Why do we read what we read? 

This question interests me as a reader; it must interest John Battelle even more as a publisher. Battelle was a cofounding editor of Wired and founder of The Industry Standard; he now helms the online publishing venture Federated Media. Two years ago, he wrote The Search, about Google and its impact on business and culture. At the close of the book he appealed to his readers to send him corrections and updates to the book: “I am committed to updating this work at the Searchblog site.”

This coming weekend I'm planning on attending the Reputation Economies conference at Yale, so I bought, and read, Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation.

The book was a delight to read, intensely footnoted and calmly presented. While there is no shortage of rhetoric extolling the virtues of new media, Solove takes that as obvious enough, and presents instead the dark side of cyberspace.

John Tehranian, a University of Utah law professor, recently published an article “Infringment Nation” where he claimed that a typical American might be violating copyright at an astonishing rate: 83 acts of infringement and a potential liability of $12.45 million a day.

Those sort of numbers echoed by BoingBoing, by Valleywag, by Ars Technica, and by David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.

To truly understand the different shades of “conversation” that have been proffered by the blogosphere, let's look at two Op-Ed columnists.

In Glenview, Illinois Saturday night, a teenager pulled a disoriented women from a car that was stuck on the railroad tracks moments before an Amtrak train barrelled into it. The only reason I heard about this was because an eyewitness, David Armano, had reported via the Twitter service, which meant that he sent via his mobile phone to his network of friends; one friend forwarded it to Doc Searls, who declared on his blog Sunday morning:  "Citizen journal breaks a heroic news story."

What the odd discovery of tapes that far-off year of 1994 mean for multimedia archival and research.

But O'Reilly ignored his own advice. His second iteration of his idea is still titled "Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct." It has six elements, all using the pronoun "we." (The wiki version hosted by Jimmy Wales is similarly stuck on first-person plural as well) Michael Arrington, the influential tech writer, demurred from what he felt effort to pressure bloggers into submission, concluding simply:

Fans of civic engagement should be delighted by the continuing constructive dialogues about Deval Patrick's new website. Since I posted last week, there's been a number of fixes to the site. Kate Donaghue, a Democratic party activist I know, made a post on the forum (and on Blue Mass Group) chastising anybody who was criticizing the website: "when opponents choose to focus only on the challenges, they are siding against the people and our opportunity to let our voices be heard."

Suppose you’re a state judge, like Conrad Rushing of the Santa Clara-based 6^th Appellate Court of California. Where do you go if you need to cleave the difference between words like “blog” and “webzine”? You could seek the opinions of any number of experts from law school-affiliated “Centers of Internet and Society” in Palo Alto or in Cambridge. Or you could have asked my opinion. But perhaps citing me directly would not have been very impressive in the footnotes. So instead, the Appellate Court cited Wikipedia, where my words were published, semi-anonymously. (Until now.)

Googlebombing is not outlawed, as the Google service is quite resilient to such antics, and Google doesn’t mind all that much as it helps reinforce their supremacy– they serve well as a stand-in for authority to try to hack. But the googlebombing can only succeed if it can offer a solid competitive narrative.

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.

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.

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.

This worries me now because of the desperate times the liberals are in. For three years the Republican Party controls the White House and both houses of Congress; this is the most conservative (in every aspect but fiscal) that the government has been in modern times. One solution, guided by the Air America radio network, is to compete with the likes of Rush and O’Reilly on the partisan airwaves. But to do that best, one might embrace generalizations, innuendo, and then finds themself down the path of falsehood.

If only he be meeting the press more often. A linguistic foray into today’s Presidential interview.