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Whoever said "there is no such thing as bad publicity" obviously never had their career "Dan Rather'ed" into tiny pieces by the twenty thousand bloggers.

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I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:

Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.

I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.

The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)

But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.

As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we - especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do - now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London's freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.

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Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and blogger, recently argued that the roots of the Web 2.0 movement creepily echoed the concept of self-realisation underlying Marxist philosophy. Keen describes Web 2.0 as a utopian project to construct new technologies which allow individuals to publish and promote their creative endeavours in music, art, or other forms of print media. The reduction of barriers to entry that this entails has had a radical effect on the traditional media. Keen portrays the movement as ideologically driven by a broad grouping of Silicon Valley veterans, fusing the dynamics of the 60s counter-culture with the techno-utopianism of the 1990s. It is an awkward fit as the New Left is shoehorned with libertarianism and the diversity of the figures cited lends doubt to the utility of the argument beyond a straw man network effect:

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the '60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google's Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris "Long Tail" Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle.

Keen is aware of his own leanings. Web 2.0 is drawn as an ideology and a political endeavour in order to level the playing field and allow his cultural conservatism to come into play. With arguments that echo those hurled at the development of mass media at the beginning of the twentieth century, Keen laments the passing of a common culture, the rise of mediocrity and the destruction of the existing elite. The future is drowned by dross. With the rise of more enthusiasts and more voices, Keen laments that the role of the media is lost and that personalised media will reflect individual preferences, losing sense of a wider world.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.....Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural "flattening." No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion — Socrates's nightmare.....

......One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

It must be such a chore to be one voice amongst many.

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I must say that I always enjoy reading what Michael Totten has to say even if I do not always agree (though in truth I find myself agreeing more and more often). His reports from Lebanon were always compelling.

He is now writing from Iraq (Kurdistan to be exact) and I strong recommend people take a peek at his blog.

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I have always had a particularly soft intellectual spot for David Friedman, the economist, for it was he who wrote the first book I ever read which seemed really to describe for me how I wanted to think about the world. It is called The Machinery of Freedom. (David Friedman has a father, called Milton, who also dabbles in economics.) And I now like David Friedman's blog, which he calls simply Ideas.

However, I do not always agree with David Friedman. Here are some recent thoughts of his:

Finding presents for friends and relatives is often a problem, made harder by the economist's puzzle of why one should give presents instead of giving cash and letting the recipient, better informed about his own preferences, decide how to spend it. A possible answer is that although I know less about the recipient, I know more about the gift. Acting on that principle, I occasionally pick a book that I and my wife particularly liked, buy a bunch of copies, and give them out as Christmas presents.

What giving money and giving the same book to several different friends have in common as present giving strategies is that they both exhibit an unwillingness to think about the individual desires of the person receiving the gift. "It's the thought that counts" is no empty slogan. And the particular thought that matters is: "What particular kind of person is he, and what might he really like?"

In one of my very favourite movies, The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine character's rich and uncaring married man lover, chillingly played by Fred MacMurray, gives Shirley MacLaine a twenty dollar bill as a Christmas present. He does not even put in a pretty envelope. He just gets it out of his wallet and hands it over. Soon after that, she dumps him, and quite right too. Why? Because this moment proved that he did not care enough about her to give any thought, before meeting with her, to getting her a real present, of the sort that she would like, and which would show that he had thought about what she would like. He simply hadn't been thinking about her.

Were I one of David Friedman's friends and I got the same book last Christmas from him that several of his other friends had also got, I would feel ever so slightly slighted, and for the same reason. "He has thought about his own opinions, but he has not thought about mine." (A copy of The Machinery of Freedom with a carefully composed and hand-written message inside the front cover would be another matter entirely.)

Blog postings, however, are different. Those, like Christmas presents, also come free of charge to the receiver. Yet I do not feel in any way slighted because a blogger has failed to craft an individual thought entirely for me, but has instead given the same thought away to all his readers. On the contrary, incoming emails full of individual thoughts, just for me, can be rather scary, because, like Christmas presents, they can imply an obligation to reciprocate, also individually, which may be unwelcome.

However, notice that a similar principle applies, and in a good way, to blog postings with which one happens to disagree, by thoughtful people like David Friedman, as applies to Christmas presents. A present that shows that the giver has done some thinking is welcome, even if one already has that CD or that book, or happens not to like that kind of chocolate. The "wrong" thing is still right, because it's the thought that counts. I feel the same way about David Friedman's occasional wrong (as I think) thoughts in his blog. These mistakes, if mistakes they be, show that he is at least always thinking. Far better lots of thinking, and the occasional consequent disagreement between me and him, than no thinking, and a mere string of truisms.

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The (Free) French Resistance has cause for joy because The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Blogosphere is back!

Let's hear it for The Dissident Frogman!

cliquez ici

Soon he will be back blogging regularly. I feel like I am in the final scene of Casablanca when I say "Welcome back to the fight".

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Signs of life have been seen from the famed Dissident Frogman, who has been been absent without leave from the blogosphere for far too long.

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Wonderful news. Stephen Green, creator of the splendid Vodkapundit blog, and his wife Melissa, have had a baby son. I had the great pleasure of meeting Stephen at one of Perry de Havilland's summer parties last year and can testify to what a nice fellow he is. Congratulations to the Green household. It would be only right to hoist a fine vodka martini to little Preston Davis Green.

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I will concede the point on the weapons, however. Unlike some of the other Samizdatistas, I am not particularly into guns. I am partial to a good set of knives, however.

(This came up when I attempted to access this site on an internet terminal in a McDonald's in Cardiff. The empire is clearly getting a bit lame. Also lame was that I had to use this in the first place. My attempts to find a coffee shop with a free hotspot where I could simply use my laptop had not gone well).

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There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran's bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.

Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.

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There is an interesting post on Bjørn Stærk's blog on his changing views of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

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In the Sydney Morning Herald entertainment blog, Edmund Tadros made this rather extraordinary claim on Wednesday:

Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.

Is a hard-hitting blog one that causes events, especially public events?

Is a hard-hitting blog one that changes public opinions, or stimulates thought?

In the United States, political groups have used the internet to telling effect, and blogs have also exerted a powerful if difficult to define effect on public debate. The rise of Howard Dean, the Trent Lott affair, Rathergate and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all things that could have happened in the context of the Australian legal environment.

Australia also had an election in 2004, but there was only one major effort to use the Internet to influence the Australian public, that being the 'Webdiary' of Margo Kingston, (which was then hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald). The reasons why 'Webdiary' was so ineffective in the public debate were numerous, but the principle reason must surely be the total intellectual incoherence of the site and the vulnerabilitiy of the main contributors to the most paranoid interpretation of public events. The most famous example of this was probably the famous 'anti-gravity' article in 2003, but it was never easy to take seriously a campaign lead by a senior journalist who could not spell. Margo's spelling errors and flights of fancy deprived her campaign of credibility and provided a rich lode of material for the likes of Tim Blair and "Professor Bunyip" to mock and ridicule her.

The more prosaic truth is that many Australian blogs are not very good, and those that are good tend to either be more interested in talking about policy of interest to a small few, or are devoted to dissecting and satirising Australian culture. The plain fact is that 'the great Australian political blog' is yet to be born. There's plenty of room for an Australian blog with journalistic skills and political savvy to wake up the slumber in Australian politics, and it has nothing to do with the Australian legal climate.

But it certainly will not be a blog that chewed through $44,000 in its first 10 months as an independent entity.

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Just did some live blogging over on PajamasMedia on the subject of who should control the internet.

I must confess that I was not wearing my pajamas however.

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The press plagarist of the year competition is in its final round. Go and vote for the worst blog content pirate...

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Well it all seems a bit quiet around here. I guess all the other Samizdatistas have lives, at the weekend anyway. Today, even I have had enough of a life to have nothing much that I want to say here. (I was watching rugby internationals on my television.)

However, regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor does have a question:

Does anyone know of a good reliable (not Garmin preferably!) GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine and is also waterproof with a long battery life? None on the market seem to have this capability.

This question up at Julian's blog, Camera Anguish, for the last ten days. And do you know how many answers the so-called blogosphere – this mighty engine of knowledge, this magnificent organ of enlightenment, this aggregator extraordinaire of wisdom – has managed to supply? 0. This is not how things should be and I want to change it.

So, does anyone? Know of a good reliable GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine, and is also waterproof, and with a long battery life? Samizdata commenters are often rather good at discussing technology matters, so go to work, people.

I personally do not. I would need to be surer than I am now about things like what "GPS" stands for to be able to comment knowledgeably. Something to do with satellite navigation? My life seems to work okay without such knowledge. But surely others among us can do better. So get thinking, please, about those personal, reliable, waterproof, etc., GPSs.

But remember, not Garmin.

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I don't know how long this fascinating New York Times article about blogging in China will survive as something you can read without any payment or other complication, so I quote from it now at some length.

Chinese Web logs have existed since early in this decade, but the form has exploded in recent months, challenging China's ever vigilant online censors and giving flesh to the kind of free-spoken civil society whose emergence the government has long been determined to prevent or at least tightly control.

Web experts say the surge in blogging is a result of strong growth in broadband Internet use, coupled with a huge commercial push by the country's Internet providers aimed at wooing users. Common estimates of the numbers of blogs in China range from one million to two million and growing fast.

In my opinion, that is the key to this development. What matters most is its sheer scale. Sure, censorship works, in the sense that you are not allowed to say that the entire government – listed by name – are a pack of corrupt scoundrels who should be replaced by this other group of virtuous persons, again listed by name. You cannot praise democracy, or freedom, or Falung Gong, or whatnot. But how do you stop this kind of thing?

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

A fresh example was served up last week with the announcement by China of five cartoonlike mascot figures for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They were lavishly praised in the press - and widely ridiculed in blogs that seemed to accurately express public sentiment toward them.

"It's not difficult to create a mascot that's silly and ugly," wrote one blogger. "The difficulty is in creating five mascots, each sillier and uglier than the one before it."

Answer: you stop it. But only after countless thousands of bloggers have had their chuckle, and after many dozens of them have copied it and pasted it.

By far the biggest category of blogs remains the domain of the personal diary, and in this crowded realm, getting attention places a premium on uniqueness.

For the past few months, Mu Mu, the Shanghai dancer, has held pride of place, revealing glimpses of her body while maintaining an intimate and clever banter with her many followers, who are carefully kept in the dark about her real identity.

"In China, the concepts of private life and public life have emerged only in the past 10 to 20 years," she said in an online interview. "Before that, if a person had any private life, it only included their physical privacy - the sex life, between man and woman, for couples.

"I'm fortunate to live in a transitional society, from a highly political one to a commercial one," she wrote, "and this allows me to enjoy private pleasures, like blogging."

What those concluding paragraphs hint at is the real punch of something like blogging. It is not that defiantly political things are being shouted from the rooftops. That is still far too dangerous. What blogs are doing is enabling an alternative attitude to assemble itself, as it were, and an alternative tone of voice to develop and to be communally celebrated. What is at stake here is not only what is said, but how it is said. Friendly chat around the table replaces the booming official megaphone. (Thought while proofing this: banning overt politics may actually amplify this particular contrast.)

Once assembled, these blog communities develop their various code phrases and metaphors, so that they always know what they are saying but so that the censors are running around in a state of permanent confusion, mostly because they now, suddenly, are faced with just too damn much stuff to censor. (One of the things that the cryptic metaphors will refer to will be links by means of which the censors can be got around.)

Beneath and behind all this is the brute fact of economic development. The CHinese government has bet the farm on this. So, although I am perfectly sure that groups of censors get together in their corridors and shout in chorus: "Shut the whole f***ing thing down, you idiots!", the government is in no position to do that. I further bet you that among the ranks of the censors are to be found some of the Chinese government's most thoughtful and well-informed critics, because nobody understands the weaknesses and foolishnesses of a weakening system better than the people who are paid to try to keep it going. (I well remember in the old Alternative Bookshop, that some of our best and best informed and most rabidly anti-statist customers were the ones working in the middle to upper reaches of the British Civil Service. They knew it was crazy.) The Chinese government wants its cake, economic development, but to eat it too, to keep the commercial classes and their children politically docile. Hm. How can it do this? Difficult, very difficult.

So, blogs form an alternative attitude, and they simultaneously sap the will to power of the ruling elite. All that is then needed is some genuine – although not especially outrageous – outrage to be committed by the government, and the whole Chinese blogosphere (now many millions in number) may then erupt with more explicit rebellion, on a scale which again overwhelms the censors. If and when that happens, the blogs will then do something else unprecedented. They will report what is happening, to each other, and to the outside world, such as to the New York Times person, Howard W. French, who wrote this article. Some will report what is happening while simultaneously saying that they oppose what is happening. Makes no difference.

And yes, if you are thinking this, this story does indeed illustrate that the much maligned Mainstream Media can indeed make a big difference in circumstances like these. Although, saying that the MSM are essential is something else again. I am sure that there are plenty of English language blogs out here - "web experts" is all that French calls them, no doubt in many cases being vague about it for very good reasons – where all these possibilities are understood and explained in great detail, and by using which French did a lot of his background research. Besides which, I only read French's article because Instapundit linked to it.

Meanwhile, French notes, the Chinese censors have resorted to leaving critical comments, supportive of the government, on Chinese blog entries. They might as well just put: "We surrender!" Now, suddenly, they must persuade the bloggers and their readers. Talk about reversing the burden of proof. So all the bloggers have to do is keep their peckers up. Many will not last. Having come, they will fade. But others will persist.

No doubt I am being, as is my taate, too optimistic about how well things in China might turn out. But I really do not see how the Chinese government can now expect anything better (for them) than merely to manage the demise of even the pretence of communism, and the emergence of a more participatory and democratic political culture. The idea that they can indefinitely sustain the communist power monopoly in the face of a new communicational world strikes me as far too pessimistic.

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There is a snarky article in the Guardian about UK bloggers (including us). I was rather puzzled by Oliver Burkeman's description of Samizdata.net being "operated from a large and dimly lit flat in a pristine mansion block in south-west London".

Flat? Pristine mansion block? I do not recall if we gave Oliver a drink or three at our famous Cold War era bar when he came to visit but Samizdata HQ is a semi-detatched four floor house. Oh well, this is the Grauniad we are talking about.

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Here is another in my intermittent series pointing out unusual blogs.

Hard Diamond is the blog of a British master jeweller by the name of Paul Hatton (and as any Londoner knows, Hatton Gardens is the centre of the UK jewellery trade). He takes commissions and explains here the reasons for bespoke jewellery. These are uniqueness, range and price & access to maker.

Jewellery is very personal: it is often used as a very unique way of showing love and affection, or human bonds. It often remains in families as heirlooms passed from generation to generation. It is only natural that when expressing a bond of love for another, people wish to seek something wholly unique to express the uniqueness of their feelings. Rather than something bought from even a high-end chain store, a design from a designer/maker, or a piece of bespoke jewellery, commissioned with an input in design, perhaps personalized with a birthstone or other symbolic stone or precious metal, speaks volumes about our feelings in a solid, eloquent and lasting way. I enjoy and am uplifted by working with people to make in fine jewellery or tableware an expression of their love or affection for another. Similarly, with symbols of status such as watches. A Cartier watch is a beautiful thing; but you will also see the same watch worn by other people. If I make a watch for you, often for the same price or less, you will have a unique and lasting timepiece no-one else can own.

What makes his blog fascinating is that it does not just display his rather groovy artefacts that he has created so far...

...but it also tells a story of his trade, such as this description of setting a gem in an emerald ring:

Emeralds are very fragile stones, as you may have seen from my first blog entry on the Moh’s hardness scale. It’s not recommended that this method of setting an emerald be used, as you have a 50% chance or more of damaging the stone. It takes extreme skill and experience to accomplish successfully this type of setting. When one has successfully achieved such a setting, great relief is felt, as emeralds of this quality don’t come cheaply, as I wipe the sweat from my brow…

Blogs like this make his profession come alive and he turns it into his own medium as well as a 'inside' story-telling space. Take a peek for yourself.

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The Research Defence Society, a body supporting animal research in medicine, has started a blog. They intend to use it to keep people up to date with their activities, to counter disinformation and highlight how animal rights extremists use terrorism against scientists, and to support staff involved in animal research.

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Barter economics at its purest.

Start with one (1) paper clip, and see where it takes you.

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2nd November 2001 to 2nd November 2005 and it is 7,220 articles and 92,741 comments later (we added comments in August 2002).

Blimey, time flies.

And happy blogiversery as well to Natalie and all hail to our blogfather. Cheers, Glenn.

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Heather "Momma Bear", who has been an important figure in the early stages of the blog world, has died after a long battle against cancer. She has been a friend to a number of bloggers I know well, including fellow Pimlicoan Andrew Ian Dodge. She was quite a character. RIP.

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And now, for something completely different... In the last four years since I started blogging, the world of blogs has evolved beyond recognition. So I decided to offer a peek into the other corners of the blogosphere far from Samizdata's illuminating glow. This, however, does not suggest that these blogs are unenlightened.

As the first in an intermittent series of interesting blogs, let me present something which will strike many as an odd choice on my part.

Baukjen & Vanessa's Diary is a blog that blurs the dividing line between what is a commercial blog and a what is a private blog. The company Isabella Oliver designs stylish maternity clothes and the two principals behind that venture set up a blog that both chronicles events germane to their company and as well as elements of their private lives. This makes quite a lot of sense as spending time engaging potential customers in a conversational manner can be a much better way of getting people's interest than interruptive advertising, which I often think is a waste of money, particularly on-line... and blogs are nothing if not about engaging people if you have a story to tell or opinions to share.

I also find this approach interesting as it helps to break down the notion that private and professional lives are perforce completely separate things. I have always suspected that if people saw trade and commerce as the social activities they are, they might be less willing to see them as something to be regulated politically. Blogs... they are not just for geeks anymore.

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I realise that Samizdata is not really for this, but what follows is what is on my mind. The woes of politics, economics, life (i.e. other people's lives), etc., can wait. My question is: does anyone know of an online source – preferably a blog – of advice about how to make a blog running on/under/with "Expression Engine" work better than it does now?

I offer no links in this posting, other than to the ailing blog in question, because links is what I want, rather than what I have.

My personal blog is now facing serious problems. First, I do not know how to make my monthly archives contain everything written during that month. You merely get the top few postings. And second, the process of uploading pictures has stopped working, without anything resembling an explanation:

A problem was encountered while attempting to upload your file.

Not helpful.

Third, in general, first really, the list of things you can tweak and twiddle when you look in the "Admin" section of the control/input system, or anywhere else in among all that stuff for that matter, consists entirely of things that could mean absolutely anything, and consequently, to me, mean absolutely nothing. Where do I find how to increase the number of postings shown in each monthly archive? It is impossible even to guess, and so far I have found nothing on the subject, despite several hours of looking.

Because the blog still is not working properly, I have not been able to get out of the "here is something silly just so as there is something up today" mode, and to start doing serious thinking and serious posting. I like trivia, from time to time. But not all the time.

My problems are caused by my opinions about how my blog should look. I think my blog should look good. I often write about the look of things, which is why I often want to put up photos, right next to what I have written. A blog that is one of those blog standard template thingies would not suffice for these purposes. I want something that looks a bit special, like the things I often like to write about.

What I really need to learn of is a blog where Expression Engine users ask each other questions and where clever Expression Engine show-offs or would-be Expression Engine paid consultants provide show-off and expert answers. Any Expression Engine experts in the London area would be especially useful to learn about. I do have someone helping me quite a lot, but that someone works funny and numerous hours at something else, and is not omniscient. A group blog just might be omniscient round the clock, as near as makes no difference. But is there one?

By the way, please (I cannot compel this but I can beg) do not turn any comments on this into an argument/celebration about how to upload photos to something else, like Flickr. My picture problem is uploading pictures into an Expression Engine blog posting. I want pictures on my blog. Pictures somewhere else as well is not now my problem.

If I cannot solve my problems with Expression Engine, which basically means finding a person or people who can help me solve my problems with Expression Engine, then I will stop using it. I only used Expression Engine in the first place because I was told that Samizdata was going to switch to it, which it has yet to do.

Bloggingwise, it has not been my year.

UPDATE Wednesday October 5th: Expression Engine is not to blame! Repeat: Expression Engine is not to blame! I am still confused by it, but I am confused by everything computational. I am now busy concocting a slightly longer version of this to put up at Samizdata, but meanwhile I attach this to the original posting. If you publicly denounce a product, and it turns out to be blameless, you must say so, and in a blog it is possible to say it right next to where you did the original trashing. So: sorry Expression Engine! Hope you are still in business. When I have done the longer posting, I will add the link forward to it from here.

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Rumour has it that Brian Micklethwait is aging nicely...

Many happy returns.

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Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.

It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.

The guide to dissident blogging

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I have decided to go on a diet, fit in size 32 trousers and get a six-pack. People often have ideas about dieting, and give up very quickly. So what, as a blogger, should I do to ensure the diet works out?

The answer is obvious: I have started a will-power blog. Come and heckle.

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The shocking story I wrote about earlier today is now being taken apart and examined to see if it holds water (perhaps an unfortunate expression under the circumstances) and as a result, it will either be reinforced as a truly damning indictment of the powers-that-be in and around New Orleans... or it will be a rather different damning indictment of a couple of politically motivated para-medic writers who, far from recording their eyewitness experiences, cobbled together a polemical message hung on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations and other people's stories. I really do want to know which it is but I am certainly not prepared to just discount this because I happen to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum to the socialists who wrote it.

Some commenters have said they suspect the article is 'true in essence' rather than a literally true account of events but that is far too 'Oliver Stone' for me (and trust me, that is not a nice thing to say given how I feel about Oliver Stone). I do not buy the idea of 'true in essence': it is either based on facts that happened and were witnessed by the authors... or it was not! It matters less if the authors were wrong about certain technical details or terminology or even the motivations of the actors in question, just so long as the actually basic facts are correct. It is their witness I am interested in, not their analysis. Once the facts are established beyond a reasonable doubt, we can argue over the whys and wherefores and justifications, but the accusations in this purported eyewitness account are just too damning to be left in doubt either way.

I find this whole thing really fascinating and I cannot thank enough all the people turning their analytical talents and local knowledge on this story for commenting! The truth will out and let the chips fall where they may.

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Or more accurately, hear one of its editors. Adriana has participated in a BBC Radio 4 discussion about the use of blogs for businesses and how it is part of the way New Media is challenging entire business models.

If you are curious what blogs mean to the commercial world... or just want to hear what a great sounding voice Adriana has, you can listen to her here (requires Real Audio Player).

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Laissez Faire Books, the bookshop that stocks all manner of fine tomes from the complete works of Murray Rothbard to obscure 19th century liberal historians, now has a blog. Definitely worth checking it out on a regular basis and some of their stuff is frequently cheaper than the other big online book retailers. I once spent a very pleasant two hours browsing through their store in downtown San Francisco last year.

Thanks to the ever-readable Marginal Revolution for the pointer.

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A very nice line up on Instapundit of the blogosphere's reactions to MSN journos putting their foot in it again...

Bill Quick on reading an article in Philadelphia Inquirer (registration required):

Sorry, but for me, this entire article was a joyous exercise of schadenfruede on my part. The agony evidenced on the part of the writer that MSM is no longer the gatekeeper, portal, and arbiter of what is news is delicious.

The brain terminal on Paul Krugman's cavalier attitude to the truth:

Good thing all those editors at the Times provide the layers of rigorous fact-checking that blogs lack!

Annoying gadfly blogswarms indeed.

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And that is exactly what Kamal Aboukhater, the producer of the movie Blowing Smoke, has just done. He has produced the film his way - deeply un-PC screenplay about cigars, men and women using cutting-edge digital technology - and now he is releasing the movie via the Blowing Smoke blog.

So having done all that, getting good people on my side working with me, I didn't want to become a slave to anyone. I didn't want to wait for my movie to travel up the long and tedious chain of command until someone finally made a decision to release it.

... There will be no waiting. I can, audience willing, get immediate response and won't be at the mercy of a movie studio or distributor. One thing I have learned about audiences, thanks to blogs, is that they are not a unified mass of "consumers." They are individuals, choosing something (like what to watch) for many and varied reasons. Some might want to watch Blowing Smoke because they like cigars, some might be drawn to the poker, and others may want their opinions about women and men confirmed. Whatever the reason, now they can do so easily. And, if they feel like it, they can let me know their reactions and opinions.

And he really does not like the studios, but he seems to like bloggers:

Major studios seem to be the last to adopt and adapt to innovation and trends. And, just like with video and DVDs, they are again missing the boat, unaware of the new possibilities for reaching their audiences. They might have caught glimpses of the future, such as Firefly, Global Frequency, and Garden State. This is thanks to a new band of warriors, better known as bloggers, who add strength to the voice of the fans, fighting for more choice for themselves and, in the end, all of us.

The point is that he can go all the way to his audience, by-passing the intermediaries. Sure, the path is not clear, the journey may be either uneventful or too bumpy, but Kamal is aware of the experimental nature of what he has done. He is enjoying the comments from those who understand and appreciate what he is trying to do. As he said after the 'launch':

It's no longer just about the movie but about an opportunity to add another dimension to the infrastructure that's already there - the blogosphere and the internet.

It has taken a while to get to this point both in terms of understanding and then realising the idea. I feel privileged to have been part of that process and enjoy working with Kamal whose open mind has been instrumental in this adventure. In return, he can be blamed for my blossoming addiction to cigars, the quality of which would make any cigar afficionado weep with joy. Whilst discussing the final details of the Blowing Smoke 'release operation', I savoured a particularly good Hoyo de Monterrey. Who says the days of plotting in smoke-filled rooms are over...

I shall leave you with an exhortation: Boxed BS available now! Get your own! Oh and, BS download is Coming Out Real Soon Now!

cross-posted from Media Influencer

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We have a mention on the BBC web site in their weblog watch quoting this.
What ever next?

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When blogging about something that has caught your eye, sometimes the other people reading what you have written can add a new dimension to the subject.

Over on Media Influencer, a seemingly off-hand blog about a controversy regarding some questionable business practices and the way journalist cover such stories in the mainstream media has got both the parties mentioned exchanging forthright views in the comments section, which I think is quite interesting.

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Clive Davis has linked to an interesting, if controversial article, that argues the liberal wing of the blogosphere is now more popular, in terms of pageviews, than the conservative and libertarian community.

The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.

The article proceeds to describe and examine two different models of political blogging defined by the political orientation of the writers. New entrants into the conservative/libertarian blogosphere have to create their own blogs and rely upon a trickle-down effect, whereas community moderated blogging platforms used by the liberal left appear to reduce the obstacles that a new generation of emergent left bloggers have had to face.

Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a small social bubble or any need to engage people within the new structure of the public sphere.

Are these valid criticisms? Has the focus upon the reformation of the existing media blinded the conservative and libertarian blogosphere to the need for further change and adaptation as the 'world of blogs' continues to develop? Is this part of the blogosphere stagnating?

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Adriana is doing some rather reluctant Saturday night meta-blogging...

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A French blog (well, sort of a blog) which fisked the EU Constitution is one of a new wave of European political blogs which are going to make it a lot harder for the technocrats in Brussels and the various European capitals to just double talk their way past the issues with the connivance or at least indifference of much of the mainstream media.

Hopefully this sort of thing will become more and more common as tools for penetrating the dense fog of half-truths and outright lies thrown up around so many political issues by people who want as little informed choice as possible.

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The latest posting of my Internet acquaintance Adam Tinworth (we first linked because he is professionally interested in new architecture and I am an amateur fan of it) consists of just two paragraphs, and yet is full of insight into the way we live now. Either paragraph would have served well as a Samizdata quote of the day.

I could not decide which to pick, and in any case did not want to neglect the other, so here are both:

WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.

In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I'm meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I'd better be on my best behaviour, hadn't I?

There is indeed, I think, something very Jane Austenish about blogging. Simply from the point of view of good manners it seems to bring the best out of a lot of people, and to moderate their snarkier tendencies, in just the kind of way that Tinworth has registered.

It is understandable that the Mainstream Media have focussed, when discussing blogging, on the impact of blogging on the Mainstream Media. Is blogging another way, and a better way, and a more cost effective way, and a less politically choosy way, to do what they already pride themselves on doing, namely to rake muck and to make powerful people wish that the ground would open up and swallow them?

This is a very good question, but it misses the degree to which blogging may also serve to make regular people just plain nicer and more polite to one another.

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This morning I ran full tilt into a journalistic conflict of interest issue. I had to pull half of a story because my official position within an organization gave a subcontractor contractual clout. Their rules required a veto over publication of information on the event. The story items were neither earth-shaking nor of great import. Nonetheless, I was not allowed to use information I felt important to my article.

I feel it necessary to state this publicly as a matter of integrity. I do not claim that all blogs and bloggers should or must always do so. It is a matter of their individual choice. You, the reader, will place your trust accordingly.

I know such issues have been discussed here and there in both main stream and the practically main stream of major blogs. I certainly do not think there is any problem that most bloggers have real lives and work with real organizations doing real things. Or that bloggers make little or no pretence of being unbiased angels in white, pure mindless beings with no belief or ideals, capable of weighing ideas as the Egyptian God Ma'at weighed souls. We are not. We have no interest in being boring and unopinionated.

Here at Samizdata we attempt a reasonable level of professionalism in our writing and presentation. I am certain we do not always meet the full level of our aspirations, but we do indeed try. What we can promise is that our biases and conflicts are out on the table for all to see.

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It has been said that the Internet, and specifically blogs, are to politics what Sam Colt’s Peacemaker was to the Wild West; an equalizer. That sentiment has apparently been taken to heart by the US Federal Election Commission because, like today’s gun prohibitionists, the FEC wants to take away your individual power and concentrate it in the hands of a chosen few.

A good background description of the bizarre reasons behind this power play can be found here, but basically it is an extension of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a.k.a. the Incumbent Protection Act. Senators McCain and Feingold, authors of the Reform Act, claim this is not true. Do not be fooled. The FEC is under a Court Order to bring the Internet under Campaign control and MUST COMPLY. It will be done by mid-summer. Failure to abide by the FEC rules will carry some stiff penalties, the mere threat of which will be enough to keep most blogs out of the political arena.

There is, however, some hope. The Internet community is aware of what is going on, and a powerful group called Downsize DC has gotten involved in the fray. They have begun a strong grassroots effort and there is a bill pending in both houses of Congress now that would exempt the Net from the BCRA laws. The Online Freedom of Speech Act is only one line long and already has bipartisan support, albeit at a low level. If you are a US citizen, you can urge your representatives to sponsor the bill by using Downsize DC’s electronic lobbying tool. It only takes a couple minutes and, best of all, it is free – the way internet speech should be.

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Ooooh..I am so excited! It will not be long now before I will be able to gorge myself on yet another body of incoherent babbling:

When the website huffingtonpost.com launches on May 9, it will eventually see contributions from Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Harold Evans, Tina Brown, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the woman who played Elaine in Seinfeld. They will offer a "round the clock commentary on our life and times"...

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but I am positively aquiver with anticipation to discover what Diane Keaton has to say about my life and times. Yet, my enthusiasm is perhaps somewhat tempered by the inexplicable absence (thus far at any rate) of the great Professor Streisand.

I submit that huffingtonpost.com will prove to be a one-stop, on-line resource for all serious students of thespianomics (advanced module). For everyone else it should be a 'target-rich environment'.

Enjoy!

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It is better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt
- attributed to various folks

The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper more famous for what happens on page three than its news reporting, has an article on their website called Blogging for your votes written by Corinne Abrams. There are three pictures of young people representing the main parties and under each there is a link to view their 'blogs'.

Click on one of the links and you get taken to a pop-up window rather like a non-interactive comment pop-up with a single scraggly bit of undated and unlinkable polemical text about their party and views... perhaps I am missing something (if so please set me right!) but that actually appears to be their "blog"!

Is that really what The Sun thinks a blog is? Given the amount written about blogs in the media these days and the number of journalists who have their own blogs, to drop such a clanger seems extraordinary.

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Today's reason for light blogging is that the Samizdata editors are in Paris(!) attending a blogging conference Les Blogs. Blogging is making some waves in France and this conference is truly international, bloggers from 20 countries are present. We have met many a blogger we have known virtually and putting faces to blogs is always an interesting experience.

For those who are interested in the blog trends and biz, head over to the Big Blog Company blog for some furious blogging of the conference.

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Our standing orders on Samizdata are to write not just about certain specific areas of thought and policy, but about what is on our minds. I take this as an invitation to stray beyond the obvious and beyond our core expertises, such as they are. Not everything here is even supposed to make complete sense.

In that spirit, let me tell you about two pieces of writing which, taken together, struck me as interesting. They are pretty interesting even separately, but together they get even more interesting. Anyway, see what you think.

