Friday, January 25, 2008

Welcome back...

Welcome back, Sausage Factory (sorry to disappoint anyone who expected to see a posting about Gabe Kaplan here). Many of us bloggers hadn't given up hope that Dan Lett's blog would return, as is evident by the long-standing, for-a-time-dead links on the sidebars of our blogs. Dan Lett is one the Free Press's best critical thinkers writers and it's good to see him posting again.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes it is nice to see Dan posting again, but I still don't consider what he's posting to as a blog. It's a forum attached to a employer sponsored commercial enterprise.

Broadly, the purpose of a blog is to provide personal commentary, or news on a particular subject, or to act as an on-line personal online diary.

The object of the exercise isn't journalism, it's to communicate, share experiences, or sometimes just vent and blow off steam.

Of course it's easier to read a well written, well thought out piece of writting that's set out in an attractive setting.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't some diamond of widom to be found amoung the roughest of surroundings or writings.

Dan's certainly entitled to his point of view, and whatever form of expression that results because of that.

But regardless of Dan being a reporter, journalist, professional writer or whatever terminology you want to use, his soap box is a forum and not a blog.

RU Sirius

Prairie Topiary said...

Thanks for the extremely well-thought out comment.

I think you're absolutely right that we shouldn't consider an employer-sponsored commercial undertaking to be the same as a blog that's driven entirely by personal and non-commercial expression. I'm not sure if that distinction makes Dan Lett's Sausage Factory "not a blog," but the Free Press's commercial interests should be kept in mind when considering Lett's or any of his colleagues' postings.

Having said that, I recently spent some time fishing around at technorati only to find disappointingly that their list of supposed "Top 100" blogs was largely made up of blogs designed to make money or teach others how to do the same(http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/).

Michael said...

This picture is so gross.