We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
(Early) this morning on Brian’s Education Blog I mentioned my unease about links to electronic newspaper articles that may, but may not, remain linkable-to. (I reproduced great gobs of an independent.co.uk piece, maybe superfluously.) John Ray (of this – which is a link that is likely to go on making sense for the foreseeable future) sent me this email:
I share your concern about linking to articles on sites run by newspapers. My solution is to put up on a separate site copies of articles that I think might “disappear”. See: www.foxhunt.blogspot.com.
I’d be particularly interested in comments on this matter. (For these purposes I suggest we treat the shambles that is the blogger/blogspot/whateverit’scalled archiving system as a separate issue.)
Much is made by bloggers of the notion of the “blogosphere”. We bloggers understandably focus on the distinction between a “blog” and a “not blog”. (See for example the critical comments on this Samizdata piece I did – and let’s all hope that that link still makes sense in five years time! – about what is apparently a “not blog”.)
But I believe that a more fundamental distinction is the one between all the stuff that is available at one press of one button (i.e. linkable to), for ever, and all the stuff that will perhaps not be available for ever, at one press of one button, either because it never was in the first place, or because, having dangled it in front of us all for a few months, the danglers are then instructed by their accountants and/or lawyers to put the stuff behind a registration and/or money wall.
John Ray’s solution seems unwieldy, and also vulnerable to small-print-wielding lawyers forcing him (or someone) to take the stuff down from his special site.
I’m not querying the right of electronic newshounds to behave like this – not in this posting anyway. (It’s costing them money to write these pieces, and our plan is that eventually we spoil their on-paper circulation numbers, right?) I’m merely wondering what we can do (that we have and will go on having a legal right to do) about it, in such a way that keeps all our postings making sense.
Because Perry de Havilland‘s solution – quote great gobs of the original piece thereby making the link less crucial – is not perfect either.
That’s the good news:
Survey: Big Business Eager to Hire Bloggers
(2002-11-03) — A new survey of Fortune 500 companies reveals that 81 percent are eager to hire weblog writers (called bloggers) at substantial pay rates. Many bloggers currently spend hours each day reading news and writing views. …
This new study, by the Center for the Promotion of Income for Bloggers (CPIB), found that many corporations are awakening to the value of having a “staff blogger.”
The bad news is … it’s Scrappleface. Thanks for the link to Instapundit, who also steers the blogosphere to those party photos below. I was genuinely excited, almost as if I was back at the party (I’m the one with the yellow British teeth). But then I read:
“Big business has begun to realize the need to have someone on staff who can express open hostility with cutting wit and a generous helping of obscenities,” according to the CPIB news release. “Of course, these qualities have been in rich supply within most organizations for years, but their expression has been reserved for private emails, and restroom stalls. Now, companies are willing to pay, and pay well, for these bitter screeds.”
The CPIB study was underwritten by income from a Pay Pal “tip jar” on its web site. The statistical margin of error is plus or minus 100 percent.
Well, you never know. There’s many a truth that started its career as a jest.
One year ago today, we first started blighting the Internet with a pixilated stream of opinions, rants, pictures, invective and sundry insightful pontifications.
Like most bloggers, we started out using www.blogger.com to publish, using the vexed blogspot servers to host our site… and also like so many we migrated to the ever more powerful Movable Type. Nevertheless, credit where credit is due to Evan Williams of Blogger.com for making it possible for blogs to explode onto the Internet scene with such vigour.
Also special thanks to Glenn at Instapundit for providing the inspiration for starting this blog, not to mention a few early links that well and truly got the show on the road for us.
Above all, thanks to Dale Amon for bringing the whole concept of blogging to my attention. If you really love (or hate) us, he is the one you should thank (blame) for getting me started!
Tonight we are having the inevitable party (we never need much of an excuse for a party) at the Black Widow Pub to toast our continuing diatribes.
Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the ride as we lionise all that is right with the world and rail against everything that irks us.
