Author: N.Z. Bear

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link in the latest edition o’ weblogging chronicles. He quotes both Meryl and myself, and in so doing, actually addresses one of my key points of criticism (that Slate should have included a lesser known blogger in the conversation), as he himself points out:
“But here’s another piece of blogging’s genius. We just did that! You can rectify editorial choices in real time all the time. If this conversation takes off, we can even continue it without Slate at all! “
Yup. And because the subject here is how blogging works, I’ll tell y’all exactly how the timeline looked for this tiny little episode in the Blogosphere:
4am – I awake to find an email from Meryl pointing me to her piece (yeah, I couldn’t sleep this morning)
4:30 – 5:30am – I blog my snarky response, quoting both Andrew & Kurt’s piece, and Meryl’s.
Somewhere between 6am – 12pm – Andrew reads my piece & Meryl’s, finds them amusing enough to quote, and drafts his own response.
12:30 pm – Andrew’s piece is posted to Slate
Try to get that kind of cycle time on dead trees some time.
And just to make everybody think that now that Andrew has linked to me I’ll suck up to him, here’s another point he gets right:
“But at a more profound level, I think the real power will be unleashed by unknown writers finding a way to get their work in front of readers more easily than ever before. The whole process of interning, or begging for work at local papers, sucking up to agents and editors, and so on can now be supplemented by real self-publishing. You can make your own clips! This can only help — however marginally — discover new talent.”
The way I look at it is similar. Once, you were either working in the media, or you weren’t. The gulf between “media” — with an audience of thousands, even at a smalltown paper — and “non-media”, was huge, and binary.
Now, weblogs go a long way towards bridging that gap. They’re not replacing Big Media — nor do I expect them to. But they’re filling in that huge cliff that used to exist between “out” and “in”. Now, the spectrum begins with the handful of bloggers who just yesterday signed up for a new account at Blogger, and have a few friends reading their weblogs. It extends up through me, with my small readership; it goes up to people like Stephen Green; an amateur, unpaid writer who nonetheless has several thousand visitors a day just because he’s that good. And then you start to hit the Mickey Kaus level, and Andrew himself — pro journalists, but bloggers also.
And at that point, you look around and realize that somewhere you crossed a readership line — and that now you’re looking at weblogs that probably have more actual readers than many “real media” newspaper columns. But it’s never quite clear where that line was.
Where once there was a jagged cliff to be climbed before one could be accepted into the Masonic club of journalism, now there is a gentle slope. Start small; learn the craft as you build your readership. And someday you might find yourself far enough up the hill to make the transition to Real Media.
Or, you might find that the distinction no longer matters as much as you thought it did.
Unless of course, you want a paycheck. But that’s another subject….

