Blogs, news, and bookmarks

I neglected to mention that the US Senate still has to approve DOPA, so contact a Sedator to undo what your Reprehensible has tried to do. This legislation would block up the system of tubes known as the internets.

I see that the Indian blog blackout was reported by BoingBoing a few weeks ago, on the 17^th, by the BBC on the 19^th, and by, for example, the Financial Express on the 24^th of July. OK, so I am a little out of the loop. I've been getting my news from CNN, from Wolf Blitzkrieg's Situationist Room, Anderson Cooper's 360 Degree VR, or something like that. So, whatever happened with the blog block anyway? Everybody found a hack or workaround by now? I will look into it.

What has changed with my news sourcing is that I now trust blogs more than the other (slipstream and cashstream) media. I wouldn't have said that a year ago. The seeds of doubt were planted by Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Bob Woodward (implicated in the Plame affair), reporters at the reputable(?) newspapers of the NYT and the Washington Post. The media reaction to Stephen Colbert's speech at the Nationalist Press Klub cemented my growing inclinations to withhold trust. Also note above in the preceding paragraph how the blogs report news before the cash-stream media does. A blogger is just your personal choice(s) of editor, among other things (columnist, diarist, essayist, unpaid volunteer, writer, correspondent, etc.).

I trust blogs more than other media, but I don't necessarily read many blogs. The few blogs I have sidebarred(?) here are ones to which I want to return, sorta like a bookmark. I have this time-consuming thing called a job, and then a family, too. One of my favorite blogs, ThisModernWorld, I only get to every ten weeks or so, then go back to read the last ten comic strips. Funny how "Tom" wasn't political at all back when I knew him in the 80s, but is actually a little too political, for my tastes, this last… decade or so.

And, speaking of bookmarks, I have been waiting for a good free bookmark manager to come along since about 1998, by which time I had accumulated an unwieldy list of bookmarks. I expected something that would update outdated links, delete nonexistent ones, map them into some kind of semantic web of lexical analysis (maybe based on the Dewey Decimal system or some thesaurus), etc. Nothing like that ever came along, and I think everyone else has also turned to Google. Sometimes Google can't get me back to somewhere I was before, if I can't remember any uniquely aberrant words from the site, though.