Press Sink(sic) Special to Press Think: Interview with Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis started Entertainment Weekly. Now he's a born again journalist who got religion about the Web. So how has his press thinking evolved?
I never tell the priests of high media what they should do. They get grouchy if you try that. In fact, one of them just said so this week, Jack Shafer in Slate: “The journalistic priesthood abhors advice.” What a grouch. But I can tell you what my hopes are. I would hope they would keep a careful eye on this experiment in journalism that keeps happening online, and learn something from it. Elite journalism is very much needed in this country. After all, it’s a country with an elite. It’s not clear (yet) how the New York Times should deal with the weblog form, and I would not expect a rapid plunge. But this week, the Los Angeles Times had cause to report that it currently has no weblogs, in an article about the Sacramento Bee, which does. I found that intriguing… for the priesthood.
· Press Think [via Tim Porter]

Erudite Gossip
While sense and sensibility are the basic equipment of any good literary critic, the mixture will vary in each individual case. Judging from the essays in ''Twentieth-Century Attitudes,'' most of which originally appeared in The New Criterion, Brooke Allen is a critic in whom sense decidedly predominates: one can more easily imagine her reading Pope than Keats.
· Twentieth-Century Attitudes [NYTimes 28/09/2003]

The tide has come in and gone out a few times
An edited blog is a contradiction in terms. It's a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That's a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it's politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable.
· First Draft [Tim Porter]

Film Swimming Pool
One of the best-loved and most influential French films of all time is René Clement's 1960 crime thriller Plein Soleil, or Full Sun. It used the sexiness of the French Riviera to throw human evil into stark relief. But Full Sun was based on the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by English writer Patricia Highsmith — it wasn't French at all.
Swimming Pool is. It's written and directed by the highly successful François Ozon. Ozon deliberately exploits the love-hate relationship between the British and the French to explore the tension between the head and the heart…
Ozon likes to look beneath the surface. He shows us the elegance of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament and then takes us under ground. Here we meet a sour-faced woman in her 50s who reacts with pointed rudeness when she's recognised.
· François Ozon [Jana Wendt:Sunday]

Agents CNNNN wins exclusive interview with my Agent, Herr Miller
Mission came to a happy conclusion this week after Cold River's agent agreed to be located by A Current Affair for $500,000.
· As Seen on 28 September 2003 AD on CNNN [CNNN.com]

The Final Earthy Campfire

My Dragon starts and ends with Daily Dose of Dust...
Oh it's-a lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night we'll hear the wild dingos call
But there's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer ...
· A Pub With no Beer is about mateship, the friendship of drinking together as equals contrasted with the misery of loneliness in exile [Slim Dusty]

The world's best blogs

Whether it's gossip, news, personal revelations or tech talk, online diaries can make anybody an opinionated commentator.
· 20 Must-surf weblogs [SMH ]

So Many books, so little time...

Maybe There Is Such a Thing as A time-travelling Rich Librarian
Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. Henry drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born.
Apparently the movie rights have already been auctioned, and Brad Pitt is going to produce it and star in it. Read an excerpt here.
· Chrono-Displacement Disorder [Amazon viaDigitallibrarian]

Lucky 13
On September 18, members of the Book Industry Study Group unanimously approved the Product Identification Policy Statement that endorses a 13-digit ISBN as proposed by the International Organization for Standardization, with an implementation date of January 2007. The statement also called for the Booklands EAN barcode to replace the price-point UPC where it is currently used on books and book-related products, effective January 1, 2005.
· Book Industry Approves 13-Digit ISBN [Bookweb ]
· Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon and Barnes & Noble [Bookweb ]
First Lady Joins GMA to Encourage Child Literacy
· ABC News' Good Morning America launched Book Drive America [Bookweb ]

Wired community: Future Is Still Full of Surprises
The idea of the ‘information society’ has taken hold in sociological and political analysis. Information technology, it is argued, is forming new virtual and actual networks that make up communities, both local and global. Computer networks are capable of transcending national boundaries, as information and communications is shared globally; they are also capable of redefining them, as they mark out new locations and regions, a new sense of place. Stubbornly, however, the problem of the digital divide has remained...
· Access [Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology(WordDocument)]
· We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information [New Directions for News(NDN)]
· Caregiver Tech Slowly Evolves [Wired ]

Marketplace will bridge digital divide
Desktop and hand-held computers and Internet technology, wired or wireless, have reached American households and businesses faster than any other technology in the past century, reaching 50 million people in just a few years, according to the Pacific Research Institute.
The debate about the so-called " digital divide " between high-tech haves and have-nots ignores the real issue, however: the lack of wealth-creating opportunities and access to capital in our inner cities and depressed rural areas. I call this the "access-to-capital divide."
· digital divide digital divide [ EmpowerAmerika]

Current Distractions: Online Opinionbarometer ...

