Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The AP and homogenous information

By Fester:



The Associated Press is about to launch their content seeking bots and continue their descent into minimal relevance according to Ars Technica.
The AP is seeking to prevent 'exploitation' of their content which is usually some of the most generic thing out there; basic information with minimal analysis and value add past the point of a national and international distribution system.



The problem with the AP attempting to firewall their content from re-appropriation from micro-users is that there is very little differentiating content in their work that I and many other bloggers can not find elsewhere.

Agence France Press, Reuters, UPI, CNN, New York Times all do an excellent job of running down the basic facts of most scenarios, situations and events that I am interested in. If the AP hassles me, or more likely poses a credible threat of hassling me, it is not worth my time to seek out and link their work when it is mostly undifferentiated information with minimal analytical value add compared to the other options that are available. I think this policy and my probable response will be replicated by the legions of bloggers with decent audiences but low revenue streams. This is a good way for me, and many other information and opinion leaders to start ignoring and devaluing AP members. And then the death spiral of tying together information gathering, analysis and distribution as a business model will continue.




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1 comment:

  1. StrangerJune 2, 2009 at 12:04 PM

    Fester, they won't even admit that the Scott Roeder who killed George Tiller is the same Scott Roeder who got busted in 1996 for having bomb making materials in his car. (I blogged about it this morning.)
    With crack investigative reporting like that, who needs 'em?

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