Tag: blogs

RSS woes

RSS can be a great time-saver, but the glitches make it less than a complete solution. Here are a few examples:

  • My Mac-based newsreader, NewsFire, does not recognize the feed coming from Boston Magazine’s newish Boston Daily Blog. My first assumption was that the BoMag geeks were doing something wrong. But no. Because Google Reader tapped into the feed just fine.
  • So I started playing with Google Reader. Great interface, good organizational scheme, and I’ve been signing over more and more of my life to Google anyway (mail, calendar). But I quickly discovered that Google Reader is fantastically slow in updating — even items from days ago don’t appear, regardless of whether I bang away at the “refresh” button. It reminded me of another Web-based newsreader, Bloglines, which I abandoned for that very reason.
  • Too many blogs I like to check in on still aren’t using RSS, such as the Weekly Dig‘s, although I’m told that should change in the near future.

I’d be interested in hearing your RSS tales of woe — as well as any possible solutions.

More: I’ve been playing around instead of making the calls I should make, and I’ve found that fiddling makes a difference. For instance, the RSS feed for Media Nation seems to work better than the Atom feed. But the opposite is true at a couple of Phoenix blogs, Talking Politics and Don’t Quote Me, where switching from RSS to Atom brought me right up to speed. Obviously some standardization is needed.

Wilpers checks in

Former BostonNOW editor John Wilpers has responded to my request for comment on his semi-departure earlier this week. Here’s what he’s got to say.

Thank you for your e-mail and offer to post my answer:

Regarding BostonNOW, I will be consulting with them and the group’s management on their Internet initiatives and expansion.

I also will be launching an effort to export the concept I pioneered at BostonNOW — introducing greater relevance and community to a newspaper’s print and online editions through blogger recruitment, participation and publication.

The BostonNOW experience convinced me that mainstream newspapers can rejuvenate themselves and find tomorrow’s readers today by inviting the community into the paper.

The hundreds of tech-savvy BostonNOW bloggers, most of whom had no use for an old-fashioned newspaper, are excited about being published in a product seen by tens of thousands of readers every day. Those bloggers are seeing their profiles rise dramatically in the market, and as a result, the potential for previously unimagined levels of traffic on their websites rises as well. That kind of mutually beneficial relationship is appealing to both parties — the newspapers and the bloggers.

I intend to take that message on the road to help other newspapers learn how to develop those relationships and build the new audiences that will rejuvenate their franchises….

(And, yes, the plan includes pay for bloggers. I have even met with the National Writers Union to talk about contract templates and to get advice on compensation plans. They’re very excited about the potential for their members and non-members alike.)

BostonNOW’s melding of print and the Web is far more interesting as an idea than as a news product. Frankly, the paper is pretty bad, although there’s no reason to think it won’t get better. This Boston Magazine piece on BostonNOW by Jason Feifer — “The Rag That Would Save Newspapers” — captures the good, the bad and the ugly.

As for Wilpers, whom I’ve known since the early 1980s, when we competed against each other, the guy is a survivor. He’ll be fine.

Update: This isn’t nice, but it’s funny.

Google Documents and Blogger

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a way to post to Media Nation without having to do it from directly within Blogger. Well, I just read in MacWorld that Google Documents has a publish-to-blog feature, so I’m giving that a try.

What are the advantages? First, it’s got a roomier, easier-to-work-with window than Blogger. second, it has more features, like strikethrough. It’s not ideal; unlike Ecto, I have to be connected to the Internet to use Google Documents. But I could never seem to get the settings right for Ecto.

Personal journalism

Dr. Denny says he’d pay a blogger $191 a year to cover his community. And what if hyperlocal bloggers cobble together user fees with advertising? “Just maybe that advertising income, paired with the subscription money, will allow you to make a living, live in a community you grow to like, raise a couple kids and become a respected journalist,” he writes.

Not a bad idea.

Sticking with Blogger (or not)

Recently I made a promise: As soon as the semester was over, I’d start looking into switching Media Nation from Blogger to WordPress. Now I’m not so sure.

Being more interested in blogging than fiddling, I naturally signed up with WordPress.com rather than trying to install the full version of WordPress on a server somewhere. I experimented a little — you can see the very minimal results here.

