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Is there anything more tedious than the editorial page of the New York Times? Yes. There's Paul Krugman's column on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And there's Frank Rich's column every other Saturday on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And there's ... well, it's a long list, and you get the idea. All the News That's Fit to Blog

The Blog, The Press, The Media: The game's up: who is paying the powerful commentators?
As someone contemplating life on the speaker's circuit, it has became very obvious that this is an area where transparency and accountability is sadly lacking. Take powerful Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt as an example. He's recently signed up with a speaking agency called ICM.

When Paul Lyneham was still with the ABC in Canberra for The 7.30 Report he was increasingly distracted by his speaking commitments. At the time it was generally thought that Red Kerry wanted to get rid of Lyneham and the chance came at last when Lyneham flew to Perth early one day.
Just after he left Canberra, Opposition Leader John Hewson's office rang to offer to go on The 7.30 Report with Lyneham to reveal the opposition's position on Mabo. It was a big story at the time but Lyneham couldn't do it and the offer was moved to Nine and Sunday. It supposedly hastened the end of Lyneham's role on The 7.30 Report and Red Kerry, who presumably went completely berserk over Lyneham's unreliability, has been in the chair ever since.

• Tracking the journalistic speakers [Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results ; Freedom wanes ]
• · Blogging is having a big impact on American journalism - with bloggers using their posts both to leak to the media and to challenge it directly. Dan Rather, the iconic CBS News anchor who retired last month, is the bloggers' biggest scalp to date. But what impact is blogging having in the Australian media? Jason Di Rosso has our special report. (Title pinched from the good fast company ;-) All the News That's Fit to Blog ; So from Day 1 of the Webdiary, July, 2000, I have written in the first person and I’ve asked all readers who want to contribute to Webdiary to write in the first person too, and the strength I feel I gained from that as a journalist running a space which I want to be a space for conversation among Australians from all different walks of life and from all different political points of view, want that space to be safe, and I feel I can guarantee safety by being very open about what my beliefs are, and publishing genuine criticisms of my beliefs and my opinions and my facts. I think the reader in the end trusts that more than a journalist who’s pretending to be objective. And that has proved to be the case. Since the 2004 election, Webdiary’s been transformed from a basically leftish, small-l liberal site to a much more balanced site, many, many more right-wing Australians are participating, and they feel safe to participate. And they feel that their voices are being fairly expressed. Webdiary
• · · Types of weblogs ; Café Press ; One of the most striking things that hit me in my analysis of the 30 most visited blogs at Truth Laid Bear was the small number of blogs using the Adsense program Why Adsense Is Not Suitable For All Blog Topics
• · · · What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia ;
• · · · · Catallaxy mention on Radio National ; Radioblogging ; Glen Fuller ; Telstra Turns to Online Television ; Circulation review sparks media spat
• · · · · · Have you ever had to deal with a difficult boss or co-worker? How did you handle it? Were you successful? What did you learn from the experience? ... How to Handle a Screamer? ; PR Agencies Become Blog Amplifiers

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One of the most egregious examples of this ideological nonsense, popular among sociologists and dramatized by the press, was the idea that the way for the poor to escape from poverty was to organize to "fight city hall" and "gain power." This seemed plausible at a time when socialist and quasi-socialist ideas were still very much alive, prompting many to believe that the cure for poverty was political activism (relying upon the state) rather than economic activism (encouraging entrepreneurial energy in markets). Both Dan and I had come from poor families, had gone through radical phases in our youth, and were appalled to discover that ideas we thought discredited had acquired a new lease on life. The Public Interest was born on a shoestring budget in borrowed office space in Manhattan. Looking Back: Forty Good Years
[From the final issue of The Public Interest, Irving Kristol on Forty Good Years]

The Blog, The Press, The Media: A Media Tipping Point?
Big journalism is in trouble, and big journalists don't like it

The instant literature on what Jeff Jarvis has been calling the tipping point continues to grow.
So anyway, we're creating new things:
Google is the new library... and network... and ad agency (see the post below).
Blogs are new newspapers, right?
Podcasts are new radio then.
Vlogs will be the new TV, yes?
But then again, no, they're not. They're none of that. They're new, they're different, and they're not done yet.

• For Every Action a Reaction [Sharing that juicy email with your friends is not such a smart move Jennifer Aniston: Think again before you press Forward ; Game: Guess-the-google ]
• · Matt Thompson, one of the creators of Googlezon, says what I've been thinking for several days: Why did Mood of the Newsroom cause such a stir? After all, I, and others, have been writing similar things for a couple of years. Snarking the Newspaper ; Finally, a personal note. I was appropriately embarrassed by Jay's "what it took to get here" comment, but, hey, he's passionate and effusive and that's where those characteristics lead. Love ya, Jay. But he was right in benchmarking my own evolution in from a hard-core newsroom editor to a wide-eyed geek entranced by what my colleagues were doing with the early web (prototype Electric Examiner, strike newspaper, Salon) to an ex-journalists working on a start-up to the returning prodigal journalistic son I am today. It is my journey and it is not dissimilar to many journalists of my time. Jay Rosen
• · · American Greek lover of Dragon: Nick or Nicholas or even Nico Legend of the Red Dragon ; The new reason to have a blog?
• · · · Even when newspapers go belly up, their kind of content will live on. Next: The Google Street Journal ; No kidding; A parasol you say?
• · · · · Google is floating a trial balloon of a service that pairs advertisements with blog feeds. Google tests out blog ad service ; NEWS Limited has rejected a claim that it manipulated sales figures for its newspapers Numbers don't lie, say News figures
• · · · · · Lawrence Solum (San Diego): The Future of Copyright; Future of political humour - More evidence of Saudi doubletalk? This is just wrong, but...

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The May edition of the Sydney Magazine that work of art insert inside the SMH this week is peppered with fascinating stories: ‘How Do I get One of Those?’ - The wizard, Mark Bouris, streches his answer over 7 pages. The famous poet and painter, John Hatton, and his wife Vera must be pleased with the apolitical Herald story as on page 120 Bonnie Malkin is on the husking at Huskinsson. The best kept secret is described as a place you do not want to leave in the hurry. For two decades in 1980s and 1990s my in-laws provided us with a cosy Batehaven weekender to travel to places like the Husky Pub - from dolphin watching to memorable walks along the white beaches.
In another master images Natalie Boog unveils Cronulla in her eagle eye lenses. Anneli Kinght deserves to be knighted for her suggestion that Cronulla is in the midst of a Velvet ‘(peaceful) Revolution, slowly blending a cosmopolitan cafe culture with its image as a lazy surfside locale ... a lifestyle that was immortalised by the 1981 Australian coming-of-exile (age) film Puberty Blues’ While Cronulla remains permanently soaked in a holiday feel the Grind expresso is in the honeymoon fever ... Richard gets a out of this world write up - ‘Grind, a tiny street-side cafe, wears its cult status on its walls in the form of hundreds of photographs of patrons at tourist spots across the world holding placards scribbled with I’d rather be at Grind.' Creative Spaces

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Reel of Seed Funds
Officials looking over filmmakers' shoulders is unlikely to improve Australian films

The Film Finance Corporation's new requirement for active involvement in the production of films that receive funding has been greeted with concern by the artistic classes. Some see further evidence of the Howard Government's crushing of dissent. Less paranoid filmmakers fear an intrusive corporation will impede their work and compromise artistic integrity.

