Like Gregory Kohs, I’ve learnt not to “wrestle with a pig.” And “I know you shouldn’t feed the trolls.” But Diigo makes it easy for me to comment through annotation. So I’ve done so. As an exercise.

Besides, Jason Calacanis‘s call to the “JasonNation” was too funny not to be heeded.
Just don’t expect me to take the linkbait. Now, if Boutin were French-Canadian, that’d be a different story… 😉

• Blogging grows up | Oh, grow up | The Economist – Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • anthropologically isolated subculture of elite bloggers,
    • In what sense is that group isolated? By virtue of being an elite or by lack of links with other people? The first is tautological, the second is absurd. – post by enkerli
  • Blogging has entered the mainstream
    • Probably the core point of this piece. Apparently the one which finds the most support among commenters. Yet “the lead” is so “buried” that this specific point gets almost lost. – post by enkerli
  • every new medium in history
    • To enhance a text, statements like these would probably require the apparatus of an actual historical perspective. Chances are, the person who wrote this thought about some analogue or two but failed to really think about the complete history of media. – post by enkerli
  • Twitter messages, usually sent from mobile phones, are fewer than 140 characters long and answer the question “What are you doing?”
    • Fairly appropriate description of one form of microblogging. But this would have been an excellent opportunity to discuss what the implications of this potential shift to microblogging really are. Given the source of this piece, one would have expected some insight into the financial implications, at the very least. – post by enkerli
  • Google, the Wal-Mart of the internet
    • Such an off-hand comment is a very inefficient way to bring about real discussion. It’s either superfluous or incomplete. – post by enkerli
  • runs Twitter
    • Given the context (with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as other key figures), this statement is too ambiguous to be really useful. Yes, Williams is CEO and a CEO “runs” a company. But the immediate context for this statement makes it sound as if Williams had single-handedly taken control of Twitter, as a direct consequence of the Blogger buyout. – post by enkerli
  • These “new media” firms are now suffering from the same advertising slowdown as their offline rivals. Gawker, a gossip-blog empire, has already begun laying off bloggers.
    • Surprising that such an important part of the story should only merit two sentences in the article. Especially in The Economist. What’s more problematic is that it seems to imply that the Gawker layoffs might be representative of the inexorable effects of the advertising slowdown. In a business-oriented publication, such an assertion merits thorough analysis. – post by enkerli
  • just another business tool
    • Sounds dismissive. Did strumpette write this? – post by enkerli
  • any sense that
    • Absolute statements like these are enough to make critical thinkers cringe. – post by enkerli
  • Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.
    • Brief description of something which could lead to actual insight. Underdeveloped as is, could merit its own article. Too fragmentary in this context. – post by enkerli

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.