Dean's World has an interesting post on blogrolls and the "gift economy". Worth reading.
A BBC reporter blogs Brazil -- including audio of the mating call of the Brazilian frog fish.
Of monkeys, voodoo and crazy-man posting -- traffic tips for bloggers. Quotable:
I know how to get a ton of traffic: post a lot of crazy stuff about monkeys, voodoo, weird crime & other oddities. We learned this doing Tabloid.net in the 1990s, and back when a significantly smaller percentage of Americans were online -- say, 1997 -- we had 100,000-visitor days on a regular basis. We also worked 17 hours a day & didn't make any money to speak of, so I no longer believe a lot of traffic is the key to the kingdom. Getting a lot of regular traffic takes hard work. Glenn Reynolds is smart & funny & writes well & has interesting views, but more than all of that he's a hard worker. He posts like a crazy man. I love going to his site in the morning to see how much stuff he posted on a dozen topics.
(via Joanne Jacobs)
The Top 50 political blogs (Alexa rankings):
1) Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish: 7,203 2) Instapundit: 9,228 3) Poynter Institute: 9,973 4) James Lileks: 14,740 5) Little Green Footballs: 14,740 6) Talking Points Memo: 19,193 7) The Agonist: 19,444 8) The Smirking Chimp: 21,486 9) The Command Post: 24,233 10) Daily Kos: 26,404 11) The USS Clueless: 29,934 12) Blogs Of War: 35,245 13) Dean's World: 36,210 14) Scrappleface: 36,277 15) Howard Dean for America: 37,052 16) Lt. Smash: 37,486 17) Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store & Reading Room: 39,903 18) Right Wing News: 42,802 19) This Modern World: 43,879 20) Maxspeak: 49,274 21) Nick Denton: 55,259 22) Stand Down: 57,756 23) Buzz Machine: 58,426 24) Matthew Yglesias: 59,599 25) The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: 59,935 26) Taegan Goddard's Political Wire: 61,223 27) The Truth Laid Bear: 62,166 28) Spinsanity: 63,680 29) Matt Welch: 68,220 30) Talk Left: 72,312 31) Cold Fury: 72,485 32) Oliver Willis: 72,774 33) Samizdata: 75,067 34) Warblogs:CC: 75,182 35) Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: 75,195 36) A Small Victory: 76,482 37) Vodkapundit: 80,019 38) Ken Layne: 82,306 39) Moxie: 82,688 40) Virginia Postrel: 89,783 41) Asymmetrical Information: 90,134 42) Winds Of Change: 90,308 43) Rachel Lucas: 97,302 44) Rantburg: 99,742 45) Overlawyered: 104,341 46) Tacitus: 107,176 47) Amish Tech Support: 109,438 48) Gary Hart: 118,274 49) The Volokh Conspiracy: 136,650 50) Unqualified Offerings:136,929
Compiled by RightWingNews. Don't miss his methodological explanation and caveats.
UPDATE: RWN missed a few, including Karen DeCoster at somewhere in the top 10, and The Agitator at somewhere in the top 20. And of course PrestoPundit.com in the top 50 with a bullet.
Great story with the details on how one newspaper reader with a little help from the internet and the blogosphere exposed Maureen Dowd's fabricated Bush quote. With this great quote from Glenn Reynolds:
Uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds sees the emergence of online group fact-checking in a parallel to Russia's post-Soviet glasnost. "People are appalled, saying it's the decline of journalism," he told me. "But it's the same as when Russia started reporting about plane crashes and everyone thought they were just suddenly happening. It was really just the first time people could read about them."
(via Instapundit)
Randy Barnett has just joined The Volokh Conspiracy. This is a major addition to both the Conspiracy and the blogosphere. Barnett is the author of the perhaps the most important work in post-Hayekian jurisprudence produced in the past decade The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law.
Here is a bit from Chapter Two of the book:
"The problem of knowledge in society is ubiquitous. So are the means by which we cope with it. Perhaps this is why the knowledge problem is so easily overlooked as a problem in need of a solution. The particular problem of knowledge that I am interested in here concerns the knowledge of how to use physical resources in the world.
All human beings are confronted with a multitude of ways that they may use physical resources, including their own bodies. The challenge of making good choices regarding the use of resources would be difficult enough in an "atomistic" world where one's choices had no effect on the choices of others. Since this is not our world, the problem of a person or association making knowledgeable choices among alternative uses of physical resources is compounded by other persons and associations striving to make their own choices. Indeed, given the number of possible choices persons might make, the number of persons making choices, and the physical proximity of each to the others, it is remarkable that the world is not in complete chaos. The world is not in chaos, I suggest, because concepts and institutions have evolved to harness the diverse knowledge about potential uses of resources ins a manner that contributes to harmonious and beneficial interaction.
In this chapter, I discuss what I call the "first-order problem of knowledge." This is the problem of knowledgeable resource use that confronts every person in any society. No one has placed greater stress on this particular knowledge problem than Friedrich Hayek. As he explains:
"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated from but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources--if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by those "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality [1]."
Hayek's account does not assume that everything that people believe is true. Rather, it maintains that (a) there are many things each of us believes that are true and (b) access to these truths by others is severely limited. The limited access to each of these different kinds of knowledge gives rise to a problem of knowledge that every human society must cope with in some manner or other.
[1] Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 77-8 (emphasis added). For additional discussion of the knowledge problem see Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980)."
ArgMax has a new pair of binoculars and a new job at OMB Watch.
Eugene Volokh fields questions on academic blogging. Snippet:
I used to read the stories that the editors of the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, or the Wall Street Journal think are worth reading. Now I read blogs -- such as InstaPundit, Mickey Kaus's Kausfiles on Slate, Andrew Sullivan, during the war The Command Post, and so on -- and read the stories (in a wide range of newspapers and magazines) that the bloggers think are worth reading. Blogs provide a much wider range of editorial judgment to choose from, and it turns out that I like the editorial judgment of some bloggers more than I like the editorial judgment of some newspaper editors.
Daniel Drezner considers the pros and cons of academic blogging:
I think the piece underemphasizes the scholarly reason for blogging. Picking apart the scholarship of a Michael Bellesiles or a John Lott is a rare occurrence. More important is the way blogs can engage an audience outside the small world of students and colleagues. At their best, scholar blogs can function as what Hayek called "second-order intellectuals," applying abstruse theories to real-world problems. They can open a window on the inner workings of ivory tower, debunking stereotypes of academics as detached from the real world. At their worst, no one reads them and you get denied tenure for engaging in such base pursuits.
LewRockwell.com has a new blog. Pro-freedom, anti-government, anti-war, anti-empire politics served up hot.
John Hawkins explains the real dynamics of a blogosphere story
Jason Soon at Catallaxy Files has a note up giving out top blog awards. I'm too modest to mention any of the winners, but I must respond to Jason's now repeated complaint against the name of my blog -- it just ain't Hayekian enough he says. In honor of that complaint I've added one of my rejected blog titles to my current banner slogan -- "MEME-O-MATIC". So my response is .. it could have been worse!
OK, let see now. Bill Bennett doesn't write his own books. Rick Bragg doesn't write his own news stories. Hmmm .. could it be we've uncovered the secret of Instapundit at last!? Naahhhh.