aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, July 12, 2008
E.Webscapes is for Dummies: Stay away from Lisa Sabin-Wilson
NOTE: THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY DATED APRIL 13, 2008. I HAVE CHANGED THE DATE TO PERMANENTLY PLACE IT ON THE ARCHIVED HOME PAGE OF THIS SITE. I CONTINUE TO BELIEVE THAT LISA WAS WILLFULLY NEGLIGENT AND SHOULD BE HELD LIABLE FOR HER AWFUL BUSINESS PRACTICES. UNSUSPECTING CUSTOMERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT THERE ARE NO SAFEGUARDS IN PLACE TO PREVENT THE SAME THING FROM HAPPENING AGAIN.
In October of last year I contracted with Lisa Sabin-Wilson and E.Webscapes Blog Design Studio to “tweak” my blog design, move this blog to a new host, and upgrade my blog software. Sabin-Wilson is the author of WordPress for Dummies, and blogs at Just a Girl in the World.
Prior to contracting with Lisa to do the work I read the FAQ posted on the E.Webscapes site, browsed the portfolio, followed her blog, listened to the podcast of a presentation she did at a conference, and contacted one of her blog clients for a reference. I thought I did my due diligence. I thought wrong.
My experience with Lisa was very bad. Very bad. I opened a ticket with E.Webscapes on October 21, 2007. I paid for services on November 3, 2007. I was told to expect a 20-30 business day turn around. I received a full refund (with $50 extra) on March 26, 2008. 
The full story of my business relationship with Lisa Sabin-Wilson and E.Webscapes is contained in the extended entry of this blog post. I am happy to provide detailed documentation to back up my claims upon request. I am posting this reluctantly in order to help stop this kind of thing from happening to other bloggers.
Read the rest of "E.Webscapes is for Dummies: Stay away from Lisa Sabin-Wilson" in the extended entry.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Blogging update
You may have noticed I’ve been missing in action lately… Well, actually, I’ve been busy blogging at The Moderate Voice where I am grateful to have been welcomed as a regular contributor.
These are among the posts I’ve been most proud of while there:
Two on the NPR series on how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, NPR: 2 families, 2 approaches to gender identity and most especially, On gender identity, amputee wannabes, & our contagious natures; McCain, abortion, Southern Baptists & the emergence of the Religious Right; Earth to Democrats: Black votes count!; Jeremiah Wright & Martin Luther King: “Tolerance” v. “Equality & Justice for all”; Fightin’ Words; Colbert & Stewart: One Formidable Opponent; Is mainstreet ready for gay PDA?
Unfortunately, I started blogging there just as the semester was winding down and work was heating up which means… the worst possible time! I was far too busy, had way too much to do to be able to keep everything going. Something had to give and, sadly, it was my own little blog.
As you may recall, I had been having troubles here. The fallout from the disastrous business relationship with E.Webscapes and Lisa Sabin-Wilson has left me in a quandary as to what to do about this site. It continues to have technical difficulties. I have closed down comments and have yet to settle on a long-term solution.
Meanwhile, there is no easy means to find my posts from among the others at TMV. And posting there is somewhat more time consuming than here on my own site. I’m trying to decide how best to address these issues and will let you know what I come up with shortly.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
More on the technical perils of blogging
We’re always hearing about how empowered bloggers are, and I count myself among those who agree that it’s a wondrous world in which any of us can become a publisher. But the perils are many. It’s an either do-it-yourself or put yourself in the hands of huge corporations choice that bloggers face when they decide to set out.
I chose the former, wanting to learn how to design and build the blog, not just enter my content into someone else’s system. But that is an even more complex choice in which you must make a myriad of complex decisions, choose a blog platform, and still you are at the mercy of web hosting companies.
