Friday, August 22, 2003

Raleigh-based Monkeytime is one of the smartest and best-written weblogs anywhere. Go give him some money. I did. 6:02:03 PM    comment []

The petition to stop a baseball stadium from being built in downtown Greensboro has been ruled valid by a judge. The vote will take place in October. The Bellemeade stadium is in a lot of trouble. Hoggard's got some details, although some of his links aren't working right. 3:24:20 PM    comment []

Orson Scott Card isn’t the only writer to get into hot water over the editing-Neil-Simon story. A Utah journalist has been fired for stirring the whole thing up to begin with. Simon the intellectual bully didn't reach out and strangle community standards, he was challenged by a local writer who tipped his production company that the changes were being made. 11:53:06 AM    comment []

Josh Marshall is steaming about the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq: “Enough talk already. Enough excuses and mumbo-jumbo. Our situation in Iraq is bad. But our situation in Washington is worse.” 11:46:01 AM    comment []

Is Howard Dean the Rod Stewart of weblogs?  Not early good Rod Stewart, either, but embarrassing “Hot Legs” era Rod Stewart.   Let me explain. Early in its lifetime, MTV didn’t have many videos to play (unlike now, when it has plenty but doesn’t play many of them). So the fledgling network put the clips it did have into heavy rotation, including one that featured Rod the Mod in aubergine-colored overalls that must have cost a sizable percentage of the video’s $73 production budget.  It wasn’t very good, but people watched it. The cool new medium attracted viewers, even when the content sucked.  I’m not saying Dean doesn’t provide good and useful weblog content, because he does, regardless of your views on the substance of what he’s saying.  The point is that whatever his weblogging virtues may be, Dean is getting extra love from webloggers because nobody else is loving us back. Oh, they say they care, but it we just feel used. Dean is in heavy rotation because he’s got product out there in an underpopulated marketplace. His weblog might still thrill us in the face of competition, just as Peter Gabriel’s video for “Sledgehammer” is still pretty cool after all these years. But until his rivals figure out the medium, he’s got the charts pretty much to himself.   Maybe the other campaigns feel they’ve got everything under control without this newfangled weblog stuff. My guess is they’re wrong. There’s too much energy and money out there, too many ideas waiting to percolate through a weblog relationship, to forfeit it all to Dean. 11:43:13 AM    comment []