In less than 24 hours, Josh Marshall raises 4864.00 to cover expenses as he blogs live from the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

Great overview of blog advertising by Kate Kaye in Mediapost.

The New York Times has hired its first fulltime blogger, Daniel Okrent.

Most newspapers would call the new guy an ombudsman. And even though the NYT folks are calling Okrent “a public editor,” he’s a b-l-o-g-g-e-r.

Okrent won’t be edited. He has no newspaper experience. “He will be given an unfettered opportunity to address readers’ comments about The Times’s coverage, to raise questions of his own and to write about such matters, in commentaries that will be published in the newspaper as often as he sees fit.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the paper’s publisher, says “Working at its best, it’s a highway with two-way traffic.”

Here’s my question:

“Dear Mr. Ombudsman and Mr. Sulzberger,

Isn’t an $120,000-a-year ombudsman/public editor an anachronism, now that the paper has 750 bloggers scrutinizing its pages and publishing their thoughts 24/7 for free?

Yours truly,

Hank”

I’m mystified. What purpose does an official critic serve today? What kind of two-way street has 18 wheelers going in one direction and a lone tricycle (occasionally!) going the other?

With hundreds of questions being raised daily on blogs, would it be it be better to let reporters and editors who create the news answer these questions themselves?

Perhaps reposing questions and underwriting/packaging official criticism in a finite space make it easier to ignore the gushers of unofficial criticism, even to ignore the relativism and indeterminancy that undergird journalism? Perhaps there are other rationales. I’ll say it again: I am mystified.

…

This is another tiny slice of the history of the sister concepts of “public” and “publish,” I think. For hundreds of years, the definitions of “public” and “publish” have been evolving. In the earliest days, the public space was the town common or church steps, and to publish (make public) was to post a notice in that space, where any and all would likely see it. As towns grew into cities and public spaces evolved, multiplied and subdivided, the only entities who could effectively “publish” were those with printing presses and the financial wherewithal to distribute their publications. Later, print publishers were joined in this monopoly by broadcasters with expensive equipment and licenses.

Late in this media history, the “ombudsman” was invented by publishers who had become embarrassed by their monopoly over the public space.

But now, the public space, the space most anyone and everyone can see and have in common, is once again public — anyone can publish. Thanks to the Internet and spontaneous networks among millions of bloggers, the public space is much larger and more porous, and traditional publishers are just one current in a sea of information.

The ombudsman can be hung up in some museum of artifacts with the buggy whip. Sorry, Mr. Okrent.

In the comments on this Buzzmachine post, Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, asks: “Who says that blogging is going to overthrow journalism?”

Certainly not I, Dave. Does anyone think there won’t a healthy trade done in reporting on information of public interest for, at least, the next millennium?

What I can say is that blogging will overthrow/surpass traditional publishing — with its first, second and third generation owners, title-encrusted executives, executive saunas, multiple layers of bureacracy, ombudsmanists, ad reps, ad rep Porsches…

The organizing principle and profit engine of newspaper publishing for the last 350 years has been control of distribution.

Moore’s law has liquidated that control. All sorts of technology — cheap servers, cheap bandwidth, cheap blog CMS, Google, ubiquitous devices for online reading, cyclonic blog networks — combine to collapse publishing’s fundemental barrier to entry. (As Jeff puts, the gatekeeper is dead.)

There’s only one barrier remaining — a machine can’t be funny or eloquent or cutting or wise. Moore’s law gives us a glut of bandwidth and CPUs but not creativity. Which means authors are the last remaining publishing players with any pricing leverage.

In fact, Dave, nobody should think that “journalism” is going to be overthrown by blogs. Quite the contrary: journalism is the only part of today’s media economy that will thrive.

Matt Welch: “There are many terrific side-benefits to this blogging stuff, but one of the most elemental is that it’s easier to keep in touch, meet great new people, and make vast geographical distances seem insignificant. Pretty cool.” In point of fact, I learned in this post that my old friend Charlie Hornberger (via Prague, Budapest and Austin) finally got hitched.

We went to the NC State Fair this afternoon. We enjoyed: airguns at the Fish & Wildlife stand; giant sand sculptures; a dozen baby pigs suckling; the rabbits; a goat getting its hair cut; little brother tossing two baseballs at the piles of blocks; big sister tossing two rubber balls into a small wastebasket; a chronological display of old plows and threshers; the smells of roasted corn, silage, cotten candy and barbecue fused in the seamless die of a clear, blue fall sky. Our favorite activity by a country mile: holding the baby chicks at a table in the poultry barn.

A carnie tipped us on how use the bb-machine gun to obliterate the red star target and win a prize — rather than trying to cover the star with holes, shoot a circle around the star and cut it out. Also, he said, boys with two front top teeth missing are usually seven.

Check out the fair webcam.

Read all about the folks who own (and now control) America’s 12th largest newspaper chain: here.

Kate Kaye writes in Media Post: “Many candidates have experimented with campaign websites, email fundraising pleas and, less frequently, banner ads. Now some are beginning to display a stronger grasp of what the Web has to offer.” In recent weeks, we’ve seen a number of politically oriented businesses selling t-shirts and bumper-stickers buy blogads and have seen huge growth in page views on politially hot blogs like Political Wire, Atrios and TalkingPointsMemo. It’s only a matter of time before we see campaigns flinging Blogads. (Via Political Wire.)

A modern children’s tale: a few months back, Tamas found an orphaned magpie in his garden begging for food from Tamas’ pet turtle. Tamas adopted the magpie and brought him into the office every day, where he perched atop various computer screens. Then, one day, a flock of magpies flew past an the orphan joined them. Here’s the inquisitive fellow. Somewhere, Tamas has tape of the magpie perched atop the turtle’s shell, tapping away, saying to the hiding turtle, “come out to play!”

Retired four-star admiral Hal Gehman, who chaired the post-mortem on the Columbia debacle: “They claim that the culture in Houston is a ‘badgeless society,’ meaning it doesn’t mater what you have on your badge — you’re concerned about shuttle safety together. Well, that’s all nice, but the truth is that it does matter what badge you’re wearing. Look, if you really do have an organization that has free communication and open doors and all that kind of stuff, it takes a special kind of management to make it work. And we just don’t see that management here. Oh, they say all the right things. ‘We have open doors and e-mails, and anybody who sees a problem can raise his hand, blow a whistle, and stop the whole process.’ But then when you look at how it really works, it’s an incestuous, hierarchical system, with invisible rankings and a very strict informal chain of command. They all know that. So even though they’ve got all the trappings of commuication, you don’t actually find communication. It’s very complex. But a person brings an issue up, what caste he’s in makes all the difference. Now, again, NASA will deny this, but if you talk to people, if you really listen to people, all the time you hear ‘Well, I was afraid to speak up.’ Boy it comes across loud and clear. You listen to the meetings: ‘Anybody got anything to say?’ There are thirty people in the room, and slam! There’s nothing. We have plenty of witness statements saying, ‘If I had spoken up, it would have been at the cost of my job.’ And if you’re in the engineering department, you’re a nobody.” (Quoted by William Langewiesche in November’s Atlantic magazine.)