Category: Main

Perhaps Mr. Levy might recall that while ” the low road is a well-trodden path to big readership,” so is twisting source’s quotes so they fit your predetermined-and-yet-oh- so-charmingly-contrarian-storyline.
Glenn says “I’ve always thought well of Levy, and I’m sure that he didn’t intend to misrepresent my meaning,” but I think he’s being too charitable by far. How else to explain this sentence from Levy:
“True, there are indeed constructive, thoughtful Web-log commentators online. But they don’t draw crowds like Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit site recently peaked at about 445,000 daily page views.”
Is there a way to read that other than that in Mr. Levy’s exhalted opinion, Glenn is not a “constructive, thoughtful” commentator?
Levy’s piece is self-righteous twaddle from a journalist who should know better. Nothing more, nothing less.

Folks:
You may have noticed that we are having some intermittent server problems around these parts: every now and then, the site will become completely inaccessible for a short period of time.
The good news is that the folks at Matters are on the case. While we still aren’t sure exactly what the issue is, they’ve decided to migate TTLB over to a new, beefier server. That will occur sometime later this week, so until then, we may see problems, but going forward, the new server should help keep things running smoothly.
I don’t say it enough, but I definitely appreciate the support and flexibility I’ve received from Hosting Matters. The Ecosystem is a bit of a beast, and they’ve worked with me to try to ensure it stays up and running. So to Annette and the rest of the gang at HM: thanks! And to anyone out there looking for hosting services: check them out!
-NZB

Just caught Kerry campaign manager (one of ’em, anyway) Mary Beth Cahill to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on the way in to the day-job this morning.
Inskeep asked a good question:
Inskeep: “One of the things that Senator Kerry has said repeatedly is that he would speed up the training of Iraqi forces, that’s one of the ways he’s says that he would get some American forces and eventually all American forces out of the country. The White House has also said that it would attempt to speed up the training of Iraqi forces, and the major criticism of the Administration’s plan is that it takes a certain amount of time to build an army from scratch. It’s hard to speed up that process. What makes you think the change in the White House could change what is actually possible for military trainers to do on the ground?”
Cahill: “Well actually I think that some of the people who have done the most with this around the world are the Irish and the French, and that if we could draw them into this, helping us train Iraqi nationals, that would be a huge step in the right direction. But they won’t do it so long as we have the leadership that we have right now.”
Inskeep, wisely, had no response to this.
With all due respect to the Irish and French militaries — and unlike Senator Kerry, I do suggest we treat our allies with respect — I just don’t see the significant problems of, as Inskeep quite rightly put it, “building an army from scratch”, melting away at the first sign of French and Irish boots on the ground. (Not to mention my considerable skepticism that either nation would actually suddenly decide their national interests have changed and alter their policies simply because Mr. Kerry had taken residence at 1600 Pennsylvania.)
Unless, of course, the main problem in training the Iraqi military is a lack of good beer and fine food, in which case, my objection is withdrawn.
But that’s Kerry’s plan. It’s the best he’s got to offer, and it summarizes in a nutshell his approach to Iraq: he doesn’t have a plan. He’s just got a plan to ask other countries to come up with a plan.

I’m a bit of an Internet-radio addict; my usual habit is to turn on a show while doing just about anything around home. Right and Center is a particular favorite, as are Don Imus’ interviews, and Fresh Air, when the guest is of interest.
So it should come as no surprise that, having now discovered how to record the Nothern Alliance’s weekly radio show for later playback (with the help of the handy ReplayRadio), I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
But I do have one request for the NA gang. I understand that the Internet stream is sponsored by the Taxpayer’s League of Minnesota, and that explains their PSA’s filling the breaks in the show. But having only listened to two weeks’ worth of programs, I have now memorized the entire content of every single one of their promos. For the love of God, please get them to cut down on them!
As a libertarian type myself, I’m sympathetic to their message. But I’m starting to lean towards big-government liberalism just out of the sheer negative conditioning I’m getting from having to listen to the damned things over and over again…

Glad they could us. Disappointed that I only had to read Page 1 of 10 before hitting a factual error:
“Then in 1999, Mickey Kaus, a veteran magazine journalist and author of a weighty book on welfare reform, began a political blog on Slate. On kausfiles, as he called it, he wrote differently.”
Wrong. Kausfiles was independent until the spring of 2002, at which time Kaus “took the Boeing” by merging Kausfiles into Slate, and I started bitching about his lack of permalinks. Which he still doesn’t have, now that we mention it.
On to Page 2…
Update: Wow, this thing is really pretty bad. In fact, I think it deserves a full-blown, semiFisking. I won’t include the entire article text, but here’s my page-by-page list of objections. — go to ‘More…’ for the full ugliness.

Continue reading “NYT Magazine Discovers Bloggers”

Magazine, pg. 30 of the September 27th dead tree edition:
Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com, which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. “If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know,” says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. “We can get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It’s like an early-warning system.”
No worries, George: just consider me your white, furry canary in the deep dark coal mine of the blogosphere!
I had thought that Time had mentioned TTLB in their edition this week, as I saw a few hits in my referer logs from them. But since they’ve got their content behind subscriber-only lines, I wasn’t sure. They made me buy an actual hard copy to find out, darn it…
Update: This is actually a rather interesting experiment in old media power. Take a look at my traffic history for the past month. (That’s my “blog only” counter, by the way, which excludes visits to the Ecosystem and other stuff unrelated to my personal blogging on TTLB). The Time piece above hit newstands yesterday, and the online edition showed up on Monday, I believe. See that huge spike in my traffic this week?
Well, of course you don’t, because it’s not there. So a direct, positive mention in one of the largest-circulation news magazines in the country doesn’t result in any really major increase in my traffic.
There’s no way to identify specifically who is visiting the site because of the Time dead-tree edition, of course, since they will just show up with no referer. But I can track those coming from the online edition. And although I did notice a handful of visits, as I mentioned above, it is a tiny, tiny trickle. Right now, for instance, there are no visitors from Time.com in my last 100 visits.
All of which makes you wonder: ignoring Time’s claimed circulation statistics, how many people actually read that paragraph I quote above, either online or in print? Granted, many of Time’s readers probably have no interest in the Internet, or in blogs, and so wouldn’t bother typing in my URL. But it is still pretty striking just how little juice “big” media seems to have when compared to a link from Instapundit or other major bloggers.

Drudge has the news we’ve been expecting: will sue CBS:
CBS DOC SOURCE SET TO SUE NETWORK FOR LIBEL
Wed Sep 22 2004 00:05:20 ET
Bill Burkett, the man identified yesterday by CBS as the source of the controversial documents used in its September 8