Stardate 20010830.1605 (On Screen): Well, what with all us amateurs having such a good time writing web logs, it was inevitable that the pros should get involved, too, and show us all how it's supposed to be done. But of course they can't call what they're doing "web logs" (or, God forbid, "blogs") so they had to invent their own term. So they're calling their work "me-zines" to differentiate the real professionals from the hoi-polloi.
Sometimes these guys come off as rubes. For instance, right now there's an entry on Virginia Postrel's page where she bemoans the problems she was having using FTP through a firewall, and my reaction on reading it was that it was strikingly similar to how I felt when I heard of President Bush Sr's reaction to seeing the scanners at grocery stores on his first visit to such an establishment in, apparently, many years. And, of course, there's the requisite link-slutting going on (a term she probably doesn't know) -- but only to other me-ziners, not to us out here who ain't real professionals. As I write this she's linked to at least three other me-zines, not to mention plugging a couple of her own articles posted in the main stream press.
Unfortunately, like so many of these upstart me-ziners, she's trying to reinvent the wheel. (The only one of the lot who seems to have it together is Dan Gillmor, who's using Manila. Unfortunately, I can't read what he writes because I think he's an ass badly misled about a lot of things.) Rather than using any of the existing tools (e.g. Greymatter, as used here) which the web log community has already created, Postrel has hired someone to create tools for her, and they're distinctly inferior, so far. (They appear to be client-side, which is part of the problem.) It isn't possible, for instance, to have a permanent link to anything she's posted until it rolls off into her archive a week later. There are tags in the page but she's adding them manually and the only way to find out what they are is to look at the page source; there's no link per entry. I wrote to her suggesting that the first entry in the archive should be this week instead of last week, but she doesn't seem to think it's a problem. This was within an email interchange which began with 
my suggestion for a member of the upcoming council on bioethics regarding stem cell research. Me-ziners apparently also haven't caught up with the rest of us on etiquette: she used my submission and credited me by name, but didn't link back to me. (discuss)