The first piece of writing is a book called The Cradle of Thought, by Peter Hobson, who is an expert on autism, but not only on autism. Hobson's subject matter is not just the particular form of unusual thought and experience called autism, but also the light that this and other abnormalities throw on the processes of normal human thought. (One of the best ways to understand how something is supposed to work is to examine what happens when something or someone damages it or in some way interrupts its smooth working.)

What comes across from this book is that thinking, of the sort that most of us do most of the time, is an intensely social thing. It starts not just with me thinking about that. It starts with me thinking about that by learning what you already think about that. What you (typically my mother) think(s) is the thing that gets me started with my thinking.

So, if I am the sort of me who is especially disposed not to pay attention to what you (my mum) are (is) thinking, that changes how I think, about everything. I may become very expert, by default, about things, but remain permanently baffled by people, and in particular by the notion that other people have a point of view of their own which I can tune into, and by the idea that other people are accordingly very different from other mere things.

This book seems to be quite well known and quite highly regarded, so there is no shortage of further verbiage to read about it should you feel the urge, now that you have heard a little of my point of view about it.

The other piece of writing was this article and related discussion, about dogs, and about the differences between dogs and such animals as wolves and foxes, which I got to via the ever interesting and stimulating Arts & Letters Daily.

Dogs are, as we most of us know, intensely social and sociable animals, and they are particularly special in their willingness – nay, their enthusiasm – for socialising with us. If ever there was an animal who tunes in to our point of view, and who is willing to organise its own life and feelings around how we feel about things, that animal is the dog.

Have you ever heard of a dog immitating vocal exercizes? As a singer, I sometimes do this descending ooh sound, down an octave. I had a jack russell that copied me, and even could be prompted by a pitch pipe to do the exercize, and pretty in tune too! [Question from Tom Boyer to Adam Miklosi – very near the bottom here.]

And you can bet that the reason this jack russell was doing this was because that way it got to be involved, to socialise, to muck in with everyone and get lots of pats on the back. Hey! Whatever it takes! And besides, it's fun!

Dogs, in short, are absolutely not autistic. Not when they are, as it were, proper dogs, doing for us and with us what dogs are supposed to do. Dogs are so doglike that we instinctively understand that to deprive a dog of another point of view to share, whether that of another dog or of a human, is a definite form of cruelty, as real as beating it or starving it.

Wild dogs – such as foxes or wolves – are very different:

Two years ago, Ms. Virányi and other graduate students began hand-raising a group of wolf cubs. They coddled and hand-fed them, took them for walks and played with them, while other students raised dog puppies of the same age. Dogs descended exclusively from wolves some 15,000 to 135,000 years ago, according to genetic studies, and the researchers wanted to see if wolves could be socialized to communicate with people.

At five weeks of age, the wolf cubs were introduced to a room containing their hand-raiser and an adult dog, both sitting motionless, and the human staring into space. Mr. Miklósi shows a video of what happened: A gawky wolf cub stumbles awkwardly up to the dog, sniffs it a bit, then does the same to the human before climbing into the person's lap and going to sleep. No eye contact is made with its caregiver; the cub appears to treat the person like a comfortable piece of furniture.

No eye contact. The cub treats the person like a piece of furniture. That is very human-autistic.

That the differences between different kinds of animals, or between the same kinds of animals differently reared, might illuminate human differences and human behaviours is obviously not a new idea. Nor is the idea that the dog/wolf difference might in some ways be analogous to the human/autistic-human difference, and that the former might throw light on the latter, as the page at the other end of this link makes very clear. Talking of autism alongside talking about "feral" children and about feral creatures of other sorts is clearly a well-established notion.

All the same, I found it all very interesting. I could ramble on, but that is really all I want to say here on this subject.

Or, to summarise it rather more succinctly: woof.

Just going woof and adding a few links, is, I think, one of the things that blogging is all about. (Blogging, like dogs, and like normal people, is also very social and sociable.)

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The fine U.S. blogger and libertarian scholar, Tyler Cowen, who's blog Marginal Revolution is well worth a visit (as if I did not have enough things to read, aarrgghh, Ed) has started a specialist blog devoted to tracking developments and medical research surrounding avian flu. Tyler is clearly worried about the spread of new and more powerful viruses and the threat this poses to the health to millions of people around the world.

Rather interesting, I think, that the Internet, which helps to spread ideas with the speed of a virus, is now spawning blogs which are devoted to actual, existing viruses.

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Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a 'glow in the dark American', should wander into the 'Hezbollahland' section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones.

Make the strangely named 'Spirit of America' Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end... and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out.

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My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.

Said I, here:

A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .

Unfortunately, I wasn't making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their "big traffic," fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company's clients, and negative remarks about their competition.

That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.

Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.

To continue my own quote:

. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .

Or, to put it another way:

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The Line of Beauty is the name of the Booker prize-winner, a book about gay sex, snorting coke and a Thatcher-worshipping MP who indulges with his secretary. The book is a good read, and I'd recommend it highly. But The Line of Beauty also the name of a new cultural blog, inspired by the book. It is early days yet for the blog, but it is already showing some promise, with snippets about graffiti, Sotheby's, and a discussion of memoirs written by 'ordinary' people. Do check it out.

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The Adam Smith Institute Blog has been nominated for the Guardian Political Weblog Awards. The nomination says the ASI blog is a "free-market blog par excellence. It takes mainstream views, batters them and jumps up and down on their grave." You can vote here.

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A journalist never reveals his sources - that is the stern injunction issued to any reporters. Reporters have even gone to jail in the past than reveal a source. Journalists who reveal sources are unlikely to be trusted again, and without trust, it is very hard for an ambitious correspondent to grab a great scoop. The problem for me, though, is how can one protect a "source" for a story if there is an allegation that the source stole an item for the story? How does one deal, for example, with alleged theft of industrial secrets? In my view theft trumps the right to keep a source private.

A test case in the United States is pitting three bloggers against Apple computer concerning their release of details about Apple products yet to be put on the market. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting for the three bloggers in this case.

Apple's lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.

All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.

Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.

The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O'Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade - all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.

This case could remind us, rather sharply, that weblogs are as subject to the laws of libel and the rest as any part of MSM. Stay tuned.

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Kudos to German media watch blog Davids Medienkritik for getting Stern magazine to change its text describing the Italian intelligence officer killed at a US military vehiclular checkpoint as having been 'murdered' by US soldiers.

The fact this powerful magazine reacted quickly to David's sharply critical remarks shows that more and more of the mainstream media are now well aware of the blogosphere's ability to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on such things.

Nice one, David!

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"To permit an entire class of political communications to be completely unregulated... would permit an evasion of campaign finance laws..."

The American regions of the blogosphere has been reverberating after Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly stated that blogs must be regulated in order to comply with US campaign finance laws.

However I do not propose to add my voice to the myriad of other commentators decrying this or explaining why it is such a bad idea, as regular readers of this blog can pretty much join the dots to guess The Samizdata Position on that issue. What I will do though is point out that as well as being a threat to freedom of expression, this has huge positive potential as well.

There are few things more corrosive to the power of the state than for it to decree something and then be seen to be unable to enforce its writ. So let Colleen Kollar-Kotelly do her worst. You want to link to a Democratic or Republican campaign site regardless of what regulations say you can or cannot do? Simple... off-shore hosting. Host your blog outside the USA and post using a pseudonym (like maybe "Tom Paine" or "Ben Franklin") and then link to whoever the hell you want to. Moreover put a banner on your blog saying "This Blog is in wilful violation of US Campaign Laws and there is not a damn thing you can do about it".

Hell, my 'inner capitalist' is whispering in my ear as I write this... I just might talk to some chums of mine who are hosting experts with a view to setting up Samizdata.net branded non-US based hosting, available for bloggers across the political spectrum who want to stick their thumb in the eye of those people who want to control free political expression. Anything which weakens the authority of the state, shows the limits of political power and makes enterprising folks some money whilst helping people to do all that is too good for me to pass up. Yeah, I really hope this travesty becomes law in the USA... stay tuned <evil laugh>

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Mark Holland is, as Instapundit would say, on a roll just now. I wonder if some things that were said at that Friday meeting I seem to want to keep mentioning has something to do with this. Mark was there, and seemed genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his blog is held by all those of us present who are familiar with it. Maybe that encouraged him. It would be good to think so. If so, this nicely illustrates the value of old fashioned face-to-face contact. "I really like your blog" is not the kind of message that carries quite as much conviction if you cannot see the whites of your admirer's eyes.

Mark writes about (and/or links to) many things (crappy old British sex comedies, the sport of bicycling, politics in Slovakia) but he told me something rather intriguing that I do not recall reading about at his blog, although this could just be me.

Mark and some friends attended a Bruce Springsteen concert some years ago, in a Manchester football stadium. He and his mates arrived early for the thing, and took their seats way up high in the stands, about a quarter of a mile from where the performance was going to be given. Then, a Big Person approached them. They were unnerved. But no. The Big Person guided them from way back and way high up, right to the very front of the assembly, into Bruce Springsteen Heaven. And they duly watched it all, feet away from The Man. (Sorry, Boss. Sorry.)

Thinking about this some more, I reckon that it makes sense, is probably often done, and is therefore not news to those readers and writers of Samizdata who are also regular attenders at rock gigs. But I am not such, and if you are not this either, allow me to reinvent the wheel for you.

What do you absolutely not want in the front few rows of the crowd at a major pop gig? Two things, I suggest. One: Uncool People (old, ugly, dressed in corduroy jackets, etc.). And worse, two: empty seats. Such horrors would completely spoil any video footage of the event. When everyone is standing in a scrum, this is no big problem. (Presumably uncool people can simply be dragged backwards from the front, and cool people dragged forwards.) But in an all-seater stadium, such as this was, with individual seats booked, there is the real threat of horrors in those vital front few rows.

So how do you prevent these? Answer, you do not sell the front few rows, but instead handpick the people at the front from the early arrivals, like a night club queue minder picking out cool people for a club. Mark, being cool and several degrees cooler back then, I dare say, was, together with his (I assume) comparably cool mates, selected for the front.

You might at this point be expecting one of those blue MORE things, after which the significance of this is explained in more detail and its relevance to lowering income tax etc. is all gone into with proper thoroughness. But, that is all.

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I am currently being held hostage in the Hollywood Hills by Samizdata.net's favourite pinko, Brian Linse.

The Bad Dude holds forth from behind a politically incorrect cloud of smoke...

The Bad Dude's predilection for things Cuban has nothing to do with any admiration for the murderous tyranny running that hapless island, but rather for their very fine cigars.

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Here are a couple of recent stories, both recently linked to by Instapundit, that I think deserve to be put next to each other.

First, here is a quote I found while rootling about in the McCain/Feingold story, which Dale Amon has already posted about here. Here is the bit that interested me:

These laws are decidedly NOT aimed at online press, commentary or blogs, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was carefully drafted to exclude them. The FEC has now been asked to initiate a rulemaking to work out how to deal with different kinds of Internet political expenditures, and there will be plenty of opportunity for public commentary.

This denial is, of course, the result of the exact opposite having been alleged. I read it because one Winfield Myers of the Democracy Project quotes it, and notes that the quotee, a hot shot lawyer, makes very little of his past legal relationship with McCain. (Bloggers prefer it when they know where people are coming from.)

And the second quote, is from a review of a book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.

McNab was a seafood importer who shipped undersized lobsters and lobster tails in opaque plastic bags instead of paper bags. These were trivial violations of a Honduran regulation - equivalent to a civil infraction, or at most, a misdemeanor. However, using creative lawyering, a government prosecutor used this misdemeanor offense as the basis for the violation of the Lacey Act, which is a felony. The prosecutor then used the Lacey Act charge as a basis to stack on smuggling and money laundering counts. You got that?

McNab was guilty of smuggling since he shipped lobster tails in bags that you can see through, instead of shipping them through bags that would frustrate visual inspection. He was guilty of money laundering since he paid a crew on his ship to "smuggle the tails." Although it turned out that the Honduran regulation was improperly enacted and thus unenforceable, the government did not relent. A honest businessman lost his property and his freedom: McNab is serving 8-years in prison.

Okay, so what do the tribulations of a seafood importer have to do with the right of bloggers to blog what they damn well please? Well, what interests me is the political process involved in both matters. How the hell do the laws and the processes that got poor Mr McNab nabbed get put in place in the first place? The phrase "not aimed at" is the point of this posting.

It may well be that the McCain/Feingold act is "not aimed" at bloggers, but the point being made is that, aimed or not, some other regulator will be able to pick it up and so aim it, and in fact may even have some kind of legal obligation to aim it thus.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that there is now a crisis of excessive lawmaking in the West generally, and in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular. It is not that our political class is hell bent on tyrranny, impure and simple. It is more that they have become legislative entrepreneurs, so to speak. And just as a businessman who is delighted to make a fast buck selling mobile phones does not bother himself about the grief inflicted by railway travellers with mobiles on other railway travellers, so too, lawmakers who are "aiming" at one particular group of alleged wrongdoers have a tendency to neglect what you might call legislative collateral damage. The laws pile up, and the other legislators, the ones who you would hope would be sitting there solemnly trying to limit that collateral damage, neglect that duty, because they are too busy hustling through other little laws of their own, aimed at other preferred clutches of alleged wrongdoers. Laws go straight from legislative entrepreneurs to government regulators, without no intervening process of scrutiny that is worthy of that adjective.

Which means that government regulators are then tempted to mutate into what you might call regulatory entrepreurs. They cannot possibly enforce all their laws, rules and regulations. There are not enough hours in the history of universe for that to happen. So, just like the legislative entrepreneurs, they also lose sight of the big picture (it having become too big to bother with) and decide for themselves which regulations to take seriously. How? Any way they please. In accordance with what rules? Whichever ones they decide to go with.

Add a dash of right wing fervour (a point which Go Directly to Jail apparently brings out very strongly) about crime being very, very bad and having to be fought with implacable ferocity, and to hell with those silly old legal safeguards, and you end up with a kind of anti-lottery instead of a government. Any person, at any moment, is liable to be picked on and turned into a criminal. At any moment, in the words of those British National Lottery adverts, it could be you-ou!!! And everyone is obliged to enter this one.

Being a libertarian, I was never very inclined to think of government as being intelligent. My prejudice is that it is mostly evil, most of the time, and the only question is: in what particular way is it evil at this particular time? Right now, I find myself wanting to describe government as evil because of a process of distributed stupidity, a phrase I adapt from the phrase distributed intelligence, which is how we bloggers like to think of how we work and of what we produce.

And I do indeed hope that the blogosphere will have a lot to contribute towards unscrambling the mess that is distributed governmental stupidity.

The problem is basically one of scale and of incentives. We now live in a world where legislators get their brownie points by forcing through ill-considered and half-baked laws, which do not do much to solve their original problem, but which create a miasma of other problems and subjecting the McNabs of this world to undeserved prison sentences. Other legislators could spend their time denouncing this torrent of ill-considered legislation, but fear that this would make them look lazy and negative, and get them minus brownie points. So, they legislate crazily too.

What I would like would be a world in which a legislative entrepreneur who is thinking of thrashing out yet another of these stupid laws, just so he can get his name in legal lights, would pause, and, you know, consider, for fear of a shitstorm from the blogosphere, and thus eventually, after a month or two, from the regular old media that he has actually heard of. I want a world where other potential legislative entrepreneurs, instead read the blogs to see more McCain/Feingold horrors coming down the legislative tube, and try to get their brownie points by being praised by bloggers not for making one of these laws, but for unmaking a few.

I would like a world in which the McNabs have a voice, before they are hit by these idiot laws and idiot regulators, and while, and for ever afterwards.

Well, I think and hope that we might be moving towards just such a world. The distributed stupidity of government is now, I would like to think, being challenged by the distributed intelligence of the rest of us. Previously, we masses did not have the means to distribute our intelligence, so to speak. Now, we do.

This McCain/Feingold thing looks like it could be the next Trent Lott/Dan Rather/Eason Jordan blogswarm furore-story. Like many bloggers, I am uneasy about living in a world where the blogosphere measures its success by how many high profile careers it wrecks. But how many potentially bad (McNab-nabbing) laws it stomps on? That I could live with far more happily.

I hereby propose the verb "McNab", to describe the process of innocent people being seriously screwed by crazy laws. As in: I've been McNabbed. Or maybe: I'm a McNab. By the sound of it, the original McNab deserves some good fame to set besides his horrendously bad treatment at the hands of the American criminal justice system.

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In an article titled The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain, fellow Samizdatista Jackie Danicki puts the boot in (though in a quite measured way) regarding 'expert' views on the nature of blogging and how it relates to journalism. She attended a high profile event at the London School of Economics called The Fall and Fall of Journalism and was clearly deeply unimpressed with what she heard. Read the whole thing.

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I will leave our own Alex Singleton to write about it... but I just spotted him (representing the Adam Smith Institute) in a discussion with the Channel 4 News anchor and a representative of the 'Fair' Trade organization.

I must admit I have no problem with voluntary 'fair' trade. I firmly believe in the PT Barnum principle that no fool should remain unparted from their money. If someone is willing to pay more for a product because it has a certain certification to it, so be it... so long as I am free to buy otherwise if I so choose.

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I have just read Glenn Reynold's article on the Gorman affair. What interests me is not this story in and of itself. It is the bigger picture of which it is a part that fascinates me.

There was a time, not so long ago, when someone such as Mr. Gorman could speak with the power of an organization behind him. He could say "WE" instead of "I" on a subject and like it or not, the entirety of his organization's membership was subsumed into public agreement. A statement was not that of Mr. Gorman, but of "librarians" as a class. If you happened to be a librarian who disagreed, you were out of luck. If you believed, for example, it was good to support dissidents against Castro... you would be pictured as someone who was not in step with their fellow librarians. The same was true of any membership organization. The leadership was your voice.

This does not seem to be true any longer, as you will rapidly discover upon reading the responses by Mr. Gorman's fellow librarians. The dissident view is as available and as well spoken as the leadership view.

Could we be witnessing the death throes of the non-consensual "WE"? The last nail in the coffin of the involuntary collective?

We will just have to wait and see.

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I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:

An online protest Tuesday of Iran's crackdown against bloggers made an impact – even on Iranian officials.

So says a leader of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the group that organized the effort to decry the jailings of Iranian bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad.

Reuters on Tuesday reported that Sigarchi was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country's leaders, a move probably linked in part to the timing of the protest, said Curt Hopkins, the committee's director. "I think there's got to be some connection," Hopkins said.

A message left with the Iranian mission to the United Nations was not immediately returned.

Hopkins' group – whose deputy director is Ellen Simonetti, the former Delta Air Lines flight attendant fired over photos of herself in uniform that she posted on her blog – asked those who maintain Web logs to call attention Tuesday to the plight of Iranian bloggers through posting banner ads and contacting government officials.

Some notable members of the blogging community took up the cause. They included Jeff Jarvis, who runs the BuzzMachine site, and Glenn Reynolds, who's behind Instapundit.

Hopkins said the response was just as impressive around the world. Hits on the committee site jumped from a daily average of about 500 to about 3,000 just during the Asian daytime hours. "It's been going like gangbusters," he said. "We've had people from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and Russia."

Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated.

As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also.

Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like "... out of the question ...", it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching.

I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now.

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The Guardian is serious about blogging, and it is also serious about presenting the occasional non-left piece of writing. (They used regularly to publish pieces by Enoch Powell.) So the surprising thing about this piece about blogging is not that the Guardian published it, but that the name of Iain Duncan Smith appears where the author's name goes. (I share Patrick Crozier's doubts about the piece's true authorship. And when we are talking about blogging, being who you say you are is a big thing, I think.)

IDS (I will assume this to be real from now on) hopes that blogging will revitalise the right in Britain, and notes that blogging has already revitalised the right in the USA, and has utterly deranged the left by causing the left to drag their party away from electability.

I wonder. I suspect that the problems of the Conservative Party are more serious than that, and that blogging will as likely serve to dramatise all the many differences that are now contained, if that is the right word, within the Conservative Party.

The Conservatives now have a hideous problem. Having lost confidence in its own economic nostrums, with the collapse both of the old USSR and of its own attempts to galvanise the British economy by seizing control of it, the British dirigiste left is content to allow Blair – or, I suspect, any likely successor of Blair – to triangulate away into the sunset. Labour knows that for them, it is either New Labour or no Labour at all. Which means that the Conservatives are no longer united by Labour. Instead they are divided by New Labour.

I do not go out of my way to converse with Conservative Party activists or critics or cheerers-on, but every one of such persons I have met with during the last decade or so has had his own distinct plan for the future of the Conservative Party, consisting of his own preferred mixture of policies. Each activist knows that his particular plan is The Answer, and that all that is needed is for all those other Conservative morons to stop with the negativity and embrace his plan without reservation. Easy really.

The Conservative Party should take a firm stand about this (or its opposite), without compromise. But, it should fearlessly compromise on that, by either lying or not talking about it. Go hard with England, Britain, Europe, the Anglosphere, the World (mix and dilute to taste). Be anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant. Anti-ID-cards, pro-ID-cards. Smash the welfare state, buy voters with an even better welfare state. Cut pensions, raise pensions. Support state education, destroy state education. Defend fox hunting, ignore fox hunting. Applaud the Americans, denounce the Americans. (I once thought that the Conservatives could maybe agree about applauding the Americans and leave the rowing about the Americans to the Labour Party. Fat chance.) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Every policy front is a distinct way to destroy Conservative Party unity.

It used to be that the Leader would decide all these things. Now they all want to be the Leader. And if they are not the Leader, and a different mixture of policies and attitudes is propose to their preferred mixture by the bloke who is the Leader, they are about as loyal to the Leader as a basket of low-IQ, but poisonous, snakes. As a result, the Conservative Party is now nigh on unleadable. It is not that they have chosen bad Leaders, or for that matter that they have chosen their Leaders by the wrong methods. It is that they cannot be lead.

I cannot see blogging being much help with all this. On the contrary, I think it will only allow the stupid snakes to hiss louder and louder. Blogging will be a whole new source of indiscretions and vituperations, a whole new way to destroy the Conservative Party. The anti-Conservative journalists could have a field day, and I think the Guardian knows it.

IDS says that blogging will put the fear of God into the "metropolitan elite", and assumes that this will help the Conservative Party. It is just as likely to start a new civil war within it. IDS says that lazy journalists think only of the impact of this or that policy on the opinion polls. Which the leadership of the Conservative Party never does, does it? The title of IDS's piece is "Bloggers will resue the right". But what it blogging rescues "the right" from the Conservative Party?

But, we shall see. Politics is weird. Often something that seems utterly impossible one month, becomes unavoidable a few short months later. Maybe blogging will provoke a big Conservative revival.

Personally I do not much care one way or the other. I agree with Perry that a speedy return of a Conservative government would improve very little, and very possibly make things even worse. My loyalty is to blogging itself. This is where I have placed my bets. If blogging very publicly sweeps the Conservatives back into office, hurrah! If it rips the Conservatives into unmendable fragments, hurrah also!

Or then again, maybe the unanimous ignorance of the modern world and its possibilities will mean that the stupid snakes continue to neglect this new way for them to hiss, and we bloggers will have to spread our enthusiasm for this new and amazing medium by quite other means.

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We interrupt your browsing for this bulletin:

Mark Steyn is back on-line.

That is all.

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Off-the-record debate mixed with off-the-cuff publication is a recipe for disaster.

- Rebecca Blood on the decision to introduce a Davos weblog

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During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it.

Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it.

Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being "unfairly tarnished".

At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied.

Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet.

This furore, remember, was triggered by Jordan saying that the US military has been targetting journalists. So - question one - how much truth, if any, is there in this charge? This question will not go away just because, for the time being, Eason Jordan has.

Given that what Jordan said at that Davos meeting, and given who he was when he said it (the news boss of CNN), why – question two – did those other MSM people ignore the fact that he said it? Every MSM news editor in the USA stands accused of not doing his job. It is absolutely not Eason Jordan who stands alone in this killing field, and his mere corpse, for the bloggers most centrally involved, is not the point. What did he say? Is there any truth to it? And why the MSM silence?

Besides which, it is not a corpse. Eason Jordan resigned to save his career. He was not admitting career defeat and slinking off into retirement. By resigning, as the wording of his resignation announcement makes clear, Jordan was proving to his Team that he is still a Team Player, and he presumably hopes that in the future, when all this silly blogger nonsense has died down, that he will be appropriately rewarded. And he probably will be, despite everything.

The claim that the blogosphere is nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty right wing lynch mobbers, which is what the MSM is now saying (the original wording for this yesterday was "what I expect some in the MSM will now to try to say" but things move fast), is false. Yes, there have been virtual high-fives in the blogosphere over the weekend, following Jordan's resignation. But the emotional and intellectual fuel driving the blogosphere in this matter is not just the partisan desire to humiliate and to hurt.

Somewhat (I would have preferred "rather" but that word is best avoided in this context) in the way that the movies and television finally overcame their initial mutual antagonisms and started working together properly, creating both combined career paths (for entertainment creators and actors) and a combined entertainment package (movies on TV, DVDs, etc.) for us punters, the MSM and the bloggers are even now working out how to combine and to cooperate, albeit with much heat as well as light. When the MSM and the blogosphere arrive at a new media equilibrium, they will together add up to a truth engine mightier than the world has ever before seen. This is what the best of the bloggers now want, and the passion driving them to sink their collective teeth into stories like this Eason Jordan rumpus, in the end, creative, rather than only destructive.

The self image of the MSM is that they Speak Truth to Power. But, they are not themselves Power. Which is humbug. We all know that the MSM are the most successful exercise in left of centre politics in the USA since the Second World War. The MSM are definitely Power, and they have been Power with a Plan, rather than just Power for the hell of it.

The irony is that the MSM people who are now cursing and screaming about blogger lynch mobs, now, really are not Power anymore. Time was when such insults would have been The Story, because they said so and they were the only ones telling it. Not any more. As Tim Blair puts it:

Certain footwear now resides on an alternate pedal extremity, and journalists don’t like it.

Insults like this one from commenter "William Boykin" (?) here …

"Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a street gang."

… now serve only to draw attention to the writings of these "knuckledraggers". Will this knuckledragger thing join the pajama crack as the Easongate soundbite that defines the idiocy of the blogosphere's ignorantly abusive enemies, the way pajamas did for the Dan Rather story? Or will it be salivating morons? Simply, the MSM no longer control the news agenda. Nobody does. The news agenda is no longer a decision, it is the outcome of a truly free and never-ending debate.

Speaking from a purely British point of view, I cannot help being envious of the intellectual firepower, time and effort, above all the weight of quality numbers, that the US blogosphere can now bring to bear on whichever MSM foolishness they decide to focus on, the way they have lately been focussing on the Eason Jordan story. The British blogosphere just does not have anything like a similar presence, yet.

And speaking some more from a purely British point of view, I wonder how long it will be before this kuckledragging lynch mob – that has already provoked Eason Jordan into resigning and is now busy pressing him and all his MSM defenders to stop screaming like knuckle-dragging baboons and to start talking sense and to start answering the blogosphere's questions – decides to focus more intently than hitherto on the nearest thing we have to MSM in the American sense over here, namely the BBC.

I think it is only a matter of time. (It seems that a BBC man is actually a quite important part of the Eason Jordan story.) It will be a fascinating contest, and I expect the BBC to be a formidable opponent, far more cunning and more impressive than its pompous and arrogant USA counterparts. The bloggers will not, I predict, have it all their own way. If I were them (and I am!) I would say: pick on particular BBC people and particular BBC shows, and take it slowly. Do not attack the entire BBC. Try to change it somewhat, because that is all you can really hope to do.

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...an angry digital lynch mob. Many fellow bloggers have been attacked by waves of trackback spam by some thieving vermin peddling online 'texas holdem' to idiots stupid enough to click those links and part with their money. We have been hit by over 450 trackbacks (which we de-spam swiftly via MT Blacklist every time they change their payload URLs).

What is to be done about this? If left unchecked this will simply destroy the trackback system and the beneficial network effect it brings. Presumably the spammers are being directed by companies to drive traffic to target sites, so if a digital lynch mob was to attack those target sites (who are presumably owned by the ones at the end of the chain who pay the spamhaus to do the dirty work), it might impose some cost on their actions, which at the moment involve stealing bandwidth and defacing private property with impunity. As the people involved in this are criminals, it seems to me that the best way to discourage them would be to hurt their ability to make their money.

Any ideas?

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I am having problems with my two blogs, Brian's Culture Blog and Brian's Education Blog. Go there, and you just get big coloured blanks next to the sidebars. I cannot post new stuff, and the only way to read my latest from when I could post is to look in the January archives (here and here). And all this at a time when I am heavily involved doing other things, and do not need such complications as these.

The good news is that this computer genius is even now giving this problem whatever attention he can spare, in among all the other demands that the world has for his skills.

I have told him to take his time. Culture and education will continue. Digital photographs will go on being taken and being displayed on the Internet, even without my inspiring example. Classical CDs will still be enjoyed, even though I am unable to tell people which. People will continue to teach and to learn, even though I am temporarily unavailable to teach them, or to say what I have learned.

Meanwhile, my thanks to all those who have kindly enquired after these blogs, and especially to those who have said that they miss them. They will return.

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If you have not checked out the marvelous Social Affairs Unit blog recently, please let me commend some simply splendid articles that have appeared of late, such as Stumbling towards the EU door marked exit. In particular, keep an eye out for all the 'Maurice and Gerhard' articles.

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At a Samizdata social gathering a few months back, one of the attendees (I think it was Patrick Crozier) posed the question of how much influence the blogosphere was having on the 'real' world.

The answer I gave at the time was plain and direct: none. A rather negative prognosis for sure but sincere and truthful as far as I was concerned.

However, my candour was not well-received. My dear chum Brian Micklethwait, in particular, took issue with me claiming that the blogosphere could well have be having an impact in ways that were not yet manifest. I countered this with the contention that in the absence of evidence of influence, one must assume that there is no influence at all.

Anyway, if memory serves, the rest of the bickering trailed off into a lake of libation and no firm conclusions were ever reached (are they ever?).

Since then, I have been forced to qualify my above-stated position because, in common with most other bloglodytes, I am all too familiar with the 'Rathergate' scandal over in the USA; a incident of such profile that it has made it impossible to deny that blogging is now having some degree of impact on the wider American polity.

But, as far as the UK is concerned, I have maintained my stance. Sadly and frustratingly, neither the blogosphere nor anything else seems to have been able to lay a glove on the great, heaving, suffocating beast of the hegemonic British intellectual climate.

That was my view. Until today. I required some proof to the contrary and now there is infallible proof:

Online journals and camera phones are a "paedophiles' dream" which have increased the risk to children, the Scottish Parliament has been warned....

Rachel O'Connell said adults could use weblogs to learn about children....

She said: "This is just a paedophile's dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life because it's an online journal."

I refuse to even attempt a rebuttal of this ludicrous and obviously desperate smear, preferring instead to let it stand naked in all its ignominy. Besides, it will not be the last. Blogging has clearly begun to make an impression on the minds of the political classes and they fear it.

The blogosphere has now landed in Britain.

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... it pays to ask if they are in a shark-repellent salesman before deciding just how risky swimming really is.

Do bad people use the Net to find victims? Without doubt they do and I would not make light of the harm that can be caused by 'paedophiles'. Yet so often when I hear of the 'epidemic' of child abuse going on, it turns out that the story emanates from some agency or NGO who just so happens to have its funding come up for review or who are in some way rattling their begging bowl. But of course who would deny funding to people who only want to protect children? And who would questions the additional motivations of people who make their living in this line of work, not to mention the veracity of the figures for just how serious a problem it really is? To ask those sort of things runs the risk of having your motivations and 'interests' questioned in ways that would make most decent folks rather uncomfortable.

But just as legitimate grievances about civil rights have in many countries spawned monstrous civil rights industries that are little more than vehicles for shaking down certain sections of society and which have a vested interest in perpetuating the idea that some problems are worse than they really are, I have little doubt that legitimate concerns about internet predators have already led to something similar in the 'preventing child abuse industry'. Oh, do not get me wrong, I neither doubt child abuse is a real and legitimate issue nor do I think everyone who works to prevent it is just looking to pad their bank accounts, but given how much I surf the net, I cannot help thinking that the scale of this problem does not seem to match the shrill rhetoric we hear on the subject. To listen to some people the fact I managed to grow up going to untended playgrounds and not treating adults as probable abusers... and yet somehow managed to never attract the attentions of a 'kiddie fiddler' must make me the luckiest lad around. Yet somehow I rather doubt that.

Cynical? You bet.

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Due to busy schedules of infiltration and meme planting, Jane Galt and I were only able to meet briefly in a Moroccan bar, a mere hour stolen from our labours.

Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

But... it was time enough for plotting the conquest of the Universe and giving thanks to RAH (All blessings be upon him). We also pondered her possible infiltration into London.

