May 28, 2002Martin Nisenholtz claims that the "weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media".He’s right, of course. We’ve had OpEd pages for more than 100 years, Xeroxed family Christmas newsletters for 50 years, home pages for a decade. A blog, seen on its own, does no more than mix these old ingredients in a new pot. Bloggers have thrashed the likes of Nisenholtz with arguments that blogs are better, faster and cheaper than "old" media. But the point, I think, is that blogs don't just excel existing media, they are beyond media. Blogs aren't nu-media but unmedia.

April 25, 2002 "What do weddings, the Super Bowl, presidential inaugurations, graduation ceremonies and political rallies... have in common?" asks Virginia Postrel in today's New York Times.

April 16, 2002 Last November, I bought a notebook. I'm on my third now. Each notebook has 80 sheets, is 4.5 by 3.25 inches and fills up in about six or seven weeks. I last used a notebook like this when I was in fifth grade. Yes, my notebook is not searchable or easily synched with Outlook. The ink smears, the pages wrinkle, the binding frays. I love it.

April 13, 2002 From what bottomless well does Glenn Reynolds, a full-time law professor, draw Instapundit.com? Is Reynolds really "a giant IBM supercomputer -- like the one that beat Kasparov in '97"?

April 4, 2002 What is it about blogs that so confuses and concerns newspaper columnists? I think most columnists lack the experiences and conceptual categories to understand "the blog." Like a one-year-old baby grappling with the idea of other beings, the average newspaperman scribbling about bloggers can describe "the other" only as an ersatz version of himself.

March 5, 2002 Many thanks to science fiction editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden for calling my recent enumeration of winning blog traits "the best of the many overviews of the Blog Phenom we've all been reading lately."

February 25, 2002 The traditional press (known in some circles as "old media") is jumping on the blogger story, writing about and drafting bloggers. The time seems ripe to recap the coverage and to describe what makes the blog so threatening to media incumbents: timeliness, willingness to credit others, passion, blogrolling, human interest, chronology, and devotion.

November 27, 2001 Why is open-source code (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Zope) so adept at filling market segments missed by titans like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle? How can a rag-tag army of uncompensated minute-men so consistently beat the well-financed Red-coats?

October 4, 2001 In the last blog, I argued that September 11 burst the seams of professional news sites & that these sites could learn from the contrasting success of blogs. Here are some other perspectives:

September 20, 2001 Last Tuesday, I could not bear to turn on the television and watch the raw broadcasts. Instead, I compulsively riffled across the web trying to piece together how and why and what was happening.

September 5, 2001 This page is where, after a long day at work, Pressflex kicks back, opens the windows, turns up the radio, invites friends over, whoops a little and listens a lot.