You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2004.
One of my favourite quotes:
Show me a teacher who doesn’t almost lose his or her mind sometimes, and I’ll show you a teacher who’s not trying.
Where is it from? Boston Public episode 3. I heard it more than two years ago and wrote it down. Any teacher will tell you that it is so true.
My Wednesday group at 17h30 is called S (all of our groups have names). I’ve been teaching it since Nov 2002, when I took it over from a teacher who went out on maternity leave. Four of the students have been there since before I took it over, the fifth joined in Jan 2003. It’s a great class. We talk, laugh, have fun, do grammar, etc. We talk about our lives, holidays, etc. They’re one of my favourite groups and we’ve become a bit like a little family.
Today was Vk’s last day in S. He’ll be going to university in a town a couple hours from here in the autumn and has a lot to do before then, so he’s going to continue working full time and do all the other things that he has to on evenings in the next few months.
I really liked Vk. He’s 22 years old and is a very nice and polite young man. He’s the youngest in the group (by more than 10 years), but still fit in well. S will continue on without him, but he’ll be missed by all (as would any student who left that group).
Today, we met in the classroom and then went out for dinner as a farewell party for him. He gave me a bottle of wine after and thanked me for being his teacher. He’s promised to stop in to say goodbye again before he moves.
The Sheffield family breaks up
My Wednesday group at 17h30 is called Sheffield. I’ve been teaching it since Nov 2002, when I took it over from a teacher who went out on maternity leave. Four of the students have been there since before I took it over, the fifth joined in Jan 2003. It’s a great class. We talk, laugh, have fun, do grammar, etc. We talk about our lives, holidays, etc. They’re one of my favourite groups and we’ve become a bit like a little family.
Today was Volker’s last day in Sheffield. He’ll be going to university in a town a couple hours from Koblenz in the autumn and has a lot to do before then, so he’s going to continue working full time and do all the other things that he has to on evenings in the next few months.
I really liked Volker. He’s 22 years old and is a very nice and polite young man. He’s the youngest in the group (by more than 10 years), but still fit in well. Sheffield will continue on without him, but he’ll be missed by all (as would any student who left that group).
Today, we met in the classroom and then went out for dinner as a farewell party for him. He gave me a bottle of wine after and thanked me for being his teacher. He’s promised to stop in to say goodbye again before he moves.
As fate would have it,
I bumped into Inacio this morning on my way to work. I live behind the train station and our school is across the street from it, so I walk in the back and out the front of the track area everyday on my way to work. When I was half way through it today, I saw O entering it with his duffle bag and daypack on his way to the track his train was leaving from. We both only had time for a very brief exchange of cordialities and a handshake, then we went out separate ways.
Report: Ports, ships not in ‘full compliance’
From Mike M. Ahlers
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A week after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that U.S. seaports and ocean-going vessels were in “full compliance” with new anti-terrorism security standards, a Congressional report is casting doubts on that claim.
The General Accounting Office — the investigative arm of Congress — said Tuesday that about 7 percent of all U.S. ports and more than half of U.S.-flagged ships have not been reviewed.
Those ports and ships will not be reviewed before a July 1 deadline because they chose an option that allows trade and industry groups to certify compliance with a broad security plan template rather than requiring the Coast Guard to review individual security plans.
“If you haven’t seen the individual plans, how do you know if those plans are in compliance?” asked Margaret T. Wrightson, the GAO’s director of homeland security and justice issues.
Ridge’s announcement praising U.S. compliance, and the GAO’s report questioning U.S. readiness, both come as shipping companies and ports around the world race to meet the July 1 deadline.
By that date, ports and ships must show that they have assessed security vulnerabilities and taken steps to address them. And they must develop plans to address on-going vulnerabilities.
The task has been huge.
In the United States alone, 3,147 port facilities and 9,194 ships drew up security plans, according to the GAO report.
In an effort to deal with the enormous task, the U.S. Coast Guard gave the maritime industry two options.
One option allowed individual owners and operators to develop security plans and submit them for Coast Guard review.
The second option allowed owners and operators to develop plans by using Coast Guard-approved security programs established by their industry group or association. In essence, the individual firms would follow a certified template.
Both options involve Coast Guard review, but “there was considerable difference in what was being reviewed,” the GAO report says.
The review for the first option was more thorough because the Coast Guard reviewed individual plans drafted by each firm.
In the second option, the Coast Guard only reviewed the template created by the industry groups and associations. Individual firms were allowed to self-certify to the Coast Guard that they were using appropriate standards.
