Rands In Repose writes about why you should weblog.#

Your opinion matters.

No matter how correct/incorrect/poorly informed it is, it's more interesting than the front page of the news because it has a unqiue voice. Chances are someone on the planet with a web browser will recognize and favor your particular flavor of insight.

Yes, it's going to take some courage to throw it out there.

Yes, you are going to find people that are going to hate you for these opinions.

Kaye Trammell wonders about the future of citizen journalism.#

I started thinking about this in the wake of Gawkerposting the Martha Stewart juror selection questionnaire. Leaks like this are not new - theSmoking Gun made a name for itself posting such information. But happens when the informant gives this info to .... Halley Suitt or Jay McCarthy ... instead of Gawker? What will happen when non-corporate entities or amateur blogs like this one post such information? Do I have to reveal my sources? What protection will such bloggers have?

The answer, as I see it, is none.

Even so, I'm not sure that we should be protected. This is not a call to raise blogging to an equal status of journalism. These are just questions to which I do not yet have an answer.

Lawrence Lessig wants more citizen journalist bloggers like me, sweet.#

Chris Winters writes about why he will no longer read Slashdot.#

Why dump it? It got to the point quite some time ago where every discussion was a shallow and distasteful replica of one that occurred before. The acrimony and name-calling drives away people who might have something original to say (a strength of the early slashdot), which just turns it into a vicious cycle. And I figure that I'm reading enough and varied blogs now that people will repost useful links found there (which apparently happened with the Mac OS X history entry I posted a few days ago). Plus I don't have the time to waste on this kind of technology landscape meandering anymore. It takes a lot of time to sort the wheat from the chaff, and while my chaff detectors are better than they used to be (a function more of age than smarts in my case), it's still too long.

My name is Jay McCarthy, and I've approved this message.

Lisa Williams on moi.#

Jay over at Makeoutcity's art form is the inspired use of the blockquote tag. He's built a following for his excellent blog by excercising his great editorial sensibility, unerringly picking out the best parts of the best posts. In the 20's, there was an editor named Max Perkins, who is widely credited with shaping a generation of writers, handpicking them and having a big hand in their greatness (they include, notably, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Is Jay the blogosphere's Perkins? Of course, it's impossible to tell today which of our efforts will be considered important a hundred years from now. We often fall into the fallacy, for example, of thinking that literature in the 1920s in America was incomparably greater than what's being produced today. But that's because we're comparing everything written today to what has stood the test of time from yesterday. Time is a winnowing fan, which sorts the wheat from the chaff. But we can see glimmers, can't we?

Lisa also wonders how I name my posts. Generally what I do is think of a song that played while I was writing, or a phrase that I have recently heard. Then I'll take the title, or maybe a random line from the song; and that will be the title. They are generally very obscure. I may consider explaining on each post where it comes from.

(Note: This is just for the "Daily Digest" posts because they generally have common thread to weave them together.)

Peter Lindberg writes up his nominations for the 2004 bloggies.#

I chose to not nominate any weblogs in Swedish. Although the rules doesn't explicitly say that nominees should be in English, I assumed that this is the case. Anyway, the ones I would have nominated in the European category are Erik Stattin's mymarkup.net and Håkan Kjellerstrand's hakank.blogg.

Finally, my nominees are all weblogs that I think are great, and that match my interests to a great extent. I could list several great weblogs that I read, but which doesn't, as often as those above, write about things I'm especially interested in.

Thanks Peter!

Betsy Devine announces the RSS Feed for the Feedster Blog of the Day. Yippee!#