Ah, metablogging! Is there anything so sweet?
No, not metablogging, this metablogging.
Andrew Sullivan, ornery individualist journablogger extraordinaire, is holding court on weblogs over in Slate’s Webhead dialogue this week, with Kurt Andersen of the late, lamented Inside.com set up to play straightman. It’s an interesting discussion thus far, and one that is sure to provoke much gnashing of teeth throughout the Blogosphere.
Meryl has beaten me to the punch by drawing first blood against the Slate Two, so much of my commentary is, in fact, going to be meta-meta-blogging (which of course means its twice as fun!).
Sullivan wastes no time, bashing blogosphere patron saint Rebecca Blood in his very first paragraph. Well, technically he bashes her book in the first paragraph, and only bashes her personally in the second paragraph, but close enough.
Sullivan: “Rebecca Blood, who wrote one book and introduces the other, oozes alternative-weekly, grass-roots-loving piety. Her ground-breaking definition of a blog is: “a coffeehouse conversation in text, with references as required.” Why does the word “coffeehouse” send me running for the exits? Worse, she can write earnestly about a Weblog “community.” Aaagghh”
Yourish: “Rebecca can write earnestly about weblogging communities because so many of them exist. A quick look around the Internet will show that. Sullivan is a perfect example of the kind of blogger that permeates the blogosphere these days: Ignorant, unknowledgeable about anything save his narrow little slice of blogdom (and that not much), yet thinking that he has been informed from on high as to exactly what constitutes blogging. It is exactly the thing that drives me crazy whenever I read something like it on any blogger’s site. Here’s a clue, people: There are thousands of blogs out there, and just as there is no one way to write a book, no single person has the claim to the “right” way to write a blog.”
Bear: Advantage, Yourish! Sullivan is at his worst (and, occasionally, best) when throwing out snarky, from the hip insults just-because-he-can, and here they overwhelm any semblance of a point he might have had. The right point to emphasize was Meryl’s: that there’s no one right way to blog, there’s a million right ways. If Rebecca claimed to have the One Truth Path, then she deserves what she gets (I sincerely doubt this, but having not read her book, I can’t say). But regardless, Sullivan blows it; instead of taking the rational route of simply pointing out the advantages of his own favorite mode of blogging (the ornery individualist), he overshoots and assumes that because he doesn’t value community-style blogging, it must be worthless. In his own words: “Aaagghh!”
Next round: Does Sullivan still not get the linky thing?
Sullivan: “The critical language of blogging—the hypertext links to other Web pages, for example—cannot even be translated into book form”
Yourish: “Speaking of linking: You don’t get blogs, gentlemen. You refer only to the professional journalists or celebrity bloggers; you link only to the professional journalists or celebrity bloggers (hands up, anyone out there who can find a link to Rebecca’s website or either book in that Slate piece); you talk with respect only of professional journalists, celebrity bloggers, and Glenn Reynolds; and you denigrate the rest of the bloggers who do get blogging, and who’ve been getting it for longer than you.”
Bear: Advantage, Yourish! Not linking to Rebecca— one of the main focuses of their discussion thus far — was pretty inexcusable. And Sullivan’s focus on celebrity bloggers (“Moby has one, and so does Michael Barone”) is, on the whole, tiresome. And that’s from somebody who likes Moby. Update: Yourish.com gets results! Slate’s Chris Suellentrop emailed Meryl to let her know they were adding links for Rebecca’s site to the original article — and they have now appeared! Actual Bloggers: 1 Guys Talking About Bloggers: 0 !
Not to be outdone, Andersen tries to match Sullivan, but I don’t think he’s quite as cut out for this line of work:
Andersen:”Year-rounders in a seaside resort who both need and mock the tourists and ooze alternative-weekly, grass-roots-loving piety. Well, yes; exactly. And that is a function of geography: The three capitals of Coffeehouse America are San Francisco and Seattle, not coincidentally the epicenters of the digital revolution, and Cambridge, where The Weblog Handbook and We’ve Got Blog were published. So, agreed: We don’t need to say much more about either of these books, which seem pretty deeply unnecessary, as you suggest. And so much less interesting than the phenomenon they aim to explain and exploit. “
Yourish: “Let’s see. San Francisco and Seattle, those damned lefty cities, two “deeply unnecessary” books…And you’re calling bloggers smug?”
Bear: Advantage, Yourish — but with points off for missing the opportunity to bash Andersen for his bizarre focus on the cities of publication of the two books in question. “that is a function of geography”? Ha-what? It’s unclear to me what might reflect a deeper lack of understanding about such a fundamental aspect of the Blogosphere (its planetary, distance-removing nature) than to find meaning in where the publishers of books about it happen to have their offices.
All that said, the Slate discussion is not without entertainment value, and Sullivan does raise some good points. He continues to be the Blogosphere’s best defender, admirably, of the position which I hold dear: that every blog is an island unto its owner, to do with as they please, and that efforts to establish ‘community standards’ should be pilloried and mocked wherever they may be found. And the pair get many of blogging’s other salient benefits right: the enjoyable and useful practice of fact-checking Big Journalism; the unmediated, direct feel of even professional journalists’ blogging; and the immediacy of blogs that, as Sullivan rightly points out, is both their strength and weakness when it comes to reporting (and punditizing) on the day’s news.
Meryl closed her post by wishing that “the next time Slate wants to have a discussion on blogs, they’ll use two people who have an understanding of the medium.” I think that’s a tad harsh — Sullivan, at least, understands one form of the medium better than practically anybody else. But Slate should have provided a counterweight to his journablogging heavyweight status. Picking a non-journalist, lesser known blogger to complete a trifecta with Andersen and Sullivan would have made the discussion deeply more interesting.
Oh, and memo to Jacob Weisberg: there’s plenty of good choices, but if you’d like me to do it, feel free to call my office. I work cheap.

Geez, everybody go over to right quick and beef up Andrew’s traffic stats.
He’s apparently very grumpy today and clearly needs a pick-me-up.

