? It’s time for the 5K design competition! Make the best website you can that can be stored on 5Kb of disk space.
Linesandsplines.com
has closed. That site could easily compete as one of the best weblogs ever published.
Steven Levy
is one of relatively few technology journalists who really lives up to the name. He seems to cover his subject relatively honestly, at least, unlike many of his colleagues. Anyhow, he weighs in on the subject of weblogs this week (Will the Blogs Kill Old Media?) and notwithstanding the backhanded compliment to Dave Winer, it’s an OK article. There’s an important hiccup though. Levy wrote, regarding how bloggers get and stay good at it, that it: “…sounds a lot like the formula to succeed as a journalist inside the Big Media leviathan. With the difference that traditional journalists uh, get paid.”
He could equally say that traditional journalists get bought – and many (most?) of them do, without much comment from their unbought colleagues (like Levy, f’rinstance). For the most part, journalists just shrug it off. “What do you expect? It’s just cars, or entertainment, or whatever, that gets bought.” Or, “Of course they’re bought off – that’s how it works, and has to if we want to sell product.”
Hooray for FUD
! I can’t begin to express how much stories like this one – “Star Wars film clones invade the Net” – piss me off. It’s clearly a story planted by some industry PR person or agency, and then parroted by others until soon it becomes real. I call bullshit on corrupt journalists and the papers who encourage them and employ them.
Corpo-Blogging
in Wired News: Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate. It’s a reasonably interesting article but it’s not without problems. The whole thing describing why they put the sites on third-party domains is just weird, and really undercuts the whole effort, in a way. The Wired News writer gives them a pass on this, and goes even further:
Hale added: “Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really.”
Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.
Not putting the sites on Macromedia.com just underlines that they think of the site as a very limited (and unitary) thing, notwithstanding the hugeness of it. It’s weird for a company that’s supposed to be all about creativity to not be creative enough to envision a macromedia.com that was both credible and had small weblog-esque sections. More likely they’re hedging their bets, giving themselves the opportunity to pull the plug quietly later if needed.
Plus, I think it does reek of astroturfing. Putting a blog on Macromedia.com would have been big news. This isn’t corporate blogging. It’s not corporate blogging until they are open to the idea of mingling official corporate messages with more informal information all on one site.
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