We have only just begun to fight!
Everything I ever say about blogging, the internet, emails, email chatrooms, etc., has to be prefaced by the caveat that I’m a ludicrously late comer to all this stuff, and what do I really know? But one thing I do know is that I prefer being a blogger to being an emailer in an email chatroom.
The thing I hate about “chat” rooms is how you seem to get these constant eruptions of abuse. It’s like being a rat in one of those horrible experiments which prove that rats can’t live like that. Every so often fights break out and with every fight that’s fought more fur falls out, more immune system damage is suffered, more rats abandon procreation as a life goal, and each rat is one fight nearer to just laying down and dying of a broken heart at the sheer horribleness of it all.
Blogging often gets frisky, especially in the comments sections (which seem to me to be a lot like the nicest of the chatrooms) but basically, I’m convinced, blogging is not like that. → Continue reading: Ratmailing versus blogging
Alas poor Brendan, we knew him well…
No, Brendan O’Neill is not a dead blogger… he has not kicked the bucket, nor shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile! He is not an ex-blogger!!!
The reason he has not posted on his blog for a while is that his blog publishing software has gone tits up in a big way. We will report when he is back on line and pooping all over the blogosphere again.
 Update: Brendan has fixed his technical problems and is once again ‘with blog’.
Tim Evans of the Centre for the New Europe has just emailed me to tell me about the blog which the CNE have been quietly running for the last few weeks, or at any rate quietly enough for me not to notice it until now. It’s called The Pulse, and looks well worth a regular read. And hello, what is this? Goodness me, a fulsomely admiring link to this. Coincidences will never cease. Of course what that actually shows is that Tim Evans is a man who knows how to get a blog noticed.
Rather more seriously, I think that The Pulse is part of the answer to that question we all ask from time to time: How Can I Get Paid To Blog? Because I get the definite feeling that The Pulse’s regulars, Tim himself, Helen Govett, Stephen Pollard, Helen Disney, Johan Hjertqvist (the last two being new names to me), are not exactly starving as a result of their association with this blog. The CNE is a real-world olde-world, meat-space institution – with secretaries, carpets, conferences, a website with swank pictures of the honchos shaking hands with swank politicians – in short with money, money that it is presumably willing to dole out in noticeable amounts to the right blogicians.
Interesting too that The Pulse follows the Samizdata example of having a team of bloggers, to make sure that it keeps fresh and keeps coming.
(PS: While checking the link to Stephen Pollard’s blog, I found myself reading his piece yesterday (Oct 22) on the impact of the Bali bomb on the thinking of the “Bali generation”, originally for the Wall Street Journal of Europe. I can’t make any sense of Stephen’s targetted links and I’m sure that’s just me, but this piece is most interesting.)
I went on a random blogwalk, as you do at Sunday lunchtime if you live alone and are still wearing your pyjamas, and came across The Spleenville Journal – A Subsidiary of Spleenville World Domination Enterprises. Aaah, world domination …
First reaction: nice looking, witty, a fine answer to what Michael of the 2Bs was saying about envy and aesthetics, see here, I should tell the 2Bs. Anyway I scroll down, and find this. Everyone has already been introduced, and here’s me introducing them to each other all over again. Imagine.
But, it’s all being done so loudly and pretentiously that all you little people out there can’t possibly miss who we all are.
I really like comments, both here and elsewhere. I especially like the comments on Little Missy, because unlike the regular stuff on Little Missy I can actually read them because – and this is very odd – they’re in bigger writing. The comments on LM are usually just LM’s friends chitchatting amongst themselves, but since I don’t know what they chatting about I don’t know what they’re chatting about, if you get my drift. There’s no harm in friendly chitchat of course, but often comments jump out at you as deserving more than just to be forever buried away as number 17 of 24, or whatever. Consider this:
The puzzle of why brilliant people (and I’m talking G. B. Shaw and Sartre here, not Starfish) are often so stupid politically has interested me for a while. My theory is that artistic types have long despised the middle class (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are born into the middle class). This disdain for the boring old sods who become bankers and lawyers and businessmen, along with the tendency to romanticize either the aristocracy or the lower classes predates communism, but with the rise of communism, those old feelings of dislike and contempt became politicized.
