Dr. Mike, who ran a kind of blog farm under WordPress, has suddenly realized what a pain in the ass that was and folded shop. So, the Committee to Protect Bloggers Archive is no more. (Formerly at this URL:
http://ctblog.daria.be/
.)
There have been so many new arrests, I’m not sure how valuable it was anyway. Thanks to Mike for the temporary reprieve from the merciless winds of time against which even zeros and ones and blips and beeps are no anti-Oxymandial.
Ashley Heher quoted me in an article on an effort to create a bloggers’ union. The story is called “Bloggers Consider Forming Labor Union.” This link is to the Washington Post publication of the story, though it’s also carried in the Los Angeles Times and others and others. Unfortunately, the way the quotes are arranged, it seems like I’m a conservative blogger. Hardly. About as much as I’m a liberal one. Still, it’s hard to deny how brilliant my thoughts are. (Ugh.)
“The reason I like blogging is that it’s very anarchistic. I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and oh my God, you’re not going to tell me what to do,” said Curt Hopkins, founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.
“The blogosphere is such a weird term and such a weird idea. It’s anyone who wants to do it,” Hopkins said. “There’s absolutely no commonality there. How will they find a commonality to go on? I think it’s doomed to failure on any sort of large scale.”
Well, “I may be just a simple hyperchicken from a backwards asteroid…”
Update: This post from Salon, gives background information I didn’t have. I thought from the the reporter’s questions that it was a more all-encompassing plan. (It was my fault for not researching before I agreed to the interview, and the one with Media Life and the one with PR Week.) I am very sorry to hear of Ms. Madrak‘s loss of her friend. Even if this is solely an issue of health care, questions that remain in my mind are the simple ones of how it would work and who would qualify. I don’t know. I wish her luck, though. Everyone deserves decent health care.
Update: Here’s another article, from PR Week by Hamilton Nolan, in which I was also quoted (though hopefully to a little better effect than the AP story), on the topic, but pointing out the focus on health insurance. It’s titled, “Proposed blogger union sparks controversy.” Controversy? Really? Eh.