This morning I shared my nearly six months of struggle with a designer I had enlisted to help with my site. Later I ran across news from Blogs for Democracy that a regional ISP in Georgia has apparently failed without warning:
Sorry for the nonpolitical post, folks, but an area ISP that I (and thousands of others) use, Speedfactory (link is dead), has apparently ceased operations with no warning. I’m taking the liberty of posting this info here, because with the exception of this web forum thread there seems to be no information available at all. All that’s known from anecdotal reports is that everything has been down for two days, customer service calls are answered by an “all circuits busy” recording, and Speedfactory’s offices in the area are locked up with no sign of activity. It’s conceivable that this will have an effect on some area web sites, so don’t be shocked if you notice some isolated outages for a couple of days while customers transfer their DSL and web hosting services.
It’s probably only a matter of time before the AJC, Clark Howard, and/or other media types bring you more in-depth reporting on this unfolding debacle, but in the meantime, you heard it here first. (This post brought to you by Verizon mobile broadband while my DSL modem sits uselessly idle.)
Nothing yet reported in the news.
UPDATE: More from Blogs for Democracy. They say they’re still in business. But I’m thankful that I’m not their customer.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Arianna beats Drudge
Could it be a digital indicator that the Blue states are taking back ground from the Red ones–at least in cyberspace?
In February, for the first time ever, Arianna Huffington’s liberal political mega-blog and news site, the Huffington Post, has apparently surpassed the longtime mighty blog leader, Matt Drudge of the conservative /populist- leaning Drudge Report, according to recent traffic data reports from both comScore and Nielsen Online. (Both are pictured here.)
According to data from Nielsen Online, for example, the Huffington Post’s traffic–as measured by monthly unique visitors in the U.S., at home and work–has more than tripled since last February. In February of 2007, it had about 1.1 million unique visitors, and by February of 2008, unique visitors had risen to 3.7 million.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
What should the Times ask its users to do?
Jeff Jarvis got a comment from someone calling him or herself Timesman:
...what, specifically, should journalists at the Times ask its users to do? Let’s hear some very concrete next steps. We’re listening.
Jarvis offered up a number of very fine suggestions:
* Put large amounts of data or documents online and ask the public to help find the stories there. The Dallas Morning News did this with the just-released JFK documents. The Ft. Myers News Press did it with a FOIA on a botched hurricane-relief effort. The Sunlight Foundation has us exposing earmarks in spending bills. Someone, I can’t recall who, did it with Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before Congress. Use your access to get such data and then ask us to help dig into it because we know what’s going on or simply because you want the help. I’d start with Congress and get help from Sunlight and bloggers to strategize that.
* Ask the public to help gather data points around a story. The quickly classical example of this was Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show asking listeners to find out the prices of milk, lettuce, and beer to find out who is being gouged where (which then enables the journalists to ask why — put their price maps against maps of income and race in New York and stories emerge). This should work particularly well on a local level: Ask people to tell you the price they pay for drugs and doctors and map that. Ask them to tell you just how late or dirty their trains are. And on and on. If you get enough data, you can pay attention to the center of the bell curve; the outliers are either mistakes are damned good stories.
* Get the public to help file no end of FOIAs to birddog government. Create a FOIA repository where you can help train them how to do it and record the responses (that bit’s a great idea from Tom Loosemore in the UK) and collect what’s learned.
* One of the great ideas that came out of my entrepreneurial journalism class — inspired by an idea from an intern I worked with at Burda last summer — is to have the public help assign reporters. Now that could get unwieldy quickly. But my CUNY student, Danny Massey, came up with a very smart structure for capturing what the public wants to know so news organizations can allocate at least some of their resource accordingly. I’ll introduce you.
* Establish communities of experts to help on stories, their reporting and checking and even their assignment. This could take the form of Jay Rosen’s beat-blogging idea or of the Ft. Myers panel of experts. Of course, every reporter has such panels in their Rolodexes. But Ft. Myers has learned that people want to be of service before the reporter happens to call. The Times’ crowd is very wise and filled with experts and so why not use the networking and linking power of the internet to help harness that to help with reporting? Imagine a social network around expertise.
