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Bloggers Left and Right Agree to Hate Health Care Reform

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Time - By Joe Klein - Dec. 30 (Opinion) - The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation of these extremes — a united front against the turgid ceremonies of legislative democracy, like compromise, and disdain for the politician most responsible for nudging our snarled checks and balances toward action, Barack Obama. The issue that has brought them together is opposition to the Senate's health care–reform bill, which makes some sense on the right, but none at all on the left.

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The Rise of the Professional Blogger

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Benjamin Carlson - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Today, the romantic notion that solitary, untamed bloggers are running the Web is more fantasy than fact—nearly as apocryphal as old myths about stoic Western sheriffs killing 11 outlaws with six bullets.

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Imagining Newspapers of the Future

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Lynn Klyde-Silverstein, Elliot Neaman, Tim Straus, Martin Kimel, Joel Kramer, Jessica Wanke, Louise Dufresne - Jan. 31 (Comment) - Re “News You Can Endow,” by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt (see link), which says endangered newspapers can be saved if we “turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities”: The writers don’t seem troubled by the rule that endowed status would prevent newspapers from attempting to “influence legislation.” Candidate endorsements are not the only thing this would suppress. Wouldn’t this also prevent newspapers from editorializing about any pending legislation? Isn’t that one of the most important jobs of a newspaper?

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Ashin Mettacara: Burma, Myanmar: 2008 voting has closed; view the Winners

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

http://www.ashinmettacara.org/ - By Ashin Mettacara - Oct. 18 (Opinion) - Ashin Mettacara is an independent blogger monk from Burma who is contributing to OpEdNews with the aim of spreading news to the whole world about the crisis in Burma.

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How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Evgeny Morozov - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - Nobody seems to know whether this is a centralized Russian attack, the work of a loose band of hackers, or something else. Having read so many contradicting accounts, I knew that the only reliable way to find out what was really happening was to enlist in the Russian digital army myself.

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Real change happens off-line

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Jul. 01 (Opinion) - By contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there. This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society - the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) - won't politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million. Millennials are poised to lead us all to reject the hyperindividualism and isolation that has dominated our recent past and recognize the deep interconnectedness and mutual responsibility that is our present and future.

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Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Miguel Helft - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google's Blogger service.

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Bogus narratives

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Jon Carroll - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - The political media, particularly the national political media, particularly the national electronic political media, exist in a vast echo chamber. Someone picks up or makes up a concept-like thought and he says it out loud and everyone else hears and repeats it, and it soon takes on a life of its own, separate from its existence in reality-based reality. The people for whom the concept-like thought is a boon immediately pick it up and use it as a debating point. The people for whom the concept-like idea is a detriment chase it with denials. The media then can follow the quarrel about the concept-like idea, providing "balanced" coverage of a narrative that they created. So not only are we dealing with fantasy, we're dealing with fantasy at several removes. We've gone so meta that our brains have traveled to our toes. Never good. There are those who believe that crafty political operatives plant these narratives with a friendly talking head, and I'm sure that happens. But I also think that misinterpretation, sloppiness, deadline pressure and quite possibly recreational drug abuse all go into the creation of bogus narratives. Certainly there are conspiracies, but conspiracies are a lot of trouble, and a lot of them break down because someone wants to leave and get room service or laid.

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Copyright: AP gets tough and bloggers get angry

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:45:58 -0700

The Times - By Bernhard Warner - Jun. 18 (Opinion) - Bloggers don't like the way Associated Press is policing its copyright, but news wires are right to object to wholesale theft. Speak to any teacher these days and the biggest gripe about the internet age will probably be plagiarism. Where I teach in Rome, the university has a strict "no copying" policy. If a student is caught lifting text from a website and claiming it as his own, that's grounds for failure. End of story. And, if the crime is particularly grievous, it could lead to expulsion. The one-strike-and-you're-out policy isn't perfect, but it seems to strike enough fear into enough students to get them to think twice about stealing somebody else's work on Shakespeare or Cicero or Einstein. If only such a punishment loomed in the professional world. The issue of acceptable copying is raging in the blogosphere this week thanks to a showdown between the Associated Press and the publisher of a well-read blog-and-news-referral network, the Drudge Retort. It's like Digg for lefties, taking obvious swipes at the better-known, bulldog-style Drudge Report. AP kicked off the debate last week when it issued Rogers Cadenhead, the founder and publisher of the Drudge Retort, with demands that five stories and one user comment be taken down. Mr Cadenhead was incredulous, insisting that the bloggers merely paraphrased details of a few AP articles and repeated word-for-word a single quote. By his calculations, the excerpts ran from 33 to 79 words, and each carried a link to the original article. Where's the crime in that?