“Every single plan the Coast Guard reviewed had deficiencies, some of which were significant,” said Wrightson.
She said it is safe to assume that many of the plans developed from the industry group templates, which have not yet been reviewed, will have similar deficiencies.
Of the nation’s 3,147 port facilities, 234 (about 7 percent) chose to follow the route with a less-strict form of review. Of the 9,194 ships, 5,689 (about 62 percent) chose the less-stringent process.
Wrightson said some owners and operators who chose the less stringent option may not even be aware they need to develop security plans, erroneously believing that membership in an industry or trade organization satisfies their obligation.
During visits to some sites, some port facilities told GAO investigators they were using the second option as a means to avoid preparing a security plan while remaining in compliance with Coast Guard requirements, the report says.
CNN provided the Department of Homeland Security with a copy of the report Tuesday, but the DHS did not immediately respond.
In the GAO report, the Coast Guard defended the second option, which they refer to as “alternative security programs” or ASPs.
The Coast Guard explained that the templates were developed after hundreds of hours of work.
“In fact, more hours were dedicated to each ASP than any individual plan, and as a result, the ASP templates produced a repeatable security plan precluding the need to have each completed template individually reviewed by 1 July,” the Coast Guard said in the report.
An update on Inacio
This post is a follow-up to my post about Inacio on 9 June 2004.
Despite the death of his mother the day before exams began, he made it through all of them (grammar, translation, dictation, oral and correspondence all in both English and French as well as the Cambridge FCE exam), passing his final oral one at 11h today. I was on the exam jury and I think it made a difference (the other members were David and Annette – my bosses). He started off slowly, looked at me and I smiled at him to let him know that everything was alright (we hadn’t planned that in advance). I tried not to write too many things down, because I could tell it made him nervous when David and Annette did. During his ten-minute presentation, he glanced at me quite a bit for reassurance, which I provided by a kind expression on my face. After the question part of the oral exam he left so that David, Annette and I could decide on a grade for him.
David and Annette are perfectly well aware of what he’s been through the past few weeks, and we all commented on his courage. He could have easily had his exams deferred due to the death, but didn’t want to. None of us thought he would…it’s just not Inacio’s style. We discussed the fact that both Annette and I knew he could have done better (Annette had been his translation teacher), but could only grade him on what he did today. We decided on the grade (a bit lower than he was capable of, but still good), called him back into the room and told him the result. We could tell he was disappointed by his performance, but he agreed with us that he could have done better.
After signing the acceptance of the grade, he told us that making it through exams had been very difficult. He said that he had had trouble concentrating on most of them, which is why all of his exam grades were slightly lower than usual. I extended my hand and shook his, David did the same, Annette gave him a hug and he went home to pack. He leaves tomorrow for his two-month job in Switzerland and starts on Thursday.
Inacio and I actually said our informal goodbyes yesterday. I was on a long break in the teachers’ room when he walked by, so he came in and we chatted for a while about he past two years, about exams and also about the future. We exchanged email addresses and are going to keep in touch, hopefully meeting for lunch from time to time after her returns to Germany – distance, time and funds permitting.
As I’ve been sitting here typing this, I’ve (selfishly) grown a bit sad realising that Inacio has left our school – students like him are few and far between. We’ve just graduated a fine young man and have unleashed him on the world. Days like this are really what being a teacher is all about.
Meet Joe Blog
Time MagazineSunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they’re fast, funny and totally biased
By LEV GROSSMAN; ANITA HAMILTON
A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.
Gross, Malda and Dutton aren’t rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor’s personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?
Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.
Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.
Most of America couldn’t have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond’s past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. “That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive,” says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.
Mainstream America wasn’t listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l’affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.
Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “I read the news constantly,” says Kick, “and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them.” By April 23 the images had gone from Kick’s blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.
What makes blogs so effective? They’re free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they’re alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They’re human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.
And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don’t pretend to be neutral: they’re gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. “Because we’re not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers,” says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. “I don’t have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It’s incredibly liberating.”
Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. “Jason,” a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein’s empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax (dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.
But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a “site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn’t exist,” Malda says, “so I built it.” Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily (artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website “where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation.” Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.
Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer’s Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. “We give books a better chance,” she says. “The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There’s no politics behind it.” Crispin’s apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it’s scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. “The Times cannot ignore this. I don’t think any big media can ignore this,” says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.
In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier’s alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.
