Following a tip from JD Lasica, I took a long look at NowPublic.com, a very interesting experiment in social news gathering and dissemination.

The premise is pure swarm logic: individual contributors create news stories, and may hyperlocalize them down to the country, state, and city level, as well as adding any sort of tag that might be used to characterize them. Visitors can find leading stories through most recent or most popular views, or by searching by tags, keywords, or location. The use of tags is facilitated by the prominent provision of a tag cloud at the top of any view.

Registered users can additionally vote on new stories, increasing their popularity, and moving them to the top of the search results for key words, tags, and general popularity. In this way, the "front page" is laid out based on the collective social gestures of thousands of registered users. Note that in true blogospheric fashion, there are as many potential "front pages" as there are keywords and tags: a front page for every interest, passion, or obsession.

I signed to fool with the site, and discovered that I was user #4324, based on how my first story's url was structured. The user interface was simple, and I rapidly created the following piece, about an antiwar concert scheduled on my birthday, in DC:

I have already received 24 votes!

NowPublic provides a great level of control on the sharing of "footage" -- imagery of various sorts. I have not experimented with that element of the service, but I intend to do so.

NowPublic allows contributors to pull stories from other locations -- such as blogs -- via RSS. I set things up so that entries that I post at my personal blog, A Working Model, are now accessible for reposting at NowPublic. Here's the RSS feed selection interface:

And the resulting story, reposted from my blog:

For those not already blogging elsewhere, NowPublic provides free basic blogging, and supports RSS feeds from them. Oddly enough, blog posts are not automatically posted as stories, and importing through the RSS feeds doesn't work: NowPublic gives an error message when I try to import my NowPublic blog content as news stories (although I was able to import that feed into Feedigest, and to import the exported feed from Feeddigest). Also odd: none of the tag or rating architecture that supports news stories have been integrated in the blogging technology: there is no way that authors can tag their blog posts and readers cannot search via tag cloud, nor rate blog posts. A strange omission, perhaps intended to get folks to push their blog posts into the NowPublic news channel.

All in all, I am fascinated by what NowPublic represents, on many levels. As a student of citizen journalism, NowPublic represents a great example of the power that social architecture, well-implemented, can put into the hands of everyday people: the power to shape, channel, and make explicit the implicit dialogue that underlies news coverage. As someone tracking the adoption of social architecture, I believe that NowPublic demonstrates the key elements of all future, successful social media, in particular the primacy of emergent, bottom-up characterization by tags and the importance of aggregated social gestures -- in this case "votes". As the president of Corante, I have specific interest in the ways that social architecture principles -- like tag clouds and user ratings -- are likely to become a commonplace in the world of social media, and how quickly we at Corante should be adopting them for our own publishing.

I had a chance to speak briefly with Michael Tippett, the founder of NowPublic, and he stated that NowPublic is a work in progress, and that recent spikes in activity -- particularly around Katrina -- have accelerated plans to streamline and scale the implementation. His interest is twofold, I was glad to hear. First, to support the NowPublic website, as an interesting activity in and of itself, and as a showcase of the design elements of the NowPublic technology, and second, to license the technology to others seeking to apply it in similar ways.

I can't make a judgment on NowPublic's likely impact on conventional media, although I beleive that all media outlets will find themselves going through "social shock" in the next few years -- being redefined and reworked by social architecture. NowPublic's experiment suggests just how radical a change that may be.

As the number of blogs and bloggers continues to double every three months, some paradoxical realities are beginning to show up. Like here, at Business Blog Summit, where I was puzzled to see that there is less and less maturity in the attendees: I don't mean that they are young, but that they are newbies. I mean, these folks don't know very much. And I am not knocking the conference folks. It's just simple numbers.

When you a show with an absolute number of attendees -- 200 or 250 attending -- and an additional 5 million blogs went live last quarter, and 10 million this quarter -- guess what? A lot more rank beginners are going to show up.

That also means that the time is right for advanced seminars and symposia to start, and that's where Corante will be pushing in the upcoming months. In an environment where six or seven of the folks speaking at this conference have "Business Blogging" books in press or in process, it is time for more specialization and depth. For example, I could see a conference dedicated just to the technical issues of blogging on Movable Type, or a one day Master Class on Blog Writing for non-newbies who want to dramatically improve the quality of their writing.

