The Art of the Blog

The best meditation on blogging and bloggers I have read so far:

In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.

(Via Open (minds, finds, conversations).)

The History Commons

As someone who has been writing about the commons for many years, I am still amazed when new ones pop up. Here's another:

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities. It is collaborative and thus allows individuals to build upon the work of others. Each investigation is organized as a “project,” which is made up of at least one timeline. You can contribute to a project by adding new events to the timeline associated with that project. All submissions are peer-reviewed by other users before being published. If you would like to participate in this effort, you will first need to create a user account. Once you have done that, you can begin adding events to any timeline.

(Via CommonsBlog.)