Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Garry Trudeau is satirizing media manipulation in Iraq -- but not quite the way you might expect, if you expect Doonesbury to reflexively bash Bush and all his works. He's got Uncle Duke, now a warlord in Iraq, reacting to a Marine advance by ordering his minions to "Alert Media Relations," then telling them to dummy up some civilian casualty reports. He even makes a nuanced reference to the Tet Offensive. Previously: Trudeau talks about BD's wounds. 2:02:11 PM    comment []

Bing West in Slate: Fallujah, the Morning After Politically, Fallujah was as infected as the air at the torture house at the corner of the park. Many of the residents were complicit in the reign of terror. Whether the city returns to its murderous ways depends on the resolve of the Iraqi security forces now moving into the city. Voter turnout in January will be an indictor of how the political winds are blowing. Militarily, the battle of Fallujah was an unqualified success. Zarqawi has been deprived of his sanctuary. He will spend more time on the run and have less time to blow up and decapitate people. His followers have been hit hard, many killed and others uprooted. Just today, an Egyptian, a Yemenite, and a Sudanese crawled out from the rubble and surrendered. 1:43:46 PM    comment []

Tim Oren promises that monetizing eyeballs is not his game. "If your level of appeal is to the undifferentiated eyeball, you're legacy media - I don't care what your bizcard says. Offer some value to the brain behind the eyes, that's another deal." Cool, but let's not pretend that VCs weren't among the unindicted co-conspirators during the last bubble...as were biz tech journalists. Maybe Tim was a gimlet-eyed hype-buster during the whole thing; I wasn't, and I hope I learned something. I worry just a bit when I see Jeff Jarvis, who wears the blogger hat as comfortably as any of us, sounding very Big Media by pimping VCs, a PR guy, and a poster boy for bubble-era media failure as the future of blog business. Nothing against any of those people, or their respective professions (again, I swim in those waters), and I wish them all success. Obviously I believe in this long tail business, or I wouldn't have written about it last week, and in my upcoming Sunday column. I do feel that we are on the cusp of something interesting and powerful in terms of local online alternative media here in Greensboro, and that it has evolved organically and without a lot of top-down organization, and I think that this model reflects something about the nature of blogging -- about a genuine popular movement -- that does not come from companies and moneymen. 9:11:47 AM    comment []

NC State launches a doctoral program that should involve blogging: "The College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State announces the approval of its new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media." Program director Carolyn Miller has written scholarly stuff about blogging. This is from her paper, Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog: "If the blog is an evolutionary product, arising from a dynamic, adaptive relationship between discourse and kairos, then if we wish to understand the rhetorical qualities of the blog as genre, we should examine the late 1990s, when the blog originated, as a cultural moment." But she does not seem to have a weblog of her own. 8:49:09 AM    comment []

anonyMoses discovers a Blogg(er) hanging out with Shem the Penman. That's "too much blog" if I read my Joycean French correctly. 8:29:06 AM    comment []

Eliot Spitzer announced his run for Governor of New York at his weblog. (via Scott Rosenberg) 8:25:50 AM    comment []

Notes on Hanukkah It is a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, celebrating a military victory in 165 BC by the Maccabees over Antiochus Epiphanes. It is not the Jewish Christmas. There is no such thing as a Hanukkah bush. It's not about getting 8 presents. It does fit into the general rubric of Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us all but failed, let's eat. 8:23:10 AM    comment []