Samizdata

The Daily Dose is a wide ranging newsblog, consistently libertarian in outlook but less likely to assault you with polemics than yours truly. Blogstress Orchid presents numerous brief-comments-with-link entries daily plus the occasional lengthier prognostication. A typical Orchic flowering:

WHY THE DOTCOMS FAILED: Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it all before… overinvestment, shoddy business models, the arrogance of 24-year-old CEOs. This rant (scroll down below the images) points out something that most chroniclers of the DotBombs underemphasized: human nature.

(Is chroniclers a word? Oh, well, you get my drift.)

If you like your bloggage in informal quick-fix Daily Doses, then this is the blog for you.

Does your blog lack a certain zip? Does it fail to reach other parts other blogs reach? Does Glenn Reynolds treat your blog like a bidet? In short, does your blog suck? Well perhaps your problem is that your refreshments, so essential to good blogging, are in pedestrian porcelain… your crockery is a mockery!

The truth is that hardcore bloggers prefer their bourbon toddies in a Bitter Princess mug. It is not enough to just hang out with a ‘Mittle European’ fixated Bitter Girl… to feel the full effects that are so efficacious to superior blogging, only a Bitter Girl mug will do! I find that running my tongue along the edge and thinking of Shannon greatly enhances the creative processes.

From this little article lifted in its entireity from today’s JPMorgan Chase Tech Industry Daily, it would appear that the corporate world is starting to take notice.

Will bloggers compete with journalists?

In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new Web logs using Blogger, Wired News reported yesterday. A Web log, or “blog” for short, is a tool for self-publishing on the Web, and often features links to Web sites that the writer finds interesting. It’s like a one-person discussion group. Web logs have now crossed a tipping point, leaping from a “self-contained community” to a group “large enough that there’s many different Web logs,” according to Evan Williams, who runs Blogger, one of the most popular services for creating a blog. Some have put the total number of Web logs at more than 500,000.

Blogging boosters have proclaimed Web logging a new form of people’s journalism. Now comes the backlash. John Dvorak of PC Magazine said that while a few blogs were insightful, many new webloggers were getting into blogging for all the wrong reasons. They are “wannabe writers” who are looking for “ego gratification,” Dvorak wrote.

[Tech Daily] Editor’s comment: Starting a blog is just like creating your own Web homepage for those who don’t know how to create one. Blogging software is a PC-based “client” that enables the writer to use a browser to post a blog to a server. That server can be inside or outside a firewall. To start a blog you first go to Blogger or one of the other blogging-service sites and download a small piece of software. You’re given a URL of your own, and you can then start publishing your thoughts right to that URL. Will bloggers replace journalists? Bloggers are to journalists as ubiquitous video camera owners are to professional photographers. It’s the talent and not the tool. Still, amateur video has a place in recording the events of our time.

Blogging has some potential in a corporate context in support of knowledge management, workgroup collaboration, or corporate communications. But blogging will take time to find a home in the corporate environment. The key to its adoption will be to find one-to-many communication requirements where other tools like e-mail and Web pages aren’t as effective. Blogging within corporations will probably follow the same route as instant messaging. IM started with kids and spread to adults as its effectiveness within corporations became evident. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who knows of effective corporate blogging solutions.

Fellow bloggers, hang on to your hats. This ride could get wild.

The Blue Button is a highly polemical independent libertarian blog. It is largely limited to American issues but within that purview tends to throw a fairly wide net. The blog has a blunt ‘in your face’ style and it would be fair to say ambiguity and nuance are eschewed for the Monster Truck car crushing approach.

I’ll tell you what really gets on my tits about Tom Tomorrow and the whole Village Voice “we’re not commies, honest” liberal set. They’ve all been doing a bang-up job documenting and bitching about privacy and civil liberty violations but when it’s cast-your-ballot time, where are they? In the booth with the statists.

Quite so. The Blue Button says it the way the author sees it. If you like opinions straight from the shoulder, then this is the blog for you.

Like all self respecting cabals of sinister globalist illuminati, we have a motley widespread and close-knit network of voyeurs spies reporting back to us with prurient valuable information… one of them has managed to get a snapshot of a well known bellicose blogger. We need assistance positively identifying her however.

We are watching you