A group of bloggers including mainstream journalists from outlets such as CNBC, The Nation and The New York Times are banding together to strike a blow at established media and pick up some ad dollars in the process.Hold on, it's better than that.
Operating initially as Pajamas Media--a play on criticism that bloggers are "just a bunch of guys in their pajamas"--the site will offer original content and links to affiliate sites written by more than 70 bloggers, as well as basic news feeds from sources like The Associated Press, said novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon, one of the founders.Much more by following the link. I knew this was going on, but it's nice to see that they are getting major buzz. I was also interested to read:
Contributors include: CNBC's Larry Kudlow; U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone; Nation columnist David Corn; Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com fame; New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor John Podhoretz; Adam Bellow, Random House editor and son of Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow; Clifford D. May, ex-New York Times editor and current president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies think tank; Jane Hall, panelist of Fox News Watch; and co-founder Charles Johnson, author of the Little Green Footballs blog.
Regardless, the site could be seen as competing with the Liberal Blog Advertising Network. That site allows advertisers to place ads on more than 70 "liberal and progressive blogs."Someone call Reynolds Wrap!
Speaking of Reynolds Wrap, you may recall wacky ole geek Dave Winer of "Lessons of 9-11" fame. He's just made some major coin by selling the weblogs.com ping server to Verisign and so Robert X. Cringley interviewed him for Nerd TV (video here). The loot clearly hasn't wrapped Winer any more tightly, but my favorite part is:
Bob: And what made you decide to make this your career?Thanks for preventing a messy freak out, Bob, but this is clearly more than we wanted to know!
Dave: A very visceral reaction to it. I mean I just knew that this was what I was gonna do. When I - there was a moment when I was sitting there at the keyboard and program. I just understood it. It just made sense to me. I just got it, and I had - there were lots of things that I really liked, and if you'd asked me when I was a teenager if I would end up being a programmer, I would've said, "That's the most ridiculous thing/idea in the world." Absolutely not. No, I was the editor of an underground newspaper. I was a promoter of rock concerts. I was a drug dealer. I was a-
Bob: What did you deal?
Dave: Well, mostly acid, actually.
Bob: Okay.
Dave: If you wanna know. I wasn't expecting the conversation to go that direction, but -
Bob: You took it that way.
Dave: Yeah, well, you asked it. Yeah, I did. I know, absolutely.
Bob: Yeah, no, no, that's fine. Statute of limitations has passed. It's fine.
Finally, for a good old fashioned geek flame job, Cool Tech Reviews points to Jack Shafer at Slate excoriating The Apple Polishers:
I don't hate Apple. I don't even hate Apple-lovers. I do, however, possess deep odium for the legions of Apple polishers in the press corps who salute every shiny gadget the company parades through downtown Cupertino as if they were members of the Supreme Soviet viewing the latest ICBMs at the May Day parade.There's more fun to be had by following the link.
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What explains the press corps' exuberance for Apple in general and the iPod in particular? After all, the portable video player isn't a new product category—Archos, RCA, Samsung, and iRiver got there months and months ago. The excitement can't be due to the undersized screen, which measures only 2.5 inches diagonal, or the skimpy two hours of battery life when operated in video mode. As I paged through a Nexis dump of the V-iPod coverage, I searched in vain for a single headline proclaiming "Apple Introduces Ho-Hum Player" or an article comparing the V-iPod's technical specs to those of competing brands. At least the techie readers of Engadget, free of the Apple mind-meld, recognize the V-iPod as a deliberately crippled by copy protection, low-res, underpowered video appliance that is merely Apple's first try in the emerging market of video players.
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Another thing that sets Apple product launches apart from those of its competition is co-founder Jobs' psychological savvy. From the beginning, Jobs flexed his powerful reality-distortion field to bend employees to his will, so pushing the most susceptible customers and the press around with the same psi power only comes naturally. Although staffed by dorks and drizzlerods, Apple projects itself and its products as the embodiment of style and cool.
