August 13, 2003

Ringside seat

Christian Crumlish

Sacramento Bee columnist has been publishing his California Insider weblog since April, but with the recall craziness, his blogged insights are especially welcome, giving us a glimpse into the chaos that is California's governance.

One of his readers likens webloggers to courtiers, but haven't journalists always behaved like a gossipy jockeying court, especially capital press corps?

His reader put it this way:

I've decided that you bloggers are like the 17th century French court: an obsessive social circle constantly calculating alliances (with other bloggers); gossipy and sometimes outrageously catty about people in power; carefully measuring the political climate, whispering rumors of beheadings; members of the highest reaches of the establishment but outsiders in an insider's world.

I like gossip! OK, I'm out of the closet on that one now. Here's my queston. Where's the California Insider's RSS feed? I guess I need to point NetNewsWire and see if it's really-simply-discoverable.

UPDATE: Doy, I looked at the source, really simple. It's clearly an MT template. There's a funky and forky RSS 1.0 feed pointed to and an RSS 0.9 feed available as well.

Posted by xian at August 13, 2003 11:48 AM
Comments

I don't consider RSS 1 to be either funky or forky.

Funky since its specs explicitly state that dublin core is to be used for metadata and since namespace elements have been in from the beginning can't be funky.

Calling it a fork assumes that the Userland path is the official path and that Userland owns RSS, something Dave said they don't. It also ignores how RSS 0.9 used RDF.

Posted by: James at August 13, 2003 12:26 PM

Another good recall weblog is the Condor blog. It's operated by a former Sac Bee editor, Dave Jensen (who is, with full disclosure, my father in law). It's less comprehensive than CA Insider -- Condor focuses on teasing out telling and/or entertaining gems from the news.

Posted by: Dylan Tweney at August 13, 2003 4:18 PM

One of his readers likens webloggers to courtiers, but haven't journalists always behaved like a gossipy jockeying court, especially capital press corps?

I feel this is a far-fetched statement. It could be that they might have over reacted on some cases to generalize makes no sense to me.

Posted by: Bingo at September 26, 2003 3:20 AM
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