Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Dave Slusher is thinking about a Myrtle Beach blogger's conf. 

Thanks Josh, and you're right, lurking in OPML is another big idea.  

A Google AdSense puzzle. For the first few weeks, audio.weblogs.com had charity ads. Now it has ads about Iraq. What's up with that? Why no ads about podcasting? (And after I posted this, the ads are back to charities.) 

One of the most interesting people I met at the ONA conf is Ken Sands of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. He's a softspoken man, the managing editor for online and new media, he runs the blogs at the S-R, and blogs are big business there. They use citizen journalists to fill in the local and specialized coverage that the pros no longer supply. Ken says he can teach a reader to be a journalist more easily than he can teach a journalist to be a blogger. That's sounds like my mantra. "If journalists won't write from a users' perspective, what's to stop the users from becoming journalists?" It seems Ken has put this idea into practice, in a big way. Let's follow what they're doing in Spokane, I have a feeling they're leading in a very important new direction.  

News.Com: "Stewart Alsop, the venture capitalist who helped foster TiVo, is leaving his firm to try something new." 

Something very mysterious that sounds like it should be up my alley, if I had any idea what it does. "MetaWeblog-compatible plugin for the popular Java cross-platform and multilingual Azureus BitTorrent client." 

Jeff Walsh: "Macromedia finally came to its senses and fired me." 

Two new BloggerCon session MP3s: Overload, Medicine. 

Scott Rosenberg on the Journalism discussion at BloggerCon III. 

Wired: RSS Edges into the Bureaucracy. 

KFVS, channel 12 in Cape Girardeau, MO, says it's "the first television station providing a news podcast. The podcast is the first block of local and national news from their newscast. The podcast is also commercial free." They serve 53 counties in 5 states, including Paducah, where I took this photo tour in August.  

Morning cold notes 

I'm finally having my post-BloggerCon crash. It's so predictable. Push yourself really hard, and your body stays up for the duration. Drive down to SF in an 800-mile rainstorm. Prep for and then manage a one-day conference, hanging out with friends from all over the world. Enjoy oneself enormously. Then hop back in the car, drive back to Seattle, having epiphany after epiphany. Rest for one day, then fly south to LA on a full plane. Sleep overnight in a room next to a bunch of hookers in a horrible LA neighborhood, in a non-smoking room that reeks of smoke, with a heater that doesn't work and wake up after two hours of sleep to a shower that doesn't work. Have a great time at a conference for reporters and publishers, make a bunch of new friends, then fly back, again -- the flight is full, the guy sitting next to me in the middle seat has his elbow in my ribs the whole way. I pointed out that my ribs are in my seat, to no avail. And of course someone on that plane must have had this horrible throat cold that I now have that's causing me to sleep 19 hours a day and the rest of the time walk around in a daze.

Yeah that's what always happens. I'm sick now, but in a relatively cheery mood. Next Monday I do it all again and fly to NYC for Thanksgiving, and then a couple of weeks after that, fly back to Boston. When will I really get a chance to get back in the groove? Maybe in late December when I hit the road again!