Hmmm. Gotta take the InstaGuy to task briefly, I think.
He the growing big media coverage of the failures of the Secret Service as an organization, which he’s been long ahead of the curve on. But his closer troubles me:
“Question: If the Secret Service can’t protect the White House adequately, why should we think a Department of Homeland Security can protect the whole nation? And if, as earlier incidents suggest, the Secret Service can’t do its job with a proper attitude regarding individual rights, how can we trust less-elite entities?”
The note of caution is appropriate — to a point. I’m no huge fan of DHS as its currently proposed, and I don’t particularly trust it. But Glenn’s criticism is so broad that it seems to suggest that we can’t possibly trust any government organization to protect the nation.
I suppose that might be true, but it certainly raises the question of what the alternative is.
Update: To clarify my point, I think my objection is best demonstrated by Glenn’s statement that the Secret Service “can’t” protect the White House properly. It’s not that it can’t — it’s that it isn’t. Identifying specifically why, and fixing it (and not making the same mistakes in IHS) is the name of the game. If we really are concluding that our government institutions are just inherently incapable of protecting us, then we’re in far worse shape than even my pessimistic views would suggest…

So is anyone else in the Blogosphere addicted to Brother 3?
I know, it’s crap. But it’s fun crap.
I used to watch the first season of the show, which was a complete train wreck. The pacing was awful, bad editing, and the cast nearly walked off the show. It was glorious in its awfulness, though, and was weirdly, disturbingly compelling viewing.
The second season, I missed entirely.
But this season, I’ve been following closely, and it’s the best yet. They’ve finally got the pacing right; limiting broadcasts to three nights a week and ensuring that there’s always something interesting happening. And the cast this year is fabulous — not too annoying; not too nice. Just right.
Which of course leads me to wonder: Why doesn’t CBS have the ‘houseguests’ blogging?
They’ve already got a paid service where you can watch all the video feeds; why not also give each houseguest the opportunity to write a blog? The fans (and there are a lot of them, I think) would love it.
The other idea to think about, naturally, is not to make the houseguests bloggers — but to make bloggers houseguests!
Imagine it:

• Lock twelve bloggers in a house with only one Internet terminal.
• Each day hold a competition to see who gets access to it for the day — and nobody else gets to touch it!
• Every week, bloggers across the Blogosphere vote to evict one of the houseguests, online.
• Last blogger standing gets the Grand Prize: A free subscription to the Blogging Network !

If there are any CBS programming execs reading, feel free to call my office and we can discuss terms.

Well, I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, but it seems an issue worth weighing in on. The Network has launched an innovative service to allow bloggers to charge for access to their content, and the Blogosphere is much atwitter over this bald threat to civilization and Our Way Of Life.
First, a reminder of a few of my basic principles:
Diversity in blogging is good. Conformity in blogging is bad. The last thing we need is 500,000 blogs all written in the same style with the same business model.
Thou Shalt Not Tell Thy Neighbor Blogger What The Hell To Do With His Blog. Anybody who criticizes another blogger for the way they go about their business (other than, say, flat out libel or other crimes) should get stuffed. It’s your page; do what you want with it.
So, with that said, how do I feel about the Blogging Network?
Ambivalent, honestly. I enjoy DailyPundit, and so I am bummed that part of Bill’s content will no longer be part of the completely free-and-open part of the Blogosphere. And similarly, I’m sure that many other fine bloggers are on the network’s list that I’m just not aware of. Their decision to go “behind the wall”, so to speak, has to be classed as some kind of loss to the non-paid Blogosphere.
On the other hand, I hesitate to condemn any effort that might actually result in blogging being a viable economic activity. Like every other blogger, I sure wouldn’t mind being able to earn income for my time spent blogging — or at least cover hosting costs.
But on the third hand (sorry Larry, Jerry) — I’m rather skeptical that the network will provide anything more than very minimal income to the vast majority of its bloggers. And for the high-end bloggers — well, they could probably do OK on their own without the help of the network.
But: Bottom line is, it’s a worthwhile experiment, and I wish them luck. Let’s see how it goes…
PS – By the way, to the fellow hiding in the back of the room who’s about to get snarky and point out the irony of a guy running a standards initiative saying that “conformity in blogging is bad” — conformity in content and approach, you nitwit. Technical standards are all fine and good.
Late Update: Owen Strawn pointed out that I had implied “David Niven” above instead of “Larry Niven”. I’ve corrected the error; I await the knock at my door from the Geek Police to take away my membership card… the shame of it!

