Tuesday, March 02, 2004

What I would tell the News & Record about staff weblogs, if they were ever to ask me: *Keep them bloggy. Let writers have their own voices. Edit as you must to protect your brand, but don't turn the prose into commodity newspaper product. *Keep them free. *Don't rot the links (go ahead and fix your article links while you're at it, so when they go behind the paywall we see a headline and a precis, not the current dead page.) *Pay your writers for their work, even though they'll figure out quickly that blogging makes the rest of their job easier. *Talk to Blogads' Henry Copeland about combining his service with your own ad sales muscle. *Offer one to each of your sports reporters -- they could be big early traffic generators. Ed Hardin was born to blog. Dustin Long could have thousands of readers every day, maybe tens of thousands, for NASCAR stuff he must already have in his notebook. Blog the ACC tournament next week.   *Local government and board blogs are a natural. *Let individual writers choose their own blogrolls. *Link promiscuously. 3:23:32 PM    comment []

I tried to give blood today. They wouldn't take it, because I have lived in Europe for more than six months since 1980 and they don't want me spreading prions to the general population. The blood lady said the rule is costing them some donors. The experience left me wanting a steak au poivre and some vin rouge. Bonus vein-spiking anecdote: Once my dad, an MD, was in the hospital for a hernia operation, and the young person attempting to put in his IV kept missing the V. So after a few tries my dad took the needle and poked it in himself. "Wow, that was macho," I told him. He said, "No, if I was macho, I would have let her keep trying." 2:59:13 PM    comment []

The News & Record is considering a weblog for some of its reporters and editorial writers. I learned this by reading somebody else's blog, of course -- it's not like they would ever ask me about, well, anything. 8:51:07 AM    comment []

Audio interviews with Elizabeth Spiers, David Weinberger (newly ordained a Berkman Fellow at Harvard), and Chris Pirillo are up at ITConversations. Previously: Doc Searls, Marc Canter, and me. 8:43:59 AM    comment []

Scoble: "Microsoft is the only large company (of more than 10,000 employees) that has more than 300 employee bloggers. In any industry." 8:08:34 AM    comment []