Yesterday, Kanye West got all screechy and babyish about a luke warm Entertainment Weekly review. Today, he has blogger's remorse. He says on his website, "Unfortunately for certain media outlets, you will never be able 2 'Michael Jackson' me. That means 2 make it seem like everything I do is so weird or out of place... they always try 2 make it seem like everything is about my ego! That joke is getting old."
Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Goldberg started his very first blog this week, with a charmingly naive post mostly about how he knows nothing about blogging but does sit near uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan. "This is almost certainly a mistake," he begins, and it turns out he's 100% right. When the New York Observer's media blogger Matt Haber (the forgotten Gawker Alum!) devoted a post yesterday to basically announcing the existence of Goldberg's blog and needling Goldberg for his initial boneheaded support of the Iraq War, Goldberg blew up with rage. Haber's post was a mugging, he says. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey. We'll show you what a mugging is.
The picture above is what you see if you try to go to shaggy-haired singer Ryan Adams' Tumblr. It was like that pretty much all last night. Adams is non-commital about blogging, so this could be him. But also Tumblr kind of sucks at security lately, so maybe this isn't Adams' fault at all. I mean, the word "hijack" is involved, after all. But given that no one has emailed us about Adams' latest outage, maybe he doesn't have any readers left. Except Sheila, of course!
In the greatest non-sequitur of our time, the scruffy-bloggy New York musician Ryan Adams writes in his best friend, his daily blog: "My hair looked like this until the dye really set and now it's fucking weird electric blue. But still, I love women, I love the shape of their bodies, and I love how they talk and how they are able to separate sentimentality from being in the now..."
America's very very close friends in the Saudi government arrested and detained a young blogger named Fouad Farhan, shut down his site, detained him for four months without charges, and finally released him on Saturday. Thankfully, they have a very very good explanation for all that: "'We have ... what we call electronic crimes—any kind of violation related to computer and technology and so on,' Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Mansour Al Turki told the Monitor when asked why Fouad Farhan had been jailed. [...]'And I believe his main case was like violating personal rights.... Like when I go for example on the Internet or I go on any electronic media and I use your name and your personality and I criticize ... or offend you without being able to introduce evidence of what I'm saying.'" So. He was arrested for electronic crimes. Farhan could still be prosecuted for his "electronic crimes" despite the release. Farhan's worst electronic crime against the government?
Barely Political, the web humor site, decided to investigate the spate of deaths among overworked bloggers. This is what they found.
"Some level of creative, physical, mental or emotional burnout is inevitable for most bloggers": the Boston Herald rounds up a list of bloggers and asks them the following questions: "hours blogged each week," "burnout likelihood," "neglected relationships?" and "afraid of burnout?" Answers range from "80 hours" to "I guest edited Wonkette a few years back, and found I was working 12 hour days just to fill a quota for readers who wanted to be reading Ana Marie Cox and were quite vocal about the fact." In other news... bloggers are bad parents, survey says?
Sex writing is, at this point in the zeitgeist, the ghetto of journalistic topics. "Who am I?" begins the anonymous lady behind "Sex and the Street," the new Princeton sex column. "I'm just an ordinary girl with an extraordinary preoccupation with sex." Not so extraordinary to be preoccupied with sex: our biological drive to mate and procreate is very strong. To build your notoriety as a dude writer, it's important to have big ideas, or at least think you have them. For postmodern girls, however, it seems the fastest shortcut to getting attention is writing about sex or relationships, faux-frankly.
Lauren Goldstein Crowe, the Portfolio fashion blogger, posted her last post today. She continued the grand tradition of bloggers on their way out: the big fuck-you last post. Noted was Moe from Jezebel and other alleged meanies of the internet, who she had been advised to ignore. But she couldn't help herself!
Tracey Ullman, that talented comedienne who is also kind of annoying, has a new Showtime sketch show. On it, she imitates Arianna Huffington, that brilliant blog-promoter who is also kind of ridiculous. A brief clip is attached—the impression is impeccable (and looks quite friendly, jokes about celebrity hairstylists "blogging brilliantly" aside). It's no "Breakaway," but it's nice to see Ullman's keeping busy.
"What's Lewis Black mad about now?" Larry King asks the Daily Show frequenter and comedian-author-actor, and the answer is: blogs! "I will not blog... I hate the word 'blog,' it sounds like a condition." It is a condition, Lewis, and that condition is called "carpal tunnel syndrome." Black is in the Lee Siegel school of internets-hating, in that it lets total amateurs from Podunk Oklahoma dictate public opinion. The video follows.
It was cringeworthy enough when pundit-turned-blogger Arianna Huffington began talking about her cronies submitting a "blog" as if the word referred to an individual post, rather than an entire site. Now another web newbie, Steven Brill's socialite daughter, is mangling the lingo. Emily Brill ran into absurd socialgay Kristian Laliberte at Bloomingdale's menswear department last night. She summoned the fashion publicist over for a photo. "Okay Kristian, get over here. Let's blog." (Laliberte's desire to promote his label, Unruly Heir, must have trumped the embarrassment of such a hanger-on.)
How to get bloggers to blog about you or your project? Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing tells us how, in seventeen easy steps. He's been tracking what makes a website "blogger-unfriendly," ranging from "have a link," to "PDFs suck" to more stuff we already know! For blog-beginners in the nascent phases of internet domination, it may be helpful. [Information Week]
60 Minutes and former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl's breathless recounting of the "cat burglar" who broke into her apartment and stole her jewels, on the new menopausal Wowowow site, reads like a hardboiled detective drama. "'We know him,' said Detective Kenney. 'He's a serial. This is his pattern, his MO.'" It's a bit unnerving, and perhaps unbecoming, to see her going on at length about rather quotidian personal dramas; the web is an undignified place for old-media icons. But at least Stahl has a little perspective: "What I am thankful for is that our housekeeper wasn't harmed..." The NYPD actually made her a WANTED poster, so you'll want to click for that and the rest of the drama.
When we first saw this graph of the recording history of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", we thought, a) god almighty everyone needs to stop covering "Hallelujah", and b) everyone really needs to stop graphing songs. It was all worth it though for this Kottke guest-blogger post, which perfectly encapsulates the blinkered triumphalism of the boutique bloggers. You see, a half-dozen random bloggers were all pretty sure that their posts on this graph launched Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" cover to number one on iTunes—until their one friend who watches TV pointed out that an American Idol contestant sang it last week. [Kottke]