The Web's Multi-purpose Nature = Power
Vietnamese journalist An Nguyen, currently at the University of Queensland, Australia, has published a paper on First Monday http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/nguyen/ about online news. It offers profiles of the online-news environments in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, drawing on studies like Eurobarometer What makes the web even more powerful than television of the 1960s is its multipurpose nature. The Internet is not just for entertainment and the news but is already a crucial part of today's daily work; and a more dramatic dependence on this medium is a matter of course in the future.
· An Nguyen [First Monday ]

How Appealing
Media Dragon owes a lot of links to Howard who this weekend reached no 51 @ Blogstreet Directory of 145330
Adam Liptak had an article headlined Experts Say Court Panel Is Less Likely to Delay California Vote. The fourth and fifth paragraph of Liptak's article refers to Howard. To boot, Kause mentions Howard as well. How appealing and well deserved too!!!
· Earnest exclamation points? They're all ironic. I swear! [Kausefiles ]

I repeat tis (sic) is not my website. Over!
· JI [JI ]

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Dorothy Parker

Free your mind, and your weblog will follow
To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: "If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don't stop! Hit it again and keep going". Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun.
· Burden of posting [mcgeesmusings ]

Make no mistake
Make no mistake, indeed; our current leaders are in love with fiction, with turning the unreal into the real, if they can get away with it. So it seems only fitting that fiction be turned on them. It is after all, the poets, playwrights, novelists, and political survivors who tend to reveal the truth to us, and speak to our souls.
· Prefer COLD Fact To ANGRY Fiction [TruthOut ]

Political marketing as party management
Political marketing has attracted increasing attention from political commentators in recent years, yet relatively little academic work has been conducted into its nature - either theoretically or empirically.
· Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997 [National Europe Centre, Australian National University (PDF file)]

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect

As anthropologists began comparing notes on the world's few remaining primitive cultures, they discovered something unexpected. From the most isolated tribal societies in Africa to the most distant islands in the Pacific, people shared essentially the same definition of what is news. They shared the same kind of gossip. They even looked for the same qualities in the messengers they picked to gather and deliver their news. They wanted people who could run swiftly over the next hill, accurately gather information, and engagingly retell it. Historians have pieced together that the same basic news values have held constant through time. "Humans have exchanged a similar mix of news . . . throughout history and across cultures," historian Mitchell Stephens has written.
· A hunger for human awareness [Journalism ]

At some point, just before oblivion of the sound of trees falling in the forrest takes us, someone will finally utter these fateful words:
eBooks are not so much different to paperbacks...

Trends
I have to brag about this! If you do a Google search for Cold River this site comes out at number 3 and 4 of about 2 million. That’s pretty good eBook surfing ...
The Open eBook Forum, www.openebook.org, suggests that Online reading, once viewed as a refuge for the nerds and as a faintly disrespectable way to read book, is rapidly becoming a fixture of publishing life for readers of all ages, backgrounds and interests.
I view this as a logical and inevitable move that more and more readers will make in the near future. I await the day when eBooks growth is routine, and no longer newsworthy. Reading will never go completely virtual, but readers have certainly noticed that with better quality Palm eReaders they can move towards saving space and creating less dust on shelves at homes and offices.
According to New Farm Organic Price Index, Organic farming makes up a fraction of farming in America, the industry is growing about 25 percent a year. Organic retail food sales in the U.S. reached $7.8 billion in 2000, up from $6 billion in 1999.

But listen here, there ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain’t built that way.
*Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Only On Sundays

Meanwhile, Kristofer Cieslak passed along some famous and not-so-famous, first sentences from his favorite novel...
Jerzy Kosinski's Being There:
It was Sunday.
Is it Sunday! and a satirical Christian Unrest online magazine, Ship of Fools, recently held a competition to rewrite the Lord's Prayer in 160 characters or less. The winner, British college student Matthew Campbell, produced this:
dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food & 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don't test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss, ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok?