I think that’s one reason why the left has never come to grips with the horrors of communism or wanted to admit that capitalism, with all its faults, offers more freedom and opportunity to ordinary people than any other system. Admitting that would mean changing one’s attitude toward the dull, plodding middle classes and that’s too strongly ingrained in Western culture for intellectuals to easily give up.
I think that’s good. Also, there is no mention of guns or killing apart from the inevitable reference to communism itself, which for Samizdata just now is a plus, I think. That was comment number 32 (you have to scroll down for it) by “Donna V”, concerning comment number 21 by “Mookie Wilson”, both apropos of a piece in Little Green Footballs about some arts people who have signed an anti-GW2 internet petition.
Or, for those more bloodthirsty readers who want a more immediate body count in the foreground of the picture, I also think that this comment deserves more attention than maybe it has so far got:
We will know that President Bush and co. are serious about the war against the Islamofascists, not when they bomb cities full of women and children, but rather when we start reading on the back pages of the papers about mysterious deaths (falling in front of street cars, say) happening with suspicious frequency to men rumored to be supporters of radical Islam (including spokesman, apologists and financiers along with the gunmen). We should take a leaf from Mossad – that exploding telephone yesterday was genius (not that the CIA has either the intelligence or ops capacity to pull something like that off). This may not be as immediately gratifying as nuking the SOBs, but the time is not ripe for that. Mr. Islamiya would be a good start.
That comment was posted by Doug Levene on October 15, 2002 03:57 AM, and was one of 28 (so far) on this, here at Samizdata. Do fellow Samizdata writers have other comments to offer? – by other people I mean, which they think deserve to be elevated into actual postings? Has His Holiness Instapundit ever linked to or quoted from a mere comment?
Thanks to Instapundit, I have just come across this gem of a blog. It seems to consist of three guys writing a fairly lengthy and very well thought out articles about French anti-Americanism, Rousseauian Conservatives, New Jersey, UN and global warming, American politics, EU, you name it. Last Tuesday they even discovered John Fonte and his Tranzi article. Welcome to the fold!
Go and see for yourself, they are definitely worth the read!
That veritable taste sensation and Slavophile angst muffin of the blogosphere, Shannon Okey needs help from you technical engineer types… so surf on over and see if you can lend a hand.
Shannon wants you badly
It’s the way the blogosphere works. Something happens in your back yard. Instapundit picks it up and tells you about it, and you get to work. It, in this case being an article in the New Statesman called “Bloggers of the Left, Unite!”, by James Crabtree. The New Statesman not itself being very blog-friendly, Crabtree decided to put his piece up at the “iSociety” bit of one of his his own websites. Here’s how it ends.
Should the left worry? Definitely. The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine’s coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree – or appear to agree – with other things that are held to be true. Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate. And the same may be about to happen in the UK. The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: “There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all – all – on the right.” But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.
Or lost.
“Blogsphere”? Is that what they’re going to call it?
There appear to be no links from iSociety to “all – all” – or even any-any of – those right wing Brit-blogs, nor to Instapundit nor to Andrew Sullivan, both also mentioned in the piece. Wouldn’t want people actually trying to find out for themselves how unthinkingly and unargumentatively right wing or not as the case may be said blogs might be. For someone declaring war, Crabtree seems somewhat reluctant actually to engage with his enemy. But I suppose that when the attacks do start to come, from real blogs, there will be links.
And as for Stephen Pollard being “on the left” … Smack in the Blairite centre middle, more like, and with all kinds of market bells and whistles attached. Ditto Crabtree, to judge by who’s paying for his web activities.
There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:
…alchemy, soapmaking, Hermetics […] laughing.
Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com!
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
