The madness of some markets.

In a nutshell ...

Once Google set the plot point, backlinks became hard to ignore. And marketers looking to get an edge started using a variety of tactics to gain a coveted spot on the front page that didn’t involve actually creating good content that people want to read.

Tim Bray, reflecting on the numbers for his Bye Amazon post.

But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.

Was true, is true, will be true.

I know everybody and her mother have already linked this and bookmarked it, but I want it here for myself, because there is some good stuff in this list.

I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it.

This is a very real tension, to me.

So many interesting ideas about not returning to normal when (if?) this thing is over.

Very interesting longish article on the role of the critic today. Artists are increasingly unleashing their fans on critics, and ignorant "critics" are doing a poor job of serving their audience. I don't know, though, how new this phenomenon is. Sure, in the olden days it was hard to get 3 million people issuing death threats, but nor was the relationship between critics and creators always a love-in of mutual respect.

Nicely anachronistic writing tool, too.