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ReadMe

Photo: From You Know You Want This. © 2004 Electablog
In Depth:
The Blogging of the President
In 2002, Andrew Sullivan, the neocon blogger behind The Daily Dish, declared blogging a media revolution, "more profound than anything since the printing press." Two years later, with over a million bloggers on the Net, political blogging is giving presidential campaigning an extreme makeover.

Beyond the candidates' self-promoting weblogs lies a universe ("blogosphere," in Netslang) of unabashed, irreverent opinion blogs, where bloggers say whatever they damn well want to. Don't believe us? Check out Wonkette's pornographic visions of John Ashcroft or the cheeky pundit's tongue-in-cheek Honorary Homo Award, bestowed on George W. Bush. But do journalists flush their journalistic ethics down the toilet when they take up blogging, where writers are their own editors and publishers? In issue 4.4's "In Depth" package of campaign '04-related articles, ReadMe talks with the blasphemers behind some of the most iconoclastic political blogs.

digital culture
Do professional credentials certify a pundit’s wisdom? Not online, says blogger Chris Geidner. In blogdom, amateurs and professionals can share the spotlight in the opinion elite.
 
digital culture
Electronic voting machines threaten the operating code of participatory democracy, in the eyes of civil libertarians Bev Harris. She's leading the Internet crusade to stop them.
 
digital culture
On February 19th, 2004, an e-mail circulated the listservs of Howard Dean’s faithful, reading: “Dear Supporter, I...announced today that I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency.” It was the death knell in Dean’s bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination. What few critics have noticed is the Web's role in bringing down the man once hailed as the "Internet candidate."
 
media
“The New York Times is really, really dumb with religion. Everybody knows this, it’s astonishing, and the editors must be even more stupid than the reporters.”--Jeff Sharlet
 
media
“Opinion [journalism] is inherently unfair,” declares Daniel Okrent of The New York Times. Josh Marshall, a respected liberal blogger, couldn’t disagree more. "Opinion journalism can be fair,” argues Marshall, as long as the writer maintains “a fundamental honesty with the reader.” Is there such a thing as honest bias in the age of Fox ("We Report, You Decide") News?
 
digital culture
A good kick in the ass from one of the few women involved in politics might just be the wake-up call that Democrats need.
 
digital culture
Political bloggers are carving out a niche for themselves in the opinion elite and they're doing it with style.
 
digital culture
Even the innovative world of Weblogging can’t escape from gender stereotypes. “Men and women, recent studies show, blog in roughly equal numbers. A notable exception: Women are responsible for as little as four percent of political blogs –‘sites devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars’ -- according to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE),” reports the Columbia Journalism Review.
 
Can Sony Connect bring Sony into the digital music game?
04.26.2004 - 11:22 am EDT
"It's my iPod and I'll engrave it if I want to."

04.26.2004 - 11:56 am EDT
"Dodgeball.com is like Friendster for your phone. Increase your social network offline. "

04.28.2004 - 4:30 pm EDT
"Is your ISP giving you the speed you're paying for?"

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