A question from the Indiana blogosphere:
Anyone else notice the tendency of some bloggers to anthropomorphize their blog? — By which I mean something like if I would write, “Masson's Blog wonders if anyone else has noticed the tendency of some bloggers to anthropomorphize their blog?”
To me, it seems to be a stylistic tendency drawn from editorial pages where the editors write in the name of the newspaper. “The New York Times endorses . . .”
We are not amused.
Somebody yesterday asked me what I do in my spare time.
"Blog, mostly," I said.
"What's that?"
Just one small story from the northwest corner of the state: An e-mail is circulated saying that the owner of a Dunkin' Donuts is turning away customers in uniform because "you are killing my countrymen and I will not serve you." Outrage builds until somebody decides to check it out:
"Hard to believe that something like this might be going on in our community,” said John Pitt of the Indiana Army National Guard.
Bloggers are cowboys, outside the mainstream, anarchists throwing bombs at the establishment, iconoclastic philosophers who go their own way, loners preaching truth to power -- well, you get the idea. So, naturally, they need to band together in solidarity:
A syndicated columnist calls it quits, with a little whining thrown in:
Cathy Seipp, among other things the author of the popular blog Cathy's World, has died after a long battle with cancer. Though I knew her only by her writing, I feel a sense of loss. She was conservative, but not always predictably so, and tough and smart and funny and a clear and compelling writer.
Gee, do ya think?
It was yet another example of how the Internet — and the anonymity it affords — has given a public stage to people's basest thoughts, ones that in earlier eras likely never would have traveled past the watercooler, the kitchen table or the next barstool.
Blogs aren't going to replace newspapers or anything else as primary providers of basic news. People who won't spend 15 minutes with the paper and can barely pay attention to five minutes of the local-news broadcast aren't going to invest all the time it would take to scour blogs and put the bits and pieces together into some kind of mental comprehensive report.
If you want a quick overview of what's going on in the Indiana blogosphere, this new site looks pretty thorough. Here's the announcement of the site's debut:
BlogNetNews doesn't have a political ax to grind and jumps a generation ahead of other aggregators out there that just reprint posts and tell you which ones get clicked on the most.
Libel law is applied in different ways to different media. The telephone company, for example, is just a carrier, and isn't thought to be responsible if Person A says mean things to Person B about Person C over the phone. But a newspaper exercises editorial judgment, so Editor A can get in trouble if he lets Letter Writer B's libelous comments about Citizen C appear on the editorial page. How does this apply to blogs? If a blogger lets a snarky reader make libelous statements about a third party in the comments attached to a post, can the blogger be held accountable?
