Day: March 4, 2012

From a comment thread about the death of Andrew Breitbart on a site that didn't like him:

You’re only supposed to say good things about the dead. He’s dead...good.

Tried to filter out consciousness of the deceased's name and presence during his lifetime but it was hard due to his self-promotional relentlessness. A few items that got past the filter:

--He promoted videos unflattering to the Obama administration and a community organizing group that were revealed to be fake, yet he suffered no shame or loss of status in the media

--he had strange ideas (projected sexual fantasies) about a certain left-leaning, authentic grassroots organization

--he was a "hit man" for a fake grassroots organization of the right funded by a couple of billionaires who don't like having their astroturfing exposed

--I saw him shouting on TV at newscaster Cenk Ungyur, not letting Ungyur get a word in, and he seemed like the classic loud drunk in a bar

--Despite all this, if you live in LA (his home town) and write for the Huffington Post you had to say he was "basically a good man" and "had his flaws." HuffPo commenters who said otherwise were reportedly censored.

Based on these few nuggets, it seems a little bit of poison left our planet last week. America constantly enables Joe McCarthy-like bullies to dominate public life and unlike McCarthy most don't get their comeuppance; the only way to be rid of them is for them to implode.

Back during some argument we were having about social media, someone lumped Word Press in with Blogger and similar mass hosting sites. This just seemed ignorant but it turns out (d'oh) that there is a WordPress.com which does hosting. Many blogs on the internet, however (including this one) use software provided by WordPress.org, which is not a host. According to WordPress.com's "about" page, the dotcom version was launched by some of the folks involved with WordPress who thought they'd confuse everyone by keeping that name (actually they didn't say that last part).

The point being, someone using Word Press software is quite likely a self-hosting "indie" who is responsible for his/her own domain and basic admin tasks such as keeping the site free of malware. It's not the same as working in what Dave Winer called the "corporate blog silos," where a balance must be maintained between complying with the silo's rules and being freed of administrative headaches. This is no diss against people who work in a mass-hosting environment (well, maybe a little, depending on which one) but an attempt to clarify this blog's niche in the new media ecosystem.

Snobbery is what indie bloggers have etc