Guess what ? They actually let you create customized peronalized online newspapers and magazines consisting of RSS feeds from publishing sources in which you are interested.

You can stuff them full of the RSS feeds from all your favourite traditional sources, and you could even slide in one or two feeds from a blog here and there without sullying your intake purity.

Like I said below, it’s probaby not *Either / Or* but more likely *Both / And*.

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James Brady is the executive editor of the Washington Post, who recently, and by now famously, demonstrated his lack of understanding … nay, contempt .. for online readers who dared to question the WaPo’s reporting by leaving less-than-positive or congratulatory comments on one of the WaPo’s blogs.

Here’s an excerpt from Leah’s column-masquerading-as-contempt:

That’s fine for some, but it isn’t enough of a reason for me to go on-line — where the growing, unedited noise in the margins is too loud to ignore — when I can enjoy my favourite writers in more established venues. If I’m supposed to feel part of some cool, fringe community, or world-changing global discussion, I’m not getting it.

Well, yeah and yeah.

In my opinion, she’s right that there is a lot of unedited noise in the blogosphere, in the *margins*, as she calls it … and yeah, I also think she doesn’t get it.

In the article, she also creates her own noise about how *the underground media revolution is officially over”, and points out her conversation with a former blogger (with one of the *sell-outs* that helped create the perception that the *underground revolution* is over):

As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger picture is much more important.

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said. “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds.”

In my adult, and working, life, I have run into many many many smart people who look at, think about and analyze much of what they encounter very quickly. In some ways, we live in an environment that focuses on, and is perhaps even addicted to, things that can be neatly described, that provide *solutions*, and that remain more or less the static model for how things are, and should be, done.

Now, what I would ask Leah (as a journalist .. or is she an opinion column writer ? The latter, I think .. a genre which often makes a living by being a tad edgy and snarky themselves. Nice work if you can get it .. blogger with a legitimate job, not marginalised .. I think) are these two questions …

Do you think, that because you and a bunch of other journalists and editors keep saying that the blogosphere doesn’t do editing and filtering the way you folks do, that all of a sudden, or even over time, people will begin coming back to neswpapers and magazines. Will the papers and magazines continue to provide you with all the information and news that a relatively small group of people decide is appropriate for everyone else .. even in the face of large amounts (and growing) evidence of how inaccurate, propagandistic and even corrupt some, or much, of that information and news can be ?

My sarcastic response .. in the online world, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the reader to evaluate and make decisions about what they read and think about. IMO, that’s clear, and her stated intent is but one example of one type of evaluation and decision. But that process is bigger than *either / or* re: traditional nedia versus blogs.

I would venture a guess that at this stage the world (or medium) of blogging is in a transitional phase wherein more and more filters (let’s call them DIY filters that tread the line between control and openness, where a new point of view is always potentially just a hop. skip and link away) will come into being, and new tools and applications that continue down the path of what has been called the Semantic Web are likely to appear over the next decade.

Because it involves people, information, opinion, voice and interconnectedness, the process of reading, writing, linking is a process of having impact (for better AND for worse) on peoples’ knowledge, opinions, abilities to think critically and understand. It’s social as well as informational, and social processes shape people and cultures.

What I hear in Leah’s cri de couer is a reminiscence for the Pleasantville of old, when kindly and benevolent hierarchs (men for the most part, but in the last 20 years or so having let a few assertive women in on the game) help us understand what we should know, and why and how.

And I found it interesting, too, that she spent time rummaging around the celebrity and gossip departments of the blogosphere … talk about meaningless drivel. Maybe deep down she’s ashamed of her interests, and wants to try to repress them by avoiding “the unedited noise in the margins” ?

I doubt that she drinks whiskey in the amounts Christopher Hitchens is rumoured to have ingested, so in all fairness I can’t use the words *whiskey-soaked*, (from the infamous “whiskey-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay” label George Galloway once applied to Hitchens), but I’d vote for her in any contests seeking to crown a winner for the title of “smug little know-it-all popinjay”.

I’m also assuming that she imagines that one day, as she grows older and moves up in the world of journalism, she will be one of those oh-so-valuable sources of edition that keep us all on the straight and narrow.

Here’s the clue:

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check.

As Butterworth succinctly puts it: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.”

Sure .. and do you expect that this blogging medium, like the more traditional medium you know and love, will remain static and not evolve ?

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“As we see more of these Iraqi forces in the lead, we will be able to continue with our stated strategy that says as Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down,” President Bush said last month.

The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday.

As usual, rhetoric outstrips implementation.

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As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker

(disclaimer of sorts - a bit more than a decade ago I was a compensation and organization design / strategy consultant working with large multinational firms. I quit quite suddenly when I realized I was being an active contributor to the problems that were bothering me so much, most tangibly with respect to compensation strategies that help to create this abusive gap between worker and executive remuneration .. a high hourly rate corporate prostitute, in other words).

As I was reading the essay (the last few paragraphs of which I will finish after completing this post), I began watching, and got into, the movie North Country, which is about nasty, ugly, brutal sexual harassment at a Minnesota mine and the eventual development of a class action suit against the mine.

In the culminating scene of the movie, in a court room the defense lawyer is using the “Nuts and Sluts” defense, probing and trying to establish the “Sluts” part of the defense by asking about the identity of the father of her son (Josey’s son was born of a supposedly unknown father when she was 16). For the first time since the birth of her son (having hidden the ugly truth from the world), under examination in court Josey states that she was raped by her high school teacher in the classroom, and that he is the father.

The denouement of the film comes in the court room as Bobbie, her principal harasser at the mine (who was her classmate and wannabe boyfriend in high school, and witnessed the rape through a window) is initially claiming it was no rape (leaving one to wonder if he was hurt or ashhamed and of course, at 16, scared of outing the teacher). He, on the witness stand, finally cracks and admits he witrnessed the rape, saying “what was I supposed to do ?

I had tears welling up in my eyes. I hate injustice, power and privilege being exercised in the course of manipulating people, and lying and circling the wagons so as to avoid responsibility for doing things that are clearly wrong.

I also often feel deeply sad about the rape of democracy and the murder of thousands of innocents ( and the lying and circling of wagons to avoid responsibility for the injustice and abuse of power) that the Bushes and thier cronies and sycophants (a small tightly connected group of sociopaths) proactively practice so that they can maintain control of the society they seem to believe is their private company and treasury.

Bill Moyers’ article from which I obtained the quote above dissects the fundamental crisis that this raping and abuse of American society and other countries in the world is visiting upon us all. Virtually no corner of the globe is untouched by this, as the USA effectively controls the World Bank and the IMF, buys what friends it can find (the UK and Israel, essentially), and has enfeebled the United Nations.

I’d recommend watching the movie North Country (the sound track has some great moments by Bob Dylan and great supporting work by Cissy Spacek and Woody Harrelson) if you are a sentient human being who has a modicum of decency and principle … as well as reading Moyers’ essay.

I am going to bed tonight with a heavy heart.

Why, when blessed with the miracle that is this planet and the equally miraculous gift that is consciousness, can humans knowingly engage in such ugly, inelegant behaviour ? You’d think we’d grow out of it eventually, wouldn’t you ?

I don’t believ humans were meant to be savage, cruel animals, tho’ goodness knows I also don’t believe that there’s some divine inspiration, guidance or design that informs what humans were meant to be either.

Tonight all I know is how I feel, and cruelty, meanness, abuse, manipulation by humans against humans makes me sad.

‘-(

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