The fella behind the ubiquitous blog
Stuff White People Like has published a
book based on the blog. I've been interested in how this might turn out and stumbled across
this review of the book in Variety:
Anyone who reads Stuff White People Like without perusing the blog it is based upon first, might well wonder what all the fuss is about. Stripped of the blog's media riffs, hyperlinks and swiped photos — its very blogginess — the tome must rely on the wit and insight of its "research findings," and there's not much of that.
The beauty of the Internet is getting to say exactly what you want in a public forum, right?(Well that and stalking ex-boyfriends and shopping at work, but I digress.) The ability to speak one's mind in bytes and blips has
landed one blogger with a jail sentence for extremism. A Russian man who called the local police “scum” and calling for the clean-up of the force he blogged that the police should be burned in the town square twice a day. For this posting, was convicted of “inciting hatred or enmity” and given a one-year suspended sentence.
Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal (subtitled: Embrace the Suck) is embracing no more. The blog, kept by a soldier
who wrote under the name LT G in Iraq, known as one of the most honest and compelling dispatches of blogging from the warfront, has been shut down by those above his pay grade.
Kaboom's LT G wrote often about his periodic wide-open disregard for military decorum (sometimes openly questioning superiors online) and just as often mused on the daily personal exploits of time in country — like the time he almost went out into the warzone sans pants.
In a stellar hybrid of New York magazine's Approval Matrix and the fascinating
Political Compass, this week's fun tidbit from Vanity Fair shows the big blogs
on a spectrum from news to opinion and scurrilous to earnest. Who doesn't want to see where
Politico stacks up against
Radar, and
Michelle Malkin against
FireDogLake?
With rollover pics popping up fairly pointed descriptions of the blogs, it does
fairly point out that the Huffington Post is shamelessly pro-Obama and that Drudge has an unfailing reach with his Republican-friendly headlines and ugly step-sister graphics.
I guess it's true: We really are
person of the year. This morning, while covering the devastation caused by the tornadoes that ripped through the mid-south, CNN relied on reporting from some very personal sources: Facebook and blogs. Using pictures of upturned cars posted on local Facebook pages and
reading a posting from the blog Sassy Southerner to report the story, CNN pulled together a very eyewitness account, using no formal reportage.
One of my most-visited television blogs is
TV with MeeVee, because it's always scoring all sorts of cool interviews and other goods on my favorite shows. So I'm psyched that BuzzSugar gets to be a part of MeeVee's newly launched blog aggregator, called
Blog Central. The site, which went live today, will round up the TV blogs' best interviews, videos, recaps, and news stories, including posts by yours truly!
