Category: Radio Free Blogistan

  • Is Kos a public figure?

    House Majority Whip Tom DeLay notes that Daily Kos is supporting his opponent, Mr. Morrison (one of the Kos Dozen), asserting “Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq.” Markos laughsthis off (Daily Kos :: TX-22:…

  • Towards a more nuanced view of the role of blogs in political journalism

    Over at Personal Democracy Forum (disclosure: I am a contributing editor there), Jed Miller takes issue with the sensationalism in the way that blogs have been covered in the media this season (It’s a Spitball! It’s a Filter!): Maybe I’m oversensitive after all the is-not/is-too-ism of the political season, but it seems to me that…

  • You lose 300 tons and what do you get?

    Please allow me to aggrandize myself, but my Monkey Vortex cohorts have scripted and produced a two-minute playlet called Sympathy for the W. I was given a cowriting credit but that overstates the case. That is me on lead vocals, though. I know, I know. Don’t quit your day job. Cruel of you to say…

  • Jerome Armstrong profiled in VT

    Jessamyn “the librarian” West tipped me off to this article on Jerome in his local paper: The Blogger: One Vermonter’s Internet ax-grinding attracts national attention. (Jessamyn also gets a plug in the article’s sidebar.)

  • Ben and Mena in the Wall Street Journal

    WSJ.com – Folksy No More, Blogger Firm Taps Big Clients: Michael Pusateri, vice president of engineering at Disney ABC Cable Networks Group, a division of Walt Disney Co., used Movable Type for his personal blog. Then he realized that technicians in his group could use a blog to update each other daily on the condition…

  • Deep thinking on folksonomies and a stream of photos from Iraq

    Geodog has summed up a lot Late night thoughts on browsing the Iraq tag on Flickr One of the most striking developments in the web over the last year has been the sudden popularity of sites like Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us, where users can categorize the data or photos they save with keywords, more colloquially…

  • Help Kos write his Guardian column

    Markos is thinking about discussing Furious George‘s debate performance in his Guardian co,umn, but he’s not sure that’s the most effective way to help his British readers understand the U.S. presidential election. he’s asked the Daily Kos community to give him advice and suggestions about what to write. (His deadline seems to be this evening.)

  • MarsEdit UI notes

    At inessential.com Brent Simmons explains some of the user-interface design decisions that went into his new MarsEdit weblog-posting product for Mac OS X. (It is in beta currently and is free for paid-up users of NetNewsWire.) It’s a pretty good tool although being in beta it still has a few flakey behaviors. My recent flurry…

  • Linkin' logs due for some rethinking

    At plasticbag.org Tom Coates has some ideas for how link logs should work in this day and age: So Paul Hammond created webkit2png which is a lovely little command-line script for a Mac that goes and grabs a full screenshot of a web-page – full length on the page. It can also do a variety…

  • The Invisible Cowgirl rides again

    Susannah Breslin, whose now-defunct Reverse Cowgirl blog still hovers near the all-time top list here among Salon Bloggers has got a new website up at The Invisible Cowgirl. Looks like her novel is about to come out. Congratulations, Susannah! (Via Xeni at BoingBoing.)

  • Ev resigns from Google's Blogger team

    In evhead: Next?, Evan Williams explains that he’s been on the startup dotcom treadmill for six years now and needs to work on some other aspects of his life. Sounds like a healthy move. He answers all of the inevitable questions in his post, debunking in advance any potential rumor of a shakeup or forceout.…

  • Blog pundits in the mix

    The Wall Street Journal quoted liberally (no pun intended) from a range of prominent political weblogs in its roundup of debate reactions culled equally from television and the print press (Shaping Opinions: Early Reactions From TV, Bloggers, Newspapers). Some examples from the newly influential Powerline and the always pithy Pandagon: Power Line: John H. Hinderaker…

  • Aggregator watch

    Clearing out an old TypePad test blog, I’m porting over some relevant comments from the beta, such as this one from when I noticed that there was no built-in aggregrator (I misplaced the date, but it was sometime in 2003 and I’m though filing a few others around their original datestamps in the RFB chronolog,…

  • You know you're obsessed with blogging when

    You lie about the size of your readership… in a dream.

  • Finding a better metaphor

    I think Annalee Newitz is onto a better frame for blogging than the tired old media-pundit sliver in her Techsploitation column in the SF Bay Guardian: reality TV. It seems in many ways as if our entire media culture is devoted to broadcasting ephemera. Blogs, like reality TV, record the minutiae of our everyday lives,…

  • NY and LA Times articles miss the big picture

    Following up on Rayne’s previous post and filchyboy’s addendum, my sense is that while Billmon is clearly thoughtful and a great writer, he makes the same mistake Klam made in the Times magazine cover story, which is to view the A-list, top-of-the-power-law bloggers for the whole shmear. Of course some will cross over and sell…

  • NetNewsWire 2.0 public beta

    Happy, happy. Joy, joy. (Gotta love Ranchero.)

  • The blog conference on the Well

    A year or so ago, with the help of Jon Lebkowsky, I started an independent conference on the Well called blog.ind. Plenty of people on the Well are blog-savvy already of course (case in point: Cory Doctorow), but the information about blogging was scattered across a number of confs, and I also detected a bit…

  • I'll be the one in the orange Yankees cap

    I’m meeting RFB co-contributor Liza Sabater outside P.S. 122 in my old neighborhood in just over an hour. Liza and I last met face to face something like six or eight years ago, so Liza, in case your blogging between now and 6:45, I wanted to tell you I’d be wearing my orange and black…

  • On the road again

    Life’s been a little crazy for personal journaling lately, but the pent-up urge to blog is reasserting itself. I flew into JFK on the jetblue redeye last night and have been holed up in the family compound in Manhattan today drinking liquids and recovering. Tomorrow I’ll check out the Tank and the other liberal bloggers…

  • Voting as a social act

    I enjoyed reading Louis (didn’t they call him Luke when he taught literature in New Jersey?) Menand in the New Yorker on how voters decide who to vote for: […] Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors.…