Blogs can be slow and wrong: Memeorandum and Ben Smith

I love Memeorandum and can admit to a guilty addiction to Techmeme. Gabe Rivera has successfully built four sites (baseball and gossip, too) in which “traditional media,” blogs and all the rest are blended into RSS goodness. But today’s Politico Edwards error demonstrate the problem of an editor-less code-reliant news site. Some five hours after Ben Smith had posted his mea culpa, the top story on Mememorandum continued to be his incorrect “Edwards to Suspend Campaign” story.

Clearly, Ben Smith’s error should not be framed as “the blogs are spreading false information” claim. Never mind that Politico is as close to mainstream as a non-dead tree publisher can be: E&P notes that Politico was not alone:

Outlets falling for it ranged from MSNBC to the Washington Times, which headlined its story “Report: Edwards Suspending Campaigning.” This appeared shortly before his scheduled noon announcement. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday were among many others which also headlined the “suspension” on their sites.

The source for many of the reports was a blog item on Politico.com. The author, Ben Smith, later admitted it was based on a single source and he apologized.

But another source was Reuters, which also had utilized a single source. ABC News’ web site, among others, picked it up after 11 a.m. The Washington Post site carried the Reuters item with the headline: “Edwards to suspend presidential campaign: source.” 

Mil bloggers on the Washington Post’s Walter Reed Series

In case anybody needed it, the Washington Post last week provided more proof of the value of professional news gatherers. The two-part series by Dana Priest and Anne Hull on the treatment of outpatients Walter Reed hospital (Part 1 and Part 2) has already resulted in a a Pentagon review, Congressional investigations and hearings, administrative promises and some paint jobs and is likely to receive wide Pulitzer and other critical praise. From the series’ opening graphs:

5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely — a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them — the majority soldiers, with some Marines — have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially — they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 — that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

What are bloggers, particularly mil bloggers, saying about the Post’s series?

Here are Andi’s thoughts:

While this story does have merit, for every one bad story, and it is bad, there are five hundred stories of hope and inspiration that unfold daily inside the gates of Walter Reed. There are miracle workers who save lives. There are people who give of their time and money to bring joy and cheer to our wounded troops. But alas, these stories are just not sexy enough. Nor do they require covert operations on behalf of reporters.

Mil blogger JR Salzman , living at Walter Reed calls part 1:

definitely the most accurate story on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, my home since Christmas Eve 2006, and for many months to come…No one knows where to go to get things done, what forms are needed, or the SOP for getting anything done. Expect to go to half a dozen different places, getting routed from one office to another before finally landing where you need to, only to have to run around to three or four different offices hunting people down for the necessary signatures. To put it plainly, their system of getting things done is more than “broke”…Over in Iraq I would lead our 20 to 30 vehicle convoys through some of the most dangerous areas on the roads over there. Now I get treated like a little kid, or more so like a normal garrison soldier, not a patient with special needs. It takes me a lot longer to do things because I only have half a hand left. Little things like tying my shoes or zipping my coat are huge obstacles to be overcome. Forget about me putting on a full ACU uniform with boots. I can’t do it myself, so my wife has to help dress me.

Fuzzybear Lioness is more critical, at least of the second article in the series:

the second WaPo article (about Mologne House) was a breathless, vile and agenda-driven piece of **** ; the first WaPo article (about Building 18, an outpatient residential facility) was also breathless and agenda-driven but largely accurate in the issues it raised about the problems at Building 18 and the broken bureaucracy of med boards and treatment/housing for the wounded after their initial hospitalization.

From My Position shares his experiences at Walter Reed:

the chain of command at med hold actually reviews the lists of people going to morale events–to the Pentagon welcome home ceremony, concerts, movies, even Fran Obrien’s–to see if soldiers are able to work. Their thinking: if you can go do this stuff, then you can do work for med hold company. Sitting at a desk doing mindless tasks for eight hours is SO much like visiting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for a two hour picnic. It is so bad that they often pair tow cripples together, so they can keep each other awake, despite all the painkillers. It’s also pretty common to see spouses just sitting at the desk with their soldier, to make sure that they are okay–often, the soldiers are unconscious or barely conscious, in their painkiller induced stupor–but they do these jobs because someone decided that they couldn’t just stay in their rooms, and besides, they manage to have the energy to go on these trips, right?

He also has interesting thoughts on the

charities who help the wounded–whether flying them or their families to hospitals, making Velcro clothes so they can dress themselves, helping to take care of the soldier’s kids, getting them a drastically discounted rental vehicle so they can get from hospital to hotel and back, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. Every single gap that a charity had to fill equates to a leadership failure–a failure to recognize the unique needs of the soldiers and their families…. when a wounded soldier has to rely on the sympathy and charity of others to simply live day to day, to meet his most basic needs, then the Army, and the government as a whole, has failed them.