Jason Calacanis proposes a new A-List -- the Blog 500 -- because a/ he is "sick of the Technorati 100" and b/ he "created what became an absurdly powerful 100 list with my last company, Silicon Alley Reporter, I’ve seen the controversy, venom, and power such lists can create. I’ve got some mixed feelings about them truth be told. These lists are really powerful at building an industry. They help define emerging spaces, and they get new players press, readers, and clients (i.e. advertisers). So, a good list is good, and a bad list is—well—bad. We have a bad list now and we need a good list. "

Hmmm. Sounds like Jason simply wants the benefits of being the media company with the most popular list.

He then goes on to list what's wrong with the Technorati 100, falling into a common error along the way:

4. It's [technorati ranking] based on the number of links for all time.

That also means that Jason's second bullet point about Technorati is also wrong. Technorati is constantly updating, based on recent links being created.

So it seems that what Jason wants is really what the Technorati 100 (or 500) is already. As someone commented to his post, he should just give the $10,000 he offered as an incentive directly to Technorati.

I personally want something completely different, as I outlined earlier today in my RankOut piece (see Mary Hodder on The Paris Index, And Why RankOut Would Be Better): a means where everyone can generate their own top 100 list, or a whole bunch of lists, depending on the topic, the community of interest, or the purpose for rank ordering blogs. And then Jason could define his own criteria for ordering, and his Blog 500 would be just one among thousands of blog lists.

Tim Oren attempts to clarify the break up of PJ Media (or is it Pajamas?) into two parts based on entrepreneurialism first principles:

[from Due Diligence: PJ Media: E Unum, Pluribus]

It's somewhat axiomatic that a startup gets one bet. That is, one product or service, to one market. There are a lot of reasons, ranging from management bandwidth to capital requirements of forming two sales forces to conflicting demands from different sets of customers. They were all relevant in this situation.

Marc and Roger can attest that I, my partners, and other business plan reviewers banged on them to cut the initial set of business propositions down to one bullet point, and focus on it. But there were two legitimate business opportunities inside the plan, each with potential support from investors and backing from part of the team. Roger is notably a content guy, Marc is a systems architect and manager. After some further input from the market (in the form of potential investors, advertisers, partners and a few bloggers), it was evident that a Solomonic solution was the best one in this case. There are now two entities that will each attempt to serve the blogging community and its own set of customers.

Ok, fine. But on the other hand, many startups do in fact manage a balancing act of chasing several sources of cash, especially in the media space. I guess there wasn't enough social glue to hold the thing together, and too many folks were fighting for the money, which (unstated in Tim's piece) is what the VCs gave the combined company.

Evelyn Rodriguez proves again why she is one of the strongest voices out there in her recap of Blogher:

We are volcanoes. All the maps change. There are new mountains.

It's taboo to talk informally, colloquially, conversationally, personally, deeply, humanely in the game called the professsional business world. Especially "not done" in public. Thank you, Jory, Koan, Ronni, and Heather for reminding me yet again of the importance of putting our selves forth as ourselves. Reminding me: I'm an advocate too. Me, I'm not compartmentalizing myself. I'm bringing forth my whole self to business. I'm not checking any part of me at the door. (Here's my coming out post.)

I can only aspire to doing it like Evelyn.

The NY Times digs into the Technorati State Of The Blogosphere report, and can't help but see itself -- mainstream media -- as the biggest confirmation for the importance of the blogosphere. Self-congratulatory dummies.

[from Measuring the Blogosphere - New York Times]

Earlier this week, Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs, released its semiannual "State of the Blogosphere" report. It records a steady, and astonishing, growth. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day - a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere - that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole - doubles in size every five and a half months.

[...]

The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.

Hmmm. Alternatively, you could interpret the growing adoption of blogs by mainstream media as an attempt to parrot the form factor of social media -- without actually adopting all of its core, chewy goodness -- because people are defecting, in droves. All those folks blogging are, in general, reading blogs first. And the hours they are spending in a deeply social interaction with like-minded others through blogs is time not spent reading the Daily Blatz.

Get Real contributor Arieanna Foley was videoblogged by JD Lasica, speaking on the issue of the legal status (if any) of bloggers. I favor the term "artisan journalism" rather than citizen journalism, for exactly the reasons she touches upon: my writing is not necessarily a manifestation of my politics or citizenship. But it is very different than industrial journalism. [JD also describes his rig and workflow for videoblogging in this post.]

