For a project I’m working on (not MediaBugs but another effort in the media realm that’s a collaboration with Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon):

We have some work for a designer who’s got lots of experience with Drupal to help us finish up a partially implemented design. This is a short-… Read full post »

[crossposted from the MediaBugs blog]

Americans trust the news media less than ever: “Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate,” according to the latest results from the Pew Research Center rel… Read full post »

I’ve begun blogging over at MediaBugs.org on topics that relate to that project — specifically, journalistic accuracy, error corrections, and the state of trust in media. The blog will also report on our progress bringing that project to life in coming weeks. I’m not going to make a… Read full post »

Mark Bowden is a seriously good reporter, and his piece in the new Atlantic, “The Story Behind the Story,” is one that every student of today’s mutating media should read. Bowden traces the route by which the soundbite that came to define, though not derail, Sonia Sotomayor’s… Read full post »

The story of the rise of Blogger from the ashes of a dotcom startup to the largest blogging service in the world takes up a whole chapter in Say Everything. So when Rick Klau of Google’s Blogger team invited me to participate in a panel as part of Blogger’s 10th birthday… Read full post »

“Everyone’s a critic” used to be a joke; now it’s a fact. You may take populist pride in the Web’s profusion of user-contributed reviews; you may wish Yelp had never been invented. Either way, if you create stuff or sell things, you’re going to get written about.

A… Read full post »

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!
– Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

This week… Read full post »

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will beco

… Read full post »

Say Everything is getting around. Here’s some links to recent coverage and related stuff:

My two favorite speaking gigs about the book are now both online. Fora.tv was there at the Hillside Club in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video, in which you can, among other things, hea… Read full post »

I’m fascinated by this: Paul Graham’s startup-seeding outfit, Y Combinator, has announced that, with each new funding cycle, it’s now going to issue a sort of open call for submissions in a particular area. The general idea is what interested TechCrunch in writing the story up. But… Read full post »

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of talking about Say Everything with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum. I don’t think I fully infected Michael with my enthusiasm for bloggers and their place in our culture, but I was grateful for the rare opportunity this show (and host) provides to dig rea… Read full post »

A lot of people have flagged Benedict Carey’s piece in yesterday’s Times, “In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable,” and with good reason: it’s a fascinating report on research into the way the brain combines visual data and emotional responses to shape the sort of insta… Read full post »

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 29) at 7:30 pm, I’m speaking about Say Everything at the Hillside Club here in Berkeley. The event is sponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and also by the Berkeley Cybersalon, a series that I have been attending, in various forms, for 15 years now.

Also, it… Read full post »

Blog historian Rudolf Ammann has done it again. First he pointed out that my statement in Say Everything that Cameron Barrett’s original blogroll had not been archived was inaccurate. Now he has dug up links to most of the original content in Dan Gillmor’s pioneering EJournal blog for the… Read full post »

“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use o… Read full post »

Just a note to let you all know that I’m in Seattle for Say Everything-related events.

If you’re around these parts, come on down to the University Bookstore at 7 p.m. Wednesday for my talk and booksigning. Would love to see you there.

Seattle is in sunny glory tonight. What a… Read full post »

Blogs privilege the “now.” New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to orga… Read full post »

Probably the single question I’m most often asked as I talk to people about Say Everything is: How has Twitter changed blogging? Twitter’s rapid growth — along with the preference of some users for sharing on Facebook and the rise of all sorts of other “microblogging” to… Read full post »

David Carr’s profile of Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke contained two statements that I thought shouldn’t stand without challenge.

She isn’t always right and, as her critics have pointed out, she’s not above using the new-media prerogative of going into her archives and changing

… Read full post »

Designing a good book cover is not easy. I was very pleased with the arresting one we came up with for Say Everything. It takes off from the popular icon for subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, but turns it into something more evocative of a person’s voice sent out into… Read full post »

A new study examines the interplay of mainstream news outlets and blogs in forming the news cycle. One of its findings is that, as a report by Steve Lohr in today’s Times puts it, “For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5… Read full post »

Last Sunday the NY Times mag ran a photo feature on abandoned, half-built real estate projects — casualties of the big bust. The pictures were stunningly otherwordly — eerily lit, human-free canvases of financial devastation. Dayna, my wife, handed me the magazine and asked, “Are th… Read full post »

There is a shortsighted misunderstanding of the motivation of most bloggers that I keep encountering as I’m out there talking about Say Everything. The people asking me questions are naturally, for the most part, journalists; and as I write in the book, journalists as a class have a particularl… Read full post »

Now live on the Say Everything website: The book’s entire set of endnotes, all properly linked to their mostly URL-based sources.

When I started writing for the Web in 1994 I quickly understood that the ability to link directly to sources was a godsend for demonstrating the quality of your work… Read full post »

Today Say Everything is officially on sale, available from your favorite bookseller.

Here’s some quick info about upcoming appearances in the Bay Area:

On July 16, at 7 p.m., I’ll be speaking at Books Inc., the Opera Plaza bookstore in downtown San Francisco.

On July 29, at 7:30… Read full post »