“”
“I was attacked, Dan was attacked, CBS was attacked 24 hours a day by people who hid behind screen names. I may be a flawed journalist, but I put my name on things.”
Mary Mapes, investigative reporter who can’t figure out bloggers’ names
“”
“If you’re reading this on company time, congratulations on beating the system. If you’re reading it on your own time, you really need to find a job where they pay you to do this sort of thing.”
“”
“The only reason I dare writing this blog is because I have absolutely no sense of embarrassment. Most people would be horrified at the prospect of proving their ignorance to thousands of readers. My attitude is more along the lines of
I have thousands of readers? Cool.”
“”
“What I’m saying is that the blogosphere should hold itself to higher standards. Reckless speculation and the dissemination of unfounded rumors should be stigmatized and treated as a stain on a blogger’s reputation (just like it would be for a professional journalist), not treated as a normal part of the process.”
“”
“More than anything else, our little blogstorm just proves that the internet doesn’t make crowds of people any more rational: it just helps them be irrational
more efficiently.”
“”
“We spend our blogging time raising our heads out of the foxholes to note the inbound missiles coming from both sides, and wishing the war would stop — really soon.”
“”
“The Internet has provided many different environments in which we are able to publish ideas anonymously and interact with others with little or no chance of suffering consequences for bad behavior. It is interesting how our behavior changes, once the danger of having another human being beat us to a bloody pulp for insulting them is taken away.”
“”
“Being an asshole is the key to blog success. Forget all those worthless articles you’ve read about getting traffic and being noticed, because all you need is to be an asshole. Say provocative things in witty, or not so witty, ways. But to be noticed, you have to be a different style of asshole from all the other assholes out there.”
“”
“How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.”
“”
“There’s an old business phrase, from long before the Internet ... ‘Make a customer happy, and he’ll tell a friend. Make a customer angry, and he’ll tell ten friends.’ Today’s digital reality multiplies that by a couple of orders of magnitude.”
“”
“It was once thought that one of the best things about this medium was that it routed around the gatekeepers in the mainstream media. And it did. It did it so well that it evolved gatekeepers of its own.”
“”
“Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.”
“”
“Suppose that the heat of political rhetoric could be charted on a scale of spicy foods. What you hear and read most days in the mainstream media ranges from unseasoned oatmeal to Franco-American Spaghetti-Os in a can. Whereas the political blogs pick up somewhere around a Taco Bell burrito and range all the way to the vindaloo you might be served by a sadist chef in Bangalore.”
“”
“I think once you do achieve a certain degree of traffic, influence, notoriety — however you want to call it — eventually the outsider label is not perfectly applicable anymore.”
“”
“You play fast and loose with facts, appeal to emotion, and be overly dramatic to get a reaction. It’s pretty much what Dvorak, Coulter, and a hundred other talking heads do everyday, but I found it distasteful my first time out.”
“”
“The fact that a professional worldwide newsgathering organization is devoting
any time to an unpublished amateur like me should be seen as the equivalent of waving a white flag.”
“”
“Internet users know what’s evil and what’s not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers.”
“”
“Weblog posts could be written and edited over the course of a week before they are posted, but they rarely are. Prolific posting demands hasty writing. Blog culture rewards strong opinion. Bloggers link to other blogger’s posts to argue with them. For all these reasons, blogging often rewards aggression and knee-jerk reactions in a way that face-to-face discussions do not.”
“”
“Oddly enough in the blogosphere, which is romanticized as this populist utopia, it too has created an elite class of opinion mongers.”
“”
“The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.”
“”
“I’m confident when I have something serious to say, my readers will know it — even if I haven’t carefully labeled my post with a satire or parody tag. They’re perceptive that way, my readers. And I suggest that it might not be such a bad idea if some people in the blogosphere stopped taking themselves so fucking seriously.”
“”
“There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.”
“”
“So what would happen if something vitally important happened — a terrorist attack, an assassination, war, political upheaval — and the blogosphere went atwitter, but Blogger went down? Does Google want to incur the wrath of the blogosphere? It’s a utility. It had better keep the lights on. Or else.”
“”
“My archives are full of two classes of post: ones where I gently suggest that something might be better another way (‘0 comments’), and ones where I bite off my tongue, spit blood, make my head spin around, and projectile vomit, nearly all of which include a comment from me saying ‘thanks for fixing it, but you really oughtn’t to encourage me to write posts like this by responding to them.’”
“”
“Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That’s just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.”
“”
“By the way, from an integrity perception standpoint, many of the bloggers I know would rather be called a used car salesman than a journalist.”
“”
“Just so you know, I may occasionally post cat photos, as is my right as the editor of a personal web site.”