Sunday @ Nine
It all started when Premier Carr claimed advertising man John Singleton had threatened to target him in a $5 million campaign...
· Week of Vitriol [Sunday]
· Latham on the Hill [Sunday ]

In the Bag
As my gypsy family prepares for the big change, a journey back to the deserted island called Sydney, it is time for In the Bag, the game that challenges you to put aside pride and admit what creative works you really like.
The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert city monitored by the good guys at ASIO, but you have to choose right now. No stalling or dithering—the secret armies of the night are pounding on your front door. No posturing—you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how uncool they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?
Here are my picks:
PAINTING: Richard McWeeney, Cannonberry McKell Park, Darling Point
MUSIC: Kristofer Cieslak, Guralu Ci Ci Nezal (slow movement guitar, accompanied by Polish Vodka on Icy Lemon)
BOOK: James Cumes, Haverleigh
BTW, If you happen to be visiting Frankfurt at the time when the city of books manages to pack every season into a week, please consider stopping by Stand 3.1 C149:
James' and Jozef's coffee hause.
FILM: Milos Foreman, Lásky jedné plavovlásky aka Blonde in Love, (1965)
POP SONG: The Black Eyed Peas, Where Is The Love?
(My Children infected me with this song ...)

Publishing translations

Disappointing news as another publisher is giving up publishing new translations: Czech-oriented Catbird Pres:
When I checked in with Wechsler, I learned that the current squeeze is putting him out of business. He'll maintain his backlist and website, he says, but cutting his losses on any future books, saying that favorable reviews have not convinced the chains, Amazon, and distributors to stock his wares.
· Lost in Translation [Saloon ]

Snubbed unknown sweeps giants off shortlist

The Booker Prize judges have ignored the uncrowned king of English letters and two past winners in favour of an unpublished writer
A piano teacher from Birmingham, whose first four novels were rejected by publishers, has beaten Martin Amis to the last six of the Man Booker Prize. 'I suppose it is a strike for all those of us who have unpublished books under our beds and wonder is it worth going on. Well it is,' Clare Morrall declared. 'Keep going'!
· Agentless Rejected Author Beats Literary Majors For Booker Nomination [The Guardian (UK) 09/17/03]

New Blog! Press Think
Political stories don't just 'happen' the way hailstorms do. They are artifacts of a political universe that journalism itself has helped to construct.
Jay Rosen is a press critic and writer whose primary focus is the media's role in a democracy. A member of the faculty since 1986, he is the current chair, and teaches courses in media criticism, cultural journalism, press ethics and the journalistic tradition, among other subjects.
· What Are Journalists For? [PressThink]
Artwork
· BookCrossers [ BookrossingCock]

Margin of Freedom in Australian media

Australia is often cited as an exemplar of the failure of media policy to guarantee the quality and independence of broadcasting. But in its development of arguments about ‘freedom of communication’, this outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire offers a surprising lesson in the significance of local experience in promoting a culture of informed citizenship.
· · Regulating for freedom [Open Democracy]

So It Is Written: Books Are Memory

Once a year, when I was a Hebrew-school student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, our class would visit the seminary's rare-book library, which houses one of the great collections of Judaica in the world. Despite our antsy, adolescent irreverence, there was something about those books that commanded immediate attention, even a kind of awe.
I have never forgotten the image of a small High Holy Days prayer book from 15th-century Spain, its odd oblong shape designed, the curator speculated, so that the owner could conceal the little volume in the sleeve of his coat to avoid detection by the Inquisition. All books over time take on a posthumous pathos, but these books — many acquired in the early part of the 20th century when people as well as books were once more threatened with burning — were survivors many times over.
As the city celebrates New York Is Book Country this weekend on Fifth Avenue, I cannot help thinking of the seminary library at Broadway and 122nd Street, where the vitality of books and the precariousness of books are simultaneously on view, a double message inscribed on every page.
I recently went back to the seminary's rare-book collection. You do not browse. Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard, the librarian for special collections, wearing white cotton gloves and laying out the books on a strip of black velvet, retrieves the old volumes for me one at a time. The first book he shows me is the prayer book I remembered seeing as a student. It was printed around 1480, which makes it an incunabulum. The Latin name means "from the cradle," a reference to books produced between 1450 and 1501, when Gutenberg's invention was in its infancy. The book, printed somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, is the only one of its kind. What happened to its owner is unknown. Rabbi Schwarzbard handles the volume as if it were still in the cradle, turning the pages gingerly to show me where a passage was snipped out by a censor. But despite its wound, the book is in remarkable shape. Paper was not introduced into Europe until the 12th century, but the high rag content made for low acidity and surprisingly durable pages. I have paperbacks from college that look far worse.
What are 20 years to a book that survived the Inquisition? I, meanwhile, am more than twice the age I was when I saw it last. I am married, I have children and I am mourning my father, who died this year. I can't help thinking that part of the dread I felt seeing those fragile books as a teenager was unconscious anticipation of the moment when I would see them again as an adult and realize that I was the ephemeral one.
· Morality [The New York Times 09/19/03]

