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Archive for September, 2006

The Blog Post Is Half-Full

Published by Olly Ruff on September 7, 2006 in Blog Fights, Democrats, Lamont v. Lieberman and Relaunches. 2 Comments

As impatiently anticipated in this space on Tuesday, the Lieberman ‘06 blog has been loosed upon the world. Despite the admonishments of Atrios, as backed up by DavidNYC and other luminaries, the comments are filling up briskly with anti-Joe sentiment. (Albeit nowhere near as fast as Atrios’ own threads.)

Alas, the only real entertainment to be had is in speculating on the layers of identity within the commentariat. Which are paid stooges from the Lieberman campaign, posting deliberately incendiary remarks to make the Lamont campaign look bad? Which are volunteer stooges from the Lamont campaign, posting obviously amateurish incendiary remarks to make the Lieberman campaign look like they’re planting deliberately incendiary remarks? How many different people are posting as “Ann Coulter,” and are they all on the same side?

The site’s design is fairly dreary, and the sense that has characterized the 2006 Lieberman campaign — that of expectations cruelly dashed — is ably captured by the policy of having every post contain a “Read The Full Blog Post” link, even when (as is frequently the case) there is no more blog post to read. Meanwhile, the tireless exuberance of the comment posse is beginning to resemble that of an unruly high-school class, and within a few posts the blog itself had devolved into the very thing Atrios originally predicted: singling out random anonymous commenters as being representative of the Lamont campaign. (The approved neologism for this is nutpicking. I am more or less resigned to it, but am going to hold out for as long as possible in the hope that someone can come up with something equally clever but less overtly anatomical.)

By all rights this should be hilarious, but for some reason it makes me feel sad instead. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing.

Foer The Record, Siegel Reinstated [Updated: Or Maybe Not]

Published by William Beutler on September 6, 2006 in Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM, Comment Sections and Sock puppets. 1 Comment

[Note: Post updated below. And updated, and updated.]

As covered extensively in the last post, last week TNR joined the Washington Post in the ranks of prominent political paper-based periodicals to get burned by its comment section; writer Lee Siegel’s blog was pulled after the editors discovered he had been posting as his own biggest fan, the artlessly arftful “Sprezzatura.”

Earlier this afternoon, TNR’s Foer went up with an editor’s note/meditation on the future of TNR’s comment section. Unable to arrive at a conclusion, Foer instead settles on drastically overthinking it:

A few months back, The New Republic actually considered requiring Talkback bylines. Our logic went like this: We would never publish an anonymous letter to the editor in the print magazine; in fact, we never publish a letter to the editor without checking the missive’s facts and authenticity. So why should we hold reader opinion on the web to a different standard?

Absent other perfectly good reasons not occurring to me just now, I’ll point out that the two are just not the same, and never have been. Comment sections are moderated, letters pages are edited. Magazines must be forgiven for being choosy, as they have very little space to work with; assuming a comment is on-topic, non-abusive and somewhere in the ballpark of substantive or amusing, it should be allowed. And it goes on like this:

The proposal wasn’t meant to demean TNR’s Talkback section, which has a far higher quality than almost any other example of the genre. Yet, scattered among Talkbalk’s thoughtful posts, you could still find examples of ad hominem attacks and argument that degenerated into taunting. (Some of which, it turned out, were produced by one of our own.)

Unlike the Post at the time of the Deborah Howell controversy, TNR already has comment registration — so that fix is out. But if one apple is bad, should the whole cart be overturned? Unfortunately, in this case the apple is from their own tree (all right, enough with that metaphor) and Foer sounds determined to let that fact ruin everything.

Later in the note, he acknowledges that many potential commenters will drop out before revealing their names. So Foer has just walked into a debate he already seems to have decided he can’t answer: Whether the honesty conferred by anonymity is productive or disruptive. Frankly, the blogosphere itself cannot really answer this question. Some have comments and some do not. Some are attacked for what their commenters say, others are attacked because they didn’t give anyone the chance to say it.

