RSS is Dead, Long Live RSS
A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead. A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn't had any interest in using it in the future. Then again, as ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 29, 2009 08:16
3 Ways to Avoid Drowing in Information
Steve Rubel offers "Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You." Between email, blog feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and various other applications out there, we've all got too much information to contend with. Those of us in the information business are even more overwhelmed because we both need to follow more things and figure out ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 19, 2009 10:09
Navy Shoots, Obama Scores
The juxtaposition of two headlines this morning at memeorandum was rather amusing: As it turns out, Michael Shear's "An Early Military Victory for Obama" and Shailagh Murray's "Obama's Chief of Staff Grants Access, Gets Results" are unrelated stories combined through the vagaries of automated selection algorithms. Indeed, the inside headline on the latter is actually "Give-and-Take With Emanuel Advances President's Agenda ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 13, 2009 06:23
The Future of News(papers)
Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent "How to save the dying newspaper industry" meme that's been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere. He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson ("How to Save Your Newspaper") that advocates a micropayment system. While pretty much every blogger who wrote about ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 5, 2009 07:34
Will Twitter Kill the Blogging Star?
Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame. In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn't uncommon for a few hundred small ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 2, 2009 10:53
Bite Size News
Michael Scherer had an epiphany yesterday searching for a transcript of Dick Cheney's CNN interview and stumbling on nine different stories in Politico about it. What struck me about all this was not just that Politico had created a hassle for me, the reader. It was that they were doing news online smarter than the rest of the old-school organs of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 16, 2009 16:03
Huffington Post-ization of the Media
Tom Barnett's latest book tour has him frustrated with much of the mainstream press, whose preference for cuteness and brevity makes discussion of complex ideas next to impossible. He contrasts this with talk radio, where he can have a long back-and-forth. He closes: Long story short: after a day of many disappointing feedbacks from the MSM world, I feel a lot ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 24, 2009 08:31
Six Years Blogging
Steven Taylor's PoliBlog turned six recently and, as he notes, OTB recently (on January 31st, to be precise) did so as well. The blogging landscape has changed markedly in the intervening period, with many of the top blogs of early 2003 long gone and quite a few relative newcomers having taken over the top rungs. Relatively few of those who started ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 17, 2009 15:01
Blogrolls, RIP
Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today. [...] Unlike other areas of blogging, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 9, 2008 11:26
Blog Linking Less Important?
Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, "I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search." He offers three likely explanations: 1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 8, 2008 08:17
Google Slowly Taking Over The World
Most of you have likely seen the EPIC 2014 video, created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson in November 2004, by now. For the rest of you: As the Wikipedia entry explains, the eight minute movie "explores the effects that the convergence of popular News aggregators like Google News and Newsbot with other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogging, social ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 13, 2007 08:44
Blog Assimilation: Resistance is Futile
Dave Schuler, who occasionally contributes here and at Dean's World in addition to maintaining his own site, laments a trend he's seeing among his favorite blogs: Brilliant bloggers who posted once a day, maybe two or three times a week, are linking arms as associate bloggers on blogs with larger readerships. They’re still posting once a day, maybe two or three ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 4, 2007 13:08
Warren Burger’s Books
While relying on RSS feeds and other aggregators is quite efficient, doing so comes at the price of missing interesting things that fall through the cracks. In example: Brett Marston, whose blog is updated much less often than it once was, recently stumbled upon a bunch of books owned by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, complete with ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 3, 2007 15:04
Site Tweaks
Some of the more astute readers might have noticed that I've added some additional links to the left sidebar. I wanted to make the site navigation links more obvious to the reader, so put links to the About, Policies, and Contact pages (previously in the top navbar) over there. That consolidates the links to internal pages and features ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 17, 2006 11:36
More News Outlets, Less News
Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a new study that has discovered six new trends in the mass media. The one attracting early attention is this: The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 13, 2006 11:54