But the documentation seemed practically non-existent, and, in poking around, I found this: “You cannot edit any template directly…. You cannot add or remove any html to any theme. This is for security reasons.”

Well, now. So much for making the type a little bigger, switching from justified to ragged-right or, for that matter, adding the code that makes Media Nation part of the Boston Blogs network.

Maybe I’m missing something. Right now, though, my inclination is to try to deal with what I don’t like about Blogger — especially the comments system — without switching. If anyone has some hand-holding advice, that would be appreciated as well.

One way to get free content

BostonNOW, the new freebie commuter tab, has attracted a lot of attention for its goal of loading up on local blog content. Participating bloggers wouldn’t be paid right away, but might share in BostonNOW’s revenues somewhere down the line.

Well, guess what? Boing Boing caught BostonNOW running an item from the Bostonist without permission. BostonNOW provided credit and a link, but obviously that’s not good enough. It was especially stupid given that the Bostonist, unlike most Boston-area blogs, is a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise. BostonNOW editor John Wilpers has apologized and said it won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we await BostonNOW’s first authorized blog item.

You can read Wilpers’ apology here. (Via Universal Hub.)

More: We talked about BostonNOW’s prospects Friday on “Greater Boston.” The video should pop up here at some point. I also shared my thoughts on BostonNOW recently with Paul McMorrow of the Weekly Dig.

Toward less anonymity

I don’t want to rehash today’s New York Times article about attempts to encourage civility in blogland through a voluntary code of conduct. Rather, let me briefly consider one aspect of this that I’ve wrestled with from time to time: the matter of anonymous comments.

The code, online here, includes this:

We do not allow anonymous comments.

We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.

I can almost guarantee that Media Nation will adopt this system later in the spring. I like how I’ve seen this implemented on other blogs. Blogger, unfortunately, does not appear to offer any middle ground between full registration and total anonymity (although some commenters here work around that by including their names or pseudonyms). But change is coming.

Josh Wolf’s costly victory

Judith Miller testified. So did Tim Russert. But Josh Wolf, a blogger and freelance videographer, won a partial victory yesterday by walking out of jail without having to appear before a grand jury. The San Francisco Chronicle has the details.

Wolf spent seven and a half months behind bars rather than turn over unused footage of an anarchists’ protest he had covered in July 2005 and answer prosecutors’ questions about violent incidents he had witnessed. In the end, he agreed to give up the footage in return for not having to testify. He also posted it on his Web site.

In a statement given in front of San Francisco City Hall and reposted on his blog, Wolf, 24, said in part that he considered not having to testify more important than turning over the video:

Contrary to popular opinion, this legal entanglement which has held me in Federal Prision for the past eight months, has never been about a videotape nor is the investigation about the alleged attempted arson of a San Francisco police vehicle as the government claims. While it is true that I was held in custody for refusing to surrender the tape and that the justification for making a federal case out of this was the police car, things are not always as they appear. The reality is that this investigation is far more pervasive and perverse than a superficial examination will reveal.

When I was subpoenaed in February of last year, I was not only ordered to provide my unedited footage, but to also submit to testimony and examination before the secretive grand jury. Although I feel that my unpublished material should be shielded from government demands, it was the testimony which I found to be the more egregious assault on my right and ethics as both a journalist and a citizen.

Wolf’s case is about the right of journalists — never fully recognized, and under increasing assault in recent years — to protect their confidential sources and unused notes, video footage and other materials from the prying eyes of prosecutors.

Wolf’s case was especially egregious, as this Online Journalism Review story explains, because the investigation was shifted from state court, where Wolf might have enjoyed the protection of California’s shield law, to federal court, where there is no shield law. The argument — that a San Francisco police cruiser damaged by protesters was paid for in part with federal anti-terrorism funds — is so weak as to be laughable.

With his partial victory yesterday, Wolf did not succeed in changing the law. But he showed that a journalist — even an independent blogger whose journalistic credentials are not clearly established — can generate enough publicity that the authorities will eventually back down.

The Committee to Protect Journalists hails Wolf’s release; so does the Society of Professional Journalists.

In February, Amy Goodman interviewed Wolf for “Democracy Now!”