B.L. Ochman wrings her hands about misquoted in Businessweek. She told a client at iFullfill to 'do something controversial' as a way to gain blog traffic, which Stephen Baker interpreted as "create a scandal." Stephen has corrected his story, and Ochman is unlikely to be harmed by this, but the exercise is almost self-defining. Ochman is likely getting big traffic from this "imbloglio" even if she never intended it that way.

Drawing a line -- making clear what your beliefs are, and what you stand for -- will often lead to public debate (like my battle with Marc Canter over the Marquiism issue, last winter). That may attract attention to a blog, at least to the degree that people care about the issue behind the controversy. But creating a controversy for the sake of becoming more well-known is shady. Even if the issue is important, the instigator is motivated purely by self-interest, and I have an almost mystical belief in the blogosphere's ability to sniff out such folks, and to ultimately reject them.

Tom Coates makes the case that blogging is changing the conference experience. "The whole weblogging culture has - in my opinion - pretty dramatically changed the conference dynamic. Now it's not good enough for someone to stand up and talk about the same thing that they've been thinking about or doing for the last six months. Many of the audience will be more than familiar with the subject already. They're going to be looking for novelty."

Rafat Ali was obviously rubbed the wrong way by Emily Bell's conclusions about the MySpace acquisition by Murdoch & Co:

Emily Bell, the editor-in-chief of Guardian Online, writes a piece on Rupert' Murdoch's "renewed interest" in online, and how MySpace acquisition is something which may not work out for the company. Which, in itself, is a fair opinion and argument to be made. But then, this: "In a company which has reinvented everything from the tabloid newspaper to the television establishment, heading to the shops for online expertise makes News Corp and Murdoch seem less like visionaries and more like spectators." Here she makes the classic journalistic mistake: laziness. And not seeing it in the bigger context. What's so hard to understand in an acquisition? It is what it is...in the evolution of an industry, that's what bigger player always do: they buy. That's what Murdoch is doing here. Take it from me: everybody and their mother in law wanted to buy MySpace. If you would have used it, and spent some time combing through the dynamic working there, you would have been amazed. The buyout price reflects that glamor element, not the best thing, but understandable. Just because AOL-TW merger went in a mess doesn't mean everything else will. And just because there are 20 stories talking about the death of media conglomerate, doesn't mean the conglomeration will end.

I think Rafat goes over the top to suggest the the "classic journalistic mistake" is laziness, or that laziness motivates her perspective on this development. (I have always maintained that the class journalistic mistake is the myth of objectivity, but that's another story.)

The price involved makes this seem AOL/Time-Warner scale bubblicious, and Bell's initial comment about " the impossibility of assessing the value of new media acquisitions to old media companies" demonstrate her willingness to believe in the wild and wonderful Web 2.0 future that the MySpace buy must be part of.

But at the core of her argument, Bell seems to be suggesting that Murdoch just can't get there from here:

All of the truly successful web businesses which Murdoch seeks to emulate - at least in terms of revenues and reach - Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN - do not have pioneering vision bolted on to them but embedded in the heart of their corporate culture. The mess of AOL and Time Warner has proved one thing - that integrating online and offline can take a decade, millions of dollars, and still leave you with two distinct businesses that have barely budged an inch.

[...]

One would have to question whether it is really so late in the game that half a billion dollars is better spent on a purchase rather than given to the sharp minds at Fox or even Sky (the most technologically advanced of all Murdoch's mainstream businesses), to see if they can hit the golden jackpot of successfully spinning a strong offline media culture into a vibrant online manifestation.

While the AOL/Time-Warner mishugas is a cautionary tale for any media move into online, the analogy fails: AOL purchased TimeWarner, not the other way around. And AOL was no hotbed of innovation, stifled by the broadcast media types: it was offtrack, denying the Internet, and playing a bad game of catch-up since the first release of Mosiac.

I agree with Rafat's perception that many, many media companies would have loved to buy MySpace. More importantly, this is just the start of the socialization of all media experience, and ultimately, all ecommerce. That is what is being lost in this discussion.

As television and other broadcast becomes absorbed by the Internet, we will not see a movement from 500 channels to five million channels, but an implosion into infinite channels. The only means of making that work are the elements of social architecture as manifested by solutions like MySpace. The role of major media outlets will shift from producing and channeling the 'content' into providing a social context for individuals to mix and mingle in a 'content' rich environment. (Note that I am using scare quotes around 'content' because it is one of the terms that will be most significantly changed by this revolution.)