* Hand out camera and recorders and ask citizens to capture meetings, lectures, events of all sorts and turn those into podcasts. Most of the time most of them will not get much audience, but the resource that went into each one is minor and the opportunity to spread a wider blanket of coverage on a community is great.
* Get the advertising side involved in supporting curated, quality blog networks: New York, political, business, and so on. The Washington Post has networks for travel and other topics, the Guardian for environment, Reuters for financial blogs. The Times could support the very best of these blogs and benefit from having a wider net of content and reporting at a low cost and risk. And this is the part they’ll like: They can set the definitions of quality. The Times also has an in-house advantage here because About.com knows how to manage and pay large, distributed networks of contributors based on ad and traffic performance.
In the comments to the post, it’s not looking like the Times’ Bill Keller is particularly smitten with any of these ideas.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Kevin Drum’s Research on the Web tips
Wonderfully concise and right on the money! I wholeheartedly endorse them:
1. If you use Google (and who doesn’t?) don’t use the default page. Use the Advanced Search page instead:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Sure, the Advanced Search page is sort of a crutch for people who haven’t memorized Google’s set of Boolean operators. But that’s most of us, right? And since any advanced search you use is better than any advanced search you don’t, you’re better off with the crutch than with nothing. So bookmark the Advanced Search page and use it.
While you’re at it, you should also free yourself from the tyranny of getting only ten results per page. The best hits aren’t always in the top ten, and you’re more likely to see them if you just have to scroll down a single page rather than going back and forth between different result pages. So go to http://www.google.com/preferences and set your default to 50 results per page.
2. Whenever you read something by someone you don’t know, Google ‘em. Find out what axe they have to grind. Are they liberal or conservative? Do they work for a think tank? Do they have a history of being obsessed by weird stuff? What expertise do they have? The web allows you to root out this stuff in less than a minute or two for most people. Take advantage of it.
3. If you’re writing about a specific topic that you’re not that familiar with, take a minute and find an article that provides a quick outline of the general subject area. Even a modest 60-second familiarity with the lay of the land can save you a lot of grief and keep you from making an idiot of yourself.
4. Speaking of which, use Wikipedia. No, it’s not 100% reliable. And given the nature of the internet community, it’s better on some topics than others. You’re more likely to get a useful description of the binomial theorem than you are of the objective correlative in Heart of Darkness.
But all reference works have limitations, and virtually all popular references should be taken as starting points, not final authorities. And that’s how you should use Wikipedia: as a starting point. The scope of Wikipedia is vast; it’s extremely useful for recent events; it frequently does a decent job of summarizing a topic; and most articles come with a lot of highly useful links. Sure, you have to be careful with Wikipedia, but you should always be careful anyway.
5. And while we’re on the subject, always click the link. The web makes checking sources so easy that there’s no excuse for failing to at least skim the primary links in an article. Click, click, click!
Bravo, Kevin!
Friday, February 15, 2008
Lingering blog issues
I’m aware that there are ongoing residual problems that remain as a result of last week’s crash of this blog. There are some display issues, but the biggest issue is that you cannot leave comments. I am trying to get these problems resolved. I am also trying to rebuild the archive and develop a long-term strategy for moving forward.
I hate that my blog is hobbling along. Through it all I have considered quitting, but I have also come to understand how much this blog means to me. I’m totally swept up in my ability to follow and interact with the news, those who report the news, and the newsmakers. I like that from right here in rural Georgia I can be part of the process and the ecosystem that is media at the start of the 21st century.
Significantly, though, I’m learning through this experience that along with the empowerment comes some complicated responsibilities to negotiate. My blog host is in Hong Kong. My designer in Wisconsin. The software from somewhere in the cloud. Much of what is going on with my blog right now is out of my control.
