b!X's postmortem on Portland Communiqué

The One True b!X shuttered his citizen journalism site in September of this year (it launched in 2002). In Coda he looks back on that decision and elaborates on three major motivators:
* Growing weariness with the prominence of demagoguery.
* Major local stories looming on the horizon.
* Inevitable future dominance of the financial issue.
(See also his article in the Oregonian on the same subject.)

Chris Nolan's 'Spot-On'

I meant to blog about this as soon as I heard, but better late than never. Chris Nolan has rebranded and relaunched her journalistic group weblog (time to update those RSS feeds…). It’s now called Spot-On. The new design is polished and handles the ads much more gracefully.
Chris Nolan is the site’s editor (and still the lead columnist) and the contributing staff has been expanded to include Josh (“Tacitus”) Trevino (who’d already been contributing to ChrisNolan.net – the original Chris Nolan blog), also reporting from San Francisco; Christopher Brauchli, reporting from Boulder; and Deborah Klosky, reporting from San Diego.
A media empire is born.

Reporters without Borders releases blog-censorship handbook

Via the Beeb:

A handbook that offers advice to bloggers who want to protect themselves from recrimination and censors has been released by Reporters Without Borders.

The Times inching toward a bloggish attitude?

Metasnark about the Times “What’s Online” column from O’Reilly Radar (The NY Times Gets into the Blog Spirit):

Today’s New York Times’ What’s Online column, by Dan Mitchell, contains this nice little tidbit:

OH, WE HAVE A BLOG? Red Hat Software, the Linux distributor, may have had big things in mind when it started its set of blogs six months ago. But one of them, the Red Hat Executives Blog, contains just three entries: two in January and one in May.

Snarky, snarky, snarky! But correct, as of this writing…. These ‘blogs’ must be quite threatening, for the Times to devote a whole column to slamming them! Of course, at least Red Hat has a blog — search for ‘blog’ on nytimes.com and you’ll find they publish none but (O’Reilly author) David Pogue’s Posts. The search engine does provide this helpful tip, though: “Did you intend to search for bog?”

While they’re at it, maybe the Times can fix Pogue’s RSS feed so that it doesn’t keep showing old articles as new and confusing my newsreader?

Did everybody forget their passwords?

The Guardian (UK) has a go at Arianna Huffington’s new celebrity group blog: With friends like these …
(via the Well’s blog conference)

Rageboy recounts a cautionary tale

Over at Chief Blogging Officer Christopher “clootrane” Locke tells how his current project was nearly derailed at its outset by sloppy journalistic practices, but the forces of light prevailed and all’s well that end’s swell in RageTown.

WikiNews to chat with bloggers

Jimmy Wales is inviting bloggers to <a title="Jimmy Wales

Annotating the Winer/Trippi podcast

Over at Civilities, Jon Garfunkel has done provided us all a useful service by partly transcribing and commenting on the recent Dave Winer interview of Joe Trippi that deals with Zephyr Teachout’s take on the Dean campaign’s hiring of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas as consultants (Dissecting the Most Important Podcast Interview to Date).
Disclosure: From July through November of 2004 I worked with Jerome and Kos’s consulting firm, Armstrong Zúniga, primarily on user-interface design issues for a few of their clients’ sites.

Ten important ideas about blogging (and legacy media)

How to Save the World delivers another trenchant run-down on the state of blogging and the media as a whole.

Does blogging need an ethics committee?

Quoting from Blog Ethics Committee, Blog Publishers Association, and the evil Word of Mouth Marketing folks – The Jason Calacanis Weblog – calacanis.weblogsinc.com

:


Nick Denton put up a pleasantly surprising post today, complimenting me for being a “volunteer watchdog” for blog ethics. He proposes Jeff Jarvis and I start a blog ethics committee in order to create some standards in blog advertising. It’s a great idea, a lot of work, and very important to the blogosphere.
If you’re blogging— for money or not—we all have an interest in having a level of comfort when we’re consuming and creating media. Who doesn’t want to know if a blogger is getting paid to write about something? Who doesn’t want to see advertisements clearly labeled and outside of the content space? I can’t think of one reader of blogs who wants to be deceived….