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Russell Baker: "This is journalism's age of melancholy. Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder. They have discovered that their prime duty is no longer to maintain the republic in well-informed condition—or to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as the old gospel has it—but to serve the stock market with a good earnings report every three months or, in plainer English, to comfort the comfortable."  Sam Ruby is keynoting the Sells Brothers Web Services conference in October in Bedford, Mass. Now I've heard everything. Phone rings. A recorded message tells me about home digital satellite systems. How humiliating can it get. Not much more than this. Meltdowns at Enron and WorldCom. Yesterday a board revolt at Vivendi, a media company, and the CEO is toast. What happens when one of the owners of one of the major TV networks becomes the target of a business scandal. Viacom, Disney, GE, AOL. Who will be first to go down? But will the reporters go there? Heh. Why is everyone so surprised. Didn't they know that BigCo's have no integrity or ethics. Where were they for the last ten years? We all didn't care too much as long as the stock prices were going up. Sure they're lying everyone knew they were. So what's new. Just as blogs are the cure for integrity outages at the BigPubs, LittleCo's will be our haven from the excesses of the idiots who run the BigCo's. Microbusinesses and microcontent. Hey it's cool that people seem to require integrity of their business leaders. How are the current crop going to compete. They didn't teach integrity at b-school. Angry White Girl posts her Top 10 tips for fitting in at Apple. Nick Denton surely is looking for some kind of pushback or maybe just a kick in the butt. Yesterday he posted an item saying that blogs were never going to equal the pro's because some of us take vacations, or (in my case) ease up when recovering from major surgery (getting better every day, btw, still no cigs). Then today he says the bubble may have burst, implying that blogs were a creation of massive media hype. Nick, you're so fucking wrong. First, blogs exist independently of the ink-stained media, they can hype us or not, it makes no difference either way. Second, there isn't much going on right now, so why not take a break. Third, if you think blogs are about a handful of people like Glenn Reynolds, etc etc, you have completely missed the point, and need to go back for re-education on the very concept you're writing about. All of the A-Team bloggers could quit tomorrow, and the thing would keep going. It'll make a difference next time there's a big story that we need triangulation on. On Sept 11, the first-hand accounts from amateurs with keyboards, telephones, digital cameras, friends/relatives at the scene, were just a demo of what's coming in the next few years. It's the massive number of people distributed over the planet that can cover a story as the shrinking budgets and conflicted interest of the pros constrict the amount of news they can carry. It's circulation and distribution. Blogs are bypasses for information, like the Internet routes around outages, just at a higher level. Thanks for listening. The most amazing thing to me (after all this is a weblog) is that I wrote that with absolutely no nicotine. Dean Peters writes that Archive.Org has been hacked. It appears to be true. Here's a request to list all the pages in their database from back issues of scripting.com. Every time I click on the link I get a porn site. Hmmm. (They fixed the outage. Here's a snapshot of this site four years ago today thanks to archive.org.) Reading this article at Business 2.0 about basic techniques for rising through the ranks at Google got me to check my various rankings, and hey, for the first time ever, I'm the number one Dave at Google. Neat. Theory about why. When I took my leave a couple of weeks ago, lots of people pointed to me by name, driving me past Dave at Bungi.Com, who was previously untouchable in the top spot. Ross Anderson: TCPA/Palladium FAQ. Mitch Wagner comments. Chris Dahlen: How to Survive Without Audiogalaxy. Salon interview with John Gilmore on ICANN. |
 
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© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
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