Scooped by the Globe

Bill Griffith notes in his SporTView column:

"Schilling was testy as he called early in the show to explain his reasons for ''posting'' on message boards and participating in chat rooms. ''I can get my message across the way I want in that forum,'' he said. ''And I'll call talk radio because I can have my say on the air, too.''
Well, what about TV, Curt? ''Too short. They cut your quotes into sound bites. What do they have, a little over two minutes for sports?'' And newspapers? ''They fit your quotes into their stories.''
Saintelus said it was ''pretty satisfying'' to have show co-hosts Tony Massarotti (Boston Herald) and Sean McAdam (Providence Journal) ''cutting me off. How many years have we sat here and had the media write stories as if they were on our behalf? In July, we [website visitors] wrote a letter of support to Kevin Millar. It was signed by 200 of our message board members and the players wound up hanging it on the clubhouse wall.
''We can think for ourselves. The fans now have a forum that owners and players are discovering, and they're coming straight to us.''
''You could feel the groundswell of interest in the topic,'' said McAdam. ''The audience got into the subject and they wouldn't be deterred.''"

All I can add is the comparison to Sci-Fi fans, and politics junkies. So far the political blogs have had the most impact on events (Trent Lott, etc) and the sci-fi fans have been around the longest... but the Sports fans seem to have the most interactivity with their stars (ie, William Shatner and Bill Clinton aren't posting to message boards, as far as I know)..

Scooped by the Times

From the timesTech section:

"Until recently, one of the main civilian uses of G.P.S. was in devices issued by the criminal justice system to track offenders as a condition of their parole or probation. The new generation of tracking devices has moved well beyond that population and now takes many forms, from plastic bracelets that can be locked onto children to small boxes with tiny antennae that can be placed unobtrusively in cars.
'We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device,' said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. 'It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late.'
Some of those consequences have not been spelled out. Will federal investigators be allowed to retrieve information on your recent whereabouts from a private service like uLocate, or your cellular carrier? Can the local Starbucks store send advertisements to your phone when it knows you are nearby, without your explicit permission? "
...
But it is not just the unnerving effect of uncovering small lies that has some users of the technology worried. Like caller I.D., location devices lift the curtain on a zone of privacy that many Americans value, even if they rarely have anything serious to hide.

"Think back to when you were a teenager and your mom or dad said, `I don't want you to do this,' and you said, `yeah, yeah, yeah,' because you knew you could do it and they wouldn't know," said Graham Clarke, president of National Scientific, which makes several G.P.S. tracking devices. "Those days are gone now, because they actually can know."

Mr. Clarke recently installed a tracking device called Followit in the Jeep Wrangler of his 17-year-old son, Gordon. It alerts him if Gordon has exceeded 60 m.p.h. or traveled beyond preset boundaries.

Many more examples of tracking in the article -- tracking employees, tracking Alzheimer's patients, etc. This just gives me confidence in my idea -- that number portability will help companies develop long-term records of user movements, spanning years, and that phones won't be left on as often as they are now... Another unintended consequence of goverment mandates...

Kausnotes

Quoting Kaus:

Everett Ehrlich notes that decreasing information costs --i.e. the Internet-- now enable outside groups to do what only big political parties used to be able to do--i.e. organize effective national campaigns. And that's before you consider the effects of the McCain-Feingold law, which Ehrlich doesn't mention but which makes circumventing the parties not only possible but imperative. (See, e.g. Edsall's article on the "shadow" Democrats in the same edition of WaPo.)

Ehrlich draws some pithy conclusions from the parties' obsolescence:

For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy.

Regarding the Kaus / Feiler Faster Theory on political trends, momentum, news cycles, Kaus says:

In short, political trends that used to last for weeks now last for hours. It's like watching the 1984 campaign on fast forward, except that the calendar still drags on into early June, meaning there's room for plot twists we could only dream of in 1984. To be commensurate with the speeded-up news cycle, the calendar would probably have to be compressed even more. Maybe we could have had the whole thing wrapped up by St. Patrick's Day!

