The Sassy Lawyer notes the launch of “Talking Points,” INQ7.net’s attempt at weblogs, or something pretending to be one. As described on their site, it is “used to chronicle news events as they happen, to post selected readers’ comments as they’re sent — much like a weblog.” And this is where things get interesting.
First of all, they select what opinions to publish, contrary to the journalistic freedom of the blogosphere. Ideally, and what has always been the case, the worldwide weblog community is self–correcting — no false information remains uncorrected for an extended period of time. The need for “selective publishing” is eliminated, since those that don’t make sense will not be noticed (well, not that much). Weblogs allow you to say what you want, but also allowing other bloggers to react, whether positively or the contrary.
Apparently, this weblog–of–sorts they’re diving into was inspired by American journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Interestingly, they featured two articles about Filipino bloggers not too long ago, but wasn’t cited at all as one of the influences for “Talking Points.” This is what bothers many pinoy bloggers — they’re trying to sound like they’re pioneering local blogging, based on the American blogging comunity, when in fact Filipinos have been doing this before 2002, even before I started.
Technically, they’re not faring any better at all. Permalinks — are they really that hard to implement? Links to INQ7.net articles die after several days, aside from usability issues they never addressed. And now in “Talking Points,” you cannot link to each reply or comment. Next time you do something like this, get someone who knows the subject matter. If you’re gonna be late in the game, make sure you do it right. If you’ll go blogging, get bloggers to get things rolling.
This is a campaign for them to pause and listen, and everyone is on this:
It’s an interesting project at least. Although they don’t seem to be all that serious about the whole thing.
You’re right though; an independently edited blog (censors?) like this one, where they select only posts based on whatever criteria they may have, is hardly a blog at all.