Some wonder if the backbiting tide won’t recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren’t showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton’s blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they’ve lost their amateur status forever.
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
Howard Dean’s campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn’t going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.
You can’t blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn’t listening.
Meet Joe Blog
Time MagazineSunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they’re fast, funny and totally biased
By LEV GROSSMAN; ANITA HAMILTON
A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.
Gross, Malda and Dutton aren’t rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor’s personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?
Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.
Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.
Most of America couldn’t have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond’s past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. “That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive,” says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.
Mainstream America wasn’t listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l’affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.
Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “I read the news constantly,” says Kick, “and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them.” By April 23 the images had gone from Kick’s blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.
What makes blogs so effective? They’re free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they’re alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They’re human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.
And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don’t pretend to be neutral: they’re gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. “Because we’re not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers,” says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. “I don’t have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It’s incredibly liberating.”
Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. “Jason,” a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein’s empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax (dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.
But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a “site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn’t exist,” Malda says, “so I built it.” Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily (artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website “where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation.” Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.
Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer’s Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. “We give books a better chance,” she says. “The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There’s no politics behind it.” Crispin’s apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it’s scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. “The Times cannot ignore this. I don’t think any big media can ignore this,” says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.
In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier’s alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.
Some wonder if the backbiting tide won’t recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren’t showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton’s blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they’ve lost their amateur status forever.
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
Howard Dean’s campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn’t going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.
You can’t blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn’t listening.
Meet Joe Blog
Time MagazineSunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they’re fast, funny and totally biased
By LEV GROSSMAN; ANITA HAMILTON
A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.
Gross, Malda and Dutton aren’t rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor’s personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?
Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.
Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.
Most of America couldn’t have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond’s past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. “That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive,” says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.
Mainstream America wasn’t listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l’affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.
Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “I read the news constantly,” says Kick, “and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them.” By April 23 the images had gone from Kick’s blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.
What makes blogs so effective? They’re free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they’re alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They’re human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.
And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don’t pretend to be neutral: they’re gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. “Because we’re not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers,” says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. “I don’t have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It’s incredibly liberating.”
Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. “Jason,” a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein’s empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax (dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.
But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a “site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn’t exist,” Malda says, “so I built it.” Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily (artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website “where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation.” Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.
Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer’s Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. “We give books a better chance,” she says. “The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There’s no politics behind it.” Crispin’s apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it’s scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. “The Times cannot ignore this. I don’t think any big media can ignore this,” says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.
In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier’s alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.
Some wonder if the backbiting tide won’t recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren’t showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton’s blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they’ve lost their amateur status forever.
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
Howard Dean’s campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn’t going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.
You can’t blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn’t listening.
Bush legacy in Iraq
Published on the web by Star on June 22, 2004.
The Johannesburg Star
By the Editor
Next Wednesday is D-Day in Iraq. The big question is D-Day for what? If one were to believe George W Bush and
his friends then it’s all peace and democracy.
In fact, last week the US president got so carried away by the thought of handing over power to the Iraqis that he spoke about “bringing back a 5 000-year-old civilisation”. And as if that wasn’t enough to fire the emotions of the faithful in Washington, he went on to declare that the recent magnanimity of his coalition of the deluded had brought freedom to 50-million people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The only claims he can, of course, make with any certainty are that he toppled the Saddam Hussein and Taliban regimes and that his troops have sown widespread death and destruction in those two newly “liberated” countries.
It also is not clear what Bush means when he says that the Americans will “stand with them (the two sets of peoples) until their freedom is secure”. Does that mean that around 150 000 foreign troops will remain in Iraq indefinitely? Does it mean that those troops will effectively do as they please while the new caretaker government tries to govern what is currently almost ungovernable?
The Iraq Mr Bush is handing back is – in the words of an article from the Los Angeles Times – “a nation in disarray, riven with bombings, assassinations and sabotage”. It is a country with 6 000 political prisoners. It is a country in which there is a Shi’ite uprising, pockets of Sunni resistence and a Kurdish community that once again believes it has been sold out.
It must be hoped that the Iraqi people can find the will and the way to rebuild their society. But they needn’t spend too much time pretending to be grateful for that bequeathed to them by Bush.
The greatest danger now is that we end up with nothing more than a puppet administration in Baghdad. One that serves as an excuse for the Americans to carry on safeguarding their oil interests, while claiming to be acting on behalf of a UN-recognised Iraqi government. That will be the ultimate con.
