Quotes

Scott Rosenburg's extensive and excellent collection of quotes relevant to weblogs and journalism - example:

What's changed is the involuntary outsourcing of fact-gathering and -checking to a growing assortment of amateurs and professionals who are largely external to the profession. What we need isn't competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two....
-- Doc Searls

Research on trust:

Researchers found that people who are wronged in a business transaction may be more likely to say they would reconcile if the offender offers a sincere apology - particularly if the offender takes personal blame for the misdeed...a willingness to take blame and offer amends can have a positive effect, and may be necessary to help repair a loss of trust in a business relationship.

From Kevin Drum *:

Generally speaking, conservatives believe that our biggest danger comes from rogue states, those who support international terrorism. Thus the "axis of evil" and the obsession with Saddam Hussein.

Liberal analysts, by contrast, tend to believe that the bigger danger comes from failed states, those that are so chaotic that non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda can flourish simply because there's nobody around to keep them under control. Afghanistan and Sudan in the late 90s are good examples.

And, from his excellent post on red-state-blue-state patterns of crime and culture:

You can define ["Blue state" culture] in a variety of ways. I'd say it's based in modernity and tolerance. But once you see it in that light, is it simply a matter of the Blue States having an attitude of condescension toward the Red ones? The country has become sufficiently divided that there is a good deal of mistrust and animosity on both sides. And I think it is fair to say that that ill-will on the part of the Blue state America does sometimes express itself as condescension.

But the bad feeling of Red State America toward the Blue is just as often expressed as contempt, moral denunciation or simple rage. To the extent that one hears Blue Staters dissing Red Staters as holy-rolling trailer park denizens, the Red staters routinely portray their fellow countrymen as corrupt, deviant, rootless perverts who express their flipflopper-dom by oscillating between being limp-wristed whiners on the one hand and signing up to work for Osama bin Laden as terrorist fifth-columnists on the other.