Might Jane one day appear at a super secret Samizdata HQ party? Might she and Adriana sit and discuss the quiet feminine art of marksmanship and trade product information on their favorite gun cleaning products?

Should it ever happen, we will be certain to bring you the spy camera photos posthaste!

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Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone's has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:

A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss.

Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone's in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for "gross misconduct" and "bringing the company into disrepute" through the comments he posted on his weblog.

Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.

My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough.

But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone's decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser.

(And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.)

For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things.

Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together.

Maybe Waterstone's regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it.

I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone's to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books.

As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right.

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I have been on the road for the last week and God only knows how much longer. Right now I am backstage doing edits on the webcasts from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco. Twelve hour plus days... but the pay is good. A few minutes ago the Surgeon General of the United States spoke and I took a photo, not of him, but of the video monitors and the backside of the scrim.

I imagine this is a slightly different view of things than the media out in the Grand Ballroom are getting!

Photo: D. Amon, all rights reserved

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They've been getting plenty of mad props from all over the 'sphere, and rightly so: no one bashes the UN better than Diplomad. Every self-absorbed, self-interested, counterproductive flaw you ever imagined the UN had, has been on display in response to the tsunami, and Diplomad has the goods.

This Embassy has been running 24/7 since the December 26 earthquake and tsunami. Along with my colleagues, I've spent the past several days dealing non-stop with various aspects of the relief effort in this tsunami-affected country. That work, unfortunately, has brought ever-increasing contact with the growing UN presence in this capital; in fact, we've found that to avoid running into the UN, we must go out to where the quake and tsunami actually hit. As we come up on two weeks since the disaster struck, the UN is still not to be seen where it counts -- except when holding well-staged press events. Ah, yes, but the luxury hotels are full of UN assessment teams and visiting big shots from New York, Geneva, and Vienna. The city sees a steady procession of UN Mercedes sedans and top-of-the-line SUV's -- a fully decked out Toyota Landcruiser is the UN vehicle of choice; it doesn't seem that concerns about "global warming" and preserving your tax dollars run too deep among the UNocrats.

We can never get too much UN-bashing here at the Rancho Dean. Add 'em to your blogroll, sez R. C.

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I have been a blogger for almost three years on my own blog and for about 18 months here at Samizdata. The nicest thing that has happened due to this is that it has allowed me to become connected and to meet a great many people I would not have met otherwise. Not the least of these are of course Perry, Brian, Adriana, Gabriel, David and the rest of the Samizdata team.

And of course links and comments come unexpectedly, from people with in widely dispersed places and from widely dispersed cultures with who one none the less discovers one has a fair bit in common. (When I write a travel article, it is always nice to be commented on and linked to by people native to the place I was writing about. And this often happens.

But being linked to is fun. Take for instance something that happened this evening. Looking at the refers to my personal blog, I discovered that I was listed in a page of links to expatriate blogs, that is blogs written by people living in places other than their native countries. This is fine and indeed good. I am certainly an expatriate. And expatriate blogs do have certain things in common. If you live in a country other than your own you do find that you look at things in a slightly different way than do natives, and you do have this in common with other expatriates, even expatriates from wildly different places and who are living in wildly different places.

And unsurprisingly the compiler of this list is an expatriate blogger himself. Like me, this blogger lives in London. However, whereas I am Australian, he is apparently German. (Actually, I have no idea whether it is a "he" or a "she", but I kind of think the mindset is a male one. And of course he could be Austrian or Swiss). As he is writing in a language I do not understand, I cannot read the blog. But from the pictures, it is none the less obvious to me that the author of this blog is my kind of guy. And possibly also Brian's kind of guy. And perhaps Jackie's kind of guy.

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The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective.

And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons.

Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish 'accessible credibility' and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about.

For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as 'Brown Sugar'. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau.

There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog.

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Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.

The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.

People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.

The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.

For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. "I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there's too much information out there already. Frankly, we don't have time to keep track of all these things," says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen's electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.

There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys.

As I understand it, what Techdirt supplies to each of their customers is a kind of bespoke e-newspaper (to replace the daily pile of off the peg newspapers and magazines that you had to make do with before). And as I further understand the situation, there is only so much that you can do along these lines automatically. To really get the full flavour – the buzz - of what the Internet is saying, about you, and about things relevant to you, you need human beings to pull it all together. To edit it, in other words. Interesting.

Also interesting is the other piece Instapundit links to, which is an example of just such a little buzz of comment, and not very polite comment, about a new corporate product, namely Microsoft's new blogging software, MSN Spaces.

I have always understood that version 1.0 of anything produced by Microsoft should be avoided like the Black Death, but that version 3.4 might end up being really rather good, not to say market sweeping, and the fact that Microsoft reckons that there is a market out there to be swept (eventually) is the important fact here is the other important fact embedded in every big launch they indulge in.

So, does that prejudice still hold good? Part one certainly seems to apply still, according to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. Alerted by a reader to the effect that …

Microsoft's new blogging tool … censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url.

… Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing continued:

… If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.

So Xeni Jardin investigated, and basically, she found that it was true. My favourite idiocy that she turned up is that if you entitle a blog posting "Pornography and the law" (not unlike this posting title here), you are told to stop being profane. Also, literary people need to be careful of any mention of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. On the other hand, other even more profane (so profane, one assumes, that Microsoft did not even conceive of them – a bit like Queen Victoria and lesbianism) titles like the one Instapundit links with "Butt Sex is Awesom", is allowed.

I assume that there must be some way to switch off this absurd nannyism, but maybe that assumption is wrong.

ZDNet UK has this to say:

Getting an amusingly named blog past the MSN Spaces controls may be fun, but it also illustrates the tensions between the traditionally free and open world of blogging, and the more corporate approach of a software giant like Microsoft.

…

These tensions are also apparent in Microsoft's approach to blog content. Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to "use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat" their blog postings.

Bloody hell. In fact: buzz, buzz, buzz. Will version 3.4 actually be any better than version 1.0?

Finally, I find this conclusion to the WSJ piece very poignant. It seems that the Ford Motor Co. was stung by the buzz:

Some companies, though, have been less successful in their attempts to find useful information in online chatter. Ford Motor Co.'s European unit last year hired a firm to help it watch the Web, but the trial soon ran into trouble: It was receiving information more rapidly than ever, but found that it couldn't act on the new data fast enough.

"To make full use of real-time information, you need to develop an internal structure that can react at the same speed," says Tim Holmes, executive director of public affairs for Ford in the United Kingdom. Three months after it began, Ford discontinued the project.

Ouch. It is not enough to know what is being said. You have to be able to do something about it.

NOTE: In the first edition of this I put that Xeni Jardin was, in the words of a commenter (to whom thanks), a "dude". My apologies to Ms. Jardin.

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On Thursday night, Porter's Dining Saloon in northwest Washington played host to a symposium titled: "Did Bloggers Tip the Election?" The event, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, drew over a hundred participants (crammed into a woefully under-ventilated room no larger than my living room.) Fortunately, I was able to infiltrate this event on behalf of Samizdata and report on the proceedings.

The panelists were (in rough order from ideological left to right): Henry Farrell, who contributes to the group blog Crooked Timber; Matthew Yglesias, who writes for The American Prospect, and contributes to both the TAPPED blog and his own blog; Ana Marie Cox, the inimitable Wonkette; Daniel Drezner, professor of political science at the University of Chicago whose blog, by an astonishing cosmic coincidence, is also called Daniel Drezner; and Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason. Drezner and Farrell were invited because they jointly authored this piece on the role of blogs in foreign policy; Yglesias was a last-minute replacement for his TAP colleague Michael Tomasky.

To answer the question posed by the title of the symposium, Nick Gillespie put it the most succinctly: "no, of course not, I think we can all agree!" All the panelists agreed, however, that the 2004 election had done more to blur the distinctions between alternative and mainstream media than it did to pit the two as adversaries.

The panel discussed at length the blogosphere's role in Rathergate / Memogate. Yglesias dissented from the others on this issue, arguing that the Bush administration certainly would have defended itself against the charges raised in the forged memo, even if the blogosphere hadn't attacked the documents. "It's not like they were going after someone vulnerable with no defense network -- this was the President of the United States," Yglesias intoned. "He knows his own war record, and that something just wasn't right about that story." Cox suggested that if CBS had acted "more like bloggers" in putting the story out with feelers, asking for help in authenticating the documents instead of dogmatically asserting them as authentic, they could have avoided the scandal (she added that she did not believe CBS or any other news organization would behave this way.)

Other highlights: Drezner spoke at some length about his recent appearance on ABC news, in which he defended the blogosphere for posting exit poll numbers on election day. Finally, Ms. Cox may have delivered the most memorable line of the night: when asked whether the blogosphere was guilty of propogating bizarre conspiracy theories, she observed that blogs were about as likely to debunk conspiracies as promote them, "most famously the Mystery Bulge Scandal; you know, the one about President Bush in the debates, not the more recent Mystery Bulge of Dick Cheney. Besides," she added, "evryone knows that Bush gets the alien transmissions through the fillings in his teeth, not through the bulge on his back."

(photo coming soon!)

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I have to say I got a totally different impression from yesterday's blog event from Brian. The point that came across was that we needed to move beyond the hype - for example that blogs make politics more important to people's lives and therefore all MPs should be given taxpayer money to blog. I once heard someone claim that blogs were great because they allow everyone's views to count equally. But they do not. While the printing press permitted those with sufficient funds to vanity publish their thoughts, it did not enable worthless books to get read. With blogs, you have to write good content and build up a readership who come back because they like it. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.

It is precisely the virtue of the blogosphere that blogs act as a filter. Boring, uninteresting blogs do not get read. That's a feature, not a bug.

When you cut away the hype, you see real uses of the technology. William Heath, one of the speakers, talks about how blogs really can help bring fresh thinking to policy problems. He spoke on how his blog Ideal Government has enabled dozens of diverse thinkers on government IT - including users and geeks, as well as purchasers - to share what they think about how government IT could be made to work better. That is a real use of blog technology to improve communication. It has been presented to and read by the government's Chief Information Officer.

Stephen Pollard talked of how blogs are not replacing the existing media, but they are serving an important role in fact checking. His own blog is very popular, which I would suggest helps his 'brand' stand out further among newspaper columnists, and it also lets him talk about things he wouldn't be able to sell an article on.

So the seminar's theme was not that blogs are no big deal, but that we need to move away from the hype and look at real end uses of the technology. There has been too much sloppy thinking about blogs in the past, often by those who desperately want politics to count more. As Perry de Havilland said, blogs tend to be more anti-establishment, having severely tarnished the likes of CBS News's Dan Rather in the US, and tend to open authority to more scrutiny than in the past. Blogs are starting, however, to be used as important tools, especially by those with views to express. As I pointed out at the event, the ASI gets a fair few media calls as a result of topical pieces that have been posted on its blog. So it answers a need to be able to publish quickly a position on something and get noticed by the mainstream media, by government departments and politicians and so on. Let's forget the hype and look at where it does useful tasks.

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Last night I attended this event, about Blogs, Democracy, etc.

The atmosphere radiating from the panel of speakers was odd. They all had in common that they were concerned above all not to get too enthusiastic about blogging. One sensed that both the dot.com boom and the current enthusiasm for blogging that radiates from sad little blogging enthusiasts like me had affected them far too deeply for their own good. To me they sounded like people saying in, say, 1550, that all this hype about the impact that printing was destined to have was all rather overdone.

Stephen Pollard told us that he did not really care about blogging in general, but then did manage to string a few more sentences together to suggest that he did at least concede that blogging had its uses. You know, fact checking the newspapers, enabling Stephen Pollard to say things that the newspapers would not allow him to say in the newspapers, little things like that.

Sandy Starr, a junior mainstream media person, and a senior website wonk if ever there was one, told us that he is determined not to let the unreality of blogging distract him from the reality of writing proper newspaper articles. He sounded to me like a man who had spent the first decade of his working life communicating entirely with carefully composed telegrams, and then reacting to – and against – the newly invented telephone. This is a machine for mere chit-chatting. It is of no importance. It is not real. However, Starr did at least register one extremely important effect of blogging, which is that it blurs the distinction between the public and the private. He described this major impact of blogging by announcing that he was not going to allow his life to get blurred in this way, but he did at least describe it. When he works he works, when he plays he plays, and never the twain shall meet. etc..

William Heath talked about his own efforts as a blogger. He had the audience grinding its collective teeth by talking about e-government as if it was an indisputably good thing, unaware, apparently, that he was addressing a congregation assembled by a Think Tank that thinks that only small e-government is good e-government. As for the "ideal government" (the title of Heath's blog), that would be … no government at all. So, there was very little raport there, except perhaps with the mainstream journalists present. However, Heath did flag up the fact that blogging can have many different uses and be used in many different ways. His recent blogging activity, for instance, was a strictly temporary affair. Who says you have to post something up every day, for ever? Why can you not have a big, concentrated, intense buzz of conversation, and then, when you have all said your various things, go quiet until the next big buzz? Why not indeed?

And finally, our own Perry de Havilland had the floor, and he too made it his business above all not to be too excited about it all. Blogs compete with mainstream media editors, rather than with reporters, he said.

As for the democracy thing, Pollard thought blogs would fact check campaign statements. Starr may have said something about democracy, but since his general message seemed to be that blogging is no big deal, it presumably followed that its impact upon democracy would likewise be of no great consequence. My mind wandered at this point, I fear. Heath enthused (he was the most enthusiastic speaker) about e-government, in the sense that filling in government forms on-line would be made easier and more consistent (with all the other damn forms you also have to fill in). Joined-up government, in other words. (The audience sat their thinking that it would prefer its government not to be join-up thank you very much.) He made no mention, as I thought he might, of the idea of the Internet, blogs etc., being used to have instant elections, referenda, etc., to decide about Big Issues. Thank God. Instead he mentioned the way that the government, when faced with an actual expression of a strongly held opinion that it had not been soliciting, against ID cards, decided that this strongly held opinion did not count, because … well, because it did not, so there. It was political, ergo however many thousands of emails it actually consisted of was only counted as one. Which makes the point that the last thing any government wants to do is let the mob decide everything. e-lectronically or o-therwise.

And Perry de Havilland reprised his blogs are not democratic speech, familiar from several postings here. They are private property and the owner sets the rules, not voters. If you do not like it, do not read it. Blogs are social, not political. Samizdata is a political blog that is anti-political.

The first question from the floor, which must have contained about fifty people, almost entirely men of various ages, concerned censorship. Apparently he (the first questioner) had had some abusive screed that he had attached to Stephen Pollard's blog about half a century ago deleted. The panel collectively shrugged its shoulders. Blogs are private property. A blogger has an absolute right to delete comments at will. It may not be wise to delete this or that comment, but he is entitled. If you do not like that, start your own blog.

Why the downbeat atmosphere? Philip Chaston commented from the floor, reprising this posting. The big British newspapers, unlike the ones in the USA, are already quite biased and lively enough already, and do not need blogging to liven them up, unlike in the USA where the Mainstream Media are pompous secret-left pseudo-extreme-centre prats, ripe for the blogging. Ergo, blogging here is no big deal.

Only two commenters that I recall expressed any great excitement about blogging's impacts and possibilities.

Jackie Danicki talked with girlish enthusiasm (what with her being one of the very few girls present – another commenter from the floor got the biggest laugh of the night by saying that he had come to this thing partly to meet girls – some hope) about how blogging had introduced her to her good friend Norman Geras and his family, which would not have happened otherwise! This, she said, was a big deal!

And who was the other enthusiastic commenter? Oh yes, me. (As you can see, the Samizdatistas were present in remarkable strength to support the Dear Leader. Even the chairman of the event, the ASI's Alex Singleton, was one of us.) After some preliminary dissent from Perry's point about bloggers not competing with mainstream reporters, I did a speech saying that the Internet – and therefore blogging (because blogging is the user-friendly front-end of the Internet – it is for me anyway) is destined (also big deal) to change the entire course of human history.

And then it was thank you thank you, clap clap for our panel please, champagne champagne, chat chat, pizza pizza, and off home.

UPDATE: The first questioner's comment at Stephen Pollard's blog was not deleted! When SP got home last night, he checked! It was still there! SP stomps all over the poor man most entertainingly. But, as SP himself says, several times and in several ways, that really is no big deal.

UPDATE 2 (apologies for all the multiple trackbacks): Alex Singleton also reports, with a picture of lots of men.

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The 'mainstreaming' of the blog phenomenon continues apace as more applications for blogging start to join political prognostication, cultural commentary, demimonde diaries (warning: X-rated), technical tantrums, hitting things with hammers and paeans to beloved pussycats. New neighbourhoods of the blogosphere are springing up every day.

And now an independent Hollywood movie called Blowing Smoke, which is still undergoing some final post production editing, has set up a blog to which the director, producer and cast members have started to post, talking about the extremely politically incorrect nature of the movie.

The blog is still in its very early days, the site is still being tweaked and the users are at the stage where they are just getting to grips with blog publishing software but I think this could quite interesting if blogs like this catch on. As a movie enthusiast myself I would love to get more peeks behind the scenes and not just the same old marketing agency hype.

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The Adam Smith Institute will be hosting an event called Democracy & the Blogosphere next Tuesday 16th November. The speakers will be Stephen Pollard, William Heath, Sandy Starr and yours truly.

The event is 'jacket and tie' at 6:15pm and will be followed by a reception at the ASI at 23 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BL

Anyone who would like to come along should send an e-mail for an invitation.

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Having said nice things about Instapundit in my previous post (below), I feel compelled (i.e. choose) to add that I have also today criticised him, here. My complaints concern, first, the unfortunate picture that is used at the top of his recent Guardian articles, and, second, a visual blemish that disfigures his otherwise impeccably laid out blog. Briefly, when he has a picture to the right of a posting, it usually has text jammed right up against it. When I have a picture on the right of something I post, it does not do this. The conclusion is inescapable: I am better person than Instapundit.

Queue an HM Bateman Cartoon, entitled The Man Who Criticised Instapundit, featuring a handsome, smiling, carefree young man (me), surrounded by guests in shocked statue poses who have just heard what he said.

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Blogging will not turn bad writers into good ones, but it can make life a whole lot better for good writers.

The fear among them (us? – I vomit the verbals, you judge) is that if you just fling your stuff up as it gets done so that it can immediately be read by all those greedy readers forthwith and at no cost, you will, at best, become a world-famous pauper, a super-celebrity beggar, famous on six continents for not having two cents to rub together. Buddy can you spare a Paypal payment? Well, at least blogging gives the downtrodden a voice.

Oh, you do occasionally get paying gigs out of all that unpaid stuff you churn out. But think tanks are one thing, and actual paying readers are something else again.

This is why I find the news that Scrappleface has just had a book published so very interesting, from the point of view of blogging in general, if not of this particular blogger.

I caught myself thinking yesterday that although I could blog about this book, I could not actually review it because I have not yet read it. But actually I have, I assume, read quite a lot of it, as soon as it came out. It is, I am entirely confident, very good and very funny. If you enjoy poking fun at Democrats etc. as much as he does, you should buy it. You will love it.

Seriously, we bloggers must all hope that this book sells really well.

At present, most regular publishers probably regard blogging as just one great big given-away cowpat on their lush and expensively priced pastures. But if the idea gets into their heads that they can grow a whole new crop of expensive books in this ordure, well, this could really bring the old media and the new back into bed with each other.

Think about it from a publisher's point of view. What do publishers do? What they do is edit stuff that they have finally got into their hands. So, let the mainstream, big name editors surf the blogs and find their writers there. They can feel happy and powerful choosing material that has – blessing upon blessings – already been written and is already on their desks. No begging phone calls, and ordeal by deadlines. (Deadlines are hell for writers, but imagine what they are like for hard-pressed publishers.) The entire job is already on their desks and in their hands.

As for readers, well, writing as a reader, I do not notice any decline in my enthusiasm for books, or in anyone else's. Books are nice. You can read them in the lavatory, and in coffee bars and trains and bank and supermarket queues. You can give them as Christmas presents to human beings, or to members of your family.

As blogs multiply in number, the need for people to spot the best ones and pick out their best bits is bound to grow. Bloggers have shown a great enthusiasm for picking out their favourite bits by everybody else, today. But not many have shown themselves willing to plough through their favourite blogs and tell the rest of us which are their favourite bits from a year ago, two years ago, and (for let us look ahead) ten years ago. (Personally I cannot be bothered to pick out my own favourite bits by me.) Publishers have just the people to do this, and just the product (books) in which to display the fruits of such labours.

Bloggers. The new book writers. We can all hope.

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Glenn Reynolds has a good article in the Guardian about the election and expresses some interesting ideas about its lessons for the media.

Thanks to the internet, cable news channels and talk radio, media bias is easier to spot and easier for people to bypass. This not only changes views, but prevents the formation of a phoney consensus - what experts call "preference falsification" - resulting from widespread, and unified, media bias.

Those of you across the Atlantic may wish to take a lesson from this. As the BBC's atrocious handling of the Gilligan affair - and, indeed, its war coverage generally - illustrates, media bias is hardly limited to the United States.

But what is with that photo? I would not have recognised that as Glenn but for the context in which it was displayed.

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Some members of the journalist profession need to be explained things slowly and clearly. Scott Burgess undertakes that ungrateful task and tries to get the message through to Polly Toynbee.

... Welcome to the new media world, Polly.

Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity - sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda.

For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that "Scandinavian countries are best of all" at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: "Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO)."

Those who did notice such "anomalies" had no easy means of communicating them to others interested in issues of journalistic integrity.

As you see, that's changing now. What you (and many others) are in the process of learning is that, from now on, reportorial sloppiness and dishonesty will be noted, exposed, and punished - quickly and very, very publicly.

Journalists who are accurate and honest have little to fear - the facts will out. Their less capable (and less truthful) colleagues risk the humiliation of public ridicule.

Best of all, in this new media environment the once-wise maxim "never get in an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel" no longer applies - we all have barrels now. Ardent proponents of equality would no doubt applaud this development, were they not the ones whose superior status was now under threat.

Very Truly Yours,

Scott Burgess
The Daily Ablution
London

For more quality time with bloggers and Polly, follow the path that lead to the above document.

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In conversation with a business associate, Alan Moore of SMLXL, yesterday, we got on to the topic of how the UK really is lagging behind when it comes to anticipating and preparing for the seismic shifts that are happening in business. I'm not sure if it was Alan or me who came up with this line, but it is as if they are standing at the foot of the volcano, having a picnic and drinking champagne. Maybe if they pretend everything is going to be okay, they won't have to change. (See, on this note, SMLXL posts passim, including yesterday's Another business model under threat.) Yes, we have covered this ground with Alan before.

Similarly, the UK market is way behind when it comes to blogging. I met in Paris last week with Guillaume du Gardier of PR Planet, and he was surprised to hear that France is much more developed on the blogging front than Britain. Does that make sense? On the surface, no, it doesn't. The UK, sharing a common language with the US, should be much more up to speed on these things.

I am sure it can be annoying for a Brit to hear it from an American, but I suspect that one of the reasons for the slow uptake of blogging in the UK is that in general it is quite unlike Brits to get overly excited about anything. It is almost something of a sin to be wide-eyed and evangelical about anything, no matter how worthy that thing may be. Brits excel at cynicism and being understated and controlled; they are not entranced by the sort of hype that excites people in the US. (I again emphasise the generality, as I know and work with many Brits for whom the appearance of cynicism is not a concern.) In Britain, it is far more the done thing to be looking the other way when the bandwagon rolls up, and then scoff and roll your eyes when you finally see it, as it goes past...and then run run run to jump right on it, usually about 18 months behind the rest of the developed world.

Indeed, I remember as far back as a year ago, observing many conversations in British blog comments and on UK-based blogs, wherein bloggers themselves were turning their noses up at the buzz being whipped up in the US about blogging. Sure, it is good enough for them and they spend hours a day in the blogosphere, but God forbid they appear genuinely enthralled by this 'phenomenon'! No, it is far easier to seem cool towards blogging. A shrug of the shoulders and a yawn would suffice...and then back to updating the blogroll and commenting on their daily tour of their niche of the blogosphere.

And so it goes. In the end, all you can do is shake your head and smile at such people - they can appear as unfussed as they like, and the bandwagon will roll on with or without their enthusiasm. But it is a shame for Britain that it once again is playing catch-up with the rest of the world when it comes to blogging and to the shifts in business that will be necessary for success in the coming decades. At times like these, that usually charming cynicism costs - big-time.

This post has been cross-posted to the Big Blog Company blog.

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The Adam Smith Institute is hosting an evening seminar on the subject of 'Democracy and the Blogosphere' on Tuesday 16 November in London. Speakers will include Samizdata.net's Perry de Havilland, New Labour journo Stephen Pollard, Spiked's Sandy Starr, and William Heath (chaiman of Kable, the publishers of Government Computing). There will be a champagne reception at the end of the formal proceedings - an opportunity to mingle with the great and the good of the British blogging world. But space is limited, so book early to avoid disappointment.

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I am intrigued by one of those little one-line links that Instapundit did yesterday, this time to a row between a Canadian politician and some Canadian bloggers.

This was only a matter of time. Bloggers in Canada are deleting posts after Warren Kinsella, an aide to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, threatened them with legal action.

By the sound of it, there is very little that the blogosphere can do to make this Warren Kinsella person think better of his threats, although I would love to be proved wrong about that. Even by the standards of regular party politicians, he sounds like a fairly unpleasant character. All bloggers can do is publicise that he has made the threats, which I think he will be very happy about. He may be nasty but he is not stupid. He wants to be known as a political bully, if only to sell his book about how to be a political bully. Postings like Instapundit's, and Cicada's, and mine, are probably the exact thing he wanted to get from his legal round robin.

What this ruckus does show is how important the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, are becoming in generating publicity. Kinsella, as the author of a book called Web of Hate, does not make the mistake of calling the Internet insignificant while simultaneously raging against it. But to all those who still say that the Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular do not count for anything, this row will be one more item of evidence under the general heading of 'You Wish'. I mean, if politicians do not rate bloggers, why do they threaten to sue bloggers when bloggers say things they do not like?

In the age of the Internet, suing people is starting to emerge as a whole new way of communicating a message, to a lot of people, very economically, a point also made by Tyler Cowen at the Social Affairs Unit blog, in a posting about how Big Music is suing lots of downloaders. That, Cowen says, is what Big Music is trying to do also.

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...as Homer Simpson might say when not contemplating donuts.

The always interesting Stacy Tabb has a rather groovy new project called Lab- Tested that does product reviews to determine the 'dog friendliness' of various things. Compelling reading for dawg lovers.

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For those of you interested in business oriented blogging, I have written an article called Business Hippos and Blogging Birds over at the Big Blog Company. I have always seen business blogs as the best manifestation of the whole Cluetrain vibe.

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That essential source for civil liberties issues, vigilant.tv is showing signs of life again after a long absence from the blogosphere. That can only be a good thing.

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In 1985 Madsen Pirie wrote The Book of the Fallacy. It was an entertaining read, explaining different types of logical fallacy and... er... how they can be used effectively. It found itself on many philosophy course reading lists. According to Dr Gary Curtis of Fallacy Files:

This book is the closest thing to an encyclopedia of logical fallacies to have been published, and it is a shame that it has gone out of print.

The good news is that, as of this week, the book has now been brought back to life - as a tool for fisking. It is available at www.adamsmith.org/logicalfallacies and is designed so that when you accuse someone of a priorism, you can link to the definition.

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Natalie got there ahead of me but I also noticed the preposterous attempt by the pseudo-liberals of Crooked Timber to lecture us "Schmibertarians" in the 'correct' libertarian stance towards Iraq.

I thought it might be informative to examine the Crooked consensus and some of its logical implications. I would summarise the "Samizdatistas are schmibertarians" argument - and anyone who suspects I'm setting up a straw man here is invited to read the relevant posts and particularly the follow-up comments - as follows:

1. 'Proper' Libertarians oppose major government programs funded by coercive taxation, the Iraq war is such a program.
2. 'Proper' Libertarians are wary of any kind of social-engineering, so the neoconservative plan to remodel Middle Eastern countries as democracies is futile folly.
3. Thus anyone who supports the war against Saddam is necessarily a sham libertarian who just thinks it's cool to blow things up.

My first reaction was to the irony of being lectured in 'correct' libertarianism by a bunch of egalitarian, social-engineering collectivists who presume to identify as "Liberal". Indeed it is precisely because this previously unambiguous term has been suborned by those who display a cavalier disregard for the classic liberal values of autonomy, individualism and limited government that many of us reluctantly adopt the libertarian moniker in the first place.

The premise behind the argument is dubious to say the least. It is generally taken to be the case that arguments are accepted or opposed on their own merits and without reference to whether they conform to some theology to which those making the argument are perceived to subscribe. I were to argue against, say, a Creationist, it would seem to me to be a pointless task to identify what a 'real' Creationist ought to believe prior to debunking his theory. Indeed, the logical consequence of a position which states that the correct libertarian ought to oppose the Iraq war according to libertarian first principles is that those who oppose the war are implicitly endorsing those specific libertarian principles. So, the next time some wonky twig proposes a massive government intervention or other, one can remind him that, as his opposition to the Iraq war demonstrates, such social engineering ought to be avoided.

It is also curious to note the partial isolationism adopted with regard to Iraq, considering the enthusiasm regularly displayed for action against third world 'exploitation'. Thus, according to the Crooked Timber moral calculus, it is not ok to interfere in the affairs of another country if its citizens are being tortured or murdered but it is ok to interfere to prevent those (remaining) citizens getting a good job with a dreaded multinational corporation!

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There has been a disturbing development in which PayPal seems to be threatening to withdrawn its services from blogs which violate their acceptable use policy. Fair enough on the face of it, as it is certainly PayPal's right to offer to do business on whatever terms they wish.

But then take a look at what those terms are:

The Policy prohibits the use of PayPal in the sale of items or in support of organizations that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance; items which graphically portray violence or victims of violence; or items closely associated with individuals notorious for committing murderous acts within the last 100 years.

So... write about or show pictures of the victims of a terrorist atrocity, or show pictures of Osama bin Laden and suddenly no more PayPal for you, as Bill Quick of Daily Pundit has found out.

They do not want to do business with Bill Quick? Well I am not so sure I want to continue to do business with PayPal then. Clearly Samizdata.net is going to have to review whether or not we will continue to have those PayPal buttons you see at the moment in our sidebar.

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Well, miracles do happen. For a while, I was labouring (scuse pun) under the view that no British Conservative MP would ever set foot (or fingers) in the blogosphere.

I was wrong. The Conservative MP for Henley and all-round media superstar, Boris Johnson, now has a blog.

I only hope he has some inkling of what he has let himself in for.

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For years, a certain type of person wrote letters to national newspapers and was frustrated that none would be published. Letter Editors would refer to their submissions as 'nutter letters', pinning some to the office noticeboard for the amusement of their colleagues.

Now these letter writers have moved into the age of the blogosphere. They are blogroaches now, but not ordinary ones. They are a type of superbug - the taxpayer-funded blogroach. They have nothing to do all day, except to collect jobseeker's allowance or, more likely, incapacity benefit (which the government encourages them onto to massage the unemployment figures).

Not having got out much recently, they have lost many of their social skills, and seem less able to interact with others with courtesy and respect. For this reason alone, workfare has a lot going for it.

In having nothing to do all day, they inhabit other people's blogs writing tediously long essays which tangentially refer to a blog's point. They write 500 to 1000 words each time, and often get shirty if a proper response is not made by the blog's author. Fortunately, Samizdata combines big readership with a high level of reader participation, meaning that its writers can sit back and let Paul Coulam beat up such annoying people. These blogroaches do not understand how to make their points graciously, normally regarding the blogs they infest as evil, and depositing their words of 'wisdom' on each and every article.

The taxpayer-funded blogroach assumes that everyone has as much time as they do for blogging, and should take their views seriously, and publish proper responses to them – or retract what they have said. In reality, bloggers on popular blogs tend to have real jobs and thus a fraction of the time to write for a blog. Spending hours responding to unemployed blogroaches seems pretty tiresome.

Some blogs solve this problem by just not allowing comments. Others delete blogroaches on sight. But the taxpayer-funded blogroach considers this to be restricting his right to free speech. Newspapers were wrong not to publish his letters and so are blogs. Apparently.

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RC Dean correctly identifies the blog-banging of Rather and his forged document as an exercise in distributed intelligence. So, can this model for cooperative intellectual activity be applied to other tasks? Can the combined power of the Internet be brought to bear on other creative tasks, rather than just the destruction of the pretensions of forgers and their mainstream media dupes?

Open Source software famously makes use of distributed intelligence. And I seem to recall hearing on the British BBC1 TV show The Sky at Night that the Internet is also already used to do combined astronomy. Also, I recall reading, but do not recall where or when, about a list of famous maths problems that have baffled the greatest maths minds for centuries, which have now all had cash prizes attached to them.