Banned Books

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Banned Books Week. Observed in America since 1982, the annual event reminds us not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.
Many bookstores and libraries across the nation join in the celebration with displays and readings of books that have been banned or threatened throughout history. These include works ranging from the Bible and Little Red Riding Hood to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
· Libraries Memories [ ALA]

The Quiet Antipodean

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a compelling story that plays to the sense of guilt felt by Australians. But sometimes a culture of guilt needs a cold bath of factual analysis.
· Whitewash [NewCriterion ]
· Aborigines victims of irresponsible word games [Australian ]

Trends Revolve
Instead of fawning over a hot young actor in Tiger Beat, teen girls are now going ga-ga for Jesus’ teachings in Revolve, a magazine that’s slicked up the New Testament (search) for girls ages 12 to 17.
Christian bookstores are selling out of the $14.99, 388-page magazine, in which Holy Writ is jumbled alongside sassy sidebars, splashy headlines and color photos — all minus the sexual titillation of other teen mags like Seventeen
· Teenagers [Foxnews]

Country music icon Slim Dusty dies aged 76

Not So Dusty
First came Johnny Cash, now in Australia, another pillar of the industry, and one whose life had some parallels to Cash's, Slim Dusty, has died of kidney cancer in Sydney today.
Born David Gordon Kirkpatrick at Kempsey, on the NSW mid-north coast, in 1927, he wrote his first song The Way the Cowboy Dies at the age of 10.
A year later he changed his name to Slim Dusty and later went on to record a string of hits including The Pub With No Beer, the biggest selling record by an Australian.
· The Way His Music Lives [ABC ]

Of Books And Mortality It's easy to see old brittle books and wonder at their fragility. But encountering them later in life one wonders: "What are 20 years to a book that survived the Inquisition? I, meanwhile, am more than twice the age I was when I saw it last. I am married, I have children and I am mourning my father, who died this year. I can't help thinking that part of the dread I felt seeing those fragile books as a teenager was unconscious anticipation of the moment when I would see them again as an adult and realize that I was the ephemeral one." The New York Times 09/19/03

So It Is Written: Books Are Memory

Once a year, when I was a Hebrew-school student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, our class would visit the seminary's rare-book library, which houses one of the great collections of Judaica in the world. Despite our antsy, adolescent irreverence, there was something about those books that commanded immediate attention, even a kind of awe.
I have never forgotten the image of a small High Holy Days prayer book from 15th-century Spain, its odd oblong shape designed, the curator speculated, so that the owner could conceal the little volume in the sleeve of his coat to avoid detection by the Inquisition. All books over time take on a posthumous pathos, but these books — many acquired in the early part of the 20th century when people as well as books were once more threatened with burning — were survivors many times over.
As the city celebrates New York Is Book Country this weekend on Fifth Avenue, I cannot help thinking of the seminary library at Broadway and 122nd Street, where the vitality of books and the precariousness of books are simultaneously on view, a double message inscribed on every page.
I recently went back to the seminary's rare-book collection. You do not browse. Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard, the librarian for special collections, wearing white cotton gloves and laying out the books on a strip of black velvet, retrieves the old volumes for me one at a time. The first book he shows me is the prayer book I remembered seeing as a student. It was printed around 1480, which makes it an incunabulum. The Latin name means "from the cradle," a reference to books produced between 1450 and 1501, when Gutenberg's invention was in its infancy. The book, printed somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, is the only one of its kind. What happened to its owner is unknown. Rabbi Schwarzbard handles the volume as if it were still in the cradle, turning the pages gingerly to show me where a passage was snipped out by a censor. But despite its wound, the book is in remarkable shape. Paper was not introduced into Europe until the 12th century, but the high rag content made for low acidity and surprisingly durable pages. I have paperbacks from college that look far worse.
What are 20 years to a book that survived the Inquisition? I, meanwhile, am more than twice the age I was when I saw it last. I am married, I have children and I am mourning my father, who died this year. I can't help thinking that part of the dread I felt seeing those fragile books as a teenager was unconscious anticipation of the moment when I would see them again as an adult and realize that I was the ephemeral one.
· Morality [The New York Times 09/19/03]

eZuckerman: Mama don't let your babies grow up to be bloggers
I find I'm being drawn kicking and screaming into the world of blogging. For the past year or so, I've consciously decided not to create a public, single author blog. I use LiveJournal to maintain a blog, under a pseudonym, for a limited group of friends. And I've been experimenting with a group blog on IT and development, called XDev, which lives at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/xdev
· Blogging [Ethan]
· Blogs offer peeks inside small firms [Boston Herald]

