What’s a blog for, if not self-indulgent long-winded rambling, eh?

This is a story about blogging. Please pardon while I work out my blogging neuroses by blogging about it.

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what would we do with out our self-appointed arbiters of hotness on the Internet?

While I’m as prone to lamenting Paris Hilton stories on CNN as much as the next gal, there’s something kind of hilarious in people’s pearl-clutching over the vapidity of this article in Salon. Considering that Salon’s whole shtick is sort of a cultural/political/random-ass-stuff schmorgasboard, I’m really confused by the commenters who have worked themselves into a cute little tizzy of moral indignation over the fact that Salon would bother reporting on Media’s Bistro’s “DC’s hottest media types” contest when don’t you know there are starving children in Africa? Examples:

so little substance.
No wonder our Republic is going down the toilet. What’s next? A Hottest Self-Congratulatory A-Holes Contest

So I’m spending my money to subscribe and read this kind of crap as the featured story? Wasn’t there something more important to run as the main story?

And probably the best one:

This article might have been worth a short blurb, at most. Please give us a solid article on who the best reporter in D.C. is.

Oh, yes, because that’s something totally capable of being measured, and people would totally read that article. Gag.

What’s worse, though, is all the people who just had to give their opinion of the relative hotness of Kriston Capps and Catherine Andrews, the two people who won the contest. That might be valid — might — if the whole point of the article was “Look how hot they are!” But it wasn’t. The point was about how Capps and Andrews won because they had bots on their side and that the whole thing — from the Clinton staffer’s “campaign” email to the fact that people started getting snippy when the bots started running amok — is kind of funny and silly and lame all at once. And yet dudes on the Internet (or gals, I guess, as some of the names are gender-neutral or anon) cannot resist one, even one, chance to exert their position as personal arbiters of exactly who is or isn’t allowed to be considered hot, because everyone knows that their personal feelings on this matter are of utmost importance and interest. As one Salon commenter put it:

Is it funny to see a DC hotness contest taken over by robots? YES!

Is it funny to see people get upset about who won? YES!

Is it funny to see critiques of society based on how society behaves in an all for fun hotness contest? YES!

So shut the fuck up, other commenters at Salon. Thank you.

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Jim Harper on Eddie Vedder

Sometimes you just need to copy and paste a few lines from another blog onto yours, even though you have nothing to add, uh, intellectually, in order to say “Hey, look here. This is a great paragraph.”

If Eddie Vedder sat stone silent for 30 seconds, everyone would know that he hated George Bush. Eddie Vedder is hate for George Bush. He is the Jeremy to George Bush’s recess lady. Bleeping out Eddie Vedder’s criticisms of George Bush is censorship in the same way umbrellas censor the sun.

That’s all.

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The Anthropology of Blogging

I was thinking about Elyzabethe’s post the other day in which she claimed, by virtue of my presence, I would be pushing the politics of this blog to the left.  It was a funny post, as it was meant to be. 

To a certain extent, she was explaining my continued presence on the blog long after my guestblogging assignment had expired but she was also introducing the idea that this blog does not represent a particular school of thought or political ideology. 

Blogs with multiple contributors from vastly different philosophical or ideological backgrounds are somewhat rare, or at least it seems so to me.  So it got me thinking. 

To what extent do people frequent only the blogs which reflect their views and to what extent do they engage blogs which challenges or stretches their views?  Is blog surfing an exercise in affirming already held political/social philosophies?  Or is it an exercise in evaluating different perspectives and choosing one from issue to issue? 

The answer is important, I think, if ever we’re going to assess the effect of blogging on our national discourse.  Blogging exposes many readers to new ideas but it also tends to solidify the division of opinions. 

For my part, most of the time I read the blogs I tend to agree with first.  Then, if I have time, I read the blogs I tend to disagree with and test my opinions on them.  

Of course, whether I agree or disagree with them, I always read Elyzabethe, Raee, and YoungJoe first.  And I suggest everyone else does too. 

Then I read newspaper and magazine articles.  And finally, I read the blogs, almost always starting with Atrios. 

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dirty sexy money

“OMG! Talk about casual chic! He’s dirty. He’s sexy. He is so money. Only Jeremy Darling could make a formal occasion look like an after-party… and for him, it probably is.”

