|
|
The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
Oh My God, the RSS Feed Actually Works!
Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
Arik
Bill
Dan
Cole
Emily B
Emily G
Helena
Jee
Jewelz
Kaila
Kathryn
Mac
Robin
Slim
Souris
Mr. West
My TIME articles
All magazine articles (subscription required for older stories)
Online column index
|
|
|
|
|
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Best of the Blogs
My goodness, the magazine actually ran the blogs package this week. You would not believe how many weeks we've been holding it, and how many times we closed it on Friday only to have it yanked out due to late-breaking Saturday news (thanks, Mr. Reagan). Anyway, here's my contribution to it: five blogger profiles.
Five Bloggers to Watch
For everything from shrewd political analysis to good old-fashioned gossip, Chris Taylor finds the blogs worth a visit
Drew Curtis / fark.com
ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FARK
Back when the air was still warm inside the dotcom bubble, registering a new Web address meant you harbored a foolproof scheme to make billions. But not Drew Curtis. In 1997 the programmer, based in Lexington, Ky., snapped up fark.com. Why fark? It's a nonsensical word Curtis says he sprinkled randomly in his conversations. By 1999 he had dreamed up a couple of equally random uses for his Web address. One was to create a database of different curries. The other was to use it as a venue for posting the odd pictures and news items he liked to gather and send to friends in endless, annoying e-mails.
Unfortunately for the world of Indian food, Curtis chose the latter. Now, with at least 5 million readers a month, Fark has become the No. 1 blog for weird and titillating links. It's a supremely simple setup. Every day Curtis posts 20 to 30 of his favorite curiosities with one-line descriptions and a small button to instantly tag the content — the labels range from INTERESTING to OBVIOUS to ASININE. Links to sites and stories you wouldn't want your boss to catch you looking at are helpfully marked "not safe for work."
The site pays for itself with advertising; his wife takes care of Fark's finances. Curtis starts blogging at 7:30 a.m. and is usually done by 9 a.m. The links are timed to appear throughout the day to give the impression that Curtis is hard at work. In fact, he says, "you'll find me in sports bars most of the day."
Fark is a must read at many media outlets, but Curtis doesn't care much about the veracity of news he posts. Earlier this year he linked to a fake story on the Hoosier Gazette, a humor website, about a man in a devil costume disrupting a screening of The Passion of the Christ. The Gazette later e-mailed Curtis excitedly to say the story had been spotted on a CNN ticker. Curtis' response? "Kick-ass, that's cool." As the tag line goes: "It's not news, it's Fark."
Cory Doctorow / boingboing.net
MR. WONDERFUL'S WEB DIRECTORY
Back in 1988, a group of San Francisco journalists launched bOING bOING, an irreverent underground magazine dedicated to pop culture and technology. Almost as an afterthought, they also began a website, for which they called on the services of a writer named Cory Doctorow. Don't bother searching newsstands for the magazine. It's long gone, but the blog boingboing.net — "A directory of wonderful things," as its slogan goes — is more popular than ever. And although it has four main contributors as well as a rotating guest blogger, Doctorow is commonly identified as its author. The reason? "I'm the one least capable of doing things in moderation," he admits.
That's an understatement. While blogging obsessively and free-lancing print articles, Doctorow (who is distantly related to novelist E.L. Doctorow) has also pumped out a novel a year for the past three years. Every morning he gets up before 6 o'clock, does what he calls a round trip of the Internet and starts commenting on whatever he finds interesting. "There are people for whom [BoingBoing] is their daily news sheet," says Doctorow. "It's nice to be the center of attention. But for me, the only reason to do it is to jot down things I think I'm going to find useful later. It's entirely directed at myself."
So for Doctorow, a blog is many things: a searchable journal, a "magical commonplace book" and an exercise in brevity. He takes pride in being able to summarize a story in as few lines as possible. Just don't call BoingBoing a magazine anymore.
