publish first, edit later

Some links from The Observer

A catch-up of stuff from The Observer - I'll explain why shortly.

John Hind on stuff that disappears off YouTube, Rachel Cooke wading into the whole fuss re lit bloggers and establishment critics, previously picked over by Richard Lea. Alan Bisset's response could be useful. Finally, David Smith's round-up of/response to the beginnings of Web 3.0 hype.

More Big Media on personal media

Last bit of late night link dumping - I need to read this John Pareles piece from the NYT, '2006, Brought to You  by You'. Found it via Nicholas Carr, who, unsuprisingly goes for, and extends the critical take on user generated content and the self-expression explosion. 

NYT's Year in Ideas

Journalists in the UK love to go on about how boring US newspapers are, compared to our own wonderful rags. Maybe they're right in most cases. But these days I find myself reading the NYT (mostly for its cultural coverage/commentary, not for its news) over anything in the UK.

Actually, I don't know why I'm saying these days. For the last eight years or so, I've been reading the NYT online, for media, tech, culture, the Sunday magazine, books and more. It does certain sorts of stories better thanthe qua lities over here (and a long time before them too). In fact, it's clear that most of the people working on the qualities over here read the NYT avidly and nick its ideas.

I know that bloggers are supposed to hate it and it's supposed to be this tedious, hidebound, doomed institution. But in all sorts of ways, even online, it's just more fun to read than some of the big name Brit papers.

Why am I rabbiting on like this? Mainly because one of my favourite regular issues of the NYT Sunday Mag came out last Sunday - the annual Year in Ideas special. Will dip into it over the next week or so, if it stays online. Expect to see the better ideas in here appearing in The Observer in a couple of weeks. At first scan, I like Rob Walker's quick take on the 'trend boom', that is, the trend for trends, sparked by sites like Trendwatching, which I used to read with a kind of elated horror a few years back.

Music recommendations without music journalists?

The Guardian Tech section has a useful look at the role social networking sites like MySpace play in music recommendation and how the record industry is trying to take advantage. Could be useful for my dissertation students who are interested in the way the net is changing music journalism.

Arianna Huffington in The Observer

OK - I need this for teaching, this being an Observer Magazine profile of Arianna Huffington, the woman behind the HuffPo and the 'Queen of the Blogosphere', apparently. Haven't read it yet, so am not really in a position to be snarky about this socially well-connected upscale media pundit and her crusade for the little guy and against the traditional, well connected upscape media world.

But scanning it briefly, I noticed this quote:

To watch Arianna at work is to see a human blog in action. Each air kiss seems like the click of a computer's mouse, each handshake a link to another potential blogger in an ever-growing network of movers and shakers.

Have just finished Fred Turner's brilliant (but kind of repetitive) 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture', an examination of the way certain strands of countercultural utopianism fed into the whole cyber thing. He points out how, in Wired, in several profiles of digital pundits (George Gilder, Esther Dyson) there was a whole trope of describing them as 'human computers'.

It's a random link, but I wonder if it's worth unpacking slightly, at a later date.

How I blog

In bursts, clearly, when I get a free evening, or day. I store stuff up in my head while I'm doing other things, or I save clippings of things I want to blog about (that can't be right). Then if I get time, I blurt it out. If not, I forget it, or the clippings wind up in the recycling bin or my bombsite of an office

All of which means I need to change the way I work if I want to blog more.