Well, how about when it hires lawyers to write disclaimers like this that you must agree to before posting comments.
The terms aren’t so out of line…not that much different from what I think most of us, without writing them down, would expect. But, really, if you need a lawyer to blog you might as well stop now.
Via untelevised.
Whither blogs? is a question posed by both PinkDreamPoppies, Alas, a Blog, and Bilmon, Whiskey Bar. Bilmon writes after attending a session on blogs at the World Economic Council in Davos.
If you are interested in such things go read the posts. In the meantime here is a bit from each. First, from PinkDreamPoppies
I’ll make a prediction on the future of blogging: We’ll see fewer and smaller independent blogs as large, corporate-sponsored blogs eat up the readership, and in some cases the writers, of smaller blogs. And that’s all I’ll commit to. I think that, as Bilmon fears later in his aforementioned post, the Golden Age of free-for-all blogging is just about up.
Now Bilmon may fear this but I don’t think he expects this:
I suppose the key question is whether the technology of the Internet will be enough to keep the blogs from going the way of the ’60s counterculture. Rock bands and radical writers could be squelched or bought off because the corporations controlled the means of communication — the record labels and the magazines and the major publishing houses. But while the Man can, if he wants to throw some money around, buy up individual blogs, he can’t buy the blogosphere. New voices can always set up shop to replace those that move to the Dark Side.
At least that’s what I hope. The potential of blogging is something I’ve come to believe in passionately — as passionately as I once believed in the mission of professional journalism. I’d hate to be wrong twice.
There is more in these posts then just this. They also take a look at corporate marketing, political power, the future of journalism and more.
Oh and take a listen to The Blogging of the President 2004 where Atrios, Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Jeff Jarvis, Jerome Armstrong, Ed Cone, Gary Hart, Richard Reeves, and a few others discuss the impact of blogs on mass media and the presidential campaign. Doc Searls blogged this show live.
As I mentioned last Sunday I have been working to wrap up a volunteer project.
Well, it took through yesterday to get the bulk of it done and this has consumed all available time outside my real job. I made a presentation last night and will hand it off to new ‘owners’ in 3-4 days.
Blogging will move back to its regular pace over the next couple days…it will take a bit to catch up on what you all have been talking about.
Luckily I have undoubtably missed most of the commentary on w’s state of the union reading.
I like and use Technorati a lot. And I know that I’m going to use it even more when the new Beta version moves to production mode.
David Sifry has an update here. One of the items is this:
1) Much faster indexing – the median amount of time it takes from when someone posts something on their weblog to when it is captured and searchable via our live database is 7 minutes.
which I will test with this post.
Update: an hour later. It is slick and it is fast and it is beta. It took a little less then an hour for this post to get picked up. The one above was picked up at the same time. At David’s site this post showed as occurring an hour later then actual (showed the update time as when his spider read the post and not the time of the post though this may result from there not being a time stamp on my posts) and it picked up two entries for Hesiod’s site…one from some days ago.
Professor Bainbridge quotes at length one Dean’s thoughts on blogging, scholarship and tenure:
Bottom line: While no replacement for writing articles and books, and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at least not today); but what I’ve called a serious blogger would get a big plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit review time! Failing to reward it would be failing to recognize that blogging is not just another new communication medium; it is a new way to do scholarship.
The Dean also recognizes something many of you are experiencing. Blogging can absorb huge amount of time:
That being said, just reading blogs – let alone writing them – can be entirely too much fun, and could suck time away from the grind of in depth writing and research. In fact, I should be massaging my footnotes instead of writing this. I’m also advising my juniors not to get blog-happy.
Read the rest and for those interested in delving deeper there are links to a couple long discussions.