Weblogs

Nothing new here, I'm afraid, or arguable, about the inefficiency, shallowness and lack of immediacy of the paper medium. The only thing noteworthy, as Jeff Jarvis notes, is that " newspaper is willing to print the first draft of its own obituary."

If you aren't tired of reading blog posts about blogging, here's a long and thoughtful article from the Financial Times, which asks, among other things, whether Orwell and Marx would have been bloggers if they'd had the technology. It's at least as skeptical as the Chicago Tribune editorial we've been talking about for the last few days, but it's a lot more sophisticated and nuanced about what blogging is and might not be.

This editorial from the Chicago Tribune, which we ran on our op-ed page late last week, seems to predict the end of the road for blogs, or at least a mighty rough patch:

Here's The Swamp, an interesting meld of blogging and big media. It's run by the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau:

How were we able to live without Scott Adams' Dilbert.Blog? How will you be able to resist bookmarking a site that has observations like this?

Today my wallet was stolen for the 400th time, and frankly I'm sick of it. I don't know what bothers me more

Now that we've got the blogosphere going, the word nerds at Lake Superior State want to ban the word, and all our blog-related vocabulary. Of course, they also want to ban Blue States/Red States, Flip-Flopping, Battleground States, Enemy Combatants, Pockets of Resistance and Erectile Dysfunction, so what would we blog journal pontificate about anyway?

The blogosphere is changing rapidly. Recently I mentioned that we needed and probably would soon have the equivalent of a blog wire service in Indiana. Now we have one. The Indiana Blog Review, referenced in the immediately prior post, promises an attempt to round up the best from the state's major blogs. And this story describes another phase in the development of the national blogosphere.

Here is a photo of my cat Maggie -- not a very good one, granted, shot hastily with my new cell-phone camera. But it shows how the reporting capabilities of bloggers are advancing. I also carry around a 5-megapixel camera, which takes much better pictures. But it's complicated to post them on the blog.

We have an interesting conversation going on in the Fort Wayne blogosphere about what news is and who "real" journalists are. It started when Nathan Gotsch wrote on his Fort Wayne Observed blog about a swinger's club in Fort Wayne. I did a post remarking that this was evidence of the evolution of blogs, from mostly expressing opinions and engaging in media criticism, to doing more original reporting. Things took off from there. (Wrapup here.)

Fort Wayne has a swinger's club. It has its own Web site, which includes rules for swingers and photos of the inside of the place.