New-school anchor blogs the news business

Brian Williams’ Daily Nightly blog is getting good reviews. (I hope that’s the right link… MSNBC has such fscked up blog URLs.) It makes sense that the anchor to succeed Dan Rather would embrace blogging as a symbol of opening up the newsmaking process. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Escalation

If only my minor email lossage of the last week had been the end of the story, but through superior advanced dimwittedness, I managed to lost my entire personal computer archive (email, desktop wiki notes, and all documents) since roughly December of last year. It feels a bit like having a house burn down. You keep reaching for missing objects and then feeling their loss all over again.
I am in fact posting this from the Apple Store in Emeryville, where I’ve spent perhaps 20 hours over the last three weeks trying to diagnose and fix the problems with my iBook.
Wait, I think I’m next. More to come.

What's a trackback?

On the Well’s blog conference we were discussing trackback, who likes ’em and who doesn’t, and a few new bloggers confessed that they didn’t quite grok what trackbacks were really all about. This prompted zorca, aka Suzanne Stefanac, to take a crack at demystifying trackback at her relatively new blog, Dispatches from Blogistan (<a title="Dispatches From Blogistan

Minor email setback

I managed to wipe out all the mail in my inbox since August 9. (Don’t ask.) If you’ve emailed me in the last 12 days and you don’t hear back from me about whatever you emailed me about, that’s probably why. Feel free to contact me again. Thanks.

Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word

Quoting from Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word:

Last July, a few of us visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn’t look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important. That got the Blogger team thinking about how to help Word users to become bloggers.
So just now I fired up Microsoft Word, wrote this, hit ‘Publish’ on the brand new Blogger for Word toolbar and voila – you’re reading it. Which means there’s really no excuse, blogwise, if you prefer to finely craft your posts over time. Use Blogger for Word as a way to back up your document drafts with the ‘Save as Draft’ button or work on posts while you are offline and post them later. Hope you enjoy this new add-in.

Hmm, I wonder how it handles special characters? Does it turn them into HTML entities? I should check this out, though I’m not personally using Blogger these days.

Echo Chamber Project launches vlog

A few weeks ago, Kent Bye, director of the Echo Chamber project, tipped me off to a new vlog (video [web] log) he’s producing. This first episode includes an animation that tries to illustrate the folksonomy concept as well as interviews “about the upcoming media revolution” conducted at the most recent Personal Democracy Forum.
He told me, “I attempt to visually represent the ‘folksonomy tag’ concept for adding context and meaning to web sites and film sound bites to a broader audience in 10 seconds or less.”
Here’s his official description:

This is the first vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq – and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.
Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz and Kent Bye.
If you’d like to have future videos automatically delivered to you, then follow the directions listed in the link above for subscribing to the Echo Chamber Project with either iTunes or FireANT software.

Wildbit report on online social networks

Chris Nagele from Wildbit gave me a head’s up about a 35-page report on social networks his company is offering for download as an Acrobat file free of charge: Social Networks Report
He says

My company, Wildbit, is currently working on a social network and community web site. Part of the research to understand and prototype the design
involved researching current social networks and defining the key attributes. The result is a 35 page report on the topic. Since you are a leader in the industry I was hoping to get your thoughts on the report.

I’ve read the report but to be honest I’ve been too busy to give it the kind of careful attention that would enable me to share any insights. Then again, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to quote myself being referred to as “a leader in the industry” – heh.
If you read the report and send feedback to Tidbit, let me know or post a comment here as well.

Blogs (and wikis) help fulfill the read/write web

Sometimes it’s useful to remember that Tim Berners-Lee’s first web browser has an editor built into it, as he reminds us in this BBC interview (Berners-Lee on the read/write web):

Towards a rewritable web
ML: I’m interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities. You weren’t thinking car rental, you weren’t thinking blogging, I assume.
TBL: Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn’t a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.
When you write a blog, you don’t write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I’m very, very happy to see that now it’s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

Generation theft

J.D. Lasica posts about a conversation with BlogHer co-organizer <a href="http://workerbeesblog.blogspot.com/"Elisa Camahort about blog plagiarism, and cites a few examples of people plagiarizing newspaper ledes in their blog entries about BlogHer (New Media Musings: Plagiarism in the blogosphere).
How lame!
Also, where’s the fun in that?

Ann Althouse fisks Pajamas Media

I really should get off my ass and get a blogads account. All my blogs together might cover my bandwidth costs, anyway.
I don’t think I’m PM material (Charles Johnson creeps me out, for one thing), but even if I were it sounds like a dubious plan. In Althouse: Pajamas Media vs. BlogAds — the blogger’s perspective, Ann Althouse goes critiques their offer email line-by-line.
(via The Editors)