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A blog's bark has bite   ß 5.13.02   John Leo U.S. News & World Report Bloggers (from the words "Web log") write online diaries & commentaries. The best bloggers weigh in on social & political issues, report nuggets of information that the national media miss or suppress, and provide links to other bloggers with something sharp to say. Subjects that the mainstream press is skittish about (e.g., the link between abortion & breast cancer, or the mini race riot that occurred in Cincinnati 3 weeks ago) tend to show up in the blogging world. Since nobody can be fired or intimidated, bloggers skip politically correct language and just write in plain English. Minor example of the culture in action: The blogging corps got wind of an online poll sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations allegedly showing that 94% of those surveyed thought Ariel Sharon should be tried for war crimes. By linking to one another's Web sites, the bloggers got more people to cast votes and reversed the numbers. At the end, 94% opposed the idea of trying Sharon. First commandment of blogdom is that anyone can become a pundit. Nobody is in charge. Bloggers can say anything they want and get their message out with blinding speed. This is unsettling to us lumbering print guys. 6 or 7 times I had to abandon a column because some upstart blogger beat me to it. Andrew Sullivan, perhaps the most quoted blogger, is surely the fastest gun. His 1,000-word analysis of the State of the Union message appeared 33 minutes after President Bush finished. Sometimes he launches attacks on wayward NY Times columnists around 4 a.m., so blog fans can read his version before they get to the columns. The fairness of blogworld is impressive. Univ. of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds whose InstaPundit site is the 800 lb gorilla of the blogging culture, is strongly pro-cloning. But he recently provided links to a series of mostly anticloning Christian sites so readers could judge for themselves. Another example of blogger openness: A site called Catholic & Enjoying it! posted the sad comment, "There's nothing like having the church you love be the butt of the whole world's jokes," and then provided the link to a biting anti-Catholic satire about abusive priests. In the print world, it's safe to say, making sure that one's detractors are heard is much rarer. The crisis over sex abuse by priests has brought a lot of Catholic bloggers into the field. Some of the commentary has been first-rate, particularly Sursum Corda & Amy Welborn's In Between Naps. Protestants weigh in, too. (A list of 118 Christian blogs is available at MartinRothOnline.) Political bloggers are overwhelmingly right of center, either conservative or libertarian. The conventional wisdom is that the strong rightward tilt is a reaction against the mandatory liberalism of the modern newsroom. But nobody knows for sure. Bloggers have given encyclopedic & favorable analysis to Bernard Goldberg's charge that the "right wing" label in journalism is applied much more commonly than the adjective "left wing." Blogworld has strongly supported the war on terrorism and is famously quick to point out logical & moral failings of antiwar relativists. Out of blogger-induced fairness, I hereby recommend 2 liberal sites. One is the site of cartoonist & commentator Tom Tomorrow. He's fair, funny, and a friend. The Daily Howler is a useful check on conservative excess, though sometimes over the top. Be sure to read: "The American way of life has been challenged. But whose side is John Leo on?" Now the corporate world seems to be heading blogward. Fox News hired blogger Ken Layne and put him on its Web site. National Review Online, an indispensable site, added a blogging section. ABC.com now runs a bloglike political commentary, "The Note," which recently mocked the "Forrest Gump-like existence" of Sen. John Kerry and the role of the Boston newspapers in keeping his reputation aloft. In 2 cases, bloggers have prepared the way for new newspapers in major cities. Smartertimes.com, a running account of the sins & omissions of NYTimes, led to the founding of the New York Sun, NYC's new conservative daily paper. Similarly in L.A., LAExaminer.com regularly snipes at L.A. Times to prepare the way for a new anti-Times daily paper. Japanese web star spreads blogging gospel   ¹   ¥ 6.1.04   Yuri Kageyama AP

A college dropout, he is founder & chief executive of Neoteny Co., venture capital firm that has raised $40 million. Ito has helped set up or run such companies as Infoseek Japan, nation's second-largest portal after Yahoo! Japan, and Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest Internet shopping site. When not jetting around the world to lecture in France about mobile technology or sit on blogging panels at U.S. tech conferences, Ito advises the Japanese govt and appears on Japanese talk shows.
But he gets his most attentive audience on his blog. Known to friends as Joi, Ito keeps up an intense blogging habit, visiting 190 blogs regularly and averaging 5 hours a day reading and writing blogs. He admits blogging is addictive, but shrugs off a question about how he finds time for anything else.
He says he splits his time equally 3 ways, for straight work, social activism and personal life. He watches less TV, doesn't plays video games as much and has stopped drinking, to spend more time on blogs and less in bars. "Joi is an incredibly dynamic person," said Justin Hall, an American writer on technology culture and a friend of Ito's for several years. "He's got a fantastic curiosity. His metabolism or something, he's wired a little different."