Of course, voters may not entirely be keeping pace with Trends 1 and 2. Are they really as well-informed and conscientious as before--swooning, having second thoughts, rebelling, coming "back home," and so forth, just as they used to, only more rapidly? Can you keep dividing time into smaller and smaller bits without bumping up against the limitations of the human brain?

I would read James Gleick's book Faster and come up with some conclusions on that question. But I've got to get this up on the Web quickly before somebody beats me.

I did read Gleick's book. But I sped-read it and didn't retain much. Ha. No. It was ok. I think the big flaw in Kaus' thinking -- and most pundits are guilty -- is that everyone is paying attention to everything. Even folks like my dad, who watch the nightly news every 'cycle', don't know that Bush's turkey was plastic or Lieberman is moving pro-war to distinguish himself from Dean.

The news cycle is sped up, there is more maneuvering and counter-maneuvering, but the vast nation of voters is only half-paying attention, maybe catching bits here and there, and in general not hanging on every soundbite. I think there may be some kind of fluid dynamics analogy: if you have two kids having a waterfight in the ocean, the further out you go the less the tide is affected.

For those scoring at home: Politicians and handlers = waterfight kids, Voters = tide / waves

Aimless ramblings

According to NOVA, TMQ and a discussion board , the earth's magnetic field is weakening. At its current rate it will be 0-20% of current strength in 1000 years. It might stay that way for a while and bounce back, or it may flip, which it seems do to with some regularity (avg = 1/200,000 years, currently 580,000 years overdue).

Some of the consequences:

Less protection from solar flare
Aurora borealis will be visible across a much greater expanse of earth
Havok for boy scouts, compasses

That last item is worth dwelling on. I actually don't know how long compasses have been in general use -- my talks with Dr. V about sailing and astral navagation suggest at least 200 years... NASA has it... but certainly compasses were one of the indespensible tools of navigation, commerce, warfare, and progress in the past century.

It is fortunate now that we have GPS technology and have progressed beyond the reliance of earth's magnetic field. So consider: our civilization needed a 100+ year period of reliance on earth's magnetic field -- which is not available ~ 1000 years out of every 200k... Would we have progressed to GPS without a magnetic field? How would aerospace tech have advanced to that point without it? Put another way, the GPS network was launched and administered by the Air Force, and the air force wouldn't exist without compasses.

Would Oersted have discovered electromagnetism without having a compass near his electricity demo? Would engineers and scientists have detected a much weaker and less reliable magnetic field, and just found a way to work around it? Would we look at old magnetic rocks of various orientations and wonder, why did they solidify that way? I don't know, but I'm ready to add "functioning magnetosphere" to the list of physical properties of the world that needed to break our way for civilization to progress the way it did. Other things on the list: water, wood, coal, a preponderance of domesticable animals in Europe, etc.

In the past few decades it's become clear that meteors wreak havok with much of life on earth on a regular basis (on the scale of hundreds of millions of years, and getting rarer). It's also clear we're advancing to the point where meteors will no longer be a mortal threat (see "Armageddon", 1998). But it's worth considering a less catastrophic, more melancholy fate: world civilizations stuck in place, unable to easily explore and reliably travel long distances, all the while dazzled by the nightly not-so-northern lights...

Also worth thinking about is if we're not already stuck due to some cosmic coincidence -- ie, the raw materials for cold fusion used to be lying around everywhere but dried up a few hundred years ago.

Slamma Jamma

Gizmodo reports:

"Everytime we write about cellphone jammers we get at least one piece of hate mail, usually some bizarre, long-winded rant about how I'll be the one going to jail if a doctor isn't able to receive an important phone call, etc. At the risk of inspiring those person or persons to launch yet another angry missive, there's an article over at Slate about cellphone jammers (like the handset-shaped SHO66P, pictured at right) that argues that in the era of cameraphones they might be the only way to get a modicum of privacy back."