But in the case of those maths problems it is only the publicising of the problem that uses the Internet. The solutions will pretty much come from individuals. Or is that wrong? Will major proofs of major theorems get themselves constructed line by line, in public, with dozens of different mathematicians chipping in with their own pennyworths, with each step not being enough to justify a journal article, but the combined effect being mathematically stellar?

Could a film script perhaps be concocted in this way?

Consider this, from Terry Teachout on Wednesday:

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they've done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn't thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds' worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: "I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it."

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who'd stepped in it up to his eyebrows? Would his candor be greeted by a wholehearted roar of astonished approval? Or would he be buried under the inevitable avalanche of told-you-sos from his sworn enemies and their robotic surrogates, amplified well beyond the threshold of pain by the 24/7 echo chamber of the media, old and new alike? …

Teachout then alludes to a movie that made a big impression on me also when it first came out, Network not least because of the amazing scene where Faye Dunaway has sex while continuing to rant about her latest TV ratings strategy. But I digress. Back to Treacher on Speaking Truth With Power. Now comes this:

... it occurs to me that such a scenario might well make for an interesting movie. …

… Imagine, then, a film about a present-day public figure who screws up in a big way, calls a press conference, admits his errors, and throws himself upon the mercy of the public. It's not hard to see how a socially aware writer-director like, say, John Sayles might weave the resulting tangle into a smart story about imperfect people who get caught up in the whirlwind of circumstance.

Treacher himself isn't going to write the screenplay of the drama he has sketched out. But suppose someone else did. And suppose, instead of mass-laser-printing-it and bombarding Hollywood with it, they instead simply stuck their script up on the Internet.

And suppose others then joined in, with technical assistance about the nuances of news conferences and of the particular milieu our Candid Hero was operating in ("that would never happen, but what you could do is …"), and with snappier dialogue, and with casting suggestions, and with observations about plot non-sequiturs, and with suggested solutions. Home movie makers might even get to work on actually shooting rough versions of some of the scenes using lesser known actors eager to show what they can do. People could suggest cheaper locations, the best available person to direct, report on suitable buildings which which are about to be demolished (Hollywood loves demolishing buildings).

In short, amateurs could horn in on the work now done by movie professionals, at such vast expense and with such huge travelling budgets.

The reason I like the idea of applying Distributed Intelligence to movie making is that the best movies are rather like maths theorems. They have a rightness to them, a quality of having been discovered rather than merely created, of having been dug up in their finished state rather than merely thrown together. I am not saying that they are dug up, merely that they feel like this. (All the best art is like this. Discuss.)

There are many advantages to putting a movie together like this, not least that financing it and (perhaps above all) publicising it might be pretty much taken care of.

It just, as they used to say in older movies, might work. (Because I believe this, and because I like thinking of movie ideas myself, I have a category at my Culture Blog called Movie ideas. Not as in ideas about movies, but ideas for movies.)

One particular skill that ,ight particularly be needed in the world of distributed, yet paid, intelligence would be the skill of tracing the history of an idea and of a creative process (whether it is a movie, a maths theorem, a chemical formula, or a new idea for a cheap gadget or an new kind of car or airplane) so that key contributors could be appropriately rewarded. Because, once key contributors do get appropriately rewarded a few times, this will enormously increase the willingness of all manner of people to make appropriate contributions.

You get a taste of how this rewarding process would work when you read the better mainstream media articles now being written about how the Blogosphere Got Dan Rather. "The story began when CBS unveiled Document X on 60 Minutes last … whichever night it was, whereupon a commenter at Blog A said … whatever he said, about proportional spacing, and Blogger B then did an exhaustive analysis of Microsoft Word and Blogger C lashed up that oscillating graphic. Meanwhile ex-National-Guardian P spoke to Blogger D …". You know the kind of thing. Once the history of the creation has been established, then the final makers of the thing (movie, car, whatever) could divvy up whatever profits they might make, on a "do you agree? – and if you do, and promise not to sue us if it makes ten times more money than any of us now dream of, do we have a deal?" basis. Tricky, I agree. But doable. Hollywood already has skills along these lines now, does it not?

Or then again, maybe, the whole idea of distributed intelligence movie-making (in particular) will separate itself out from money-making movie-making, and the whole process will be done for free, and distributed for free, and watched for free. What are the odds that the smash summer holiday hit of 2012 will be a blog-movie, on super high definition DVD, playable not only in home cinemas but also in cinema cinemas (by any cinema that wants to show it), while Hollywood is stuck with its latest unsellable Dinosaur Sequel and snarls, Rather-like, that civilisation as Hollywood knows it is at an end. Which it very possibly would be.

The general principle here is that – Vinegar Joe Stilwell style – you set about solving your problems, or, in more peaceful times, seizing your opportunities, by first stating in public just what they are, and inviting Distributed Intelligence to get to work on them, rather (Rather!) than by keeping your problems secret until your secret hirelings have solved them, or can plausibly claim to have solved them. And only then does Distributed Intelligence go to work second guessing, or improving on, or making monkeys of the hirelings.

Think of it as Western Civilisation only more so.

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Recent events in the United States have demonstrated the effectiveness of political blogging on the reporting of the presidential campaigns in the established media. They also provide a useful comparison with the United Kingdom where this relationship between the media and the blogosphere has not been cemented. The difference that blogs have had in the political cultures of both countries lead on to wider questions about the preconditions required for the political bloggers to play such a useful role, as they do in the United States.

There are distinct aspects of the development of the blogosphere in the United States that could not be replicated in the United Kingdom. Both the political culture and the press is far more decentralised and local, allowing new entrants to disseminate information and find new audiences with far lower barriers. The press in the United States was also far more highbrow and expected to maintain high standards of accuracy and objectivity by its readership.

By contrast, the British press has taken a far more visible role in forming and leading public opinion with a greater emphasis upon comment, sometimes likened to a published version of talk radio. Facts and objectivity are not as important in the British press as they are in the United States. It is also a far more centralised concern reflecting the concentrated nature of the British state and the Westminster village. Such a small circle breeds tighter and more incestuous networks of journalists and politicians who maintain control over the flow of information between the political class, the press and the interested public.

The other key difference between the two countries lies in the attitude of the professional towards blogging.

One of the most admirable features of the blogosphere in the United States, perhaps the key to its success, lies in the marshalling of professional knowledge towards public ends. This has created a meritorious Republic of Letters. Professionals in the ivory tower, in private sector research or in companies do not police the boundaries of their profession but contribute to an open-source medium, putting their private expertise into the public domain, if they can write or comment authoritatively on a particular matter. As such, it is not possible to make the distinction between the professional classes (if that term can be used) and a wider blogging public.

In the United Kingdom, there is far less professional participation in the blogosphere. Without that participation, it is not possible to marshall the distributed and specialised knowledge necessary to challenge the established publishing and broadcasting media. Why is this so? A smaller country such as the United Kingdom may place a greater status upon joining a profession, providing a cultural barrier towards public and political participation. However, I suspect that the most important precondition is the nature of the paymaster. Most professionals in the United Kingdom are paid for by the state with all of the developments that such funding entails: an aversion to overt political participation, an unwillingness to engage in behaviour that could jeopardise sources of funding or cast a cloud on one's professional career, and support for further policies that will increase funding from the taxpayer.

It is clear that the developing blogosphere demonstrates that countries with larger governments, a centralised state and a preponderence of public-sector professionals are far less likely to enjoy the benefits of such smart networks. As such, the impact of the blogosphere in a particular country will allow observers to assess how open their society is.

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I frequently hear "Oh blogs, they don't really have any influence" and "What real difference do blogs make?" - Individually it is certainly true that popular blogs like Samizdata.net or even Godzilla-blogs like Instapundit are dwarfed in numbers of eyeballs they attract by major newspapers and TV networks... but just as a single piranha is not so fearsome a beast, a large school of them is another thing all together. When you look at a blog, you are just looking at a single node: you need to stand back and look at the network.

Tony Blankley over on Townhall.com has written an interesting article called A revolution in news:

As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger's strength this past week.

For three quarters of a century until last week, when CBS News had entered a fight it had been an unfair mismatch for its adversary. The credibility, research capacity and gate-keeping monopoly of CBS would overwhelm its victim. But last week, it was breathtaking to see, moment by moment, the Internet blogger's advantage.

[...]

As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected.

[...]

The Internet bloggers picked CBS's story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.

This is the distributed intelligence that has been discussed here before. Blogs have in many ways been over-hyped but that is mostly because it is not blogs that are the revolutionary driver... it is the blogosphere.

Old media is learning the hard way to be sure of their facts because somewhere out there, sitting in front of a computer in Biloxi or Berlin or Bombay, is someone knows the subject you claim to be an expert in a damn sight better than you do with a whole lot of bloggers looking over his shoulder.

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An awesome glimpse at the potential for distributed intelligence is occurring right now in the blogosphere. A series of 'newly discovered' memos purporting to show that George W Bush failed to fulfill his national guard duties has, in the matter of a few hours, been subjected to the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere, and have been pretty conclusively shown to be forgeries, as far as I can tell.

The speed and apparent quality of the analysis of these memos is stunning, as the blogs allow the assembly of the observations, recollections, and thinking of dozens of people in real time. The mainstream media must feel the Polish horse cavalry trying to stop the blitzkrieg in WWII.

Warning: Powerline is getting buried with hits from a Drudge link right now, but keep trying.

Update: Just to reinforce the point, commenter Dave Sheridan points out that its not just distributed intelligence, it is actually a glimpse of the face of the true god of liberty, spontaneous order.

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I have always suspected the notion blogging will lead us into a wonderful future of 'participatory democracy' was one of those ideas which withers away to nothing under closer scrutiny. Sure, we can 'fact check the asses' (as Ken Layne put it) of the established political/media classes but that only makes us bloggers 'participants' in the sense that calling the cops when the party next door is making too much noise makes you a 'participant' in the next door's party.

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Samizdatista Jackie Danicki spotted an interesting fact that well known writer and commentator Theodore Dalrymple is now a contributor to the Social Affairs Unit blog, publishing under his real name, Dr Anthony Daniels. The SAU has scored quite a coup by getting such an excellent contributor signed up.

The blogosphere continues its march into the mainstream.

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The BBC is running a competition:

BBC News Online wants your nominations for the best political websites and blogs, preferably with a UK focus. We are looking for lively, thought-provoking sites that stimulate genuine debate, rather than just pushing a particular narrow viewpoint or agenda, but all suggestions are welcome.

I know of a political blog that is lively, thought-provoking and stimulates genuine debate. In fact, it must surely be a shoe-in for the title of 'Best Political Blog'.

I would tell you the name but...modesty forbids.

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I've done several posts at my Education Blog on the theme of the educational gains to be got from blogging, by the blogger. Of course writing things communicates to others. But it also organises the thoughts of the writer, and makes them more likely to be remembered by the writer. Failing that, it makes it easier for the writer to access his written thoughts later, if only because the writer is likely at least to remember having written on that subject.

I did another such posting yesterday, in connection with something Michael Jennings said to me last week in conversation about how he blogs about computer matters with this benefit in mind.

Rob Fisher commented on this post, in a way that emphasises the point:

I certainly find that the act of writing a blog post forces me to get my thoughts into some kind of order, which is useful. The part of my website that gets the most feedback is a tutorial I wrote about how to use Linux to edit digital video; and I wrote this mainly because I knew I would forget half of it if I didn't write it down - and if I'm going to write it down I might as well publish it.

I think this could explain the presence of a lot of the wide range of useful information available on the web.

I'm currently investigating the possibility of using a Wiki for publishing useful information. Wikis are interesting because they make web pages so easy to change; and even more interesting because they let other people add and amend information.

By the time I understand that last paragraph I will have had to have made some educational progress myself, although I am sure it is straightforward enough once you understand it. Educationally helpful comments, anyone? "Wiki"? I have heard that word, and the presumably related word "wikipedia", but what does this stuff mean?

Blogging, it seems to me, blurs the distinction between the private and the public. It is not that this distinction is now of no importance. But blogging does shift the economics of (what do we call it?) message management? … towards combining the public with the private, wherever that can be done without too much risk. Simply, by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible.

I think, as I said in my original posting, that this is one of the big reasons for the success of blogging. Constructing a helpful set of notes as one learns a subject area might be too difficult, and hence beyond you. Writing material good enough to reach a wide readership, ditto. But licking your notes into shape and sticking them on a blog, which obviously can be read by millions, but need not be in order to be an economic proposition, adds up to something that can make a lot of sense.

I did not set out with my Culture Blog with the self-conscious aim of learning about new buildings in London, but that is the way it is turning out. And I definitely did start Brian's Education Blog in order to educate myself, about education, as the ambiguous name, I hope, communicates. Brian's Blog About Education? A Blog About Brian's Education? Both.

These friends of mine are in the business of helping businesses to set up blogs. They emphasise the benefits blogging can bring in the form of communicating with customers, and that must be right. But a company which blogs will be, it seems to me, a company which learns, individually and collectively, more than it would learn otherwise.

But of course there is a further potential benefit to blogging as self-education, I have already tried to illustrate with this posting by asking commenters to explain wiki to me. Commenters can help to educate you. Not all such help is truly helpful, but sometimes it can be very helpful indeed.

I would be delighted to hear about any other bloggers who have used blogging as part of their effort to further their own education. I would not be surprised if a consensus were to emerge here, or to have emerged from a comment-fest somewhere else of interest, along the lines of: this is (partly) what all bloggers are doing.

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Samizdata.net will probably be moving away from Moveable Type and to Expression Engine some time in the not too distant future. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has made this move with their own blog or who has experience using Expression Engine.

It has been obvious to us for a while that MT is groaning under the weight of Samizdata.net (the comments are agonisingly slow for example) and a full site rebuild now takes about 4 hours! We really do need to move on to something better!

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David Sucher seems to like to have the last word on his blog City Comforts, and as it is his blog, he gets to call the tune and delete comments as he sees fit. That said, his claim that he only deletes comments which do not have real e-mail addresses is simply untrue. Nevertheless, his blog, his rules. Fair enough, we set our comment editorial policy here on Samizdata.net as we see fit too.

I took Sucher to task for what seemed to me to be some vindictive comments aimed at Jackie D, one of the Samizdatistas, regarding comments over on Harry's Place and on his own blog that were started off by Dick Cheney's indelicate words on the US Senate floor. My final comment on David Sucher's blog was deleted, so... this one's for you, David:

I am, as you point out, a 'libertarian' (for what of a better word. I prefer 'liberal' myself, or even 'social individualist'), so the reference to 'statism' cannot be put aside. However the fact there are indeed a great many libertarian jackasses is not germane at all.

The use of the term statist in my comment is to demonstrate that I (like Jackie) regard both parties as odious and largely interchangeable thieves, and therefore the issue of Cheney telling someone to "go fuck themselves" is, to me, not a very damaging uses of language in a legislature. I wish all they ever did was curse at each other, but alas they do eventually get down to the serious business of administering looting rights. So for me, it is all rather a non-issue for the same reasons Jackie indicated.

Both here and on Harry's blog you commented "It's obviously not the saying of "fuck yourself" which is the issue"... but you are quite incorrect as Jackie makes clear that is *indeed* the issue she is talking about, not Dick Cheney.

As she was defending the use of "Go fuck yourself" when appropriate, rather than Dick Cheney himself, it seems that her disinclination to get into what I have described as a partisan 'two minute hate', adding to the chorus of "Oh those wicked Republicans", was what incurred your ire and intemperate language. We all have tetchy days on our blogs but you do yourself no credit given the length you seem to have gone to to pick a fight with her.

So I am not holding "feeling better" as a standard for public behaviour because for me the issue is *your* behaviour, not Dick Cheney's.

With due regard.

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A few weeks ago when we culled the so-called race realists (neo-fascist racists) that were camping in Samizdata.net's comment section, it became clear to me that if you let ill mannered loud mouths use your venue to try and shout down discourse and endlessly turn unrelated topics to their pet thesis, all you do is attract more ill mannered loud mouths who will do the same.

Everyone has their techy days in the comment section but when a person makes a habit of being obnoxious and immune to rational argument, I see no reason to indulge them or tolerate them. This is not a forum and this is not a chat room, it is a blog, which is quite different. Many blogs do not even have comment sections.

When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, "Oh but that is censorship if you stop them". Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property... but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is 'democratic' these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our 'problem commenters' tend to spring.

Some cannot see that they are not being 'censored' because of whatever their views are, any more than a man who gets on a table in a restaurant, drops his draws and starts calling for the darkies to be thrown out of Britain or for the middle class to have their homes confiscated is being 'censored' when he gets thrown out by a bouncer for being an jackass.

If I have any regrets it is that I have been too indulgent of endlessly poorly argued and often off topic drivel posted by a small minority of serial commenters in the past. I have no objection to vocal dissent from the 'Samizdata.net world view' (whatever that is), I just object to a constant stream of unsupported contentions delivered by megaphone that makes no attempt to actually engage in discourse. We have lots of dissenters who comment here regularly that I would not dream of banning.

So yes, there is a new hard line. Trolls and blogroaches will not be indulged and will be ejected rather swifter in future.

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Nick Denton of Gawker, Gizmodo (etc. etc.) fame is perhaps the best known face on the commercial blog scene and certainly the most quoted these days. I also think he is quite incorrect in his understanding of why people read blogs, which means I think his business model is not one I would care to follow myself. Do I think all of what the redoubtable Denton does is wrong? No, not at all, but I do not really think the foremost advocate of blogging-for-business really understand blogs that well and I do not think he understand the blogosphere at all.

Most people do not look at something because they want to have advertisements shoved in front of them. Old style 'interruption marketing' might work when people have few options, say just a few TV channels, and are willing therefore to accept advertising as the 'price' for something else they value, but what Nick Denton seems to be saying is that there are lots of people who actually like reading ad-copy and will read blogs that are just well packaged advertisements (or 'advertainment' if you prefer) when the Internet is awash with places giving content away and doing no such thing. I simply do not believe that is true. Yet I do believe that there is a role for commercial blogging.

People read blogs to get a different perspective, even if they do not always agree with it. If people want to read a blog which is largely advertisement dressed up in well written urban hip and blog-speak rather begs the question, why would such a person not just stick to established media channels which are filled with endless marketing? Are blog readers really so dim as to not pick out the fact they are just being handed the same old interruption marketing message dressed up in a slightly different way?

I think for a commercial blog to succeed, it must do the same thing as a successful non-commercial blog, and that means it must be interesting and credible to its audience. In fact I would say a blog is a 'credibility machine'. To use the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a blog must speak with the author's authentic voice if it is to be believed... and it is a rare company indeed who can be authentic if all people hear from them is what their marketing and PR department say.

For a companies and other institutions to blog successfully, and people like Macromedia, The Adam Smith Institute, Microsoft and others do indeed blog successfully, then they actually have to speak in ways that are a long way from a press release that has been carefully worded by the PR department, and a million miles away from copy produced by an advertising agency. No one actually believes that crap any more and sticking it on a blog just makes it stand out like poop on a pool table.

No, if a company wants to blog, it needs to decide that it wants to be forthright and talk to people like human beings... if you have desirable or difficult or complex products and have interesting things to say about them, people might actually be interested in hearing what you have to say if you can convince them you are not just parroting the same old sales pitches served up for the Google Generation.

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When I am not lurking and posting here in Samizdata.net, I earn my daily crust selling blogging expertise to companies via The Big Blog Company. Business seems to be picking up as increasing numbers of people in boardrooms are getting more clueful about what a blog (or blogs) can do for them, and so... we are looking for a couple people who might be interested in helping out on an independent, project by project basis.

London location would be ideal - face-to-face just has so much higher bandwidth - but we would certainly consider working virtually with someone more or less anywhere provided they have broadband. Our tech guru Henry spells out here what he would like.

1. Efficient in HTML/XHTML and CSS in order to work out advanced mock-ups that we will provide, understand them quickly and 'translate' them into actual code - in the most effective and accurate way (under our guidance and with the help of our specifications of course).
2. Ideally, we're looking for somebody who can look at the mock-up, and perceive the most efficient underlying HTML/CSS structure, with as little explanation as possible - although we will provide instructions. However, it will just make things much easier if he/she can look at the mock-up and have a feel for how the code should be structured.

3. He/she should also be able to manage gracefully - again, with our input if needed and under our supervision - the slight inevitable differences that exist between the graphical mockup and the final display in the browser(s) window, in compliance with the original design.

   In any case, we will handle and provide each and every graphic element to be part of the design, and we will manage as needed any subsequent editing or addition of graphics all along the development process. Therefore, he/she doesn't really need to be a Photoshop guru, as we will spare him/her image editing work.

4. A reasonable understanding of PHP and Javascript, in order to painlessly implement scripting within the (X)HTML code he/she will produce. We're open to any kind of proposition as far as scripted features and solutions are concerned, but this is not something he/she should have to worry about on a regular basis, as we will provide the said scripts, and the instructions to implement them.
5. A swift understanding of the CMS(s) we will be using and coding for. His/her expertise on both points 1 and 2 should be enough for him/her to learn quickly whatever software we are (or will be) using, but any preliminary knowledge of the way most CMS templates are usually structured will be a definite plus.
6. Flexible enough to adapt and produce code according to our guidelines and conventions (for the most part, we’re following XHTML recommendations: all tags and attributes in lowercase, quotes around attributes’ values, closing tags, etc.).

   Ideally, we would favor somebody who codes 'by hand' (the 'Notepad School' as opposed to the Dreamweaver one) but ultimately, we'll leave it to him/her, as far as he/she can provide us with clean and optimized code, that complies with our specifications (and mind you ladies and gentlemen, someone will be watching).

   Also, I think Firefox and Web (would-be) standards are cool. No, really.

   Having said that, I know that (somewhere between) 80 to 90% of the people out there surf the web with various flavors of Internet Explorer. I have no intention to lecture them, snub them or Javascript-Alert them to change their browser (and face it: unless you're a sleazy authoritarian, you can't shoot them either) even if I could, even if they would (when asked politely)… and even if I didn't thought IE is a great browser anyway. Consequently, my policy is fairly simple: I'll stick to the aforementioned standards up to the point where it makes no sense to stick to them, and I expect the same from our code assistant.

   Producing code that fully validates is brilliant, congratulations and kiss the bride for me, but if it breaks up in 80% of the people's browsers, then as far as I am concerned it does not validate. Sorry.

   We have a job to do, and the last thing we need is a techno-bigot Code Evangelist that yells 'Vade Retro Microsoft' every other sentence. We're looking for a pragmatic professional with a solid sense of reality and who understands that between 'standards' for a happy few percent of users and Word crippled HatcheTML there is a quite wide and acceptable margin of operation.

   Life is about compromises and stuff, or so they say.

7. Any delivered code has to be rigorously and intelligibly commented, as our code assistant shall always keep in mind that somebody may have to (will) work on the code he/she produces in the future, and should be able to do so as painlessly and quickly as possible.

   In the same spirit, strict naming conventions will be used consistently for files, directories/site structure, templates and CSS selectors. We'll expect him/her to follow them conscientiously.

   If not, we'll feed him/her to the most aggressive member of the staff (no names, you know who you are anyway) for the lasting entertainment of the others and the benefit of peanut and popcorn sellers.

8. In a more general way, we're truly looking for an assistant. He/She will specifically code what we will design, and therefore will only have to care about his/her code. He/she will be spared the tribulations of decision making and will sleep blissfully at night, ye lucky son/daughter of a lady-of-negotiable-virtue.

   To that end, he/she will have to work in close collaboration with the Head of the Design Department, (who incidentally doesn't live in a jar filled with formaldehyde solution and happens to own the rest of a body), who really is a nice and easy going guy and a great bloke to get drunk with, while being someone you would definitely introduce to your Mom.

   However, like the rest of you fallible humans, he is afflicted with a limited patience, a well established (albeit fairly adaptable) conception of How Things Should Be Done in his own field (that might appear a bit 'rigid' sometimes), and in the specific context of this Call for a Coder, a strong understanding of Who Runs The Show and gets to say the last word on design/code wide issues (namely him).

   And bear in mind I should know about him, because it's me.

1. Ideally, we're looking for somebody who would be able to manage both design and coding aspects of a project, albeit with a stronger emphasis (and expertise) on coding. Let's say two third web developer, one third web designer.

   He/she can code (X)HTML/CSS in his/her sleep and is at an advanced level at least in PHP/Javascript (any extra competencies/mastered languages are of course welcome). A strong understanding of the Dark Mysteries of MySQL wouldn't hurt as well.

2. On design considerations: It's definitely okay if he/she is not the Next Big Thing on the art/graphic design field as far as he/she is able to produce good looking, elegant and professional blog/website designs -- with our input when or if needed. Maybe not a graphic design pro (remember that’s just one third) but at least an 'enlightened amateur'.

   On the technical side of graphics, my policy is: When it comes to graphics optimization, broadband doesn’t exist. If we can gain that extra 0.2 Kb on a .gif or a .jpg simply by moving the cursor one notch down while maintaining top visual quality, then go for it. There’s no such thing as a small gain.

   He/she should therefore have that sense of balance and quality demanding spirit. The first and authoritative judgment is that of the eye, as we will always be aiming at top quality graphics. We don’t want fuzzy gifs and grubby jpegs (and I mean we f****** don't), but the more we can reduce file sizes, the better.

   Having said that, the 'graphics intensive' projects will be (usually) the prerogative of the Easy Going Guy Who Doesn't Live in a Jar.

3. Although he/she will regularly answer to both the Design and the Sales department and get their validation all along the development process, he/she should be able to manage the project(s) in a fairly independent way. He/she will have to conceive and design, make structural and aesthetical decisions and create the final product. No blissfully sleep at night, but there are other rewards anyway.
4. Independent doesn’t mean 'loner', so he/she should be able to work with the other members of the Design Dept. whenever a project requests it - and in full awareness of #6, par. 2nd and 3rd of course. Ahem.
5. He/she will be a 'self-maintained cutting edge pro' in his/her field. Additionally, we do hope he/she’ll never hesitate to share the relevant part of the knowledge he/she'll gain that way, in order for all of us to move forward and stay ahead of the curve.
6. Generally speaking, we're indeed looking for a web developer with a strong emphasis on design, able to work in parallel with me on separate projects, or complementarily on common projects where both our strong points would marvel and leave the competition flabbergasted, in disarray and ultimately deeply demoralized.

   And then we would live happily ever after.

We would and we will.

Still wanna work with us? Serious enquiries and CVs/résumés should be e-mailed to pdeh at bigblog dot net.

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… and the reason I was listening to Radio 4 (see below) was to hear one of my favourite programmes, which is called Quote Unquote.

Some recycled quotes, then.

Apparently, a newspaper whose name I did not catch had on the front at the top, everyday, the following slogan:

As independent as resources permit.

I requote this in my turn because (a) I like it, and because (b) I think it says a great deal about blogging.

This was supplied by Simon Jenkins, who then went on to say that he "used to be" a pompous reporter, which also made me laugh. He did later somewhat redeem himself in my ears by reporting this motorway sign:

Emergency toilets 25 miles.

I guess emergency toilets, like newspaper independence, occur as often as resources permit.

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The furore over blog publishing software Movable Type's new licence arrangements continues to send shockwaves across the blogosphere. As it happens we were considering moving away from MT to a different php based content management system for Samizdata.net anyway (and we certainly will now)... but I think that what is really interesting about this incident is that trackback has truly come of age.

Like many very thoughtful bloggers, I think SixApart have just taken their best weapon, pointed it right at their foot and pulled the trigger.

But what really interests me is that the storm of hostile trackbacks have provided SixApart with magnificent and unequivocal information on what their market really thinks. The business implications for spontaneous feedback like that are almost inestimable. Of course that does not mean SixApart will correctly respond to the explosion at the core of their business model, but the fact is that the information they need to do exactly that has just landed on them in a very helpful and rather spectacular manner.

Trackback has come of age. It is now an indispensable feature for any commercially oriented blog.

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If reading about the failing of Robert Fisk and being hunted in a pub by 'peace' activist harridans if your cup of tea (it certainly is mine), then you could do worse than read the compelling and pleasingly off-beat Blog Irish:

Having exhausted her ignorance on the subject of Eamo, she suggested that we discuss the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We suggested that after five pints that was probably not a good idea.

With no further ado, she started screeching at the top of her lungs at us. We walked to the other end of the pub, and she followed, still screeching. The pub patrons and staff took no notice whatsoever. She left, and returned five minutes later with five angry women who were apparently going to show us the error of our ways. They searched through the pub, and though we were sitting near the entrance, affected not to see us, and left.

It is a funny old world.

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The Adam Smith Institute's blog has moved, so update your links to:

www.adamsmith.org/blog

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This story is already being well bounced around the blogosphere. Let me give it another bounce. Here is what Jacob Sullum of Reason online says:

Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking. That jaw-dropping outcome illustrates two sadly familiar side effects of the war on drugs: the injustice caused by mandatory minimum sentences and the suffering caused by the government's interference with pain treatment.

Paey, a 45-year-old father of three, is disabled as a result of a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis. Today, as he sits in jail in his wheelchair, a subdermal pump delivers a steady, programmed dose of morphine to his spine. But for years he treated his pain with Percocet, Lortab (a painkiller containing the narcotic hydrocodone), and Valium prescribed by his doctor in New Jersey, Steven Nurkiewicz.

Insane.

I got to this by going to Instapundit and then to National Review.

War on drugs: insane; the blogosphere: sane.

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I can report a successful semi-transition to my new position in Dallas, Texas, where I am on the legal staff of a large health care system. I am still very much in transition, but once our house sells in Wisconsin things should settle down and allow me to get back to regular blogging.

I had thought I might be able to shed the pseudonym when I landed in a new place. I do not like pseudonyms, but in my former position I was doing political work for clients, a business where where publicly held strong opinions of my own would be both a professional liability and a disservice to my clients. I expect to be doing political work for my new organization, so at this point it seems prudent to keep the pseudonym.

Still, I hope to hook up with the du Toits (and any other Dallas-area Samizdata readers) soon. Just let me get my concealed carry license first.

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Anyone who frequents our comment sections can hardly have failed to notice that several of our serial commenters are profoundly collectivist racists who like to call themselves 'race realists' whilst at the same time affecting implausible pretensions to be supporters of liberty. Fortunately this does not seem to fool anyone if the reactions of other commenters are anything to go by. A person may hold whatever prejudices they wish but when they make it clear they value their notions of the good of some collective volk over the rights of individuals to pursue inter-racial relationships, and would use the state to give those notions the force of law, it should be clear that person has little conception of what 'liberty' means.

Now as this blog is private property, we can delete comments and/or outright ban people for no better reason than the editorial pantheon simply feels like it. Although we do not use pre-publish comment moderation, just as a newspaper editor can publish (or not) whatever letters are in keeping with the mores of the publication in question, we too have that right post-publish and we do indeed occasionally exercise it when we delete unwelcome comments from spammers or blogroaches.

However although we are within our rights to handle our comment section as we wish, we dislike excluding contrary views to those expressed in our articles unless we see a very good reason to do so. Whilst reader comments are an optional adjunct to blogging (many highly successful blogs do not have them at all), at Samizdata.net we do indeed appreciate the contribution commenters make and thus are loath to over-manage what they write, provided a reasonable degree of civility and topicality to the article are observed.

However when collectivist racists start using Samizdata.net to consistently promote an agenda, and are condescending and misogynistic to boot, it is time to show them the door without any insincere regrets. Now I realise that given the personalities involved, this will be seen as proof of the irrefutability of their positions regardless of the fact they have repeatedly had the sand kicked out of them intellectually on many occasions by some very insightful people. To put it bluntly, I am not unduly concerned and a certain Monty Python episode comes to mind.

For me as editor the final straw was hearing that one of our contributors was loath to write on certain topics because of the near certainty that the discussion would be immediately hijacked with the same flawed but stridently put arguments that had been convincingly demolished time and time again in earlier comment threads. Although I always urge our contributing writers, the Samizdatistas, not to actually write with comments in mind but rather what is on their mind, this for me was intolerable and more or less mandated action on my part. Henceforth comments by the people in question will be summarily deleted from the blog.

As you might surmise, I am not writing this article for the people who are being banned from commenting but rather for other readers whose opinions (and disagreements) I value more highly, and also for the Samizdata.net contributors as both an ex cathedra editorial policy statement and a not uninteresting discussion point on the nature of blogs such as Samizdata.net and internet discussion generally in its varied forms.

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Alice Bachini has decided to bring her blogging career to an end. At least for now.

I really have got to the end of the blogging phase that started a year and a half ago when I created this blog under the old title you can still see if you look up the stats. I've said everything I wanted to say here, met lots of interesting people and had a huge amount of fun. And now my creativity is going into new demanding projects and as a blogger I've run out of anything original to say.

I am sure she has not run out of original things to say because people like Alice seldom do. However, operating a solo-blog is a demanding and time-intensive business and, if there are other things that she wants to do with her life then I can sympathise with the need to boldly prioritise.

