Listed on Blogshares

As of yesterday, June 6, 2003, The Dagley Dagley Daily is listed on Blogshares, a fantasy stock market for weblogs that now has a total (virtual) market capitalization of $10,207,843,189.60. Blogs are valued based on their outgoing and incoming links (far more for the latter), as well as market demand. Right now it's just play money, but at least two Blogshare investors have turned their holdings into legal tender. In signing up for Blogshares, we also got $500 fantasy dollars to invest, which we spent quickly. Our picks: William Gibson, valued at $242.83; Charlie Stough's Newsgorilla at $0.23; Lawrence Lessig at $15.69; Salam Pax at $82.09. This blog is currently valued at $0.26 per share.

You don't have to be a blogger to play along; just register and you, too, can get an imaginary $500 to spend on the blogs of your choice.

Do you belong in the blogosphere?

By Janet Dagley Dagley

(Blogger's note: Today's post is an article I put together for the new online version of AIRSPACE; the final version will be published there later this month.)

 

I’d like to begin this piece with a sound snippet: unfortunately I didn’t record it, so please indulge me in this reconstruction:

 

September, 1990, Moscow, USSR: “If you want to talk to Russians, go to Pushkin Square. You'll find a bunch of men on the street corner, all shouting at each other, talking politics, all day, all night. Get in there among them and start talking in English, loud. Anyone who can speak English will want to talk to you. They don't get to meet many English speakers," explained Eric, coordinator for our group, just arrived for a 6-week intensive Russian language course. Mikhail Gorbachev was still president then of what was still the Soviet Union, though glasnost and perestroika were well under way and communism had already fallen in Eastern Europe, all of which gave the shouting men ample conversation fodder.

 

And so we did just that, eight of us, in pairs spread out through the crowd, shouting at each other in English. Nobody seemed to notice, but we kept on, talking and talking about everything we could think of to talk about, still without drawing the slightest interest from any of the locals. Eventually my shouting partner and I got around to asking each other mundane questions such as, "So, what kind of movies do you like?", which at least revealed a mutual interest in the films of the Coen Brothers, and that led, in turn, to shouting our way through some of our favorite scenes from Raising Arizona, ("You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? Cause if'n I freeze, I can't rightly drop, and if'n I drop, I'm a-gonna be in motion"), but even that failed to draw the attention of a single one of those shouting Muscovites. We were disappointed, but understood that the locals had plenty to talk about amongst themselves: they kept on gathering and shouting until the racket they made changed their country and our world.

 

That's kind of what the blogosphere sounds like: a crowd of people all shouting at once, some at each other, few of them listening. Some of what they say is meaningful, some not, some original, some derivative, some of it other people's words, much of it pointed commentary, more of it pointless. The vast majority of voices here are shouting (whispering, muttering, confiding, babbling, droning) in English, with a noticeable minority blogging in Farsi (some of them getting hauled off by Iranian authorities as a result). Some of the English comes from non-native speakers, who blog in a foreign tongue so as to reach a wider audience, as Baghdad blogger Salam Pax did so notably during the invasion of Iraq. Some of the voices are saying something interesting, and saying it eloquently, while others seem to be going on and on about nothing.

 

Let's move on to another place, and another sound clip, which also will have to be heard only in your imagination because this one's not quite recordable:

 

June, 2003, New York, New York, USA: The raucous din of thousands of bloggers blogging is cited as one factor in the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd from The New York Times. Many 2004 presidential candidates have blogs, as does at least one 2008 candidate. Everybody and their dog seems to have a blog.

 

So blogs are popular; ubiquitous, influential -- but what ARE they, exactly? "Blog" is short for "web log," and a web log is simply an online log or journal, with a series of posts usually in reverse chronological order. Blog posts are usually text, but can be graphics or audio if your blog host can handle larger files. Blogs usually include links, as this article does, which is why some people describe them as "guided tours of the Internet." Blogs are easy to set up and maintain, and there are numerous blog hosts and services out there, the best-known being Blogger (recently purchased by Google), Radio Userland, and Movable Type. You can put up a simple blog for free, or pay a little more for extra features and server space.

 

Blogging itself doesn't pay, per se -- not yet -- but some bloggers accept donations (blogger Andrew Sullivan reports in his "Blogger Manifesto" that he received $27,000 in donations the first year), either monetary (via PayPal) or in gifts (via wishlists set up at Amazon.com or elsewhere: here's a randomly chosen blogger wishlist). But a blog can be a great way to get the word out about your product, which is why more and more businesses are entering the blogosphere. The BBC set up a blog for its correspondents during the Iraq war, and some of the world's best-known newspapers also have blogs. One newspaper reporter started a blog, on his own time, but had to stop posting or lose his job at the Hartford Courant.