• Less government help may be better for the box office ; [Lord knows I was frustrated enough to kill someone. Joshilyn Jackson's Backstory for gods in Alabama ; Have you seen Consumating.com? It's a Whole New Internet; New libraries turn tide of decline Who Knew? Great Libraries Draw Readers ]
• · Did Michael Chabon invent a personal Holocasut history to "fashion his previously banal suburban persona into a more complex Jewish identity? Anatomy of a hoax ; Calling upon writers to do more of their own promotional The Hype Debate ; An Argument for Writers' Taking Charge ; Today's corporate weather-makers hate "book-lovers", as they sneeringly refer to them.Against Good Books
• · · Slavoj Zizek's rock-star status brings out adoring fans. The intellectual giant ; Samuel Taylor Pooter at your service. High as a kite and mad as a goose. Emerson and Coleridge: never meet your heroes
• · · · Yeah, but who makes more money? ; Gimme A Pound Of The Roast Beef, And One Of Those Tom Clancy Things Attention, Shoppers: Sale on Fresh Books in Aisle 3; Even well-established writers with great reviews are having difficulty getting their books sold these days He's a Literary Darling Looking for Dear Readers
• · · · · While in Australia Book Chain Collins Booksellers Goes Bankrupt - in the Us independent bookstore's last chapter Another Indie Bookstore Gives Up The Ghost: Bound To Be Read ; Getting Foreign Lit A Place At The Table Found in Translation ; For the first time, print-on-demand companies are successfully positioning themselves as respectable alternatives to mainstream publishing and erasing the stigma of the old-fashioned vanity press Self-Publishing Finds Its Legs
• · · · · · E-books have yet to crack the publishing industry Books Get Wired (As A Plot Device) ; Word Associations: The wicked allure of lit blogs - Blogging The Written Word ; From coast to coast, budget strains and tax pressures are forcing cities to make hard choices about how to spend limited money, and libraries, much to many residents' dismay, are taking the hit. The Endangered American Libraries

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I wasn't prepared to be famous for 24 hours, but now that my weblog traffic has subsided to normal levels, I can relate some of the experience. The rest has to be filtered through therapy first. Fame or Something Like It

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Overload & Memories
It's interesting, for somebody who doesn't even believe in information overload, Steven Cohen's Library Stuff has been providing some excellent coverage on this topic lately.

I definitely agree with the conclusion that one of the answers to information overload is to trust that other people will read things which I won't, and that I'll find things through them or through the people who read them.

• Information Anxiety [In any revolution, one hopes for an outcome like the one Vaclav Havel wrought in the Czech Republic, but one is at least as likely to wind up with Robespierre Mood of the Newsroom: Letters from Three Journalists ; ]
• · Is CNN right to predict the end of conspiracies as we now know them? CNN Blog spam Google conspiracy theory (Nancy Grace) ; Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism ... A conversation about the future of journalism "by the people, for the people" -- and occasional other thoughts: Love happens. Impossible to predict where, why, when, or with whom. But I think Susie's right. Somebody at the White House was head over heels (literally) in love with Gannon - Doing Pro Journalists' Work For Them
• · · Some would suggest it's a case of Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Maybe the media isn't too inclined to report on its own dirty secrets. Slowly, slowly, Crikey's investigation into circulation rorts is starting to bite. Ten days ago, the Audit Bureau of Circulation announced it was looking into the issue – hardly an independent inquiry, but a start. Today, the biggest figure in Australia's multibillion-dollar media buying industry, Harold Mitchell, has thrown his substantial heft behind our investigation US case study ; This morning Crikey editor, Misha Ketchell, lodged this formal complaint with the Commonwealth Ombudsman We take Budget lock-up ban to Canberra
• · · · Hugh Brown teaches New Media communication in the School of Journalism Communication at the University of Qld. He now blogs at http://www.huge.id.au while conducting research into the distribution and promotion of music via New Media ; He was editor of On Line Opinion from 2000-2004 during my extended tropical holidays in Sunshine state ;-)
• · · · · Singleton sees profits in Lonely Planet ; Living the Literary Life: Writing, Reward and Rejection ... nobody can thrust the idea down the throat of a writer that the only valid publication is American publication Writers uphold literary works free from market demands
• · · · · · Imagine a day when you just have to enter a few words on your computer, such as Iron Curtain push a button, and be able to read an automatic -- and accurate -- summary of what appears in major sources about this specific subject After PageRank, Here Comes LexRank; AerialText of Joseph DePalma

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OOoh, Steven Johnson turns the traditional “we must read books” argument upside down in his forthcoming book, All Bad Things Are Good For You. Here’s an excerpt from his blog:
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. Danger: linear reading

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Tale of woe wins book contest
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now ...

Farah Ahmedi was still getting used to wearing a prosthetic leg after her body was mangled in a land mine accident when her tailor father and two sisters were killed in a rocket attack on the family's home in Kabul, Afghanistan. About a year later, her brothers, Mahmoud and Ghayous, disappeared as they fled to Pakistan to escape joining the Taliban. Ahmedi was barely 10. Now at 17, the Wheaton North junior, who wears leg braces, is partaking in another incredible experience.

• The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky [They’re buying a powerful media platform” while providing “paltry” compensation ... Ahmedi says she’s happy just to see the book published, and plans to use the $10,000 to buy her mother a house, so she’ll be comfortable and won’t think about all this terrible stuff that happened to usA cautionary tale of reality-publishing ; Orange prize for first-time writers boosts short stories; Peter Thompson: Film: Three Dollars ]
• · Powerful writing stumps ayatollahs and sets free vibrating broomsticks Salman Rushdie on how literature is a loose cannon. Books vs. Goons ; Even Chris Sheil would approve ;-D recommended by one and only Terry Teachout: Eleven perfectly lovely records
• · · I started a taxing trend! Pushing 'presell tours,' publishers are picking up the check for first dates between authors and booksellers Dine Now, Sign Later ; It's been an incestuous system that worked along the lines of, I'm the jury, the publisher, the writer and the journalist From the Outside, a French Publisher Thrives ; Making literature appealing
• · · · It took on a life of its own. It proved to be way more successful than we could have ever dreamed. Airport-based Paradies Shops report a 20 percent increase in book sales following their initiative to buy books back from customers at half the purchase price within six months. (They sell those books again, also at half price.) Airport stores offer 50 percent return on hardcover books ; Read & Return ; A Look at Fiction Online
• · · · · Actors generally don't know who they really are. They find a center only when they pour themselves into the container of a "character"; they become most fully who they are when they turn themselves into someone else Fonda vs. Vadim ; Give me Saltz's 885 words without theory any day of the week. Saltz's article actually means something to me. I can feel his experience of Hirst's work. I can connect to his opinion. I can sense Saltz's emotional response to the work. Opinion Over Theory Any Day
• · · · · · In the first of a series of interviews introducing this year's inaugural Vienna Writers' Festival Viennese whirl ; For figs to do what figs were meant to do Vienna Writers' Festival

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EMPEROR: My dear, young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.
MOZART: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
Oh wow, that's a big blog you've got there! It's a different world out there

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Put a Dragon In Your Think Tank
ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. Herewith, a representative overview

A godfather of global warming denial, author of The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty and Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate. Key quote: “There is no convincing evidence that the global climate is actually warming.” Connections to ExxonMobil-funded groups: at least seven.