Because I host it myself, you’d think I would have that control. I have a tech team I can draw on; you’d think I could direct them. For a number of reasons, I cannot. I’ve thought, then, that maybe I should take this opportunity to move to a hosted blog option. After all, there’s power in numbers.
danah boyd tells a Google horror story that puts the kibosh to that:
Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.
::gasp:: My heart threatens to attack my throat at the mere idea of losing four years worth of email. ::shudder:: Or what if this blog disappeared? Like, OMG. {insert horror film music here}
Bob’s story has a happy ending, because Bob is well connected. But what if he were me? I’m not well-connected so I’d have no protection.
The bottom line is: please bear with me. I hope to have comments back soon!
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Internet Memes 2007
Rocketboom‘s got ‘em. A couple favorites…
Rocketbom 2007 Meme of the Year award winner:
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Happy Blogiversary Digby!
Five years of Hullabaloo:
The blogosphere is changing, becoming much more sophisticated and much more innovative. It has to. I’m a dinosaur in many ways, still plugging along on my own, writing on a random daily schedule and basically following my bliss. It’s not necessarily the smart move, but it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done and I’m loathe to change it. Perhaps, for a while, there’s still a place for the (almost) lone blogger like me to keep doing this the old fashioned way.
I, too, am an old fashioned blogger in that dinosaur mold. There’s a place for us…
Friday, December 14, 2007
Design issues
I have two weeks and 4 days until my blog hosting expires. In October I contracted with E.Webscapes to do the move and, with it, some design work. Everything seemed to be on schedule until recently. It’s three weeks now since I’ve heard from them and so I’ve begun to worry!
It was with my design in mind that I took special note of Poytner’s redesign effort. They have set up Poynterevolution blog to inform readers about the process and gather feedback:
I hope you’ll help us with a fundamental challenge we’re facing in building the new site: the best way of highlighting new content as it’s posted throughout the day. A new edition of Al’s Morning Meeting is posted just after midnight, Jim Romenesko begins updating his page shortly after 7 a.m., and new content from elsewhere on the site is linked from the New on Poynter stack in the right rail. But there’s no easy way to track everything added to the site as the day unfolds.
My design challenge variant on that theme is that my site is such a hodgepodge of stuff that it may be an obstacle to growing readership. If you read me for my gay perspective, for example, there’s too much tech talk. And if you read me for tech insights, you may be bugged by the politics.
Then again, that’s the nature of the individual blog. And much as I may crave readership, a large audience is not the driving force of my blogging. So for the moment I’m not sure how I might handle that challenge, or whether to address it at all.
Meanwhile, Poynter’s challenge is hardly unique among large sites, and the other day Jeff Jarvis pointed to a solution that may just be an emerging trend:
We’ve heard news sites preach the gospel of making “every page a home page” since readers more and more are coming into content directly from search and links and not from a packaged home page. This presents the challenge of how to promote and lure readers to more content.
Well, Aftonbladet [link] seems to have taken the every-page-a-home-page strategy quite literally: As I clicked around from story to story, the bottom half of each page was filled with the content from the home page. The home page followed me around, trying to tempt me to try something else they’d packaged and recommended.
How that might work for me is that my content areas could follow individual stories, e.g. if you are reading a gay story, the gay content flows to you. It you’re reading a tech story, the tech content flows to you.
E.Webscapes, are you listening??? If not, I may be spending the holidays rebuilding this site on my own!!!
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Journalist Priests: on David Hazinski’s risky vision
Journalists have built themselves a pretty exalted temple way up high on a hill. David Hazinski wants to keep it up there:
Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.
The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people “journalists.” This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a “citizen surgeon” or someone who can read a law book is a “citizen lawyer.” Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip.
Oh. Ouch!
We citizens may only worship in the temple and genuflect at the altar of journalism. We dare not be full participants. Real, professional, journalism requires that journalists be drained of all ideological energy. Thus, the highly engaging and invigorating ways of the blogosphere must be monitored and regulated.
