Category: Media

Smart/curly quotes have been a thorn in the side for a while. When users of some browsers paste out of Word and into Movable Type (eg. for NGNO), the smart and curly quotes would come out as question marks (i.e. unrecognized characters). I had taught them to either turn off Smart Quotes or save as text, open in SimpleText or NotePad, and paste from there. They hated me for it.

Just found Brad Choate’s regex plugin, which lets your MT templates do search/replace on-the-fly. Configured it to replace curlies with straights, problem solved.

Of course, working with PHP would have been easier in a case like this — would not have needed a plugin to churn text; but the benefits of using a prefab publishing platform outweigh these occasional downsides.

Al Gore is apparently looking into purchasing an entire news network, which he would fashion into an antidote to the predominant conservative media. Going after Fox with something that might actually resemble “fair and balanced?” They’re casting it not as a leftist media outlet per se, but as a sane info source on the landscape. Former chairman of the FCC says:

“We’re not trying to fight fire with fire; we’re trying to fight fire with cold water.”

Al Franken says::

“[people are] listening to NPR not because it’s left-wing information, but because it’s information.”

Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll finds that 45% of Americans think the media is too liberal. That must be mostly the same chunk who think Saddam attacked the U.S. Wait, no, that was 70%.

Update 10/14/03: The network is now being re-cast not as a liberal outlet, but as a news network for youth (under 25).

“Liberal TV is dead on arrival,” said an insider advising Mr. Gore and his team. “You just can’t do it.”

Thanks David K.

A seldom-mentioned side-effect of “the RSS revolution” is the weird way it skews web traffic. If a person subscribes to my RSS feed, index.rdf is going to be pulled off my site every time the person’s (or site’s) aggregator checks to see whether I’ve published updates. I leave NetNewsWire up and running 24×7, and set to refresh its feeds every hour. That means I generate 24 hits a day on Radio Free Blogistan and around 100 other sites I like, even though I actually look at the site only once or twice a week.

In August, I had 24,000 requests for index.rdf — fully 6x more requests than for my homepage. More than ever before, traffic fails to equate with readership. In fact, the numbers are way off. And the more popular RSS gets, the more skewed the numbers are going to get.

If you’re dishing up RSS, make sure all feed paths are removed from your traffic summaries (this is easier and more effective than trying to trap the UA strings of the various readers). You’ll still want to count those requests, but don’t be misled: You’re not nearly as popular as you think.

xian forwarded the URL to another blog called “The Birdhouse.” My blog is a general-purpose catch-all broken into loose categories. His is dedicated to the topic of mental health. Wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or upset by the copycat name. Since we’re both not-for-profit, there’s no question of business trademarks, but it just felt odd to see.

Then I saw that both he and I have pages called “Why is this place called The Birdhouse?” (his | mine). After reading his, I’m convinced that his site is not copying mine – the title is sincere and the story of its origins are touching. There’s more than enough room for more than one birdhouse on the web.

Had it up to here [points to gullet] with the endless expanses of nothingness on standard cable TV. It’s not that there’s nothing on, just that every time we sit down we have usually half hour or so and just want to be entertained for a bit. More often than not the burrito is done before the commercials finally end, and what’s on is just plain bleak, unsatisfying. There are a few things we like, but the likelihood of them being on when we have free time is slim. Tivo seems like the grail, but to have that, you have to subscribe both to Tivo and to the cable or satellite to feed it.

Feh. Mutiny. Jacked in the 50-year-old antenna on top of the new house and whoa, we get almost a dozen network channels, most of them fairly clear. Unfortunately this also means no 24 hr news and no trigger happy tv, but we’re going to live with this for a while and see how it goes.

The feature piece on comparative weblog systems I wrote for the July issue of MacWorld is now on newstands (page 76). A version of the article is online, but sans graphics and screenshots, sidebars, and feature comparison charts for blogging systems and for Mac-based posting tools. The article covers pMachine, Movable Type, Radio Userland, GeekLog, iBlog, LiveJournal, and Blogger Pro.

Amazing how much harder it was to do a feature piece with a baby in the house than without. Some of my online friends are “accidentally” screenshotted, and I even managed to squeak a teensy image of Amy, Miles and me in there.

Just got a call from Noah Glass at audblog – a service that lets you post to your blog from any phone. He wants us to consider it for use at the J-School… some interesting possibilities. Noah set me up with an account to test with — click link below to hear me narrate this entry live and unedited. And the first person to respond that it sounds like I just “phoned in my performance” gets a noogie.

audblog audio post

Ever notice how your local paper seems perfectly credible until you read an article on something you actually know a lot about? All of a sudden it seems like journalists know nothing, and you wonder: If this piece is so ill-informed, then what stories can I count on to be well informed?

Bloggers tend to write about what they know (myself excluded). If bloggers present an actual threat to traditional journalism (as is often suggested at jschool seminars), it’s not because the public isn’t discriminating enough to care, it’s because no journalist can know (or research) everything about everything. Bloggers sidestep this problem by virtue of sheer numbers.

John Naughton:

In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media – including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it’s just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them – which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.