Well, the last week has been nuts; real life stuff and the launch of the project all at once. The RL stuff has calmed down though, and as for BlogMD, it is off to a great start — go check it out if you haven’t already, and join in the fun.
Anyway, seminormal blogging over here at TTLB should resume shortly; you have been warned…
-NZB

Well, it’s finally time for me to stop being cryptic. As I’ve hinted in various ways over the past weeks, I’ve been working on developing a new project in the background for some time. And it’s finally ready to see the light of day.
The Initiative is a proposal and a project designed to focus attention on the problem of “metadata” in the blogosphere. The goal is to bring together any and all interested parties — including weblog authors and readers; weblog software developers, and “metadata application” developers (folks building things like my old Ecosystem) — to try to develop open standards to describe the typical metadata which would be useful to track about weblogs. And to then implement those standards into reality; building them into future blogging tools and applications.
It is an ambitious goal, but happily, I’m not alone: I am pleased (and fortunate) to be joined in the project by Phillip Pearson of the Myelin Ecosystem and Dean Peters of blogs4God.com. In addition, we’ve specifically invited several other Blogopshere notables to join the effort; and more generally, we are asking everyone interested to come and participate in the discussion and the work of the project.
The BlogMD site, currently hosted here at TTLB, should have everything you could possibly want to know, so go take a look; it include a detailed Concept Doc, a high level Key Benefits summary, and of course, a FAQ. And most importantly: we’ve set up a Forum (which anyone can post to) for discussion of the effort. And trust me, we’ve got plenty to discuss!
Finally, I’d like to express my personal thanks to those who’ve provided feedback and helped me get this thing off the ground; y’all know who you are.
This is, as Churchill is famously quoted, not the end; nor is it even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning… so come join in, before you miss the fun!
-NZB

Ah, fanmail! One of the joys of blogging:
Listen here, you’re a lazy bastard for not updating that Blogosphere on a regular basis. If you start something like that, keep it updated!
A lot of the bloggers out there are pining away for a move up your ladder. Of course, by the time you get around to updating the list, all their best posts with the most links are gone!
[Name withheld in a inexplicable moment of courtesy]
Somebody’s grumpy that they’re not getting their ice cream on time, I see.
Well, all I can suggest is this:
1) Go read the Myelin Ecosystem. Phillip, being a non-lazy bastard, updates every single day. And his routine does a bunch of other stuff mine never did. Yes, no cutesy categories — but if you’re suffering withdrawl, print out the category names, tape them in the appropriate spots down the side of your monitor, and it’ll be almost the same.
2) Coming rather soon (perhaps Monday?) you’ll all see the start — not the finished product, but the start — of the project that is one of the major reasons why the Ecosystem isn’t getting updated. And if it is successful, I can quite comfortably assure you it will make the usefulness/amusement factor of the Ecosystem pale in comparison. Hint hint hint.
Hmmm. Now that I think of it, those aren’t the only suggestions I could provide for the gentleman, but I’ll be nice and assume his message was meant in the spirit of gentle fun and admiration… where did I put those rose colored glasses….

The Review pointed me to Sibo Lin, a high school senior with his own blog.
I was a bit of a online juvenille delinquent back in the day myself, so I checked it out, and indeed Sibo’s got some interesting stuff. It helps that he’s a student at Signature School, a charter school in Indiana, and so has some ready-made good topics close at hand. Check out his righteous Fisking of the public-school official who ‘s attempting to blame his budget problems on the charter school.
So first: welcome to the neighborhood, Sibo!
And second: this sparked my interest in the Blogger Youth movement, if there is such a thing. (Yeah, I’m getting all nostalgic again, sue me). Anybody care to point at other young bloggers? For my purposes, no purely personal blogs, please — nothing wrong with ’em, they’re just not my cup of tea. I’m looking for youngsters who are actually addressing issues — any issues — of some kind.
And by the way: if you’re a young lad or lass reading this right now, and you don’t have a blog yet, it is not too late. Go sign up at BlogSpot, show me at least two or three solid posts, and I’ll link to you. Yes, I am attempting to disturb the system I am measuring, thank you very much.
Hmmm… there might be a TTLB prize in this somewhere for the youngest polito-blogger out there, but we’ll see…

I’m not much for the straight linky stuff these days, plus, this one’s already been InstaBlasted, but just that good.

So I’m browsing through my pile of mail, and come across a letter from none other than the Republican National Committee. Interesting, I think; I don’t generally get political mailings — let’s have a look.
So I open it, and I see:

There’s just one problem. It shows my “Membership Status” as “Lapsed”.
And I’ve never given the RNC a dime in my life, nor ever had any association with the group whatsoever.
This, I think, is an example of a technique I’m beginning to see employed more and more frequently with groups soliciting donations. Somebody in development somewhere decided that it is far easier to convince people to give money to a group if they think they already did so in the past. Nevermind if they never actually did: just try to convince them of it anyway!
I’ve also noticed this several times because I (perhaps foolishly) actually donated to the local police association, and have since been besieged by law enforcement and emergency service organizations calling to get their piece of the Bear pie. I am fairly sure that several of them used this exact technique — just a few days back, a representative began the call by saying he’d like to “Thank me” for my previous donation last year, and ask if I would donate again. Which was, unless I’m going completely senile, a bald-faced lie, as I had never donated to the group in question ever before.
(I would document more clearly the groups in question, but as they were phone calls, I wasn’t in blogger-mode at the time and my main concern was making them go away, not reporting. But I shall the next time…)
Anyway, this is fairly low stuff, and I’m certainly unimpressed with the RNC for resorting to it. It’s certainly unethical, and it wouldn’t shock me to hear if it was illegal, as well. (Is there a lawyer in the house?)
I’ve sent an inquiry to their web contact; we’ll see if they come back with a reasonable explanation. In the meantime, I’d like to hear from others who have had similar experiences. Am I the only one noticing this trend?

