Blogging

Changes

Dan Gillmor says esentailly the same thing Adam Curry told the BBC a few days ago. Curry was talking about podcasting, the online radio equivalent of weblogs, when he said podcasting will kill the business model of radio. Gillmor's article suggests a similar shift will happen in the newspaper realm.

I agree that podcasting and weblogs will have powerful influences in toppling the traditional media business model. All too often, however, this is taken as an excuse for producing a poor quality product. Podcasts-a-plenty are full of folksy poorly produced blots of sound. Of the many podcasts that have at one time or another crossed my iPod the only ones that have stayed are IT Conversations, Career Opportunities and New York Public Radio's On the Media. All three share several things in common. Among them high production values and they are the right length. What is the right length? Long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep it interesting.

I suspect I am not alone in that after the first "wow" factor wears off listening to someone who is not good at radio will loose its allure quickly. There is a reason Rush Limbaugh has a radio show. It is not his politics. There are conservatives behind every corner these days. The reason his show is on the air is he knows how to put together a good radio program. The same will be true of weblogs and podcasts. The good among them, those that find a stride and figure out how to put a professional polish on the product will likely replace many of the mainstays of the media machine.

The echo chamber

Dave Winer is concerned with openness and disclosure in the mainstream media. It is disappointing that this morning he posted a deceptive item on his site. The item quotes another source "2WW" - the two way web website. The post on the the 2WW website it is Winer's own writing. Linking to one's own writing while hinting it was said by a third party is dishonest.

This is one of the one of the dilemmas the blogging community hasn't adequately addressed. There are sites that I read regularly and respect the authors, but I don't link to as much because they don't want their name associated with their site. I have decided to use people's names when they are known. If I cannot determine the name then I will use the name of the publication in rare cases.

Winer's post makes it seem to the casual reader as though somebody else said something. The truth is Winer wrote it on another website. The post should have said "I wrote this on 2WW" or something to that effect.

On The Media on blog swarms

WNYC's On The Media covers blog swarms. They start by talking to Wall Street Journal editorial board member Brett Stevens who was in the audience for the statements made by Eason Jordan. Asked about leaving the story to blog space Stevens made all kinds of excuses and failed to even discuss the fact that by the very nature of being off the record it is a matter of professional credibility not to jump into the fray.

A perfect opportunity to focus the debate on the right way to share information and the personal responsibility of those involved to be honorable. Instead it was used as a puff piece for blogging. Even in the discussion with Rony Abovitz, the blogger who originally posted the blog comment from the off-the-record-session, he was never asked about writing about something that was clearly off the record. He also furthers the myth that Jordan could have had the tape released by placing a call to the World Economic Forum.

DirecWay and XML-RPC

Last month I posted about DirecWay problems with MarsEdit. It occurred to me today that the problem may instead lie with the way DirecWay does "Web Acceleration" and that it could be interfering with the XML-RPC calls.

A quick search reveals that this indeed seems to be Direcway XML-RPC problem. The author of the WordPress article suggests it is related to latency. I'm not certain as it was working for me at one point over the satellite connection. I noticed, however, a problem with DirecWay's cache last night. At one point it attempted to load this site and munged the .css files associated with it. From then the only way I could load the site was to power-cycle the DirecWay box and load it before the Web Acceleration kicked in.

So I called Ground Control tech support and they say there is nothing that can be done. They recommend contacting the author of the software to have the problem with their system fixed.

Which version of reality do you see?

About a year ago the coverage of the Howard Dean scream points out an important question for all journalists (those writing for traditional media and those writing for blogs and other media outlets). A journalist should always ask themselves if they are accurately representing the situation. The coverage of Dean was part of the truth, but not an accurate representation of the situation. The microphone singled out Dean's voice and did not show it accurately in context. WIth more unedited reporting in blogs and podcasts it is important to remember that a single point of view in a situation, or a single microphone in a room, may not accurately reflect what is really happening.

Pages

Subscribe to Blogging