David Akin’s On The Hill

No one really knows and you will find a plenty of arguments. However, I will aver that a blog, for our discussion anyhow, must have the following:

• A diary-like organization. That is, entries or content are organized chronologically.
• Ability to include comments from readers, generally without the intervention of the blog owner.

That's it. There are a tremendous variety of blogs. Generally, though, you will find the entries at most blogs are short. There are lots of links at blogs, links to other blogs or other material that's central to the blog's mission. Blogs often refer to other blogs. There is frequently a strong authorial presence at a blog. In other words, blogs are usually about personality.
But really, you have to get into the blogosphere to smell one or two up close.
Here's what opinion writer Kathleen Parker had to say about blogs in a July, 2003 piece at Townhall.com:

“…what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest “tidy desk” memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.
In some areas, bloggers are beating the knickers off mainstream reporters and commentators.

Journalist and blogger J.D. Lasica had this to say:

A blog is “a Web site that's updated on a regular basis in reverse chronological order and includes a time stamp. A lot of people in the media keep calling them online diaries or personal journals and I don't think that's quite right.” Lasica describes blogs as the ground zero of the “personal media revolution”

Sheila Lennon, a staff journalist at Providence (R.I.) Journal says this:

“A blog is just a form. There are no rules about it.” She says all you need is a permalink — that's about it for the rules. “[You get] Incoming information, you just package it as quickly as you can and get it out there and have a two-way exchange with your readers.”

So how big is this blogging thing? Well, it's pretty big and getting bigger but, in my opinion, it's not replacing anything just yet. It's a great resource for journalists and it offers the potential for journalists who blog to reach new audiences and, for freelancers, the potential for new income. Various surveys have been done about blogging and here's the latest stats: Depending on how you measure it, between two and seven per cent of all North American Internet users maintain a blog or participate in a community blog. But just one in ten North American Internet users regularly read a blog and the odds are they likely read a handful of the world's most popular blogs.

“Blogs . . . are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.”

What are the world's most popular blogs? Let's take a look at one ranking from a site called Technorati, set up specifically to track activity in the blogosphere.
Technorati maintains a service which tries to rank the most popular blogs in the world. It is a ranking of blogs based on the number of links at other Web sites to the blog in question. Here's the Top 100 right now.
And we'll leave the last word here to novelist and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith:

The blog phenomenon is perhaps the strangest side of the Internet. It's stranger even than all the porn. Thousands of unremarkable people are posting their diaries on-line. Sometimes these blogs contain humorous commentary on global current events or local politics.
Sometimes — and more often — they contain a list of daily activities. “Went to the post office, managed to do laundry, talked to Jason about Our Relationship . . .” Who do they expect will read them?
Well, Jason, of course.

This category and blog entry was built to accompany some presentations I'm involved with for the 2004 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Journalists. This entry accompanies a panel titled The Blog Revolution. The panel discussion is scheduled for Friday, May 7 at 9 am Pacific / 12 noon EDT. So far as I know, the panel will not be Webcast although we might be lucky to have a live network connection in the room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Here's the panel's mission, some bullet points I plan to elaborate on, and then (I hope) a place to jot down some of the panel discussion and feedback. This blog is now open for comments and feedback from all.
Panel Mission:

THE BLOG REVOLUTION: How blogs are changing and challenging journalism – Everyone's doing it, including media professionals. Web logs, or blogs, give anyone a platform and a potentially limitless audience. Lately, bloggers have broken news stories, kept other stories alive, created their own celebrities and, oh yeah, helped overthrow the editor of The New York Times.  Previously unknown bloggers have been offered plum jobs in conventional newsrooms, and conventional newsrooms have started blogging. Some prominent journalists have even found themselves paired with “watchblogs” that analyze and critique every story they create. What are the tensions between bloggers and traditional journalists? And what can journalists learn from blogs and bloggers? Is this a new form of media democracy? This panel of tech-savvy journalists, bloggers, and media observers will explore the way blogs are changing and challenging journalism – and where it's all going. The panel includes: David Akin, technology writer for the Globe and Mail and CTV; Emira Mears, co-founder of Raised Eyebrow, web design, media activist and co-editor of soapboxgirls.com; Alan Bass, assistant professor of journalism, University College of the Cariboo; Robert Washburn, professor, e-journalism at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario; Caterina Fake, community development and marketing lead at Ludicorp; and Saleem Khan, editor at Toronto Metro News.

Saleem asked me if I would talk about this:

Share your experience as a working journalist who came to blogging, explain why you do it and similarities and differences between traditional journalism and blogging. It would also be interesting to hear how your blog or others you read may factor into your daily work.