She intimates that she might return to blogging at some point in the future and I certainly hope she does. The blogosphere, particularly the British end of it, needs all the voices of reason it can get.

As a parting gift, her final (if indeed it proves to be 'final') entry consists of a fulsome and righteous rant:

It's fine to blow people up if your cause is anti-Americanism. Only capitalists should be pacifists: because that way, they will lose the war. Evil fucking hypocritical bastards. Every single one of them should go and live in a country whose values they actually support. But I suppose they don't want to strap pretend bombs to their kids, give them machine guns and parade them in the streets.

In the traditions of good performers everywhere, she has left us all wanting more.

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A good many of the Australian bloggerati (including Scott Wickstein and myself) attended a fine blogger bash in Melbourne over the weekend. A splendid evening was had by all, and photos have been put up in various other places, but there was just one additional thing I have to share with the world.

This is Tim Blair.

Notice the glass of the pale coloured yellowy stuff in his hand. Tim spent the whole evening drinking chardonnay. He made some feeble excuse about how is is trying to reclaim chardonnay for capitalism, but I was not entirely convinced about his protestations. He did, after all drink a lot of chardonnay. In fact he couldn't stop.

Could the whole Right Wing Death Beast thing be an act, when Tim has such an extreme characteristic of the enemy? I am fearful.

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In response to a couple of kind inquiries from readers, a quick update on my personal situation. The job search grinds on, although I am getting some good interviews. Later this week I go to Dallas to interview for a position I would very much like to land. Home to Texas! Spin a prayer wheel for me.

My visit a few weeks ago to the Minneapolis gun show was semi-productive. I got to handle a number of pistols, and pretty well settled on a 4-inch barrel, single stack .45 as the kind of gun I will eventually purchase to carry. The Kimber was veerry nice, but pricey, as was the Springfield. The HK USP Compact may just carry the day, though. Sadly, more research will be needed, more gun shops will be visited, and a regular paycheck will need to be found, before this issue is closed.

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Spotted at Samizdata.net HQ, a well known Samizdatista demonstrates multi-tasking...

... he may well have also been touch-typing on a laptop under the table using his toes.

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Although it is more or less a policy of mine to not write directly about comments made regarding Samizdata.net articles, it is a policy occasionally worth ignoring.

Many commenters have reacted poorly to David Carr's article AZNAR KNEW!!!. Whilst it is the readers prerogative to judge articles here as they see fit, I must disagree with some of the views put forward that it was an inappropriate article at a time of such truly hideous moment. I do not say so out of an urge to 'circle the wagons' but rather because many of the commenters are fine people whose opinions are of value to me. And because I think they are quite wrong, I feel I must say why, as Chief Editor of Samizdata.net, that I am delighted David wrote such a piece and published it now.

It is a 'humorous' article in so far as satire is an appeal to humour, but that does not mean David is laughing at what happened. Just as Jonathan Swift was not laughing at the Irish famine when he penned A modest proposal, so too is David drawing attention to something deadly serious.

It is at times like this when we most need to pour scorn on the people who are, by virtue of their world views, indirectly part of the problem. This hideous and evil act must be met with force and implacable resistance... and it is that sort of response that the people who are the targets of David's satire will work tirelessly to prevent.

All David is doing is shining a light on them and now, not later, is the time to do that. The fact that what David wrote is close to the bone is what makes it effective. Why? Because it is only a few degrees off the non-satirical screeds we will actually be reading in a few days.

Now of all times, while the stench of death and horror are fresh in Madrid, it is right to point out that some well meaning people's views, and some not so well meaning, are nothing less than an apologia for mass murderer. Ideas have consequences and that it what David was writing about.

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Übersportingpundit, the Australian based sports blog to which Brian Micklethwait, David Carr, and myself also contribute, has been down for a couple of days because the domain name expired without being renewed. Normally I think one should laugh at someone whose domain expires the way you would laugh at someone whose car has run out of petrol, but blogmaster Scott Wickstein assures me that he did not receive a renewal notice. (Perhaps it was swallowed by a spam filter or something). In any event, for those who have noticed, the site is back up. As a bonus, non-Australian readers can read and take pleasure in the fact that the Australian cricket team is not doing so well in its first test match against Sri Lanka.

Also, we should observe that Scott has suffered so much from the loss of his blog that he has been driven to writing guest posts for Samizdata. So give him some sympathy.

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Not long ago, our beloved David Carr did a characteristic posting here entitled The joys of pessimism.

Here is how David ended that posting:

I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.

As he constantly is, I am sure you would all agree.

I remembered this while I was dipping today into Hitler and Churchill – Secrets of Leadership by Andrew Roberts.

Here is what Roberts says, on p. 93 of my 2003 hardback edition, about Winston Churchill's wartime leadership:

'Long dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us,' he warned in an especially bleak radio address. 'Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted. We must be inflexible.' One man who immediately recognised the strategy behind Churchill's dismal honesty was Joseph Goebbels. 'His slogan of blood, sweat and tears has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack,' wrote the Nazi propaganda chief in a magazine article entitled 'Churchill's Tricks'. 'He is like the doctor who prophesies that his patient will die and who, every time his patient's condition worsens, smugly explains that he prophesied it.' By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full propaganda value of their victories. They could not wreck national morale if Britons had already heard the worst from the Prime Minister himself.

So now we know. David is really trying to cheer us all up.

 

The bulldog breed

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There is an interesting article by Peaches Geldof about the perils of being a little bit too free and easy with one's innermost thoughts on-line.

Mandatory reading for all Journal Bloggers!

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One of the many things I love about novelist Ayn Rand is her idealistic view of the human form, especially when shorn of its drag-down weight of socialist commitment. This view of humanity is best portrayed, I think, in her stunning short book, Anthem, especially when Randian hero Equality 7-2521 is described by his lover, Liberty 5-3000, as being beautiful. Equality 7-2521 then re-christens himself Prometheus, after the Greek deity who created mankind in the image of the Gods.

Anthem is a marvellous book, and I'm glad to see that Boston airport's Terminal E shopping mall was carrying so many copies, on a recent visit to the socialist wonderland of Massachusetts. You very rarely see this lesser-known Randian masterpiece in UK bookshops.

What you also rarely see on blogs like Crooked Timber, another socialist wonderland, is an acknowledgement that mankind is of itself a wonderful thing. With a site name based directly on the Kantian principle that mankind is intrinsically flawed, its thirteen professors of economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology, work to the premise that we feeble creatures of mankind need an overarching social democratic system to live by, as a consequence of our crookedness. Oh, how Ayn Rand would have applauded this use of Kantian philosophy.

And who better to create and rule over this overarching system of social democracy than these very same supermen. They inhabit a Byzantine mirror-world to Samizdata, composed of obscure left-wing papers, unreadable left-wing books, and oxymoronic left-wing position pieces, most of them funded from the immorality of taxation via the state-worshipping gravy trains of various Anglospheric Universities.

As well as being stuck in the trough of government supported research grants, they also seem to have got themselves stuck in the 1980s. Witness this quote from a recent post, Making sense with Marx:

Sasha Volokh cries out for some intelligent Marxist analysis in the blogosphere - right on!

Intelligent Marxist analysis? Crikey. Who'da thunk it?

Before you decide this quote is a pre-Berlin Wall fall parody, in the style of the 1980s BBC comedy cult programme, The Young Ones, if you read the rest of the piece you'll realise the poster is quite serious.

Here on Samizdata, of course, we already know the only good thing you can do to your typical 'Intelligent Marxist Analyst'. And that's to put them on a plane to Pyongyang, in North Korea, to visit Mr Micklethwait's hilarious cream cheese skyscraper, and to hopefully stay there in that starving concentration camp hell, on a one-way ticket. But no matter.

Crooked Timber is often acknowledged as being the most powerful and most widely read blog on the other side of the political street from Samizdata. But what I love about it is that whenever they post such pieces about Marxism, they often get shredded by libertarian sharks and other barracuda sympathetic to our viewpoint. [Just check the comments to the piece above.]

Their only defences become personal insults and unquoted references to long-winded treatises written by their state-paid University chums, usually only available in a University politics department near you. The actual argument is rarely attended to.

Being an eternal optimist, this gives me great hope. Because although there are many minds possibly lost forever on the other side of the fence, if their self-appointed intellectual vanguard keep being rendered speechless by these walls of reasoned anti-Marxist argument, whenever they pass comment outside the confines of the Marxist hate shops, it may be that we are holding our own in an early twenty-first century war of ideology. At best, we may even be beginning to turn the tide.

Yes, I know, I'm far too much the optimist, and we're still like Socrates against the Athenian social democratic mob. But I have to preserve my sanity, in some way, here in David Blunkett world.

And yes, it may take many more decades before we eventually triumph, but one of my favourite Randian ideas is that to beat these people we need first of all to clear them off the ideological battlefield, and then to get them scurrying away into miserable defeated holes. So to all those fine libertarians out there who do regularly patrol sites like Crooked Timber to perform this arduous and thankless task, particularly Micha Ghertner of Catallarchy.net, I salute you. Ladies and Gentlemen, you are doing sterling work. Please, keep it up.

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Cecile du Bois is getting grief at her school for opposing affirmative action. Her teacher asked her what she thought about it, and Cecile told her the truth. She is against it. And for that, she got all the grief.

And I'm not complaining, I am merely expressing my frustration with the atmosphere of being "weird, and going against the flow". My very own friend advises me not to speak my mind if I am going to offend anyone. And yes I did, I poured it all out, given the opportunity because the discussion was on womens rights and for some reason my teacher asked me if I agreed with affirmative action. Does affirmative action relate to womens rights? Not in my world it does. I guess in her world where being against illegal immigration and calling African-Americans "black" are racist, it does. Well, if asked a question, I am compelled to answer honestly. My mother suggested I could have asked her what it had to with Mary Wollstonecraft, but I was so flustered by her laughter at me, I replied. I said "No". And did that cause commotion!

Go to Cecile's blog and read the whole thing.

I can just about understand (although I despise) the way that Cecile's classmates (if that is the right word) are treating Cecile, but some way ought to be found of communicating to Cecile's 'teacher' that she is now being deservedly trashed for profoundly unprofessional conduct on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and everywhere else in the world where the blogosphere counts for anything if this posting has the desired effect.

Isn't education supposed to encourage people to tell the truth and to stick up for their ideas? Someone she can not manipulate and ridicule should also tell this Grade A Bitch of a teacher that there are impeccably non-racist arguments against affirmative action, like: affirmative action exposes all those people from ethnic minorities who do get ahead to the accusation that they are only did well because they were given an unfair advantage, even if they actually got ahead entirely on their own merits and by their own efforts. Affirmative action encourages racism, in other words. Hasn't this ignorant woman even heard of this line of argument?

And even if she has not, she has no damned business encouraging all her other pupils to pick on one pupil, just for expressing an opinion, honestly and courageously.

If you agree with me about this, please do at least one of the following things.

1. Add a short comment to Cecile's own blog, supporting and sympathising, and do it now. Warning: when I tried to do a quite long comment I came up against a thousand character limit, so don't try to write at too great length. Something short and nice, and soon.
2. If you are yourself a blogger, then write about this thing yourself, and link to this posting. Link to Cecile's blog as well, of course, but the particular advantage of linking to this piece is that the number of linkers will be automatically counted and announced here, and people reading this will be able to swing straight over to your blog, and then link to you themselves. I'm going to do a piece about this on my Education Blog just as soon as I can.
3. Put a supportive comment here as well, especially if you want to say something that makes use of more than a thousand characters. Cecile will definitely get to read it because I've already promised this posting in my comment at her blog.

It is not strictly relevant to the rights and wrongs of how she is now being (mis)treated, but since it may cheer her up, I will add it anyway. In my opinion Cecile is a terrific writer, and very possibly destined for literary superstardom. (She is certainly obeying rule number one for being a writer, which is to Live Interestingly, and rule number two, which is to get started with Living Interestingly good and early.) Be sure to scroll down, past all her links to other people, to the links to her own archives and previous postings. I particularly enjoyed her description of going to the movies with her Dad and brother, which Cecile's Mum also liked. LOR: LOL.

If only for coining the phrase prostitute college, Cecile du Bois is destined for world fame sooner or later.

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As a few (very few) kind emailers have noticed, I have been pretty much out of circulation the last couple of months. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, there just isn't much going on that has caught my eye. We are seeing a bunch of pre-existing patterns play out, with little new in such arenas as the Iraqi war or domestic US politics. Its all blah blah blah, same old same old. Bush lied, Halliburton is a bunch of crooks, you are all helpless victims of the corporations, etc. ad nauseum, but very little new in the way of facts to move the discussion forward, really. I find the Democratic primaries intensely uninteresting - none of the candidates will do anything to make the US a freer, more vibrant society, so a pox on all of 'em. If GWB ever does anything on the domestic front that I approve of, you will be the first to know, but don't hold your breath. I certainly won't.

Second, my apathy toward current events probably has a lot to do with the fact that I have been laid off (Friday is my last day), and have been spending most of my energy scratching for a new position. The circumstances of my departure (law firm political backstabbing) are guaranteed to produce a jaundiced attitude in even the most callous of self-reliant free-marketeers, which has doubtless colored my view of the larger world.

One ray of sunshine - the Wisconsin Senate voted last week to overturn the Governor's veto of a concealed carry bill. The even more Republican Assembly has it calendared for today, which they wouldn't do unless they also have the votes to overturn (barring an outbreak of utter incompetence from Assembly leadership, a possibility I wouldn't dismiss out of hand). So, it looks like Wisconsin will legalize concealed carry at the exact instant that I lack the funds to score a new gun. Bah.

Speaking of which, suggestions from the commentariat on concealed carry guns are hereby solicited. I have one, and only one, non-negotiable requirement - .45 only. No Europellets, no marketing department hybrid calibers like the .40, just good old, puts-big-holes-in-people, .45s for this Samizdatista.

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One of the most welcome commenters in my part of the blogosphere, including here of course, is Mark Holland. So it was a great pleasure to learn, some few weeks ago, that he now has his own blog, called Blognor Regis, which is the name of a famous English seaside town plus an L. Take a look. What can you lose?

It definitely is a libertarian blog, let there be no doubt about that. When he mentions car tax, for instance, he says there ought not to be any. But when I went looking for further items of libertarian holy writ that has not yet sunk into the archives I found almost nothing else that was really hard core. He does not hit you over the head every day with his libertarianism, in other words.

Nor does Richard Garner's new blog, which I heard about by reading Blognor Regis, but that is because Richard seems to post less frequently than Mark Holland does. Otherwise, Richard Garner's Thoroughly Enthralling Weblog could hardly be more different. This is a blog with long quotes (scroll down to "EDUCATION (HEALTH CARE, FOOD, ADEQUATE HOUSING... ADD GOOD OR SERVICE AS YOU FEEL APPROPRIATE - IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT" - January 25 - blogger archiving ...) from hard core libertarian luminaries, world famous and not so world famous. Hairs are split. Doctrinal purities are distilled still more. Libertarian colours are nailed to the mast and carried into battle. Peace movement people ("PEACE AND THE STATE" - also Jan 25), for instance, are politely and patiently told why, if they believe some of their more benign slogans, they ought to follow the logic of them a little further and be libertarians rather than statists.

This is the kind of thing I used to do but – and I intend no disrespect here – have now lost the taste for. Like playing international rugby or going out on all night drinking sprees, debating the ins and outs of libertarianism and libertarian doctrine, against anti-libertarians and with fellow libertarians is, I feel, a young man's game, and yes I think I do mean man. And as I enter my old woman phase of life, I find myself less inclined towards it, in writing at any rate. (I just did a spot on Radio Humberside about the merits of privately owned public space, and I suddenly sounded to myself about a quarter of a century younger. I sounded, that is to say, like Richard Garner.)

In pre-Internet days, both of these gentlemen would either would have become regular contributors to the Libertarian Alliance or to something like it, or they would have been frustrated at not being able to do that because it was too much of a bother, what with them having to worry about whether someone like me would like their stuff enough to publish it. Now they can just blog. Beautiful. For both, I am sure that this is a huge liberation.

Such blogs as these may or may not immediately set the world alight, but they, and other blogs like them, are part of an immensely important process, and a huge step forward for the libertarian movement.

There are two important things about libertarian publishing, one of which is very widely understood by libertarians, and the other of which often has to be explained to libertarians in tortuous detail.

The obvious bit is the number of people who read the stuff. You want that to be as big as possible, of course you do.

But the unobvious bit is, if anything, far more important, and concerns the political and philosophical assumptions that are the basis of your publication, the things that you and your readers take as givens that do not have to be argued for every time you mention them in passing in a piece about something else (like how to do them, how to phrase them, or about car rallying). Running publications which have the assumptions built into their intellectual architecture that we want built into them is at least as important as building up mere circulation, and especially so if circulation is built by surrendering on key political and philosophical assumptions.

One thing is for sure. We libertarians will not command many ocean liners if we are not in the habit of launching dinghies and ferry boats and tramp steamers.

This is why I am so delighted when I see new libertarian blogs setting sail. They may not now be carrying many passengers, and perhaps they never will. But the value of pushing an ocean liner a tenth of a degree away from the bad direction it is travelling in (by getting a letter or article published in a mainstream media organ) is often exaggerated, and the value of sailing a much smaller craft in precisely the right direction tends to be underestimated. (I would not have spent two decades slogging away for the Libertarian Alliance if I believed otherwise.)

So, congratulations and very best wishes to – and another pair of links to – Blognor Regis and Richard Garner's Thoroughly Enthralling Weblog. To revert to the maritime metaphor one last time, God bless them and all who sale in them.

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Mark Steyn has been running his columns from the 1999 Clinton impeachment trial over at his website, and they are just priceless. The link is likely to rot soon (its not a permalink), so get it while it is hot!

A taste:

The intern has landed. She had, as is her wont, been keeping her head down, but on Saturday, at the behest of a federal judge, Monica Lewinsky returned to Washington for a "debriefing" with House managers (that means an interview, not that her thong’s been subpoenaed).

No larger point; just a pointer for the political junkies to some good stuff.

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As our regular readers will notice, Samizdata.net has had a major re-design and functional upgrade. The old site was great but things moves on and it was time for an upgrade. Take a moment to examine all the new options and links! Also see the revamped domain page and blogging glossary!

We would like to thanks thank the Dissident Frogman for his really great work.

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A new blog has made its way onto my short list of bookmarked blogs: Allah Is In The House. The funniest stuff going, bar none, and brutally incisive social commentary to boot! His periodic surveys of the news are just priceless.

R. C. says check it out.

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It would seem for the third time in my life I am to be granted the pleasure of visiting Benjamin Franklin's sceptred continental homeland. If there are any bloggers in the Boston MA area willing to show a certain tight-assed Brit where the tea was thrown overboard in the harbour, I am more than willing to buy them a drink, as we discuss the consequences of this immortal event.

Alternatively we can talk about the far more important merits of American beer versus British beer, if you can think of a bar suitable for such a debate!

If the US immigration service let me in, I should be at home in Massachusetts between the 26th and 29th of January.

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Glenn Reynolds blogs about a happy ending to the story of imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. This is very good news. The icing on the cake (the cake being release from prison) is that he credits blogs for playing key role in the events.

OJR [The Online Journalism Review]: So why do you think they let you go?

Motallebi: They didn't expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I'm an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I'm not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn't be strong pressure to release me... I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.

There will probably be much written and made of this (quite rightly). What caught my attention was this bit from the 'post-release' interview with Sina Motallebi.

At newspapers, an editor can change your article. They're [ed. Iranian authorities] afraid of Weblogs because in Iran we don't have the experience of an [open] society. We have a [closed] society. Weblogs are a good experience, where everyone can explain their ideas. And the government is very afraid of them.

...

Socially in Iran, we haven't experienced a [free] society where everyone can express their ideas. We don't experience the freedom of expression that much. But Weblogs give the opportunity to Iranians to speak freely and share their ideas, their views, and even the details of their personal lives.

Freedom of expression was also important for people talking about their personal life, especially for girls and women. That's the reason you see many Iranian females blogging now. Under Islamic rules, many things are prohibited for young people. Each week many Iranian youngsters are arrested only for going to a party or walking with a friend of the opposite sex. So normally, they can't even talk about their personal life. But online with their fake names, or in some cases their real names, they can mention their personal lives and experience freedom of speech.

The Bloggers of the World Unite!

Aargh! Typing this almost hurt and the instinctive reaction is one of: Over my dead body...but you get the drift.

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My friend Michael Jennings is looking for a job. At the top of his CV it says:

OBJECTIVE – Find a position taking advantage of my advanced quantitative and computational skills, business and financial knowledge, and expertise in telecommunications and media and use my ability to explain complex subjects to non-technical audiences.

Michael is a one man research department, which is a very cost-effective and useful thing for a person to be. If your company or enterprise is thinking of expanding into new areas, to take advantage of newly emerging trends, technological and/or political, you need someone like Michael to answer your questions, which are liable to be complicated and which must be answered correctly. Answering complicated questions correctly is what Michael does best.

Michael is the sort of person who is easily mistaken for a useless geek, but actually he is a very useful geek indeed. There are several reasons for this.

First, he speaks geek. If you want someone to translate to and from your geek department, he'd be excellent, but he hasn't gone native. He will listen carefully to the questions you are asking. He does not insist on deciding his own agenda and then spouting irrelevant facts all over you that you didn't want to know, on a subject of no interest to you. On the contrary, he will seize on your question like a dog who has been thrown a bone, and gnaw away at it until he has the answer.

Second, unlike an actual dog, he is a man of broad education and wide interests. He does not suffer from tunnel vision. There is a big world out there, and he knows a great deal about it. In one key respect, the quote from his CV above is deficient, because it implies an ability to function effectively only within his existing intellectual comfort zone. But on the contrary, when I have a question concerning some issue which has both a political complexity angle and a technological complexity angle, Michael is always my first port of call, whether he already knows all about it or not.

The obvious hostile question that has to be dealt with is: If he's so smart, how come he's unemployed?

Well, first, he can afford to be, at any rate for a while longer. In the aftermath of 9/11 he lost his previous job. (In an economically hesitant world, businesses become less curious about the big wide world out there.) But he'd been well paid and had received a generous financial settlement, so he could afford to do what he has done since, which was basically to travel and to learn.

What Michael really needs is for the world to be seeking him out with its questions. He needs to be head-hunted. He is not so great at getting out there and begging the world to ask him questions if it is not already bursting with the desire to do so. Nevertheless, the above process, though unwelcome, is under way, and he has already had one very juicy job offer. However, accepting it would mean working in Australia's rather dull capital city, Canberra, and Michael would prefer to work in (in descending order of preference): London, New York, Tokyo, another big US city like San Francisco or Los Angeles, Hong Kong. Although Michael is presently based in London, he is very keen on the idea of living in the US at some point in his life, and would be very interested in talking to American as well as British employers.

Answering the private questions of profit seeking enterprises is one obvious use of Michael's talents. Answering the questions of the general public, in public, by being a journalist would be another. Of all the writers I am personally acquainted with in the blogosphere, Michael strikes me as the one most likely to make the switch to becoming a paid writer. Once again, the key quality is his ability to focus on other people's questions, and not just his own. Someone with a great nose for a story but who is too busy or otherwise engaged to actually chase it up himself. That's the sort of boss Michael needs, and would handsomely reward.

If you want further evidence of Michael's powers of analysis and explication, you need only brouse through this list of his Samizdata postings. I think he writes particularly well for Samizdata. As a journalist, Michael would make a great "Your questions answered" columnist. Indeed, one way to get some more excellent Samizdata postings would simply be to email him with technical/political questions. Of the pieces he has already done here, I especially liked the ones about airline regulation, on supermarkets, and on mobile phones.

He also did a good piece on Transport Blog about the Channel Tunnel, and for Ubersportingpundit about the scheduling of international test cricket, and about the format of Rugby World Cup.

My experience of what happens when a network of friends makes a fuss of one of their number with a view to getting someone to help him in some way is that the most help usually then comes from the existing friends. The fuss helps, but only because it gets the minds of the friends focussed on what they themselves can do. However, if you are one of those ultra-well connected, super-highly paid, super-influential, silent readers, of the type who, we here like to think, reads this blog from time to time, in among all those commenters and other lesser mortals whom we inevitably also attract here, and you have or you know of a job which might suit Michael Jennings, please get in touch with him. In other words, please go ahead and prove me wrong.

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I'm going to be on the road again this month, so I don't know how much posting I'll be doing for a few weeks. It is the perk and the curse of being a freelance consultant. The upside is lots of travel and interesting people. The downside is lots of travel: sometimes three or even six months at a stretch away from home. The other downside is spending months at home between jobs with little to do but learn new and interesting ways of convincing the landlord not to put you out on the street.

This will be a short trip. I'll be doing a job in San Francisco for a week and then back to Manhattan for a few days before coming home. On the San Fran end I simply won't have time for anything - it will be 12 hour days netcasting a major business conference for which failure is not an option. As soon as we load out, we catch a Redeye flightback to the East Coast.

If any Manhattan bloggers are interested, I will have some free evening time there between January 16th and 22nd. (I have been known to frequent the Trad music haunts of the Lower East). If you miss me, don't worry all that much: I've a regular customer there and pass through once or twice in almost every year.

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As you may have noticed, the festive season has seriously interrupted Samizdata.net's usually inexhaustible flow of content... I expect our collective hangovers and Christmas bloat will start wearing off soon

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Nulabour MP and blogger Tom Watson, offers this inspirational Yuletide message to his readers:

Christmas is a dangerous time of the year. Tree lights send 350 of us to hospital each year. 1000 people suffer trimmings damage. 17 people died through christmas candle disaster. This, before you even get in the kitchen.

Gott in Himmel! Even during the festive season, Nulabour acolytes just cannot rein in, even temporarily, their neurotic impulse to lecture, hector and nanny. Bring back Scrooge. By comparison that crotchety old miser was a bundle of laughs.

It's Christmas. Revel. Have fun. Go crazy. Get drunk. Eat lots. Ride a motorbike. Have sex (while riding the motorbike). Go bungee jumping, deep-sea diving, shooting, hunting, caving, mountaineering and anything else you desire to give yourself a rush of heady adrenalin. Party on down, dudes and celebrate your lives.

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Neither Instapundit nor I stop for a little thing like Christmas, and he links to this piece by Jay Rosen, which quotes Frank Rich saying this, which I think is rather smart:

Rather than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960 debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was "the goofiest idea since the Hula Hoop."

And Frank Rich saying this also:

The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches.

I like that. It'll be extremely interesting to see what happens to the Dean campaign. That all suggests that it may do rather well. However, I saw a tiny glimpse of Dean on TV last night, on a BBC Newsnight report of his efforts, and both the BBC reporter and Dean's performance suggested to me that he's a crazed demagogue and that when he comes flapping out of the caves of the internet into the cold light of those "impromptu televised press conferences" that JFK started all those years ago, he'll crash and burn very quickly. But like I say, it'll be interesting to see.

Even if Dean himself has (metaphor switch warning force six) flown on the wings of the internet too close to the sun of real politics, he has certainly done a lot to give political credibility to the internet, blogs etc. And sadly, what that means is that there will soon be a zillion blogs out there, but that they won't be linking to the likes of this blog; they'll be linking to each other. I am about to be an even smaller fish in an even bigger pond. You can feel the word 'blog' and 'blogger' (the BBC also made much of Salam Pax) becoming something that everyone will soon understand and have an opinion about and which about half of everyone will have to have, like 'website' before it. Respectable political opinion has stopped ignoring the political impact of the internet and has switched to worrying about it.

"Weimarization" is the word I am hearing, although I can't recall where. The idea is that the internet is empowering the extremes. But that's only because the non-extremes aren't using it, and that's surely about to change. Indeed, I keep thinking that this 'the internet is predominantly conservative and libertarian' vibe is about to roll over and die. And in terms of sheer square yardage of verbiage, it probably already has. If we continue in any way to 'dominate', it will be (a) because our ideas and arguments are better, not because we merely proclaim more of them, and (b) because to the liberal left, a media system not biased in their favour – not owned or captured by them – feels like it's biased against them, even if all that's really happening is that anyone can now say what they want and read what they want.

That of course being one – and I speak as a libertarian rather than as a conservative now – of our ideas.

By the way, who exactly is Frank Rich?

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The blogosphere has been pulsating with comment and counter-comment about the dramatic events in Iraq over the weekend. My favourite comment of all on these events comes from Alice Bachini, who yesterday evening put up this posting, which I reproduce in its entirety, on her blog:

I've been away ...

... and unable to get to any media for the past 24+ hours. Did something happen?

Said her first commenter, of just two so far (but she likes friendly comments so do go over there and add a friendly comment) said:

Alice. We love you.

Indeed.

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And not before time either.

Yes, there is a new kid on the blog and one that I am sure is going to be mighty popular. It is called Eursoc, a blog set up and run by British and European anti-EU dissidents and dedicated to the sole task of exposing the horrors of the European Union.

Pay them a visit and extend them a big, warm, blogospheric welcome.

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Lawrance M. Bernabo, Amazon reviewer #2 with 6700 reviews behind him faces a Hamletesque (Hamletian?) dilemma:

To review, or not to review: that is the question:

Whether 'tis better to post reviews and cover

The pros and cons of action figures,

Or to write reviews about best sellers,

And by reviewing diss them? To critique: to review;

No more; and have a life again we end

The long-nights and the thousand misspeeled words

and buy things instead, 'tis a consumption

Amazon devoutley wish'd. To critique, to review;

To review: perchance be voted: Yeah, there's the fun;

For in those votes for reviews what ranking may come

Whence we may achieve a cute little badge,

Must make us crazed: such obsession

Surely makes such big time fun of reviewing life;

For who would bear the wit and scorns of posts,

The counter review, the second page oblivion,

The pangs of negative votes, posting delay,

The insolence of edits and revisions

The steady rise of the unworthy reviewer,

When anyone might their ascension make

With some extra accounts? who would freebies take,

To read and review someone’s new book,

But that the fun of something never reviewed,

The undiscover'd product for the nounce

No reviews critique, inspires the mind

And makes us rather review everything we have

Than review those things that we know not of?

Thus ranking does make competitors of us all;

And thus the constant cry re: ranking

Is debated o'er with constant call for reform,

And reviews of great length and insight

With words counts the elves judge too high,

Do lose the chance of posting.-- Submit you more!

Fair Amazon.com! Jeff, on thy pages

Be all my reviews spotlighted.

We conclude that he needs a blog. Now!

Via Many-2-Many

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On Sunday I had lunch with fellow former St Andrean, James Stanley. I explained blogging to him, and he seemed very interested in setting one up himself. Remarkably, he is already up and running. I should warn you that he is very much a libertine and owns a velvet smoking jacket (although these are quite common in St Andrews). So if you are very conservative, you may find his blog... er... distrubing. The name of his blog is The Permissive Society.

One of his first postings is about Peter Cuthbertson:

Peter Cutherbertson has been thinking about homosexuality. He seems concerned about the promotion of homosexuality in schools. He should relax. Straight people are not straight simply because the government tells them to be. Heterosexual sex is not a great chore that they would abandon if homosexual sex was easily available. They really do like the opposite sex. Believe it or not, letting gay people have the same rights as straight people will not mean that the species dies out.

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Long time readers may have noticed that I vanish from time to time. A week or two here; three months there and with rarely an explanation. Perhaps I owe you one and in particular to those who have been tossing the occasional virtual egg because I've not updated a certain graph.

I make my living as a freelance consultant, mostly on Linux based systems with which I have worked for nearly a decade. I do security checking, networking, administration, systems programming in whatever language people want. I sometimes do user applications. I design, purchase, and build racks of servers from components for special projects. I write system documentation and specifications. I do engineering design and analysis for complex systems and products. I take on pretty much anything 'high end' that has enough money and a long enough time line to soak up the learning curve. I rarely do the same thing twice.

When times are really bad, I have been known to pull out the Martin guitar and ring the local bar-owners and booking agents.

Sometimes, like this last spring, I spend months on the road. Other times, like the last two weeks, I telework. In either case "Have Laptop, Will Travel" is an appropriate motto for me. Perhaps a few of you know the original version of that line... but I'm not allowed to have one of those in the UK!

When work comes I have bills paid and my head down; when there are bad times... tuna and spaghetti do become boring. The other side of that tuppence is that I have loads of time to blog when I have no money; and barely time to read what others have written on my own blog when I've a contract on.

The last two weeks I've had a job on. The booking came quite in the nick of time, but I'll not go into the gory details of life on the edge. Consequently I've not been much heard from lately, and for the last week not at all.

What I do for a living is a very stark example of why borders are dead. These last two weeks I have been part of a subcontractor crew on a JP Morgan business conference in Boston. We did live webcasts of the financial reports of CEO's and CFO's of a large number of JP Morgan 'associated' companies - Google's CEO was among them - to fulfill SEC public disclosure requirements.