• The Cold Earth Society [Extraordinary libel case Could the editor of 'The Times' really end up going to jail? ; A blog is a blog when it's a blog.... ; Richard A Clarke What Congress can do now to bust the boom in identity theft. You've Been Sold]
• · Many mainstream-media blogs manage to combine the worst of both worlds: Hemmed in by tradition, they lack the candor and point of view that distinguishes good blogs. Bereft of good material, they lack the depth and quality of print journalism. Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com ; To read the headlines, or the bloglines, one might get the sense that the bloggers have arrived on the scene to challenge the “gatekeepers” of the big media. This is an essay in six parts to examine this theme The New Gatekeepers
• · · There's a mysterious kind of guarantee when a real name is attached to a weblog. Without it, everything is less real, more inconsequential Is It Cool to Be Anonymous? ; Under dozens of pseudonyms, Kyle Vallone has orchestrated the publication of scores of letters to the Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the Tri-Valley Herald during the last decade Why write letters on behalf of a candidate and send them to a "tree" of supporters who would sign their names and send them to newspapers? It occurred to him that he could skip a step, make up fictitious identities and send the letters via e-mail Grassroots Astroturf
• · · · Bloggers without Borders is a citizen journalism hub, dedicated to raising conscience for, and about, events around the world Bloggers without Borders ; We have started a new feature here at Small Business Trends: i.e. Brewed Fresh Daily is like an online coffee shop. The atmosphere is warm, inviting and interesting, just like your favorite neighborhood place. Like any good coffee shop, it's part office, part living room, part cafe. It feels like a physical place, yet it's all online Brewed Fresh Daily is a weblog to start your day with.
• · · · · More simply, professional life isn't turning out quite the way these journalists thought it would - and it makes them mad Jay Rosen: Tim Porter Lets Out a Roar [In comments: If I wasn't humbled before, I am now. ... Tim]; Last Draft: You have one life, one career, you might as well shoot for the stars The Mood of the Newsroom
• · · · · · I delete my cookies weekly! Helps me to rememeber all the passwords ;-) Boo-hoo, internet users delete our ad-tracking cookies, it’s all the consumer’s fault. More self-absorbed whining from the advertising community, as a survey of 2,337 consumers reveals that 39% of of them delete cookies at least monthly, casting a shadow on website traffic statistics. Here’s the article, from ClickZ News: Study: Consumers Delete Cookies at Surprising Rate ; A decade ago, in the spring of 1989, Communism in europe died-collapsed, as a tent would fall if its main post were removed ... Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Cold River) ; Lessig & Imrich

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A Warning To My Readers
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
-Wendell Berry

I came to Sydney a quater of a century ago from a little town located right at the heart of Europe so I identify even deeper than Terry with his sentiments. Like the cops say, Rule No. 1 is to go home alive at the end of your shift. Every day is a victory over the abyss. Sydney Loves Me - It Really Loves MEdia Dragon ;-) During my exile years I learned the surreal meaning of philosopher Karl Popper's words: Those who believe they can make men happy are very dangerous men. I came to Sydney two months and a day after reaching the Austrian soil in 1980

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Twentieth: If Only Life Was As Predictable
Why are you holding back? Why are you stingy with yourselves? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now

I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I'm still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely home in a city to which you move at the age of twenty-nine. Among other things:
-The World Trade Center still existed.
-So did the Berlin Wall.
-I was using the first VCR I'd ever owned.
-I hadn't bought my first CD player or fax machine.
-I had yet to use a personal computer, much less buy one.
-Cell phones didn't exist.

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Marcel Proust, in whose imagined world I am currently immersed, assures us that happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. Making Happiness Possible [Truckers use that term when they have been on the road Black Dog: Bark and the world barks with you; Interview with Czeslaw Milosz by Professor Malgorzata Anna Packalén in Cracow - It isn’t at all that we write for those who come after us. We write to gain the sanction of our forefathers! ]
• · Czech writers have lost their status Writers without a cause ; The Enemy Within: Iron Curtain vs. Velvet Curtain; Iron Curtain Thriller
• · · Sure, anybody can tell you which authors you need to check out, but someone who spends seven days a week reading and writing is sure to make compelling suggestions Esquire editor Daniel Torday picks five young writers you should be reading ; A British television commercial for Australian food icon/condiment Marmite, inspired by 1950s sci-fi classic The Blob, is banned for “terrifying children.” Here’s the story, from BBC News: Marmite ads 'terrified' children ; A guide to surviving the bad dresses and expensive shoes to be the bride's right hand when she needs you most So you're gonna be a bridesmaid
• · · · Television advertising is blamed – or credited – with killing off small brewers and speeding the trend toward corporate consolidation. Profs uncap secrets of beer trade ; via John Kuraoka - adblog
• · · · · Painting pictures in the minds of your listeners is the key to effective presenting and persuasion Cheers, Not Jeers!” The Secret to a Winning Presentation ; UK High Street chain Marks & Spencer became the latest taker when it announced a tie-up with Amazon in a bid to breathe new life into its online business. Amazon pushes e-tailing expertise ; Self-publishing is in danger of becoming mainstream
• · · · · · Once Upon a Time When I Wrote a Book Authors helping authors ; Perhaps it is a saving grace of Russian politics these days that laws and orders are honored more in the breach than in the observance Honored in the Breach ; A blog can become like a monster that just gets hungrier as it grows, threatening to take over one's life My annual April allergies: taxes or pollen?

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Journalists, George Bernard Shaw once said, are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. How odd, given the profession's un-equaled reputation for narcissism, that Shaw's observation holds true even when the collapsing "civilization" is their own.

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage," writes Thomas Bleha in Foreign Affairs. Tim pulls the money quotes; of Japan, S. Korea and China America: broadband backwater

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Business is Like so not Interested in Digital Migration
News affect us constantly. They are both the mirror of the present and the building blocks of the future. Every hour, every day, all the time ... Some news such the one coming from Darwin is all about dead past ...