Maybe docs and VIPs can get Jammer jammers! Or, personal jammers will be outlawed, and wide-area jammers in movie theaters and lockerrooms will be allowed, if signs are posted. But jammers will stop incoming and outgoing calls, but not the actual photograph-taking. Once you're out of range of the jammer, you can still broadcast your pics. Really, the South Korean requirement for loud clicks upon snapping a pic is the only way to prevent unauthorized photos.

The Dark Side of Interactivity

Within a week of Curt Schilling turning to fans online for career advice, this quote from the Boston Globe that shows there's another side to internet geeks who think they should have a say in things:

"Chris Feehan, co-president of the Battlestar Fan Club at www.battlestarfanclub.com, said he's 'shocked' that the fans have not prevailed. 'Deep down,' he said, 'I'm hoping this is a flop so we can have a proper revival.'"

My guess is that sports hyperfans are intrinsically more reasonable than these sci-fi hyperfans. The sports fans who log on and listen to sports radio debate calls, debate managerial decisions, debate player merits, but appreciate that athletes are doing something that the fans themselves cannot do. Furthermore, sports is unscripted and there is at least some home-town loyalty and kinship.

The sci-fi hyperfans are different. They think the shows are for them alone, that they know more than the writers, more than the producers, more than the actors, and if the reigns were handed to them they would make a top-notch show or movie. Unlike sports, with hollywood you have script leaks, previews, and early reviews. Hence you have ridiculous quotes from fan clubs of long-defunct TV shows (which were never popular to begin with) about how they hope a remake of a show they've never seen fails, so a better remake can be made. As if there's enough interest and money to go around making multiple versions of Battlestar Galactica, all to please an intense but puny fan base that can't number more than a few thousand.

Steal This Book

InstaPundit.Com: "According to Danny Goldberg, CEO of Artemis Records and the author of 'Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit,' stars tend to alienate their fans 'if they become preachy, didactic, too predictable.' Despite the artists' best efforts, this seems to be what happened, at least at times, during Tell Us the Truth."

Schilling on the new Media

The new Red Sox ace (two aces? Full house?) was up late Thansgiving night, the night before the contract talks deadline, and decided to log into a chat room on redsox.com. Apparently he proved his identity (to some) and made some predictions about the talks (that an extension would be filed to continue talks until Saturday).

Just amazing stuff. What guided him to the chat room was a desire to feel out the Boston fans, to clear up some distortions foisted and amplified by the media, and to just air his thoughts, unfiltered. He gives really long interviews, and watches them get chopped into soundbites.

Now, think about it like this: a good fraction of sports fans are 'rabid', ie very informed, very opinionated, and can essentially go on reading about small facets of sports for days and days. Kind of the same with politics, with music, with movies. To these rabid fans, even ESPN isn't good enough -- SportsCenter can only give so many minutes to covering Boston pitching deals. When they do cover it, there's too many soundbites, it's too glib, and there's too much missed. Basically, if Theo spends 20 hours talking to Schilling, there are fans who need about 20 hours of coverage.

So, Schilling bypasses the media and talks directly to the rabid fans (at the only place they can congregate -- online), at least for a few hours. Tells them what he thinks, gets their ideas, gets their attitude... The rabid fans win, and Schilling wins. The media look slow, bloated, self-important, and even unnecessary, except to serve The Nonrabid Fans... (like me, I guess...)

Give credit to big media to making it part of the way -- Sports coverage, politics coverage, entertainment coverage is all 20x what it was 20 years ago, both in magazines and on cable. For the casual fan, that's plenty. But the rabid fan wants more, far more than can be profitable for a major network to provide. Fortunately, the internet has the infrastructure to accomodate the rabid fans, and now the stars themselves are tuning in. Sure, there have been AOL-sponsored celebrity chats, etc, and artists have been using the web to reach out to fans, but Curt Schilling has, to my knowledge, performed the first Big Media Bypass in breaking real news ... at least, that I can recall.