A Life Worth Reading
For the past few weeks, since I began this weblog, I've been struggling to figure out just why people would ever want to post their day-to-day lives on the Internet for the masses to read. I've been grazing among the blogs and chewing that question like a tough mouthful of cud.
It seems to me that we all want a life worth reading, a life worth remembering. Nowadays to accomplish this, we turn to the great plains of the Internet. And the net IS a lot like the plains. Ages ago, early pioneers left the confines of their narrow cubicles in search of a new life. They found it in the fertile grounds of the World Wide Web. But what once was a heartland is now overgrazed and us bloggers are like dustbowl farmers planting tiny seeds of hope in a field of sand.
We’re hoping someone might take interest in our miniscule bit of life. That someone might stop, if just for 30 seconds, and acknowledge our existence. We're counting on some way to add significance to our lives, to be remembered and to be reassured that the hell we went through during puberty wasn’t for nothing!
· Ages ago, early pioneers left the confines of their narrow cubicles in search of a new life [ CowboyX]
TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation
This Modern World
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Eschaton
Scripting News
KEN LAYNE . COM
MaxSpeak Weblog
USS Clueless

Bits

I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake.… I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications.
· Critics on Reviews PW ]
· Book Reviews Survey [Slate]
· Self-declared art-lover [Spectator]

The Guardian of the Web

Editor in Chief Emily Bell says the success of the Guardian Unlimited didn't happen overnight. Britain's second most popular source of online news matured through consistent investment, international word-of-mouth and a commitment to innovation.
· Virtual News [OJR ]
· Professors [Journalism ]
Top Sites, Blogs for California Recall

The state's gubernatorial recall has been a multimedia circus of sniping, legal action and online organizing. With nearly a month to go until the vote, here are our awards for the best online efforts so far.
· Circus&Bread [OJR ]

The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In
Which is not to say that 90 percent of news-related blogs aren't crap!
After two years of reading Weblogs, my short list of favorite news commentators in the world now includes an Air Force mechanic (Paul Palubicki of sgtstryker.com), a punk rock singer-songwriter (Dr. Frank of doktorfrank.com), a twenty-four-year-old Norwegian programmer (Bjorn Staerk of http://bearstrong.net/warblog/index.html), and a cranky libertarian journalist from Alberta, Canada (Colby Cosh).
· Breathing in Blogworld [OJR ]

Memory of Running

Stephen King uses his power for good, not evil. He wants you to go listen to an audio book called Memory of Running. King says it's the best novel you won't read all year:
So why can't you read it? Because -- so far, at least -- no publisher will touch it with a 10-foot pole. Publishing houses, once proudly independent, are today little more than corporate wampum beads, their cultural clout all but gone. Novels that were neither dopey best-sellers (think James Patterson) nor dull ''serious fiction'' (think William Gaddis, Paul Auster, and their overpraised ilk) were one of the first things to go when the conglomerates took over. Dull or dopey: These days that's pretty much your choice at the bookstore.
· Memory of Escaping [EW via BookSlut]

Real life Russian tragedy
"The Return", a Russian film about the harrowing reunion of a father with his sons after a 10-year absence, won the Venice Film Festival's top prize, the Golden Lion, on Saturday.
First-time director Andrey Zvyagintsev dedicated the award to the 15-year-old star of the film Vladimir Garin, who tragically died a couple of months after shooting. He drowned in the region where the film was set.
There are only two actors here. Those who've seen the film know there should be three actors, three heroes up here. But two months ago he died tragically," said Zvyaginstev, who was greeted with a standing ovation.
We want to dedicate this victory to him."
The spare, brooding picture tells the story of two boys whose lives are changed forever when they go on a fishing trip in rugged Russian lake country with their newly returned father.
· The Return" ("Vozvraschenie") also won the award for best first feature [NZHerald ]

Their most perceptive observers paint a picture of journalists working at the Parliamentary Press Galleries as a pack of docile Faust, who make a pact with political masters in order to fulfill professional ambitions. Hollywood suffers, as does parliamentary journalism, from a belief that people are far more interested in the inner workings and machinations of the business than they are. It's common for Hollywood writers to write books that they think will be colossal, and often they're not. Web is in uncharted waters in terms of what the potential political coverage might be. Web, like samizdat literature, is built on rational Absurdity ... Irony of being irrelevant one moment and most relevant the next. Read by media monitoring units, ignored by friends and coworkers. Yet bloggers link stories which even Prime Ministers and Premiers are not in a position to ignore...