But the highly paid professional, credentialed journalist is out of touch with - and has a vastly different value system than - those who journalism is meant to serve. Where once salaries were in line with public school teachers and the working class; today celebrity journalists are the de facto ruling elite.
And from that perch they insist the journalistic product must be reduced to the boring and technical “balance” of “both sides” of every story (as if there ever were only two). Partisan vigor may only be expressed in the cable TV colosseum point/counterpoint of the pundit gladiators.
In the end Hazinski is like those who want linguists to regulate language. Bemoaning its latest twist and turns and appalled, for example, that the populace has moved the meaning of “gay” from “jovial” to “homosexual” to “stupid” they wish to command that its meaning be turned back to the earlier, idealized, “lighthearted, cheerful.”
Would that it could be, I might worry. As it is I’ll note that the blogosphere is not the cause of the erosion of traditional journalism’s trust and credibility. Rather, it’s a healthy reaction to it.
Friday, December 07, 2007
My Blogiversary!
I almost forgot. Today is 3 years and over 4,400 posts (4,464 but I’ve had some guest bloggers) since I started blogging.
Here’s my first post. And the original why I blog post. Three years later and I plan to replace it with this one.
I am working to address the technical challenges the site has presented to visitors (and me!) this year. I have contracted with E. Webscapes to tweak the design, optimize the engineering, upgrade the blog software and move back to my old host, ICDSoft.
I’m looking forward to a banner blog year in 2008! I hope you’ll all stay with me.
Silent Debate. And Barack OBollywood.
Joe Gandelman (who graciously included my more-marginalizing-our-media-reaction to the YouTube debates in a recent Around the Sphere) points us to…
Harry Shearer hosts another informative Presidential silent debate via My Damn Channel (which makes a lot more sense than the presidential debates we’ve heard so far..)
Harry Shearer’s close, “Thank you all gentleman. You’ve given us a lot not to think about.”
LATER: Barack OBollywood...
Via Blog for Democracy.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
On writing
In Catholic grade-school I got an A in “penmanship.” I wonder if students today would even know what the word means!
A decade ago I got the gift of a personality test from a popular handwriting analyst in Manhattan. 
He asked for my signature, took one look and, appalled, declared, “you’re trying to obliterate yourself!!!”
Golly, I thought it showed I had an artistic creative flair with the right-leaning swoop meaning I had a futurist bent and the left-leaning “J” and “W” implying that futurist bent was one informed by the past.
He took my hundred dollar gift certificate and sent me on my way. Dissatisfied.
Still, I note that I can barely write with a pen any longer. It’s chicken-scratch that I can hardly read myself. So I just don’t do it.
I never considered myself a writer. I went to engineering school and hated writing. I think my dislike of writing came from my severe inability to write as a kid. I can’t hold a pen or pencil very well, I hold it way too tightly, my handwriting is terrible, hard to read, messy, and often illegible. Typewriters made life easier for me, but the big breakthrough came when I started writing on a computer. For years it was just memos, email, business stuff.
But blogging has changed all of that. Now I write every day. I feel incomplete until I write something. Often it’s hardly worth hitting the “save” button. Sometimes it’s good. Once in a while it’s great. But it’s a routine and one I cherish.
I was 30 before I made my way to an undergraduate education. My performance in grade-school nosedived with the puberty and the realization that I was gay.
When I contemplated going back to school I was petrified that I would not be able to write papers. The first course I took was in writing and rhetoric. I got an A+.
Now as a blogger I have neither the influence nor the audience that Fred does. But I, too, cherish the routine:
Hardly anyone writes letters anymore. The rare book dealer told me that emails between writers and famous people are rarely well written or as interesting as the letters he sells. I was thinking that it’s a shame that letter writing is done as an art form. But then I realized that it’s evolution at work. We lose something, letters, and gain something, blogging.