I sat here in my flat in Newtonabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast and worked with a team in the US. On the days of the setup and run, the crew was spread out over three locations in Manhattan, the hotel in Boston... and my flat in Northern Ireland.

Physical location has little meaning when you meet and work in cyberspace. Borders are a joke: they have been erased by the scouring terrabytes of global connectivity. I can be and work anywhere I want on this planet, any time I wish and noone can stop or question me.

True... no one in advanced societies is trying at present but even if they did they would have a very low chance of success. An attempt to control such international working would be an economic disaster in any case. If some State tried and succeeded the result would be a brain drain of massive proportions: "Would the last computer scientist over the border please turn off the data pipe?"

That is the deadly threat people like me hold over the State. I have distributed employment. I live where I like, not where I must. I am mobile. Screw with 'me' and you lose 'me'. I use scare quotes because I am just one data point, one representative of a rapidly growing class of people whose day to day life is in cyberspace.

We are the future and we are killing the entire concept on which the State is based.

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In the comment section of David Carr's article here on Samizdata.net called Government Property, one of the commenters, Tim Haas, suggested the inimitable Dissident Frogman should come up with a suitable graphic... and indeed he has!

click for larger image

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After a worrying hiatus lasting no less than eight days, Natalie Solent is back blogging:

Whew. I'm sorry that a combination of circumstances has kept me away from the computer for several days. Would you like to hear about the pump on our boiler, our header tank and the partial collapse of our garage roof? No, thought not.

Oh but we would, we would. Natalie doesn't have comments, but if she did they would already be piling up: tell us, tell us, what happened with the pump, what's a header tank and what went wrong with it?, etc. When did the misfortunes of others suddenly become an unfit subject for public entertainment? It sounds like terrific stuff, and Natalie should itemise every horror she endured.

I still smile to myself about the day when I first blundered into this my-misery-equals-other-people's-happiness thing. I had a job in the building trade as a sort of very junior sub-lieutenant, and on a particularly gruesome day matters culminated in me being chased back into my sordid, dirty and leaky little caravan in the pouring rain by a big Irishman waving a trowel. He had built a slightly crooked wall during all that rain, and I had helpfully explained this to him, in between keeping up with the cricket scores in the bloody caravan. Plus there had been all kinds of confusions over some tunnelling that had been going on, and there was a hell of a muddle with the concrete, and I did some laying out of foundations for some houses that still worries me when I think about it. It had not been a good day. Basically I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I just wanted to go home and sleep.

But just to put the tin lid on my day of misery, I had to go to some damned party that same evening. (This was before I had discovered that the thing to do about parties you don't want to got to is not go.) Misery. All the people there would presumably have had brilliant days and would be yacking away about how well they'd done, and all I'd have to talk about would be my insane bloody job in the insane bloody building trade, and insane Irish people with trowels and concrete-related fuck-ups and hideously misplaced suburban houses.

I entered the party, dreading it, and immediately the questions started. Who are you? What do you do? How was your day? I had just about had it at that moment, and I thought to hell with this, they've asked, now they're going to be told. And of course within about a minute I was the life and soul of the party. I soon got the joke of it all myself and started exaggerating and inventing, using fuck-ups from other days, and fuck-ups I'd only heard about from other building trade idiots, and combining different fuck-ups into the same fuck-up. All those posh stockbrokers and lawyers who had spent their entire day achieving only the exact results they wanted never got a look-in.

So tell us Natalie. The collapse of the garage roof sounds especially entertaining, even if it was, alas, only partial.

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With apologies to Bob Dylan... A welcome new addition to the blogopshere is David Smith, the economics editor for The Sunday Times. More and more well known journalists are seeing blogging as a useful adjunct to their work. Blogging is here to stay, ladies and gents.

David's latest blog article is entitled How high is the next peak in base rates?... and he started off with an article with somewhat broader appeal called George Bush's scorched-earth economics policy. The EconomicsUK Blog promises to be a regular stop for economists, policy wonks and politicos!

Welcome to the blogosphere, David!

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I must be the last person in the blogosphere to have spotted this. Some guy seems to have been fired by Microsoft for posting a photo of a bunch of Macintosh G5 computers being delivered to some nameless warehouse in Microsoft's Redmond headquarters.

It seems a tad capricious… unless of course there is more to this than meets the eye. Much as I dislike Microsoft, we have only one side of the story here so I feel no great need to follow the herd in leaping to this bloke's defence.

For me the interesting thing is the way a personal problem of less than earth shaking import can flash around the world and get the blogosphere clucking... I guess it was a slow week for interesting world events to write about and anyway, who can resist the chance to bash the Evil Micro$oft?

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Here's our first week's archives. As da boss said back then, "Post away and remember... let's NOT be safe out there!"

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Adriana & I recently returned from a two week business/fun trip to the USA which took us to initially to New Jersey for a couple days...

Samizdatista Walter Uhlman demonstrates conclusively
that things are... bigger... in America

Adriana thought she should practice a little before venturing out

And thence to Los Angeles, where we lurked in the stygian cigar fog that is Brian Linse's rather nice home in the Hollywood Hills. We also ventured from there into the equally pungent Cigar Club The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, as this proved to be the perpetual hang-out of our illustrious host. Therein amongst its Armani'ed and Prada'ed denizens, we encountered the splendid actor Robert Davi, who had some, interesting, things to say to us which I cannot repeat

Welcome to Los Angeles!
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
your papers, please

It took a while to convince Adriana that this 'drive by' she had heard
about was not a sport much practiced in the Hollywood Hills

Hell, in Crimson Skies, I used to fly through the
second 'O' in the Hollywood sign... I dooooon't think so!

...then back to NJ/NY area for a blogger bash in the Big Apple organised by the mighty Jane Galt...

Time Square on a grey day really does look
like something straight out of Blade Runner

In the murky darkness that is the Shahel Lounge on 70th Street...

...we peered through the inky gloom...

...trying to make out who we were talking to

We then ventured into the wilds of rural Pennsylvania, a ways north of Scranton, a land known for its 'punkin pie'. The wildlife (a different sort than that which we encountered in Manhattan) looked apprehensive as we arrived at fellow Samizdatista Walter's stupendous property...

And I do mean stupendous!

Conditions were harsh and we had to eat typical hillbilly fare

Why does this thing have a honking great bottle opener on one end?

Adriana was looking forward to some sight-seeing

Perry shot a large number of leaves stone dead

It is nice to have enough land to shoot and not have
to worry overly much about where the bullets ended up

Glad to be back in London? Er, no, actually.

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I've just killed off another comment spamming attack against Samizdata. It was clearly automated so I expect many of the rest of you are getting hit as well. The methodology is an attempt at subtlety... but it ignores the fact that a blog is actively monitored.

I suggest you all immediately ban the ip if you haven't done so already: 80.58.11.45.

The attacker hits comments sections of old articles; the comment itself is trivial and innocuous. "nice website" "interesting post" and the like. They payload is the URL field.

This looks like a google-bash for hire scheme to me.

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There was a grain of seriousness to my second option for dealing with spammers. We can't actually shoot spammers - however pleasant that might be - but we can expose them. The Blogosphere is a huge intelligence collection and dissemination service. There are agents (bloggers) everywhere. There are highly proficient engineers and scientists amongst us. How long could the whereabouts of a spammer remain secret with the the entire Blogosphere out to get them?

With personal contact details in hand there are simple, legal means of retaliation. We could make their life hell and do so without violating the libertarian ethos.

Small expressions of annoyance have little import if taken singly... but what happens when 10,000 people ring the spammer at home and say: "Please stop"? Or 10 people a day ring the doorbell and say the same? Or 100,000 each send one email to the home email address of the spammer? Or 1,000,000 bring a class action suit against the spammer for one pound each plus court costs?

It is not as if this hasn't happened before. James Taranto (Opinion Journal) recently published the phone numbers of people and organizations involved in telephone soliciting. He caused them no end of grief. Six years ago the fax phone number for the London Metropolitan Police was published after they threatened a brutal and heavy handed censorship of internet news groups. They ran out of fax paper rather quickly and more importantly, ISP's were neither raided nor shut down. (I will admit to a personal interest in the event as I was the Tech Director of the first ISP in Northern Ireland at the time).

Don't get me wrong. I am not claiming this would wipe out spam. It raises the cost of doing business. That is enough because it means less spam.

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It seems quite a few blogs got hit by a massive porn spam in the last few days. There is a good summary and links at Winds of Change

We were hit pretty solidly by it at Samizdata. Brian Micklethwaite reports he deleted a large number of them.

I've an idea for a technical solution if anyone at MT is listening. It would be to have a settable time threshold on comments. Commenting on an article would be closed after a specified number of days. All the Lolita posts I saw went to articles that were 3 months old. This tells me the spammers want to bolster their search engine ratings by getting lots of links in lots of different places. Otherwise we'd have seen the posts go to new articles. You don't get many eyeballs on 3 month old news archives.

It would not be terribly onerous to remove spam from the current twenty or so 'active' articles. We are already are moderating those.

There is another more satisfying solution though. Given the number of libertarian and fellow travelers blogging about the world, someone should find the address of the spammers and pay a visit. A Glock has a certain, je ne c'est quoi, especially when displayed at close range to one's nose.

It makes the words "Please stop" seem an eminently reasonable request.

Dale ponders where to place the next round
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved

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Last night until late, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a veritable multiplicity of LA Bloggers swarmed into Casa Bad Dude...

Bill Whittle & Rand Simberg... Jets and Rockets

Cathy & Cecile

Matt Welch & Martin Devon

Rand Simberg & Mickey Kaus

Kate Sullivan & Emmanuelle Richard

Martin Devon, Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum & the pseudonymous Armed Liberal

I finally got to meet Rand Simberg face to face

Sara & Moxie, who contrary to some scurrilous rumours, is most certainly not deformed!

This being Casa Bad Dude, the air was thick with cigar smoke

Update: The morning after the night before...

Brian Linse recovers slowly from last night's festivities

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Two members of the illustrious Samizdata Editorial Pantheon are going to be in the USA... myself and Adriana, on a mixture of indolent tourism and ardent capitalist business. We will be in Los Angeles from 10th -16th October and then in the New York/New Jersey area between 17th - 21st October before returning to London.

We would love to meet up with US bloggers and so we are organising blogger bashes, one which is already arranged in LA on Saturday 11th October... and one in NYC on Friday 17th October.

Please let us know if you would like to join us so we can get an idea regarding numbers.

That inimitable gentleman Brian Linse, Samizdata.net's favourite pet pinko, will be hosting the West Coast blogger bash so numbers may be limited.

The splendiferous Jane Galt is heading up the where-and-when of the one in The Big Apple.

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Great personal friend, long-standing libertarian and self-defence enthusiast Russell Whitaker is back with his blog Survival Arts after a brief hiatus. Good to have you back!

And I was particularly interested in his take on the California recall election. In a nutshell, he is profoundly unimpressed with Arnold, preferring Republican alternative Tom McKlintock. The latter has gone on record time and again vowing to shrink the State's crippling government spending and is a hardline defender of the Second Amendment.

Of course, can you imagine a single major Tory MP on this side of the Big Pond arguing such views at the moment?

Exactly.

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Last night was a speaker at a blogging seminar in London at the IBM building, organised by Sp!ked called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The other speakers were Brendan O'Neill, James Crabtree and Bill Thompson.

The introduction to the seminar asked:

Enormous claims are made for weblogs, or 'blogs' - online publications in diary format, where individuals publish comment and links to other online content. In media and technology circles, it is often claimed that blogs are revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy. Meanwhile, others complain that blogs are dangerously unaccountable, and that blogs are clogging up Google's search engine results with insubstantial material, because an incestuous coterie of bloggers all link to one another.

Are blogs revolutionising journalism, or have people in the traditional media lost faith in their own authority, leading them to talk blogs up? Do blogs enhance democracy, or do they make a virtue of narcissism and navel-gazing? Does a dangerous clique of bloggers wield unaccountable power, or are these bloggers simply exercising their right to free speech on an exciting new platform?

The interesting thing to me was that there was really very little agreement as to what blogging was 'all about', either amongst the speakers or from the floor. One recurrent theme was endless blather about blogs being 'good for democracy' without really saying why that might be the case.

Paleo-socialist Bill Thompson of the BBC, about whom we have written on Samizdata.net before claimed to now like blogging and regarded the fact virulently anti-socialist folks like Samizdata.net also blog as 'an acceptable cost'. He also egregiously mis-characterised Brendan O'Neill's rather temperate remarks on the topic of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. Whilst a reporter mis-representing a person's remarks is hardly news, for him to do so when the person in question is sitting a few yards away and is able to point out that is not in fact what they said is... interesting.

Below is the text of my opening remarks:

The intro to this seminar asks on one hand: is blogging revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy? On the other hand, it is asked, are blogs dangerously unaccountable and are some bloggers wielding unaccountable power?

From the phrasing of the question, we are presumed to feel the first two of these things would be axiomatically 'good' if true and the later two axiomatically 'bad'.

Well, I would answer that blogs are evolution–izing journalism, not revolutionising it: Brendan O'Neill is no less of a journalist for being a blogger and neither is Stephen Pollard, who also blogs. The dead tree publications for which they write are neither harmed nor helped overall... blogs push a great deal of traffic towards their websites, but are in direct competition with the part of a newspaper or broadcaster which editorialises. However blogs do not have reporters in Afghanistan or Liberia: blogs are mostly about punditry rather than reporting. So a journalist's ability to write an article for a newspaper is much as it was, but his ability to act as a credible independent ‘commentator’ is enhanced by his blog articles, many of which might be overly opinionated for a newspaper editor mindful of his shareholders or ministerial chums…

And far from blogs 'enhancing democracy', which is just another way of saying enhancing 'politics', blogs are giving people a social alternative to political interaction. Certainly my personal little section of the blogosphere (which is the term for the community of blogs) is dedicated to throwing spanners rather than oil into the political machinery of state. Democracy is just politics and politics, and like the established media which panders to it, it is a crude tool for representing the reality of any society it claims to 'serve'… well, they serve it in the farming sense of the word I suppose.

And yes… bloggers are unaccountable… its not a bug, its a feature… unaccountable to the extent that you, the reader, do not get a vote on what a blogger writes, and unlike a newspaper or broadcaster, it is much harder for the establishment, be it the forces of crony 'capitalism', organised labour or the state itself, to twist a bloggers arm to get them to stay on message: there are simply too many bloggers to regulate effectively. If pseudonymous Iraqi blogger Salam Pax can blog under the nose of Ba’athist Socialism, I suspect blogs will be able to annoy New Labour or Microsoft... we are the Samizdats of the future.

As for us bloggers being dangerous, well, I think our influence is far less at this stage than some have been claiming, so I don’t think we are all too dangerous yet… but it is certainly my hope that we will be very dangerous indeed one day.

And who do I hope we will be dangerous to? To the state’s lying spin machine, to the established media's ability to editorialise unchallenged, particularly the tax funded bits of it, and all who underpin the simplistic left-right axioms within which so much public dialogue is framed…and also I hope blogs will be dangerous to businesses whose P.R. is an obstacle rather than an asset to the marketplace. In short, I hope we are dangerous to those who have a vested interest in 'business-as-usual' both politically and commercially.

Are bloggers biased? Of course they are! But then does anyone really think the Telegraph or Guardian or BBC or CNN or the Daily Mail or the New York Times do not work within profoundly ideological meta-contexts as well? But the blogosphere is like a vast interlinked rolling peer review (which is of course precisely why some people hate it). Rather than just having to pass muster with a handful of editors vetting what gets written, the blogosphere is a true open stall market place of ideas in which the currency is called 'eyeballs' rather than Pounds or Dollars. Write what you like, but if what you write is unsubstantiated or poorly reasoned crap… you will get ripped to shreds and people will just stop reading you.

But blogging is not just about one-man bands standing on a virtual soap box on a virtual speaker’s corner. Companies and institutions are starting to understand that blogging and the blogosphere can work for any group of people who are articulate and who genuinely want to be heard above the dissembling information pollution that passes for 'P.R.' or Spin.

Just this week, the world renowned Adam Smith Institute. started a blog in order to editorialise on the issues of the day… also a major high tech multinational has asked the company in which I am a partner to examine how blogging would help them present credible views to their clients… I think eventually the era of 'press releases' at least as they are currently done, will gradually draw to a close as blogging starts to fulfil that role… but with the happy difference that any PR bullshit will get the harsh light of the blogosphere shone on it.

Blogs mean saying what you need to say without intermediating cumbersome and distorting media machines, and doing it in a way that is resistant to conformist political pressures.

Blogs are heralding the end of 'business as usual'.

And I certainly think that is true.

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This is going to be a long, long post. Where it says 'MORE' it ought perhaps to say 'A LOT MORE'. But my basic message is very simple. Go and look at – and have a read of – this new blog.

Want to read the longer version? Very well, gather round. Once upon a time, long long ago, before many of you reading this were even born, in an unhappy land ruled by unhappy people some of whom were perhaps doing their best and others of whom were just plain bad, and none of whom seemed to be able to do anything right …

It's hard now to remember the political atmosphere in Britain in the late nineteen seventies. Frankly, the place seemed headed for the Third World. The public sector was growing and growing, in every way except in the contribution its workers made to the lives of others, and the public sector trade unions seemed untouchable. But then the International Monetary Fund came calling, demanding economic rectitude and cuts, and the public sector had to be challenged, even though nobody knew how. It wasn't pretty.

I remember this as the time when a cup of coffee in Covent Garden went from costing about 15p to costing about 30p in what seemed like the space of a few months. Inflation is a thinly disguised tax, and this tax was going up, fast. National ruin beckoned.

When it came to the public sector, one of the words most commonly used in my part of the political landscape was 'ratchet', meaning that it got bigger, click by click, but couldn't ever get smaller. This was a sort of domestic version in our midst of the Brezhnev Doctrine. What the public sector had the public sector held. Public spending could only increase. That was its nature. It couldn't go down. That wasn't possible.

The free market academics trying to make sense of these horrors even found themselves an economic theory to explain why public spending could only go up and never go down, which they called Public Choice Theory.

Public Choice Theory was perfect for all those free market economists who had been trying for several years to stop the public sector getting huger and huger, but failing. They had been campaigning for spending cuts for a decade and had hardly a single actual cut to show for it, merely a few slimmed down expansions. They favoured denationalisation, but nothing ever got denationalised.

Were these academics failing because they were stupid? Impossible. No, they were failing because the task was impossible. What Public Choice Theory told these academics was that the growth of the public sector was unstoppable, not because they, the free market academics, were too stupid to stop it growing but because it was, indeed, the nature of the public sector to grow and nothing and no-one could change that.

Public Choice Theory said that each item of public spending, each nationalisation, was extremely good news to the small group of beneficiaries who each benefited a lot from it. But, individually, taking each spending increase or nationalisation separately, no one spending increase or nationalisation was of any great consequence to the massed ranks of the taxpayers. Ergo, the small group of beneficiaries lobbied like mad vultures for the spending increases and the nationalisations, while no one else worried that their taxes (or their inflation) was clicking upwards in individually tiny clicks of that ratchet, up and up and up. Thus grew the public sector. Thus collapsed the rest of the economy. Thus Britain was becoming Argentina and thus we were all doomed.

I was hanging around the Alternative Bookshop at that time, around 1980, and we at the Alternative Bookshop prided ourselves on not being too bothered about what was practical or achievable. We concentrated on what was sayable, and we said what we damned well pleased. Slash public spending. Shut down the Welfare State. Taxation is theft. (And although this is something of a tangent here, we also said things like: legalise heroin. Because we wanted to shove economic freedom and 'social' freedom into the same freedom bag where we thought they belonged.)

But what if you wanted to be practical? What if you wanted actually to roll back that state, instead of merely talking about how nice that would be? Impossible, right?

At this point enter Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler, two rather confident people from something they referred to as the Adam Smith Institute, carrying gifts. Pro-free-market policy publications on every subject you can imagine. Housing, education, health, pensions, 'privatisation'… we're going to make a difference, they said. And they did.

No one wants to take the blame for failure, but success is something that lots of people want a slice of. Was it Thatcher herself? Her cabinet ministers? The Centre for Policy Studies? The various political and policy advisers buzzing around then, like Sir Alan Walters?

It's hard to tell just how important was the contribution of the Adam Smith Institute, but I think they made a big difference. Others may have disposed, but they proposed. They didn't bet on a tiny few policies, and raise them like mammals. They spawned a vast shoal of policy ideas, in the knowledge that only a tiny percentage of them had to reach maturity for the project as a whole to succeed massively.

Some of their ideas got huge amounts of press coverage, and provoked PhD theses all over the planet. Others were merely done. They went straight from boring old 'reports' to being boring old government policies, with the media hardly even noticing. For many, it was all just so ghastly that they preferred to pretend it wasn't happening at all. At lot of 'privatisation' went on beneath the radar of public debate and media coverage, which suited the ASI fine. After all, it's a lot harder to oppose a policy if you don't know it's happening.

It's also hard to oppose a policy if it comes at you not in one huge lump, but in the form of a thousand little steps and from two dozen different directions. At what point do you draw the line, and who do you then get to stand at it and fight to the death?

How did the ASI do it? Their central insight was to see that Public Choice Theory, far from being a mere excuse for failure, was in fact a recipe for success. Did individual expansions of the state sector concentrate the benefits while dispersing the costs so widely that no one complained? Why then, individual contractions of the state must be like that too. 'Cuts' were no good. They united those cut, while enthusing no one else. But how about 'privatisation'? What if … you sell some shares in a formerly state-owned enterprise, at a price that causes great happiness to the buyers but without upsetting anyone else involved nearly as much as the buyers like it? What if … you sell off state-owned houses for less than the going rate? Again, the buyers love it. Who objects? Well, 'the public' may be getting a raw deal from the deal, but that's the point of Public Choice Theory. The public, spread around everywhere, count for far less than the special interests.

As the later history of privatisation in places like the ex-USSR illustrates, there are moral hazards associated with privatisation, just as there are with nationalisation, and for the exact same reasons. By the end of the Conservative era of the eighties and nineties, the word 'sleaze' came to mean everything that was wrong with the government, much as 'spin' does now. Nevertheless, 'Thatcherism' was a success, and the Adam Smith Institute with it. It turned Britain from a country that might or might not have been disappearing down the plug-hole into a country that might or might not have bounced back into making some serious progress in an upwards direction.

What I remember most about those ASI policies of the eighties and nineties was their sheer number. It was the flexibility and inventiveness of the place that was so striking, especially when you compared it with the leaden-footed fixation on single-issue lobbying that dominated the thinking of their 'free market' predecessors. While unwieldy delegations of old fogeys battered away for years with their 'demands' for things like education vouchers, cursing the politicians for being insufficiently 'courageous' (which means stupid), the ASI would spread out a continental breakfast of suggestions for the politicians and their advisers, and for all the other interested parties involved in the public policy debate, to choose from and to feast on. They never expected politicians to be courageous. Instead they treated them as decision-makers with interests, and ambitions, and pressures, much like anyone else, and crafted their policies accordingly.

At first, the ASI had high hopes of New Labour, who at first made a great show of continuing with their own version of Thatcherism – the sort that never spoke its name, the sort with a human face – even as they insisted that 'sleaze' was not for them. But slowly, inexorably, the clock has been turned back by this government and by its massed ranks of unreconstructedly socialistic backbenchers and interest groups. Too few of them really believe in decentralisation, in 'private/public partnerships', in 'reform', in 'empowering' people, in involving 'stakeholders'. (The words were different, but the policies were at first much the same.) But now New Labour is looking Older and Older Labour with each month that passes, and they are falling back more and more on their default position of mixing bribes with threats with an ocean of regulations. Britain is now entering (many would argue that it has been there fore some years already) a very nasty episode, more or less protracted, of seventies style misgovernment, which will probably end just when everyone is thinking: My God, is this never going to end? Can't governments do anything right? Can't public services ever be made to work? Can Britain ever truly recover from its post-imperial disappointments? The state, having blundered forwards and sideways and everywhere for a few more years yet, will then be ready to draw back, and then we may see a rerun of that attempt, first made twenty years ago, to roll back the state, to cut taxes, and to unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs.

If that happens, the Adam Smith Institute will still be there, ready to supply a new torrent of policy ideas, and, just as important, to spread the attitude that gave rise to them, to spread, as we might put it here, the Adam Smith Institute meta-context.

Can you see, once I myself got into blogging, why I wanted the Adam Smith Institute people to become bloggers too? Just as blogging contrasts with old-school political publishing in offering a lot of small posts, often, rather than a few big table-shakers every few months, so too does the ASI style likewise depend on saying a lot of different little things, in all directions, to the people who want to hear about them, with the 'media' (i.e. the other media) paying attention or not as they please, but not able to control the process. Blogging is not something I merely wanted these guys to bolt onto the side of what they do seriously; it could be central to their entire way of operating. Oh well, dream on Brian.

But now it has happened. Now there is an Adam Smith Institute blog, and, just as importantly, the writing of it is not being done by some invitation team of extras while the real honchos do the Stuff That Really Matters. It really looks as if the A-team are going to write for this one.

Their official launch is today, but for the last week or so they've been accumulating some postings, so that when we all go there, there'll be a decent spread of things to look at. These postings are already good, and worth looking at. They're going to get a lot better. Madsen, Eamonn and their collaborators are some of the smartest people I have ever been acquainted with, present company excepted, and once again they're thinking a spread of things, not just banging away about only three or four excessively detailed and over-elaborated 'campaigns', with much forcing of the issue under the noses of the unwilling, of whom 'courage' is demanded. No, they'll just launch a whole new dinghy fleet of little ideas, and see who else is interested. It is going to be a lot of fun to watch, and it'll be all the more fun because although a lot of people are going to pay a lot of attention to all this, a lot of other people aren't, who aren't going to know what is hitting them when it hits them.

And just as I believe that blogging can do big things for the Adam Smith Institute, so too I believe that the Adam Smith Institute blog is a notable addition to the blogosphere. They will bring into the blogosphere a whole new network of thinkers and movers and shakers whom they've been cultivating over the last three decades. With their arrival in our midst, they make us all stronger.

And yes you're right, I am starting to repeat myself. Stephen Pollard. Now the ASI. Could they and their blogs, I wonder, have anything in common? Nah, it's just a coincidence.

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Last Friday, Alice Bachini blogged this:

I am now going to attempt to eat fire while walking barefoot on hot coals over Niagara Falls juggling three lives cats and singing the National Anthem of the United States of America.

It worked. She is now back in blogging business full time, newly energised and revitalised by having a new blog address without_any_underlinings_in_it_as_per_this, which apparently some people couldn't get. (Although I notice that the archive links in the rest of this posting still have underlinings in them. If the links below still don't work for you, go to the one in this paragraph to the top of the blog and scroll down.)

There's also a picture of Alice wearing a bikini and a fur coat, and there is practically no bikini visible at all.

She's been flying, over America:

Flying is fun. You get to go right over the clouds in a huge powerful machine that has conquered gravity by the use of massive jet engines. Wow. And then you get to see things like glaciers and snow-buried mountains and mathematically squared-out American farmland out of the window. Cool. And then you get to eat small odd plastic dolls'-house food from miniature trays. Huh?

Americans:

They shout. They smile all the time. They go very fast. This is slightly scary to a polite English person. They don't speak English, just something similar to English, and assuming they speak English is liable to get you into trouble. Just as I have no idea how young people acquire their detailed knowledge of mobile phone texting language, I have no idea what college one goes to in order to learn how to order a coffee in America. But I intend to find out someday.

American supermarkets:

There is a wonderful array of weird junk-food (I use the term approvingly) in American supermarkets. Twinkie bars. Kool-aid drinks. Bubble gum that looks like cotton-candy. Chewing gum in interesting flavours. Breakfast cereal with enough food-colouring in it to kill a small Korean village. OK, that was a joke. None of us died from eating Froot-Loops. Anyway, this stuff is creative and fun, and Tootsie-roll is clearly designed as a minor snack and not a dietary staple.

Some stupid anti-mobile-phone "research":

Implicit meaning: Just because nobody has so far managed to prove that mobiles fry your brains, the evil mobile industry has managed to persuade researchers to give up trying! Watch satanic capitalism destroy the path of human truth and ruin all our lives with its, um, cool gadgets! Gah!

The Grinch:

OK, so, it wasn't my own personal first choice of video for the night, but my young friend assured me that this film is absolutely beautiful, and that the fact it is being rented so rarely that one can take it out for a whole week now at no extra charge is totally unaccountable and a sad reflection on the taste of our fellow townspeople. So I agreed to give it a go.

And this is what struck me: it's about American values. Dr Seuss embodies about as much American morality as anyone ever did or will except The Wizard of Oz. And this is what the Grinch learns about the horrific evil capitalist greed of the aforementioned much-despised country:

"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store." "Maybe Christmas ... perhaps ... means a little bit more!"

Well, there you go. Don't expect critics of The Great Satan actually to find out anything about American culture before they trash it, though. Ain't gonna happen.

Which brings us to … Iraq:

… Iraq as a whole is, of course, not angry with the US and Britain. That's just what antiwar people argue to trick people into believing their horrible ideas. Actually, a few people are angry, because those people don't have any better ideas, or they are angry about specific errors resulting from the job of the US and Brits being bloody difficult, …

Which is exactly what I heard the other night from someone who has actually been out there for the last few months.

Alice says she wants to be a millionaire businesswoman. Good luck, and I'll believe that when I see it. Meanwhile, someone should pay for her to visit Iraq.

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It is terrific news, not just for those who like his writing, but for the blogosphere in general (and therefore even for those bloggers who don't like his writing), that Stephen Pollard has now got himself a brand spanking new blog, which really is a blog, and that it is now no harder to link to his blog postings than it is to anyone else's, which wasn't the case with his previous arrangement.

Consider his piece for today's Sunday Telegraph, which he has also put up at stephenpollard.net, entitled, in his (to quote the top of the new blog) "never knowingly understated" manner, Why Israel is right to assassinate Hamas leaders.

The comparison with the IRA is entirely specious. If the IRA had espoused not merely the separation of Northern Ireland from the UK but also the murder of every Unionist and every Anglican in Great Britain, the abolition of the United Kingdom and its replacement with a Catholic state, run by the IRA and dedicated to converting the rest of the world to Catholicism by force, then there might be some merit in the comparison.

Hamas is explicit about its aims. In August 1988 it published the Islamic Covenant, which makes clear its opposition to Israel's existence in any form. It states that "there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad (holy war)". Any Muslim who leaves "the circle of struggle with Zionism" is guilty of "high treason". It calls for the creation of an Islamic republic in Palestine to replace Israel. Muslims should "raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine".

In a statement released on May 19, after a wave of suicide murders in previous days, Hamas said: "These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land." A Hamas member explained to an interviewer last month that: "The Jews have destroyed your Christianity just like they are trying to destroy our Islam. You should read the words of the Prophet. Join us. We do not just want to liberate Palestine. We want all countries to live under the Caliphate. The Islamic army once reached the walls of Vienna. It will happen again."

If Stephen Pollard were the average waffling egomaniac blogger, the fact that linking to him used to be a combination of an obstacle race and an egg-and-spoon race wouldn't have mattered all that much. It would have been a pity, but no more than that. As it is, and quite aside from whether you happen to agree or disagree with Pollard's attitude to all this (personally I'm pretty much in complete agreement), this is heavyweight journalism. Facts are being assembled and deployed, not just impressions or feelings. Those gruesome quotes are for real. This man is not merely clearing his throat and finding his voice. He has found his voice. And he has the regular, big-media columns, like this one, to prove it.

And now, his blog-microphone, so to speak, is also in full working order. Other Pollard pieces, not originally for a big print newspaper, can now also be linked to by the rest of the blogosphere with impunity.

But couldn't one just link directly to pieces like this Hamas piece by going direct to telegraph.co.uk? Why pick on a Pollard piece that would under the old regime have been just as linkable to as it is now? Well, yes, but. But, if one wanted to mention Pollard, one wanted also to mention that Pollard "blog". Ah, but then, that was a problem because it wasn't a properly functioning blog, and did you want to be having to explain that every time, …? Aaaargh!!! Too much, in the words of the great Chuck Berry, monkey business. Forget it. Just pretend that Pollard doesn't exist.

Seriously, that's what I believe I often did. Even when there was something to link to, in the Telegraph for example, I often didn't. My basic attitude was: bloody well get it sorted, matey. You may be a big cheese journo and all, but as a blogger, you simply ain't, but worse, you or whichever blog-ignorant web-designer did it for you are/is pretending that you are. When you are a blogger, then I'll link to you every day of the week and twice on Sunday (sorry I've slipped into A Few Good Men mode and am rather exaggerating, but you get my point I hope). In the meantime, Pollard, you don't exist.