Puzzle: It's not exactly true that Bloggers Don't Think For Themselves
Are bloggers barometers of opinions? Are tough talking politicians afraid of real bloggers? Why are bloggers seen by some politicians as tormentors?
Web is becoming a weapon of mass communication and even a place for a colourful political labelling. Like most labels, terms like "left" or "center" are problematic and inaccurate. The problem with words beginning with the blogger.
I'm very supportive of people expressing dissenting views. We need bloggers who can generate ideas and links from as many angles as possible. Being out of touch with humanity, however, is another thing.
Whether one leans towards left, right or hangs around the center meaningful linking requires a blogger with time to invest, and also a certain personality. What kind of personality? Well, it is suggested a sort of Imrich test: Bloggers who think the childhood story of Stone Soup is silly (or cynical) should probably not start blogs. Bloggers who believe it’s a heartwarming story with worthwhile insights into human nature are probably more likely to be constructive and deliver fruits worth digesting.
Most of us know who those bloggers who fail to be moved by this story really are. They are those who email you off the group discussion list and make fun of others behind their back. They are those who attack the powerless in our society such as single mothers, unemployed people, and accuse those on the opposite side of the political pendulum of being irrational. We know too well bloggers who grovel to those in power and who know no shame when it comes to spreading lies about any issue or anyone in the name of the next promotion. If you blog in order to impress your boss, you get find out on the web. We can read you like a book.
· People's Empire Strikes Back [WebAdvantage]

Times are strange. Not so long ago everything was extroverted, all about scandals and shock tactics. Now we don't know if Saddam is dead or alive, or if it's Osama on tape. Deceitful politicians who have lost all sense of nuance act otherwise, but Harry Potter is right: "The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters." Today things are ambiguous and cryptic. No one knows which way the wind blows. Certainty is suspect, even scary. This upheaval is causing tremors in the art world. There's no paradigm shift; no major fractures have appeared. But change is in the air. Batons are being passed.

Is Good Art Making A Comeback?

Thrillingly, for the first time in a while, art seems more important than the system. The professionalism of the recent past, the thing that made the late-'90s art world seem corporate and unsafe, is morphing into something less predictable, more homespun. The fringes feel frisky, good new artists and galleries are appearing, hype and fashionableness matter less, those capacious galleries don't seem as off-putting, and art is becoming the focus again.
· Babylon Rising [Artnet.com 09/10/03]

The Censorship Of Space: CENSORSHIP BY WORD COUNT

Kyle Gann writes that music criticism has been reduced to shorthand that renders it toothless.
We critics are told that it’s up to us to defend classical music in the public marketplace - but the newspapers have taken away our tanks, bazookas, and machine guns and left us armed with garbage can lids and pea shooters. The space crunch is everywhere, in every publication. It used to be, when I’d write for the New York Times, they’d ask me one of the sweetest questions a writer can hear: 'How many words do you need?' No longer. Articles that would have once garnered 2000 or 2500 words now get half that. And according to what editors tell me, this is true across the board.
· 'How many words do you need?' [PostClassic (AJBlogs) 09/05/03]

Don't be a blurbwhore

What's more, the general derision heaped on blurbs and blurbing has the effect of making writers — particularly less–established writers — feel like jerks for even asking. I recently received an email from a woman who wanted me to take a look at her first novel. To read this note, you would have thought she was asking me to examine her stool sample. Such was her sense of shame.
· Make sure they get a bound copy. Include a note. Send gifts. And so on ... [MobyLives ]

Lead-Meisters

My father was Greek, my mother French; my grandfather was Danish, my grandmother Russian, and my other grandmother half Spanish

Every year, just before Labor Day, Press Clips reviews the latest magazine leads. It's a subject that never gets old. The point of writing a good lead (a/k/a lede, or first paragraph) for a feature story is to get the reader's attention. It's a difficult craft best learned by reading the masters, not me.
He is a man without a country, a family and a home. For more than a decade, Jozef Imrich has been living in X..., waiting. For what, he doesn't know anymore.
· The Lead-Meisters [VillageVoice ]

Ministerial staff: a need for transparency and accountability?

In this submission to the Senate inquiry into the staff of members of parliament, Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller identify five core problems with the ministerial staff system as it has evolved. They argue that the system has outgrown the arrangements designed to support and control it; that it is premised on a number of myths and assumptions that have become redundant as the staffing institution has evolved; that the roles and responsibilities of ministerial staff and the public service are ill-defined, undermining the quality of advice and support to ministers; that there is too little public information about the operations of the staffing system.
· Ministerial staffing system lacks transparency [Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University: PDF via APO::http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/fapa_ctte/mops/submissions/sub04.doc]