Also, curiously unmentioned in Foer’s meditation: Lee Siegel’s blog is back. All the posts have been returned, even the controversial ones about pedophilia, even the comments by Sprezzatura. I take this to mean that Siegel is not only not fired, he’s cleared to blog again. That’s fine, it’s their call to make. But shouldn’t Foer have included at least a sentence addressing this development?

Update: It’s worth noting that the return of Siegel’s blog seems to fly in the face of the New York Observer’s report, which quotes Foer as saying Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.” Are some suspensions more indefinite than others? Or is it more likely he actually hasn’t been reinstated, and that the blog’s return is an accident; after all, the last post is dated 8/31, shortly before it was replaced by Foer’s apology. And that apology is pretty firm about Siegel’s blog no longer being published there. What we may have instead is the temporary (?) return of Siegel’s blog as an orphan page, not linked to by any other page on the site. But if you have the URL handy, “Lee Siegel on Culture” is yours for the reading.

Updated again: I am informed by Tyler Green of Arts Journal that Siegel’s blog is not actually back — just the archives. That’s actually what I’d asked for in the previous post; it sounds like they took so much heat for closing off the archives that they decided to open them back up. Good. And so I’ll conclude by going back to how I concluded this post in the first place — Foer’s note is more than annoying, more crucially, it lacks transparency. And in the end, it adds nothing.

Updated one more time: The first and last lines of that Observer piece, the first quoting Siegel, the last quoting TNR literary editor (and onetime Sopranos guest star) Leon Wieseltier, are expecially [Update: This should be a word] telling. Siegel first:

I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have.

If you’re wondering how Mr. Siegel got off on such a bad foot with the blogosphere, look no further. One wonders why he stooped to the level of writing a blog in the first place. Now Wieseltier:

I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.

I would say this very post is evidence of that. Lee Siegel had no business writing a blog in the first place, but Wieseltier sounds like he’d do just fine. Mr. Foer?

A Flock of Siegels or, Don’t Cross The Streams

Published by William Beutler on September 5, 2006 in Blog Fights, Blogs vs. MSM, Comment Sections and Sock puppets. 3 Comments

Sometimes the blogs take you down. Sometimes, you take yourself down first. The latter is especially true of those who engage in sock puppetry, a too-cute nickname for an activity itself too cute by half. Our latest practicioner is arts critic Lee Siegel, who seems to be everyone’s least favorite writer at The New Republic.

To recap: During the Armstrong/Townhouse/Kos/Zengerle knockdown in June, Siegel stepped in, univited, to unleash an overheated rejoinder to the bloggers, including the spasmodic coinage of a frivolous term, “blogofascism.” Flash forward to two weeks ago, where Siegel took after English professor and, ah, pedophile expert James Kincaid, who had analyzed the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession for Slate earlier in the week. Siegel’s argument, if that’s what you could call it, was that Kincaid was a pedophile himself:

What a shame that editors still publish his disingenuous screeds against the media’s sexualization of children. They really just seem like ways for Kincaid to hide his own appetite for children behind his indictment of all of us hypocritical “voyeurs” out there.

Among the lefty bloggers who tuned in first, his attacks were deemed so incomprehensible and so unfair that it was beneath even TNR. Marty Peretz and Peter Beinart may offend them politically, but Siegel offended their sensibilities. Within days, a decade-old Siegel column more or less about having the opportunity to sleep with a flirtatious, 16-year-old Uma Thurman surfaced, and brought further ridicule. Ezra Klein suggested it was a case of projection, and though Siegel’s ancient TNR piece seemed to be about not wanting to to do so, it was too on-topic not to become an issue.

And then, without fanfare, Siegel’s blog disappeared from the site, and in its place appeared a mea culpa from editor Franklin Foer:

TNR Apologizes for Lee Siegel's puppeteering.

Unless you’d been reading the comments to these posts, you would have missed the exchange that brought it all down:

Sprezzatura is caught

One wonders if Siegel or his accomplice meant for the handle to be quite so apropos — “sprezzatura” refers to artwork produced from a genteel, aristocratic point of view, a reaction against the more spontaneous work of rising young artists. Sound like an ongoing feud that you know of?