Will the politicians be far behind? Will Dean's blog release campaign news to Dean fans, and let them inform the media (and by extension, the casual politics followers)? Why not? The Dean followers care the most, contribute the most, and will accurately propagate the news (probably..) Reward them by telling them first, and in the most detail -- let the media break it into soundbites later, for the casual fans...

Sit tight

Just browsing though the Ideas.doc from May and June. Sheesh, when the thesis writing was slow-going, the article ideas knew no limits. There must be a dozen columns in there. And the basis for those columns should find its way onto this site.

Remember shazam. That will rule. Witty ticcy Ray, Police distributions, cameraphone implications, stubborness vs. intelligence... it's all there, baby.

No articles in November, so make it two in December? You have between Christmas and New Year's -- and many columnists will be away, many editors with deadlines...

Just the concepts, ma'am

Sure, the web is a place where ideas percolate, people network, knowledge is shared, blah blah blah. Is there a single site where all that really happens? Where you don't have to sift through layers of intro and setup -- where it's all just idea after idea, and a place for your feedback?

There is. Whynot.net. And, I guess, halfbakery has been around doing sort of the same thing.

It seems, though, that you could pick up the Tuesday Times and a half-dozen or so innovative new ideas on science and technology. Maybe it's too slow to read a 2000 word article, sift through the descriptions and whatnot... So this site just has one-line ideas: "Have the third brake light indicate degree of deceleration" or "put a GPS-stamp in a camera" (both ideas which have been pursued elsewhere...).

Is it progress towards Open Source Everywhere (there's a manifesto out there you can link to)? Or is it more, I suspect, the slimming down of extraneous content, down to the meat. My thesis abstract is boiled down from 200 pages to a few paragraphs, essentially with a footnote saying "I've got some proof." Those interested can read further... Those ready to comment and opine and adapt, however, can go right ahead on whynot.net.

The Politics of Laughing

It struck me when SNL started making fun of the "let inspections work" movement... And sure, they make fun of Bush, and Daily show is a solid left wing comedy factory, but the right making people laugh too, and not just by their actions. Some call it South Park Republicans, or attribute it to the Howard Stern following...

The bottom line is, it's become a lot easier to make fun of liberal excess, especially as they get shrill in their hatred of Bush. Also, as they get shrill, it becomes harder for them to laugh about stuff. Dark sarcasm doesn't count; too bitter. Maybe it's a function of being out of power (the right was pretty shrill during the clinton years), getting angry and desparate about the direction of things.

But the left could laugh in the past, even when they were out of power (the Nixon and Reagan years). But today, I'm hearing mostly venom. A party that can't laugh can't bring in new members.

Here's what I said in the old journal:
5/21 Is it me or is liberal humor just not funny? The most cutting edge comics -- Tom D'Bug, Waylay, and others, are just seeming mean-spirited and nihilistic.

And the left was supposed to be funny -- subversive, anti-establishment, etc. So why is Naomi Wolf blocking the Ali G segment?

Moreover, SNL seems to have switched -- with pieces ridiculing the UN as self-absorbed obstructionists, and Powell as a Cassandra.

But right-wingers aren’t funny either, they just don’t have a sophisticated sense of humor. They laugh at stooges, broad caricatures. No subtlety.

The Tryptophan Meme

Tryptophan gets a ton of off-hand mentions around Thanksgiving. Like the Y2K bug and several other memes, has filtered its way down to the masses over the last 10 years. "turkey has tryptophan, makes you sleepy. FX network has Awesome-o-phan!" I'm not making that up, I saw it on TV. Maybe people are interested in hearing how Tryptophan gets broken down and how the pineal gland makes melatonin, seratonin, etc. I don't know much about it myself, yet...


This is tailor-made for your MD/PhD background, the only time I would consider tacking it onto my pen name. I hope you write it up and submit this around thanksgiving 2004, along with some election jokes. If you go on to explain melatonin, the link, etc, say "The literature on this topic is somewhat dry, not unlike many turkeys today will be."Bring a clip to your interviews.

