Ibidem’s all about “same news, but different…” This is what “jesus gil,” ibidem’s apparent webmaster, announces in introducing his plain vanilla Blogspot weblog — and I was immediately off to discover how “different” this “same news” was…
Jesus gil casts his net wide. His blog is a succession of hyperlinks leading to big media stories on mostly everything: oil slicks, Harry Potter, surgical tags for sex offenders, Iranian women in the fight for democracy, FISA’s secret court, Marge Simpson’s breast job… You name it, jesus gil has it.
Ibidem’s plain presentation won’t tire your eyes, but I felt the page was just too bare-bones. A column of links to other blogs on the left-hand side includes a substantial component of Religious Blogs, but ibidem’s posted material did not indicate any special focus on religion (although the use of an alias like ‘jesus jil’ probably points in one particular direction).
Typically, jesus gil inserts a paragraph or two from the news story, leaving it up to the reader to follow the link and read the actual source. Sometimes, the post is just a bare link without even the sample paragraph(s). There’s little commentary or counterview. Links take you to mainly common mainstream media.
Straightforward links to news stories hardly produce “same news” that is “different.” I couldn’t find anything while reading ibidem to support jesus gil’s header claim.
“Different” could have been asserted perhaps if there were some form of specialist commentary; or maybe an innovative cross-reference job showing how a main, high-visibility news story originates in less than credible information or deliberate distortion of the facts.
With Bloggosphere swarming with News/Links blogs, any “blog master” with even the slightest claim to fame and originality is hard pressed to work out an interesting formula. Ibidem hasn’t got this formula yet. Posts come from all points of the compass — and are not integrated with any opinions or points of view of the blog master.
A mark of 3 is all that I give imbidem. I don’t see a target audience and I can think of better and faster ways of reading the news.Ibidem