Via Outta Mind Outta Site, the next step in online advertising: inserting ads directly into “the blogstream.” Sure, businesses and politicians have been trying to do this sneakily (with what level of success, who knows?) for years, but this brazen display of advertlogging (hey, if you people are going to persist in making “vlogging” into a word, then pardon me this one) by celebrity-blogger Perez Hilton is somehow more and less offensive at the same time. I mean, it is marked “advertisement,” but it’s also designed to look and sound identical to a typical Hilton post. Catherine writes:

perez hilton, what the hell is this? for a couple of weeks now i’ve noticed these oddly-written, oddly-imaged posts and wondered if you were on crack while writing them. and now in my slow stupor i finally realize they are ads for dirty sexy money, placed as posts, right in the blog stream.

In my limited knowledge of Perez, I’m not sure he’s ever claimed NOT to be a complete shill. But still. Keep this up, and people are going to start calling for some sort of professional-standards-inducing “blogger’s union.” Oh, wait …

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Owners vs. Journalists – Winner? Everyone.

Sometimes the questions raised in a legal battle bear only passing resemblance to the facts of a case.  Neat abstract legal principles are extrapolated from messy realities and the court rules on the principles, often times emphasizing and embellishing certain facts over others in order to make a point. 

So I don’t know exactly what’s going on over at the Santa Barbara News-Press. 

After a year of name calling, serial litigation and dozens of newsroom defections, American journalism’s nastiest in-house squabble debuted in a courtroom here Tuesday.

Attorneys for eight fired journalists accused Santa Barbara News-Press owner Wendy McCaw of trying to quash a union organizing drive, while the publisher’s lead lawyer argued that the employees overstepped their authority and tried to seize control of the newspaper.

But among other things the dispute raises an issue which should get more attention, as it is an issue being played out nearly everywhere. 

“These are employees who will testify that their sole goal was to take control of the newspaper,” Cappello said, “so the publisher [would have] no control of what is written in the newspaper and how it is written.” He added in his opening statement that McCaw was merely trying to rein in workers who had an inflated “sense of entitlement to write what they wanted, when they wanted” and who, when challenged, denigrated their own paper and publisher.

…

McCaw bought the newspaper in 2000 from New York Times Co., raising hopes that local ownership would insulate the venerable newspaper from the economic woes plaguing other dailies. Internal disagreements at the paper exploded into public view last summer, when Editor Jerry Roberts, four other top editors and venerable columnist Barney Brantingham resigned en masse.

The journalists said they were protesting improper meddling by McCaw and editorial page editor Travis Armstrong in news decisions. They cited management’s decision to block publication of a story about Armstrong’s drunk driving conviction and a reprimand issued to journalists for publishing actor Rob Lowe’s address in a story about his proposed home construction, something McCaw said was an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

Union activists said the exodus now totaled about 50. Although the News-Press has hired replacement workers, the city desk reporting staff has been reduced to four from 14, according to several journalists who have left the paper. McCaw’s spokeswoman would not confirm or deny those figures.

There is a long and somewhat venerable history of newspaper owners who feel their paper is soap box for their views.  In fact, it was the norm of the press when this country was founded.  But that history has run counter to a relatively recent trend, started in the early 20th century, of professional journalism. 

Media critic Robert McChesney noted that the rise of professional journalism could be linked to media consolidation and the disappearance alternative presses.  Instead of being one voice in a chorus of various perspectives, with that chorus fading, a newspaper needed to market its credibility in order to be relevant.  Otherwise, it would just sound like noise to the readers. 

It was in the cauldron of controversy, during the Progressive era, that the notion of professional journalism came of age. Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their businesses would be far less profitable. Publishers pushed for the establishment of formal “schools of journalism” to train a cadre of professional editors and reporters. None of these schools existed in 1900; by 1915, all the major schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, Missouri, and Indiana were in full swing. The notion of a separation of the editorial operations from the commercial affairs—termed the separation of church and state—became the professed model. The argument went that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy by the owners to make the editorial decisions, and these decisions were based on their professional judgment, not the politics of the owners and the advertisers, or their commercial interests to maximize profit. Readers could trust what they read. Owners could sell their neutral monopoly newspapers to everyone in the community and rake in the profits.

I think on some profound level we are starting to see the media swing back to the practices of an earlier era.  With the entry fee into the new media being so cheap and simple, via blogs, there are far more voices today, even in spite of the excessive big media consolidation. 

So while media owners still have an incentive to sell the credibility of its product, FoxNews, Air America, and especially blogs are showing that bias can be a force in the new media. 