• Wasn't sure when I started why I should blog and am still not sure. I've been blogging since Feb 2003 and I now think I'm learning why it's valuable. First, it makes me part of a online community of bloggers and, as I cover online communities, it's important I hang out in these online communities. Beyond that, by initiating conversations on my blog, it's a great way to develop story ideas, find new sources, and solicit for both. It's also a nice outlet for news tidbits that I think are interesting for my beat but which might be too trivial for either CTV National News or The Globe and Mail.
• The big difference for me between my traditional journalism and my blogging is really tone of voice. My day job is a reporter. I'm not a columnist. I'm not a pundit. For me to be an effective reporter, viewers/readers and sources (and my bosses) must believe I can treat just about any story assigned to me fairly. For that reason, I'm going to avoid saying things in any public forum — my blog, a listserv, a conference like this one — that will compromise my ability to treat a story subject fairly. That said, I can be a little more loose in my blog with what I say and I can use the first person point-of-view when I write, something I can't really do when I report for The Globe or CTV. That's my difference. Other journalists who blog will tell you something completely different.
• My blog regularly helps with my day job. In fact, I think it's important to note here that, my blog is absolutely secondary to the work I do for money — namely report for The Globe and CTV. The Globe and CTV are interested in boosting readership and finding viewers. The purpose of my blog is not to find more readers. It is it to help me help the Globe and CTV find readers and viewers. I do that by finding stories that are more interesting and compelling than the stories my competition has. Usually, what makes one story better than a competitors', particularly on a business beat, is that a reporter can illustrate a trend by bringing a real person into the story and ditching analysts, experts, industry spokespeople etc. I'm convinced that by being a blog author and and a blog reader, I'm able to find individuals to help with my stories more quickly than ever. Even for journalists who don't blog, staying on top of some key blogs that fit into your beat or even just knowing your way around the blogosphere, seems to me to be as vital a skill nowadays as knowing how the World Wide Web works.

In Canada, so far, this seems to be pretty much your decision. So far as I know, no news organizations have any formal policy on their staffers blogging. None forbid it. None require it of their staff and are willing to pay them for it or make it part of their daily routine.
So this will be up to you. Does it pay? No. In fact, I would suggest that, for freelancers, it might take away from time you could be spending writing things that do pay. Still, some freelancers blog if only because they enjoy the form.
So if you're going to blog, it's going to be on your own, it seems to me, with your own tools, your own sense of what makes good content and what doesn't.
Some thoughts about this issue:
John Markoff, San Francisco-based technology reporter for The New York Times, interviewed by Adam Clayton Powell III in an article in the Online Journalism Review:

[Powell] …A really central concern of a lot of people – over the last 10 years, if not longer –  particularly among journalists who, I guess you could say, are more traditional, who look ahead and see all these pitfalls that are coming — of people who suddenly start creating content who don't have the same standards as, well, The New York Times. Do you see that as an issue or are we beyond that now?
[Markoff] Well, I'm of two minds. I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that's certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now – it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that's what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It's possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time.
When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. … I also like to tell them, when they (ask) when I'm going to start a blog, and then, 'Oh, I already have a blog, it's www.nytimes.com, don't you read it?'

Here's a comment from a journalism school instructor who is a friend of mine:

I think the issue of starting your own blog is a complicated one for journalists (we talked a lot about this in my online class).
Does the blog represent part of the work the reporter does for the paper? Or TV station?
Is it entirely personal and if so, can the blogger reveal personal views and biases and still operate as a reporter?
What goes on the blog? Rumour you can't publish but want to get out? Is that fair?
All of this makes blogging pretty controversial for the professional journalist.

Steve Outing had a column in Editor and Publisher on this issue. (You have to register for E&P so I've made a PDF of this column and you can download it here.)

When Journalists Blog, Editors Get Nervous
Personal Web logs are becoming a contentious issue in newsrooms across the country.
Outside of the news industry, bloggers are an opinionated bunch.
Typically they write independently; they're usually unedited, unfiltered voices. Controversy is considered to be a good thing in the land of blogs. But what happens when professional journalists enter this often contentious world? In many cases, their employers get uncomfortable. In a few cases, reporters have been fired or punished because of their personal blogs. A Houston Chronicle reporter a couple of years ago was fired after his employer learned he was writing an anonymous blog that offered often scathing commentary on the people he covered as a suburban-government reporter. Last year, a Hartford (Conn.) Courant columnist who was demoted to travel editor decided to continue his opinion columns in a personal blog, but Courant editors told him to shut it down.
Personal employee blogs, it seems, are land mines for media employers.
The nature of the Internet is why. A simple family blog written by a reporter might contain a reference to trouble at work, or discontent with a boss. It's so easy for such an item — meant for a tiny group but accessible by the entire Web world — to take on a life of its own and spread to a huge audience, embarrassing not only the employer but also the employee. The media operates in a Google-driven, Romenesko world now.

Novelist William Gibson set up and ran a blog for a time, mostly, it seems to talk about his most recent books Pattern Recognition and the subsequent book tour. But after a while, he decided to abandon the blog:

I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation.