And if it is the case that I wasn't the only one who felt like this about the old Pollard blog – and I'll bet it was and I'll bet I wasn't – it could even be that this old "blog" was achieving a minus quantity in terms of Pollard blogosphere impact.

My reason for going on at such length and with such negativity about what was wrong with the old Pollard regime is that the Pollard news now is exactly as good as it was previously bad, and it was bad. Which means that the Pollard news now is very, very good.

Just to hammer home this point about how much readier I am to link to Pollard now than I was under the old dispensation, I am also about to do, now, a couple of pieces linking to this clutch of Pollardiana from my Culture Blog, and to this clutch from my Education Blog.

I'm looking through the music stuff now, and I realise that, entirely because of the old linking problem, I didn't actually read most of it, because not then being able easily to link to it would have been too frustrating.

So don't now just read Pollard now. Have a trawl, now or when you can fit it in, through the Pollard archives.

Because Stephen Pollard's writings are about to count for a whole lot more in the world than they did a week ago.

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The day started off with ominous signs as I left the house, a raven seemed to be calling a warning from atop the church...

Even when I arrived at the appointed place, I found nervous animals, disquieted by a change in the ether...

And then, suddenly, he was there! The rumours were true! He had returned and the room exploded into chaos!

In no time at all, he was back to his old tricks as though he had never left...

Andrew Dodge is back in London after his long exile in the colonies. God save us all!

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Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.

The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.

But how about this for a train of thought?

Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn't really taken off. There's too much free stuff, and anyway, people don't want to pay. Maybe they're scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they'll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they're waiting.

But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?

What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that's why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.

Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

I finally took a look a long overdue look at the MIT OCW site (OCW = OpenCourseWare) today as a result of my Education Blog activities, but it seems to me that the give-away principle is far broader than merely educational – and incidentally that education itself will gain from many other institutions besides straight-up educators giving their stuff away. (Like the BBC.)

I still don't think it's right that the BBC should be paid for by me, in the form of a tax on my television viewing of over £100 per annum, and I hope they lose this privileged economic position no matter how generous they now say they want to be to the world. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact (whether business or political) rather than of morals, it seems to me that we may see a lot more of this kind of reputation-building giving-it-away stuff.

I reckon that for the right kind of global institution, basically an already globally leading operator which is eager to stay out in front of the pack, and which has a big archive the selling of which is not (as it would be in the case of, say, a big record company) central to its economic success, a huge give-away could be the smartest possible move.

The BBC is fighting for the current version of its life, and their give-away may only be talk, as part of that fight.

But MIT have, I reckon, taken a huge leap into the educational twenty first century with their great, global give-away, in a way that can only secure their position as global brand leaders in higher education.

There must be big organisations whom it would suit to do the same. There must be others who are doing the same.

The blogosphere is going to love it.

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This needs to be read here:

I'm still reading this blog, and I'm still not feeling like blogging for it. And I've finally figured out why. It's a boys' club. Not that I don't love boys, but it's one thing hanging out in the bar with them and quite another trying to get them to take you seriously when you're talking, um, golf, with them. Digital ink, ID cards, government inquiries, Mars, US politics, transport ... it's a man's world. And frankly, I am not man enough to go up there and start talking about shoes. Don't interpret any of that as insulting: I read Samizdata every day, and find it not only interesting and righter than lots of other places, but diverse and entertaining as well. In a very very male kind of a way.

Hm. Yeah. Good point, er, what did you say your name was again? Alice. Yeah. So. Tell us about shoes then. How are they designed? – do they use the latest materials for those super-thin high heels? – you know, the ones the Space Programme made for the outsides of Shuttles, I bet they do, and get those acrylic surfaces, first used in the automobile industry I believe (although I'm open to correction on this – I'm not any sort of techno-fanatic you understand), for the Ford Psychopath ZPX100 Concept Car in 1971 which never made it into production but which looked really cool, like a Dan Dare rocket …

That's enough about shoes. Get a load of this:

Shaped like a giant jellyfish and sheltered from the sun beneath its own artificial clouds, the world's first underwater luxury hotel is to open beneath the waves of the Persian Gulf within three years.

The 220-suite Hydropolis Hotel in the Arab emirate of Dubai will cost £310 million to build. It aims to charge guests up to £3,500 per night and to provide them with the last word in undersea luxury.

It will be built of toughened, clear plastic Plexiglas, concrete and steel. Guests will be able to experience the sensation of sleeping in the sea by booking a bubble-shaped suite – including a clear glass bath tub – offering views of the sea life all around.

For those worried about terrorist attack, it will boast a high level of security, including anti-missile radar. If disaster does strike in one section, it can be sealed off with watertight doors.

Babe magnet or what?

Actually, Alice might quite like a night in that.

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Frank J. at IMHO has come up with the perfect way to fish for links (well, I fell for it at least)... he has declared war on the mighty Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit .

And what is our view on this revolt against The InstaPowers That Be?

We are one of Glenn's blog children... fie on that false prophet Frank J. and all hail to Glenn Reynolds, the Dark Lord of the net, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, the Balrog of the Blogosphere!

Behold the fate of those who defy the InstaPowers That Be
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved

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Someone has recently set up a syndicated account for Samizdata.net over on LiveJournal... if XML feeds are something you are interested in, check it out!

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Provoked by a couple of the comments on this, I've just posted a potentially rather boring blog posting about the problem of the potential boringness of blog postings, at my Culture Blog. But I don't want to go on about it here.

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Veteran Labour MP, fierce opponent of the European Union and one of the more congenial politicians, Austin Mitchell, has his own blog. Mitchell is a pretty outspoken MP, and though his mixed-economy Keynsian economic views are hopelessly wrong-headed and out of date, he is one of the more independent minded MPs in our rather colourless political landscape.

I had a brief look at his blog and it should be good to read, though Austin had better be prepared for how fellow bloggers will be ready and willing to 'fact-check his ass' at a moment's notice.

Come on you Tory MPs, get a blog!

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Today I received the following email:

Brian,

Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.

Brian

What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends..., I'm personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?

In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)

Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O'Driscoll.

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Now, we have to be doing something right! The Guardian has written many articles about blogs - arguably they are the most clued up newspaper in the UK on the subject, however much it pains me to admit it - and so far not once they mentioned Samizdata.net. The latest omission occurred in their article on political blogs, a day after the VoxPolitics seminar in the House of Commons. We were there, in force, and made ourselves heard. To our surprise, we learnt that many people who are not our natural fellow-travellers (to put it mildly) apparently read us quite regularly. So it can hardly be said that we are unknown among the statist left and right.

1. The Guardian have heard of us, in fact, maybe even read us but given our dislike for their ideology cannot bring themselves to mention us. Perhaps, the Guardian blog crew who have studiously been ignoring our existence hope that if they shut their eyes long enough we will have disappeared like a bad vision. Ain't gonna happen, guys. If this is the case, the Guardian is biased and their reporting is poor.
2. It is just possible they have never heard of us - stranger things have happened. However, we do get around and it is no mean feat to miss us in the blogosphere... Out of eighteen bloggers they mention in the article we know personally, in the flesh, seven of them and further three certainly know about us. So, if it is the case of the Guardian missing us, well, they did not do their homework right and their reporting is poor.

It's a win-win situation.

The Guardian do not need to like us or our writing, agree with us or even rate us particularly highly. But to write about the British blogosphere as if we do not exist, means that they really do not understand what they are writing about as we are almost certainly the most visited British political blog. We know from our comments and emails that a goodly chunk of our readers do not always agree with us. We take their custom as a compliment since they obviously find us interesting enough to return regardless.

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Last night's seminar on blogging at the House of Commons was quite interesting for all sorts of reasons. Firstly it is always nice to meet fellow denizens of the blogosphere face to face for the first time, such as Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole. Secondly, it is fascinating to see who 'gets' blogging and who does not. Much of the discussion was about how blogging can make politics more inclusive and participatory... 'making democracy work'.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who is the first Member of Parliament with a blog. Tom clearly does indeed 'get' blogging but I think he is quite wrong about blogs being inherently 'democracy-friendly', though in fairness he did not labour the point and seems quite realistic about the potential downside for a politician of having an easy to search archive of his views. He also made the interesting point that party whips are going to get very nervous about blogging MPs and I am sure he is quite right once they realise that an enthusiastic but untutored MP swinging his blog like Excalibur is more likely to take his own head off than that of the leader of the opposition... to be an effective blogger you must write what you really think: insincere political PR speak is treated with derision by the blogosphere... and thus I look forward to watching many MP's torpedo themselves spectacularly via injudicious blogging far more effectively than we could ever do it for them. Not surprisingly we at Samizdata.net see this as a feature, not a bug.

It will surprise no one who knows me that during the public section of the proceedings I could not resist making the point that blogs like Samizdata.net are not in the slightest bit interested in helping the political system work but rather about throwing spanners into political interactions whenever possible. To be able to say that within the Grand Committee Room of the Houses of Parliament, with Members of Parliament present, was something of an inexpensive thrill for me.

Redoubtable blogger and journalist Stephen Pollard was also one of the speakers and we were delighted that he mentioned our across-the-spectrum civil liberties sister blog White Rose as an example of an issue specific collective blog. He also rather artfully addressed the question of 'why would a professional mainstream journalist write for free on a blog?'... and his short answer was that he does get 'value' from his blog which often translates into paid journalistic output. Unsurprisingly Stephen uses his blog as a 'vent' for issues which irk him but for whom there is no market, but also he uses blog commenter feedback to spark ideas for articles for which he does indeed get paid.

Overall it was an interesting evening. Blogging continues its march ever deeper into the public consciousness.

Adriana Cronin, Perry de Havilland, Mick Fealty, David Carr

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Tonight many of the Samizdata.net, White Rose and the Big Blog Company bloggers will be attending a seminar about blogging being hosted at the Houses of Parliament in London.

It will be interesting to meet fellow members of the Blogerati in such a different context.

In case some of the people attending did not get the message, the time has been changed to slightly later (now 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm), and the venue is now the Grand Committee Room in order accommodate the larger than expected demand for seats. Entry as before will be via St Stephens Entrance, Houses of Parliament.

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F is for Frogman... Dissident Frogman... he is here... in London!

We know who he is... and you don't.

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We got a mention in The Times (link may not work if you are outside the UK) today in an article about blogging by Michael Gove. Excellent.

And they go our URL completely wrong. Bugger.

I called up The Times this morning and asked them to at least correct the URL for the on-line edition. And did they? Nope. It seems the wheels grind extremely slowly at The Times.

Oh, and Michael... I ready don't think our antipathy to statist solutions to most things makes us 'right wing' as social conservatives we ain't.

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The Telegraph continues to paddle in the murky waters of our Gallic neighbours with a further editorial devoted to Sabine Herold and what appears to be a growing movement for free market reform in France:

The French long for a Margaret Thatcher to tame the over-mighty public sector trade unions, but despair of ever finding one. In the cafes of Reims, speaker after speaker deplored the weakness of President Jacques Chirac in the face of union opposition, with many echoing the withering Thatcherite critique launched against him by the 21-year-old student Sabine Herold in Paris.

What really caught my eye though, in the sidebar next to the article, is the link to Merde in France.

En avant et vers le haut, nos amis.

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With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.

White Rose will point a finger at the British government's measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state's reach over the individual.

The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.

To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.

If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.

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The sharp eyed and attentive amongst you may have spotted the funky monkey that has appeared in the 'free market' section of our sidebar... we have acquired a sponsor!

But not just any sponsor.

The Gold Casino is an off-shore internet casino (obviously) in the most literal sense of the term. It is located on a server in the Principality of Sealand, a fully independent micro-state off the shore of Great Britain. Don't like the state? Go set up your own.

No I am not joking!

Well I did say micro-state, didn't I?

So take a peak at what our sponsor is offering by poking the funky monkey and check out their message via the link underneath the sidebar graphic. I assure you it is far more interesting that the usual marketing blather one is usually confronted with... you will see why we find them so ideologically agreeable!

It adds a whole new nuance to the term 'off-shore business'

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Responding to a posting a fortnight ago on CrozierVision, I posted a piece the day before yesterday on my (Brian's) Culture Blog entitled Do blogs convert people? Jonathan Wilde commented on that piece in a manner which suggests that the early editorial meetings concerning Samizdata may have been bugged. By Jonathan Wilde. He certainly gets what we're trying to do here:

As I stated in my original post on Patrick's entry, I do believe that blogs at least influence people, if not convert them. Yet. I was a libertarian prior to finding Samizdata, but over the 18 months or so that I have been reading Samizdata, I have been directly influenced by what I have read. I used to be a reluctant voter thinking that to be a libertarian meant being a Libertarian (i.e., member of the American Libertarian Party) and that taking part in the political process was the only way to be a libertarian. When I read Samizdata, I saw people who didn't really care that much which political party was in power, but were in the business of changing 'meta-contexts' and going around the state, rather than through it. Further, I saw people who were influenced by Mises, Popper, and Hayek rather than the usual Rand and Rothbard that you find in America, yet arrive at the same basic conclusions on most issues. I saw people who were proud of Western culture. I saw people who were proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII rather than simply seeing it as just another state war, with all of its side-effects. These were all things that made me believe that it was okay to be a libertarian and agree with those ideas.

Since this is a culture blog, let me mention that the 'culture' of Samizdata had a lot to do with its success. Yes, the brilliant writing on the blog is vital to convert readers. But the culture is also essential. Pictures of Samizdatistas drinking, acting goofy, fondling women, and making fun of war protestors gives the impression that libertarians aren't angry gun nuts from Montana (the stereotype in America), but are simply regular, everyday people.

And the last way in which Samizdata influenced me is to start my own website with similar characteristics – a group blog focused on Austrian economics, with a 'laid-back' non-angry-gun-nut atmosphere, and periodic 'off-topic' content.

I was already a libertarian, and perhaps I'm not the best example of blogs influencing, if not converting people, but the blogosphere is young. If our ideas are better than the rest, then they will rub-off with time. After hearing Perry being on a forum with 'mainstream' media on BBC last week, I really think that Samizdata has a chance to be something special. And it's a classic libertarian strategy: carve a new niche, go around the established paths, and succeed on what you do best. The blogosphere is the new niche, and Samizdata is at the top.

Jonathan Wilde

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People in the US, who take notions of Freedom of Expression and Private Property for granted, will be astonished by the latest steaming pile of wisdom to emerge from the clenched cheeks of our European would-be masters. Declan McCullagh reports:

The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council's bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:

• "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."
  
• Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.
  
• "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."
  
• Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."

It's pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it's no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only "professional on-line media." Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word "professional" and intentionally covered all "online media" of any type.

Read the whole article.

So what is the message to the EU I mentioned in the title? Simple:

We will not comply

We have a comments section on samizdata.net in which people can and do comment about what we write, but access to that comment section is at our capricious discretion. If we decide we want to IP ban someone or want to delete their remarks from our comments section because we think they are offensive, or even if they are not offensive but we just bloody well feel like doing it because we have a headache, then we bloody well will. This is our private property.

We are already hosted on a server in the USA and I am quite confident our hosters would tell the EU where they can stick any demands to yank us off the net because we decline to submit to political moderation of the form our free speech takes on our private property (i.e. the server space we rent from them). If we have to go entirely pseudonymous and log onto Samizdata.net in order to post via 'dead drop' servers rather than submit to EU regulation of how we manage the information on our blog, then that is exactly what those of us who post from within the rapidly emerging EU tyranny will do. We utterly reject political moderation of free speech in civil society. This is not about giving people a voice but rather about replacing social interaction (which is what true free speech is), with political interaction mediated and mandated by the state.

If these regulations become the law of the EU (as seems likely), we will not obey, we will not cooperate, we will not accept that anyone has a 'right' to reply on our blog. Do you think we have said nasty things about you and want to reply regardless of our unwillingness to let you use our comment section? Fine...go to blogger.com, sign up (for free), click on 'create a new blog' and voila... you have your own blog on which you can scream about how those mean old Samizdatistas 'done you wrong' to your heart's content.

And if the EU says we have to let you comment... tough shit, it ain't gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.

 

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The inimitable Alice (well, only by herself) sums up some 'lightbulb blogs'. In the spirit of pro-Samizdata bias I select two for your amusement:

How many David Carrs does it take to change a lightbulb?

I had thought that the madness of last week's lightbulb-blowing could not be toppled. I was, of course, wrong. Things are much worse than I thought then, in my light-hearted, innocent, Morris-dancing kind of way, and it is now perfectly apparent to all of us here at Samizdata.net that today's lightbulb lunacy is tomorrow's Mysteron plot to destroy the universe. Those who disagree must be conquered in the strongest terms. I refuse either to change the bulb or not change it. It is an outrage that anyone should dare to ask such a thing in the first place. I personally refuse to compromise and demand that they cease forthwith!

How many Brian Micklethwaits does it take to change a lightbulb?

Yesterday I posted about this article. Tomorrow I am going to post about this blog, which related to an earlier posting of mine here, about this rather interesting subject from last Thursday, which I've been wondering about for weeks, to do with car parks. I wonder whether anyone will comment or not? Sometimes they comment many times, and other times they don't. It's hard to predict these things. In the meantime, I might watch Friends tonight. Not sure yet, depends whether or not I blog about lightbulbs.

Heh.

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I have placed my bets. I am now a blogger, and I intend to die a blogger.

And how will that work? "Today folks, I want to take another crack at the crisis in the Middle Ea………..UUUUURRRRRGHHHH!!!!" Crash. Head hits keyboard. Interestingly, funny random typing, thus – ";ldsrh;rg;gfmj'o;sarl'mj;gdvlklkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk" – is what you might then expect. But it turns out that if your head does hit the keyboard, almost or even absolutely nothing happens. Try it. Pressing random keys one at a time, monkey-Shakespeare style, gets you a mess of letters as above. Pressing just one key continuously gets you kkkkkkkkk, also as above. But pressing fifteen keys at once and holding them all down continuously while keeping the head motionless seems to achieve nothing.

Delete the above two paragraphs only if they crack immortality soon enough to include me, and if that happens I intend to blog for ever and ever. (And how might that work in the decades and centuries to come?!?!?)

What I'm saying is that I think blogging can only get bigger and better until it conquers the whole world and there are blogs everywhere about everything.

Samizdata's readership seems to be creeping ever upwards. Yes there are numbers dips, which apparently afflict the whole blogosphere, but they are soon corrected and the underlying upward trend then resumes. People taking walks in the early summer sunshine after a war, like animals after they've been hybernating, for a few days, and such like. That's all that is.

My reason for thinking that the blogophere is expanding is basically that, so far as I can see, it is. New blogs (thankyou Instapundit just when I needed you) are being started. Semi-sleeper blogs that have going a while are starting to really come alive. Long time scoffers give up the unequal fight, and start blogging as well (and yes there should be a link there alsol but I don't know of a recent example – maybe commenters can chip in there). I really don't think that this is CB radio. And these people certainly seem to agree with me. I wonder who they are.

But, question: Has anyone abandoned blogging with extreme prejudice?

By this I mean not merely stopping because it is taking too much time, and the blogger has just got married, or has a life, or a job which he has to do constantly, or some such distraction, and blogging can't be fitted in. I mean, has anyone given up blogging and gone out in a blaze of vituperation?:

Tata losers. The blogosphere is a great big crowd of self-abusive egomaniacs full of sound and fury, and achieving nothing. Blogging will never make big money, for anyone. It's a total waste of time and brain cells. I'm out of here, and so should all of you be, you pea-brained fools. Get used to it. Nobody cares what you idiots think except you idiots. In 2013 you'll be a joke on "We love 2003" and that's all you'll be. I'd tell you to drop dead, but I don't have to, you will, and you won't be replaced. Addios.

I made that up. But can anyone supply a genuine quote along those lines?

My impression is that the answer is no. No such proclamations have happened.

That doesn't prove that people aren't giving up blogging and thinking things like this. So maybe the above, or words to that effect, wouldn't be their last blog posting, but would instead be an article for the mainstream media of the sort that the blogosphere can't link to, containing also sentiments like this:

Buy a newspaper, you scumbag parasites. This took me two hours to write, and some guys paid me. So pay the guys. But, if one of you then scans all this into a blog, guess what, I don't care, because nobody cares what you losers put in your loserblogs.

But as I say, I'm not hearing that. I think blogging is like telephones. Soon they'll be everywhere.

But it's the rest of my life I'm talking about, so if I'm wrong I need to be told.

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A democracy is a form of government in which the people, either directly or indirectly, take part in governing. The word democracy originates from Greek, and means rule of the people.
- From Wikipedia

In my recent trip to the FACT centre in Liverpool to evangelise for the blogosphere, it was suggested to me by a young lady that one of the great things about blogs is that in contrast to the established media, they are inherently democratic.

She was somewhat surprised when I disagreed. The young lady then suggested that as blogging empowers the common man by allowing them to express their views to the world without big business media owners or the government getting in the way, that it must surely be democratic. I agreed that blogs do indeed give people an unprecedented means to express themselves directly by disintermediating both the established media and the state, but there was nothing democratic about that whatsoever.

Democracy is about politics, and politics is about the use of the collective means of coercion. Democratic politics thus refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be 'democratic' therefore, it must be amenable to 'politics'. Therefore for a blog to be 'democratic' that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved.

But you, the reader, do not get a vote on what get written in the articles on Samizdata.net. You may agree with what an article says or you may utterly disagree, but what gets written does not depend on how popular those sentiments are. We write what we want to write.

Where you do get to choose is whether or not you decide to come back and read us again. Much as in an open market, I might decide to try and sell my fruits and meats to those who pass by, yet I cannot force them actually purchase any of my goods if they do not wish to. They cannot stop me offering for sale those things I think makes economic sense but if I am wrong about what the market wants or if others make a better offer, then the passers by will choose to shop with someone else.

Where potential clients do get a vote, albeit indirectly, rather than a 'market choice' regarding what I sell, is when the polity regulates what can or cannot be sold. For example it may be up to me if I wish to try and sell veal or chickens or bananas, but I may be prohibited from selling crack cocaine or flamethrowers. So to that extent a market can be made more subject to politics and less to several choice.

And so it is with blogging, at least to a point. But to the extent that if Samizdata.net was to suddenly and highly improbably start advocating Nazi politics (such suggestions are illegal in Germany) or rather more plausibly call for the overthrow of Islamic law wherever it pertains (such suggestions are illegal in Saudi Arabia) then the very fact it is so extraordinarily difficult to prevent such sentiments being proffered by us makes us the very antithesis of 'democratic'. You can do the 'equivalent of refusing to buy' in a market, i.e. you can just stop reading what we write, but you cannot actually stop us from writing. You, the reader, do not get a vote on that.

Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place... a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are 'selling' interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that... and long may it be so.

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We Samizdatistas are in the blogging business for the long haul and so it is very gratifying indeed to be involved with a highly a successful blog... we may not be in the same league popularity wise as Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan but we are nevertheless a significant fixture in the Blogosphere.

However as our hit rate steadily creeps upward, so do our bandwidth costs. As a result, Samizdata.net has finally succumbed to the economic facts of life and our sidebar now has buttons which give our truly global readership the option to send us a donation via PayPal to help defray our mounting bandwidth expenses.

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I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is that I cannot link directly to this article in the UK Sunday Times about the growing influence of Blogging and Bloggers.

The article is focussed on the fall on former New York Times editor, Howell Raines and unequivocally places the responsibility for his downfall on the Blogosphere:

A proliferating band of independent writers known as "bloggers" (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.

The article goes on to specifically mention Glenn Reynolds , Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus and the leading role that all played in the relentless (and thoroughly merited) hounding of Mr.Raines, emphasising that, ten years ago, he would have gotten clean away with putting idealism before the truth. Nor is this the end but merely the beginning:

Their latest target is Maureen Dowd, a star writer who jeered at Bush for claiming that Al-Qaeda was "not a problem any more" and has yet to acknowledge that she played fast and loose with his words.

The article also goes on to hint at the depth of the libertarian/conservative influence in the Blogosphere:

The attacks on The New York Times have added to the suspicion among Democrats that internet pundits are part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" once alleged by Hillary Clinton. The right is certainly gloating over the newspaper’s discomfiture. According to Kaus, a Democrat, "the blogosphere does tend to skew to the right, though not as badly as radio".

And a warning of things to come:

Raines’s departure is allowing bloggers to indulge in further self-congratulation. The internet’s new breed of media commentators is already savouring its potential impact on the 2004 presidential race.

Which means that traditional opinion-shapers like the UK Times are also 'savouring' (or, perhaps more accurately, 'fearing') that potential impact as well.

I must say that I have had my doubts about the capacity of the Blogosphere to impact upon the wider world but perhaps I have underestimated it. When a handful of bloggers can force the editor of a publication as august as the New York Times out of his job, you know that the game has changed. The once-untouchable are now touchable and they know it. That, of itself, is hugely significant.

I don't believe that British or European bloggers are yet having the tangible impact on this side of the Atlantic that US bloggers are clearly starting to have on that side but, then, orthodox opinions are far more hegemonic here. Still, I do not believe that the Guardian would have been forced to issue a shame-faced apology for its woeful distortion of the Paul Wolfowitz statement even a year ago. Maybe they feel that they cannot get away with that kind of thing anymore. If so, good.

The watchers are being watched. They probably don't like it. I expect that, in due course, they will respond by lobbying the government to bring bloggers under 'democratic control' which is the widely accepted procedure for laying low the competition. When that happens, we will all know that we have truly arrived.

[My thanks to my dear friend and reader Nigel Meek for alerting me to the article in the Times.]

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I have just got back to London after spending the night in more northern parts, where I gave a talk about blogs and blogging at Liverpool's rather swanky new downtown FACT (Film, Art & Creative Technology) centre.

Many people are looking for the FACTs about blogging in Liverpool

It is good to proselytize the joys of blogging to a wider audience. Although though the audience was rather technology savvy, blogging was a completely concept to many of the people there. Also interesting was to see a couple people in the media lounge where I turned up to give my talk reading Salam Pax's blog.

On a day in which an article in The Times notes the power of blogging to scare the living daylights out of some sections of the established media and quotes blogger Mickey Kaus, it is interesting to see our blogger-in-arms in Iraq helping to raise the profile of blogging generally in places like Liverpool.

I even managed to meet a new potential client for my latest business endeavor, a blogging consultancy that will show companies how blogs can greatly assist their businesses. Together with two fellow Samizdatistas David Carr and Adriana Cronin, who was the one who thought up and elaborated the idea, we have started a new venture called the Big Blog Company.

Blogs are increasingly starting to enter the public consciousness ... we are spreading like a virus but are much more fun that SARS

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Blogs of course!

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We now know that Salam Pax worked for a time as an interpreter for New York Times and Slate journalist Peter Maass. Maass had absolutely no idea of his interpreter's secret identity until he returned to the US, found out some more about Salam Pax, and eventually realised that Salam Pax had been blogging about his experiences with Maass (although he hadn't revealed Maass' identity either - presumably to protect his own). We thus had a situation where Maass and Pax were working together, and both were writing for large global audiences, but one of them was unaware of who the other was and what he was doing. There were no doubt people in the west who were reading both Maass and Pax, and had no idea that the two people were talking about the same things - quite literally - from different points of view. Plus we have the fact that the blog and the blogger are a much more interesting story than anything in the New York Times. (It's probably possible to relate this to Dave Winer's bet in Wired that the blogosphere would be more authoritative than the New York Times by 2007, but I am not sure quite how. I don't think anyone thought things would unfold like this).

When Maass first met Salam, Salam was reading a copy of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Dick was the master writer about issues of identity. His books are full of questions about who is who, and who is real, and what is real. Although Dick wrote most of his books in the 1960s and 1970s, the issues raised in them have steadily become more relevant and fascinating to people as the decades have gone by, and the world has come to seem more like the world he envisaged. Hollywood has been influenced more and more by Dick's work, both in terms of direct adaptations like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as by works obviously Dick influenced, such as The Matrix, Dark City and Vanilla Sky. The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate world in which America has lost World War Two, and America is partitioned into a Pacific Zone ruled by Japan and an Atlantic Zone ruled by Germany. And it is about occupying powers becoming fascinated with the question of the authenticity of the culture of the country they occupy . By being seen to read it, Salam Pax almost seems to be making some kind of deeply ironic statement about his situation.

And that seems to me the odd contradiction. Pax seems largely unaware of the extent that he is famous in the outside world (or at least claims to be unaware) and yet at the same time he is reading and referring to cultural items that are about the kind of awareness and interconnectedness that he is denying. The question is to what extent he is doing this deliberately, and to what extent this is simply a consequence of the zeitgeist of the age. As I discussed a few weeks ago, Pax previously compared the situation in Baghdad to something out of a William Gibson novel, unaware that Gibson himself, on his blog, had already compared Pax to a character out of one of his novels. Then of course we had Gibson commenting about Pax commenting about...

And that is the extraordinary thing about all this. Salam Pax is the most Gibsonian and Dickian figure to ever actually exist, I think. The writings of Gibson and Dick are about the muddiness, murkiness and complexity of the modern world, and the patterns that arise from that muddiness and murkiness. As Maass observes, Iraq is very muddy and murky, and Salam Pax himself appears to be a pattern coming through this, as well as a suberb chonicler of it. And through his actions, Salam Pax seems to be making a peculiar commentary on himself. And yet to make that commentary one thinks he would have to understand more than he actually does, and indeed understand more than it seems possible that anyone in Iraq could understand. From his writing it is easy to tell that Salam is very smart, but is he that smart? This is why I am finding the Salam Pax saga to be such an extraordinary story.

(This is also why I am finding the "Salam is a tool of the Ba'athists" theory steadily less likely. The more detailed and intricate the story gets, the less I simply can believe they could have the imagination to dream something like this up).

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John Naughton has written an article about blogging and much to my surprise, he avoids all the usual Big Media whinging.

In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.

Third, there is the problem - not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way - that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it.

Read the whole article, it is good stuff!

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It was strangely disconcerting to suddenly see our blog-father off the ether for such a long time, particularly as, like Glenn, Samizdata.net also resides on Hosting Matters servers.

For those of you who do not know, Hosting Matters had an electrical fire and whilst it took us off the air for only a few minutes, the James Brown of the Blogosphere was silenced for most of yesterday.

But he is back and blogging his heart out once more. The world is back running in well-oiled grooves.

Heh.

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I suppose that to many Samizdata readers the quotes below will be old news. But it was newsworthy news to Patrick Crozier when he wrote it, and it was news to me when I read it about two days ago. I realise that two days in blog time is a lifetime, but I think this double titbit may still have enough pep left in it to be worth recycling here in full. I hope so.

Two bits of news today (or at least news to me today) suggest that there's going to be a hell of a battle between rival blog management systems.

First up is Movable Type who are introducing a new system called TypePad. This will be a sort of Movable Type Lite with the additional features of a template design facility and inclusive hosting. The idea is to appeal to the casual ie not very technical blogger and bearing in mind that the lack of templates and fact you have to find your own host are the very things that put people off switching to Movable Type it would appear that they could be on to something.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Blogger is hitting back with Dano, the Blogger that works ie a Blogger where the archives don't do a runner every five minutes. I assume that they will lick their archives problem which should prevent a haemorraging of customers but that still leaves the problem of lack of flexibility which the introduction of no more than about five new tags will do little to alleviate.

So, to sum up, MT are going to compete on Blogger's ground of being easy to use and Blogger are going to compete on MT's ground of actually working. Things are about to get very interesting in the Blogosphere

And the morals of that are, I suppose, (a) that if you are still with Blogger and you are a technophobe, give them a few more months to fix their archiving nonsense; and (b) that blogging as a whole is about to conquer the known universe, or they wouldn't be fighting over it like this.

Patrick has been quietly writing things at CrozierVision, but hasn't been telling anybody. What I've been telling him is: stick with your two blogs, CrozierVision and Transport Blog, and help the rest of us sort ourselves out. Transport Blog is slowly improving its regularity and broadening its scope, now that Patrick is being assisted by a handful of Transport Blog occasionals: me, Michael Jennings, David Farrer, with more to come I expect. It is slowly becoming a group blog. I wonder where he got that idea from.

Patrick and I have been collaborating on the look of my two blogs, starting with the Education one. It has taken me months to persuade some blog-techno-savvy person to sit next to me in my kitchen and press buttons for me while I strode about making aesthetic judgements, because it has taken months for Patrick to decide that being blog-techno-savvy is what he does, but finally it has happened.

The verdict so far is: a few like it and the antis have stayed quiet. Which is as it should be. I made it clear that I was only in the market for compliments and would be ignoring all complaints.

The London-and-surrounding-areas blogosphere is showing no signs of running of out steam.

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...Natch!

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Salam Pax posted a big update yesterday, with photographs taken during a trip from Baghdad to Basra via Najaf.

