Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Susan Sontag eulogized by Christopher Hitchens. 5:59:09 PM    comment []

Lord of the Blings? Sydney was in a rush to tell us what she read today as she digs into Tolkien, and she ran two names together, and it came out like this: "I just got to the part where they meet Pimpin." He was always my favorite hobbit, yo. 5:41:31 PM    comment []

Winter in the North Carolina Piedmont: an authentic seasonal experience, but not too much of it. Last week, cold cold cold. Today, golf with the kids. Bonus: I plopped the trick floating golf ball that I got from my Ziff Davis Secret Santa right into the middle of a pond. 5:34:34 PM    comment []

Satellite pics of Sri Lanka tsunami. (via Boing Boing, an essential read over the course of this horrible story.) Last night Lisa and I watched TV news -- something we almost never do. CNN was strong, serious and comprehensive. But gee that Tucker Carlson is not prime time anchor material. 12:00:11 PM    comment []

Philly Future is a city blog aggregator worth checking out. Founder and editor Karl Martino is doing a lot of the things we're talking about here. 11:53:30 AM    comment []

Over at the Barber Shop, Unkle L weighs in on the draft ("My opinions we should make the cats laying around prison go to war") and limns the congruity between barbershop banter and blogging: "It's all in whom ever willing to listen to what's going on at the time, it's going down. That's why barbershop is so luv." 11:27:29 AM    comment []

More thoughts on the N&R's web presence over at PressThink, from Dean campaign vet Zack Rosen, with commentary by Dave Winer. Zack suggests a centralized community of diarists and commenters, operating under the N&R rubric much as the community works at Daily Kos. Dave sees a more decentralized model, with writers encouraged to start their own blogs and where (as he put it in an earlier essay) "Editorial people become talent scouts. Instead of employing writers, employ facilitators and teachers." I find myself thinking what I do in many of these discussions: it's probably not either/or. Meanwhile, TheShu raises a question we're already on the verge of dealing with here: what happens when there is too much local online content to read on a regular basis? My answer goes back to the various portals I see arising, which will filter content into a manageable torrent. The N&R might be one such hub, along with general and targeted local aggregators and central sites that will continue to emerge, and (as I guessed in my first N&R column about blogging way back in 2002) popular blogs themselves will be portals into the web. And some people won't try to read all or most of the stuff out there, just as some people read only the sports or the obits and business news in the paper -- they'll find the blog or blogs serving their interest (church, school, whatever) and put that on their favorites list and go on happily ignoring the noise around them. 8:58:38 AM    comment []