There’s a new blog focused on Berkeley. Says the creator: “I am happy to give blog authoring privileges to anyone who lives in Berkeley, and who commits to write about issues, events, and news that are directly related to Berkeley. People add entries as they please about Berkeley stuff, and we end up with a local weblog. Will it be as simple as that? Undoubtedly not, but it seems like a reasonable place to start.” The idea was spawned by Peter Merholz.

I’ve been talking with friends in Amherst about doing similar here, so will be interested to watch the idea closely. When I first mention the idea, people say “but we’ve got a newspaper.” Point out that having your “own” blog would mean you could write about that zoning issue that is driving the neighborhood crazy, or that soccer field mess, or the true price of multi-lingual education… and eyes start to light up. “Oh” becomes “WOW.” As blogging and broadband spread and the local news hole continues to erode in print, this is a model to watch and nuture. (Via Gawker.)

Clay Shirky continues to attract attention with his argument that blogs are a scale-free network; in rough terms this means that a few blogs get most of the traffic and will accelerate away from their peers to become mainstream media. Clay floated this idea on the NowEurope list many months ago and has made it several times recently, most fully here. Here’s my take:

Clay’s argument that ‘the blogosphere is naturally elitist and will soon generate its own strata of mainstream media’ contains two generalizations that should be untangled.

a) Yes, Clay is probably right that 5% of the blogs will always account for 50% of blog traffic. But it is wrong to talk about “The” blogosphere. We’ll certainly have hundreds of blogospheres, each with its own elite and power law distribution. And we don’t need to worry about stasis any time soon. These new spheres will be emerging for a long time. Glenn Reynolds obviously won’t be the hub for French bloggers, and BoingBoing won’t be the hub for evangelical Christians. New bloggers will invent and serve new spheres.

b) Clay suggests that because mainstream media is elitist (ie governed by the power law), all elitest media is mainstream media. “As we get used to weblogs, they will become mainstream media too, and will take on the trappings of mainstream media,” he says.

Sure the blogospheres may each display elitist traffic distrubutions and may not be able to link to everyone. But Clay’s equation of blogs and mainstream media elides the many traits — links, chronology, personality, blogrolls, 95% lower overheads, Google-friendliness, trackbacks — that make blogs different from (and subversive of) today’s dominant media, aka “mainstream media.” Lumping the two classes of media together is like declaring, 1.5 million years ago, that “homo erectus shares traits with the ape, so we can safely ignore their differences.”

What makes blogs unique? I’ll advance the argument that a key difference between blogs and today’s media is corporate structure. As media organisms, blogs have shorter life-cycles, smaller metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit new media challenges. Weird, subversive, new things will come to pass.

If you’re still reading this post, you might enjoy Albert-László Barabási’sLinked: The New Science of Networks, or at least my review of it.

I trudged out through six inches of snow just before lunch to retrieve the mail and got a nice surprise: the prototype for the Los Angeles Examiner, still toasty after its flight from the coast. What a buzz to hold this thing, this bastard spawn of blogs and print.

My favorite line comes in a story about waiting in line to get into trendy LA nightspots. “This embarrassing sidewalk is the Majave Desert and her clipboard is the only canteen of water for miles.” The comment from Nick Yulico on this page on the LAExaminer blog turned into the “Angelenos are Pansies” letter to the editor. On the Nuptials page — my favorite spot in most papers — we read about the not-so-recent union of Angelenos Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch.

I look forward to reading lots more of the gab, grub and grab of LA life as reported by the guys the Economist calls “Messrs. Layne and Welch.”

Noting that Jim Romenesko changed his media blog’s name from MediaNews to Romenesko after threats from the MediaNews newspaper group, Jeff Jarvis concludes this is a “smart move.” After all, “he’s the brand.”

With blogs leading the way, maybe we’re headed back to the days when businesses are named for their owners. Heinz, Levis, Merrill, Merck… these businesses were built from the blue-print of one individual’s integrity and passion.

