Friday, October 10, 2003

Taranto recanto (low in column): "(W)e misinterpreted a statement in an article in The Hill newspaper that Howard Dean is "paying 'bloggers' or professional Internet surfers to keep the enthusiasm up on his website." Peer editing works. 4:23:07 PM    comment []

Josh Marshall, on Bush mouthpiece Scott McClellan, re the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame: "Listen closely: He's not answering the question." Marshall also renders inoperative some butt-covering by Robert Novak. 3:33:29 PM    comment []

When Mr. Sun first rose into the blogging firmament, he disdained the term "blog" and hinted that his dalliance with this new interest could be brief. People say that about heroin, too. "Mr. Sun, the little project to learn HTML and cascading style sheets, has outgrown its Geocities home," says the page that forwards you to his swell new blog. Guilford County has a some good bloggers, and I'm sure there must be more than the ones listed at right. Who am I missing? 3:14:37 PM    comment []

Credit John Hammer for moving on after Tuesday's stadium vote. "The people of Greensboro have spoken, and they want a downtown baseball stadium," he wrote in yesterday's Rhino (not yet posted). "If the vote had been close, then the battle would have continued at some level. I don't see how anyone can argue with the results." City Council candidate David Hoggard said all along that he would honor the will of the voters on the stadium issue, and he's saying it again as he begins his general election campaign, emphasizing at the same time his ongoing commitment to renovating War Memorial Stadium. "I will now turn my attention and efforts to make both projects the very best they possibly can be while also forwarding many other ideas that will improve Greensboro." 12:34:29 PM    comment []

Strathlachlan: "Political candidates will eventually break your heart just like Sarah Jones in the 3rd grade and the Chicago Cubs. You put them on a pedestal and you honestly believe that because they have a weblog then you have some kind of cosmic connection with them. Political candidates are rock stars in suits and you're just another groupie." 12:03:25 PM    comment []

Eric Muller is providing live coverage of  the UNC Law Review's symposium on Law, Loyalty, and Treason. I don't know how people do it. One of the best decisions I made at BloggerCon was not blogging it in real time. That, and not eating too much at Hong Kong on Friday night. 11:54:31 AM    comment []

The blogging scandal that wasn't. Lots of blogging goin' on claiming that this article says the Dean campaign is paying independent bloggers for their kind words. Suspects named in various blog commentary range from Oliver Willis to Glenn Reynolds . Not so, says Dean blogger Zephyr Teachout. "We have one paid fulltime blogger, that's Matt Gross. I am a paid staffer, I blog sometimes, but mostly do online organizing." She says nobody who is not a staffer gets paid to blog for Dean. I also asked Alex Bolton, the staff writer at The Hill who wrote the article, if he meant to imply that any blogger other than those appearing on the Dean campaign weblog is getting paid by the campaign. "No," said Bolton. "I meant people contributing to Dean's own site." The sentence in question reads: "Dean has done other things to maximize his online fundraising punch, like...paying “bloggers” or professional Internet surfers to keep the enthusiasm up on his website." I can see how people might have been confused. Yesterday. 11:39:29 AM    comment []