It’s unfortunate that TNR has removed his blog in toto, as we bloggers would really like the chance to go back through and dig for more

Not that it deterred the swarm, of course. At this point, the rightosphere jumped in as well: John Podhoretz dubbed him “perhaps the single most pretentious person in America today,” and Ann Althouse rediscovered just how little she’d liked his writing. The fact that Siegel/Sprezzatura was convinced jhschwartz was Mark Greif from the literary journal n+1 was almost an afterthought, as was the identity of Sprezzatura’s other master — if indeed such a person exists. To date, the kerfuffle has inspired not just a parody post by Michael Bérubé, but also a parody blog by person(s) unknown.

As Blog P.I. has noted before, it’s been a banner year for sock puppets already — Michael “Mikekoshi” Hitzlik, Glenn “Ellison” Greenwald, even Jason “George Gooding” Leopold. As in the case of Greenwald, hubris played a big factor in this un-socking. For both writers, the temptation to praise oneself in a manner even one’s biggest fans are unlikely to do was insurmountable; this hubris [in part] drives the similar impulse to pour self-generated adulation into one’s own Wikipedia entry. Had Siegel (or his rumored accomplice) just toned it down, Sprezzatura might still be antagonizing Siegel’s antagonists. And whereas the semi-retired Greenwald is unfireable, Siegel like Hitzlik before him is (or was) eminently vulnerable.

Another interesting aspect is just how muted the swarm has been. Possible reasons include the fact that Siegel did himself in, as well as the possibility that Greenwald’s allies are unwilling to make themselves hypocrites. A typical half-hearted criticism comes from Gavin M. at Sadly, No!:

[S]ock-puppetry is bad and embarrassing, but on the scale of human folly, it must rate somewhere near swiping parking spots or soaping postage stamps — a meniality for which one’s own conscience ought to be the thing most permanently troubled.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money offers some good thoughts, but still downplays the charge:

It seems to me that most incidences of sock puppetry come from writers who are moving to the blogosphere from another medium, and who are unused to a) the immediate feedback, b) the vitriol, and c) the freedom to be whatever or whoever you want to be. I also, like Gavin, think that sock puppetry is a relatively mild crime as blogospheric sins go. Siegel’s examples were particularly pompous and mean-spirited, but I still suspect that sock puppetry is the excuse more than the cause for his suspension, and that the real reason is that his blog proved to be an embarassment (and perhaps even legal liability) for TNR.

Needless to say, I can’t agree, at least not entirely. Besides plagiarism, what could be worse? (The pedophilia accusation was likely a factor, though legally speaking, Siegel never outright accused Kincaid of being an active pedophile; he merely (if that’s the word for it) suggested Kincaid had the inclination). Sock puppetry is no different from astroturfing, which bloggers usually despise, only it’s done by an individual or two in service of ego rather than many individuals in service of an outside interest. In the blogosphere you have little more than your integrity to go on, and when that’s shot, well, at least your friends will (probably) still link to you. Atrios, incidentally the object of scorn in Olly’s post preceding this one, gets it right:

Simply having an alternate identity online is fine. What isn’t fine is when there’s implicit deception involved which is almost automatic if you’re assuming a new identity to defend yourself. There’s no reason I have to be “Atrios” everywhere on the internets, but if I assume the name “Atrios Rulezzzz!” and run around the internets talking about how Atrios is human perfection defined then I will have succeeded in making a supreme ass out of myself. And if one, Mary Rosh-like, starts inventing tales (I was in John Lott’s class and he was the best professor ever!) then you’ve moved into the realm of explicit deception…”

I’m reminded of the advice Ray Stantz gave to Peter Venkman early in a classic film of the 1980s:

Don’t cross the streams.