It was only a matter of time until someone defended BookCrossers

There is only an infinitesimal chance that the person who finds a 'released' book would have otherwise bought the same title, and the industry has long survived alongside second-hand bookselling and lending. If · Bookcrossing lasts, the number of books that are left and then picked up will remain small. However, the vast network of reviews, discussions and reading groups that have grown up around the site have helped fuel word-of-mouth bestsellers such as Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. There's even evidence that Bookcrossing adds sales: aficionados of the site buy multiple copies of new books to randomly distribute.
· Lovely Crossing [Guardian]
· I see myself predominantly as a [RiverCrosser]
· Frumpy-looking librarian [SMH]

Chief tormentor Keating's Song

The writing of The History Wars (Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clarke) is very important. The book will sit on the shelves of libraries as a sort of code stone to help people understand the motivations of players in today's contemporary debate. It sheds light on the political battle which is carried on in the pubs and on the footpaths about who we are and what has become of us. For the protagonists and antagonists in academe are now surrogates in a broader political battle about Australia's future.
· The History Wars [SMH]
· Banjo Paterson's trick: the song is the ghost of the swagman [SMH ]

Chile September 11th, 30 Years After

On September 11, 1973, a military coup cut out the democratic way of Chile. Today, 30 years after, local media are remembering what, why, and how it happened. The newspaper La Tercera has an hour by hour historical account of that day, while La Segunda offers a full biography of President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet and his troops. Finally, Emol.com has the private stories of 40 people, who write very personal My September 11th accounts.
Other media websites also are in the mood of remembering. Television Nacional, a state-owned TV network, has an hour-by-hour story with photos and video (including the "Palacio de la Moneda" bombing by air, and Radio Cooperativa has a wide selection of audio clips with the most important moments of that day, including the last speech of President Allende (5Mb file in MP3 format).

Blogging Lawyers

It’s not unusual for law offices, inside the government or out, to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on · knowledge management systems that wind up as failures. They often fail because they are too complicated. The training necessary to become proficient is too time-consuming.
· Blogs may work better than more expensive systems because they are more user-friendly
· Privacy Under the FOIA vs. Historians/Journalists Need to Access Data[LLRX ]

Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined

What's the point of being a sole survivor if you're not convinced the world will read your story in the end? Somehow an awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely. I know writers who are smarter than me, who are more talented than me, who have stronger instinct than me, who know more literary agents than me. I am preoccupied with more guilt than all of them. I'm a survivor - nothing more, nothing less. I don't fear life, I don't fear death and I don't fear literary humiliations.
The struggle against forgetting is unending and according to Elie Wiesel: Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened.
Somewhere in the depths of my foolish soul I nurture one conceited notion: One day, perhaps - one day - something shining will be prised out of all this raw skeleton...swimming in my Cold River
Like a good father or a beautiful view, a work of art is harder to describe than to recognise. Professor Gombrich once said that there was no such thing as art, only artists. Which begs the question, what makes an artist?
Vaclav Havel says that they are those who ‘celebrate our existence by making us more conscious of it.’ Art is a language and that it must have something to say:
Having my first daughter being born exactly 9 months after the Velvet Revolutiont is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable illustrations of how hope can spring from the most appalling of tragedies.
To download "Cold River: a survivor's story" use any of these links:
· Three men with courage to escape make a majority [Double Dragon Publishing]
· via Microsoft
· Via FictionWise
First Palm Digital Edition
Send constructive editorial suggestions to jozefimrich@authorsden.com

Essential Titles for Public Use in Paper Format:
The list comprises 48 titles, along with associated web links as available.
These titles contain critical information about the activities of the U.S. Government or are important reference publications for libraries and the public. Maintaining the availability of these titles for selection in paper format has been deemed essential to the purposes of the FDLP.
· Right To Know [Access ]

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call book reviewing a labor of love, except for the fact that it is so often a vilified profession. Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It’s a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline. So what’s the draw?

Writing & Reviewing from the margins

V.S. Naipaul is not an easy man to please. Over the course of a long and brilliant career, the Trinidadian author has displayed a tendency toward excoriating. His judgments, especially of human character, can be pitiless. He maintains that the world is populated by countless mimic men, individuals who muddle through their days in darkness, their thoughts and actions little more than degraded mimicry.
Half a writer's work is the discovery of his subject. The discovery of every tale, Naipaul writes, paraphrasing Joseph Conrad, is a moral one.
· Literary Occasions [nationalpost]
· Dimitrov's odd habit: keeping a diary [nationalpost]
· Why Would Anyone Review Books? [Poets & Writers 09/03]

The Paths of St. Blog's Are More Heavily Trodden

Online Journalism Review has a lengthy summary of a speech by online-news consultant Peter Krasilovsky, in which he discusses online-news business models. Those who think that free news websites are Not a Good Thing will find much to argue with; Krasilovsky and I tend to see things in the same way.
· Fat Prophet [OJR ]

Corporate Blogs Blogging

Securities Litigation Watch, a new corp law-related blog "with the goal of providing a valuable, timely resource for anyone interested in developments involving securities litigation or securities enforcement."
Alan's and Jon's Blog and The Deal Guys' Blog, both cornerstones of TheCorporateCounsel.net's Blog City, have recently starting blogging semi-regularly. Alan and Jon's posts cover corporate governance issues, while the The Deal Guys discuss the practical side of M&A deals.
In addition, Bruce Carton's Securities Litigation Watch was recently annexed into the City.