I think that’s a good thing, actually. 

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me = switzerland

So you may have noticed, oldmancoyote is now blogging at yellow is the color on a regular basis. Which is a good thing, since I’m apparently never going to blog again, if the past few days are any indication.

Warning: he is a HARDCORE DEMOCRAT, which means that he may clash with Ms. Raee, who is a HARDCORE LIBERTARIAN. Lucky me, I’m in the middle.

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One emotionally disturbed woman v. A Gaggle of Violent Misogynist Loons: the Internet at its finest

Ugh. In the grand scheme of intense angry blog fights that seem omnipresent in certain circles and make it damn hard to forget that it’s only about .000005 percent of the US population who has any indication that this is going on, — we’ve got quite a doozy on our hands.

Here is the summary, from what I can gather: A woman named Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, age 55, (who also goes by the name “Heart”) started a blog and forum called Women’s Space. Heart does seem a bit, uh, odd – she’s running for presidency on the “Free Soil” ticket, for one thing. And she’s that kind of old-school-hippie-feminist who kind of makes you cringe a bit because dear-god-no-wonder-people-get-such-misconceptions-about-feminism-when-you-have-people-like-her-running-around. Still, off-kilter or not, she seems intelligent, as well as harmless and well intentioned, and her Women’s Space community obviously fills a need for like-minded souls, and that’s fine. Great. Good for them.

Except ….

A woman named Biting Beaver – the kind of person that also makes me cringe because she refers to women as “womyn” and such — wrote a post on one of Heart’s forums about how she was very upset to find her teenage son looking at porn on the Internet, and sometimes she wishes she would have aborted him. What we can see here is a woman who is clearly (if not a parody) somewhat mentally and emotionally disturbed. A few commenters make some disturbing comments as well.

And that’s that, right?

Well … no. I don’t know where the attacks began, but somewhere in the dark nether-regions of those-people-who-give-Internet-geeks-a-bad-name, someone coordinated an “attack” on Heart’s Web site, presumably to teach her a lesson for having positions they don’t agree with and allowing other people to post in her forums with positions they don’t agree with (the horror!). They sent enough traffic to her site to shut it down, and they filled the comments section with frightening remarks such as this:

Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you. In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.

Begging the question of Um, really? Really? Who is more nuts in this situation????? One emotionally disturbed woman makes a post on a site run and frequented by a group of slightly kooky individuals, and they are met with a coordinated Internet attack and hundreds and hundreds of threats containing truly disturbing and graphic descriptions of violence? Who is more nuts, a woman who says she wishes she’d had an abortion or a person who says they’d like to slit someone’s throats and penetrate all their orifices?

Of course, people are chiming in now and trying to say that the words of Biting Beaver and a few of her supporters at that site constitute proof that ALL FEMINIST BLOGGERS ARE MURDEROUS MAN-HATING HARPIES. For instance, the comments at Riehl World View read mostly like this:

At any rate, the batshit behavior exhibited by Biting Beaver is considered nowadays to be normal and protected by the feminist groups who share similar conditions. Meanwhile, legions of young men held in the crossfire of these womyn’s rage and anger will grow to be mentally and emotionally dysfunctional creatures who will either self-terminate themselves or be removed from society after fulfilling the very prophecies embedded into them by the very womyn who raised them.

And God help us all if they stumble upon Islam as a way to reclaim the manhood stripped of them by these womyn. If there is ever a growing trend for disaffected males to turn to the Religion of Peace in lieu of a patriarchal figure, the feminists will be responsible for condemning their fellow womynfolk to a religion which views them in the same regard that the womyn viewed the “evil rapist” men. Just notice how Islamic cultures don’t have the “rabid feminist” problem. And there is a very good reason for that.

And again, I ask you, what is loonier? Some old-school-hippie-feminists still using the term “womyn” (which is something they harp on in a good majority of the comments there), or someone who believes that “rabid feminists” are going to lead to Islamic jihad committed by America’s own children?

[I love this, though. Riehl asks in the post’s title, “Are some radical feminists child abusers?” to which Jill replies “Uh, yeah, probably. Lots of different kinds of people are child abusers — being an asshole certainly crosses ideological lines.”]

A Web site called Encyclopedia Dramatica has a round-up of the whole thing, although I warn you, this place is like the dark unkempt labyrinth of hatred, hysteria and lameness. It seems to be an entire wiki documenting Internet memes and flame wars while simultaneously spewing insults at women, gays and liberals, with links upon links that take you to more and more weird wiki entries, like the 7th Circle of Wingnut Internet Hell.

