David Tiley is standing in for Tim Dunlop for the next four weeks. He is a writer, script editor, teacher and occasional director who works in film and multimedia, particularly on documentaries, and has done his bit as an arts bureaucrat. His blog Barista tries to find humour in a deadly serious world.

 

Jozef Imrich at Media Dragon is a prince of the link. This very Tuesday, for instance, he carries enough connections to deep thought about the nature of blogging to torture the rest of us with unaccustomed self reflection.

Gary Sauer-Thompson has a reflective but highly conceptual chew on the issues, on the grounds that:

…the media has become a battlefield for those who hold that a healthy, participatory democracy requires noncommercial access to the tools of communication.

Does this mean we have become important by accident? Press Think provides a potpourri of ideas for a BloggerCon at Harvard, which is enough to make me fear that the medium will stop being fun.

The NYT account of this (thanks Jozef) adds a note of squalor:

“Soon, advertisers will be able to say “I want to buy ads on 25 different Web logs in Southern California written by women who drive humvees,” and have the perfect audience at their fingertips, he said.”

We all need money, but bloggers are self selected against being a commodity – there are so many better ways of putting ourselves up for sale.

We Australians, of course, will die to preserve a sense of fun. Professor Bunyip, on enigmatic hiatus, threatened to return ten days ago but hasn’t. In his absence, we have only the moppet muggers of pretension atThe Spin Starts Here to keep the monstering light.

Gummo Trotsky is wrapped in a similar silence. He seems to be running a strange Giaconda game, where his not blogging makes us comment, until it dies away into silence. Now. Silence.

Cricket has given way to football, while After Grog is combining the two in one last hymn both to the Laragod and the Sex scandals. Drug scandals. Umpire abuse. Goal umpire abuse. Tribunal inconsistencies…which make up the AFL.

The Monday Experts section of Ubersportingpundit is a treasure, though Uberpundit Scott’s politics are not inclusive.

Chris Sheil, meanwhile, continues his public agony over his mistaken loyalty to a failing rugby team. Yobbo remains existentially true to a vision of the game which football would dearly like to deny. He will never be allowed to coach your childrens’ team:

My contribution to the game was limited to being involved in a 6 person brawl midway through the last quarter. Next week I’ll try to get a kick as well.

I don’t know what effect the bloggers are having on the Australian media. But I do know that any episodes of public stupidity will be paraded around the houses on a stick and barbecued on the hot griddle of sarcasm. Maybe we are starting to keep the bastards of the press honest.

Tim Lambert hunts pseudoscience and stooges for right wing pressure groups with the calm zeal of the truly outraged. Gun control, crime statistics, global warming and passive smoking are grist to his mill. Hisinterest in the statistical arcana of epidemiology (you think this is a meaningful statistic? THIS is a meaningful statistic) has spread to Quiggin, parts one and two.

It is one thing to hurl facts across the blogosphere; to undermine the models and ideas of science itself is a truly dirty trick. Science ain’t the law and adversarialism don’t play.

Back Pages, in a more serious vein, has caught the NSW Leader of the Opposition (who? where?) in an extraordinary piece of pure political obscenity. Rather than a raft of Boards and State Authorities and Quangos and the Salvos (yes, in welfare, even the Salvos), Brogden says:

if you are the minister for transport you should be responsible for our railways. If you are the minister for utilites you should be responsible for our water supply. If you are the minister for health you should be responsible for our hospitals. That is our philosophy. No ifs or buts.

He will be telling us the Government is elected to govern next. That means, of course, we would go back to the olden days when we, the public, knew who to biff if something went wrong. And Ministers used to do this weird thing called “resigning.”

Catallaxy has taken up the question of our faith in government from its particular free market perspective. Talking about services like schools and hospitals which are historically not Big Ticket monopolies like trains, Andrew Norton says:

In my own research into privatisation, the best way of predicting public opinion is to look at the historic ownership of that sector. Where it is historically private, private ownership is most popular. Where it is historically public, public ownership is most popular. When there is a mix, that too is reflected in opinion.

Whatever it is, we like it like its always been.

There is a reminder, incidentally, at Kick and Scream, about spam. The Evil Ones can rip email addresses off comments, and there are various ways to hide them.

Internationally, the news continues to be grim. Swanker looks at the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide.

Juan Cole continues to track the politics and slaughter in Iraq. Tim Dunlop guts Howard’s logic on the Spanish withdrawal – and points out that Zapatero actually did what he promised, which at least is refreshing.

Southerly Buster reminds us that Negroponte the Nasty is now U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. And I found a pair of harrowing, chaotic tales of the war – a circus worker turned humanitarian, and a woman soldier’s first night uner fire.

Fortunately, we can seek solace in our local individualists. Hot Buttered Death can be relied upon to find any idiocy going, while Gianna is falling in love with her baby again:

And we spent a lot of time just looking at each other and smiling. I’m pretty sure he felt the same way. I looked at him and finally it hit me that I’ve made a little person.

No-one else can get away with that. In a single day, Boynton manages to swing from walking a dog in memory of Wodehouse to the Jerusalem Chainsaw Massacre.

Loobylu is celebrating Autumn, while Invisible Shoebox is taking the world’s wisest ants to Barcelona.

The Governor-General has a tribe of librarians to comb his magnificent collection of comic writing. How else could he find an old Bernard Levin remark about Michael Foote to describe Bush on television:

I felt like a member of Greenpeace watching a month old seal pup beating its own brains out.

If individual blogs can become all self important and angsty, the group blogs can turn into a public soap opera. Witness Troppo Armadillo, as Ken Parish introduces a new flame, who turns out to have a mind of her own thank you very much, Woodsy discusses investment advice, and Geoff Remains Poised.

In the middle of this blog domesticity, Wayne talked about the right to die. And I know, as I reread it in this context, what blogging is for. Go there and let it work on you.

NEXT WEEK: small treasures. Use the comments at Barista to tell me those exquisite blogs that seem to be ignored. You all know some.