Twitter Not Just About Lunch
Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon. Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks: (1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day? You, of course, wouldn't. But that's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 2, 2009 14:43
Killing Presidents
Related controversies roiling the blogosphere today point to the dark side of American politics. First, NewsMax ran an article by a John L. Perry titled "Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention.’" It has apparently been removed from the site (it's now directing to the home page and isn't showing along with the author's other pieces) but the excerpt says "There ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 30, 2009 12:51
Conservative Media Scoops Mainstream Media
A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions. The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 16, 2009 08:30
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
Magazine Format Blogs
Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this: Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should ask them when you play-test ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 28, 2009 08:54
Liskula Cohen Forces Google to Reveal Anonymous Blogger
A Vogue cover model of whom I'd never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet. A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 20, 2009 09:04
Selling Online News
Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition. Michael Crowley is enthusiastic: Given that some people spend $5 per day on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 11, 2009 07:57
Blogs ARE Social Media
Copyblogger's Brian Clark has noticed a distinction developing between blogs on the one hand and "social media" on the other. He rightly notes that "blogs were the first modern form of social media" and thus the distinction is artificial. My sense is that, blogs are indeed social media, they’re definitely of a different piece than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatnot. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 10, 2009 12:17
Four Day Week?
Over at his other digs, Dave Schuler muses, Is it my imagination or do things become very, very quiet on Fridays these days? I know that traffic at this blog drops sharply on Fridays which suggests to me that a lot of people read blogs from work and that they aren’t at work on Fridays. In the DC area, at least, it's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 10, 2009 10:10
Blogging is Hard
Bernard Finel has been trying this blogging thing for a while and finds that it's harder than it looks. He notes that even very short posts require quite a bit of effort. Even short posts take me forever. Not writing the text, per se, but I think most posts are useful if you include a couple or three links to relevant ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2009 07:50
Failure of Breaking News Reporting?
Aaron Brazell argues that, with the advent of instant-reporting of rumor via Twitter and other social media, the mainstream press has fallen behind. He cites yesterday's Steve McNair murder, the false rumors that Jeff Goldblum had died, and Michael Jackson's death. He laments that, while the McNair news broke on two Nashville stations but "It was a long time (30 minutes ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 5, 2009 09:03
Presidential Press Conferences, RIP?
Quite a kerfuffle has broken out in the blogs and on Twitter over President Obama's calling on HuffPo's Nico Pitney to ask a pre-screened question in yesterday's press conference. Politico's Michael Calderone broke the story: In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post's Nico Pitney near the start of his press conference and requested ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 24, 2009 09:02
Made-up Wikipedia Quote Makes Obituaries
[caption id="attachment_36114" align="alignright" width="229" caption="AP Photo/Fionn Kidney "][/caption] The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster: When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news. His report card: ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 12, 2009 05:44
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
