Special Announcement:
blogScream Lives!
This is a news service that features headline links to current articles on good, information-intensive blogs. The screen you see will be offered to blogs and news services so the featured blogs achieve greater exposure and so what those bloggers have to say becomes more widely known.
One reason this service is being provided is to counteract the troubling trend toward information control in the Blogosphere by a handful of huge blogs that attract thousands—in some cases, hundreds of thousands—of visitors every day, thereby pulling readership away from the many small blogs that are saying important things but that are being ignored by a population that has come to believe that popularity conveys exclusivity in authority and worthiness of patronage.
Another reason this service is being provided is to lessen the distance between the Blogosphere and the mainstream media, which has now shown that same, troubling tendency to focus on a cluster of "reputable, if somewhat scandalous" blogs as being a representative sampling of the Blogosphere. The mainstream media is familiar with the "news wire" feed concept, and it is hoped that the blogScream news wire will play to modern, mainstream journalists' desire to see summary information already distilled to headline format, which can then be investigated in greater depth should one of those headlines look particularly interesting.
blogScream isn't the first attempt at a blog news wire. Several earlier efforts failed either quietly or rather spectacularly, judging from a smattering of post-mortems that can be found online. And blogScream won't be the last, either. The true mark of whether this news wire service is successful will be told by how many knock-offs show up within the next couple of months. In that regard, of course, 'success' is a relative term: not only could blogScream get plowed under by more powerful, better funded services still to be founded, but in their potential for being many, varied, and sectorized, they could even further fractionalize and fragment the smaller-blogs side of the Internet.
The concept of a grand Blog Federation well might fall victim to very lure of blog federations, each of which never constitutes more than a few blogs, which can then continue to be ignored by the mainstream media and the giant blogs that are becoming nothing more than the institutionally acceptable alternative within the mainstream.
For now, though, blogStream lives. With a bow to Ms. Julien...
The alternative to the alternative.
So says the Dark Wraith.
Published 3/07/2005 08:53:00 PM
<< 14 Comments Total
Dark Wraith -- you are the hero of the "second wave" of the blogosphere! Thanks so much for this nifty wire.
Good evening, Pam.
You are one of the reasons this wire was created. The articles you and Ms. Julien are writing are real journalism. So too is the content on Shakespeare's Sister and Media Girl.
I am seeing "Beat Journalism" the way it was back in the '50s and '60s, and too many people aren't seeing it, for Heaven's sake.
For me, this is like having a whole era replayed, though; and if we do it right, we could have something really amazing for future generations to hear about.
But we must push.
Thank you and all of the others who are trying to make the future America something it otherwise might not have been: free.
The Dark Wraith blogs forward.
Hello Dark Wraith. blogScream is an excellent idea. That said, I am going to find out just exactly how I can get the code for my blog. Thanks. Long live the Revolution!
get ready to run screaming because it looks great in Safari. nice work!
Outstanding!
Thank you for all the work you are doing.
Good evening, Guy.
My project for the remainder of the week is making the code portable so I can send it to interested bloggers as a text file.
It will be a cut-and-paste job with three components: a block that will be put in the cascading style sheet portion of the blog; a little snippet that will go right in the BODY tag; and finally, the big "event handler" that will go in the body code right where you want blogScream to show.
The one thing you'll need is a place that is at least 220 pixels wide to put it. Almost all blogs can handle this requirement right in the sidebar.
You'll have your choice of a black screen or a white screen, and I can set a border of color choice around the screen. The only thing I'll be asking folks is that the actual news feed not be altered. Other than that, anyone who is handy with code can take a crack at improving it, although I assure you that this code is about as confusing as you can get, since it is a blend of several different attempts by me and by others, especially with respect to an architecture done at dynamicdrive.com that had cross-browser stability, which was the greatest of all the challenges in this project.
Anyway, as I told Shakespeare's Sister about an hour ago, suffer me a couple of days here to make this as easy as possible for recipients to put into their own blogs.
The Dark Wraith cruises through the night.
One reason this service is being provided is to counteract the troubling trend toward information control in the Blogosphere by...
Big Brother too? Say no to Big Brother plan for Internet
Good afternoon, Mr. Goat.
That article should give folks a warning call, but it appears to me that we have already gone way down the slippery slope. Right now, the United States government can compel ISPs to provide lists of users and where they go on the Internet, with the users never being made aware that their surfing habits have been told. No one knows whether or not the government is maintaining dossiers on people based upon where they go, but it would appear that this is the case. Because evidence presented in grand juries may be secret, people could be indicted on information like this, but that evidence used for the indictment would not be used at trial. Hence, the proof of federal Internet dossiers would remain beyond what people would know about.
There is no question that the level of surveillance is escalating. I, myself, am being hit with snooping hacks many times a day, and it takes a darned solid firewall to stop the nonsense.
On another front, it will take just a little more time, but ISPs in this country will definitely go to packet preferencing, which will slow the success of smaller, up-start, and less compliant service providers.
Also, you can bet that these blogs are being monitored by private organizations that will be all too willing to provide what they know to a government or to those within a government that wants to know what blogs are of what character.
In summary, the Internet is not nearly as free and open as it once was; and it will become less free and less open as time goes on. That's why it's always important to have a little bit of a tendency to be a techy nerd. Even a small amount of knowledge can make you a bit safer.
And a lot more paranoid.
The Dark Wraith has blogged.
DW, being a network admin I know that have a little information can make a person paranoid. But having lots of of information can be downright spooky....
Working in the IT biz I get to see everyday the wonders of people that get hacked and beaten by spyware, scumware, and malware. It leads to a fatigue which among many other reasons is why I'm going for the career change I've talked to much about.
Sometimes I think that I would love to know the truth about what is going on in world. But other times I realize that it would probably just be too damn spooky to deal with.
Like Emily Dickenson said. "The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind"
-Gary A
Thank you, DW, for including me in this project. Let me know when the code is available and I'll gladly add it to the site. Good work.
Will be back. Great site with some great info. Glad your here.
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