Brad Warthen's Blog

OK, I THINK I've got the comment function on my new blog fixed

I know that at least bud has tried to post a comment at bradwarthen.com and failed. There have probably been others by now. Sorry.

I THINK I've got it fixed now. Please go try, and if you have problems, let me know here.

Today's column, other stuff on my new blog

FYI, today's column -- the long-promised one about Gresham Barrett (a perfectly pedestrian column that didn't deserve such a buildup, but at least it technically fulfills the promise) is to be found on my new blog, bradwarthen.com.

Also, I've posted a nice (I think) note I got from the governor, which I hope you will help me decipher...

Check out bradwarthen.com

There's not much there -- the new blog is just taking its first, teetering, baby steps -- but I urge you to go check out bradwarthen.com, and watch it grow.

I will no longer be doing THIS blog after Friday, so if you want to continue the conversation, you'll have to go there. Again, that address is:

bradwarthen.com

And I promise, there will be much more to see there soon...

This is worse than Facebook

You know how I've complained about how I just don't get Facebook -- that I find it disorienting, and just generally a lousy way to communicate information?

Well, I've found a worse way -- Twitter.

Have you seen this new site that S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP "political operative" Wesley Donehue have started, SCTweets? Basically, its point is:

...to find a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials. Specifically, we expect the Statehouse crew to be twittering a lot from the floor and we thought it would be cool to see what they were saying. That goal somehow expanded and we decided to showcase all South Carolina politicos with our directory. We then gave them a way to interact through #sctweets.

Look, I don't mean to criticize Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue at all. I appreciate the effort. Go for it. But when I try to obtain any sort of information of value from a series of incomplete, typo-ridden sentence fragments from a bunch of people ranging from Anton Gunn to David Thomas to Bob Inglis to Nathan Ballentine to Thad Viers, with a lot of Blogosphere usual suspects such as Mattheus Mei thrown in, I feel like I've trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack with cotton candy and Pop Rocks on top, stirred with a Slim Jim. Just a jumble of junk.

The "authors" aren't to blame. It's the medium. I'm still waiting to find any value in this Twitter thing. I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.

What do I consider to be GOOD way to communicate information? Well, here's a coincidence: I actually looked at my Facebook page this morning, and as usual got little out of it. But I noticed where a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago posted something that seemed a deliberate illustration of the incoherence of Facebook. He exhorted readers to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

So I followed his instructions (except for the posting part). The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here's the fifth sentence on page 56 (if you count the incomplete, continued sentence at the top of the page as the first):

"He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame."

And you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.

It occurs to me that Twitter is the bright new world that that Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extols. And then it occurs to me that to the extent he is right, to the extent that this is the future of political communication, we are in a lot of trouble int his country...

Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

Boy, and they say the MSM can be guilty of hubris...

Some congressman out in Colorado who is apparently overimpressed with himself because he travels the Information Superhighway (golly, how futuristic!), is quoted as saying:

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better...The media is dead and long live the new media."

Here's what's really ironic about this: After this was brought to my attention, I tried following various links to find any sort of authoritative, original source as to what he actually said, and within what context, and found myself bouncing around among a number of poorly designed, unattractive Web pages that didn't tell me much.

Romenesko pointed me to The Denver Post, which pointed me to an alleged "digital recording of the event" at something called coloradopulse.org, which may be the ugliest (and least helpful) Web page I've seen this year. So I struck out on my own, via Google, and found this Denver magazine site (I think), which pointed me to this item from something called "Denver Young Democrats Examiner," which read like someone's very run-of-the-mill blog post written "from the Netroots Nation speaker series at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westminster," which actually told me less than The Denver Post did.

The congressman's own Web site didn't enlighten me. Finally, I went back to Romenesko, which provided a link to where I could listen to the guy's comments, but when it told me it would take 9 minutes to download (it's still downloading as I speak), I lost interest. (By the way, I did run across an entire site devoted to the question, "Who killed the Rocky?" It's apparently done by one of the laid-off journalists, and displays far more Web savvy and accessibility than those other sites I was led to.)

Welcome to the brave new post-newspaper world, in which we all stagger around groping in the dark for information -- and then, when we find it, wondering whom to hold accountable for whether it's right or not. (The answer: Nobody, sucker.)

By the way, as a sort of postscript -- the Post says that on Monday, Rep. Polis was a little more "subdued" on the subject:

"It's not just 200 jobs that have been lost; it's also the silencing of a voice," he said. "The rise of new media and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.

ANOTHER social networking site? ARRGGGHHH!

Just got this press release:

Hi Brad,

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know about a unique social news service that just launched - BUUUZ.com.

Have you ever wanted access to a community of people who have the same interests as you? Where you can share artistic visions, muses and styles? Many people find social websites like Facebook and MySpace invasive and difficult to navigate. At BUUUZ registration is simple and members create virtual "islands" based on subjects of interest (islands are populated with news from websites across the internet as well as BUUUZ community discussion). Creating an "island" for a topic is as easy as picking a few keywords that best describe your interests.

As an example, if you love to oil paint like I do, you can use favorite artists, museums, etc. as island keywords to be alerted on stories and member conversations mentioning them. Then you instantly become a part of a worldwide conversation through this new service, where you can find and interact with new friends who have the same interests.

In light of the Facebook Terms of Service uproar from last week I wanted to mention:

- BUUUZ's subscription revenue model, makes it so they do not have to "fight" with the users about owning their data.
- At BUUUZ, when a user deletes their account, and their data is completely deleted
- BUUUZ has also set up automatic deletion of old messages

Please feel free to take a look at the service at BUUUZ.com and reach out if you would like images or have questions.

Best Regards,
Brent

Brent Bucci
FortyThree PR

... to which I can only say, "ARRGGHHH!" Or, perhaps, "AIIIEEEE!!!" Or somewhat more sedately, "Please; not another freaking social networking site."

