Sunday, January 23, 2005

Editorial about new syndication formats called RSS. 

If I had one thing to put on the agenda of news professionals... 

BBC: "US TV star Johnny Carson has died at the age of 79, after losing a battle with the respiratory disease emphysema." 

5PM snow movie: The snow has stopped, the wind is still blowing it around, and the shoveling crew in the earlier movie has been replaced with a mechanical snow mover. 

Dan Gillmor's trip home from Boston to San Francisco via San Diego and Los Angeles is almost done. "In other circumstances I'd be grumpy about this detour and overnight layover. Right now I'm feeling lucky." 

Robert Scoble: Microsoft geek blogger. He's over the hill™. 

Movie: Men shoveling snow. There's still a blizzard going on. Nice and warm in my hotel room. Doesn't look very nice out there! 

Ed Cone, who was at the Blojoucrecon, tells the story of how he got home to Greensboro, while the entire east coast was under huge weather. At dinner last night, talking with Rebecca MacKinnon, Betsy Devine and Jenny Attiyeh (lucky Dave, three babes, one guy) about what we can take away from the conference, I said that we had our moments of civility, even affection, across the divide between the pros and the bloggers. But, I posited, the real accomplishment may be that now we better understand who we are, having had a chance to take the same side, even though we're so different. For example, I came to admire John Hinderaker, of Power Line, even though our politics are opposite. We have deeper values that bind us. Same with Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia guy. Again, we're opposites in the way we create text but we're both advocates for the same idea, people doing it for themselves. In this context, Ed's story seems slightly profound. A blogger, on arriving safely at home, feels compelled to tell the story. Since I care about his well-being, I'm happy to know that his travels ended safely. But I get a bonus, because his personal story makes the story of the blizzard more real, it's the human interest angle that TV strives for, but really doesn't deliver. Dave Weinberger nails it. In blogger-land, we don't work at being real because we are real, we never weren't real. That's the bond in common or so it seems to me. 

BBC: "Blogs are giving departments, staff and students the freedom and informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper."