"A way to bring a lot more people into the fold"

"AP, you're gone. Blogosphere, here it comes," quipped Larry Kudlow during yesterday's Kudlow & Company interview with Roger L. Simon, Glenn Reynolds and Charles Johnson re their new venture, Pajamas Media, blogged live here yesterday. Excerpts from the transcript at Radio Blogger:

Roger: Here's what we're trying to do. First, by affiliating as many blogs as possible . . . we have 250, and more as of now . . . we are going to massively put ads on blogs from coporate advertisers, who previously were shy of blogs. And this will happen in the next few weeks. Then, once blogs become more financially viable, we are going to affiliate these same blogs into a nation's news service, called the Blog News Service, with correspondents worldwide, from Beirut to California.

Larry: How can you keep the standards and the quality of reporting and opinion making as high as possible?

Charles: Well, one of the main things that any blogger has is his credibility, which he earns, basically, through his writings. . . we'll have a back end system where bloggers will be able to submit breaking stories for review by the editorial board, and it will be a pretty transparent system, a lot like blogging right now.

Glenn: We've seen a lot of independent reporting and fact gathering and analysis that was sort of pulled together by the blogosphere, in kind of a self-organizing fashion. And that happens when there's a really big story. But I think it'll be useful to have it all happen on a more regular basis. And I think that'll also be a way to bring a lot more people into the fold. I mean, one of the problems that smaller bloggers, or bloggers with smaller audiences have now, is just getting noticed. And this will be a system that I think will be a little more egalitarian, and make it easier for anybody to rise to the top and get attention when they have something worthwhile to report or to say.

Charles: One of the great things about it is that we'll have people on the scene any time there's some happening story that's breaking.

Re other concerns in the blogosphere, Larry asked Glenn about rumors that the supposedly impartial search engine, Google, has been rejecting conservative searches and ads:

Glenn: People are saying that, and they're talking about their disfavoring conservative sites, and even conservative blogs on Google news. I don't really know. I think it would behoove Google to get out in front and explain what is going on with this stuff.

Roger had written about Google's shenanigans the other day, concluding "Myself, I'm switching over to the new Microsoft search engine":

The news that Google -- our once warm-and-fuzzy Internet friend -- has, in Reuters' words, "applied for U.S. and international patents on technology to rank stories on its news site based on the quality of the news sources" is one of the more sinister revelations of potential mind control I have read in years.

What they are really doing is turning their search capabilities into the instrument of a form of censorship never before devised. No matter what supposedly impartial algorithms are built into their ranking system, I would bet my house that they will be constructed to come to the conclusion that, say, CBS News is to be trusted far more than the bloggers who correctly showed the network's anchorman was lying. And all this will be done in the name of "science."

Creepy.  But as Roger notes, MSN search "is pretty good anyway."  We've already switched our default search engine.

Comments

[GunTrash]

Thank you for posting that. I was looking for an alternative to Google, but for some reason, hadn't even considered MSN. Think I'll take for a test drive over the next few days.

[Sissy Willis]

Hey, Gun Trash --

Thanks for stopping by. I checked out your blog and like the look of Teoma search, too.