We've had a near-continuous stream of blog-hype in our faces for quite some time. Both online and traditional media just can’t seem to dish up enough of it. But if you, like me, have about had your fill, you'll agree it’s time to do a reality check. In all the cacophony of this breathless blog exhuberance, there remains one largely unspoken truth: Business just isn’t jumping up and down about it.

• Enough With the Blogging Already [A good one is Blogger.com It's a blog, blog world ; Blogging About the Job? Proceed at Own Risk Infection or Information ]
• · Blog-Linked Firings Prompt Calls for Better Policies ;
• · · The White House and its supporters, he writes, are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own 'news reports' and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved broadcasters; creating and crediting their own political activists as 'journalists' working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations. WH attack on press involves secrecy, lies and fake news ; Bloggers are like so not interested: Enough of Online Features
• · · · David Weinberger: Blogs don't need mainstream media. Mainstream media needs blogs; I can't begin to imagine how hard MSM'ing about blogs is. It reminds me of the line from Jon Stewart on his show about blogging, "And that's CNN reporting on why blogs are much more interesting than CNN. Joi Ito
• · · · · Randy coppers in New Zealand waste so much time surfing for porn while on the job that fully 20 per cent of police computer system capacity is devoted to storing the images, an official audit has revealed. Computer coppers sheepish on capture; via Barista
• · · · · · Susan Getgood is a results oriented strategic marketer and Marketing Roadmaps looks at every angle of marketing fictional or real: Persona Redux ; Rok Hrastnik Studio Moderna: Character Blogs as a Branding Vehicle; Character Blog Discussion: A Taste Of What's To Come

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My writing is outsider's writing - and all of a sudden it becomes a kind of trend or mainstream My characters are always the one who gets kicked in the chair [Until you're 70 you're a young writer ;-) ]

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Stream of consciousness in full spate
Consciousness is very isolating for Virginia Woolf, but her fiction always works towards making connections - between people, and across time. This may be the reason why her novels so often focus upon hostesses, such as Mrs Ramsay or Clarissa Dalloway, for the hostess is a person who specialises in bringing people together. Perhaps they reminded Woolf of the kind of role she herself wanted to play - that of the discreet enabler, who helps establish connections between strangers ...
In May 1929, at the peak of her literary career, and having already published eight novels to critical acclaim, Virginia Woolf made the following note in her diary about a new idea for a novel:

Now about this book, The Moths [later to become The Waves]. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all?

Virginia Woolf didn’t believe in biography. A bastard, an impure art she called it, in which the truth of the inner life - the only life we have - was always being strangled by the fungoid growth of external facts. The biographer cannot extract the atom, he gives us the husk. And so Woolf remained deeply suspicious of conventional biography, always more interested in what slipped through its net - the unrepresented, the unfixed, the fine-grained, the feminine.
• It is true that biography tends to see everything back-to-front Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life [With online shopping comes a new chapter in the secondhand business, and shops morph to survive Creative destruction: Used-book sellers span digital ; Marina Krakovsky: Making Books Love, lust and literary life ]
• · Who can forget the day Oprah came to Literaryville? She blazed into town like a carpetbagger preaching glory, unpacking her Book Club to the awe and unease of the locals, who whispered about her behind her back. She was sanctified and vilified and, finally, she was hounded right out of town - well, metaphorically speaking Thorn: Author covers prose, cons of Oprah's club ; A novelist is an imaginative historian who is able to get closer to contemporary facts than social scientists possibly can Novelist par excellence: Praise from the best
• · · Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned... I did a bad thing today. No, really. I know it's hard for you to believe. Arrggghhhh...I guess I'll have to fill you in. Super-volcano, robotic rebellion or JI (Jozef Imrich)? Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assesses the chances of it happening What a way to go ; The Fire Sermon: The more criticism attempts to tame this wildness the more it must ultimately have recourse to adjectives like ineffable, unspeakable, unutterable Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews of Waste Land
• · · · It's not always interesting, but it's my life ... My husband and I were sitting in the kitchen, the edited manuscript of my first book in my hands, the galleys in his. I always read aloud, he always proofreads -- that's our system. That was the first time, though, and we didn't really have a system yet. It was just the two of us, trying to figure out how to review galleys The I in Sociology ; Research and Markets: Teenagers Hold Power Over Advertising and Marketing World ; If you walk into the library with an axe and start surfing Internet porn sites, you're bound to cause a stir Library rethinks ‘porn' policy
• · · · · Maurice Yacowar is right that The Sopranos bears the critical analysis routinely accorded good literature, drama, and films When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ; Believing in Yourself" as Classroom Culture (Special Edition - Issue) : It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League institutions. Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves. History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War
• · · · · · Rural schools often lack a library. This means that there is no place for children to get their hands on a great book to encourage more learning or to gain a new skill like computers Reading Room ; During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the "Unhappy Consciousness" of Critique

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If enjoying 15 minutes of fame is wrong, I don't want to be right ;-:

As at Sunday 24 April 2005 AD at 7:07 AM, there is something for everyone on the Blogstreet . Want a proof? Look no further than all the content they have managed to squeeze into the top 50 (Fifty) political bloggers, the virtual movers and shakers ;-D Media Dragon is on a list (#40 or #430 in the whole wide world context) and who can blame us for making hay while the sunshine is smiling at us. We realise how fleeting the Warhol’s metaphor of15 minutes of fame really is. We also know that Blogger is under ruthless attack from the Microsoft which has created 7 Million blogs (as of Friday) and it is growing by 100,000 every week. The only sad news is that many blogs tend to fade and die within a month or so. Anyway if you decide to take a walk down the Blogstreet Boulevarde (sic) I can assure you that you can find something to suit whatever political mood you are in today. Scared of Dragons? Try Eschaton as Atrios is #1 Like conservative way of betting? Czech out the Soprano, also known as Instapundit, as Glen Reynolds is #2. How about daily political fights or rants on the state of the nation (US bias), as there is only MEdia Dragon and another antipodean Angry Bear on the loathed and loved Blogstreet ranking system. Turn to Daily Kos is at #5 (whole world wide web has him at #7). If you are a riverbend fan of war and peace, czech out Baghdad Burning at #12 (or overall #35) Do not forget that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. The Smallest Minority with cold dead heands is #49 (or #575 on www)

The Blog, The Press, The Media: CEOs & Followers - Tail or Heads
The yogurt-maker's CEO Gary Hirshberg and Chief Blogger Christine Halverson on how the Web journals connect them to customers

Stonyfield Farm, 85%-owned by France's Groupe Danone, is the largest organic yogurt company in the world. Based in Londonderry, N.H., Stonyfield took to blogging in a big way last year -- and even hired its own blogger, Christine Halverson. A former journalist and almanac writer, she landed the job a year ago in March and now authors five blogs for Stonyfield, including Strong Women Daily News and The Bovine Bugle