Wearing my Pressflex hat, I talk to publishers every week who think their own couple of sysadmins can whip up a great site. (“Gee, my cousin built a web site in one weekend, how hard can it be?”) I check back six or nine months later, and these guys are usually still siteless (and sightless.) For anyone intoxicated by the idea of “cheaply” building their own app rather than using something that has been user-tested, this page paints a sobering picture.

“EBay hosted 300,000 used-vehicle sales last year. That’s just a sliver of the estimated 43 million used vehicles sold in the U.S. But in a highly fragmented market, eBay’s tally makes it among the largest used-car sellers in the country,” reports WSJ.com.

eBayers are willing to buy cars that are 1000s of miles away, sight unseen. They trust what they are getting. “Sellers often photograph their vehicles in copious detail because dealers who unload lemons through the site risk having their ‘feedback’ — a permanent rating left by buyers — tarnished by disappointed customers.”

No wonder eBay is mopping up in used cars. If you’ve ever haggled with a used car salesman, the opportunity to give the dude feedback in front of 60 million other buyers is exhilerating.

One of the funny things about reading some print journalists try to “get” blogs is just how bad their information is. You wonder whether an article was written three months ago and just stuck in the can or whether the journalists just don’t bother to read the blogs they write about.

Take, for example, the Washington Post’s latest report on blogging. Opines the scribe: “while blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth.”

Hmm. The final paragraph notes that “people are pushing the boundary of blogging formats.” For example, “CityBlogs.com is pioneering an attempt at locally oriented blogging in New York City.” OK. Click on CityBlogs.com and discover that the site, launched in November 2002, hasn’t been updated since December 17, 2002. Why didn’t the Post get one of its “paid staff to ferret out and vet” the fact that CityBlogs has been shuttered longer than it was open?

Dave Winer, who was interviewed for the story, has some further thoughts.

Rick Bruner hears the President say Iran when he means Iraq. Rick looks at the NYTimes’ quotation but the mention of Iran has been omitted. What gives, Rick asks?

As I recall, there’s some long-standing tradition among journalists of quoting Presidents EXACTLY. No cleaning, no sanding, no smudging. (Is this even codified in the AP style book?) Presidential words, after all, have incredible de facto and de jure power; they are, in some quasi-religious sense, the utterances of the United States itself. So this retouching shouldn’t go unremarked.

While visiting Rick’s blog, don’t miss the BUSH SPAM one slot higher on the page.

Ever dryly hilarious and sloshingly brilliant, Ken Layne explains why a new column in an Australian newspaper is called The Continuing Crisis.

Dave Winer says he gets roughly 5000 visitors when monster-community publishing site Slashdot links to him, and says this is typical of other Manila and Radio sites.

Dave asked why Joel Spolsky, author of Joel on Software, gets 400,000 reads from a Slashdot link.

For comparison, I wrote my buddy Ben Sullivan, who publishes ScienceBlog. He says “For me, the Slashdot effect is spilt in two. Sometime they put a story from Science Blog exclusively inside on their science section. That generates, maybe, 2,000-3,000 reads over several weeks. But a front page posting for all the world to see brings in about 10,000, almost immediately (12-24 hour period).”

So I wrote Joel, noting that other other folks get up to 10,000 page views when Slashdotted. Joel replied: “we get about 30,000 page views on a normal day and about 120,000 page views on a Slashdot day. This includes every page, not just the one that slashdot linked to, and I’m not counting based on referrers because that only gets the first page. … I think my site is quite a bit stickier than average. (Every day I get a few emails of the form: ‘I found your site from a link and spent the whole afternoon reading everything…’).”

On his blog, Joel has added further context, noting that a) the number Dave originally quoted was for “hits,” which are approximately 400% higher than “page views” and b) the Slashdot links always come on days when he’s sent out his newsletter to 16,000 subscribers c) plenty of other bloggers link to him on that day.

For reference, a February 1999 article about the Slashdot effect’s impact on traffic at three web sites concluded that Slashdot could drive up to 4000 readers to a popular link. An addendum to that article noted that the original article got 17,000 visits after being Slashdotted itself.