Update: According to Shakespeare’s Sister, a lot of the original “quotes” from Biting Beaver that provoked such outrage and such weren’t even real quotes, but from a parody site. (Edit 2 — which, as someone in the comments points out, may or may not be true).

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Let the bits go

I keep reading about all the fabulous panels at the recent BlogHer conference, and I’m quite jealous of everyone who got to go. Luckily, all the bloghers are blogging up a blogosphere storm about the blog conference, so we can all get secondhand accounts of the wit and wisdom and all that. Despite the many great posts I’ve seen about BlogHer panels on all sorts of hip and interesting topics, the one that has compelled my attention is …. a post on organization!

I love organization. Yep, I’m that big of an anal-reterntive dork. I love The Container Store. Instead of keeping old love letters in a box under my bed or something, they are in a file in my file cabinet marked “old love letters.”

So this blogher-inspired post I read is on “how to deal with information overload.” If you were once one of those people who got stressed out by having too many unread magazines lying around the house and are now one of those people who get stressed out by having too many unread RSS feeds, do read this. It’s all common-sense organizational advice, but it’s well-put common-sense organizational advice. For example:

There’s a really great book by Mark Hurst about handling information overload called Bit Literacy, and it’s main tenet is that we need to learn how to “let the bits go.” When it comes to reading my 258 feed subscriptions, I let the bits go by:
* Marking all as unread often,
* For a feed with lots of unread items (>10 or 20), just skimming the first handful of new ones. If there’s nothing good, mark the rest unread – it’s old anyway

I like that, “letting the bits go by.” I think it means not feeling guilty that I’ve del.icio.us’d about 87 articles and blog posts that I’ve never gone back to, or never returned certain wall comments on facebook, or forgotten to give my friend comments on the play they sent me to read 6 months ago, or forgotten to blog about that really great article or idea or conversation or whatever which I was so sure I had something interesting or insightful to say about but obviously didn’t or it would already be written. There’s something very liberating about pressing DELETE on things that have been rotting in your email inbox forever or marking 40 RSS feeds at once as read instead of trying to sort through them after taking a several-day hiatus. My favorite thing I’ve compelled myself to do recently is answer emails when I first receive them. For the longest time, I would always just send things back to the inbox after I read them, to reply to later, even if they only required a 1- or 2-setence reply. It was stupid. I’d end up with 8 billion emails to reply to and it would become such a chore that I’d dread it and write it on my “to-do” list for days and then when I finally sat down to do it think, “for fuck’s sake, why didn’t I just reply to these when I opened them?” So now I try to make myself shoot off a reply before even returning to my inbox.

I am probably boring the shit out of you, whoever you are that may still actually be reading this post. Sorry. I forget that not everyone is as crazy obsessive-compulsively organized and neurotic as me. Let’s bring this all back together. What does letting the bits go by mean for you? And what are your own technigues for dealing with “information overload?”

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Belmar cops: in ur blogz, monitoring ur lame spring break stories

So AP reports

Monitoring blogs is the newest tactic in Belmar’s long-running effort to keep its notoriously rowdy group rentals under control in one of the Jersey shore’s last true party towns.

The article covers the beach town’s metamophisis from land of summer-rental-party-houses to land of fancy shmany condiminums, and how this has led to a police crackdown on noise violations and rowdy parties and the like. But I don’t understand this whole “monitoring blogs” business. The article is called “N.J. town monitors blogs to fight rowdy summer visitors,” and notes this little anecdote:

A blogger using the name “Belmar Benny” sat down at his computer and tapped out his prediction of what the summer of 2007 would be like at the group rental he shares with his buddies by recalling last year. “Partying ’till daylight, banging pots and pans together, tossing the kitchen table on the roof, hanging the furniture upside down from the ceiling, waking up the neighborhood with a contraption called The Horn On A Board, smashing glassware over each other’s heads,” he wrote.

But local officials were reading his blog as well, promising to counter “Horn On A Board” with their own favorite: “Cop On Your Porch.”

But it leaves it at that, which I find strange. Because I mean, really, what could police do with this information they’ve found on blogs? Some kid with a psuedonym talks about beer bongs and flip cup and … what? Even if they’re blogging under their real name, what are the police going to do? It’s not as if the police can prevent them from renting a beach house in the town. They could, maybe, check and see if that blogger is renting somewhere and then stake out the house or something, but wouldn’t that 1) be such a complete waste of police time and resources, and 2) possibly amount to harrassment?

