Daily Bloggerback
Best of Blogs Round-Up: Monday, February 20, 2006
EDITED BY PIERRE TRISTAM/Candide's Notebooks

Non-disclaimer: We're liberal to the core, but we include in this daily blog review the political, the social, the cultural and the undefinable from the left, the right, the in-between from all over the globe. And we're suckers for good writing regardless of ideology. Clicking the link will take you to the original post.

• Outragedmoderates have the memos: 9/11 and Donald Rumsfeld
• Bush’s upcoming hypocrisy at Clrado’s National Renewable Energy Lab
• In the US, zero tolerance = zero education
• Preparing for Halliburton detention centers
• As they have been for years: Islamists warming up to overthrow Pakistan
• The Church of England’s apology for the slave trade: Natalie dissents
• Coexistence v. the secular society: A defense of individualism first
• Ukraine had orange, Lebanon had the cedars, and Syria? Chicken
• Beautiful Atrocities’ complete guide to better sex
• The Hamas “conundrum,” in 1,168 words
• Dennis the Peasant pulls a Spinoza for the masses on right blog rants
• Liberal Oasis on Iraq’s Tammany Hall
• Statistics’ free lunch fools at the White House
• Liverpool, slavery and the Beatles
• Trula Mama on bad, crazy, unbearable Cleveland drivers
• What south Africa needs. Cynical expats need not apply.
• Why India, 1-sport nation (cricket), never wins at the Olympics

Featured Blog I: Lockdown
An American In Northern Iraq
Michael Totten /Feb. 17,2006

ERBIL, IRAQ – A Western journalist I met in Erbil, who has been in Iraq for some time, told me the place challenges almost every liberal idea he has ever had in his head. I don’t know what he was like, ideologically speaking, before he got there. But he certainly doesn’t have orthodox left-wing opinions today. (Some right-wingers, especially those who think of the entire Islamic religion as a totalitarian death cult, would likewise get a crash-course in reality if they ever bothered to hang out in Iraq and meet actual Muslims.) I was only in Iraq for two days before I had to face the sort of thing my journalist friend was talking about. Omar and Mohammad, the two brothers from Baghdad who write at Iraq the Model, were supposed to meet me in the “Sheraton” hotel lobby. They emailed me from Kirkuk and said they would be there in a few hours. I waited. And waited. And they never showed up. Read the rest at Michael Totten...

Featured Blogger II: Nibblers of the Narcissus
The Blogosphere, R.I.P. (2002-2006)
Daniel Drezner /February 19, 2006

Well, it's time for me to pack it in -- blogs are finished, caput, history. How do I know this? Why, I've been reading what the media has said about it this month. They're doomed economically -- Slate's Daniel Gross says, "as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top." Gross is just following up on a New York cover story by Clive Thompson, in which it turns out that it's difficult to eke out a living from blogging:

By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that. In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. Read the rest at Daniel Drezner...