• The Hot Breath of the Web [BusinessWeek Blog: Blogspotting, Where the worlds of business, media and blogs collide ; Adam Groves says he's "sure Bill Hobbs is feeling his age and trying to keep up with all the grassroots political reporting that blogs are accomplishing now statewide for different demographics with different biases." If my dream for the Tennessee blogosphere was realized, there would be a slew of Tennessee bloggers reporting ]
• · Headlines from Australian political blogs Blogdiggers ; Capture: Tim Dunlop on the way to catch the waves The Surfer is Back
• · · You Know the Internet Has Come of Age... When the two highest paid CEOs in business are Barry Diller (IAC) and Terry Semel (Yahoo) Semel, Diller are top dogs; Vertical Engine Lures IT Marketers
• · · · On a worldwide basis, Google employed 3,482 full time employees as of March 31, 2005 GOOGle Earnings are In: Big. Big. Big. ; This is a purely snobby elitist bad-ass-A-list-bloggers exclusive event BEFORE the dinner which is open to all EXCLUSIVE: Defining the A-List at BloggerCon
• · · · · Our media environment is very noisy, abundant, even polluted. Columbia journalism professor Todd Gitlin calls it “media unlimited,” while writer David Shenk calls it “data smog” Too Much Media ; These folks that, that sat in front of me today are the most remarkable, efficient producers we've ever known on the face of the earth. And they produce and produce, and we need to figure out a way to get their product sold A Bumper Crop of Government-Produced News
• · · · · · The future of journalism Yesterday's papers ; You can't afford to miss this wave -- and even more important, you can't afford to do it wrong Six Tips for Corporate Bloggers ; I've just been reading the drafts of the four interviews that Shel Israel posted in the past few days ... Why Every Company Should Blog

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When you listen to Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 ("From the New World"), which the Czech composer wrote just before he left New York in 1895, you can hear his awe at the open spaces of this grand new country - awe at our unlimited sky, endless grasslands and the energy of a people with the space to dream, think, plan and act. What if we are suffering from a failure of imagination?

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Virtual Watercooler Effect
The literary blogosphere is fighting back. Just when it looked like what you might call challenging fiction was ready to go on life support—at least, judging by what people like you and I have written regarding its decline at publishing houses and in terms of media coverage—along comes the Litblog Co-op, a cooperative effort among 20 literary blogs that intends to find strength in numbers to build support for their cause.

Are books a byproduct of culture or of entertainment? Both, of course. These two events—the creation of the Litblog Co-op and Judith Regan’s loudly proclaimed move—are two sides of the same coin. The culture buffs are always small in numbers, but on the intensity scale, they’re off the charts.

Bloggers attempt to tap a new group of viewers
• Bravo and Brava, I say [This has been my lucky week ... Just two days ago, I was informed by e-mail that I had won a Honda from England. As if that's not exciting enough, yesterday I got another e-mail informing me that I had won the British National Lottery! Megabits and pieces ; via Boyton: The Role of the Author in Topical Blogs]
• · Oprah has decided to launch a series of hardback books spun off from stories from her magazine Oprah hardcover series to extend brand ; Everyone from my literary agent, to the publisher at St. Martin's Press, has been totally astonished by the display of a Keith Thomson's blog's sales power: Author's Blog on Lycos Drives Upcoming Book to Number One on Amazon Advanced Sales List ; Do you own up to your mistakes? To paraphrase an old song, it's not for everybody - just the sexy people Now What: A daily blog on choice issues
• · · The Monthly, a new magazine of ideas, is being started up by Morry Schwartz, the man who brought us the Quarterly Essay. Better yet, you can sign up for a free issue by going to their website before April 27 Last Day: The Monthly ; More variety does not, by itself, always encourage more demand: Tyranny of Choice The Economics of Variety ; I love movies. I love music. I love television shows--the good ones, anyway. I think all of these are very worthy art forms. However, they don't compare to books for me--though they all come close in certain ways Writing and storytelling in general is, I suppose, the oldest art form and it is, as far as I'm concerned, the truest art form
• · · · Vote: Be the Judge of the Amazon web-films ; What They Did For Love Welcome to the world of the novel-in-blogress, BEYOND YOU & ME, by W. S. Cross; It’s not an original idea for a story but, hey, there’s something to be said for sticking to the standards. Boy meets girl. On a train. She disappears into the urban anonymity of . . . oh, make it Tokyo Beauty and the nerd: a net tale ; Tokyo-Japan v. Beijing-China: When Chinese censors axed a novella about steamy sex in the People's Liberation Army, it was the timing of its appearance earlier this year that proved most crucial in effecting the ban. No room for sex in China's army
• · · · · Who's worse: people paying cops to enforce the law, or cops that won't enforce it unless you pay them extra in order to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs Police Payoff Probe ; When Death Comes to Suburbia: Original
• · · · · · NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates reports on the increased influence of Internet Web loggers -- known as "bloggers" in the book publishing world... What happened to Karen? Bloggers Influence the Publishing Industry ; The Elegant Variation Literary Web Log Live From Ucla - Los Angeles Times Book Awards

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Nobody is reading my blog ... Help me! Blogexplosion is the internet's first blog exchange where thousands of bloggers visit each other's blogs in order to receive tons of blog traffic Leverage the power of viral marketing!

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Hey, what's buzzing?
Typically one of the quietest bureaucracies in Washington, the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been unusually active in recent weeks.

CPB this month appointed a pair of veteran journalists to review public TV and radio programming for evidence of bias, the first time in CPB's 38-year history that it has established such positions. PBS officials were unaware that the corporation intended to review its news and public affairs programs, such as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and "Frontline," until the appointments were publicly announced

• New Beat For Corporation For Public Broadcasting [A look at how a one-man Web site is improving journalism The Romenesko Effect ; Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers 'Infomania' worse than marijuana ]
• · Incarnation of big brother Smile. You're on candid cop camera ; Can't tell your GPRS from your GPS? Need to get a handle on wireless protocol? Technology is moving so fast it's hard to keep up, writes Valens Quinn. more Guide to geek speak ; Guide to Cgaigslist Competing with Craigslist
• · · One of the most difficult challenges for a journalist is covering a conflict between two or more embattled sides and filing a fair and balanced report. But that's the job description -- and the obligation is to our readers, not to anyone on any side of the story. Striking the balance and 'just' printing truth; It's not like a blog or a bulletin board where people just throw things up and the publisher has no control Citizen media perils ; The Infinite Library Will Digitization Make Libraries Rethink What They Do?
• · · · Visualising frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory Hey, what's buzzing? From the Cambridge Coffee Pot to Gary Brolsma, what has been your favorite internet meme? Greatest Internet Memes. ; Technorati reaches nine million
• · · · · Though they only constitute one out of every 33 computer owners, Mac users have long held a reputation for acting smugly superior to their Windows brethren Dragon’s Tale: A first look at the new Mac OS ; Zap this: Video games are very big business. Now raking in more than $10 billion a year in North America alone, games have surpassed the behemoth motion picture industry to dominate the entertainment scene “Moral Kombat”: Documenting the Game Industry
• · · · · · “Moral Kombat” places the entire game industry in its viewfinder, training its sights upon the pioneers who conceived it, the politicians who want to regulate it, the publishers and retailers who are reaping the proceeds and the pundits eager to pronounce on topics from copycat violence to First Amendment freedom. Pioneers, Politicians, Publishers, Pundits ; With Apple’s new HD workflow, there is no online — because you already are online Poetics of the Green Curtain ; If you have a blog, I heartily recommend:

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I have yet to meet a poetry-lover who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if, as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization, the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his phantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life ...
-W.H. Auden, A Literary Transference (Southern Review, Summer 1940)

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Art must give suddenly, all at once the shock of life, the sensation of breathing. -Constantin Brancusi

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than E.E. Cummings. By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. That said, determining Cummings' influence and his present stature in the poetry world calls for a more measured view

to be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting ...
• Why E.E. Cummings Matters [What makes a city a magnet? Richard Florida charts the rise of creative hotbeds and their appeal to the global talent pool: Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers ; Supporting cultural attractions produces jobs, enhances quality of life Arts funding pays off ]
• · Gerda Brender Girl who fled Nazis is handed her passport in Shanghai; For half a century, legions of planners, urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and declare a victor. It's time to make the most of suburban sprawl ; Sydney is becoming the most divided city in Australia A tale of two cities, the inner and outer ; It's not a crop circle, or the remains of an ancient burial ground Borgelt's maze: homage to the ubiquitous sheepyards of rural Australia
• · · Senior finance executives say the profession must be opened up to non-commerce graduates. Critics say the bodies should embrace the British model of induction to accounting and open their doors to graduates from disciplines other than commerce Let them come; How business bestsellers help impoverish our souls Who Moved My Cheese? and the Meaning of Life ; From the new issue of NYRB, a review of books on men and women, and Thomas Frank on what's the matter with liberals: Amen and Awomen! Adam's Curse: A Future Without Liberal Women ; Damien Murphy of the Bulletin and the SMH fame writes about a new death. In this managerial age, there's no longer any room for the non-conformist Death of the ratbag
• · · · Secular and the City is a weird show to be in at the moment. Reverence Gone Up in Smoke; A recent essay raises interesting questions about literary hoaxing Strangely Enough ; As I stripped off two layers to dive ... Your rendition of the poetry reading is so exquisite, so redolent of the truth of so many occasions like this, that it makes me want to say: Seven Ways of Reading a Poem
• · · · · Below is something philosophers don't seem to have thought about very much, especially those who get offers to move from one institution to another. A Parable on Justice and the Market Power of "Star" Academics; oung girls who enjoy classic romantic fairy tales like "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" are at greater risk of becoming victims of violent relationships in later life Fairy tales linked to violent relationships ; As America ages, we will confront the dilemmas of caregiving on a mass scale, living long enough to suffer cognitive and physical decline in a culture that values the vigor and freedom of youth Peter Augustine Lawler on The Caregiving Society
• · · · · · Being sacked can set people on a slippery slop ... Homeless man Ronny Ng (above) says being dismissed from a job as an advertising consultant 15 years ago triggered a chain of events that led to him sleeping in Sydney's Hyde Park Out in the cold ; To stand out in the current sea of memoirs isn't easy, but with fine writing and a compelling story, Jeannette Walls' debut memoir, The Glass Castle (Scribner), is winning rave reviews. From her nomadic, unusual, and difficult early life to her current success as gossip columnist for MSNBC.com, Walls provides a balanced portrayal of a family led by parents who themselves were prone to extremes. Inside the Walls of The Glass Castle ; A writer never knows where he may strike freedom Inside the Banks of Cold River

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There are tributes from every corner of NSW for the Mayor of the Greater Hume Shire, Ian Glachan, who died in hospital on Wednesday. I met Ian Glachan and his wife Helen even before he became a Member of Parliament in 1988. Yes, Ian was a much admired Member of Parliament. But oh, there was so much more. Everything he tackled, he gave 300 percent. Ian was one of those special people, who it was a privilege to know and a pleasure to work with. I recall fondly the thousand and one meetings Ian organised around the NSW rural communities during the inquiry into the Rural Assistance Scheme.
NSW Liberal Leader Mr John Brogden led the tributes, noting Mr Glachan had served the people of Albury with distinction for 15 years before retiring in 2003.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords:
Mr Glachan was a humble man who thrived on hard work.

He was proud of his service as a marine engineer who became a farmer, then a businessman and above all, a great servant of the people of this area. Mr Glachans achievements in his first few years were impressive: a new base hospital, a new police headquarters, a new school for Jindera and the Borella Rd bridge on the Riverina Highway.
Among his important State appointments was acting Speaker of the Legislative Assembly and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Ian Glachan was a true gentleman, Mr Brogden said.
Member for Albury Mr Greg Aplin said he would miss Mr Glachans voice of reason. “Ian was a great rock, a magnificent community member, a mentor and friend to me,” Mr Aplin said.
The Anglican Bishop of Wangaratta, the Rt Rev David Farrer said Mr Glachan had been a significant figure for St Pauls Church at Jindera, the Northern Albury parish and Trinity Anglican College.
Former trade minister Mr Tim Fischer said Mr Glachan never knew when to stop giving to the community locally, State-wide and nationally.

Mr Glachan is survived by his wife for 47 years, Helen, three daughters, and several grandchildren.
• He will be sadly missed [When I was a child I lived fairly close to the Sydney Cricket Ground, In the summer.. my mother would give us some lunch you know to go to the cricket ground, and if we had no money we would just hang around the gate, and the old fellows on the turn styles would say what are you kids doing and we would say we haven't got any money, and they would say come on sneak in you'll be right. In we would go and we would watch whoever was playing.. "I saw Bradman a number of times and I saw Keith Miller too...Mr Ian Glachan had a vivid memory of Keith Miller on the cricket pitch ; Mr Glachan (courtesy of Google) ]

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Philip Blosser, like thousands of other people across the world, has created a place to share his thoughts by blogging, among a number of Catholics who are using the net to share their faith and to talk about what is right and wrong with it. For bloggers, Pope Benedict XVI 'rocks': I love the smell of napalm in the morning ... The smell -- you know, that gasoline smell -- the whole hill -- it smelled like ... victory Google on Benedict XVI

The Blog, The Press, The Media: For Every Story, An Online Epilogue:
Whew, relief. I have been dying to talk about this for months. BusinessWeek this week has a cover story on blogs

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later
Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself.