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In Egypt, YouTube Trumps Facebook

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Alaa Abd El Fattah - Jun. 04 (Opinion) - Today the most effective political Web site would be YouTube. With the pervasiveness of mobile phone cameras, it is rare to hear of a human rights violation, a political event or a major incident that isn't accompanied with a mobile phone video published on YouTube.

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Arab Bloggers Keep Watch Over Government -- And Each Other

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Mona Eltahawy - May. 23 (Opinion) - In Saudi Arabia, which fuels most of the world's cars but bars half of its population from driving, women's rights activists used Facebook and emails to collect petitions against the driving ban which they then sent to the king. One of the activists, Wajeha al-Huwaider, further protested the ban by getting behind the wheel as her sister-in-law filmed her, and posted the video on YouTube on International Women's Day as an open letter to the Saudi interior minister, urging him to lift the ban.

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Gone in 60 Seconds

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Nancy Nall Derringer - Mar. 04 (Editorial) - Finding the theft took 60 seconds; drafting a post for my blog, about an hour. I held it overnight to give my ex-colleagues a little notice and published it at 7:38 a.m. Friday. It was linked pretty quickly by Romenesko and then by some of the big-traffic amplifiers (Talking Points Memo, Atrios). I figured the story would get some notice, but I was unprepared for the turns it would take.

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Unlock the voices of the Arab street

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Globe and Mail - By Mona Eltahawy - Jan. 14 (Comment) - Why are bloggers so feared by authoritarian regimes in the Arab world? Because they are young and blogging is, at last, a way to express themselves in a world where they are ignored. The majority of the Arab world is under the age of 30 and this majority has few venues in which to express their views -- political or otherwise.

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A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 08:22:04 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Aug. 08 (Opinion) - Most CogDaily readers are familiar with the little icon we developed to indicate when we were reporting on peer reviewed research. We created it when we began to offer links to news and blog posts, as a way of distinguishing those less "serious" posts from when we were talking about peer-reviewed journal articles. But Sister Edith Bogue of Monastic Musings recently pointed out that other academic bloggers could also make use of the icon, to distinguish when they're blogging about news, family, books, etc., from serious scholarship. But our icon isn't ideal for this purpose since its design is specifically linked to our site. I also think a public icon should come with some guidelines for use.

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Beware the Bloggers' Bile

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:09:21 -0700

Time - By Joe Klein - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - First, let me say that I really enjoy blogging. It's a brilliant format for keeping readers up to date on the things I care about--and for exchanging information with them. I recently asked Swampland readers with military experience to comment on whether it was General David Petraeus' "duty" to tell the unvarnished truth about Iraq when he testifies on Capitol Hill in September. About a dozen readers responded with links to treatises about "duty" in various military journals. Furthermore, I've found that some great reporting takes place in the blogosphere: Juan Cole's Iraq updates are invaluable, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo did serious muckraking about the U.S. attorneys scandal, and Ezra Klein (no relation) is excellent on health care. I love linking to smart work by others, something you just can't do in a print column.

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Code of Conduct: Lessons Learned So Far

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:18:20 -0700

O'Reilly Radar - By Tim O'Reilly - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - Rather than responding in detail to the many comments on my Draft of a Bloggers' Code of Conduct or the earlier Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct, as well as some of the thoughtful discussion on other blogs, I thought I'd summarize some of my chief takeaways from the discussion so far. These include: The poor choice of the "badges" I proposed, together with a reiteration of why I thought badges might be useful. The need for a more modular code of conduct, a set of axioms rather than a single monolithic "code of conduct" or "terms of service." A suggestion of some moderation mechanisms that might be more effective than a code of conduct. A discussion of constructive anonymity vs. "drive-by anonymity". An acknowledgement that a "code of conduct" should be reviewed by lawyers lest bloggers incur additional liability for commenters. Why I think civility matters, despite all the nay-sayers.

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The Blogosphere

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:44:40 -0700

Wired - By Tony Long - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - Civility? They're proposing a code of conduct for the blogosphere to ensure civility online? Who's kidding who here? Before you can expect a bunch of utterly spoiled, self-indulgent bloggers (i.e. the kind who indulge in their online mudslinging) to practice civility, you might try restoring a bit of it to what passes for civilization these days. Civility is all about self-restraint. It's not about being told by someone else to say "no," but finding the inner resolve to say it to yourself. Call it self-discipline. Call it having a little bit of class. Whatever name you give it, it's almost completely absent from modern society.

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