“”
“The ‘persistence of memory’ capability provided by technology, omnipresent video, and the web will no longer allow major leaders, as well as the rest of us, to ever escape what we say or do. Like the Biblical concept of the eye that sees all, and the scroll that records all, we are entering an era of informational accountability.”
“”
“I’m going to stop playing with HTML until it learns to behave itself. ”
“”
“I detest the word ‘blog.’ It sounds like the noise a bulimic makes after a hearty meal.”
“”
“Blogging is a tool, Journalism is an occupation, and Credibility is a goal. They are strange bedfellows.”
“”
“I’ve been averaging about 15,000-20,000 hits a day, which means that, on an average day, probably 10 times as many people hear what I have to say than otherwise would have heard me in the rest of my life. Admittedly, about half of these people come here looking for pictures of Ernest Borgnine and Thundarr the Barbarian in compromising positions, but the point stands.”
“”
“I’d point to this as a warning for anyone who isn’t self-employed and who writes a weblog: watch out. Indeed, it’s a warning to anyone who isn’t self-employed and who wants to write in their own time. Corporate reach is threatening to deprive you of the right to self-expression.”
“”
“Until names are named, we can assume every conservative pundit is on the White House’s payola rolls.”
“”
“You bunch of geeks. It’s past midnight and you losers are arguing politics. Tell ya what ... how about I tell you what it’s like to kiss a girl?”
“”
“It’s sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say.”
“”
“In the last 90 days Wizbang has been mentioned by the AP, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. In every story — including the one that focused on how errors are corrected in the blogosphere — the big media outlet made significant errors of fact.”
“”
“People who use [Live Journal] talk about their LJs, not their blogs. They mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart’s tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i’ve been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard. LJ folks don’t see LJ as a tool, but a community.”
“”
“If you produce content and produce comments, then you have to read comments and moderate comments. You have to treat a Weblog like you’d treat a good garden.”
“”
“I’m firing up a text editor and deleting databases. It’s reached the point where I can write markup by hand quicker than I can delete spam and manage my spam managing plugins. It’s just not worth the effort anymore.”
“”
“I was totally guilty of doing what I accused many of my adversaries of doing. I was writing about what I was against, not what I was for. I was writing with long, broad strokes. I was engaging in the worst of unsocial discourse. And I was fueling ten thousand people a day while I was doing it.”
“”
“I would really like to find the exact moment in time this stopped being fun.”
“”
“It seemed that the
technical mechanisms of reputation, such as blog-rolls and Technorati, had codified
social inequalities in charisma and popularity (the politics of groups), until they had actually become institutionalised political forms.”
“”
“The blogosphere had no clue ... This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or ‘MSB?’) This wasn’t ‘The Year of the Blogger’ at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election.”
“”
“But I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they’re you’re primary source for information, you’re outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works.”
“”
“Still here, ready to bathe in the frothy spume of my bull-headed ignorance? Well, I warned you.”
“”
“Content management isn’t a software problem at all. It’s a process problem. By solving process problems, you often find you don’t even need software. Many companies buy software thinking that it will fix their process problems. But that’s like buying Microsoft Word hoping that it will make you a better writer.”
“”
“We live in the same geography, but our sense of country and nation could not be more different. I don’t want my kids to grow up in their world, and they don’t want their kids to grow up in mine. It’s as simple as that. We might as well be Israelis and Palestinians. I see no compromise with the Left, only victory against them. Leftism needs to be stamped out, just as they wish for conservatism to be stamped out. Neither side will have it any other way. It’s a death struggle as far as I’m concerned.”
Typical blog comment,
Election 2004
“”
“Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world. Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square — without editors, correction policies or community standards.”
“”
“This must have been what it was like for the Catholic Church when movable type was invented. Until then, the Church controlled who would be the scribes.”
“”
“It used to be that only leaders could be demagogues. They were the only ones with access to mass communication, which allowed them to manipulate popular prejudices in pursuit of power. Now fast computers and the World Wide Web have democratized demagogy. Today anyone can sit at his or her terminal, spew hatred, issue false accusations and become a virtual Sen. Joe McCarthy. On both sides of the political spectrum, that is exactly what some people are doing. Last week, they found my e-mail address.”
“”
“We are deluding ourselves if we think our blogs are themselves having a direct impact — they’re not. Instead, we have an indirect effect by pushing the media and certain opinion leaders, who in turn push the wider American public.”
“”
“I’ve learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.”
“”
“You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at
60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
“”
“If you don’t see an American flag behind the links, then you are using an Al-Qaeda Browser!”
“”
“Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca. In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site.”
“”
“I’m more and more convinced that just as e-mail reinvigorated the art of letter writing, blogging will reinvigorate civic discourse”
“”
“After kicking and screaming over the long dormancy, I’ve come to accept that no matter what the IE team does now, it’s not going to actually make much difference in my day to day life for many years yet.”