• Blogs Will Change Your Business BusinessWeek Gives Blogs The Cover Treatment [Shel Israel and Robert Scoble Interview with Bob Lutz of General Motors The Deepest Blog in the Bloggosphere is among the real stars ;-) Congratulations Michael of Deep Blog Fame ; Bill Gates Wants Your Media Dragon; Microsoft Service Lets You Create A Nice Blog, But Limits Tweaking ]
• · That's what Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. told a University of Kentucky audience this week Don't bet on the mainstream media becoming irrelevant ; Child mag dumps tech editor for taking payments from firms
• · · Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat The press is less liberal than it is oppositional ; Television news has been taken over by an "idiot culture"
• · · · Former Durham Herald-Sun exec Jon Ham remembers when newspapers covered the public sector as a preventative to corruption and abuse of power: They now cover it as a partner in the effort to get government more involved in people’s lives Ex-editor: Newspapers are preaching rather than reporting ; Changing nature of news bothers editor, causes nightmares ; Journalists do run in packs, and that they are prone to forgetting history...The increasingly caustic nature of some online criticism is prompting many journalists to complain that their honesty and motivation are being trashed along with their work, reports Howard Kurtz Journos say bloggers' attacks on them are nasty, personal ; Even the best solo blogger doesn't stand truly alone. We are all building on each others' work, and learning from each other and our communities. Chris Nolan: The Stand Alone Journalist is Here...
• · · · · The Australian arm of a multimillion-dollar internet pharmacy racket has been raided by federal police as part of a US-led cyber crackdown across several countries Police raid illicit internet pharmacy ; Today we attempt to answer a question that has no impact on the course of life or blogging, but is still fascinating: how many great and useful lists of whole world wide blogs can you find out? Global Voices
• · · · · · James Governor: what happens to Scoble now? Here's a hint: Lenn wasn't my only protector Can Scoble Still Blog Freely At Microsoft? ; Have you noticed how, unlike “life,” politics is not a box of chocolates, as Forrest Gump put it. It is, however, a lot like the movies Now What: A daily blog on choice issues

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During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man's beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant; accidents that had occurred en route, like the shipwreck in Galveston harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric.
-Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

On April 25, 1915, the Anzacs landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula and carved a special place in our history ... A time to remember ...

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Dear Oprah
Dear Oprah Winfrey,
We writers want to say thank you ...

More than 150 authors including 4 Pulitzer Prize winners, 17 National Book Award finalists and winners; 3 MacArthur recipients; and 36 Guggenheim and 18 NEA fellows, as well as winners of American Book Awards, Southern Book Critics Circle Awards, PEN/Malamud and Whiting Prizes, an Orange Prize and a Newbery Medal have signed an open letter today to Oprah Winfrey, asking her to re-instate her book club.

• Word of Mouth [via MJ Rose ; I used to have a beer or three with Bill at the Iceberg: Jason Benjamin - Bill Hunter gets a kiss from the packing room ]
• · Eddie is funny and honest and likes to help, but the sunniness of his character is shot through with small slivers of irony and pessimism. He has a sharp eye for life's small print - the ominous bits which alert you to the fact that you're not getting the bargain you may have been led to expect. Eddie finds himself with just $3 left ; The more I have tried to make sense of Kuhn's words and deeds, the more I have come to regard him as an intellectual coward who benefitted from his elite institutional status in what remains the world's dominant society. Kuhn vs. Popper
• · · There's a Hemingway-esque terseness to present tense, a "just the facts, ma'am" minimalism that hasn't time to get beneath the surface. Interview: George Soros is the author of eight books, including The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power; An Amazing Breakthrough: Scholars Decode Sophocles, Euripides... ; Toby Clements grits his teeth and finds inspiration in a bestseller A Da Vinci Code Parody (On Publishing)
• · · · Amitai Etzioni Notes Do Libraries Still Matter? ;
• · · · · This week the poetry world is atwitter over the closing down of an Internet site that for the last year dedicated itself to exposing what it calls fraud among the small circle of poetry contests that frequently offer publishing contracts as prizes. Surrender in the Battle of Poetry Web Sites ; Foetry: American Poetry Watchdog
• · · · · · When he was driving taxis to earn a buck, Bondi director Tony Krawitz seemed like a luftmensch. Now, the 37-year-old looks more like a macher who gives his family nachas.* Making waves from Bondi to Cannes ; Minima Maxima Sunt Breathtaking images of ocean's oxygen engines

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Compared to the circumstance that mainstream America lavished on an NFL player pointlessly cut down by friendly fire in Iraq, the death of Marla Ruzicka has been largely ignored. Marla gave her life in Iraq fighting peacefully to protect and preserve the lives of average Iraqis--the reason we're supposed to be there in the first place. You can visit the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict to pay tribute to Marla and to the movement she's left as a legacy. Marla Ruzicka, RIP

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Ho Ho Greenfield
ABC discovers what David Neiwert’s been writing about for years:

Once I’ve passed judgment on someone, I often forget the details. I just remember that I don’t trust them. Jeff Greenfield’s one of those people. I don’t remember why I don’t trust him, just that I’d switch channels before I listened to anything he had to say.
Atrios reminds me why I don’t trust Greenfield.
It’s stupid to get your news from someone after you’ve caught them lying. Deliberately manipulatively lying. Not presenting just one side of a story.
I hate major media for making me defend Bill Clinton. But right is right and they haven’t stopped lyin’ yet.

NEWS HOUNDS: If you want to see real investigative reporting you'll need to turn off your TV and click on over to Brad Friedman's in-depth BradBlog.com
• On not trusting Jeff Greenfield [It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. Blogger Digby: Flame On High ; University of New Hampshire loses job over blog post via Blog Herald]
• · I'm at the annual convention where TV and radio news directors get together to talk about their craft. My job is to riff on the usual topic, on a panel entitled: Are We Becoming Irrelevant? ; Nabad Al Horriye: A Lebanese Freedom blog ; Ezra Klein is providing a valuable public service by writing up concise summaries of how health policy is done in other countries. Best Practice in Health
• · · What does Google mobile, Yahoo mobile and services like 4Info have that a local newspaper mobile effort wouldn’t have?(besides whopping stock prices or $8 million in recent funding) Hitchhikers guide to anywhere ; Grid computing still has to move from idea to action for most organisations, but such a move is very likely as the momentum behind virtualisation will drive this natural evolution," the report says. Is office politics killing grid computing? ; By word of mouth and guerrilla marketing, it could be an important step toward winning the hearts and minds of the consumers away from the mainstream media? Survey: Bloggers embrace online advertising
• · · · Once again, we read a story of improper activities by people who appear to be journalists. How Companies Pay TV Experts For On-Air Product Mentions ; Jim Hill has been expelled from the Happiest Place on Earth. And that makes him ... well, unhappy Blogger bounced from Disneyland
• · · · · Radio shock jock Alan Jones became very rich today. Welcome to my Family: The $54-million man ; Snobsite: Online home of the Rock Snobs Dictionary
• · · · · · There are about 10 million blogs out there, give or take, including one belonging to Niall Kennedy, an employee at Technorati, a small San Francisco-based company that, yes, tracks blogs. When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene? ; Singapore Librarian Ivan Chew blogs under the handle of Rambling Librarian: The article mentioned Niall Kennedy, who works for Technorati (he still does, as of this post!). Hey, I know Niall. He was the guy who replied to my suggestion to Technorati; When we blog, we are in effect writing for the Whole Wide World

