For Theories of the Bulge, I needed to come up with a timeline of when theories were developed. I researched through the core websites, and had a look at a few more that were linked. Afterwards, I gave this a bit of structure by splitting it up into weeks. And then I thought, what else was going on in the news that week? This was quite a busy month– and it didn't help that four debates were cramed into the first half of it. If the debates were spached out by a week or two over a longer period of time, it perhaps would have allowed the country to spend more time on the issues covered– as well as the meta-issues like this.

Whatever happened to the bulge on President Bush’s back, visible in the Presidential debates? It was referred to by the usual family of -Gates: AudioGate, PrompterGate, and, my favorite, “The Battle of the Bulge.” I had followed the story develop first-hand on various blogs, and saw how it played out in the national media, fading out by election day. It’s returned to the news, briefly, courtesy of a Dan Kennedy column in the Phoenix. I thought I’d take another look at the story, and try to answer the question as to why the Internet blogs, for all their supposed powers, could not shake the truth out. This is part of a series on “Truth Exposure: Getting the Facts to Light.”

I’ve been batting back and forth this weekend whether I needed to explain why I am a "Zephyr apologist." I posted on Thursday night by criticizing the Wall Street Journal, on Saturday on her blog Zonkette, and exonerated her again by analyzing Joe Trippi’s comments on the matter.

1. Does dKos have room to grow?
2. Among the “Big Five” most read bloggers by journalists (according to a study this past summer), there’s only one liberal site– Talking Points Memo. Is this a problem? dKos is further down the list. Should it crack the top five?
3. Do the sheer number of contributors make dKos stronger?
4. Why be part of dKos, and not be part of MyDD? From a handful of measures, dKos is 10x bigger; what if there were two equally strong collectives to crack the top 5?
5. Do you consider yourself part of the blogosphere?
6. Do you see any values or methods used on dKos which should be shared with the larger blogosphere?
7. Would you see a benefit in extending Scoop to institutions which are considering setting up blogs?
8. How much do you use the dKosopedia vs. the classic Daily Kos diaries?
9. How about the citizenry and local party leaders/activists? Should they be engaged through dKos? or through scoop-like sites, or through anything in the netroots?
10. Do you understand what Kos’s ethics are?
11. Are you worried that, given Kos’s penchant for saying what’s on his mind, he may put the entire website in jeopardy? considering all that you have on the website.
12. Do you think that Kos is deserving of the revenue for the site? Has anyone considered a revenue-sharing program? Or, at least a way to offer reward top contributors with prizes?

I’d post on my own in Kos, but I don’t have a diary yet, so Paul said he’d try to post this in his. I suppose it’s easiest if dKos members want to post their answers on there and not here. I hope that this is even more helpful for the dKos community than it is for me. I originally started out writing a piece on Kos as an instution/advocate/observer, particularly related to the DNC Chair race and netroots efforts– this had 7500 words by the end of Decemeber. I held onto it do a little more research, and to work on other things. I now realize I ought to continue the research after the DNC Chair race is decided. This discussion is incidental, but is very helpful in shedding light on the big picture.

As I’ve explained, blogs are different things to different people. Rebecca Blood one of those people who is more respected than most, and here’s her recent definition: “The weblog is at once a scrapbook, news filter, chapbook, newsletter, and community.”

I wasn’t there then, but it’s possible that the perception leads reality. Wherever one looks on the Internet, there is activism, though the physical evidence, and quantifiable acheivements, are harder to discern (Zinn did not admit to much web-surfing, let along blog-reading, other than reading his email).

“Jeff Gannon” was originally outed as a conservative operative in the White House press room one year ago. Why did the story take so long to break?

Last month, I wrote that publications, traditional and online, have a primary responsibility to demonstrate that they are responsive to their readers, and that a majority of the questions along these lines should be concerned with how they handle tips. This month Jay Rosen recognized the problem in the midst of a PressThink discussion and spelled out some guidelines for sending in tips (e.g., “Write a post in PressThink’s major areas of interest that gets other people talking, and makes an original point or two.”) This is a good start. Here’s a longer proposal for how it can be done that meets goals of accountability and fairness.