I hope blogging will inspire people to compose their thoughts as eloquently as letters have done over the years. It sure has inspired me.
For me blogging is both a practice and a process. It’s not motivated money or a wish for fame (though influence has its attractions). Instead it’s motivated by the wish to be engaged in the community of ideas and interests that exists only on the web. It is a mash-up of my mind’s thoughts, interests and ideas.
And, just like it does Fred, it inspires me.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Blog design inspiration
As I contemplate my design tweaks, I’m looking around for inspiration. Here’s some from Smashing Magazine:
It’s not hard to design a weblog, but it’s getting harder when you try to achieve a unique weblog design. It doesn’t matter what weblog-engine you are using — frequently used themes tend to become boring over time, and they also don’t necessarily reflect the unique identity of the blogger.
To create an original design you need fresh ideas and creative design solutions. However, you don’t need to go too far with your design experiments. Basically that’s a close attention to finest details which makes a weblog stand out and gives it a fresh flavour and soft touch visitors can recognize immediately.
We’ve selected some more of them — over 30 excellent weblog designs with unusual design approaches; these blogs don’t only have a unique voice, but they also pay close attention to the finest design details.
- You might find not all of the designs listed below beautiful; but that’s not what it’s about. They are beautiful in their own way as they are both well-structured and originally designed.
- you can find further blog designs in the post 45 Excellent Blog Designs we’ve published before;
- you can find even more designs in our Design Showcase section.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Color of Change
Matt Stoller - in three posts today - and Markos (following up on Jane Hamsher last night) have noted the fast rise and significant influence of Color of Change.
And quoted Jill Tubman:
NAACP: 500,000 members, almost $20,000 raised for Jena 6, 0% of funds disbursed to families and lawyers to date
Color of Change: 400,000 members, over $200,000 raised for Jena 6, 100% of funds disbursed to date
As African American Political Pundit points out, which of these organizations looks more competent, effective and credible in terms of black leadership to you?
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Best science blog???
Skye sez, “In the ‘Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest’ a psuedoscience web site denying the effect humans have on global warming is currently in the lead over real science blogs. Apparently conservative political sites have been directing their readers to vote for it, whether they read it or not.” - Link
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains
Oh. So that’s what’s fueling the blogospheric vitriol:
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience. [...]
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, “and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes,” Walker speculated. “Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It’s a real oddity in nature.”
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Top Library Blogs
Lots of talk of library blogs here. For the occasion I share the Meredith Farkas ("Librarian, writer and tech geek") Favorite blogs - List and Commentary:
The Top 10
3. Information Wants to be Free
5. Tame the Web
(for the rest of the results [please click here)
What can we learn from this? That no top ___ librar* blogs list is going to be definitive? That it doesn’t matter all that much as long as you enjoy what you’re doing as a blogger? How about all of the above?
As I had predicted, the top 10 list is a good bit different from the top 10 list on the OEDB site. The three blogs with the most Bloglines subscribers (librarian.net, The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff) are not the top 3 favorite blogs, though they are not surprisingly in the top 10. Some of blogs did better and some did worse. It seems like any measure you use, you will get different results.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
What the Republican Party has become
One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family’s case. [...]
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I’m registering Independent tomorrow.
More here.
LATER: Steve Benen notes that Rush is in full-smear mode against the 12-year-old and reminds us that GOP aides may be complicit in spreading disparaging information about the Frosts.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Who the Right don’t like on the Right
John Hawkins has his Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Least Favorite People On The Right (2007 Edition) posted:
The field was wide open—with two exceptions that I didn’t want to clutter up the list since they have absolutely no support in the party: racist David Duke, who never won national office and Democrat Fred Phelps of God Hates F@gs fame, who often gets misidentified as a Republican.