While it may be true that Murdoch & Co don't have the vision to see this all coming, and maybe the visionary DNA at MySpace won't take control at News Corp fast enough to ensure the successful transition of News Corp into a viable competitor of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, you have to admit that they need to do something. The era of the traditional media conglomerate is coming to a close, and if News Corp doesn't do something fast, it will hit the bottom of the elevator shaft and bounce.

And handing 500 million to the folks who are programming reality TV shows and Homer Simpson reruns at Fox, or to the folks doing whatever they do at Sky, is really just arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

No: win or lose, this is a good bet. Let's see if Murdoch & Co are willing to see the hand through to the end. This is not the last bet, and you can be sure that the others at the table -- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, for example -- are going to continue to raise the stakes.

[pointer from Dana Blankenthorn]

Jeremy Wright mentioned -- in passing during an IM chat, today -- the flap about Technorati's increasing interest in making money from the company's tracking of who's quoting who in the Blogosphere. He pointed me to Doc Searls piece, that does a good job of summarizing the merging controversy.

This imbloglio arose from a Silicon Valley Watcher piece by Tom Foremski, who implies that their is something immoral -- although not illegal -- from Technorati making money from the public data about links on the web. Now, I am a guy that has harrassed Technorati right and left about bugs, lags, and various other gaffes (like the Niall Kennedy political satire mess), but I have consistently argued for the utility of the service. I even wished publicly that they would get purchased by Google or Yahoo so that the service would work more reliably.

But I think it perfectly reasonable for them to try to make money ("monetize", as Tom writes) from the analysis they are making about the Blogosphere's interconnections.

There is a deep-rooted theme of opposition to money making in various quarters of the Blogosphere. As just one painful example, the near-riot at Bloggercon as a result of the "Making Money" session (see here) as a result of Dave Winer's philosophical dislike of money making through blogging. Personally, I am all for making money: Corante is not a non-profit, for example. So when Tom asks,

Am I a bit harsh on Technorati? I hope not, it has every right to make a living from its work, it shares a considerable amount of data it collects with the entire blogging community for free, and it is just one of many companies selling the blogosphere.

I suggest we tone down the rhetoric, and argus the basic question: Is it OK to make money in the Blogosphere? I think it is. Doc cuts through the fog, as usual:

[from Department of Connections] Okay, a few questions.

First, How many witnesses reported on what Peter said on that panel?
Answer: One. Another panelist, by the way. How many bloggers jumped to conclusions based on what one guy said?

Next: Are marketers clueless or cluefull about blogging?
If the answer is "clueless," then don't we want them to get the clues? Especially if all the raw data is nothing more than what's been published on the free and open Web, and what's sold is data about data rather than "repurposed content"?

Next: Do we think they can get all the clues they need from search engines and feeds of blogs and searches about blogs and other stuff that's already out there?
If the answer is no, then what is wrong with selling those clues to people willing to pay for them?

Nothing is wrong with it, Doc.

I suspect that one of the issues here is the lack of cluefulness of Technorati, however, who have seemed to surprise everyone with their intention to make money -- and lots of it -- from its activities and services. Here' is a great opportunity for Dave Sifry and company to leverage what they know about blog dynamics to head off a potential big stink. Remember the "Founding Fathers" flap from the Always On/Technorati Open Media 100 announcement?

A few recommendations to Sifry and Technorati:

1. Its ok to make money, so don't cave on the core issue. State, unequivocally, that you plan to make money, and have always said so.
   
2. The raw information you are using is public, and anyone has access to it.
   
3. The service that Technorati offers is important, and you will continue to offer many elements of that service free, as a public service.
   
4. It is true that services -- such as Google search -- can have an enormous influence on business and society. That's why Google's share price is where it is, and why so many people work so hard at search engine optimization.
   
5. Technorati will inevitably -- to the degree that it is successful -- influence the behavior of those who would like to benefit from the power thet comes from a high Technorati ranking, just like the lengths that people will go to in order to get a high Google ranking. As a result, Technorati will need to have very scrupulous business practices in its dealings with those to whom it sells its services.