Well, the Younger is out, even if McKinney the Elder still has a chance to save his anti-Semitic hide in a runoff.
I’m struck by the whole Republican crossover vote issue in this election. CNN quotes McKinney in her concession as saying:
“Tonight we saw massive Republican crossover into the Democratic primary, and it looks like the Republicans wanted to beat me more than the Democrats wanted to keep me,”
The interesting thing to me here is that traditionally, “abuse” of the ability to cross-over and vote in the other guy’s primary is generally intended to ensure that the weaker candidate wins — so then your party’s candidate can defeat them easily in the election.
In this case, Republican cross-over voters actually seem to have voted their conscience, and did the country a service while doing so.
I’m sure the Republican candidate will have a harder election battle ahead of them because of this. But it, will, we can hope, be a battle based on issues — or at least, more so than it would have been if I-haven’t-been-kidnapped-by-aliens-but-my-brain-has Ms. McKinney were still in the race.
I think all we can say to the Republicans of the 4th District of Georgia is “Thanks.” And let us remember that occasionally, once in a while, if you look long and hard enough, you can find honor in American politics.

Given latest from Pakistan, anybody still doubt that Suman is (and was) right?

Yet another rumor that is going to get his own talk show.
Screw that, give Glenn a show. Clinton can fill the amusing-but-not-terribly-bright sidekick / band leader role — he plays sax, right?

Brief thought of the day: The of the al Qaeda videotapes appears to be me to be the most convincing evidence yet that bin Laden is, in fact, dead.
Consider:
Experts seem to see this cache as highly significant at least, and quite possibly bin Laden’s personal library. CNN has indicated that they obtained them from a source who found them in a house bin Laden had previously stayed in.
So: one can presumably understand that bin Laden or his close associates might abandon the cache in haste to depart the scene in Afghanistan.
But: why, then would bin Laden and/or his top aides never bother to send somebody — anybody — back to retrieve the tapes?
Unless, perhaps, everyone who knew of the tapes last location was, in fact, dead dead dead.

I swear, I had already decided to do this before the Quick did yesterday. But ah well, here goes anyway:
I’ve concluded it may be time for me to move on to greener pastures than my current employment gig, and am looking for any help my kind readers and fellow bloggers might provide. To drop my usually-at-least-pretending-to-be-humble blogging style for a moment, here’s my pitch:

• I am a senior software development manager with extensive experience delivering large-scale and high-risk projects for one of the top worldwide information technology consulting firms;
• I have over ten years of experience spanning the full software lifecycle including requirements analysis / design, implementation, testing, and software support & maintenance;
• I have worked most recently in the web development space, and have experience in web portal implementation, content management systems, and web infrastructure;
• I am seeking a position in the Orange County/Los Angeles area which does not require significant travel.

In addition to these qualifications, I am also (as should be obvious) the creator and publisher of The Truth Laid Bear, a weblog which in a few short months has met with significant success, and is now ranked in the top 10% of weblogs by incoming links, as calculated by the Myelin Blogging Ecosystem. In addition to writing content, I also created and implemented the full site design myself (with the exception of the bear-at-typewriter logo, which was drawn by Sekimori from my spec) using Moveable Type, and am the creator of the original Blogosphere Ecosystem.
My default goal is a ‘traditional’ position making use of my core professional skills; however, I’d be very interested in any offers or leads that relate to my more bloggerly skills as well. Yes, I will blog for food, if it comes to that.
I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who can help me in the following ways:

• If you have an actual position to offer
• If you have suggestions of companies which might be hiring or specific leads that you think it might be worthwhile for me to pursue
• If you have any general suggestions on career searches in my field (I’d love to hear positive/negative feedback on resume distribution and exec search firms) or more specific advice relating to searching in the Southern California job market

Thanks in advance to any and all who can help. And if my resume doesn’t strike your fancy: well then, go hire Bill!
Or even better, hire us both. (Hmmm… Bill, you think we should work out some kind of “buy one blogger, get the second free” deal? The marketing potential here simply boggles the mind…)