I just got email from a beleaguered media guy trying to figure out how to host decent conversations in blog comments. Too bad he can’t put up a velvet rope like Nick Denton did.
Tag: Weblogs
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Damned Blogger comments
Everytime I try to leave a comment on a Blogger blog, the damned identity system hangs up and takes forever to let me sign in. Typepad is no picnic either. Registration is no panacea. Just growling.
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One Web Day
Susan Crawford starts One Web Day. What’s important about this is that we need to maintain ownership of our world online; it is our home.
It’s about action. We’ll be encouraging global efforts to wire villages, connect schools, put up more hotspots, build collective online artworks, write and perform collective online music, show “days on the web,” and many other barn-raising and creative and connecting projects. We will have a major offline component, with people telling stories about how the web has changed their lives, and showing each other special OneWebDay artifacts. There’s no limit to what will happen on OneWebDay every year.
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The new grammar of crisis coverage
Chron.com, the Houston Chronicle’s site, is featuring the same tools to cover Rita that Nola.com used covering Katrina as its delivery is also disrupted: a blog to cover the latest hurricane news; reports from citizens (arranged by Chron blogger Dwight Silverman, according to local blogger Tom Tyler, one of the stormwatchers); staff blogs. These elements are fast becoming standard in crisis coverage.
By the way: Since I visited Houston only a few weeks ago, they’ve been adding even more blogs and more links in them. Bravo.
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Off the air
I was on a panel at the public radio program directors confab with David Weinberger, KCRW’s Jennifer Ferro with On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone moderating (she sounds just like she sounds on the radio and I’m silly enough to find that amazing). Most of the folks I could see were nodding at the right moments (that is, they were agreeing with us, of course). But at the end, there was one guy who sounded just like a big, old, for-profit media mogul, complaining that they’ll lose money giving away programming for free. Ferro dealt with him handily, saying that they all need to use online to reach a wider audience, freed from the schedule. She also said that online is a great means of developing talent, that in the old days you’d have to put someone untried on at midnight on Sundays but now you can give them a show online and watch them grow. Brooke said that OTM is now getting 270,000 podcast downloads each week; that’s impressive new audience growth. David and I merely solved the world’s problems, save one.