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Weblogs
Can Blog Awards Identify Quality Online Content?
I met the news that my blog, Bloggasm, had been nominated for a 2008 Weblog Award with a mixture of amusement and apathy. I had watched last year as my RSS feeds became clogged with the incestuous link trolling common with such contests. The Weblog Awards, like others of its kind, are based on a popular vote, guaranteeing that most...
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Is Six Apart's 'TypePad Journalist Bailout Program' a Gimmick?
The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!" But one advertising and blogging company is...
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Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way
During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after...
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Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere's Origins
In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled "Happy Blogiversary," claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that...
more »Digging Deeper
BBC Trains Iranian Journalists through ZigZag Online Magazine
Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a large educated and Internet-savvy class of people. But because it's a closed society, most journalism training does not address the importance of objectivity and balance in reporting, nor does it stress the importance of online journalism. The BBC World Service Trust has been quietly trying to change that, training 150 journalists in...
more »Your Take Roundup
Google News Comments a 'Fabulous Step Forward'
For an experimental feature that barely registers a blip in reality, the idea of letting sources of stories comment on Google News has stirred up a hornet's nest in journalism circles and the blogosphere. Two software engineers at Google News said they would be adding limited comments to news stories that are linked from the news aggregator, giving quoted...
more »Philosophy
Offline or Online, Civility Depends on Each Community's Tolerance
Lately, the crass nature of talk radio and the blogosphere has been Topic A in the media. Shock jock Don Imus has been fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC TV for his racially charged comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team. And publisher/blogger Tim O'Reilly has called for a Blogger's Code of Conduct after blogger Kathy Sierra was the...
more »Your Take
What hidden info-nugget did you find in the State of the News Media report?
When the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) released its annual report on The State of the News Media, the response was quick from the blogosphere: "We'll get back to you on what it all means after we have time to read the 160,000-word report." I lost count on the number of media watchers who made the same statement. How...
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Judging the Best Weblogs in the World at The BOBs
Last Friday, I was sitting in a conference room on the 37th Floor of the Park Inn in Berlin, Germany, along with people from Brazil, Holland, Spain, France, Russia, Germany, China and other far-flung places. We had all been flown into town by German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle to be jury members to decide the winners of the annual Best of the Blogs (The BOBs) awards.
more »Your Take
What weblog or podcast would you nominate for Best of the Blogs?
Is there a particular weblog or podcast that you love more than anything? Do you think it deserves some international attention? Now's your chance to nominate that blog -- whether it's yours or someone else's -- for the Best of the Blogs (The BOBs) awards, put on for the third year by German public media company Deutsche Welle. There are awards given for blogs in 10 different languages, and now they have categories for audio and video podcasts. Plus, award categories include Best Corporate Blog, Blogwurst Award (for wacky subjects) and Reporters Without Borders award for a blog supporting freedom of speech. You can nominate a blog for The BOBs here. But also explain your nomination(s) in the comments below, and I'll review some of the better ones in next week's Your Take Roundup. (Full disclosure: I will be judging the English-language blogs.) Nominations close on Sept. 30.
more »Your Take
Do you trust photographs from war zones?
Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about a Reuters photographer who used Photoshop to double the amount of smoke in a photo of Beirut. The photo was scrutinized by conservative bloggers, starting with Little Green Footballs, and eventually Reuters admitted to the fakery and fired the freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj. The British press has been defending its photos against attack from conservative blog EU Referendum as well. It's very easy for photographers to add Photoshop touches to make a shot more dramatic or to stage photos by asking people to pose in them. However, most media organizations have strict rules against these types of manipulation. As a news watcher and reader, what do you think about the professional photos you have seen from war zones such as Lebanon, Israel and Iraq? Do you trust them or have questions? Do you feel like the photographer has a political bias? Would you rather see photos taken by amateurs at the scene? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »World View
Bloggers Freed From Jail in China, Egypt, Iran
With bombs dropping in Lebanon and Israel, sectarian violence rising in Iraq and civil war in Somalia -- among other bad tidings -- we are in dire need of good news and a reason to get up in the morning. Thankfully, there has been a spate of such news in the blogosphere, with a few high-profile bloggers being released from jail in China, Egypt and Iran.
more »Social Media
Blogging is a funny thing. Weblogs, those online diaries that run in reverse chronological order, are just like any other new technological advance: more people have heard of them than have actually read them or written them. My Aunt Bobby, when she heard that I was writing about blogs, would say, "Gosh, those conservative bloggers are sure stirring up a...
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