Blogging Pols

Following on the elections, I’ve collected some more examples of public officials who blog—and some who don’t.

Example 1: Massachusetts

John Palfrey (”One of the questions that’s always bothered me is why candidates who use the Internet to get elected seem to use the Internet much less effectively as they are governing.”) and Dave Weinberger (”There’s no place for citizens to post in public and talk with one another.”) have both pointed, with varying degrees of optimism, to Mass. Governor-elect Deval Patrick’s transition web page.

Example 2: China

Over at Global Voices, John Kennedy (via Rebecca MacKinnon) reviews blogging pols in China. Kennedy asks if blogs are “an effective way for public servants to hold themselves accountable to city residents? Or yet another empty symbol of a feedback mechanism?”

Example 3: Nigeria

Ethan Zuckerman points to the blog of Donald Duke Calabar, the governor of Nigeria’s Cross River State. (Duke is a member of the PDP, which is the party preferred by at least some of my Nigerian neighbors.)

Example 4:

Alas, here in Cook County we have no such shining paragon of openness, having offered our blogging junior Senator up to the world. Who wouldn’t enjoy reading blogs by Todd Stroger, soon-to-be ex- County Board President Bobbi Bobbie Steele, Mayor Daley or some of his pals.

We do have CTA Chair Carole Brown’s blog, which I pointed to last month. After more than a month of silence, she has a new post, and it seems she’s been listening to the comments and even breaks some news:

Some of you have asked about recent construction reports and slow zones. CTA’s new manager in charge of construction, engineering, and facilities began work at CTA in early November. I wanted to give him a chance to review some of the research I have requested on slow zones before presenting it to the board. That presentation has been set for our December board meeting.

 

Blogs and Newspapers Take Different Cuts on Gates

Richard Sambrook compares the ways in which the major newspapers are covering Robert Gates’ nomination to the coverage in blogs:

Both constituencies are using the tools and processes they have - access to politicians and opinion formers in the case of the press, internet research and networked knowledge in the case of the blogs. What’s interesting is the gap in the image that emerges - a gap that hopefully the Senate hearings will close.

Josh Marshall’s newest team member David Kurtz has been looking into the question of when the Gates hearings should occur. He doesn’t understand why Senate Dems “are not demanding full hearings on the Gates nomination after the first of the year. No one is eager for Rumsfeld to hold the post for a minute longer than necessary, but what better way for Democrats to begin to exert control over Iraq policy. You want to do oversight on Iraq? Start there.”

Later, Kirk juxtaposes the positions of two readers:

From TPM Reader JW:

I don’t see the logic of waiting two months to confirm Gates just to use the hearings as a platform to talk about Iraq. The Democrats …don’t have anything on Gates that would prevent him from becoming Defense Secretary. It’s pretty clear they’re going to have to work with Gates; why make him the whipping boy from the outset?

Then again, TPM Reader EC:

It really is important to maintain that the problems with Iraq don’t simply go away with Rumsfeld’s departure. The administration OWNS this one, and whether Rumsfeld leaves immediately or lingers until a successor is confirmed should not matter… If there’s a mandate in any of this, it’s that the American people don’t trust a Republican Congress to run things…and that should certainly include the relatively important decision of who replaces Rumsfeld. Democrats should support an extensive, reasonable examination of any nominee for any position; that can’t and won’t happen if they appear too timid to challenge the administration on the timing.

Will My Mother-in-Law Blog?

My suegra left her first comment on a blog yesterday. In a voice mail thanking her, I encouraged her to start her blog:afterall, she's a bright, witty woman with a lot to say about the state of the world. But will she? Will blogging become the next email, as some predict– an Internet activity that everyone does? Or is merely a geek activity more appropriate to debates about the validity of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 conclusion than to mainstream discussions?

These questions are coming to the fore a bit more. Can those of us like Ethan , who are "who are enthusiastic about the read/write web" take heart in the recent Pew Iternet Study that found that 57% of adult respondents have created and shared something online? Are we sobered by the release of research like Eszter Hargittai's that shows the number of folks actually engaging with blogs and read-write web devices is astonishingly low? Jakob Nielsen makes similar points in a discussion with Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine:

You are extrapolating from your personal experience. This is invalid. You are not an average user….

Jeff responded,

Who would have thought even a year ago that the BBC, The Guardian, CNN, CBS, and other major media would need to run to catch up with this wacky thing called the podcast — and that once they did catch up, they’d serve them to large and devoted audiences.

And who says we need to create for the average anymore? Who the hell is average? No one is. The beauty of this new world is that we can create and serve in many ways for many people and needs and interests.

And Jakob responds in a comment :

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction.

