John Markoff doesn't get it

Christian Crumlish

I relish this opportunity to agree 100% with something Dave Winer wrote:

OJR interviews John Markoff from the NY Times. "It sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that's what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio. And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It's possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time."He's not listening. [Scripting News]

In fact, Markoff's quip about telling people who ask him why he doesn't have a blog that he does have a blog, "it's called nytimes.com, don't you read it?" brought to mind something my friend Levi Asher told me back when he was working for Time Warner and I asked him if the people he worked with had their own websites (Levi started his Literary Kicks website back in 1994). Levi told me that when he asked his co-workers if they had a website, they'd say, "Yes, my website is Pathfinder."