This is likely to flare up into a big imbloglio, with many perspectives swirling around, and a lot of hand waving and finger pointing. But I think it is a tempest in a teapot. The implicit social connections that blog linking imply are public: they are there for anyone to see, and the individuals involved actively create those links with that in mind. This is not some sort of surreptitious surveillance, like video cameras on street lights, or someone tapping our phone calls. And more importantly, as Doc suggests, the world is a better place if big corporations begin to take advantage of this information to figure out what people think is important, whose thoughts and observations matter, and how to better understand what is going on in the world. What is the alternative? We -- the Blogosphere -- are going to a lot of trouble to read and link to one others' writing out here; do we want the rest of the world to ignore it? We are trying hard to make sense of the world; it's stupid to think we would be better off if the world doesn't pay attention, and adapt to the feedback system we have become. The value of that feedback is enormous, and people should be free to make money from turning it into bite-sized chunks for companies that want to do better: build better products, provide better service, and innovate more quickly.

The Blogosphere is not some private club for those most actively engaged it in: its a global asset, a new means of understanding the world, and perhaps the best hope we have for making a better world. We cannot imagine for a minute that it belongs to us. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than us.

JD Lasica concludes several weeks guest blogging at The Importance Of with a big question, one that I have been puzzling over recently: What will happen when we become the media?. He notes that the recent Gnomedex conference seemed a sort of turning point for the new media crowd:

As Adam Curry noted in his keynote, "We are the media." There's no doubt about that now.

The consequences of that for public discourse loom large. That's why, as I wrote my book, I began focusing less on copyright law or the current bills before Congress and more on the long-term outlook for media culture.

The future of television is not about interactive commands that let you buy Jennifer Aniston's sweater. It's about putting a blasting cap to big media's strangehold on our nightly viewing habits by opening up the television experience to the multitude of niche media that ordinary citizens are beginning to create.

The future of movies is not about digital delivery of Hollywood entertainment at the multiplex. It's about instant access to Hollywood classics, new releases, indie fare and grassroots films, at any time, on any device.

The future of music is not about finding a silver-bullet DRM solution for secure delivery of megastar content. It's about building new platforms for recommending and filtering thousands of new voices and creative talents that would never make it through the record labels' sausage factory.

As the cost of the tools of media creativity continue to plummet and ease of use increases, millions more of us will begin taking part in the personal media revolution.

JD is, as usual, running ahead of the pack in his vision. There is going to be a long and painful transition as alternative media begin to supplant mainstream media in all of these areas.

• Long, because the habits of the majority are slow to change, and for many, will never change. My father, for one, doesn't read blogs, not even my blog, and has never used an ATM machine or written an email. There is going to be a long, long tail for the traditional TV experience, since some people believe that Seinfeld is a sacrament.
  
• Painful, because deep and fundamental change will disrupt existing business models, and as a result, many people will find their worlds upset. The purpose and patterns of advertising, public relations, and marketing -- just to name some obvious areas -- are going to have to be completely revamped, and that will lead to a major shakeup in all corners of those industries.

As I first stated at Les Blogs in Paris, publishing companies will need to wise up to the fact that today's writers -- the bloggers en masse -- are really a wave of artists, bringing back the ethics of art into written media. The reporter mindset of mainstream media is being jettisonned for something else, something better: I have taken to using the team "artisan journalism" to denote this new sort of writing. Investigative journalism is not dead, but the soulless reporting by know-nothings is going to be replaced by something better: front-line insight by deeply involved, committed, and knowledgeable commentators.

JD focuses our attention on the experience of those who will grow from couch potatohood into involved participants in a media revolution. At the same time, the role of media in society will shift at a profound level, since it will no longer serve only as a channel for the institutional media to push "content" into our lives, and "monetize eyeballs": the socializing of media is transforming it into a shared place where we can find meaning and make sense of the world through active and authentic involvement.

Flash from Blog.DanYork.com: "Kind of like the whole world of podcasting got a massive slash-dotting by Apple." Its going to take a while to assimilate the influx from the iTunes podcast onslaught.

Tony Perkins announced the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 today (see here). There were a number of Corante contributors honored, including Liz Lawley, David Weinberger, and Clay Shirky. Hylton and I were recognized as practitioners, I guess because of what we are up to at Corante. Cool.

I haven't heard anything much about the Open Media 100 project since the initial announcement. I read a bunch of stuff early on, but its pretty quiet recently. However, yesterday I got an email from Tony Perkins, trying to get me to become an Always-On Insider with the come on of getting the new issue of their blogozine (although he didn't call it that in the email).