Strategery

The Atlantic Monthly is reporting that 37% of all political news coverage is about strategy, while only 25% is about actual policy details (one assumes the rest of the political news is about polls...)

I suspect this is even more biased towards strategy than the numbers indicate, since stories about policy often include coverage of how it "plays" among constituents, who's lining up to oppose it, etc.

Some of this is because, for the audience, policy is dry and measuring the impact of various proposals in real terms is difficult and contentious. Furthermore, political strategy is fun and engrossing in a gossipy sort of way. But it's also easier for the journalists to report on intangibles like "the mood of the electorate" and "responding to attacks" and "appealing to the middle" and whatnot. Actually a lot of these pieces report as fact that which can only be described as opinions on motivation. Nowhere in the language of an FCC ruling is a phrase like "we're caving to powerful communications lobbies" and yet, it is often reported as such. Strategy and maneuvering and style trumping substance.

This fits with that princeton economist who said this is the first White House he's seen that has no independent policy team -- instead, policy is guided by politics at every level. Ideas aren't proposed by wonks and economists only to be massaged and spun by Rove -- instead, they are proposed by pundits based on what will win, wedge, and energize the base. Only later do the policy wonks chime in about feasibility, worth, usefulness, etc.

Coin the Phrase

The Atlantic runs a contest every few months called Word Fugitives -- find a phrase that fits the given scenario. This summer it was: "what do you call it when you're driving on the highway and you come across a police car and a bunch of slow cars clustered, afraid to pass?"

I came up with "cruiser control" which was apparently quite a popular entry. The winner was "Halo effect" because everyone's acting like angels, but also surrounding the cop. Whatever. I like mine better.

But more importantly, I generated "Cruiser control" by listing all the synonyms and slang and associated words for cops, and for driving, and for traffic, and just mixed and matched. It kind of worked.

Let's do the same for location-based cell-phone ads! I could coin the next "spam".

Here are the categories:

JUNK MAIL: spam, bulk, mass-market, targeted ads, demographics, ad blitz, campaign, commercial, unsolicited, privacy, brand, image, telemarket, promo

GPS: global positioning, satellite, location-based, geocache, triangulation, search, track, stalk, signal, message, orbit, earth, home in

Mobile phones: cell, talk, charge, minutes, flip phone, dial, text, call, connect, busy signal, ring, tones, answer, message, voicemail, hangup, memo

my predictable, uncreative picks include "location-spam" or "GP-Spam" or "telespam"

my early favorites include "hard cell" and "stalkmail" and, though this makes almost no sense, "promoto"


will keep mulling...

Remote Possibilities

Clive Robertson in the New York Times magazine writes: "Pundits have fretted for years that mobile phones are making us ruder. In June, Nokia released some evidence that may actually prove it. A survey found that 71 percent of mobile-phone users admit they are now consistently late for social events. Why? Because they can send a flurry of text-messages explaining where they are, how fast they're moving and precisely when they'll arrive, down to the minute. ''You sort of feel you've got more play, because you're in this incredibly close contact,'' says Robbie Blinkoff, the principal anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group, which has found similar trends in its studies. "

...

Indeed, the next generation of phones is slated to become even more sophisticated. Phone companies have begun offering ''location based'' services with handsets that let other people know where you're walking, all day long. Next year, the French telecommunications equipment company Alcatel will offer Guardian Angel, which will let people track the movements of their children (or their Alzheimer's-ridden elderly parents) via their phones. We won't need to send out those ''where are you?'' queries anymore; instead, we'll have a nearly psychic level of knowledge about one another. New forms of play will arise: in Sweden and Finland, teenagers already play BotFighters war games -- one phone attacks another if they get physically close enough, like two Game Boys sensing each other's presence. Nokia's N-Gage phone, designed specifically to run games, lets players go head to head in a racing or fighting game with anyone nearby. Beyond this ''whoa'' potential, though, the privacy implications of location-based capabilities are hair-raising, says Roger Entener, a mobile-phone analyst at the Yankee Group. ''Your spouse will say she's on a business trip in Kansas City, but you'll notice that her phone is actually down in Chelsea. So you'll go, Hmm, what's happening there?''

