Sunday, February 13, 2005

The bloggers of Chapel Hill are starting a series of weekly meetups, each Wednesday at 6PM, location to be determined. This is very good news, imho. I put together a cheat sheet with some ideas how to get it going, and how to use what was learned from the Berkman-Thursday group at Harvard.  

Terry Heaton: "Nashville area bloggers gathered Saturday to meet each other and swap yarns in the studios of WKRN-TV." 

At 11AM we're having the second-ever Scripting News brunch at Crook's Corner in lovely Chapel Hill, N. Cackalacky. I called the restaurant to tell them to expect ten geeks, based on the comments we've received. 

Mike Manuel: Oracle's Taste of Media Transparency. 

Advertising and the Internet 

At yesterday's conference Dan Gillmor talked about a looming crisis for print pubs, that most of their advertising is moving to the Internet, to services that don't care much about objectivity. This line must go over well when he's talking to editorial people at Knight-Ridder, for example, but to a blogger, well, I want to ask the (obvious) questions.

Isn't it true that eBay and Craig's List (two leading examples) don't actually have editorial content that could be objective or not? Hasn't the Internet done what it always does, unbundle and disintermediate? Who says that local advertising has to be bundled with local editorial and opinion? Sure, it was that way in the past, but why should it continue? What advantage is there for the user?

And by the way, can we once and for all get rid of the notion that professional journalists are objective? They may offer independence, but no human being can get away from their own experience, which colors everything they see.