Why? It would be bad. You can have as many online identities as you see fit, and they can say whatever you’d like, just so long as they don’t interact as if they were different people (the number of longtime Internet users still using the handle they first logged on with is vanishingly small). True, the Ghostbusters got away with it at the end of the movie, just as as many (perhaps most) sock puppeteers escape undetected. But as web literacy rises, it’s easier and easier to root out the cheaters. When called out, the consequences can be dire. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light — or at least losing your job and reputation.

P.S. The first half of this post’s headline was borrowed from S,N!

P.P.S. As far as I am aware, this post has the most 80s-centric header yet.

Caught In A Trap And I Can’t Back Out ‘Cause I Hate You Too Much, Baby

Published by Olly Ruff on September 5, 2006 in Campaigns, Lamont v. Lieberman and Website Design. 4 Comments

Atrios pointed out yesterday — for the purposes of warning people away from it, so without an accompanying link — the relaunch of the Lieberman campaign blog (or alleged blog), scheduled for today. (As of 4:30 PM EDT, the new Lieberman site is still completely dead. This is not the only respect in which the Lieberman campaign could learn from Phoenix Suns G Raja Bell, who at least managed a countdown timer.)

It will certainly be an accomplishment for the Lieberman campaign to have a presence in the ’sphere that (we devoutly hope) doesn’t use a default Blogger template, so this is already a big step forward from the L/L primary. However, this quote from Atrios deserves attention:

A reminder that the Lieberman blog is apparently going live tomorrow. It’s basically going to be a trap to entice people to say mean things about the Last Honest Man so they can go whine to the press about how mean everyone is unlike Stay the Course Joe.

Ah, yes. A “trap” to “entice” otherwise reasonable people to say “mean things” about Joe Lieberman. If there’s one thing the leftosphere has been short on this year, it’s people flying off the handle about Joe Lieberman. Were I working for Joe ‘06, the first thing I’d be looking for would be a cunning scheme to get bloggers to break cover and let their true feelings show.

Seriously, it could be argued that Lieberman has the worst profile in the leftosphere of anyone, ever, including George W. Bush. A trap designed to accomplish this goal would presumably resemble… a keyboard?

Update: Having given this some more thought, maybe a keyboard with a big neon sign pointing at it.

Consolidating Yglesias

Published by William Beutler on September 5, 2006 in Journalist Bloggers and Relaunches. 1 Comment

It’s the end of an era, of sorts, and the beginning of another. Matthew Yglesias, the New York-born, Harvard-educated, District-based, recently-bearded, mid-20s American Prospect contributor and one of the first “famous for DC” bloggers, is removing himself from the three (!) blogs he’s been writing for more than a year now — to write a book and reopen his original site, MatthewYglesias.com. And it’s long overdue.

Yglesias has long been a contributor to his employer’s blog, Tapped, and when Josh Marshall launched his TPM Cafe in early 2005, Yglesias was invited to be the only blogger with his own permanent subdomain. His original site (moved to Typepad) became a repository for discussion about the Washington Wizards, indie rock and his Logan Circle neighborhood.

I was always a bit surprised that Yglesias was willing, let alone able to write for three separate blogs: politics for Tapped, policy for TPM Cafe and whatever he wanted at his personal site. True, he is a full-time writer, he had plenty of co-writers at Tapped, and his Typepad site was published no more often than he chose. Nevertheless, dividing your blogging efforts among multiple sites is a troublesome proposition for several reasons. For one, that’s three times the upkeep to keep up with, not to mention as many as three different content management systems to contend with. While it may bring greater exposure to you, the blogger, it requires too much of your readers. Even if you aren’t spread too thin, they will be. To find your latest insight, they may have to visit three separate sites, and plenty won’t bother. (Myself, I usually settled for the personal site, also being a fan of The Decemberists and Rilo Kiley.)

The disjointed nature of this practice limits the blogger as well: You can’t reference a previous post from another of your sites with too much confidence that a reader will have seen it, so you should probably explain it again, just to be sure, and pedantry is the death of blogging. So is sameness. Most bloggers need a relaunch every year or so to keep things fresh, and Yglesias’ latest transformation will probably serve himself and his readers very well — for another year or so.