Yet even then, observers say, people will probably never be willing to rein in their mobile lives. Bell tells a story that illustrates just how central phones now are. In Malaysia, she recently attended a ''feast of the hungry ghosts,'' where Chinese Malays burn paper replicas of food. ''They do it to ensure that their ancestors are well fed,'' Bell notes. But in recent years, they've also begun burning paper versions of mobile phones -- and even paper versions of prepaid phone cards, to make sure the phones will work beyond the grave. ''They can't imagine their dead relatives existing without the latest models,'' Bell says. ''And they wouldn't want their ancestors to be lonely.'' Even in death, no one wants to be cut off.

-----

If I'm going to pull this together for an article this week, here's the format I imagine:

1: Cell phone portability is here! Now we can keep our numbers forever.
2: Is this really good news? How many people want to keep their email forever? I don't.
3a: Email addressess eventually get discovered and spammed. Relentlessly. Now I know better than to buy stuff or register with my regular email address -- I should use a throwaway spam yahoo account.
3b: email spam is so bad that it may force borderline users away from email, and keep kids off altogether. the long march towards universal interactivity has hit a snag with spam.
4: The same thing may happen with cell phones
4a: text spam is already a problem in the UK
4b: the new location-tracking GPS phones could take it to a new level
5. Unlike junkmail or telemarketers, Spam is a parasite, draining internet resources and helping no one but the spammers (and a tiny number of customers).
6. GPS-spam would be made possible via the FCC mandate for GPS, but also by a significant investment by the phone companies themselves, and others. They can charge what they want, do what they want with their network. Virgin already announced they've been tracking users for years, just with tower data alone.

7? Cell phone companies were against number portability, because it would lead to higher customer turnover. They might have been shortsighted -- in the future, keeping your number might mean keeping your tracklog of all the places you've been, all the stores you've shopped in... They could sell that to advertisers and corporations, recouping any losses from turnover.

Tracking will make people conscious of where they shop, who they visit. Yet they won't stop shopping or sneaking around. But they will turn off their phones when they're doing it.

Kicker:

In the early days of email, the entire process seemed so benevolent and efficient and progressive and I would have never imagined the current situation, where 75% of email is repulsive, tedious junk. I would have never believed email could be too risky for kids to use; too bothersome for regular / recreational folks.

The same thing may happen to mobile phones. What seems like inexorable progress toward universal reachability might suddenly stop with GPS-enabled tracking and ads. People will be powering down, leaving the phone behind, or only using it in emergencies. One step forward, one step back.

JJ on AS on blogs

Jeff Jarvis on buzzmachine.com quotes Andrew Sullivan on blogging. I'm just going to leave this up, peruse them later for potential future jumping-off points:

: Andrew Sullivan is speaking to the Online News Association. I'm just putting up quotes now... Will clean up and comment later (I have to be on a panel next).... Talk about instant analysis....

: He is doing a superb job lecturing this audience on how to blog, explaining to them that they must consider themselves part of a community who will correct them and contribute to them.

: Best gag: "Will there be blogs that are purely fictional -- and I don't mean Eric Alterman?"

: "Whenever I wonder why I have not written a book lately [because he is blogging instead].... I say this happens once in a lifetime: You don't stumble across a new medium every day."

: "I think of blogging as the first genuine innovation that came out of the Internet itself."