Without further ado, here are the right-of-center bloggers’ least favorite people on the right with the number of votes beside of each selection in parentheses:
18) Ted Stevens (4)
18) Olympia Snowe (4)
18) Mel Martinez (4)
18) Sean Hannity (4)
18) Lincoln Chafee (4)
17) Bill O’Reilly (5)
14) Lindsey Graham (6)
14) George W. Bush (6)
14) Mitt Romney (6)
12) Arnold Schwarzenegger (9)
12) Rudy Giuliani (9)
8) Andrew Sullivan (11)
8) Chuck Hagel (11)
8) James Dobson (11)
8) Ann Coulter (11)
6) Arlen Specter (12)
6) Pat Robertson (12)
4) Larry Craig (13)
4) Michael Savage (13)
3) John McCain (17)
2) Pat Buchanan (18)
1) Ron Paul (23)
LATER: Steve Benen parses the list. And points to Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Favorite People On The Right (2007 Edition).
Thursday, October 04, 2007
GA bloggers call on Marshall to switch on SCHIP
Amy Morton’s all over telling us,”This could be Jim Marshall’s moment.” Georgia Women Vote, Blog for Democracy and Tondee’s Tavern.
I’ve come late to the party, but I’m with Amy!
Sign the online petition or send an email
Call or fax him:
DC: (202) 225-6531
Fax: (202) 225-3013
Macon: (478) 464-0255Fax: (478) 464-0277
I’ve amended my earlier post.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
What bloggers do
In the ongoing discussion of what’s a blogger? I am inspired and informed by a comment a few weeks back from Lolis Eric Elie is a metro columnist for The Times-Picayune in an On The Media discussion of how the narrative of Big Easy rebuilding is not what it appears to be:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think hasn’t been covered? What’s the story that still isn’t being told?
LOLIS ERIC ELIE: The great thing about American media is that most of the stories get told, but unless they are told repeatedly, unless you have one media outlet breaking a story and another one attempting to come up with a better day two story, the stories aren’t important.
I cannot think of anything that has not been reported, but it does not get analyzed and it does not get viewed in the context of the national implications. So I suppose I would say that what has not happened is a discussion of the lessons to be learned for the rest of the country.
My role in the media ecology is not that of the reporter. I’m typically not going to go out and do original reporting; that’s not what I do and it’s not what is needed from me.
I can, however, help keep a story going day after day after day until it gets the attention it deserves. And I can be part of the feedback mechanism that analyzes, contextualizes and draws lessons from what the traditional media does.
That’s plenty good enough for me. 
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
More crack reporting from the traditional media
MSNBC, in a story on how the Vick case divides African-American leaders, quoted from Al Sharpton’s personal blog, “If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green
Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting unit out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other, would they bust him? Of course not.”
Just one problem. The “personal blog” was in reality a parody site.
How did the reporter figure it out? Digby:
The editor of the site, terribly impressed with MSNBC’s investigative skills as you might imagine, wonders which one of these clues finally tipped them off:
1. The words “fake parody blogs” in the titlebar of every page of our site
2. Our logo
3. Al Sharpton blogging on the same site as Lindsay Lohan, George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
4. Our about page http://www.newsgroper.com/about/
5. Al Sharpton referring to himself in his bio as an “Emancipation Proclamation enthusiast”
LATER: Joe Gandelman points out that the MSNBC correction was wrong; they were carelessly taken in by parody, not duped by a hoax:
rather than admit “we put that on the site without really checking the website source as a whole - sorry!” or “we made a mistake in not looking at the post a bit more carefully but mistakes do happen!” MSNBC’s website writer called it “hoax” which implies Newsgroper set up to trick people.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Journalism pot calls blogger kettle black
Josh Marshall was named in LATimes opinion column yesterday penned by journalism professor Michael Skube. The column is subtitled, “The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.”
Josh’s site, Talking Points Memo, is one known in the blogosphere for its efforts to include more original reporting. So he wrote Skube:
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt ...”
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example—along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.
To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... “
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?
Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.