 

For me, blogging seemed like the perfect way to concentrate on my own writing once more after two years as AIRSPACE editor, and even more years editing other people's work. Perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, I set myself up with a daily deadline simply by naming my blog The Dagley Dagley Daily. I set up the site in about 10 minutes on Feb. 1, but didn't actually go daily until Feb. 16. Days after that, WYSO expressed interest in an audio version of a post I'd written about a local hero there in Dayton, Ohio, which I recorded, ripped to mp3, and e-mailed right away, then posted the mp3 on my blog later for those who didn't hear the broadcast. I haven't fully explored the audio aspect of the blog, though the "audioblogger" feature would allow me to literally phone in my posts if I wanted to go for that "distant correspondent" sound. But then, I've only begun to explore the blogosphere itself.

 

If you'd like to visit the blogosphere before deciding whether to establish your own outpost, try one of the constantly updated blog index sites such as DayPop, Blogdex, Weblogs.com or Blo.gs. Daypop will allow you to search or sort several ways through more than 45,000 blogs, including the most-linked-to blogs and top word bursts. Weblogs and Blo.gs both give you a chance to choose a random blog. Or use Google to search either the web or the news for words such as "blog", "blogger", "web log", or "blogosphere."

 

If you become a blogger yourself, remember that however personal your blog may seem, it's public. Anything you put on there is out there, where it can not only be seen, but copied and distributed, no matter what kind of copyright notice you may attach. If you don't mind having your blog content distributed elsewhere, you can still reserve some rights with a Creative Commons license. I chose to require attribution and allow noncommercial, but not commercial use.

 

By an interesting coincidence, on the very day that the Federal Communications Commission voted for media deregulation, which many predict will lead to a massive wave of media consolidation, I received an old-fashioned piece of paper by snail mail. On that paper: the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) assigned by the Library of Congress for The Dagley Dagley Daily. I may be just one of many voices shouting on a street corner, but now my blog is officially a real periodical, an independently owned and operated, nonconsolidated media outlet.  

Breaking News:

Times tosses top editors, GOP cancels vote on overtime bill, blond-bashing spree continues

The New York Times has apparently decided not to take my advice and retrain Executive Editor Howell Raines: they're firing him instead, along with Managing Editor Gerald Boyd; the official word is that they are "stepping down." Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who is not "stepping down" so far himself, praised the departing, much-dissed executives for "putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own." Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld will come out of retirement to serve as interim executive editor while the Times tries to figure out what to do next. The Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko has published Sulzberger's memo to the staff. Of course, since we last wrote about the Times May 25, embattled Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg has also "stepped down."

Meanwhile, the Republicans have cancelled the vote scheduled for today in the House of Representatives on a bill that would allow employers to substitute compensatory time off for paid overtime: the outcry from working Americans was so loud that they realized they just didn't have the votes for it. In that case, it would have been better if they had just gone ahead, so that H.R. 1119 could be declared officially dead.

As you may have noticed if you've had your television on for more than 30 seconds today or yesterday, celebrity homemaker Martha Stewart has been indicted for a crime that involved much, much less money ($45,000) than the billions involved in the recent Worldcom, Enron, or Tyco scandals, but then the deposed heads of those companies are neither blond nor female, nor do they go around offering handy hints.

Coincidentally, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) does happen to be both blond and female, which may or may not be a reason the media has pounced on her for daring to write a memoir, Living History. Whether you agree or disagree with her, she's had an interesting life so far, the most interesting part of which was not, as reported ad nauseum, her husband's most-publicized infidelity.

Blonds, especially blondes, are perennially popular targets, though there has been some backlash from blonds (and blondes) themselves, most enjoyably in the 2001 movie "Legally Blonde," so successful that a sequel, "Red, White, and Blonde," is scheduled to premiere next month.

Not blond, but still picked on: Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, duly elected head of her nation's government although she has yet to take office because of a 1990 military coup, is now in "protective custody" after being injured in what junta spokesmen said was a clash between her supporters and the military's. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who himself was injured and taken into "protective custody" by the North Vietnamese military some years ago, has wasted no time calling for her release. This story may be a bit confusing because in addition to taking over the country, the coup leaders tried to obfuscate the issue by changing the name of the nation to "Myanmar."

Public domain, public airwaves

I spent much of the morning watching/listening to the Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearings on Monday's media deregulation decision by the Federal Communications Commission, and I managed to take a few notes.

Kudos, as they say, to Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who chairs the committee, and obviously made a review of the controversial FCC decision a priority. Kudos as well to Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana), who was in the broadcasting business himself years ago and understands how easily small and independent media outlets can be muscled out of a market. Burns offered a most disheartening statistic: 85 percent of independent production companies (presumably television, but that might possibly include radio as well) have gone out of business since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. FCC Chairman Michael Powell (son of Secretary of State Colin Powell) responded by pointing out that there were at least 26 independent production companies still in business, as they were providing more than 50 percent of the broadcast networks' prime-time programming.