: What sets apart weblogs, he says, is economics: He talks about the economics of thoughtful journalism: The New Republic has never made money and loses more. The Nation doesn't make money.
"And then I experienced blogging as an alterantive. It staggers me to realize that last week, AndrewSullivan.com... is now reaching more people online than the magazine I used to edit, which is still losing... hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's a big deal... We haven't just made the economics of journalism cheaper.... We haven't just lowered the barriers to entry to journalism, we've completely revolutionized it."

: "The overhead is minimal and the reach is almost infinite."

: Journalists have longed for this day, he says -- a world without editors. He told about having to rewrite a piece for the London Times -- and now he can put his original online.

: "I think it's going to get more revolutionary. We're going to see self-publishing of books... and taking power away from editors and publishers and media magnates."

: In the news media now, he says, the public "knows there is a man behind the curtain."

: He says that the trend toward anonymity is dying. Tina Brown killed it a bit when she said that no one cared what The New Yorker says; they know there's an individual there. Blogs extend that individual identity.

: "People trust [blogs]. Not because they are authorities but because they are subjected to scrutiny day in and day out and people decide whether they like them or not."

: Andrew waxes wonderfully on the ability and necessity of bloggers being able to change their minds, being transparent and honest; that is the essence of their (read: our) appeal.

: "They introduce back into the public discourse provisional thinking." We can change our minds. We can miss things. Others can have better ideas. "It recognizes the fallibility of the human mind and opens up to the wisdom of the communal mind." That's a whole new media dynamic, he says. Columnists and magazines have to wait to correct so they work to get it right now. Blogs, he says, don't make that commitment... "Let's continue that conversation onwards."

: "It's a much more modest mode of discourse... That modesty strikes a chord with people."

: "It's very, very modern. It's postmodern.... It's a combination of trends in modern thought and trends in technology."

: "Interactive... this is not a monologue, it's not even a dialogue, it is a conversation."
Amen! I'll say it again: News is a conversation.

" I'm just the recipient of a collective brain. I'm just a portal for the thoughts of other minds." He says he spends 40 percent of his blogging time reading email from contributors to that conversation.

: "It's more transparent than anything in journalism before." He says that when you make an error, there is no shame in that. "In mainstream journalism," he adds, "you have to climb down from your pedestal to correct an error and then climb back up again."

: He says a blog must be read long-term. "It accumulates a voice... traditions... in-jokes... its own vocabulary."

: He says he invented a t-shirt slogan: "Go ahead, fisk my blog." Three people in the audience got it.

: "I feel like an old brick wall covered with ivy and I can't cut it off... I used to take the weekends off but they wont' let you."

: If he were to start a new magazine, he'd find five of the smartest bloggers and put them on a web site "and tell them to go at it."

: "The ultimate and most successful news blog in the business is Drudgereport."
Andrew said he goes to Miami once a year for what he calls a "summit." He says he studies Drudge because "it is by far the most successful blog in history.... He's incredibly powerful."

: Unlike talk radio, he says, weblogs try to talk to people who disagree with us.

: Talking about the ability to use blogs to challenge authority and using Iran as an example, he says: "I'd much rather live in a country where the most we have to worry about is Howell Raines rather than live under the thumb of Saddam Hussein."

: Asked a good question about whether writing a blog affects his style and ability to write other things, Sullivan says yes. "It's like the cuckoo in the nest. It crowds out other genres... I'm supposed to be writing this book and I can't seem to get started."

: Should blogging be taught in journalism schools? "Absolutely... That's one sure way to kill it off."

Salon.com | Camille speaks!

Camille speaks:

"As a writer, I'm inspired not just by other writing but by music and art and lines from movies. I think that's what's missing from a lot of blogs. Most bloggers aren't culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric 'gotcha' mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space -- voices on it should have energy and vision. "

It's nice to agree with a firebrand, if only once in a while. And this blog should be more than just a depository for snippets about gadgets and medical facts and laments about Democrats. Keeping my interests broad, and the commentary honest, is the key to Paglia's 'energy and vision.' And remember that thing about hobgoblins and little minds -- try not to fit everything into the same worldview or you'll end up in a bad state.