But you can still see a cached version of it on Google’s Translate service here.

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My take on anonymity is that it is the right of every citizen of the Internet to decide how much or little of their personal information they choose to divulge and when. Unlike other forms of communication, Internet information has a way of staying around forever and being publicly available, which means that the normal rules of disclosure do not always apply. For my own part, I really don’t care what anyone thinks of my personal political views; if someone changes their mind about employing me because of something I’ve said on this website, they can go outside and play a game of Hide and Go Fuck Yourself.

But the decision whether or not to reveal one’s identity has nothing much to do with the veracity of one’s writing. Clearly, Smugtown has an authority issue on this one. An authority issue that goes beyond the relatively petty disagreements between private publishers and seems by all accounts – including those of City Newspaper – to be affecting the democratic process in Monroe County.

Late Update: I’m also told that this Smugtown thing appears to be a bit of astroturf. They’re apparently advertising in City Newspaper and paid someone to get a professional website done for them. To each his own and my design skills are hardly immune to critcism, but it looks to me like the site was built by the same person who did the RBJDaily.com site, which is a piss-poor representation of what modern Internet sites should look like:

RBJDaily.Net: No RSS, Ten Year-Old HTML Style

The Smugtown Beacon: no RSS and fifteen year-old HTML style. This is the face of Hypertextile Dysfunction.

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So just a reminder to be on your toes. This issue of quoting original sources (called a bibliography when I was in school, and a means to avoid copyright infringement) comes back every so often. Now with a down economy and newspapers becoming dinosaurs sinking in the tar, they’re kind of dangerous animals.

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Nothing big, I’m confident I’ll live. But keeping this foot raised makes it difficult to get to the keyboard. So, keep looking at the headlines, as I’ll try to keep those updated. But don’t look for too much analysis today or this weekend. See you Monday!

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The short answer is, I think, that Progressivism is less easily defined – and more importantly – that it’s very factional.  This means: some of us are economic progressives, others gay rights activists, others many other things.  You don’t have to be all of the above in order to be a Progressive and one rarely is.  That means that Progressives often feel that thier niche issue is not getting the exposure that they feel it deserves.

That lends itself to the need for self-expression on a very personal level.  That, I think, leads heavily to blogging

By comparison, Conservative values can be boiled down to small government, low taxes and strong military.  You don’t need a lot of voices to make that happen.

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It’s sure to be a great program, so I hope you all check it out.  It’s tonight at 10px on cable channel 16.  I guess we’ll also be doing a bit of live-blogging, so be sure to drag your laptop in front of the television and check in here for the latest!

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jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a crap about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more. (just sayin’).
Also miss jolie says she likes mccain too and hasn’t decided who to endorse….huh? Aren’t you supposed to be somewhat enlightened, or do you not know that the african daughter you hold in every picture had parents who suffered and died because of the republican party’s worldwide economic assault on africa over the last few decades since reagan? whaaaa…??????!!!! (for that matter, the thai and vietnamese sons you are photo’d with weekly too!!!? who’s pictures you sell to raise money to help the poor? Their families are victims of America’s right wing military incursions too. Mccain wants to continue with the idea of war for profit…the americans are over that thinking now! They have drugged our troops and lower classes into supporting their oil business atrocities for long enough. We want to save not lose our souls thank you. Now go back to making your movies about women who love to handle big guns that shoot hundreds of people to death. Ps….it might be good for your asian and african children’s self esteem to know you support a brown man for the leader of the free world.)

Granted, her English skills could use some brushing up and she’s a bit over-fond of punctuation, but hey!  It’s all just criticism, after all.

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Evan asked the following:

1) Elmer writes on The Fighting 29th that blogs offer a real chance to find misinformation. While that might be true, doesn’t it seem that blogs are rising as a form of respected journalism?

To the extent that blogging is journalism – or rather, in those cases where it might be seen as journalism – the quality of the content does indeed have the potential to be quite suspect. Then again, the recent history of main stream journalism doesn’t leave traditional news outlets with much to crow about in the veracity department. Mr. Dawson points out the Fast Ferry debacle as one local example, but there are many others.

Actually, blog journalism and traditional journalism have a lot more in common than is generally acknowledged, and perhaps if traditional media considered blogging a return to roots, our democracy’s informed public would be much better off. If you look at many articles posted to the D&C or any other traditional print publication, you will find that the story that runs isn’t really original reporting by the paper in question, but rather a reprinting of an AP news ticker story with perhaps a bit of editing and a few paras thrown in about the local reaction to the story. The same goes for television and radio news, where reports by correspondents from outside the station are rebroadcast.  Additional local context or editorializing is done by the anchor before and after the piece. This is not one or two stories, but rather a consistent pattern.

Blogs do much of the same, though the ratio of original content is often opposite: we usually read a full article from a traditional source, quote a paragraph or two, link back to it and then add our own reporting, commentary or whatever along side it. I have often said that blogging might be thought of in many cases as “meta-journalism,” adding additional context to stories carried by mainstream media, or taking two or three stories and putting them together to paint a more complete picture that might get missed when reporting gets too far into the weeds.

So while traditional outlets often advertise themselves with pretentious tag lines like “the most trusted name in news,” or “digging for answers, reporting them first,” the truth is that they are rarely the sole source of information, they rely on collaboration and fair use as much as any blogger, and in fact they are at least as given to inaccuracy as the blogging community and more so.

Why more so? Because the very nature of the Internet – let alone blogging – is collaborative and based on collective assent. Open Source software, for example, relies on many programmers to write code and check each other’s work, and only when that work gets accepted by a plurality is it included in the project. This here blog is proudly powered by one of the greats of Open Source: WordPress. Similarly, bloggers have the ability to spew off whatever ignorant or factually incorrect garbage they want to, but in order for there to be a general consensus of fact, many blogs, bloggers and readers have to agree that what is being said is factual. That’s not as easy nor as prone to mistakes as you might think. Come to think of it, Elmer, the reader from whence the question originates, is a notorious fact checker.

You don’t earn readers by making statements you can’t back up. You don’t earn respect in the blogging community without linking back to where you got your facts from. Obviously, some of us have a few anonymous sources and avenues of finding information that we can’t always disclose. But by and large, debating an issue without proving you are right with external verification is a losing proposition on the Internet. Hence, hyperlinks and quotations become sort of an inline bibliography from where you back your reporting up. No such vehicle exists or ever has existed for traditional journalism.

The tremendous advantage that MSM sources do have is resources. This is the primary reason that large media outlets are not likely to go away: having a plurality of journalists – some hired, some freelance – all covering one story for your paper means you get access to stuff we bloggers don’t get. Having a television station that reaches an entire constituency means getting interviews and access we bloggers don’t enjoy.

But having those advantages also means having tremendous responsibility as well.  That responsibility is not always lived up to, and so blogs also perform the job of fact-checking the media from time to time.

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