Of the Democrats on the committee, the junior Senator from New Jersey, veteran Frank Lautenberg, was downright fatherly as he talked to Powell and the other 4 commissioners, saying something along the lines of, "You know how this looks, don't you? You took all those freebies, you seem to have ignored the will of the public, this does not make you look good, so you might as well come clean and let's try to undo the damage." (I hope the reader as well as the Senator will pardon my paraphrasing there; my intent was to convey the message accurately if not verbatim.) And even more senior veteran Sen. Dan Inouye (D-Hawaii) served not only his constituents, but the nation in focusing on the local angle: what will this mean to the people of Hawaii? Will one company take over all the state's media? Will that company even have any connection to the state aside from its media ownership? He ended by conceding that under the new rules, it appeared that Hawaii's media choices could be reduced to two companies: a duopoly. He did not concede that that would be a good thing for his state.

As the committee considered the future of the public airwaves, elsewhere Stanford Law Professor (and blogger) Lawrence Lessig continued his campaign to preserve the public domain. I was the 5,833rd person to sign his petition this morning; by this afternoon more than 7,500 had signed.

All in favor of democracy, cast your vote

I voted again today. In this particular election, I didn't care who won nearly as much as I did the last time I voted: the May 13 Hoboken City Council election, a lively race with 26 candidates for six seats in which my candidate, Beth Mason, was one of the survivors. Nor did I care as much as I will next time: the runoff from that election, a week from today. This was just a primary for assorted local and state offices, with only two minor seats (county executive and county clerk) even contested. On one side, we have the Hudson County Democratic Organization (HCDO), and on the other, a splinter group, Democrats for Hudson County (DfHC). (Hmmm... already this is starting to read like one of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Senior Regional Analyst Michael Shafir's tomes on elections in Moldova or Romania, where alphabet soup is also a factor. We still don't have as many factions of Democrats here as Moldova's wide assortment of parties, but ours is still a lively political scene.) After reading whatever I could find online and in my local newspapers, I decided to vote for the dominant HCDO, primarily because while the DfHC may have a justified grievance or two, their web site seems a bit mean-spirited, amateurish, downright overwrought, and besides they have some serious spelling and punctuation problems.

I voted today not because I feared that the DfHC might manage an upset in those two races and thereby bring ruin upon us by spreading those distressed vibes and misplaced apostrophes to our local government, but because I want to stay in the habit, especially after what I heard the other day. Of the hundreds of people who live in the hundreds of apartments in our building, only a few even bothered to vote in the city council election. Turnout was low all over the city, with only 7,600 (according to the Hoboken Reporter) of Hoboken's more than 38,000 residents exercising their right. Of course, not all residents are eligible to vote, as many are under 18 or are not registered here, or anywhere. But still: Moldova has more political parties than our building has active voters (Moldova even has more ethnic groups than our building has active voters!), yet the people who don't bother voting here love to brag that "this is the best country in the world 'cause we've got democracy." Friends and neighbors, unexercised democracy becomes weak and flabby just as quickly as aging abs. You've got time to go to the gym and ride a bicycle that doesn't go anywhere for 30 minutes while you read The Wall Street Journal, but you can't go across the street to the firehouse and flip a lever or two?

I also voted today for the same reason I sent a message to my Congressman today: to remind our elected representatives that somebody is paying attention. I don't think I changed Rep. Bob Menendez's mind with my plea for him to vote against the Republicans' attempt to replace overtime pay with comp time. But now he has one more message to count when he tells his colleagues there in the House of Representatives that his constituents are opposed to H. R. 1119, so much so that they bother to contact him about it.

If you don't care whether overtime pay is replaced with compensatory time off, if that, then don't bother contacting your own Congressional representative. But if you do, go here to speak up before it's too late: the vote is tentatively scheduled for Thursday.

P.S. Thanks to NJ.com for linking to The Dagley Dagley Daily!

FCC deregulates media ownership as Library of Congress issues ISSN for The Dagley Dagley Daily

It figures: on the very day that the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to deregulate media ownership, we finally received our official International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for The Dagley Dagley Daily.

The ISSN from the Library of Congress will make it easier for librarians, researchers, graduate students and others to find The Dagley Dagley Daily and cite it in scholarly or even non-scholarly papers. The FCC's decision means that one company can own as many newspapers, television stations, radio stations, or other media outlets as it can afford. If that leaves a city, state, or region with only one company controllingall its airwaves and newspapers, every media outlet, well, that's market capitalism.

Although the FCC's move was opposed by an interesting assortment of activists, including not only consumer groups and most everybody on the Left, but William Safire (a conservative who writes, most likely with the assistance of interns, freelancers, and other noncredited workers, for The New York Times, who once was a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon, and who usually stands somewhere to the right of the Right).

Safire wasn't on the scene for the FCC vote, or if he was, he did not join in as protesters reacted to the vote by bursting into song. "Mass deregulation of our mass communication is the end of democracy," the protesters sang as they were led out of the room by police. The Senate Commerce Committee will begin hearings on the controversial FCC decision June 4, so it's not too late to write, call, or fax your elected representative.

From blogger to columnist

Most everyone else in Baghdad may be unemployed, but at least blogger Salam Pax has a new job: he'll be contributing a fortnightly column to the Guardian in London. Read all about it here.