Posts from May 3, 2004

Former American idol

Former American idol
: Best Week Ever reports rumors that Bob Dylan will be a guest judge on American Idol. Oh how the times a-change.

Effing wonderful

Effing wonderful
: A census of the number of Fs on Deadwood. [via David Weinberger]

Next, the FCC will censor the President’s name

Next, the FCC will censor the President’s name
: I’m not sure I buy this because it’s just too perfect but

The International Broadcasting Bureau set up an anonymizing service to let Iranian web users view sites around the mullahs and their censors but the F filter built in to prevent it being used for porn (why?) allegedly blocks any site mentioning “bush.” [via Lost Remote]

Core

Core
: I’m on the floor of the Soho Apple store after the Denton-Calacanis panel. I won’t blog it live. When Anil Dash asked how many people here — and it’s quite crowded — have blogs, a forest of hands went up. Welcome to our echo chamber and we love it. But there’s nothing wrong with this. Bloggers get together at every opportunity. Accountants don’t. Funeral directors don’t. We like doing this and like the other people doing it. And we also love to blather. So here we are.

Nick and Jason weren’t quite as sparky as some may have hoped, but there were moments with flash. I’ll look at others’ blogs to find them.

: The panel with Choire, Lockhart, Jen, and Felix is by far the most entertaining and charming.

: And here (thanks to a Technorati link) is a blog report on the blog event.

News is a conversation, redux

News is a conversation, redux
: Ken Sands, blogging master of the Spokesman-Review, sends me a great story of news as a conversation — before the news is published. Here’s a case of an editor consulting his audience and asking them what he should do before he does it. Chris Cobler, editor of the Greeley Tribune, writes Ken:

I thought you’d be interested to know we used our e-board and my editor’s blog to survey readers before deciding whether to publish the latest disturbing images from Iraq. I sent a query to the 565 members of our e-board shortly after 2 p.m. today. By tonight, we have received more than two dozen e-mail responses and a half-dozen more comments posted to my blog. In the mall e-mail we sent, I referred readers to my

blog at www.greeleytrib.com/triblog to see the three photos distributed by AP.

After listening to our readers, we decided to publish the photo of the human pyramid on an inside page with the jump from a front-page story. With the A1 story, we published an advisory warning readers of the disturbing nature of the image inside and also referred them to my blog for more discussion of the images….

We have benefited greatly from this new conversation with our readers.

Now that is respecting your audience. Better, it’s looking upon the audience as the editors. Good work.