“”
“What’s most telling is that of the 15,000 members of the media expected to cram the Fleet Center — assuming they will clear security in time — 35 of them will be bloggers, a statistically insignificant 0.2 percent. There are a higher percentage of gays voting for Bush than that.”
“”
“Here’s how you can tell bloggers aren’t journalists — they almost never include a pretentious and utterly gratuitous middle initial in their bylines!”
“”
“With a diary, the danger was that someone might sneak a peek at it or even steal it and expose one’s secrets. With a blog, the fear is that nobody might do so.”
“”
“Content truly is king, and as blogs draw more eyeballs away from mainstream news and topical sites, the dollars will follow the eyeballs.”
“”
“I’ve never been on InstaPundit. I don’t even know what that is.”
“”
“Sometimes I think the Web’s primary function is aggregating stupidity.”
Jason Kottke
“”
“I want your blog readers to know that the only reason Micah Wright came clean on his lies last week is because I pursued three FOIA requests with separate US Army commands, seeking proof of his service, after he failed to provide documentation to me.”
Richard Leiby,
Washington Post,
in a comment at
A Small Victory“”
“We happen to like the new color scheme. Some people don’t like it so much. Some people hate all change and newness, and would be perfectly happy if we were still living in caves and riding dinosaurs to work.”
“”
“A tip on how to make your blog popular: position yourself in a place where a bomb might fall on you. Tickles everybody and makes your hits-counter happy. Possibility of death is a downside, but hey! You get linked by A-list bloggers.”
“”
“TypeKey is centralized, so naturally lots of control freaks who run their own weblogs are against it. It’s not open source, so naturally lots of commie bastards who run un-American open source software are against it. And it’s not from Dave Winer, so naturally Dave Winer is against it. I am reflexively in favor of anything Dave Winer is against.”
“”
“I’m shocked. To be accused of being a whore is one thing, but to be accused of being a weblogger is actionable.”
“”
“A blog’s for life, not just for Christmas.”
“”
“The biggest impact, I still think, is that citizens will see themselves more and more as publishers, as co-participants in a discussion they were usually barred from previously.”
“”
“There are lunatics who are out there running blogs, and there are lunatics who work in the print media. It all sorts itself out.”
“”
“I daresay that if you challenge a Dean position or a quote from the candidate in the comments section of a Dean-leaning blog -- or if you challenge Bush in a Bush-leaning blog -- you won’t get a spirited defense. You’ll get called names, accused of apostasy, and treated to a shrill listing of the other’s guy’s defective positions.”
“”
“Our notions of control, who’s an expert and what it takes to establish credibility, have been challenged, and the information dialog of the future may not resemble what we have known from the past.”
“”
“This is their place, their medium. They were there, online, before any company or organization. They were there before venture capital companies had wet dreams about ‘upswings’ and IPOs. They were there before a thousand experts decided that the web was about technology, design and process. They were there before some of those same experts announced that people don’t like to read online.”
“”
“People, the web is a big place now. And not every website needs to be understood by every person. Some sites exist purely for the joy of their creator. Some exist for a very specific audience. It’s myopic and arrogant to assume that every site out there needs to be understood, needs to make money, needs to be usable. Maybe, if you don’t get it, it’s not the site’s problem.”
“”
“If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV. If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate.”
“”
“The biggest boost ever for ‘web standards’ would be if Google gave an extra PageRank point or two to pages using valid markup. Overnight, the commercial web would start taking the issue seriously.”
“”
“If we are eager for Iraqis and Iranians to blog, we certainly should be eager for AOLers to blog.”
“”
“In summary, don’t let your ego take up more bandwidth than your site.”
“”
“Somewhere on earth right now there’s a person that would like to do nothing but wear flowing golden robes and throw pickles at people in the street, and thanks to the web that person can connect with a group that also indulges in that specific activity, compare locations, techniques, and preferred robe fabrics.”
“”
“Sure, his content is more intellectual than mine. Sure, his writing is clearer, his politics are more defined and his subject matter tends to be of world importance. But I have boobs and mp3s.”
“”
“Complaining about built-for-the-web content taking over the web, is like complaining about the cars when you’re trying to pogostick down the motorway.”
“”
“In other words, if you choose not to participate on the public, freely linkable, not for pay Web, don’t complain when others who
do participate by the rules of the game are easier to find.”
“”
“The other day I made a comment on someone’s blog and I noticed I was the only one that put my online pseudonym into the name field. Everyone else posted as ‘Jane Doe’, ‘Bill Simpson’, etc.. Thirty real people and then there’s me with my cute name. How quaint. This is one of those moments when you notice you’re becoming a dinosaur.”
