Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

and gets reamed for his trouble. But he gets a good post out of it, and that's something. Something really good, in fact. Because most of this new Blogosphere 2.0 is just crap. Well designed, timely, Seth Godinesque, crapola. Even, or especially, this post.

Arrington is at his best when he puts one sentence in front of the other. Here he is at his best. Here he is not reporting, not a journalist, not a blogger, not a mainstreamer, he's Mike Arrington, walking tall and carrying a big stick. I'm amazed the sponsors weren't all over him. After all, they spent a lot of someone's mainstream money to get him there and push him into the Coliseum. They bought and paid for what they wanted: red meat and a good show.

Normally I would defend Staci and Jeff and the rest, terrific journalists all. In fact, Staci and Rafat have created the most incredibly mainstream product from day one by owning the story of media reboot. Nobody else, not Om or The Times or Rolling Stone, nobody owns that beat like paidcontent. The name shouts out the audacious challenge. I don't care how they make their money, how they do their reporting, any of it. It's consistently a great product with important information about a story that keeps growing in implication and authority.

But nobody has got the high ground on journalism right now, if they ever did, and the storm that results from these "showdowns" does little to prove anything except the ease with which a Mike Arrington can put one sentence in front of the other and inflame journalists who damn well should be inflamed. Because they do a remarkably shitty job of communicating the so-called value of their product as in any way superior to the best of whatever anybody with a computer can muster.

Forget superior for a second, and look at what happened when music rebooted in the Sixties. Were The Beatles superior to Sinatra? Coltrane to Armstrong? Dylan to Guthrie? Did they boo Dylan? Yes they did. Now we see that as the watershed of the era. Was this a problem? Listen to the newly-discovered tape of Dylan with Butterfield's band at Newport and it's stunning in its obvious power. They were booing because they were insulted, scared, angry, moved.

I am moved by Arrington's story. God knows I could care less about all this page view Web 2.0 shit that he's leading, but when he doubts himself and suggests even briefly that he should prepare better for a next time, I say no fucking way. Prepare better for what? It's like Hendrix dialing back the funk or Miles apologizing for standing with his back to the audience or any of you out there settling for the pathetic crap that floods the blogosphere or the so-called mainstream media. It's hard to cut through the noise; it's simple but dangerous to make enemies. In an interrupt-driven media world, where "bloggers" and "journalists" compete head to head on every story, it's one big race for class president going on here.

The New York Times is a great publication on its good days, a lying pack of self-protective weasels on others. Same for every one of us in the blogosphere. When I see Arrington filibuster on the floor of the Senate, I see one of us out there making a fool, and us proud, of himself. Suck it up, mainstream media. Next time it's your turn. Something is going on here and we do know what it is.

Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 11:24 pm.
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