So if they have published the issue, or its in the works, I guess the OM 100 have been selected. Has the list been released? I haven't seen anything about it.

My pal, Ted Rheingold, is receiving a Webby Award this week for the best community site, Dogster, and it's well deserved. Amazingly, this started as a goof (see here and here).

Still, some have suggested that many of the judges are suspect, because they don't maintain an active web presence thewselves:

[from Judging the Judges at the Webby Awards]

As of this moment, with 340 of the Webby Award judges surveyed, here's the count:

Webby Judges Possibly Fit to Judge Because they have Active Web Presences:
251 (74 percent)

Webby Judges Whose Judgment Should be Questioned Because Their Pages Are Out of Date:
30 (8 percent)

Webby Judges Unfit To Judge Anyone With a Web Page Because They Have No Credible Web Presences of Their Own:
59 (17 percent)

I locked horns with John Dvorak a few years ago when he fired off some not-very-well-considered flames about the stupidity of instant messaging (see Dvorak Weighs In On IM, An Exchange With Dvorak, and Dvorak Relents). The interchange followed what I believe to be the MO for Dvorak: he makes wild pronouncements about the inutility or outright stupidity of some technology and its adherents, someone calls him to task and is called stupid, and then he caves or says he didn't mean it (because he is already off on his next harangue). More recently, Leslie Martinich got in a Dvorak headlock, when Dvorak claimed that "concept of disruptive technology" "the biggest crock of the new millennium" and Leslie called him an idiot, justifiably. In particular, I realized that I was dealing with a toad when he attacked me for using the term "value proposition":

"to tell you the truth these VC phrases such as "value proposition" -- which is a completely meaningless phrase -- do nothing to help your argument.

combining these two words is nothing less than silly

I'm guessing that what you mean to use is "worth" as in I don't understand the worth of IM. This may be true. Or possibly I do understand it and reject it anyway. But instead of saying it simply you use the condescending language of Silicon Valley 20-something bullshitters trying to sound important. So how can I take this seriously?

So, now Dvorak suggests that A-list bloggers are a bunch of off-the-map self-idolators:

[from To Tag or Not to Tag, That Is the Question]

The influential bloggers should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion -- an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area. Except for Wired online and a few media bloggers, nobody is in the area, so nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this. These explosions are generally self-contained and harmless to the environment.

After my previous go-around with Dvorak, I know better than to contact him directly. I have learned that he is a troll, and he doesn't really stand for anything. His technique is to throw darts at whatever trend has a sign of life, and to put on his fools cap and cut some capers for four or five paragraphs. This likely satisfies some cabal of equally negative pooh-poohers, who he as accumulated after decades of this nonsense. He is the Jerry Springer of IT Journalism, and we should simply change the channel. You will not be able to change his "mind" since he is not really interested in discourse, he is a fatuous actor, and beneath the greasepaint there is... nothing.

As a result, I recommend to all and sundry that it is pointless to dig into his arguments against blogging or tagging, because there is really no antagonist behind the barrage of words. He is a cardboard cut-out, not a real adversary. I have probably expended more words than he deserves, but based on my experience with him, and the concerns of other bloggers (see here and here), I wanted to head this off. I don't even consider this a media convulsion because of the threat that blogging poses to mainstream media: Dvorak is not launching a polemic against blogging and bloggers because he's threatened, but just because he needs to rant every month in his column, and this month it was blogging and tagging that wandered into his crosshairs.

I was catching up on various people's responses to Adam Cohen's polemic about blogger ethics. I read Jarvis, Ann Althouse, and James Wollcott. I had looked over the piece in the Sunday Times, but it was only this morning that I tried to follow the link, and mull his arguments online. But I encountered the Iron Curtain of the NYT's archives:

This is where business model truly evicerates the openness of a dialogue, and one that is important. The NYT's wants to make money on their "content" -- that's their perogative. But it makes it very difficult to have an Internet dialogue with Adam Cohen, for example. Maybe he doesn't care that we can't link to what he wrote, that our reader's can't click through and see his words.

But that matters to me.

The traditional media behemoths have gotten so big that they don't even perceive the disconnects that their business models can create in the discussion going on around the issues they are writing about. That's why they are failing in this new era.