There are a number of values associated with, and celebrated in, the blogosphere: Freedom. Anonymity. Immediacy. Talking. Breadth. Ego. Involvement. Serendipity. But we may view them in different light when we consider what values they displace:

A wonderful set of coincidences happened this weekend; I decided to take a break from writing, and then a beautiful woman flew into town and we happened to met, and we decided to go out Saturday night. Pretty quickly I had to find something to go see and a restaurant to dine in. Your dividend from all of this, dear reader, is an illustration about the different circumstances where gatekeepers are necessary or not: from theater shows to dining options.

It’s been over two weeks since the that last part of this series. This gap in time can be partly rationalized by my hoping to build up some anticipation for this next part. We’re going to look at epidemics, cascades and the problem of crowds.

Here’s a summary of reactions to The New Gatekeepers series– and some brief responses back from me. Also see reactions froom delicious as well as Technorati.

February 11, 2006: The number-one ranked site for "The New Gatekeepers" is no longer this series but a thousand-word essay with that title that Tristan Louis posted last Friday. I have a lot of respect for Tristan as a guy who has contributed a lot of critical thinking and original research on Internet and media over years. And we correspond somewhat, not as much as I do with Seth, but I would have figured that he might have Googled the title, to see whether it has an active promoter of it. Dave Rogers was first to comment to Tristan’s piece, sending him the link to this series.

It’s now my 200^th post. My hundredth post was a year ago. It took me five months to get to that first hundred. I don’t expect to keep up that pace in the next year. But I have a hunch that many of you– my regular readers, which includes 54 bloglines subscribers— would like me to. I really want to get back to the coding that I put off a year ago. I’m looking to people to help contribute editorial content. I’ll explain in the next part what I’m looking for, but I just want to expend a few words sharing with you how Civilities has evolved. Plus links to thirty-one pieces, some of which you may have missed.

Let me correct those mis-impressions which I’ve just made for myself:

Yesterday I posted the article Fixing a Blog in Time, which was a little experiment in reading a particular blog, and trying to understand how it covered 26 different posts over a period of a little over two weeks. I chose Robert Cox's The National Debate. I did not make fully clear, with each post, how much I was mixing my initial impression of reading it with subsequent understandings. This begs a larger discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in impressionistic news.

Bob sent me the following response via email this evening. I post it in full here with my brief reactions interjected.

A decade ago, the term webzine came into vogue simply to mean a web-based magazine. I’d like to breathe new life into it to describe an alternative format to the weblog for online publishing. Whereas the design fundamental of weblog is the reverse-chronological format, the design fundamental of the webzine is separate departments based on the style of the writing. I’m going to describe here how this would be useful for online communities/publishers.

I’m looking for a team to help me continue to keep Civilities relevant and moving forward. It’s been exhausting for a year-plus doing this all myself, and I need some assistance so I can concentrate more on the software parts. I’m especially looking for people who aren’t bloggers, that is, with have no prejudice about what online personal publishing should be. Here’s what the work here involves:

This is a technical design document for the Webzine module for Drupal. It will be updated in an ongoing basis as I work with other Drupal developers.

I’m returning from my summer break away from writing. As I hinted three months ago, I’d be on a bit of a break for a while– work had gotten pretty intense, and I was in the process of moving across town (which caused two outages of over a day last month: one by my poor planning, one by Verizon’s mistake in fixing my phone line), and then setting up the new place. And I wanted to get some normal sleep.

I’m a software architect in Boston, Massachusetts. My day job is working for a software company in Cambridge that makes business process management software. A hobby of mine is doing research into media structures, the output of which you see here. What is “media structures”?

While the podcast medium has not ushered in much of a revolution so far– downloadable audio files have been around for years now, and their marriage with RSS has not made it that much easier to skim them, as it has for bloggus bloviatus, the common blog– there is one use where the aspect where podcasters make a brilliant use of the format.

That the Supreme Court of Delaware affirmed the right of anonymous free speech shouldn’t be news. That they affirmed the precedent that there is a tradeoff between anonymity and credibility– this should be news to people quick to celebrate this decision.

Ok, you’ve written a really good, original, article on your blog or webzine or civ or whatever. Your next step is to promote the heck out of it: not just get people to read it, but get people to reference it later, and recognize you as the smart person behind that idea.