A San Francisco New York jury has found former CSFB investment banker guilty on all counts of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Quattrone, who was a star during the dot-com boom and made the guys at Research In Motion very rich, faces a maximum of 25 years in prison. Read more at the usual places.

In the continuing battle for the hearts and minds of music lovers
everywhere, the Canadian Recording Industring
Association (CRIA) releases a survey today done by Toronto-based firm
Pollara Inc. that concludes that 90 per cent of Canadian believe recording
artists and songwriters have a right to copyright protection.
These and other surveys are likely to become increasingly frequent over the
next several months as CRIA ratchets up a public relations and lobbying
campaign to convince lawmakers in Canada to change copyright laws so that
there would not be the kind of ambiguity and doubt which led a
Federal Court of Canada judge earlier this year to declare that peer-to-peer
file trading services like KaZaa were not illegal and sharing music
files through these networks was not necessarily illegal under Canadian law.
CRIA is appealing that decision but is also pressing hard to make sure that
politicans get the idea that they have to do something and do something toot
sweet.
Prime Minister Paul Martin is
receptive to CRIA's message and has said the government will act. It's
not clear, though, with an election looming if this issue at the top of the
government's agenda.
Meanwhile, the Pollara survey for CRIA — 1,350 Canadians were surveyed
between April 12 and 19 — suggests that just about everyone in Canada has
heard about this ruling. The survey said 70 per cent were aware of the
decision but that 63 per cent apparently disagree with the judge and say
that the law is indeed being broken when Internet users share music over the
P2P services.
Pollara says its survey is accurate to within 2.6 percentage points 19 times
out of 20.

Writing in the New York Times today, Frank Rich reflects on a current production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, now playing in the Big Apple. I saw (and reviewed, back in my theatre critic days) a production of Assassins at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. I like Sondheim a lot and one of the reasons I do is that his work is like Shakespeare in that it is tremendously malleable and invites the most creative interpretations you can bring to the work.
When I saw Assassins it was the mid-90s and there were folks, mostly nuts we believed, who wanted to take pot-shots at the world's leaders.
Nowadays, of course, we are in a post-9/11 world, as Rich notes, and Assassins in New York, certainly, loses some of its earlier malleability.
Rich's column also notes that we will see this summer a re-make of The Manchurian Candidate and it will be impossible not to view it (in fact, the film's creators are riffing off of it, apparently) in light of the events of September, 2001.

A busy weekend in the garden.
Transplanted the rhodendron in the back garden into the front. Also bought a rhodo from Hortico — Catawba album — to go there as well. Put in some pansies purchased from Canadian Tire. The daffodils and muscari in the curbside garden are doing well.
The Double Beauty of Appledoorn tulips look ready to go at any time.
The hostas in the canyon have popped up and are doing well.
Watered with fertilizer the seeded plants in the basement and took any peat pods that had not germinated and planted them outdoors. Who knows how they'll fare. The Larkspur were absolute duds indoors with not a single germination. The Strawflowers were also a bit anemic as were some of the Cosmos with about 50 per cent generating stuff.
The best stuff in the peat pods have been the Alyssum, the Campanula Blue Clips, the Zinnias, and the Evening Scented Stock.
Put regular Larkspur seeds in the ground, mostly out the back around the lobster trap but also put a half dozen seeds in the ground out the front.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed 2,700 musicians to get their take on file-sharing, music downloads, and the future of their livelihoods. The response was not nearly so uniform as the record industry might assume.
The Pew people say: “These musicians are very divided about the problems and marketing potential of online file-sharing systems and they are not sure the recording industry campaign against illegal downloading will help them. Many of these artists themselves share some of their songs for free online and find that it helps them sell more CDs, draw bigger concert audiences, and get more playing time on commercial radio.”
The Pew survey in PDF form is here.
Among those surveyed, roughly one-third said they agree with the statement that file-sharing services are not bad for artists; one-third said they agree with the statement that file-sharing services are bad for artists; and a confused one-third agreed with both statements.
But a solid majority — two-thirds — believe artists should complete control over material they copyright and they believe that copyright laws do a good job protecting artists. (Pew does not say where the artists reside for this survey but many of the groups who helped bring the survey to the attention of musicians are U.S.-based groups so we can assume, I think, that we're talking about U.S. copyright laws here.)
And an even great majority — 83 per cent — say they have made some of their songs available for free download online and have seen improved sales of CDs and improved attendance at concerts as a result.
Lots of grist there for the policy mill.

It's been a long week already and this was too funny not to pass around . . ..
[ via FilePile ]

[The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century]

Tip o' the hat to super-searcher Tara Calishain who points out in her latest newsletter that Lycos — which once battled AltaVista for search engine supremacy a million years ago — is being shopped around.

C|Net says Lycos' owner Terra Lycos has hired investment bankers Lehman Brothers to see if anyone wants to buy its search portal.

Not sure if that would be an easy task for Lehman. Who wants to buy something that would ultimately compete with Google on the eve of that company's IPO?