That the article makes no mention of what is actually being done with this information police are gathering from “monitoring blogs” makes me suspect it’s all just kind of a scare tactic, and a very silly one at that. I actually hope it is a scare tactic, rather than the alternative, which is that policemen are actually sitting there getting paid to google or Technorati “Belmar, partying ’til daylight,” “Belmar, beer pong,” “Belmar, hanging furniture upside down from ceiling.”

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Adventures in short-blogging

Shorter Don Surber:  Liberals swear a lot. 

Shorter Amanda Marcotte:  Fuck off.  

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libertarians: manliest of all blog readers

According to Mother Jones open-source politics issue, the median political blog reader is a 43-year-old man with a household income of $80,000 and 75 percent of political blog readers are male.

Seventy-five percent of the total political blogosphere audience is male? Because a good portion of the blogs I frequent are feminist blogs written by women and full of women readers and commenters, I guess I was just sort of surprised by these statistics (do you think they are counting feminist blogs as “political blogs?” or what about “mom blogs” that are partially about parenting but also about social issues and politics?).

I was also sort of surprised by the median age … most blog readers and writers I know are in their 20s. Interesting but not exactly suprising? 98 percent of Daily Kos readers and 87 percent of YouTube users are white.

Blogads has its own stats, which are roughly similar on the gender and age thing. Their stats are also broken down by political blog readers of various partisan persuasions. Of the Democrats who read political blogs, 66 percent were male; of Republicans, 81 percent were male; of Libertarians, 88 percent.

So ….

1. Why aren’t women reading political blogs?

2. OR, are women reading political blogs, but just not the sort that are being lumped into this “political blog” category? (I noticed that in the categories Blogads uses to lump blogs together into “hives” for ad sales, Feministing and Pandagon are both listed under “women’s issues” or something like that, although Pandagon is also listed under “liberal blogs”).

3. Why are libertarian blogs in particular so predominantly male?

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tag clouds …

… the mullet of the Internet?

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This post is paid by and for the corporation of yellow is the color

You know it’s sad when it’s a wee bit before midnight and you haven’t even hit the half way mark for work. Alas, if only I had an extra hundred dollars to spend, I could hire a work-servant to do it for me! I could then spend my day blogging about which color line metro is my favorite (yellow still holds a fond place in my heart but green is coming up a quick second).
With my (slight) obsessive tendencies towards reading business magazines, I came across a
Red Herring article on the PayPerPost company. What is PayPerPost?

PayPerPost, a website that lets bloggers write reviews about advertisers, and get paid by those advertisers, said Tuesday it raised $7 million in a second-round led by prior investor Draper Fischer Jurvetson.

Before anyone gets all angry and Captain America on the issue. PayPerPost has a code of Blogger ethics. That’s right. To keep us all safe from ourselves and our tendencies towards lying and trickery.

Disclosure Badges

The Disclosure Badge example on this page is a representation of graphical icon that informs the reader that a particular piece of content is a sponsored post. Advertisers may request that you place these icons next to the appropriate content in your blog as a signal to your readers.
In-Post Text Based Disclosure

In the event that an advertiser does not request a Disclosure Badge you are free and encouraged to disclosure within the post itself via a text disclosure. Example of test disclosures include: This Post Sponsored by ACME, This Post Brought to you by AMCE, Thank you to my Sponsor ACME. Always thank the sponsor themselves, not PayPerPost.
Site Wide Disclosure Policy

You can choose to adopt a site wide policy that lets your readers know that you accept sponsored posts. This policy MUST be displayed in a prominent place that is easy for your readers to locate.

I’m all for it. Call me the lady for looking for ways to make legit money, but you have company A and they want to help companies B-X. So they source out the work for people willing to do it. Those people get paid for talking positively or negatively about said companies B-X. Masses who listen to those people either take it in or not. What’s the big deal? We have sales people hocking bad perfume and cheap watches in malls across America.

Looking at possible arguments, if companies B-X try to do illegal work, that is not the fault of company A. Also, if blogger is engaged in illegal activity and signed the ethics agreement, it could be fishy legally, but ethically, company A is not wrong (maybe if they were behind the illegal actions but we won’t go there yet).

Plus, with any quote that mentions Google right now, is so looking for some SEO action!

