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Monday, January 17, 2005



I'll die as I've lived, with a book in my hand.
-Machado de Assis

The idea of blog policies itself is controversial. Personally, I don’t believe that bloggers need to subscribe to any particular set of policies, or even have a policy at all. The only freedom we really have lives in the few square centimeters inside our skull, and if we don’t have that, all the other freedoms are worthless. Blogs are uniquely a product of a writer’s mind, and should be unfettered by any rules that they have not thought out themselves. What’s interesting to me is what kind of rules bloggers think up for their blogs, if and when they decide to have them. Die with Blogger policy in your hand (via the best spider - Bill Ives)

The Blog, The Press, The Media: While We Were Sleeping lots Happened: The Naked Blogger Corp ...
It's not just big government that has trouble reforming itself. So do big organizations of any sort.

The scandal over CBS News' attempted election-eve hit job on President George W. Bush is only the most recent sign. Two investigators asked to look into the case, former Associated Press chief Lou Boccardi and former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, took the Al Capone approach -- nailing the defendants on some technicalities. But lopping off a few midlevel heads, or the "retirement" of Dan Rather, won't solve the problem.


That problem runs deep, so deep that many of my colleagues in the business, for the most part well-meaning, talented people who truly feel a sense of public obligation, simply don't recognize it. It rests on their assumptions about the way the world works, assumptions that are widely shared in the nation's newsrooms and thus rarely challenged.
Media need to consider alternative realities [Liberal Jacqueline frequently blogs naked! Of course, I frequently sleep naked, so is that the same as blogging in my pajamas?]
• · The Gillmor Gang with guest Adam Bosworth
• · · The flip side of adulation for winners is often contempt for people with cumulative misfortune, who routinely slog through murky quasi-netherworlds and do their best to keep from going under. Far from Media Spotlights, the Shadows of "Losers"; [Love is on the Blog Streets I would not walk across the street to piss in your mouth if you were dying of thirst]
• · · · Know what’s worse than being fired from your job at the paper because your bosses discover your blog? ; Exalead, a company that powers AOL France's search (I was introduced to its founder by Alta Vista founder Louis Monier - yup, he's French) announced today that its stand alone search engine has surpassed. the 1-billion-pages-indexed mark
• · · · · Know what is worse laughing or crying over the human condition. I am clearly for the first: not because it is more pleasant to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
• · · · · · Blogging is a cultural phenomenon too fascinating to ignore. Enjoy the guilty pleasures of short attention spans, imrich or embrace the instant punditry; be daring dragon; [Technorati serves up its version of tags ; Del Icio ]