[UPDATED: I meant to add: with RSS' spread into mainstream products like IE7, the New York Times' MyTimes, and Yahoo, won't that tiny fraction grow exponentially?]

Relatedly, John Dickerson, in his article on Lieberman challenger Ned Lamont, asks whether blog-driven challenger Lamont has

tapped into a winning political movement, or does he just have a bunch of supporters who can type quickly?

Like Ethan and Jeff, I'm an optimist– I think the blogosphere is certainly more than quick typers. But, per Eszter and Nielsen's challenges, where's the data, Pew phone studies notwithstanding? In a similar vein, see the comments left by Eszter and Pat Aufterheide in response to my post about Saul Hansell's optimism that MySpace is a media literacy tool:

Eszter: "I am not sure who are all these people he is talking about who are or will be participating actively enough to learn. But it will be interesting to follow and find out."
Pat: "The evidence at the outset of this phenomenon gives us no guide."

Notes on Hyperlinked Society

Four top thoughts from the Hyperlinked Society at the Annenberg School, which took place about 12 days ago,  way back at the outset of the World Cup. (These are paraphrases, not quotes– I dongt tpey so good.)

  o       Professional and amateur approaches are not at odds, but rather complement each other. –Martin Nisenholtz, Sr. VP, Digital Operations, The New York Times Company

o       The future is hybrid professional/amateur models like OhMyNews and NYT’s partnership with About.com [Jimmy Wales]

o       Media literacy will be achieved through doing; an understanding of media will result from participatory media; people will perceive how other media are constructed by making their own. [saul hansell, New York Times]

o       Blogging finds most traction in counties that combine repression with digital infrastructure, Iran, e.g. [Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices Online] (Though I wonder about Ethan's example– myarmchair reviews of the data on Iranian blogging lead me to doubt their validity.) 

Xu Jing Lei Takes Boing Boing’s Crown

Steve Rubel points to Sam Fleming's succesful argument that Technorati was not correctly weighing Chinese blogs. This demonstrates once again that data about Internet traffic and usage are unreliable– especially when we're talking about the non-English Internet. Chinese actress Xu Jing Lei doesn't have a (English) wikipedia entry yet– other than the stub I just started– but Sam in Shanghai gives some of her data:

She can get well over 100,000 page views per article and at least 1,000 comments per article, sometimes 3-4,000. I would be curious how many blogs can generate thousands comments per article on a regular basis. Granted, Xu Jing Lei is not your typical "citizen" blogger, but her not being on the list suggests that Technorati is missing Sina. And if they are missing Sina, Bokee, and Blogbus…then they are missing a big chunk of the Chinese blogosphere.

Ethan Zuckerman says all thisgoes to prove the need for projects like Global Voices and Blogamundo:

All of which suggests that English-language blogging is becoming a smaller plurality each day. Which makes me very happy that we made the decision a few months ago at Global Voices to focus heavily on translating blog posts as well as linking to them. Haitham, Veronica, David, Feng and Alice have been steadily translating content from Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and French, respectively, and we’ll be introducing our new Portuguese translator in a few days. This has let us run fantastic posts, like this analysis of the Spanish blogosphere’s reaction to today’s boycott of US goods in much of the Spanish-speaking world by David Sasaki. But it makes me hungry for even more, including projects like Blogamundo, which promise large-scale systems to help translate blog content.

In the meantime, monolingual idiots like me are made even more aware of what we’re missing…

If all monolinguists were as "moronic" as Ethan, the world would be a much better place.

LA Times Blogs Immigration, Corrects Falsehoods

Borderline is the new blog from the LA Times. Its latest post debunks ten xenophobic myths, supposedly from the Times, about immigrants. The best part of this is seeing the Times use its blog to address and correct the lies– by using Snopes, no less. (The comments appear to be dominated anti-immigrant advocates.)

Google Over-Values Blogs

This site is proof positive that Google over values blogs. Check it out: do a Google search for "Un Dia Sin Inmigrantes." For some goofy reason, the second site listed is this site, Media Sitrep itself. I humbly submit that this site is not the second most relevant site discussing el dia sin inmigrantes. De todas maneras, bien venidos y disfrute. 

English not leading blog language: Technorati

I'm surprised this hasn't received more attention (it has from Neville and  Ewan McIntosh of the Modern Languages Blog). From David Sifry's latest state of the blogosphere:

…English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore.

And from McIntosh's post:

For linguists, what is amazing and wonderful and scary at the same time is the predominance of Japanese in the blogging world - 31% of all blogs are written in Japanese. Also, Chinese is on an equal pegging with English at 25%. Why is this scary? Because we're teaching all the languages that rank WAY under these two foreign languages. Clearly, the blogosphere is one place where authentic 'flattening' of the linguistic world is already happening.

So, what does this mean for the unity of the blogosphere? I can only comprehend one-third of  he blog posts out there.