This blog has been quiet of late because I've been working in every spare moment I have on a couple of projects that are going to launch soon, good lord willing and the creek don't rise. Given that I'm sleep deprived, stressed and generally ground down to a nub, it's a bad, bad time for me to read my media-heavy RSS feeds.

Before I get myself into trouble, I just want to say this: If all these people who know so much about journalism on the web spent less time on waving their arms in hysterics and actually built something -- created value, or tried a new model instead of opined on one -- the world would be a very different place.

So, memo to journo-bloggers: Less talk, more walk. Build something or STFU. When that urge to run to Wordpress so you can tell us your thoughts on paid content or aggregation or community strikes you, stop yourself and spend that time actually creating something that does what you say. I'll care about your thoughts when you can include a URL to your thoughts actually working.

Those who are making a go at it, who are actually walking the walk, will understand this:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are." -- Teddy Roosevelt, 1910