Glenn Reynolds / instapundit.com
BETTER THAN TETRIS
Glenn Reynolds found instant success with his blog in the most somber of circumstances. Instapundit started in August 2001 as a hands-on experiment and part of the Internet-law class Reynolds teaches at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He figured he might get, at best, a couple of hundred readers. Then came 9/11. As Reynolds saw it, "TV pundits were doing such a terrible job that it turned a lot of people to the Internet." Instapundit was there to welcome them.
Reynolds quickly acquired rock-star status among Web surfers. Not only was he getting thousands of hits a day in the wake of the attacks, but Fox News's website asked him to write a column on the strength of his impassioned Sept. 11 rhetoric alone. A couple of years later, MSNBC offered him a second blog (glennreynolds.com) on its site. Meanwhile, Instapundit kept growing. It gets 120,000 visitors a day, which means more people are reading Reynolds than are watching many of those cable-news talking heads. In February, Wired magazine named Instapundit the world's most popular blog.
Reynolds is notorious within the blogging community for his prolific posting. On an average day, he might make 20 or 30 entries, many of them fairly lengthy and most sharply political, with a conservative bent. "People always ask me how I find the time," says Reynolds. "Basically, I'm a geek. I'm in front of the computer most of the day anyway. It's a substitute for Tetris."
Ana Marie Cox / wonkette.com
BORN TO BLOG
Nobody could accuse Ana Marie Cox of sticking to a job when she's not having fun. The author of Wonkette, the plugged-in must-read Washington gossip blog, has spent much of her career on the outs: being fired from American Prospect magazine (for "not being civil," according to the editor) and quitting book-publishing house Knopf (where she says she was reprimanded for reading at work). Says Nebraska-raised Cox, 31: "It's taken me 10 years to find the thing I was born to do."
For Wonkette, work begins at 7 a.m. "I usually wake up and say, 'Time to make the funny,'" she says, "then stumble to Wonkette world headquarters [her spare bedroom in Arlington, Va.]" Here she writes her daily quota of 12 blog entries (enough to satisfy Wonkette publisher Nick Denton, who also owns New York City gossip blog gawker.com). The subject: whatever Capitol tittle-tattle amuses Cox most.
Funnier than the Drudge Report, snarkier than Lucianne Goldberg's scribblings, Wonkette won't fabricate, but she isn't afraid to satirize. She has doled out awards for "gayest-seeming Bushie" and speculated on the size of John Kerry's member. "I am proud to get hate mail from both liberals and conservatives," she says.
A richer compliment, in her view, is the one that came from Tina Brown. If she were starting out today, the former New Yorker editor told a panel of journalists recently, she would be Wonkette. That might seem strange, given that Cox skewers Brown's Washington Post column every week with a chart translating "Tina-speak" into English. But Cox speaks directly to political junkies in a way that magazine mavens can only dream about. Denton does not edit Wonkette, and Cox is hardly the kind to censor herself — especially not when she's having this much fun.
Rebecca Blood / rebeccablood.net
REBECCA'S HIP POCKET
Everything good in her life, Rebecca Blood will tell you, came from her blog. After she created Rebecca's Pocket in 1999, she got an invitation to speak at a conference called BlogTalk in Vienna. An essay she posted on the history of blogs led to The Weblog Handbook, a book that has been translated into four languages and is in its second printing. And when she met the first guy who linked to Rebecca's Pocket, she started dating him.
These days Rebecca's Pocket gets about 30,000 visitors a month. "Blogs become popular by word of mouth," says Blood. "We don't have an advertising budget. But if you're enthusiastic about what you write, that shows through."
So what is Blood enthusiastic about? Well, just about anything. Rebecca's Pocket is filled with rambling, free-associative entries on anything that pops into her mind: politics, culture, journalism, miscellaneous links and film reviews (Cold Mountain: "[I]f I don't cry at the big scene in a movie, something has gone terribly awry" she didn't cry).
But you won't find many personal secrets revealed here. Rebecca says she is a fairly private person who grew up "somewhere in the Midwest" and blogs from her home in San Francisco. "Most women's blogs tend to be personal diaries." Not hers. Though she did make one exception last year when she and that guy who linked to her site got married. Chalk up one more good thing to come out of this pocket.
|
|
|
|
