Peoria Pundit

While I have been fiddling around with Blog Peoria to make is easier for citizen journalists to use, C.J. has been committing some great citizen journalism. He’s blogging the Hell out of District 150 these days, with posts here, here, here and here.

I am reading NONE of these things in the Peoria Journal Star, a newspaper that was once — and very recently, too — worthy of respect. No one would mistake if for the New York Times, but it was better than many papers of its size and circulation. Now, it’s like they are trying to shed pages. I picked up a copy the other day and was astonished at how skinny it was.

On Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise cruised the galaxy defending the United Federation of Planets. Is this the first step to making that future a reality?

The Personal Spaceflight Federation, whose establishment was announced Tuesday, brings together a who’s who of space entrepreneurs, including SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan, whose team won the $10 million X Prize last October, and video-game genius John Carmack, whose Armadillo Aerospace team was among the leading contenders for the prize.

The industry group plans to work with federal regulators to help draw up the “rules of the road” for suborbital space tourism, following up on last year’s landmark law on private-sector spaceflight, said Gregg Maryniak, who serves as the federation’s chief spokesman as well as executive director of the X Prize Foundation.

Actually, an association of private businesses designed to bring commerce to space seems like something one would find in a Robert Heinlein novel that anything created by Gene Roddenberry, who couldn’t even bear the though of money being used in the future.

Since our government seems more interested in subsidizing tobacco farmers and honey production than in extending humanity’s presence to the Moon, Mars and the outer planets, it’s up to private enterprise to secure humanity’s survival by placing all our eggs in more than one basket — the Earth.

The Chicago Tribune’s Charlie Madigan tells politicians and Big Media pundits to stop whining about blogs:

It all reminds me of a mix of what I have read about genuinely robust periods in American journalism, the era of the pamphleteers back before everything became so formal, the “yellow kids” era, when the media barons of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were carving up the pie, and maybe the birth of TV, when no one quite knew what to put on the screen.

The difference is that, in those eras, it took decades before media became self-referential enough to develop ethics and standards and journalism schools and thoughtful journals that would deconstruct every aspect of this messy business. Because the medium of blogging is speed-of-light stuff, we have become self-referential and obsessive about what happens well ahead of the historical curve.

Also, it’s so easy an idiot could do it.

Witness the fact that many are!

You don’t know how hard it was for my to resist the urge to link the phrase “an idiot could do it” to a certain blogger I know. I leave it to my long-time readers to guess who.

Heh.

Anyway, Madigan expresses a thought I’ve had many times. Eventually bloggers who want to be taken seriously will have to develop a set of ethics and standard rules. There’s nothing that’s going to keep people with an axe to grind and a chip on their shoulder from signing up for a free blogger account. The trick for them will increasingly be getting heard past the noise. The last time I checked, there were more than 8 million blogs. There are blogs that get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, if not more.

And frankly, I don’t want blogging to grow up too much. The value of blogs is their raw, uncensored, unedited nature. If blogs become newspapers on computers, we’ve accomplished nothing except put a lot of printing press workers out of work.

And just once, I’d like to see some attention given to the effect microbloggers are having on the communities in which they work. A small blog in a small community can have a tremendous impact.

The difference between bloggers and the “yellow kids” is that bloggers are the guys next door (just ask my neighbors) and that the yellow kids were old, rich white dudes who could afford to buy a printing press. You don’t even need to own a computer to blog; you can do it from a public access computer down at the public library. I’ve blogged from a computer in a hospital waiting room.

Let’s say there was a blog. Now, this theoretical blog focuses on local news and events. The guy who runs it has a passing familiarity with the processes of journalism and is formally trained in the field.

He’s a big proponent of blogging as new method of practicing journalism. This theoretical blogger would love make it a vocation instead of an avocation. He imagines having the time and resources to blog full-time and still be able to pay for health insurance and make the rent.

But, alas, he also knows that no local print or broadcast media company is going to hire him to do it. He knows because he been asking around and dropping hints for more than a year. Theoretically, that is.

Where could this would-be professional, full-time micro-blogger go to apply for a grant to see if such a set-up might work?

Susie was eliminated from the Single Make II contest. She says that the people running the contest didn’t follow the rules. She’s a little annoyed, and I can’t say that I blame her. I think she was hosed.

I want to thank everyone who voted for her on my behalf.

As I seem to recall, I promised a cheesecake pic if Susie won. That she didn’t win is certainly not the fault of the people who voted for her, so I think I’ll go ahead and and post that cheesecake:

(Not safe for work)
Read more »

I’ve got a feeling I’m gonna like this chick. Jennifer lists the Grandmaster of Science Fiction as one of her literary influences:

Robert Heinlein is not only a superb storyteller, but heÂ’s a truly free thinker. He has a libertarian bent, which makes for a good political read, and heÂ’s usually ready to address the hard questions through some unusual approaches, to illustrate a point. HeÂ’s fun to read. Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land should be on anyoneÂ’s must-read list for the questions they ask and address about relationships, government, and service.

Hat tip to Acidman, who says:

I read everything he ever wrote. Boy, did HE put an eggbeater in my head. Heinlein believed in freedom, but understood clearly that freedom isn’t free. It is EARNED and DESERVED. The crotchety old bastard was anything BUT a liberal, I started reading him when I was 12 years old and I still agree with him today.

I knew there was a reason I liked that hillbilly Jawa b*st*rd.

Heinlein was like a slow acting innoculation that eventually cured me of the liberalism that permeated the high school and college education I received.

My nephew Neil is a Duke fan (having attended the school), so he’s probably a bit happy tonight. He’s also not above insulting North Carolina on his new blog, The Sports Pundit:

Q: How do you get a Carolina grad off your porch?
A: Pay him for the pizza!

Q: What’s the difference between the Dean Dome and a porcupine?
A: A porcupine has thirty thousand pricks on the outside.

It doesn’t really matter in the long run whether Duke beats North Carolina, because the Illini are undefeated and could stomp a mudhole in both their sorry asses.

Sorry, Neil. The national champions this year will come from Champaign/Urbana, not Durham.

On the other hand, Neil is a Cubs fan, so he’s not all bad.

Notice the Blogad strip to the right. Hopefully, it’s there for you to see.

I can’t see it. More accurately, I can’t see it on my main computer. I can see it on other computers. But, when I call up my homepage on my main computer, it’s not there. It’s the same story using IE and Firefox. I’ve tried the refresh button, cleaning my history and deleting my cache.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Always follow that advice. Even if you work for a blogging company:

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company.

“Mark is no longer an employee at Google,” a Google representative said in response to an inquiry Tuesday. Efforts to reach Jen for comment were not immediately successful.

Jen’s departure comes less than a month after he joined Google as part of a wave of new hires and began recording his impressions of his new employer, including criticisms, in his blog.

For those bloggers living under a rock, Google owns Blogger, the world’s most popular free blogging service.

Actually, I haven’t been bad. Just sick, over-tired and chronologically out of whack. That’s why I haven’t been posting much. No apologies.

I’m working third shift now. It eliminates some attending problems I was having at work, but I am still trying to get my internal clock adjusted.

But I have some hours available today, so I’ll make some posts before I take my pre-work nap. I do have a lot of blog business to take care of today.