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Austin Blogs and the American Statesman Newspaper

February 21, 2005

Today's Austin American Statesman offers an article on blogging and the success of Six Apart's Moveable Type, launched by Mena and Ben Trott, subsequently bought out for over eleven million dollars. People are buying that web-logging software/service stuff!

The penultimate paragraphs in the article read:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 27 percent of U.S. adults online read blogs, and 7 percent write them.

Critics view all the fuss about blogs as the latest bout of Internet hyperbole, which will eventually fade once readers realize they are rife with inaccuracies and mundane minutiae.

A number of Austin locals are an active part of this Internet Hyperbole, surely more than even we here can track, including

and

  • educated-past-our-station us here at Good&Happy, devoted to the cultivation of intelligent happiness amidst mundane minutiae, unless our venomous tongue overpowers our better judgment, in which case we occasionally with all the accuracy we can muster lap the waters of morose delectation.

Not that we crave any kind of notoriety or even mention, but couldn't a reporter have quickly Googled weblog + austin and found Coté's Weblog, or Roland Smith's Weblog, or someone else blogging in & about Austin, in preference to an unattributed "critics view" of "all the fuss"? In fact, austin + blog would have led the hypothetical researching reporter to Austin Bloggers! Statesman reporters also blog, sort of, most sans reader comments, updates from their beat, and that phenomenon is ignored as well.

Our 19th straight annual daily subscription renewal, somewhere in excess of $100200 US to be squeezed directly out of our very own bank account, is coming up. A friendly readers'-suggestion to the local MSM: it is 2005 AD/CE, time to sit up straight, take some notes, research and think through the topics you report on, and start covering this town with at least a toehold in the 21st century.  Associated Press may distribute the tinfoil cubes of soup stock, but couldn't you add a little parsley from your own flourishing garden?

Update: Blogosphere as Gift Culture, by Ambivablog, which may explain some of the otherwise surprising oil-and-water aspect of Professional Journalism's response to bloggers.  We're, really, just a flowering of Letters to the Editor, and to Each Other. And all parties occasionally fall into bloggadocio and blogatry,
via The Corner. And Amba & comments collect more blogalicious vocabulary....

February 21, 2005 in Paying attention |

Comments

There's an interesting article on a sociological project to geocode the blogosphere. Our beloved town is mentioned as a hot spot for blogging. This comment form doesn't permit HTML, but the link is: www.buffalo.edu/news/fast-execute.cgi/article-page.html?article=71440009.

Via In and Out of Confidence (tamarika.typepad.com), a very nice, thoughtful new blog.

Posted by: Richard Lawrence Cohen | February 22, 2005 at 01:23 AM

Thanks, Richard. The URL for this G&H post has been sent to "Letters" at the Statesman, in part as a formal innovation on "letters to the editor;" and now here you are adding further information about what could be an informative and colorful local interest story for them.

Time (or at least the Statesman) will tell. Or won't.

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