It’s not just a magazine on a screen
From time to time, if I find myself at Andrew Sullivan’s blog and there’s nothing new on Gawker or io9 (the Internet is not that big for me), I look to see what’s up on Marc Ambinder’s blog, which is more or less next door to Andrew’s. It’s not a bad place to go for information—it has been useful during this primary season—but I really don’t think Marc quite understands the technology he’s dealing with.
I mean, first there’s the fact that (as I happened to mention on Gawker) he turned off his comments recently. It was indeed getting pretty ugly in there at times, but, y’know, such a cut-and-dry dismissal of one of the most interactive aspects of an interactive medium seemed a little heavy-handed to me, and definitely indicative of the fact that The Atlantic in general and not just Marc doesn’t seem to really understand how to manage the new media. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A lot of folks tend to look down their nose at Gawker as some kind of lowbrow, mean-spirited peanut gallery, but I have yet to find another online community that’s as worthwhile for intelligent discourse, and it’s because Nick Denton and his people know how to apply the technology—TMITFMP.)
But more irritating to me is Marc’s occasional posting of his corrections.
Dude. Unless you are updating the offending posts themselves (and from what I can see, you are not), your corrections are useless. Pointless. Without a meaningful end. Once the post with the error drops off your front page, most readers who find it in the future are going to do so through a search engine or by way of some equally nonlinear method. They will never see your correction, and so the mistake you made will continue to perpetuate itself on and on until the end of time.
If you’re going to correct something on a blog, the correction needs to go in the post to which it corresponds, at the bottom or the top; the strikethrough function may also come in handy. By all means, feel free to augment this with a separate post explaining what’s been corrected, but that should be a secondary action.