“We want to be the Google of consumer-generated advertising,” said PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy.

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new blogger

Welcome youngjoe below. Raee and I wanted this to be a group blog, but our original two other alleged contributors never contribute, so we’ve brought youngjoe on board for the time being. I will let youngjoe give his own introduction or bio if he wishes, but in the interim, I will provide … let’s see … 5 facts about youngjoe.

1. He is on hiatus from an undisclosed college somewhere in the midwest.
2. He can walk on lighting grids like a monkey.
3. He has to get up to go to work really early in the morning, allegedly because he works for some shipping and packing company, but maybe because he is a spy.
4. He is going to an IHS seminar this summer, and I am very excited for him because they brainwashed me when i was there and now they can brainwash him too!
5. He generally has cool shoes.

Bonus fact: he is kind of young, but not that young. he can drink legally. but he couldn’t when I knew him.

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slushie dogs, link politics and why paris hilton would be on everyone’s blogroll

It’s all very Slushie Dog Theory (it’s a picture of a dog on a cup holding a cup with a picture of a dog on a cup holding a cup with a picture of …. ): linking to bloggers blogging about linking to bloggers who have blogged about links to bloggers ….. But anyway, I thought this post by Terrance at The Republic of T on the “politics of blogrolls” was very interesting.

I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve blogged a lot in the past about blogrolls, the politics of linking in, and how links are a kind of currency that follow the same rules as currency in any other economy: those who have the most tend to get the most, tend to keep it, and tend exchange it mostly among themselves.

What’s funny, too, is that he talks about the “old days,” when bloggers could rise up the popularity ranks pretty quickly. I wish I’d been around for the old days — there must have been such a sense of excitement and possibility then! — but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who starts a blog these days thinking there’s any chance they’re going to get any sort of audience. Except for maybe professors or published authors, who already have a sort-of audience, or the corporate sponsored blogs, which he mentions.

{during the good old days of blogging, I was busy posting memes and playing dear diary with my college friends over on livejournal, the ugly stepsister of blogging platforms}.

{I remember once in 2003, I was up in my bedroom doing homework and a few friends were downstairs talking about these things called blogs, and my friend james was going on about how it was going to revolutionize this or that. And I was so annoyed by the whole conversation that I felt the need to put down my book, go downstairs, and tell them how stupid they were. Huh. But then, I’ve always been something of a luddite. I was vehemently against DVD players, cell phones, and text messaging for a time, too.}

Terrance’s post reminded me of an article imaginary-co-blogger justin told me about a few months ago, about how bloggers should strive to be more like Paris Hilton (which I had never gotten around to looking at), and lo-and-behold, a quick google search for “paris hilton linking to people” and I found it: Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World).

That’s the real reason Paris Hilton is really famous. Because she is the queen of links. When Paris first came on the scene with her own user generated sex video she used that attention to create a career. Here’s how she did it.

Though she hired a publisist to get her on Page 6, She never really talked about herself. She talked about other people. She would mention the designers of her clothes, the club she was going to, who made the sweater for her dog, all without any guarantee of any return. She just threw out links. It didn’t take long for designers and club owners to realize that Paris Hilton was a walking billboard. So they embraced her. She paid attention to them, so they paid attention to her.

{This is the second time we’ve talked about Paris Hilton on this blog in a week. Yellow is the Color: All Paris Hilton, All the Time!}

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i used to read the sunday comics. now it’s sunday blog cartoons…

One of my favorite cartoonists, Natalie Dee –– herself a blogger — often makes fun of blogs in her cartoons, and it’s fabulous. Why is bloggers making fun of blogs so funny? I don’t know. Maybe to show we’re all so uber-hip and ironic and self-aware. But it’s what all the cool kids do, okay? And I’ve found my new favorite cool kid, Hugh MacLeod:

Via Erin.

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links for 2007-02-07

• PsyBlog | Psychology Blog: The Chaos Theory of Career Development

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why are reason bloggers now appropriating the language of michelle malkin?

Jeff Taylor at hit-and-run joining the mounting snark over jon edwards hiring amanda marcotte as blogmaster comments on one of amanda’s duke-rape-case posts with this:

…. interesting in the same way that ramblings about CIA radio transmitters in your teeth are interesting — as a marker for raving moon-bats.

moon-bats? i know and have grudgingly come to accept that some libertarians have their heads really far shoved up neo-cons asses and all, but let’s please not start appropriating malkin-speak.

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