The issues Ito and other bloggers cover are broad, human rights, cool Web sites, cooking and, of course, blogging about blogging. Blogging is such an integral part of Ito's life that he recently decided against expanding Neoteny's dozen-company portfolio to focus on Six Apart Ltd., California co. behind Movable Type & TypePad, among the leading tools for blogging. He promotes the technology in Japan as chairman of Six Apart's Japanese subsidiary.
Ito also leads intl & mobile operations of Technorati Inc., Web service that ranks blogs by popularity and monitors the Net for the latest buzz among bloggers.

Blogs have been rapidly growing in popularity in Japan, catching on esp. in the past year at a pace that's believed to lag only U.S. At least a dozen companies in Japan provide blogging services. Internet service provider Nifty, which licenses Six Apart's software, has drawn about 25,000 bloggers.
Most of the blog services are free so far. But once blogging gains acceptance as a self-publishing medium, business opportunities such as advertising and premium photo-sharing services should emerge. Ito has yet to launch a specific moneymaking service for bloggers, but he has created a Neoteny blogging team to feed the fad. Blogs here look similar to those in U.S. People comment on the news and music, pass around jokes, rate restaurants. In a society that emphasizes conformity and harmony, blogging makes it easier for people to express unpopular opinions and get tangled in emotional debates.
"The thing neat about weblogs is you find each other," Ito said. "It gives you a feeling of empowerment. For grass- roots movements and things like that, it will be great."

Junjiro Hara, who has known Ito for decades, is sold on blogging and prefers it as an outlet for his views than his real job at major newspaper Asahi Shimbun. "Japan can't change for the better until it becomes a place where everyone starts blogging," Hara said.
For Ito, promoting blogging came naturally in a life already devoted to bridging Japanese & American cultures. Ito was born in Japan but spent parts of his childhood in Canada & U.S. because his father worked abroad. While in Japan, Ito attended intl schools. He became fluent in English & Japanese while always feeling slightly outside mainstream Japanese society.
Ito joined friends from international schools in creating Japan's first Web pages. "People thought we were crazy. But we had great confidence because we saw that it was going to be giant one day," said Cyrus Shaoul, one of Ito's international-school buddies. "The point wasn't to make a lot of money. The point was to change the world." Ito believes blogging will one day prove as influential as the printing press.
"Blogging will fundamentally change the (way) people interact with media and politics and provide us with an opportunity to overhaul our outdated democracies," he said.

Attack ads go online and underground   'Viral' Web video spreads fast and far, biting candidates hard, sometimes with their own words.   1.29.07   Michael Finnegan L.A. Times

The first whack at McCain, now on the video-sharing site YouTube, joins a rapidly growing collection of Web videos posted by critics of leading contenders in the 2008 presidential race. Targets so far include Barack Obama, Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The explosion of video-sharing on the Web poses major risks for presidential candidates: Gaffes and inconsistent statements witnessed by dozens can be e-mailed instantly to millions.
The White House ambitions of Republican George Allen of Virginia were dashed in no small part by a Web video that showed him, at a campaign event, calling an Indian American "macaca." Allen also lost his November bid for reelection to the Senate.

And Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, was hit this month with an anonymously posted YouTube video made of footage from a 1994 debate in which he took liberal stands on abortion and other matters. Romney, who has staked out more conservative positions in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, posted his own video to explain the shift.
"I was wrong on some issues back then," he told viewers. "I'm not embarrassed to admit that."

For the candidates, as well as their detractors, the chief attribute of Web video is its broad reach, accomplished at little or no expense.
"You can grab it, send it, link it, and at zero cost," said President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign top strategist Matthew Dowd. "Two hundred thousand people could see it in 24 hours."
Several White House contenders have already made promotional Web videos a central part of their communications strategy, using them to reach supporters directly, without a media filter. Democrats Clinton, Edwards, Obama and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson each made Web video statements for their campaign launches.

