Mark Cuban's expensive blog

Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban is a blogger. I've been aware of it for a while, but the other day when he was fined $100K for one of his posts I had to check it out. Now his blog is in my lineup.

Today's offering is pretty tasty. In the post, Where Newspapers kick the Internets behind he makes a points I totally agree about the lameness of on-line sports media, and the great value of newspaper sports writing:

Which is all the more reason that rather than focusing on speed and breaking stories, I personally think newspapers and websites need to define their brands to heavy readers like myself through depth and differentiation. Brand yourself as the home of unique stories, not for breaking news. We have been trained that the net has all news 15 milliseconds after its "broken" elsewhere. But if i know that you are the sole home of in depth coverage on things I care about, you got me.

OK, it's a tortured stretch to say that this blog offers depth and differentiation. In fact, this blog is totally scattered and lacking in focus. So Mark won't be hanging on my every post. I can live with that.

But one of my motivations here is to relax the ridiculous time constant of the blog media. The fast twitch memetics of the blog world—which is actually a web disease that predates blogging—take slashdot for instance—makes the blogosphere almost unbearable. Millions of ditto-heads on the left and the right trying to post nearly identical thoughts on the meme-of-the-moment makes for a droning, featureless bore.

Buried in this cacophony are bloggers who differentiate, who speak with a more grounded voice, who have something to say. That's why I obsess on blogs. That's what I try, with only occasional success, to report here. You would not come here to catch the newest ripple in the blog pond. But I might be able to link you up with some bloggers who have something to say, something worth reading. Like Mark.