can deliver a very powerful punch.
At the end of the day, Matthew Buckland got it just about right with this remark:
Obviously bloggers have to respond. But what some fail to see (or grasp) is that there is a strong baiting element to Bullard’s excellent columns. In fact every week there is a strong sarcastic and satirical edge to his writing. Just about the silliest thing a blogger can do is reply with righteous indignation and call for his head. And Bullard does rightfully point out some weaknesses in blogging, albeit in a sarcastic tone. (And who’s saying ‘blogging’ is ‘journalism’? Some blogs are journalism, some aren’t, some don’t care.) [My bold]
Now see what you’ve done. David Bullard has started a blog … or will it be one of those one-post wonders that litter cyberspace?
David Bullard’s Sunday Times column was not kind to bloggers. If you missed it, here is a line:
Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?
The response from bloggers has been outrage. Vincent Maher had this to say:
I think we need to demand an apology or a justifcation for what Bullard has said in his column, and what the Sunday Times has endorsed by publishing it – that we are the type of people who will gun down our fellows at university.
My feeling? I read Bullard’s column with both a chuckle and a gulp. A chuckle because Bullard is wicked. Which is why so many people laugh with him when he pillories the idiots. A gulp because its not so nice when you are lumped with his idiots. I have to disagree with his harsh conclusion that all bloggers are wannabe columnnists or pimply teenagers or psycho killers.
The irony for me is that Bullard is actually being true to the spirit of blogging, he’s just doing it in print. Think about it: Emotionally charged, unmediated, quickly researched, instinctive, raw and controversial. Now he was just a little more technologically literate, we could have a great blog on our hands …
The question I have is why do bloggers feel so threatened by an old media column? And why does an old media columnist feel so threatened by blogging? The answer is that we are living in a time of rapid change and the old is rubbing up rather uncomfortably against the new.
As for Vincent’s demand for an apology because the Sunday Times “endorses” what Bullard says by publishing it. I’m sure he’ll think about it and realise that the publication of opinion, varied, controversial and perhaps even insensitive is better than starting to sift through writing for anything that offends anyone. Like they do in Zimbabwe.