Clinton has been especially aggressive. The New York senator and presumed party front-runner took questions from supporters on three evenings last week in half-hour Web chats. As part of a broader effort to warm up voters (a fireplace crackled in the background when she appeared Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show), Clinton pivoted from Iraq and healthcare to the delights of gardening, dog-walking, movie watching, swimming and even closet cleaning.
McCain is planning his own Web version of reality TV. He has hired a videographer to record behind-the-scenes campaign moments of the senator in relaxed settings.
"What the campaign can do in a Web video is show a more personal side of the candidate," said Spencer Whelan, who works on McCain's online communications team.

But the same technology allows others to broadcast, often anonymously, videos utterly outside the campaigns' control. Already, attack videos range from the caustic to the ridiculous.
McCain's comic potential is on display in a YouTube video featuring the melodically impaired senator singing lines from "The Way We Were" and other Barbra Streisand tunes in a "Saturday Night Live" skit.
Another video on the site shows Giuliani dressed in drag, with Donald Trump nestling his face in the former New York City mayor's fake breasts, a gag from a long-ago press dinner that struck many New Yorkers as funny, but might puzzle some Republican primary voters in, say, South Carolina.

Edwards, the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president, is the subject of a popular prank video that uses humor to skewer the former North Carolina senator. Mocked by critics as "the Breck girl" in 2004, the telegenic candidate is shown fussing with his hair for a full two minutes in preparation for a TV interview, as Julie Andrews sings "I Feel Pretty." YouTube visitors have viewed it more than 27,000 times.
Among the Clinton material posted on the site is a home-video excerpt, first broadcast by ABC News, that shows her confiding to someone at a campaign fundraiser that she avoided e-mail because of constant investigations of the White House during her husband's presidency.

Obama, a newcomer to presidential politics, is just starting to draw the sort of negative attention that the Clintons have long attracted. Last week, Chicago-area political consultant Joe Novak posted several Web videos taking aim at the Illinois senator's wife, Michelle, for her healthcare business dealings.
"I've gotten very angry over the fawning cheerleading that's going on in this city by so-called reporters," Novak said.
Obama campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said Novak's videos show that the Web "is rapidly becoming the place to put video that is too inaccurate and too scurrilous to put on television."

For candidates, one of the troublesome aspects of Web video is also one of its most appealing: the ability of viewers to send it to untold numbers of like-minded voters on an e-mail list.
"A lot of what strategists rely on is the viral impact of sending something to your existing list, and have them push it out to friends and family, make them evangelists and messengers," said online political strategy consulting firm. Blackrock Associates founder Brent Blackaby.

But the impact of a negative video can be devastating and undetectable. For candidates trying to appeal to a distinct demographic group, for example, video that shows them taking stands that the group opposes can spread fast without the campaign's knowledge. And the words pack a more profound emotional punch when they come from the candidate's own mouth.
"Voters understand that everybody's shading the truth, but this stuff, they can look at it and say, 'Jeez, that's what he said,' " said David Doak, a veteran Democratic ad maker.

Giuliani, for one, is facing an underground Web-video effort to undercut his appeal to the social conservatives who dominate the Republican nomination race. Two videos posted on YouTube show him making remarks at City Hall news conferences that could prove unpopular among them. In one, he calls for an expansion of immigration. The other shows him announcing a city lawsuit against gun manufacturers, accusing them of deliberately selling more guns than needed for hunting and law enforcement.
"The more guns you take out of society, the more you're going to reduce murder," he says in the video.

To Greenwald, who is not getting paid for the McCain project, Web video offers a chance to end what he sees as the senator's "free ride" in the mainstream media. "It's primarily that there was a story that wasn't being told," he said.
His first video strings together some McCain statements on Iraq, the Confederate flag, Christian conservatives and same-sex marriage, remarks contradictory enough to suggest that McCain falls short of delivering the "straight talk" that he made a trademark of his first campaign for president, in 2000.
"I certainly think we'll make an impact, and he'll have to respond to what we're doing," said Cliff Schecter, a Democratic consultant working on Greenwald's project. "That's all you can hope for."
But McCain campaign spokesman Danny Diaz declined to comment on the Web-video attacks.
"Our focus," he said, "is on using video that communicates a positive message about our candidate."

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