I have a confession to make, which may surprise close readers of this space. Earlier this year, I wanted to actually start a blog– you know, write off the cuff like a blubbering fool about any topic that crossed somebody else’s mind. I needed help, some of my curmudgeonly correspondents to help breathe life into a made-up person named Fabio Folio. Nobody wanted to help, and then I discovered that a Google search revealed that “Fab Folio” was the name of a real person in Italy, so I retired the character. I’d like to say that my second choice was “Valerie Flame,” but I can’t find the piece of paper where I wrote that. I bring this up to expand on some points about fake blogs (flogs?).

The word “blogger” gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with shape-shifting definitions. Having studied this over the past year, I thought it best to cleave out four senses of a definition. (Note: The definitions have been updated with clearer names from the original post twelve days ago.)

For community journalism, there’s no easier story to carry than the one I’m about to describe. The ol’ “Mainstream Media” broke it first. Now we would expect the blogs to enter stage front and take the case, maybe organize some advocacy journalism. Heard of made-for-TV? This one’s made-for-blogs: it’s got an underdog community media effort against an out-of-town one trying to push it out. The Maynard (MA) High School radio station is about to lose its license to a California-based religious broadcaster which has been scouring up licenses nationwide, with the FCC’s neutral approach enabling it.

The logo is sharper. The old Civilities logo was a

Civilities.net has been upgraded to the latest version of Drupal, 4.6.3. It’s been three long months since I connected with the Drupal and Bryght communities at the Open Source Convention in Portland, and I feel like I’d let the group down. Part of the recent motivation was an exchange with Lisa Williams on UniversalHub about the current state of "community journalism," following my Still Too Static article. Lisa runs a "hyperlocal" community site H2Otown for Watertown, Mass. and felt that the site would greatly benefit from the webzine module.

Welcome to Civilities– and the latest “about” page (this is a long-overdue update of previous versions).

My name is Jon Garfunkel and I’ve been publishing my research, observations, and documentation on Civilities since January 2004. By “publish” I mean that I stand by the words written in articles, and I keep a higher standard for what is written here than what I would articulate in spoken conversations or in private emails or in public online forums. Comments are open to registered users, and reflect the views of their respective writers.

Last night I stopped by the Symposium for Social Architecture, sponsored by Corante and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School (I hosted one of the panelists, and another one crashed on my couch following a red-eye flight from San Francisco). The “social architecture” up for discussion is really about social software, which has proved to be a very useful term for framing contemporary Internet technology. I was curious about how it should apply for businesses and other community of practice, and whether it is all-encompassing. But first, I wanted to make sure I had a complete understanding of what the term has meant over time.

Recently there’s been a rash of cultural artifacts glossed with the suffix “2.0” as if they were software products prematurely released to the marketplace as version 1.0. Journalism 2.0, Web 2.0, Recovery 2.0, God 2.0. Which leaves a good portion of the cultural dictionary yet unadulterated. So I wondered… what about the Times 2.0?

"People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power."

I invite you to come up with a possible explanation of what "it" is:

a) Wikipedia
b) a blog
c) a Colt .45
d) the new Oral-B computerized toothbrush
e) the 82nd Airborne Division

The current movie Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and directed by George Clooney, has been co-produced by a group called Participant Productions. They got a good head start with setting up companion websites (using the Drupal software, no less) for their films (which also include Syriana, Murderball, and North Country), but these are mere baby steps. If they want to have an activist mission, they must have an educational mission first. And it would also be best of them to avoid the scattershot "blog" approach and instead adopt a constructive media approach. Here’s my review that I also posted on their site.

In thinking about how to write up a Civilities-style proposal, I started mining the old Brill’s Content magazine– which for a few years at the turn of the millenium was a handy gloss of the information age. Its hundred-and-fifty pages,were news about the news, reviews of the news, and just about everything would look for in a magazine if one weren’t lookinf for advertisements. It had a running gag which took the trouble to actually rate how many of the predictions made by the Sunday pundits came true. For kicks, the magazine also compared them to a prognosticator on loan from a local zoo, Chippy the Chimp. (In his debut in the August 1999 issue, Chippy went 3 for 6 , “good enough to beat George Will and John McLaughlin”).

Anyways, you get the idea. Coding takes solid concentration, and I have to manufacture some time over the last several weeks to get this done. Perhaps a dozen articles have been on hold in the ensuing time. But we’ve got comments once again. For some reason it’s no longer preserving line breaks. But I have made several key improvements over the 2004: