To the editor,
Brendan Nyhan advised the Washington Post to set-up a 'blog' to deal with e-mails in his column on 4/05/02 ["Going Post-al? Before their reporters lose it, the paper needs to get a blog"]. Can anyone set-up a blog or just newspapers? Just what is a blog?
Regards From Northern California,
Jim Lynch
TAP Online responds:
Dear Jim,
Even though we ourselves are starting to do it with Tapped, we understand that not everyone is up to speed on the blogging trend yet. The beginnings of a helpful definition can be found in Nyhan's article itself, in the second paragraph, which lists and offers links to a number of bloggers, including Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, and Joshua Micah Marshall. For more info, see here.
Mistaken Identity
To the editor,
I was shocked to read about Susan Schmidt's behavior regarding calling one's employer to criticize her critics ["Going Post-al? Before their reporters lose it, the paper needs to get a blog", Brendan Nyhan, 4.5.02]. These are unacceptable and just plain mean guerilla tactics. If you choose to employ her and let her continue in this manner I will no longer frequent your site.
Sincerely,
Mike Skallas
http://everythingisnt.com
TAP Online responds:
Dear Mike,
We think you might want to visit our site pretty frequently. The article of which you speak actually exposed Schmidt's behavior; she works for The Washington Post, not us.
Extreme Technical Difficulties
Gentlemen --
I am not technically sophisticated with respect to the Internet, and particularly with respect to tracking viewing and push ads responsive to what are perceived to be the reader's interests. I do not regard it as a coincidence, however, that while I was reading the article "Label Whores" by Geoffrey Nunberg on your site -- and it was on my screen for an unusual amount of time because I was distracted by a conversation -- ads for various pornography sites, the first of which had "whores" in the name, began popping up on my screen. This continued for more than five minutes, and I received a total of close to 40 ads. Because I have never frequented such sites and have never before had anything approaching this bombardment of ads, I can't help but believe that it resulted from me viewing your article, probably by virtue of the porn sites scanning for other pages with certain words in the title and somehow linking their ads to those pages.
If there is any means of preventing such surreptitious linking, I hope you will avail yourself of it.
William H. Hinkle
TAP Online responds:
Dear William,
All we know is, this doesn't happen to us.
