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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.