David Kline, co-author of the blogging book I contributed to appeared on The O’Reilly Factor Tuesday night.

[...]the show turned out to be a total set-up job in which host Bill O’Reilly and guest Jed Babbin spent the entire time attacking the web site Media Matters for having posted commentary in the past critical of them both.

If you’re interested in how shows like the O’Reilly Factor work, then let me explain how the ambush against Media Matters — and against political blogs in general — came about.

Links:
David’s blog post about the interview (with more than 100 comments).
Media Matters video of O’Reilly interview.

So nobody in the UK knows what blogging is and we’re all wasting our time. Or perhaps they do know what blogging is and this new survey about blogging in the UK is wasting our time.

A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers — often seen as barometers of popular trends — found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.

Funny that. Three professions that spend all day interacting with people and none of their day at a computer. And they don’t know what blogging is. Well, I never…

Today’s links:
Danish air force admit liability in reindeer sleighing! (via Lise)
Pooter Geek has ten products routinely used in ways which expressly contradict their accompanying instructions or break English law.

I am not a big fan of the “citizen journalism” being practiced on the Internet these days. One of the tenets of “real” journalism is that you don’t distribute information that hasn’t been checked. Citizen publishers are under no such obligation, so the information that winds up in blogs and distributed on mailing lists must always be considered suspect, even if sent with the best of intentions.

So begins a (yawn) dissection of a scintillating article in Publish about misinformation spread (horror) via a mailing list. I could bore you to tears with the details but I’d rather not. (Masochists head this way.) All I have to say is that all information—from the New York Times to BoingBoing—should be treated as suspect. It’s called weighing information; making your own decisions; having a brain.

If you don’t get the New York Times delivered, as of today you won’t be able to read their Op-Ed columnists online—not unless you pay $49.95 a year for the privilege of a TimesSelect account. The New York Times is putting its prized writers behind a paywall.

Andrew Sullivan has some interesting things to say about it (he doesn’t understand why they’ve done it and thinks it is bad). As of tomorrow, his blog posts will be appearing on the Washington Post website as part of a four-day trial merging online newspapers with blogs.

To be fair to the Times, TimesSelect offers a lot more than just access to Op-Eds. As a New York Times subscriber, and therefore a TimesSelect member, I will at last have access to the newspaper’s archive as well as multimedia presentations like video profiles, photo essays, roundtable discussions and soon-to-be launched podcasts. That’s great for me. But what about everyone else? Doubtless, some will continue to read and comment upon Dowd and Krugman et al despite the fact that many of their readers will not be able to access their articles. But many will probably move elsewhere and the Times will be talked about less among bloggers.

It’s a phenomenon I discussed at length with Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen in interviews for the Blog! (shameless plug) book. Both of them, like Sullivan, considered it an ill-considered move for the newspaper of record. Unlike the WaPo which seems to be getting creative in its attempts to increase its online market share.

UPDATE: There’s a brief but interesting interview with Diane McNulty, the NYT’s Group Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations, over at Mediabistro. The following was of particular interest:

We expect to have an affiliate program for bloggers in place by the end of the year that will offer bloggers financial incentives to link to TimesSelect content.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sullivan pronounces the trial a success.

The whole raison d’etre of a blog is that it provides an immediate – sometimes intellectual, sometimes visceral – response to events. Blog articles are not commissioned. Blogs are not sub edited. Bloggers are not line managed. Indeed, blogging only works if bloggers can freely write things which are accidentally or deliberately offensive. The hope is that gems of wisdom will shine through the muck. And they always do.

If you don’t like what you read on a blog, you simply stop reading it. Or you argue back: temporately or intemporately. But never forget that winning an argument on the internet is equivalent to winning a prize in the Special Olympics.

David T at Harry’s Place on the untimely demise of Shot by Both Sides.