“”
“Give it up, dude. This is the Internet -- and now we can fact-check your ass
from a satellite 22,400 miles high.”
“”
“A syndication format that requires valid semantic XHTML markup? Spare me. 9 out of 10 bloggers can’t even spell XHTML.”
“”
“I have a sick fantasy: lock up the inhabitants of Metafilter and Little Green Footballs in an arena, and let them whine each other to death.”
“”
“I hope to eventually achieve web design nirvana, a state in which, if anyone can’t read my site, it’s their own damn fault.”
“”
“Your website’s so ugly, blind folks asked you to remove your ALT tags.”
“”
“”
“Last night I went to a fight and Metafilter broke out.”
“”
“The table tag was a great addition to the HTML language, especially useful for displaying scientific results data, but it quickly became an innocent victim in a nefarious plot to twist the usage of the HTML language, resulting in the dot com collapse of the year 2000, and the loss of thousands of web related jobs.”
“”
“I’m surprised more novice web designers don’t put their fist through the computer screen, especially since monitor prices have come down so much lately.”
“”
“We’re all stringers for each other now.”
“”
“But to lazy reporters, the world of blogs represents their worst nightmare: It’s an endless parade of experts in every conceivable subject they might write about, all equipped with Internet-style megaphones ready to pounce on errors.”
“”
“Just heard about Blogger on Vatican Radio last night.”
“”
“The mere act of creating a public entity, however accidental, re-wires your brain, and makes previously impossible fantasies seem like amusing challenges.”
“”
“I blog for fun, not profit, which I think is a little like saying I’d rather be a slut than a whore.”
“”
“TV relies on pictures; radio on emotive voices. Blogs are about words, period, and you stand or fall on how well you use them.”
“”
“Web logs are infuriating because they are thoughtful alternatives to the self-important
New York Times,
Los Angeles Times,
Washington Post and their toady satellites, much of whose reporting has become hardly less biased than the bloggers’. Bloggers at least have the honesty to admit their biases up front. They don’t pretend to be objective.”
“”
“People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.”
“”
“I don’t want parole; I’m too busy working on my web site.”
Charles Manson,
3/27/97
“”
“Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.”
“”
“The Web is - or should be - a new beginning. A tabula rasa. So why smear this freshly gessoed, stretched, and easeled canvas with the same old daubs?”
Michael Swaine
“”
“Don’t mind me, pulling my hair out because of the squandered potential of the web is a hobby of mine.”
Jamie Zawinski
“”
“To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly, yet that’s what I understand of your position.”
John Wilcox, Microsoft employee, defending Smart Tags
“”
“Even if smart tags don’t violate copyright or deceptive trade laws, they still violate the integrity of the web. Part of the appeal of the web is that it allows anyone to publish anything, to take their thoughts, feelings and opinions and put them before the world with no censors or marketroids in the way. By adding smart tags to web pages, Microsoft is interposing itself between authors and their audience. Microsoft told Walter Mossberg ‘the feature will spare users from under-linked sites.’ Microsoft is in effect deciding how authors should write, and how developers should build, websites.”
“”
“Maybe it’s because the perception among the wider public is that ‘anyone’ can make a website. And they’re right. Anyone can make a website—but not everyone can make an emotionally engaging interactive experience that will live in the visitor’s memory. (Similarly, anyone with access to a photocopier and a stapler can ‘make a book,’ but good books are scarce.)”
“”
“[Jakob] Neilsen has single-handedly unleashed his bland vision of the web and allowed untold acolytes to implement this misguided approach into personal pages that have all the prosaic joy of a McDonald’s Happy Meal.”
“”
“We’re all stuck here. We have no choice. We are logging automata - forced by the web to prostitute our writing skills day in and day out until we die. We shall write until we drop. Then we shall be boiled down into a black unctious liquid and people will use us for ink.”
“”
“The problem is that most corps think of their website as a marketing endeavor -- like a billboard -- instead of as a front office to their corporate headquarters. If they thought of their websites as places where they brought their clients, those websites would be much classier and elegant and usable -- same as their offices. You don’t let your marketing people run your front office; you shouldn’t let your marketing people run your website.”
Vanessa Layne, web designer
“”
“I’m waiting for technology adequate to enable the fulfillment of my vision.”
Chief Broom, on why he doesn’t have a web page
“”
“It
is different for the web, and will
always be different for the web, because the web is not a sheet of paper. It doesn’t have finite or even predictable dimensions. Its content is not static. It doesn’t have five centuries of process and tradition from which we can draw best practices. It cannot be expressed entirely as a Cartesian coordinate system in increments of six or twelve hundred. Nor will these things soon change.”