George Allen Takes Some Good Advice

Published by William Beutler on September 2, 2006 in Blog Consultants, Campaigns, George Allen and Midterms '06. 1 Comment

In the days after Sen. George Allen’s YouTube-preserved “macaca” moment, my erstwhile colleague Danny Glover recommended on his own blog that Allen shore up his online campaign, post-haste:

Engage like-minded bloggers to get them behind your campaign. Let them bash the Post for you. Hold conference calls with them. Grant interviews to bloggers. Write entries for their sites and respond to readers when you do. Hire a blog expert to connect with online activists. Those are the kinds of things smart candidates already are doing.

Consider the advice taken. On Friday morning, Richmond-based blogger and former radio personality Jon Henke announced he would be joining Allen’s re-election campaign as a Netroots coordinator:

Obviously, this will change my focus quite a bit, but I will continue to blog at QandO whenever possible, generally on the issues and stories in this very important Virginia Senate race.

As a right-libertarian, Henke generally supports Republicans, but he can’t be pegged an apologist, and has on occasion sided with liberal bloggers over conservatives. I haven’t met Henke in person, but in correspondence going back more than a year, he’s struck me as serious and thoughtful. He’s a good get for them.

As often is the case with newly-created positions related to the blogosphere, even Henke isn’t completely sure how he’ll spend his working hours, but his mission includes “helping to close the strategic blogosphere gap.” Says Henke, via e-mail:

The leftosphere is very good at getting their campaign message to bloggers, getting bloggers to talk about the campaigns and spreading the muck through back channels. The Allen campaign wants to establish some outreach to supportive bloggers and to make sure our side of heard when the Leftosphere is smearing us.

The hire is too late to be damage control, but it should be insurance against future controversies. Allen isn’t the only candidate hurt this year because their media consultants are unsuited to the strange new landscape of user-generated media. (How many have even heard the term “Web 2.0″?) The Allen camp’s multiple revisions of what “macaca” meant is a good example. The breakthrough, if there was one, came from Chad Dotson, a conservative blogger unafilliated with but sympathetic to the campaign. Henke too had Allen’s back, although either one could have ignored the situation. Now the Allen camp has a go-to guy in Henke, and that’s important.

Henke’s widely-read blog is certainly an asset, but that too raises new questions: Henke says he is not proscribed from writing about anything in particular, but he’s also in the odd position of having two co-equal bloggers at QandO. While Dale Franks and Bruce McQuain are supportive of his decision, the possibility exists that they will disagree about some campaign-related issue yet to arise. Henke tells me: “I will not — can not — tell them what to write and what not to write.”

The flip side is that it recalls the issue of whether Democrats Mark Warner and Sherrod Brown hiring Jerome Armstrong meant getting positive coverage from Armstrong pal Markos Moulitsas as well. Of course, there were never any serious allegation of quid pro quo there, only suspicions. Because Henke is the lone QandO contributor who actually lives in Virginia, my guess is that the other two will follow his lead a bit but largely focus on other matters — and you can be sure the lefty blogs in Old Dominion will keep an eye on it.

Also worth noting: Compared to the disclosure issues surrounding John McCain’s web consultants, Henke and the Allen campaign have handled the announcement in an entirely appropriate manner. Henke suspended his own blogging after the 28th, while discussions were ongoing with Allen’s camp, then announced the change in his first post back, and has since added a disclaimer to the bottom of each post:

“Jon Henke is the Netroots Coordinator for the George Allen Senate campaign.”

Interesting, then, that Pat Hynes and Nicco Mele are PR and campaign veterans — yet they were outed by reporters, and ended up looking less professional because of it. Hynes and Mele had certain imperatives from their other jobs that conflicted with their blogging disclosure, but as a hobbyist turned pro, Henke didn’t have to contend with the same issues. He also benefited from having so recently seen what not to do. And though it’s more a case of avoiding a pitfall than doing something especially brilliant, it bodes well enough for Henke that he passed this test.