Daily News – Halloween Edition

Descartes’ Bones

descartesbones-bookcover.jpg I spent two hours with Russell Shorto yesterday thanks to the New School. Mr Shorto talked about the being a journalist turning to history. “History and journalism are very similar. A journalist interviews people, a historian interviews dead people. ” he said.

As he took questions he cringed expecting an assault on Cartesian thought for which he has become an unwitting lighting rod. “At Harvard” he said ” the first question they asked me was ‘Don’t you believe in free will?'”

Even thought Mr. Shorto told me “that none of the early reviewes of my book got it at all” I’ll add one anyway…

International Herald Tribune

Bones for the Media

Who needs Wall Street? New York media has a friend in Washington. David Carr in the New York Times wrote about the embarrassment of riches dumped on the media industry by the Obama campaign. Unprecedented spending from the best candidate money can buy is about to end. But the irony has been that even with a spending that would make Lee Atwater blanch, the trump as been small scale open platform video and blogs in web space. Too bad that an Obama presidency plans to use a revitalized fairness doctrine to shut down all that web 2.0 dissent and advocacy – right after they pulverize AM talk radio – a little payback to old print media for their coverage of his campaign.

New York Times

The Brand Called Obama

The Size of Blog Space

To hear talk about it, blog space is so big that bloggers outnumbered people three or four to one. Technorati runs an annual survey called “State of the Blogspace” and the numbers show something less than the hype.

There are two questions. How many blogs are there, and how many are active. Technorati crawls about 7.4 million blogs that were active in the last 120 days, 1.5 million active in the last week, and 900,000 active in the last day, much smaller than I thought given that these are global numbers. It seems that people are getting tired of their blog toy.

I bet we will start to see articles about the carnage of hobby blogs dying off as some realize that being a solo publisher is a lot of hard work. CSS code anyone?

Technorati State of The Blogsphere 2008

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