BuzzMachine

Off the air… Back when I get back that funky rhythm…

: UPDATE: Not that you should care but I’m home, not “converted,” seven hours and probably a few thousand bucks poorer. Blogged to relax. We’ll see what tomorrow brings…

Here come the flacks!
: Two flacks tell their colleagues how to pitch blogs. As much as I disdain flacks (I have long said that if I ran a news organization, I’d have a flack-free day), this is a good indication that blogs matter. We’re influencers influencing influencers. [via Paul Boutin]

Choice
: Martin Devon says we’ll have a clear choice in 2004:

Don’t kid yourself, this is going to be one heck of an election. Remember last time around how Ralph Nader would go around saying that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush? No one is going to be saying that in 2004. On Iraq, the war on terror, taxes and social policy the differences between Howard Dean and George W. Bush will be crystal clear. The American people will be like the proverbial sailboat captain facing a heavy wind as he tries to pull into the harbor. You can tack right or tack left but there really isn’t any “in between.”

Google++
: Jason Shellen hacks the Google toolbar nicely.

The cradle of civilization
: The Messopotamian, Baghdad’s newest blogger, has insightful observations about what’s really happening in his neighborhood:

Jolted and shocked by the events of September 11, the United States of America, the greatest and most powerful politico-economic power that humanity has ever known has realised that the advanced and rich western world can no longer ignore the plight of the poorer and underdeveloped world. Those “nation states”, who have totally failed the test of self determination and self goverment, and degenerated into obscurantism, sectarianism, tribalism, and all the other isms of hell, pose a mortal danger, both to the people unfortunate to live there and to the Western civilisation itself….

So Action was decided upon… to bring the values and standards enjoyed by the prosperous world to these places, by force if necessary, by example preferably….

The old style of european imperialism, which aimed at exploitation, cheap raw materials, and keeping people backward and in a state of peasant low existance, has gone and is no longer suitable for the world. A globalised world where every body can enjoy the freedoms and benefits taken for granted by the “advanced” world. This is liberal neo-imperialism.

Years ago, in my earlier youth, had I heard somebody talking like this, my hair would have stood on end, I would have been thrown into a fit of rage enough to give me heart attack. But years of suffering, years ground to dust and wasted living under a system which had hardly anything right in it, atavism which took us back to a moral state comparable to that that existed even before the reforms of Islam fifteen centuries ago, have finally brought me to this forlorn conclusion: that perhaps it is better this way – perhaps that really, salvation lies herein.

Caution to the wind. Consider this: if the U.S. tommorrow announces that anybody willing to come to its land would be given the “Green Card” immediately with no further question, how many people do you think would stand in line? Answer this question if you dare ? Why if Western values are so bad and so terrible would you find Muslim, Hindu, Buddist, and every colour and every breed standing in that hypothetical line, in their billions ?

But America cannot take in the entire humanity, so america decides to go to them instead.

See the Democracy Doctrine, below. This is about making the world safe for its citizens. This is about setting a standard for human rights in the modern age that includes the rights of freedom and self-determination. And, as this post so wisely points out, this is also a matter of self-defense for the democratic against the tyrants.

: I had suspected it but only saw today that, indeed, the author of the Messopotamian, Alaa, is a friend of Zeyad’s and Zeyad convinced him to blog. Bravo, my friend. The more the better.

Hoder started two years ago with just one Iranian blog and now there are as many as 100,000 new voices silent no longer. Yes, the more the better — in the service of democracy.

The U.S. Blogging Service
: Dave writes that blogs will be like mail servers; they’ll be everywhere serving many publishing needs.

Yes, and they’ll also expand to store and serve (that is, publish and broadcast) many more types of information and content: video, audio, presentations, data, shopping lists, spreadsheets, forms, tests, conversations, photos, songs, sermons, lessons…

Weblogs are about more than publishing. They are about storing, organizing, and presenting our thoughts and our digital stuff for ourselves, our groups, our world.

(un)wired
: Time does a big special thingie on wirelessness. (Sponsored by — surprise! — Intel.)

A radical view of a newspaper
: Hugh MacLeod, who leaves a blog’s worth of wonderful comments here, has a brief and brilliant view of what newspapers should be (in response to my call for things we bloggers want newspaper people to hear at next week’s Online Newspaper confab). Hugh said:

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as “things”, rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like brain trust, held cohesive by a good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won’t (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

Hmmm… somebody must’ve spiked my drink.

Bartender: Give me some of whatever he’s drinking.

That’s a radical, transforming way to look at a newspaper’s role in a community and I like it. I’m not sure many newspaper people will take to it, for this requires intensive interactivity.

But in my experience, now that Hugh says it that way, I think that is what I’ve been headed toward online at the day job. As you’ve heard me brag many times before, our forums are wildly popular, getting between 75 and 100 million page views a month. We’ve found that if we put up a forum on its own, it won’t work; we need to have related content; we need to start and contribute to the conversation. The thing is, most times, we just start the conversation and then don’t continue to contribute and interact. We need to find a way to do more of that (not as easy as you’d think because, as Clay Shirky said at the AlwaysOn confab this week, conversations don’t scale at big-scale operations like newspapers). We also need the new improved tools of audience content creation — weblogs — and interaction — friend networks. And we’re working on that, too.

I like Hugh’s view.

(Please continue to contribute things to say to online newspaper honcho here.)