Via Kieran at CT, I learn that a new multi-blog enterprise with the working title Pajamas Media is about to be launched in New York. The name is redolent the early days of blogospheric triumphalism, with fact-checkers sitting at computers in their bedrooms, waiting to pounce on the errors of the tired and discredited MSM and their uncritical regurgitation of dripfeeds from inside-the-Beltway sources.

So who is giving the keynote address to this group of rebels against the established order (Answer over the fold).
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I did an interview for Inside Business a while back, about the Internet and similar. A brief snippet went to air last Sunday, though I didn’t see it. There’s a transcript for those interested.

I’ve got on top of my backlog of work sufficiently to spend a couple of hours updating my UQ website with lots of journal and newspaper articles for 2005. I’m also planning for an update and redesign of the Risk and Sustainable Management Group site in the near future.

Read and enjoy!

Tim Worstall, who also has a blogbook coming out, sends news of a wiki for blogs. To quote from the site

For the love of God, no!

They said it shouldn’t be done, and they were probably right, but here it is anyway

The project is still in its infancy, but will be a good resource if it works.

Feeding http://www.johnquiggin.com into this calculation applet, it’s estimated to be worth $US108,391.68, using the same link-to-dollar ratio as the AOL purchase of Weblogs Inc deal for a rumoured $25 million. Crooked Timber is worth nearly a million

fn1. Presumably AOL based its purchase on the value of ads, which are hypothetical in this case.

My column in last weeks Fin (over the fold) was about the implications of blogs and wikis, particularly Wikipedia for the business model of Google, Yahoo and similar firms. Looking at Wikipedia a few days later, not only did I have an entry (not there last time I looked), but my piece had already been quoted. Clearly Wikipedia is as collectively self-aware as any of us self-Googling narcissists.
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The mainstream media panic about blogs reaches new heights with a piece by Daniel Lyons in Forbes (free registration required). Thanks to David Heidelberg for the alert.

The title Attack of the blogs is about the most level-headed sentence in the whole piece. The author’s main concern is “attack blogs” that have the temerity to criticise corporations. Bloggers are variously described as “online haters”, “evil” and “an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective”. He suggests using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which requires hosts to take down copyrighted material used without permission) as a way of silencing critics.

Interestingly, Lyons suggests that “50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors”, which rather suggests that the appropriate target of his ire should be the corporate sector rather than the blogosphere.

There’s a lengthy critique at Americablog.
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The Walkley magazine (home of the Walkley awards for journalism – the nominees are in this issue), has a feature about blogging, including a bit from me. The money quote from the main article is

Daily Telegraph columnist Anita Quigley spoke for many journalists when she wrote on August 10, 2005: “Why some pimply-faced geek, sicko or average Joe Blow thinks someone else wants to read every random thought that crosses their mind is beyond me. Alongside the belief that we all have a novel in us – we haven’t – blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism.�

There’s also an online blogging forum, but it hasn’t really got started yet.

Also from the Telegraph, a piece by Malcom Farr, which I’ll link without comment. Hat tip, Surfdom

Last night I had the great idea of using Blogpulse trend to look at what had happened to the influence of NY Times columnists since the introduction of Times Select. But these days, it’s difficult to have a really original idea (or maybe just easier to verify unoriginality), and it turns out that Kos beat me to this one a couple of days ago. Anyway I’ve done the work, so here are the results for the last six months on
krugman or “frank rich” or “tom friedman” or “bob herbert” or “david brooks”

The month or so since Times Select came in isn’t unprecedentedly low (there was a similar low patch in June), but blog interest in the NYT certainly appears to have fallen off, as you would expect. And at least some of the recent posts are the tail of the discussion about TS itself, visible as a spike in mid-September.

Meanwhile, AOL has abandoned its decade-old attempt to create a walled garden of pay-only content (and therefore gets a much-coveted link from this blog).

Those who follow buzzwords will have seen lots of references lately to Web 2.0. This is the new collaborative interweb, symbolised by the transition from (more-or-less static) personal websites to blogging (other examples are Flickr, Wikipedia and so on).

I’ve always wanted to coin a buzzword of my own, so my idea was Web 2.1. Being the .1 version, this would actually work. Links wouldn’t rot, spammers would be automagically repelled, comments wouldn’t vanish into some ethereal sub-realm of the database and so on.

But, of course, I was too slow. A month ago, this would have been an original idea, but Google already shows 65000 hits for “Web 2.1”, and a fair few of the first 100 are playing variants on the same riff. Here’s a link from Ozplogger Trevor Cook