Posts by matt

Adrian H. announces the launch of Post Remix, the WaPo’s version of BBC Backstage. Yexcellent.

Awesome.

Yes, that’s Jarah Euston on the front page of Sunday’s L.A. Times, standing in front of the building that gave her super-hott website its banner.

Aside from providing an incredibly well-informed perspective on Fresno’s downtown development and arts-and-entertainment news, it occurred to me this weekend that Jarah is a fantastic editor. On the Fresno Famous blog, Sour Grapes, Jarah puled together bits and pieces of Fresno’s mediasphere that matched my information needs better than any other editor in Fresno could. I think citizen editing hasn’t been paid enough attention, but it’s as vital a function as citizen reporting is. And it can happen on multiple levels, from the collective story judgment of a broad community (see Digg and Tech Memeorandum) to super-savvy individuals like Jarah.

A dream-ish prose poem of reasonable length, by Haruki Murakami, on spaghetti.

PART I: Rick, read more blogs.

Rick Edmonds, a buddy of mine and Robin’s, takes the nascent “citizen journalism” movement to account in an article for Poynter Online. I’m rather disappointed. Where’s Rick’s typically razor-sharp, data-heavy commentary on the outlook of the journalism industry? This seems like Yet Another Meandering Rant Against Blogs. How could someone so smart produce something so wrongheaded?

I can’t blame Rick at all. His rant reflects how other folks from Big Media — including CitJ triumphalists — have come to view participatory media. And it gives me the opportunity to launch my own rant(s). Sorry, Rick.

Read more…

If there is one thing you must never, never do, it’s press this button.

David Vise peers into the soul of Google for The Washington Post‘s Sunday Outlook section, and finds some stuff I didn’t even know was going on. (Googling your genes?) Good, quick read.

For those of us who miss the old days of AdCritic, Tim Yang (of Geek Blog fame) has created The Ad Blog. Dorkcellent.

CSSVista: Live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. Hoooott. [/geek] [oh wait]

This one’s from 1987, made for Apple. And you know what? It’s not all that outlandish.

A fascinating New Yorker article last week profiled one of the many claimants to the title of forefather of modern conservatism, Peter Viereck. The article talks about how far conservatism has drifted from Viereck’s ideals, and how some of his greatest fears about the movement have been realized. But the profile ends with an extraordinary passage from one of Viereck’s lectures. It struck me as a wonderful summation of the value and mission of what many of us do, so I’ll share it with you:

What causes the greatest crimes in history? The greatest bloodshed? The most murders? I would say two things: sincere love and a sincere devotion to liberty. … If you kill out of love or for a perfect utopia, you never stop killing because human nature is always imperfect. Robespierre, rightly called “the incorruptible,” was more sincere than Danton and always found somebody deviating just a little bit from true liberty. …

I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts; attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.