Blog Bits

Antidote to the Liberal Monotone: Blogging: Why are Web logs so infuriating to their shrewish detractors? Is it really the narcissism? Or is it the political opinions being expressed? ...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.

Talk is cheap and so is blogging: What is it about blogs that so confuses and concerns newspaper columnists? I think most columnists lack the experiences and conceptual categories to understand "the blog." Like a one-year-old baby grappling with the idea of other beings, the average newspaperman scribbling about bloggers can describe "the other" only as an ersatz version of himself.

In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap: Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow ''blogger,'' no matter how outre, goes unpraised.

Big media beats the blog drum: The traditional press (known in some circles as "old media") is jumping on the blogger story, writing about and drafting bloggers. The time seems ripe to recap the coverage and to describe what makes the blog so threatening to media incumbents: timeliness, willingness to credit others, passion, blogrolling, human interest, chronology, and devotion.

Blogging from 1750 to 2302: evidence that a) blogging predates press-powered journalism and b) the first blogger was an eighteenth century Parisienne's servant.