Story Archives of 'Blogs'

Twenty-three-year old Nathan Williams has had a stressful year. The singer and guitarist records under the name Wavves. And in the past eleven months or so, he’s seen the kind of rise and fall that provided the arc of the “behind the music” series for years: gritty-beginnings, rocketing rise, drug-induced crash and burn ending in rehab, Holiday Inn lounge circuit, or reality show.

At first, music blogs and established rock magazines alike embraced Wavves’ lo-fi, punk aesthetic, and hundreds of people showed up at his very first show. Nathan was on top of the world. But at Spain's Primavera music festival in May, things took a drastic tumble. He was disjointed, he couldn’t play worth a lick, and angry fans hurled bottles and shoes at him. The blogs documented his self-destructive episode, and reader responses turned rancid.

Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards has seen the same backlash happen to bands like Vampire Weekend and Black Kids, and hip-hop performers like Charles Hamilton. Richards believes that as music blogs take up a bigger role in promoting and distributing the newest bands, more aspiring young stars will be thrust into the spotlight well before they’re ready. Chris Richards joins us from the studios at the Washington Post.

The Washington Post: Indie-Rock Success So Sudden, It Actually Hurts

(Photo by The Accent via Flickr/Creative Commons)

If you watched any network news channel this month, you no doubt saw clips of James O’Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles walking into the Baltimore and Washington, DC offices of the non-profit ACORN organization. O’Keefe and Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute looking for advice on how to evade taxes and funnel the money into O’Keefe’s fake congressional campaign.

The video quickly jumped from the blogosphere to run in heavy rotation on conservative media. Mainstream news networks soon followed in lock-step. Stories about Sonia Sotomayor, the birther movement, and town-hall disruptions followed a similar path and have trickled up throughout the Obama era.

So where are these stories coming from? Citizen journalists, activists, or covert partisan operatives? Mark Bowden is a longtime journalist and author, most recently, of The Best Game Ever. He wrote about how these clips become news for The Atlantic.

The Atlantic: The Story Behind the Story

(Photo by Antonio Martínez via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Back in 1995, well before the dot com bubble burst, the internet was an exciting and vast place, like the wild west. And for those looking to hang their shingle on the information superhighway, came an easy on-ramp called GeoCities. The site was precursor to online networks and blogging platforms.

Users could quickly create personal homepages or star wars fan sites, and update them regularly. Then, of course, came blogger and metafilter and myspace. A decade and a half later, GeoCities is a virtual ghost town and the butt of internet jokes. The site's owner, Yahoo, announced this spring that it plans to shutter GeoCities for good.

Phoebe Connelly wrote about what gets lost in the demise of an online community. She's web editor of The American Prospect, where we found her article.

The American Prospect: The Life and Death of Online Communities

(Photo via Krissa Corbett Cavouras via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The website BLDGBLOG launched five years ago with this quote from the late British novelist J.G. Ballard, “Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.” In the past half-decade writer Geoff Manaugh has explored how those disparate elements of city life fit together.

BLDGBLOG combines insights from architecture, history, graphic design, urban exploration, and city planning in a sort of online ideas factory. His pairing of stunning archival photographs with highly-literate essays has earned the site nearly six million visitors. In June The BLDGBLOG Book was released, expanding upon the ideas explored on his blog. Geoff is also a senior editor at Dwell magazine, and he joins us from London with some updates from the world of imaginative architecture:

BLDGBLOG: Landscapes of Quarantine

BLDGBLOG: The Bioluminescent Metropolis

BLDGBLOG: Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia

(Photo of The Church of Hagia Sophia via BLDGBLOG)