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The past does not lie down and decay like a dead animal. It waits for you to find it again and again.
-Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories

The explosive growth of the Internet, driven by its unique combination of simple interface, thanks Tim Berners-Lee, and robust interoperability, thanks Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf, continues to yield new applications for communication and participation. It was not long after the coining of the short lived slogan “information superhighway” that the democratising power of an uncensored, uninterrupted, global communications technology caught the imagination of new social democrats and fringe media proponents to spawn a range of new and alternative media channels across the globe. Peter Chen: A growth spurt for online media

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Link It Forward: Building up Goodwill

A Friendly Blog Game of Tag comes from White Lightning Axiom: Redux who got it from Sitka Surfin who got it from BuzzStuff and there the trail goes cold: -Bloggers, random link-out to other bloggers hoping that they will link-out to other bloggers, and so on, and so on. "Pay it Forward" in the blogosphere.

Think of life in terms of kairos - holy time - rather than chronos - clock time ...
• Michael Schaefer Born to a good Land of many Lakes--grew in a Garden State--now living in a City of Angels - Brought to my attention bytthe Deep Blog [Bill Ives: Certainly, blogfolks, he is a Scholar and Gentleman - one who impresses me with the depth and the breadth of his interests: I - Wisdom of Portals and KM ; When Gareth first asked if I wanted to give a pint, I flatly refused. I don’t have a problem with blood, it’s just all the paraphenalia they use to extract it. The big bitey needles, the tourniquet thingy, those vile plastic bags and little tubes. Especially the big bitey needles. When I last got a tetanus shot the doctor had to hold my hand and promise me jelly beans, and I was twenty years old. I hate the needles. This is a sample from Shauna, a 27 year old Australian who moved to Scotland in pursuit of adventure and kilts: II - Humour and Lifestyle of WNP ; Hot or cold, topped with foamy milk, laced with liquor, or spiced, quality Australian coffee is a unique experience. Makes blogging look easy: III - Images and words by Barista]
• · The Pope Blog is celebrating the new pope, Benedict XVI, with a new title and design The Pope Blog: ; The Pope Blog: Pope Benedict XVI
• · · So what happens when a foreign correspondent finally hangs up his microphone? Stephen Sackur: Dark Side of Reporting ; Bloggers v. Journalist a set of examples; via Trevor Cook
• · · · The Strange Brand blog has 10 commandments Top Ten Tips for Corporate Naming ; You’ll want to bookmark these site to improve your skills, find new markets and get the word out about your writing Power Reporting ; Could cyberspace be the novel's best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up Book Smart
• · · · · Welcome to the blogging craze, Microsoft and Yahoo! They have plenty of company: Google, America Online and Six Apart, among others ; Bill Gross - Founder of Snap (and Overture, and Picasa, and...anyway). Snapping Joe ; I'm afraid it's become quite clear that my blog is haunted Craigs Ghost
• · · · · · Give Them Quality, and They Will Watch ; Neville Hobson: Are Character Blogs Worthwhile? ; Red Couch: Character blogs

James Hillman said that memory is a form of fiction...so we are very much a creation of the stories we tell ourselves ...

When Does Work Become Play? Dr Russell Cope is part of that special hard working yet playful Australian story. I cannot imagine Australia or Sydney without him. Many other people were on the same river and rowing that special legislative boat during the 1980s. My daughters love to hear stories told by Dr Cope and I gather that daughters in the Vella and Papadatos families are also partial to having a morning tea with the special man in their mothers lives. The drawings Amy, Christie and Ruby created were for many reasons, not just because they were drawn at the East Gardens, more colourful than usual ;-D Creativity allows us the chance to connect with our inner child and the inner child of others... I can live two months on one good compliment, observed humorist Mark Twain. Rowers like Pauline and Carmenn agree, Dr Cope has a knack for prolonging our lives ...

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Tips For Personal Brainstorming
I know, I know, Mark Swinson dislikes the word brainstorming, however, it is not a crime yet if you decide to use it ;-P

Everyone has problems and challenges that need solving; they're an inevitable part of living. What many people don't realize, however, is that most of them can be overcome using a simple, focused program of personal brainstorming. Here are some practical tips to help you increase the effectiveness of your personal problem-solving skills

Criticism and putdowns are easy. As Dale Carnegie once said, Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.
• The fun in the fun-damentals of storming [Film: 2005 German Film Festival and Downfall ; Note to Minna Finnish Gene ]
• · David Horowitz Prof sails against liberal tide; David Horowitz Hit by Pie at Butler Lecture ; Corporate College
• · · Ricky Gervais could not have made it up. Indeed, antics at the BBC make The Office look remarkably mundane. We were comparing Mark Thompson’s rottweiler tendencies on Wednesday to David Brent’s management style. Yesterday, it was revealed that the director general had bitten a colleague Beeb boss's bite worse than his bark ; Michelle Grajkowski is a Madison Literary agent who has sold 145 titles working out of her East Side home: Everybody wants vampires and media dragons right now Literary agent is a success story
• · · · After wading through a myriad of books on journaling, I have found that the overwhelming focus has been on "Self." ... What good does it do for any of us to journal our way into self-realization if we then fail to take it to the world around us? Journaling as a Tool to Redemptive Living ; I’ve been looking for it everywhere: writer’s retreats, a bedroom converted into a chic writing studio, the refrigerator, which is filled with brainpower snacks, specifically chocolate-mocha Haagen-Dazs Have you seen my voice?
• · · · · What happens when bloggers of a literary bent get together to promote reading A BOOK? We’ll find out May 15 ; LitBlog Co-op in the Digital Waters Temporary Litblog Co-op - Google News April 2005 ; Robert Orben: A compliment is verbal sunshine.Google: Cached Litblog Co-op (or Coop)
• · · · · · R.R. Bowker and All Media Guide Join Forces: Bowker has formed a "strategic alliance" with the All-Music Guide to develop a web database for license that contains information about books, music, movies and games. Bowker evp Gary Aiello says: The major consumer Web sites and entertainment companies want to be able to have information about books, music, movies and games all packaged and linked together in a way that is easy for their visitors to navigate. Books and Music In One Database ; Random House issued the following brief statement yesterday: "Random House, Inc. has entered into a short-term pilot agreement with Google authorizing them to scan and store a limited number of books of our selection as a test to determine whether or not we will become an ongoing participant in their Google Print program." Random Googling