Since I did that column over the holidays about Facebook, I have had even MORE "friend requests," and some of them have been from being I actually felt obliged to say "yes" to, so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. (And yes, some of them were people I'd actually like to maintain connections with, but not all...) And some of them were ... a tad... weird. Like, if I thought myself a target for such things, I'd think "stalker." Which is not a good feeling.

Who's got time for all this socializing? Hey, you've got time on your hands, go read a newspaper. And then, go to the mall and buy something, and tell the merchant to buy some ads. Make yourself useful.

My measly 1.5 Million looks sort of sad now

You know, I was going to brag on the blog today because I just noticed that, at 1,473,925 and climbing, this blog will soon pass the 1.5 million-page view mark. Like, within the coming month -- maybe two weeks, maybe three.

I thought that was pretty cool because it took three whole years to reach a million, and here we are at half again that much just nine months later.

But then Tim Geithner comes out with that 1.5 Trillion number, and I just don't feel so special anymore...

Well, if you MUST know...

For this post, I should create several new blog categories, such as "Way more than you wanted to know," and "Extreme disclosure" and ... oh, I don't know what.

Anyway, some of you asked yesterday where I was ("Where the heck is Brad?" quoth KP). Some of you divined political import in my absence from the blog for a day. Back in the second take of comments on this post -- the 41st comment, I believe (16 after you click on "Next") -- I answered the question. I'm not going to repeat the explanation, on the grounds that some of you may be possessed of delicate sensibilities. If you're curious enough, you can go look. And after you do, don't ever accuse me of not being in favor of full disclosure.

Perhaps this would be a good time to remind y'all that:

a) I don't actually get paid an additional dime for blogging; and
b) even if I did, I might occasionally get a weekday off, at the very least for medical purposes.

But hey, I appreciate the concern. And everything was fine, by the way.

Everything's up to date in Pelosi city

Obama finally has his genuine, official presidential seal to speak from behind, but when I saw what Nancy Pelosi did yesterday, the president's trappings looked oh so last century.

Nancy's hep. She's with it. She's on the information superhighway. She's a Cyberspeaker.

Kidding aside, it's smart. You might only get a few seconds on the evening news, but it you can get somebody to go to your Web site, you can unload a truckload of your worldview on 'em. Which she does.

The presidential seal, like a royal coat of arms, communicates traditional authority. A URL communicates information, all you want...

Excuse me for getting all earnest, but how can we interact more meaningfully here?

And yes, I mean "earnest" and not "Ernest" like in my last post, although if you'd like you can attribute the seriousness of my message here to the influence of my serious new notebook.

Anyway, I wrote the following as a followup comment on my otherwise silly, fun post on Tina Fey, and it occurred to me I should elevate it to a separate post and see if we can get a good dialogue going on the subject here. Rather than rewrite it, I repeat myself:

Funny thing is, I used to not like Tina Fey -- or Jimmy Fallon, or, going way back before them, Dennis Miller -- in their Weekend Update days.

As y'all know, I like to have fun and kid around, but I do take the news and the issues of the day seriously, and at some point I get turned off by people who day in and day out sneer and make jokes of serious issues. I mean, let's have fun and kid around, but when one's entire diet of commentary consists of such junk food, and it's all about mocking and never taking anything seriously, I think it has a corrosive effect on society. Taken at it's extreme, I think it has helped raise a generation that has trouble respecting anyone and anything in politics. The constant drip, drip of smarmy satire adds to all the partisan attack politics and tactics of personal destruction to prevent us from coming together to solve the problems we have in common -- which is what representative democracy can be all about.

Needless to say, I have NO appreciation for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. And while I enjoyed meeting and kidding around with Stephen Colbert (see video), I can't get into his shtick, either.

But even though the Palin gag was pretty hard-hitting satire, it was so enjoyable that it caused me to have a soft spot for Tina I didn't have before.

I should also mention that I revised my opinion of Dennis Miller just from the couple of brief spots I've done on his radio show. I had always thought of him as just too much of a wise guy, too impressed with his own snarky cleverness, to be borne. But he's actually deeper than that, and pleasant to talk to.

Of course, this is just a corollary to something I've found about life -- almost anyone is a more likable, admirable person once you get past the shorthand, bumper-sticker version of that person. To know a person is to appreciate him or her more. Maybe this sounds trite, but in our 24/7 headline news/blog world, we increasingly go by the bumper sticker, and don't get into people deeply enough to appreciate them.

And just to get WAY philosophical on you.... One of my great disappointments with this blog is that I had hoped, by having this forum for going way beyond what I'm able to say and explore in the paper, I could forge some avenues where I could have more meaningful exchanges with my readers and fellow citizens about the important issues of the day -- and the people who are important players in those issues.

Unfortunately, the resistance to that is just tremendous. So much of what passes for dialogue here remains on the superficial, partisan, shorthand, bumper-sticker simplistic level. I try to say something to provoke thought, and somebody gives some standard, boilerplate ideological response, and someone else shouts the established bumper-sticker counter to THAT, and off we go on the kind of pointless partisan merry-go-round that you can read or hear anywhere in the blogosphere or on 24/7 talking head "news." And what is the point in that?

I draw hope from the fact that occasionally, we get to the point where some actual,  mutually respectful dialogue occurs between people who HAVE gotten to know each other beyond the surface here. I see this particularly with Phillip and Herb and Karen and a handful of others -- and in the past (although, unfortunately, not so much lately) from you, Randy. I even get an encouraging word now and then from bud or Doug.

I just wish I knew how to build on that. I'm open to suggestions.

Maybe I need to make this a separate post...

... which I just did.

How about it? Do you see any way we can start having conversations here that matter?