Alan's and Jon's Blog and The Deal Guys' Blog are available only to TheCorporateCounsel.net subscribers.


An Easy Case for Tax Blogging
Victor Fleischer's and Jeffrey H. Kahn's "A Taxing Blog: The Uneasy Case for Blogging Taxation" makes a very easy case for tax blogging: Email groups, e-zines, usenet groups, news trackers, -- that's soooo 2002. Blogging is where it's at now. . . .
As bloggers, we enjoy an excuse to keep up on what's current in the tax world and to read more widely than we might otherwise. We also hope to make a connection with an audience that we might not otherwise reach with traditional legal scholarship. There is a potential downside to blogging: it's possible that blogging consumes intellectual energy that might be better spent doing the more carefully considered analysis of traditional academic commentary. But we think of blogging as a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- our more traditional scholarship. And blogging might even enhance our scholarship by giving us access to and feedback from a broader, more diverse audience than, say, the readers of the Harvard Law Review. Moreover, as shameless tax nerds, we feel a right -- nay, a solemn duty -- to introduce the world of tax policy to the blogosphere.
· Via Corporate Bloggers [Corporate Blog]

Life & Loss

Meaningful Blogging on Life & Loss

Let it not be said that this blogger ignored the deep and meaning blogging Down Under. Of all the snippets I’ve read on antipodean blogs in the past years, the ones that's stirred up the most belong to postings by Gianna and Wayne.
If you don't already check their sites I recommend you do, they write beautifully and inspirationally in my opinion...I think they make my Slavic soul sing...

Antipodean Bohemians Shake your booties
Fictional pregnancy diary of Cooke's trademark cartoon character, Hermoine the Modern Girl:
One book has four filthy drawings of bright pink couples 'making love' during pregnancy, in different positions. In the first position they look bored. In the second position they look like they've had a lobotomy. In the third they look really smug, and in number four, I don't know how this is quite conveyed, but I'm pretty sure they were singing 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore'.
· Pregnant Pause [Gianna/Sanctuary ]
· Wayne on Feelings [troppoarmadillo ]

Don’t be afraid
Don’t be afraid to cry, as tears can baptize the soul anew.
Don’t be afraid to change your mind, as concession is often an act of courage.
Don’t be afraid to be lost… you might just find yourself if you leave the safe path.
Don’t be afraid to fight a just fight… if it matters to you… it matters!
Don’t be afraid to be laugh at the hilarity of it all.
Don’t be afraid to feel scared, life IS scary.
Don’t be afraid to trust, love or care about others.
Don’t be afraid to fail, as doing so often offers the most valuable lessons.
Don’t be afraid to be alone, for until you can be alone you cannot be with others.
Don’t be afraid to be different because we all are.
Don’t be afraid to dream as they are your only limitation.
Don’t be afraid
(via Prague Bloggers)
NB:: Dan Quayles of this world, take note: The hatred you're carrying is a live coal in your heart - far more damaging to yourself than to them.

Gooal shifts

Pushing further into the book How Breakthroughs Happen......here’s quote: The pursuit of innovation changes dramatically when the goal shifts from invention to inventive recombination, from pushing people to think outside of the box to helping them think in other boxes.
Seeking a greater depth of knowledge
I've been writing and talking about weblogs and news feed readers to the point that folks think of me as some sort of "blog nut." By writing this column, I risk perpetuating that notion, but this is too big of a deal to keep quiet.
· Your Life [ CNN]

I wish I had had a dictionary that good when I was learning Corrugated English circa September 1980.... Who knows? Perhaps my Cold River would have turned out, submerged, differently...Dare to voice your opinion how wonderful, crazy, sexy, charming, powerful, mysterious my writing should be?(smile)

TO REMEMBER Czech Free Czechglish Lessons

For example, it was a surprise for me to learn that the person who robbed a cradle isn't some weird psycho but a guy who dates a girl who is much younger than him.
By the way, this is NOT fair. It is usually the girl who gets the guy, so we should say she robbed a coffin.
· Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but rather by the moments that take your breath away. [CzechOut ]