Striving For “Fair And Balanced”

The piece got my attention too. Yep extrapolating from 9 blogs is not too sharp but then when looking at most polls these days one can tell that the poller was funded to demonstrate a Client specified point. The samples that are picked are often absolutely ridiculous, needless to say how weak the conclusions the poll puts forward.

I would expect that the CanWest had an agenda when they commission that piece of brilliant-Not work. Perhaps they are affraid to get “lonely” too if their readers keep drifting and fragmenting away, would you not think???

I need to talk to you Jon BTW and I can ensure you that it’s not about lonelyness. For the curious ones, I have met Jon several times in the real world and I in fact recall first meeting him in the real world. I wonder what the CanWest sponser blogger basher would conclude on this dataset.

Hi, gaulois and thanks for stopping by.

Yes, my first impulse (a reasonably eduxated one, I think) was that CanWest is letting their agenda out to play a bit as well. It’s a highly conservative right-wing (for Canada) media organization, and I also was not surprised the=at the author Karen is at the U of Calgary
Polls carried out by the media are in the ’00’s nothing more that propaganda mechanisms, and in my opinion the large majority of poll questions are very poorly shaped, transparently so.

Gaulois, I think you have my email address. Please feel free to contact me, and we can meet up pour un caf

Woah there, cowboy. Jason Kottke is “absolutely ridiculous”? He was one of the first bloggers to begin to attract any kind of attention, and is doing pretty damn well there. Canwest commission? Have you lost it? Canadian Press interviewed him on it first, and theres obviously no exclusivity deal. The dude published at a small press, and probably isn’t making much off of it - a canwest commission is bottom of the barrel conspiracy bullshit. Why does someone always have to spout unintelligent crap from every orifice without doing the tiniest bit of research first? Like, maybe, read the book? If you’re so determined to prove bloggers are active, rational, and effective, relying on more than an article would be a good start. You make blogging look like an excuse to rant without the review and research that any decent journalist would never forget.

Fine if Kottke did not get a penny out of this fine piece of research then. It still fitted the agenda of Canwest and the Canadian Press facing a reader erosion as well as decreasing avertising revenues.

And money grows on trees too for bloggers as well as Canwest. Who is ranting BTW?

Hi, Riled In Regina. I’m not sure where in this post I mentioned jason Kottke (I don’t think I did) .. as for it being an example used in the book, I think it’s a reasonable example and Jason struggled quite a bit, i believe (if memory serves).

But .. this environment still is very new, really .. and there are still many seeking for the right combinations (for them) of passion, grunt work, talent, luck, energy, etc. that will make blogging work for them.

But .. it also seems clear that blogging and / or blogging-like derivatives are not going away, and are creating a “long tail”, and are still facilitating many new connections, friendships and more.

I think you are right about the value of reading a book when ciriticizing it .. that action lends even more weight, although it doesn’t help much if you are just as stupid and / or uninformed after reading the book as you were before you started reading it.

In this case. in my opinion I know a reasonable amount about blogging (more than 5 years, lots of thought and study, development of blogging software, speaking at a number of blogging and social sfware conferences, etc) to pass a general opinion about the scope, reach and depth of the book based on the article and any ionformation I could find out about it on the Web.

I’ll take just a tiny bit of shelter from your aggressive and generalized comments by hiding behind the one-star review on Amazon (and no I did not participate in rating the book nor do I know anyone else that did so .. )