Friday, January 07, 2005

Tom Phillips is blogging. The Greensboro City Council member is a plain speaker and a common-sense conservative. "I know I'm going to get myself in trouble unless I use a lot of restraint," he says. That's true for a lot of us, Tom. Thanks for your willingness to put yourself out there for your constituents. 9:43:48 PM    comment []

Gonzales hearings...what did we really hear? EdCone.com flashback: July 14, 2004 -- Seymour Hersh remarks to ACLU convention about Abu Ghraib. "Hersh says there was 'a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.'" 8:37:27 PM    comment []

Michelle Malkin picks up on the Bush administration media bribery scandal: "Rod Paige should be fired. Those who came up with this disgusting scheme should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Any other pundits who accepted money from the Bush administration, whether from the Education Department or any other bureaucracy, should come forward now and disclose. And then they should immediately return the money. Grow some principles, for God's sake." Props to her for speaking truth. Anyone else wanna play? 8:19:37 PM    comment []

Bush's Deptartment of Education paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote its policy. I'm sure RatherBiased and Powerline will be all over this one, huh? UPDATE: Atrios is on it. Here's a letter from three Democratic Senators to President Bush, full of words like "payola" and "propaganda" and "illegal" and "bribing journalists." They want the taxpayers' money back, too. 3:06:01 PM    comment []

Bill Gates reads a lot of blogs via RSS, but sometimes he likes to visit the sites themselves, too. Chris Anderson just wants to mainline the information pushed his way by syndication. I'm more in the Gates camp. I love my feeds, but there's quality time to be spent at particular pages. 2:54:48 PM    comment []

Chris Wallace is the new community sports reporter at the regional daily. His beat seems a promising one through which to explore the Long Tail in local media. The community sports scene must generate many, many items per week, each of intense interest to different, small groups of people. A limited number of these items can appear in print. A reporter with a blog is freed from the space cotraints of print and can post lots of these items online, thus drawing many small groups of people to the N&R site. The audience in aggregate may be large enough to sell to advertisers. Meanwhile individuals can send Chris pictures and text, and he can post the best stuff, and the coverage improves as the relationship with the community deepens. 11:46:04 AM    comment []

Department of Clarification, re a breakfast table conversation this morning: I would be terribly sad should an experimental spacecraft bearing our dog explode AND I would be proud of her sacrifice on behalf of all mankind. Also, the last cup of orange juice from the carton is not "toxic." 8:50:24 AM    comment []

Hoder: Iran tries to censor blogs by filtering at the service provider level. (via Dave Winer) 8:08:44 AM    comment []

Julie Salamon in the NYT: "Before my son turned 8, he had watched 'The Matrix' numerous times on videocassette." Different rules at our house. But still an interesting article about ratings and kid-appropriate fare. 7:38:58 AM    comment []

Dan Gillmor: distributed journalism. Hey, Wharton, Dan's got a name for what you're doing with the TREBIC project. 7:15:27 AM    comment []

This quote from Walter Shapiro resonates: "A year ago, the idea that I could leave the house without reading three newspapers would have been unfathomable to me...if I'm trying to find out if there is time to read the papers, imagine what the casual reader is going through." Part of this interesting year-in-media article. 7:12:53 AM    comment []

Tough times at the Durham Herald-Sun. Indy: "Media mergers based on profit potential rarely end well for the readers." Clearly this one is not working out well for the writers. 7:08:12 AM    comment []

Quite  a few emails from folks getting a "403 forbidden" message when they try to post comments here and at other sites running Radio software. Nothing personal, it's a problem with the hosted comment function, not you. But it's frustrating, because the comments are often the most interesting part of the page. Comments at Hogg's blog suggest a way around the issue, but you shouldn't have to do all that firewall management stuff just to get on board. 7:02:27 AM    comment []