How novel - a blog critiquing blogs
I've had several recent conversations about the value of "open" web information sources like Wikipedia and blogs when compared to "traditional" sources like encyclopedias, journals, and institutional news sources. In the end, I do see the value in the newcomers: I do check Wikipedia when I'm not particularly invested in strict attention to detail and I want an overview. Blogs are useful for finding a.) links to institutional materials I have missed and b.) helping me weigh the merits of opposing opinions. But, fundamentally, I value the "mainstream" sources of information. I know they're flawed, I'm not so naive as to believe everything I read. But let's face it: with all their flaws, mainstream news sources can offer two things that the communal web sources haven't come close to touching: depth and reliability. Sure, blogs are good for getting a superficial take on nearly every issue, but they're virtually useless when you would like in-depth coverage of any issue, because it is hard for the armchair journalist to make it out to dangerous and far-off locales (where there may be few intrepid bloggers writing in your language) to write a compelling blog entry.In the end, I guess all I'm arguing is that while we are right to celebrate these new venues, we need to be careful not to overstate their importance. And we certainly should not be teaching the new generations of netizens that blogs, Wikipedia, and other communal offerings are replacements for their professional counterparts. If we do, we will increasingly find ourselves limited to only those free communal offerings and without recourse to professional and reliable information. To this effect, you should read (ironically enough) a blog entry from Nicholas Carr's "Rough Type" on the same subject (and its wider implications):
Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.On a completely unrelated note:
But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.
. . .
Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
(The amorality of Web 2.0)
Let's hope Zack is right about where the video iPod is headed. Personally, I think he's being too optimistic. We've all been waiting for flash drives to replace moving component drives for years. It'll be great if it happens in the next 18 months, but I'm thinking it'll take 5 years or so. I do, however, agree that Apple should upgrade my recently purchased iPod.
And speaking of Apple:
I've been meaning to point out that I find it endlessly amusing that OS X Tiger's startup "progress bar" is just a placebo. It isn't actually measuring any sort of progress at all: it is just there to reassure you. How does it know how long the bar should take until it reaches the end? Practice. It stores how long it took to boot up last time, and times its meter using that rubric. It stores the time it takes to boot (in seconds) here:
/var/db/loginwindow.boottimeApparently my last boot took 2.253010 seconds. The engineers at Apple must have a sense of humor (or are humorless robots that make humans laugh, anyway) because the application that displays the bogus progress bar is called, of all things, WaitingForLoginWindow! For more information on this and other Tiger tricks, check out Daring Fireball: Tiger Details.
Labels: blogging, media, technology
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