Monday, May 6, 2002

backlinking: This is very cool. If you'd like to encourage the growth of the "two-way web," backlinking is for you. Apparently if you link to anything at Disinchanted.com, they'll show readers your link. This allows people to see immediately whatever dialogue is created by any blog post or article. Radio 8 needs to adopt this function -- it should be as simple as checking a box on a Prefs page. Are you listening Dave Winer? I arrived at Disnenchanted via John Udell's article about it, and from the explanation of backlinking I naturally moved to the example, which, while an interesting read (and very appropriate to me for reasons I won't go into here), needs an editor who knows the difference between "depreciation" and "deprecation." Ok, I'm probably splitting hairs, but.... Mark Pilgrim also has backlinking in effect. It doesn't matter that no one links to these posts. I want this. The whole web should work this way. 10:28:16 PM

Beyond Software: Today's Davenet is right: Professional journalists did a better job covering technology when the tech market was competitive. Now that a few big companies largely "own" the major software categories, there appears to be less competition, so journalists are reduced to producing endless repetitions of "here's what Microsoft did today." Journalists could (and should) play a role in changing this situation by focusing more on independent developers, shareware, etc. But the bigger point is that what Winer observes about tech journalists is just as true of journalists covering politics, international affairs, or any other "industrial" sector. Let's take politics as an example. When Bush says he cares about education, journalists tell us "Bush said he cares about education." Wow. If space and time (or the journalist's editor) permits, the story might also include the voice of some educational leader -- a prominent professor at an Ivy League school, the head of some educational research organization, perhaps even the head of a teacher's union. That's all good, but for the most part all these voices are comparable to just asking the different divisions of Microsoft what they think about the software industry. The role of journalists should be to broaden discourse and deliver as many different perspectives on a question as they can possibly find. On the education question, this would mean talking to students, teachers at all levels, faculty at small schools or junior colleges, contract-teachers who work from semester-to-semester with no guarantees they'll have a job (or health insurance, or any other benefits) in 6 months. Do these people feel like Bush cares about education? Has he done anything to show them that what he says is more than words? Of course, news coverage like this would require a lot more resources (people, cash, time) than most news organizations are willing to commit. What Winer's primary focus on the software industry tends to miss is that most of his complaints about journalism have nothing to do with journalists, and everything to do with the "BigCo's" who employ them and limit the range of things they can say and topics they can cover. Much of Winer's writing about the problems with BigCo's merely skirts this subject, but it seems to me it's the central issue. For more on this, check out Robert McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy. A fast and very eye-opening read. 12:29:53 PM

In her generally great "review" of blogs (in the NY Times books section, no less!), Judith Shulevitz begins by telling us that Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of a library the size of a universe, whose wealth of books would induce first delirium, then despair, then breakdown of the social order. Wow, what a great image. Shulevitz uses it to suggest the positive promise many techno-utopianists (I might be making up that word) claim for the web. This would be good writing, except for one thing: Shulevitz fails to tell us where to find Borges' dream. Since she doesn't cite her source, this image is much less useful to her readers. I often notice professional journalists do this (in their opinion pieces especially), and every time I notice it, it bothers me more. The point: If you want your writing to be meaningful and useful to people, cite your sources, please. To her credit, Shulevitz goes on to provide the best summary I've seen of blogging's addictive appeal. She writes: Needless to say, blogs are addictive. They are not, however, the most economical use of your time. To read blogs requires a willingness to wander from link to link in the hope that some mind-numbingly detailed dispute over, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Catholic Church's position on homosexuality or an Oscar nomination will resolve itself into a usable insight. All the blog posts about how much time blogging takes (like this one at Nonsense Verse) are testaments to the accuracy of Shulevitz's description. 7:57:03 AM