LILEKS (James) The BleatAn absolutely fabulous writer. This is one of the highest forms of the blogging art I have ever seen, although it has been pointed out to me that this is HTML and not a true blog. I’ve linked to his slam of the Michael Moore movie, Farenheit 911, so you could compare it to Christopher Hitchens slam of the movie. Lileks simply kicks Hitchens butt. (not to mention Michael Moores). The piece is simply better constructed and more convincing. He goes after Moore in a most unusual way. Well worth reading. Meanwhile, the Hitchens piece falls apart halfway through and becomes a hopeless ramble. Hitchens did have this one interesting anecdote worth repeating:
In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way.
I’d didn’t see Moores new creation, so I can’t comment on it other than to say I’m sure the film is raking in the dough. Moore is getting rich telling people how screwed up people are as if it isn’t clear enough already. I do blog, so I can comment about that in more detail. It seems to me most people who blog don’t really have an agenda. What makes a blog worth reading is some connection with the blogger or some piece of information that is able to be confirmed and has some larger meaning or importance. Most of the political blogs I’ve seen are full of useless info like this, “So I was going to blog from Fenway, but my computer ran out of batteries and I had to wait until we got back on the plane to plug in.” Big deal, your battery drained, carry a spare battery with you buddy and have a nice flight. Who really cares about this and why bother blogging it?
The Bush Blog contains this nugget of information, “The citizens of Massachusetts will barely recognize the Kerry Democrats visiting their state this week.” Yea, I guess so if you’re from Boston and a guy shows up from LA, Pittsburgh or Chicago for the convention you might not recognize him or barely recognize him or whatever. Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? This nonsense goes on to say, “Their nominee is even more of a mystery”. Like nobody in Boston will recognize John Kerry, who holds a U.S. Senate seat there. Give us a break! This kind of stuff gives blogging a bad name.
I corrected my error with a re-write. 🙂
All that a Blog is, is a web page. Blogging is simply generating web pages in an automated way. I’ve read that “Blogging is changing the media world.” This is always the claim in tech circles. To me, Blogs aren’t a killer application, they may lead to some other applications as they grow. I like blogging because it helps me keep track of information online. I want to setup an encyrpted blog for private data and email storage. Any ideas out there?