It is funny how the side you take influences your position. Dave Winer spends a great deal of time talking about the need to properly give credit to those who create solutions. When it comes to the unintended consequences of a "solution" - aka a problem - he is quite happy to pass the buck. He sites The Yahoo Problem. Wait a minute though, what product was it that started the trend towards putting a little icon on the page for each different news-reader? That's right it was Userland's Radio, which Winer was a key intellect behind.

How did this become the Yahoo problem anyway? They are amongst the latest to pile on the "add this to whatever" bandwagon. And is setting up a collection of competitive directories for people to store their RSS subscriptions in one of several centralized data vats really the answer? The solution proposed by Winer has a clause stating there should be open competition. So for a while everybody plays nice, and then when AOL and Time Warner split they setup competing services. And very soon we're back to a whole bunch of buttons that don't do much for anybody but clutter up the landscape.

In fairness, Winer has removed the Radio button from his main website, but the orgins of the problem lie in the early foundation of the idea there should be a button to subscribe to specific news readers.

Jay Rosen says Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. I agree. Dan Gillmor contributes a draft of The End of Objectivity which also raises many great points.

In new media and old the question has to now be framed as what is good journalism.

Rathergate and Trent Lott

Rathergate is a great example of people online fact checking a major news organization and catching them practicing sloppy journalism. The fact checking, however, did not require a great deal of investigation. It required a couple of observant people to pick up on the anachronisms and point them out. Once that happened online communities spread the word quickly.

The UK paper Telegraph posted a story late last week saying "5,500 men and women have deserted since the invasion of Iraq." A search of Google shows a few articles from last year, even covering President Bush speaking on the topic, but very little is said about it in the mainstream press. There has been pretty widespread coverage of the casualties of the invasion of Iraq, but few mentions of the deserters who according to this article seem to be nearly five times as numerous.

Many a discussion recently has been held on whether blogs are journalism and their authors journalists. At the same time we hear from our new audio blogging, er podcasting compadres that it was wonderful that Jon Stewart gave the entertainers at Crossfire what for and called their bluff. In less than a half hour Stewart pointed out the problem. The entertainers on Crossfire are no more journalists that most bloggers.

Somewhere along the line it all broke down. There is an aspiration that many bloggers have to be recognized as journalists. They want to be a part of the club, to call the fourth estate home. But journalism is so much more than just telling the story one wants to tell. It's more than a collection of press releases and spun yarns. Dave Winer has been a poster boy for the power of blogs (and there are multitudes of ways in which blogs are very powerful). Those who say blogs aren't journalism often draw out comments on his weblog about how the writer "doesn't get it." Today Winer said: