Tuesday, February 11, 2003

It's good to hear that people who know what they're doing have been thinking about audio blogs for a while.  Professor Nesson, you're on.  (Is anyone doing a good one today?) 1:00:12 PM

John Ellis noted: "The good news is that Ellisblog is now one year old.  The bad news is that it doesn't make any money at all."  (Yeah, but we read it).  As his thoughts often do, John's comment begs a good question.  It's been bugging me about blogging: why do so many people do it, especially when virtually no one makes any money at it?  People like to speak and to be heard?  Because it has this hard-to-describe addictive quality?  We like to feel like we're part of a community of interest?  Shy people turn into extroverts as bloggers (someone's suggestion at a bloggers' lunch yesterday with Dave, Donna, Hylton, Derek)?  Because it's e-mail without spam? 12:53:40 PM

I keep coming back to what Jonathan Katz said about the media and the young in his critique, last September, of the Columbia J-School deans' search.  Among other good insights: "The challenge for media and for the academic study of media has been the same for a generation now, and both media and academe have failed to meet it. Journalism has become irrelevant to younger Americans, and marginalized by those vibrant and ascending new information cultures — computer gaming, movies, music, graphic design, software, popular culture, the Net and the Web. A generation without a common information structure is by definition alienated. This has profound consequences for any democratic society, almost all of them bad. It's had ugly implications for the future of journalism, too." (Emphasis his).  I care lots about the Net and democracy, which is the point at which he got my attention and got me thinking in new ways.  But he might have grabbed you earlier or later in the piece, if you care about the media and its modes and audiences.  He's also right about: what we young are after and what we do on line; Lessig; open source (maybe a bit too breathless and not yet dug into the hard questions in what he says but certainly, I sure hope, ultimately right); slashdot; and blogs (but his mention is just in passing and might well be the subject of a larger discussion), among other things.  Mr. Katz, please build out your argument along the blog lines.  You have our (at least my) attention. 12:38:22 PM

Wayne has put up a great piece about Kingstonians (Jamaica) with "fluidity with the hip-hop idiom."  He has a way with words and music. 10:57:03 AM

Tonight (Tuesday, Feb. 11) is the first in a series of meetings about blogging at Harvard (and beyond), led by Dave Winer.  Please come: 6:30, Lewis 301, HLS campus.  If you can't make it, not to fret; there will be more.  This is just the thin end of the wedge. 9:36:12 AM

© Copyright 2003 John Palfrey.