Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Is Blogging Journalism?

I’ve been futzing with that question for months, and I think I finally got it down in one place. Is weblogging journalism? The question confuses the technology with the act it supports — not something that technologists have ever done before, oh no no no. Just as the equipment doesn’t make me a musician or […]

Pitching to ‘Blog Authors

Journalists spend a ton of time bitching about PR reps; some of it is even justified. So it’s always encouraging to find a successful attempt at PR cluefulness, like this dispatch from the Public Relations Society of America about how to pitch to weblogs and their authors.

The Latest Fashion Accessory

The other day, Olivia, the twins, and I were making an expedition to the marvelous Fairway up in Harlem. While she was attending to a call of nature, I was charged with keeping an eye on our two carts, each containing an 8-month-old boy strapped into a car seat. Those of you who have met them are aware […]

QOTD

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” — P. J. O’Rourke This may be true, but it’s pretty clear that legislators — on the national level, anyway — are being bought and sold anyway.

On Being a Singer

Bell-ringer of a piece by Todd Purdum in today’s NYTimes. Nominally, it’s about a master class given by Broadway legend Barbara Cook. More deeply, it’s about what means to stand on stage and sing — and it’s a complete bullseye. Best graf is the last, which I need to post on every surface that I […]

Can You Hear Me Now, Screw?

A New York City Councilman wants to pass a law to force people to turn off their cell phones while they’re in a performance space, like a theater. From the NY Post: Council staff cited reports of movie star Laurence Fishburne’s profanity-laced admonition of a patron whose phone went off during his performance in “The […]

Introducing blogcritics.com

I’m part of a fascinating new experiment called blogcritics.com. It goes like this: there are tons of recording artists with no access to mass media to help promote their products. There are tons of good writers who love to write about music. How about using weblogs to bring them together? A perfect application of the Internet. […]

That’s About Right, Actually.

You are 38% geek You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important […]

Worse Than Rap Music From A Passing Car

The NRDC is going to sue the U.S. Navy over a new kind of sonar. From Reuters via CNN: Reynolds cited Navy estimates that the LFA system generates sounds capable of reaching 140 decibels more than 300 miles (483 kms) away…. But the fisheries service, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, said it approved […]