BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

An op-ed

7 comments on An op-ed

An op-ed

: Here’s the op-ed piece about weblogs in Iran and Iraq that I wrote for the Star-Ledger, the largest paper in my company.

The Ledger’s good headline: “The building blogs of democracy”

For those of you coming from the Ledger: Welcome. The links in the article are clickable, below. And here are some additional links here about this story.

On the arrest of Sina Motallebi and the Iranian weblog scene: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. On weblogs in Iraq, here.

To read the whole op-ed piece, click on the “more” link.

Weblogs are revolutionary

Weblogs are not just the hottest trend on the trend-addicted Internet, they are a powerful tool for free speech, a free press, and democracy. Because they are the cheapest, easiest publishing tools ever created

7 responses to “An op-ed”

  1. hooman Avatar
    hooman

    jeff,
    as a weblogger myself, i tend to think the same. plus i think everyone has a story or interesting thing to tell and share.
    having said that, i won’t get my hopes high. weblogging is still limited to people with a certain commonalities. journalists aside, the vast majority of us have something different than our mainstreams. our failure to express ourselves in the real world has turned us (majority) into the virtual one.
    so when we read weblogs, we gotta be careful of what we read too and don’t take those thoughts as popular ideals on the ground. in many countries around the wrold, access to the internet is limited to yuppie people.
    till weblogging catches on in the next generations, that will remain my major concern with weblogs. i was one of first few who got access to graphic internet in iran. and i am telling you, i was not a yuppie, but i WAS a yuppie-minded. i keep these in mind when i come across a new weblog.

  2. hooman Avatar
    hooman

    OK. i think, i was carried away a bit when i used ‘vast majority’ and ‘failure’.
    what i wanted to say was that people who turn into the virtual world don’t necessarily see things the same way that people in the real world see. i simply think people who are into the weblogging don’t fit in the mainstreams for any reasons. and at the moment people who still fit in the mainstreams outnumber the webloggers by a large margin.

  3. Perry de Havilland Avatar
    Perry de Havilland

    Very good post! As more and more blogs appear, they will become a better and better ‘sample’ of views around the world. keep in mind that we are only at the start of this phenomenon.

  4. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    Jeff –
    I don’t think it’s so quite so self-evident that access to the blogosphere is more than a single notch below food and water.
    One of the first things I learned about Earthquake safety as a grade schooler, apart from “get under your desk”, we learned you need an emergency kit including food, water, and a radio. The radio being key to provide information about, among other things, where to get more food and water.
    Yes radio is the cheapest way to get information from the top down – reminders to boil water, locations of triage centers or high school gyms with available cots – but weblogging is clearly the cheapest way to get information fom the bottom up and – in the absence of democratic institutions, democratic information flow is a pretty good substitute – and that, almost as much as clean water, is exactly what Iraq needs – and deserves – right now.

  5. rj Avatar
    rj

    ‘Salam Pax’ plays Americans for fools in Iraq
    So, now that he’s gone from anti-Saddam to anti-American, he was an evil agent all along?

  6. button Avatar
    button

    RJ: I just read that piece and copied it to floppy because I have to go out now and do some chores. I’ll reread it later. Everyone is entitled to his point of view– rich people, leftists, the anti-war folks, the exiles. His point of view is just one of many. But, having established that, he has a right to express himself, as do the others. I wouldn’t worry about that too much.
    I must say, as an aside, I was irked that Warren seemed to be characterizing Burns as a “hack.” Really, was that necessary? Tacky, tacky, tacky! What Jeff said about the press conference and do you really HAVE to be so obnoxious? P.S., Burns is not a hack. But even if he were, what’s chewing YOUR shorts– you got space in a deadwood newspaper. Most of us would never be so privileged.

  7. button Avatar
    button

    Good op-ed, Jeff! I’ll try to post an entry about this later.