So, those of you who thought he was not 'for real'... has this changed your mind? Whilst it is difficult to be sure, I have always suspected the 'Baghdad Blogger' was exactly what he said he was.

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I cannot speak for other of course but, as far as I am concerned, if you're not making enemies then you are not trying hard enough. Conciliation is for wimps.

With this is mind I must commend the blogosphere (well, certain sections of it anyway) for their admirable efforts as enemies are, indeed, beginning to nail their colours to the mast.

Case in point here is a certain Bill Thompson who wants the world to know that, while he loves blogging, he is very worried by actual bloggers:

Yet the blogeoisie and their acolytes dismiss 'journalism' and those who practice it, arguing that the direct reporting of events is the only thing needed. As Dave Winer says: 'The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it's quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between - what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures?'

This isn't about not liking blogs. It's about not liking unaccountable concentrations of influence, about believing it is still true that 'the first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of events of the time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation' - and about noting that 'most correct' does not mean 'what the blog says'.

Mr.Thompson names a few names in his diatribe (but rudely fails to mention the Samizdata) and ruminates darkly about 'economic libertarians' and their 'voo-doo'. Looks like the large preponderance of libertarians in the blogosphere has not gone unnoticed in places where we sincerely hoped we would be noticed.

Given that Mr.Thompson appears to be a acolyte of the BBC/Guardian Axis, his animus is hardly surprising. Indeed, it is welcome. We cannot honestly argue that we have even reached base camp until we are well and truly getting up the noses of people like him.

And getting up his nose we most certainly are. Mr.Thompson makes not even a faint attempt at concealing his haughty indignation that this gathering moss-ball of independent voices does not include any (trumpet fanfare, please) 'PROPER JOURNALISTS'. Yet, lacking in some such official stamp of professional approval, we spout off like men and women possessed, filling cyberspace with our dangerously 'un-approved' ideas.

I am going to hazard a guess that Mr.Thompson doesn't quite get it. Perhaps it is simply beyond his ken that it is exactly his brand of arthritic leftist orthodoxy that we are aiming to disassemble. Or perhaps he does get it. Maybe he can see that the writing on the blogs is, as far as he an his ilk are concerned, the writing on the wall. Hence his complaint of us being 'unaccountable'. To whom or what does he expect us to account to? The government? The BBC? A committee of appointed poo-bahs? Or 'the people', that abstract, meaningless totem on behalf of which guardianistas like Mr.Thompson love to crusade but which is, in fact, a euphamism for a committee of appointed poo-bahs?

It matters not. What matters is that Mr.Thompson is seething with resentment. He doesn't like us and thinks we are far too wrong and far too influential. Good. All that says to me is that we are doing something right and that we must keep on doing it.

[My thanks to Steve Chapman for the link.]

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If you have not checked out the Dissident Frogman's groovy new multi-lingual blog, then now is the time to rectify that oversight. However be careful not to push the red button.

Dissident Frogman is one of the best pro-liberty sites on the internet and is a reminder than there is more to France than Weasels. Just remember not to push the red button.

The Frogman is still working on the site so updates are a bit patchy at the moment; however it is worth checking it out now just to marvel at the sheer technical virtuosity of his graphic design talents. Note the 'Busted Beards Al-Qaeda Fragboard' in the sidebar...

...it adds a whole new meaning to the term 'hit counter'

BUT DON'T PRESS ANY RED BUTTONS!

Don't say we didn't warn you.

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I have always regarded blogging as a labour of love. At the very least it is means for people with something to say to the world to get these things off of their chest. But, let's be honest, recognition out in the wider world is sweet and makes the effort all the more worthwhile.

So Natalie Solent can justly feel as pleased as punch that she can count the venerable Mark Steyn among her fans:

As to sites I like, a lot of them are the obvious ones, like National Review, but if I had to single out a non-big-media site, I'd put in a word for Natalie Solent, who writes from somewhere in England and has a way of looking at subjects from odd angles with interesting historical allusions.

Muchos kudos to our Natalie.

[My thanks to Steve Martinovich of Enter Stage Right for heads-up]

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Our chum from Baghdad has some new stuff up, so check it out.

If the blogger archives are still phuked, just go here.

Although I have never met the guy, would not know him from Adam and I doubt we see the world in the same way, I am unaccountably delighted he made it through the war in one piece and is once more blogging.

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If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.

The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I've posted tangential comments of my own about the "New Urbanism", briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.

First, here is "Tom", replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:

You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50's creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are - a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation - appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.

But I am nervous about blanket condemnations of any kind of architecture. Modern architecture is not quite the force for evil in the world that I keep reading on this blog. That said, modernist urban planning is as bad or worse than has been expressed. What we need to be worried about is any totalitarian vision for architecture or urbanism. A strong town or city has the capability to absorb any style of architecture or building type, but any utopian or totalizing scheme will always destroy the city. Hitler and Speer's megalomanical plan for Berlin (dispite it's neo-classical style) was not a good thing regardless of how much Leon Krier liked it. We need architecture and urban planning that is anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian, not necessarilly anti-modern.

And second, here's Michael Blowhard himself, commenting on posting number two, having a go at A. C. Douglas:

… I don't know about you, but I have a hard time reconciling ACD's language with his implicit claim that he's the reasonable one here. Um, to say the least: his words seem to me to be dripping with irrational fury. Castigations, imprecations -- hey, son of a gun, that's the language of the offended religious nut! I'll resignedly point out, feeling slightly wounded, another anomoly -- that ACD, despite his habit of presenting himself as the ultimate arbiter of all things civilized, never shows the grace to express even the smallest appreciation for the way 2Blowhards occasionally stimulates a little conversation on architecture topics. No, he just seems to want to stamp it out. Tres civilized. …

You need a bit of heat in among the enlightenment of a good debate. Michael then goes on to offer an example of what he has in mind. In general, the needle between the Blowhards and ACD is something to savour. My opinion of ACD's views on the Modern Movement in Architecture is that I agree with most of what he says about the operas of Wagner.

My take on all this is that Salingaros is onto quite a lot of good stuff, and stirs in quite a lot of opinion-wrapped-up-as-science sense and ditto nonsense. I don't plan to read his magnum opus until it is (a) a huge best-seller and then (b) remaindered. I'm not holding my breath.

The way I prefer to write about modern architecture – well, maybe I mean the way I prefer to see it written about – is one bad idea at a time. And there are plenty of those, believe me. I'm strongly with "Tom" in wanting to see fact and opinion separated, as Salingaros and Douglas are both very bad at doing. In my opinion.

In my other postings on this subject I've been recommending in particular this article, entitled The New, Neighborly Architecture.

Meanwhile, my congratulations to the Blowhards on some fine blogging and some truly outstanding blog-debate hosting, terrific even by their standards.

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I find it fascinating to see which blog posts generate passionate interest and a deluge of comments.

Often it is articles that I expect will shuffle down Samizdata.net's page largely un-remarked before falling into the archives which turn out to be the ones greeted with clarion calls and angry-villagers-waving-torches, whereas some of what I think are 'dynamite articles' generate little more that a subdued murmur and the occasional burp.

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Blogger Sina Motallebi has been arrested by Iranian authorities for the 'crime' of giving interviews to Persian language radio stations outside Iran and for his blogging (in Farsi).

I suspect giving his plight as much publicity as possible may give the notoriously intemperate Iranian security services at least some motivation to play it cool if they think the spotlight of world opinion is on them.

It is a good thing we in the west have freedom of the press and internet, eh? No way would such heavy handed tactics be tolerated in somewhere like the USA, right? Right?

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Bloody media. Always complaining. Thus Rumsfeld at the end of last week, himself complaining about all the newspapers featuring looting instead of liberation.

Last night, I caught John Simpson of the BBC opining that the fall of Saddam is of no significance to any country outside of Iraq, and I don't know where to start, so hopelessly mistaken does that strike me as being. The argument was that because Saddam's regime was a "dead end", it couldn't therefore be of any greater consequence when this inconsequential regime was toppled. And then various other Talking Heads took it in turns to agree. They didn't seem to understand that there could possibly be anything between America invading a country and smashing all its statues and bombing all its bunkers and decapitating all its leaderships, and having no effect on a country whatsoever, despite having lots of bases in a newly liberated country right next door. Twats.

Nevertheless ...

Nevertheless, as this guy for one (and kudos to Instapundit for linking to this guy given the kind of thing this guy says about him) points out:

# of important news stories Glenn Reynolds broke during war: 0
# of important news stories journalists broke during war: All of them

It's from these same media people that I get the evidence in the light of which I choose to regard their editorial biases as biased, their conclusions and prophecies and prognostications as mistaken, or not as I please. The media are still the people supplying the news, even as they try to spin it in ways that the samizdata related blogosphere mostly disapproves of.

The media are, I think, rather like Windows. There are all sorts of things wrong with them, but, with occasional cock-ups and catastrophes, they get the job done, approximately speaking. If you are prepared to put a bit of effort into learning how they work, you can usually dig below the surface and get what you want, if you really do want it.

When that CNN guy revealed that they'd been concealing the truth in order to keep the flow of nice TV footage, I can't say that I was especially surprised. Only the candid way he admitted to it struck me as in any way out of the ordinary.

As to the present coverage of the Iraq war that Rumsfeld was so irritated by, I would far rather have the media biased against what the powers-that-be are doing than biased in their favour, even when I agree, approximately speaking, with the powers-that-be.

Suppose our newspapers and TV screens had indeed swamped all mention of looting and pillage with falling statues and cheering crowds and nothing else. Would the world in general, and Iraq in particular, really be better places? I say not.

Perhaps the problem is that the media do several different jobs. Two in particular have been seen colliding with one another in recent weeks, namely reporting, and complaining.

The complaining, as is natural just before a military campaign is being embarked upon, has taken the form of prophecying a succession of disasters. And the reporting has consisted mostly of admitting, sometimes through gritted teeth, that most of these disasters have not occurred. Iraq has not proved to be Vietnam. Baghdad has not been Stalingrad. When Baghdad fell with hardly a skirmish, we were told. When that statue fell, we saw it. When the Iraqis finally felt sure enough to smile and cheer, we saw their smiles and heard their cheers. And we drew our own conclusions, to the effect that our original conclusions about all this had been right, and that the media's had been mostly wrong. Are we really going to begrudge the media one genuine disaster, one which neither the blogosphere nor they foresaw, in the form of the looting that is now still going on?

They may be exaggerating this story, but it is definitely a story and they are quite right to be telling it.

Non-looter Iraqis have been shouting at camera crews that the bloody looters are making their lives a misery, and doctors have complained that their hospitals have no drugs or security guards. Well, good. Good for the camera crews and good for the Iraqis. Who suffers from these complaints? Coalition leaders impatient for their triumphs and their rounds of applause? Tough. Who benefits? The good citizens of Iraq and the wounded of Iraq and their carers, who get their law and order and their drugs about two days quicker than they would have done if the media had merely been blowing fanfares of praise to the soldiers and their commanders. There'll be plenty of time for handing out testimonials and retractions and apologetic analyses concerning what went right, albeit mostly from different people to the original Cassandras. Meanwhile, things are not completely perfect and the Cassandras are still complaining. Quite right. That's one of their jobs. And another part of their job will be to say: oh it's stopped, and oh, it wan't that bad, as and when it stops, and if it turns out that it wasn't that bad.

Meanwhile, you can interpret the complaints about looting very differently to the way that the complainers are mostly interpreting them now. One way of discussing Iraqis cursing the Coalition for screwing up the first few days of the peace is to say: the Coalition is screwing up the first few days of the peace. Which they did. But another is to say: well, thank God the Iraqis feel safe enough to call the Coalition a bunch of arseholes for screwing up, and to do it on camera. Maybe law and order is a couple of days away yet, but civilised politics, the sort where you can call Bush and Blair a couple of wankers without having your tongue cut out and bleeding to death in a basement, has started as of now.

The media are rather bad at dealing with important problems where the problem is knowing exactly what the right thing to do is. Most of what most of them know about such things ain't so. But when the problems are urgent, and the answers are pretty obvious – subdue looters, anaesthetise the wounded when they are being operated on, feed the starving, switch on the damn lights, comfort the bereaved – the media are at their best. Instead of the murderously sedate solving of the problems (or not as the case may be) away from the glare of the TV lights that those in authority would prefer, unaccompanied by any embarrassing questions about why they hadn't thought this through a month ago, there must instead be an undignified scramble to sort things out, accompanied by the lies and contradictions of press officers. It must be galling to get onto world-wide TV to complain about not knowing where in hell your next thirty meals are going to come from, but still not to get a meal. But such arrangements save lives, nevertheless.

Rejoice, rejoice, says the blogosphere about this war, now winding down. I say, with the media and against the blogosphere: hold the rejoicing, there's still work to be done. Now, Rumsfeld, about those anaesthetics …

Stepping back and looking at the larger picture, would all that military planning – the stuff that mostly went very right indeed – would have been done so well had the soldiers not known that failure would involve not just the hell of battlefield reverses but the further hell of being sneered at by those media arseholes? And were they not further encouraged in their work by the thought that success would means far fewer friends dying, and wiping the smug sneers off the faces of the arseholes? That's a big stick, and a big carrot. The media tried to destroy the military attack on Iraq. But they didn't destroy it. And because they didn't destroy it they made it stronger.

Looking at the even bigger picture, for "military attack on Iraq" read: everything. The media, the complaints department of capitalism. They demand the impossible, and sneer when they don't get it. When they do, they move immediately on to the next impossibility. Hurrah for capitalism. It finds creative uses even for socialists, which is more than you could ever say for socialism.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and the price of vigilance is the arseholes who do it mouthing off about what they think about what they see on their various vigils. It's a price well worth paying, I say.

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Patrick Ruffini is having server or hosting problems and thus has set up a temporary blog at patrickruffini.blogspot.com.

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An interesting debate has been going on about one warblogger's reporting in particular and about bloggers and source attribution in general. Apparently, Stratfor accused Sean-Paul, the Agonist warblogger providing minute by minute coverage, of plagiarising their news that are available by subscription only. There are various threads to this discussion. Here is the Agonist one, here Metafilter is asking some pertinent questions about blogs and copyright, and here is the latest from Strategic Armchair Command.

Most comments on the Agonist are adoringly supportive of Sean-Paul, encouraging him to carry on providing what they see as an invaluable service to them. Most comments on Strategic Armchair Command who positioned themselves against the Agonist are sufficiently abusive to make someone stop blogging. There are a few comments that break the rank and this one comes from a supporter who sees beyond the gung-ho attitute of some parts of blogosphere in taking on the mainstream media.

Actually, I am an attorney. There isn't a problem if SP is just reprinting headlines that Stratfor provides on its site for free. But if he was republishing wire reports that Stratfor sells by subscription, that's a serious problem and SP should have known better.

This all reminds me of littlegreenfootball's assertion that his site broke a story of WMD suits found in Iraq, when all he did was link to the newspaper that actually did break the story. Bloggers are confusing what work belongs to someone else and what is their own.

And another reasonable sounding voice:

I can understand why alarms have been raised. *If* a lot of content is being posted from a subscription site without mentioning the source, some might be lead to believe the author of this site was trying to infer he had unique or personal sources that don't exist.

In plain terms: anyone can scour sites and post links to the material he finds, but if that's what you're doing you should provide sources. Otherwise, when the curtain is pulled aside, folks may be disappointed to find the little man working the levers. If you do have your own unique sources, highlight those somehow, so no confusion can arise.

People post an awful lot of value-less material out on the net; this site has provided some interesting material though. Understand though, that when a site like this grows in popularity, it's likely to be scrutinized by many who are well-equipped to discover any cracks in its integrity.

Perhaps there are better or more illustrative comments in the threads I link to above, but I have not had the time to go through the hundreds of comments on the Agonist alone. Some are quite surreal in attacking the very idea of copyright from angles that boggle the mind, invoking anything from Dark Ages to free ideas for all.

My view on the controversy is straightforward. For me, good blogging is one based on credibility. Audience is, for most part, discerning and it does not make for good practise to make yourself look bigger & better than you really are. If you can't come up with new interesting ideas, there is nothing wrong with using someone else's as long as it's clear. In fairness, Sean-Paul posts were not meant to be creative, but to be on the 'breaking edge' of news.

Another essential feature of blogosphere is linkage. Not linking to sources is a cardinal sin for a blogger, in my opinion, and I am often annoyed by the pseudo-blogs that have started to emerge, namely the BBC Reporters' Log or ComputerWorld blog that do not link and individual posts cannot be linked to.

Also, when something as controversial as the war in Iraq becomes the focus of the news, objective reporting and information are not the only factors at play. People's allegiances, emotions and self-interest often outshout voices of reason and objectivity. And as the commenter in the first quote points out "cracks in integrity" become more apparent. On the other hand, I can understand the race to breaking news as I share the bloggers' desire to become more influential vis-a-vis the maintream media.

We have a few simple rules here on Samizdata.net. A very lenient editor whose occassional editorial spankings are a gentle reminder that minarchy rather than anarchy is the game... Links to and/or attritbution of any quotes and text lifted from elsewhere and although we occassionaly nick a picture or two, we try not to make a habit of it. I would certainly consider it good practise to be careful about using paid subscribtion sources, let alone not crediting their material. And I would certainly not want to see a backlash against bloggers from the traditional media, especially if it is triggered by careless rather than bad practice.

I am sure this is not the first or last controversy about copyright and blogs and I will welcome any contributions to the debate.

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A true story about Little Bobby Fisk that deserves extensive spreading across the blogosphere.

Many years ago, in the mists of pre-history, or as they say here in Australia, back when the blacks were bad, a little boy called Robert Fisk thought he'd become a journalist and tell the truth to the world. You and I know that never happened, and time is running out for him to repent his sins. To show that he's always been an arrogant, self-opinionated prick, I present the following - Robert Fisk and the Magic Roadblock.

Full story here, thanks to Tom Paine of Silent Running.

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Our faithful readers may have noticed that Samizdata.net was down. Hopefully, the problem is fixed now and we shall be blogging our hearts out... from a critically rational libertarian perspective, obviously.

Some of us have also joined the ranks of warbloggers at The Command Post as we collectively surf the breaking news.

Click for on-target news

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The reason why there has been a relatively small number of posts on Samizdata.net is the simple fact that we have been glued to our TV screens. We don't have better access to facts and news than the media and there will be time for analysis later...

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I followed Instapundit to this:

America's oldest institution of higher learning has hopped on the Internet's hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.

Harvard University has given the former software executive a fellowship at its Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School, in order to head up the new Blogs at Harvard Initiative. Winer, who studied math at Tulane University before collecting his master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, will instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to the Web.

That took me to this, and I went from there I came across this:

SEOUL, South Korea – The earnest young man in tortoise-shell glasses spends up to 18 hours a day peering at a computer screen. Despite his unassuming appearance, Hwang Myong Pil's online moniker is ''Nuclear Bomb,'' and he is one of the secret weapons of South Korea's president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun.

Hwang, 29, is a volunteer for an online fan club that is an increasingly important player in South Korean politics. The fan club, popularly known by a Korean acronym for ''People who Love Roh,'' boasts 80,000 members -- most of them in their 20s or early 30s with little previous taste for electoral politics. They are widely credited with playing a major part in Roh's upset victory Dec. 19, and they are taking an unusual role in the transition to his inauguration today.

Meanwhile Freedom and Whisky links to a grumpy journalist complaining about blogging.

I WORRY about the internet. Useful it might be in many ways - make that some ways, rather like the occasional usefulness of a mobile phone - but the prat, nerd, geek, wonk, crank and fanatic count continues to rise inexorably.

People who surf the net for hours tell me that it is fascinating. Wrong. Unless you are looking for a specific piece of information that can be located within seconds by Google, the search engine which is a remarkable and useful invention, surfing simply wastes time.

Millions of people are apparently happy with that. They spend time on sites for sad people such as the "re-live your schooldays fantasy" of Friends Re-united, or track down weird theories about what’s wrong with the world, from global warming to athlete’s foot or how aliens are responsible for power cuts.

And they blog. Blogging, I’m told, is producing an online diary. Anyone can do it, inflicting the result on the world’s overloaded net rather like over-filling a slurry tank, to coin a farming metaphor.

Well, the man has a point. Not all blogs are as good as some blogs. But there are giveaway phrases: "I'm told" (he doesn't really know about this stuff), "I worry" (yes, it's not just harmless chit chat, his job could eventually go), and above all: "Anyone can do it" (!!!).

This bloke senses that the culture is shifting underneath him, and he doesn't like it. The internet was fine when it was just a machine to help him write his columns. But what if millions of people out there would rather spend their time writing for a blog and reading other blogs, than reading his newspaper columns, or gawping uncritically at the television where his mates do their thing? What if people start having their own weird theories about everything, instead of getting them from him? Scary thoughts indeed.

His answer is: "Just say no." Which never works.

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Is this the first 'blogger-marriage', I wonder?

Regardless of whether it is or not, many congratulations to Andrew Dodge and Sasha Castel who are now Mr. and Mrs. Castel-Dodge.

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I still cannot say the word 'blog' in any non-blogger company without being confronted by blank faces and puzzled expressions. The medium isn't really 'out there' yet.

But gradual recognition in the circles of orthodox journalism gathers apace although I am not, perhaps, as wildly enthusiastic as I ought to be about this BBC editorial:

"Weblogs, for those of you still outside this ever-increasing loop, are personal web sites, updated frequently, and increasingly interlinked and interconnected to such an extent that some people have started to think of them as a kind of "hive mind" for the internet community.

As American technology writer Dan Gilmor, who first reported the Google/Blogger story, has realised and publicly stated many times: with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists. And the journalists had better remember that."

The hook of the editorial is the acquisition of Pyra by Google but I suppose that it's a good sign that they've been interested enough by blogging to write about the medium in fairly glowing terms.

They do mention one or two blogs specifically and, naturally, both are left-wing but then the BBC can hardly be expected to even acknowledge the existance of anyone or anything that isn't.

Do you think they've noticed this one yet?

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Samizdata voted No. 1 Group Blog by a fairly large group of the great and the good of the blogosphere (or the mad and the bad, depending on your p.o.v.) Nice. True. Stiff competition, too.

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In the course of my duties as a occasional and strictly-when-I-feel-like-it culture blogger, I watched, with a view to commenting on, a short profile that was shown on BBC2 TV last Monday night about the great conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, a musician I've admired and enjoyed the recordings of ever since I first heard him in the nineteen sixties. The show only lasted half an hour and there wasn't time for much to be said, but one very interesting thing was said, by conductor/composer Pierre Boulez, who, perhaps somewhat surprisingly (trad classical musician versus enfant terrible avant guardist, etc.), is a close friend of Barenboim's, as well as a musical collaborator from way back.

Boulez pointed out that Barenboim is unusual in being a musician whose repertoire and general interest in the world and its affairs have both broadened over the years rather than narrowed. And it's true. The typical top-flight classical music career starts in a blaze of somewhat indiscriminate fireworks and political pontifications, and then as age sets in our wunderkind becomes a not quite so wunder-mensch, cuts out the political posturing and the extraneous repertoire, and homes in on a gradually diminishing core of favourite pieces, and then disintegrates and dies.

Barenboim is doing the opposite. He started out as your typical sheltered prodigy who loved the great classics of classical music to distraction, and ignored just about everything else. But his repertoire has never stopped expanding, and simply as a result of being an A-list classical musician, and especially in his capacity as boss of one of the Berlin opera houses in the years since unification, he has found himself reflecting, if not quite on the wider world as such then most certainly on the place of classical music within that wider world. (You don't conduct the first Wagner ever played in public in the state of Israel without thinking about that very carefully!)

To this end, he writes. Go to his website (see the link above) and you'll see what I mean.

Barenboim is not an actual blogger. He is no daily diarist. Nevertheless, his writings are referred to at his website as a "journal", and had this site been set up only a few years later, it might have included a bona fide blog. After all, these classical musicians are having to sing for their suppers, to fight for their arts council grants and their permanent recording contracts, and they know it. (And if your appetite for supper is anything like Barenboim's, you really have to sing, let me tell you. Old style opera in the newly wilting German economy. That's one hell of a sell.)

So, Barenboim writes. My question is: are any genuine Barenboim-level celebs actually finding the time to blog, in approximately the kind of way that we guys do?

I rule out writers, because that is not enough of a sideshow to really be a sideshow. But how about sportsmen? Do any movie stars blog? Perry mentions film producer/occasional blogger Brian Linse here from time to time, and he could become very famous if things go well for him. But, unsurprisingly, Linse seems like he's too busy to put frequent postings on his blog. Either that, or he just can't match that Barenboim level of energy. (Few can, let me tell you. That's no big criticism.)

I'm guessing that some pop stars blog. But are they any good? Also, I tend to discount them because, if they write lyrics, that sort of makes them writers too.

But that's my question. Who is the most famous blogger? Not famous for blogging, but who happens to blog about the life that does make him or her famous. Anyone?

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I have long known that the world is essentially a madhouse with no locks on the doors, but when I read that a former Taliban soldier who fought against British and US forces in Afghanistan will be given asylum in Britain because the pro-western government in Kabul is 'persecuting' him, I start to really wonder at what the word 'asylum' really means. Did rational people object to former members of the National German Socialist Workers Party being 'persecuted' in the aftermath of World War Two?

A few days ago, American bloggers Andrew and Sasha arrived in Britain, neither of whom have ever fought against British soldiers, or called for the death of Christians and Jews, or joined any organisations like Al-Muhajirun which aims to make Britain a muslim caliphate...

...and yet they were nevertheless detained at the airport upon arrival in the UK on Thursday and grilled for nine hours before being provisionally allowed into the country. In fact Sasha's blog was examined by the Immigration agents and its content used as the excuse to initially deny her entry. It is strange that the content of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad's website does not seem to get him kicked out of the country.

The state is not your friend.

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This is a terrific idea, and this is how nytimes.com reported it (scroll down to where is says "Sam's blog"):

A new online diary made its debut on Jan. 1. Yes, there are already millions of such personal Web sites. But this diary belongs to Samuel Pepys, who lived from 1633 to 1703, long before "Weblog" cracked the lexicon.

Pepys (pronounced peeps), a British naval administrator, was a compulsive diarist who recorded his life in detail for nine years beginning on New Year's Day 1660. The resulting diary is the most comprehensive personal account of life in the 17th century. The site, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (pepysdiary.com), posts Pepys's entries in a Weblog format as if they had just been written - a new one is added each day - with the goal of allowing people to read along for nine years.

Phil Gyford, a Web developer in London, set up the site because he had always wanted to read the diary but found it "daunting and uninviting" in its long form. "I haven't read much further ahead than what's on the site," he said by e-mail. "I'm enjoying reading it along with everyone else."

Mr. Gyford also had the inspired idea of allowing site visitors to annotate the entries. The annotations can be personal comments or explanations proffered for obscure terms and historical references. The result is like reading a book along with a group of clued-in friends.

Still, Pepys should not be taken as a model by today's online diarists. Although "Pepys's diary shows us that the smallest of everyday details can be fascinating a few hundred years in the future," Mr. Gyford said, "I wouldn't want to encourage Webloggers to put even more of the details of their lives online."

Gyford started this project on January 1st of this year. Pepys himself started on January 1st 1660. To make a start yourself, go here and scroll down.

I have a small personal link to all this through the late Robert Latham, one of the editors of the latest edition of the Pepys Diaries, and, it seems pretty generally agreed, the best and most complete one. Before going to Magdalene College Cambridge to work on Pepys full time, Robert Latham, a memorably jolly man as well as a great scholar, was a Professor at Royal Holloway College, Englefield Green, which was a walk away from my childhood home, the Lathams and Micklethwaits being good friends. Robert Latham's son went to the same preparatory school as me and my elder brother.

I wonder what Robert Latham would have made of this project. He might have had mixed feelings, because the edition that Gyford is using is, alas, not his, but an earlier and less complete one, simply because only the earlier one is now out of copyright.

I've always meant to read Pepys but have never quite got around to it. This is my chance. All sorts of people are congratulating Gyford for having embarked on this project, but Pepys himself kept at it for nine years, and I will save my heartiest congratulations for the year 2012 when Gyford is scheduled to complete the job. So far he's managed just over a fortnight of it.

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Back when I was running an ISP here in Belfast, I was a regular reader and occasional poster on an email list about business in Eastern Europe. Steve Carlson, the list founder, moved with the times and the list expanded to general European internet business discussions; it spun off First Tuesday meetings all over Europe; then it became nowEurope, a more tightly edited Digest...

And now it's a blog. They've got some good writers who have been involved with it from the beginning. I sort of dropped out as I moved on to other things. Well, truthfully, 90% of my writing goes to Samizdata now. So there!

The nowEurope blog looks interesting, but I hope they soon learn how important cross linking is: they currently are pretty stand-alone. So visit them and urge them to join the community.

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In some cases, it is a heavy price.

The Swordsman, Iain Murray, one of the brightest stars in the blogging firmament, has just been summarily dismissed from his job:

"My employment was terminated this morning, with this blog stated as the reason.

It sounds like he has been treated very shabbily indeed. He has a wife and a small child so, if you can, please make your way over to his blog and leave something in the tip-jar. If you unable to do that, then at least let him know that you care.

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Glenn Reynolds' latest TechCentralStation piece is up, and in it there's a link to one of those Famous Articles you know you should have read, in this case Garrett Hardin's 1968 piece called The Tragedy of the Commons. I went to it, and since it's not a piece I actually know very well (I may or may not have read it, and if so how thoroughly I can't remember, a long time ago), I decided to have a read of it.

And I immediately, without further conscious thought, whistled up a complete print-out.

This was, I feel, one of those revealing moments. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but here's my surmise.

The much famed "collapse of attention span" that we've all been suffering from lately is mostly no such thing. All that we are suffering from is the limitations of the computer screen compared to paper, which (to recycle a very old joke), if it had been invented after the computer screen rather than several centuries before it, would have been hailed as a huge advance.

When I am thinking about reading something – anything – I need to know when I start what I'm getting myself into, so that I can decide now if I have the time and the effort ready for the job, and so that I can generally work myself up into the correct state of determined receptivity, like a sportsman psyching himself up at the start of a long race or a big fight. That's maybe over-dramatising it a bit but that, in a mild form, is what's going on when you "settle down" to read something.

When I have my read in my hands, on paper, I can immediately tell approximately what I'm in for. But the computer screen, despite all kinds of software trickery that's been devised to help with this exact problem, only really tells you what you are facing if you can see all of it on your screen, or at the very least can scroll down very quickly to the end. (Am I the only one who often finds a brief moment of scrolling a wildly inaccurate method of guessing length?) If I stop this blog posting very soon, I'll just about be in under this particular bit of wire, and I will in fact try very hard to do just that.

Another way to answer the length question for the reader is to establish a pattern that readers are familiar with, the way samizdata does. Our readers know that even if it says "MORE" on one of these things, they'll only be troubled for a certain sort of length of time, and thus they can embark on the reading with that vital part of "settling down" process having been done for them. (And by the way, clicking on "MORE" has the effect of "separating out" the piece from all the other bloggage here present, and thus making an assessment of the length even of the not-so-short samizdata pieces that much easier to do. At the end, there's not more bloggage, there's just empty space, which makes length-guessing a lot less confusing. At least you know which piece this ending is the ending of.)

Computers have created a new niche for pieces short enough to be "settled down to" very quickly, without you having to scroll down carefully or go to the bother and expense of a print-out. But because our attention spans have not in fact collapsed that enormously, computers have created a very big niche, for a lot of such pieces. In short they have created the blogosphere.

I could, I'm sure, say a lot more here about all this, but that would obviously be a very foolish thing for me to do.

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Today I had lunch (a sandwich and coffee anyway) with my friend Kristine Lowe, who is a journalist - you know, one of those people who writes stories for a "newspaper", which is "printed", on a Big Machine somewhere in London. The newspaper that Kristine writes for is called the "Daily Express". She had a story in it today, about the improving business performance of a company called London Clubs International, which is now doing better than it was, because of the relaxing of the British regulations concerning gambling which apparently occurred last August. (So something is being deregulated here, even if it's only gambling.)

The reason I am reporting for Samizdata.net on this meeting is that, much to my surprise, I found that I was able to tell Kristine things - about business, about the big wide world, about the world of men trying to damage each other - things which she didn't know much about and which I knew somewhat more about, as a result of me being a blogger. I talked of Glenn Reynolds (K: Who is he? What does he do when he's not blogging?") and of Trent Lott ("Who's Trent Lott?" – this despite Lott having finally made it to the British TV news shows last night), of the arguments about data copying and patent protection, in connection with the music industry and the pharmaceutical industry. I told her of particular bloggers to pay attention to, such as Stephen Pollard (pharmaceutical patents and intellectual property generally), Michael Jennings (telecommunications), my recent discovery China Hand (China), and Reynolds of course (for the Lott story, and for his very different take on intellectual property).