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Category: News of News (Page 8 of 11)

News and comments about news and media

Jones-mania in USA Today

Watch for it on the stands tomorrow! Or on the net now! In an article titled “RSS feeds college students’ diet for research” I give what appears to be a complex, yet concise explanation of RSS:

It’s like a subscription or clipping service,” says Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of ibiblio.org, an online public library of Web information (www.ibiblio.org). “You can drag any Web site you want to watch, from BBC to personal blogs, and it will let you know if you have new stuff.

Shuttle liftoff – select the cameras

ibiblio alum Jim Ray may be over in the penumbra of the dark side but he is making the best of it. Check out the slick multimedia package that Jim worked on for MSNBC on the Discovery shuttle launch. You can select which 3 camera angles you’d like to use to view the shuttle launch at once from a set of up to 11 available cameras and that’s just the beginning. As you replay the launch, you can move between cameras. Take a look. This is a wonderful piece of work.

kegbot kegerator and Tar Heel of the Week

Technology to the rescue! Teen age drinking is a problem in Chapel Hill and elsewhere. Anti-drinking crusader Dale Pratt-Wilson is on the case and is featured as Tar Heel of the Week in the News and Observer (note: I was TotW back nearly 10 years ago. My being there had nothing to do with drinking.). Pratt-Wilson was a strong proponent of keg registration laws which if put in place would create stronger controls on kegs than on firearms. DPW makes sense on at least one point since more teens die in drinking related accidents than from gun shots. But as opponents point out, teens are not buying or drinking most of the beer. Immediate civil liberty questions come to mind. There was even a move to put RFIDs on kegs.

Leave it to the folks at Make Magazine. These technologists have gone several steps better with the kegbot kegerator. The Kegbot keeps up with all kinds of information including temperature, amount of beer remaining, etc but more importantly Kegbot keeps up with who is drinking how much using an iButton key. It can cut off heavy drinkers. And it does create an amusing way of measuring beer usage.

Princess of the Piedmont; Duke of Devonshire

The Honorable Dr. Sally Greene, Esquire will be returning to her reporting roots when she interviews the Duke of Devonshire as he visits Tyler, Texas. The Duke is there to promote a showing of selections from his family’s collection of art and fine objects opening at the Tyler Museum of Art called “The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth.”

Sally will be taking a break from helping out her mother who is recovering from an automobile accident at East Texas Medical Center Rehabilitation Center in Tyler.

ibiblio = memex authority says aussie rag

The Aussie “multiple medium” magazine, Gizmag, in print form is “distributed in environments where affluent males congregate.” This may be the reason that I’ve never seen it. That and that I think they are limited to Australia in the print edition.

Nonetheless I was delighted to discover that in their article on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” essay, they included two links to ibiblio sources. ibiblio link and the link to Ted Nelson in the article [they should have used this link for Nelson] go to a JOMC master’s project by Scott Griffin from 2000 on Internet Pioneers. Unfortunately, they misspell Dr. Bush’s name regularly.

Anniversary of Vannavar [sic ] Bush’s famous essay describing the MEMEX machine

[…]
Bush was a visionary and his work in creating the environment which nurtured
the development of what became the internet is well documented in several
excellent articles in Wired magazine and ibiblio.
[…]

Truth and Reconciliation – G’boro style

Ed Cone is intensely blogging (is that a term) with photos, the hearings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Well worth reading and seeing and the best coverage I have found (as several of his commentors note).
The Commission is digging into the 1979 killings of Communist Workers’ Party marchers by members of the KKK and of the Amercian Nazi Party. The killers have never been convicted. The complex relationships between the Communists, KKK, G’boro police and hints of FBI involvment are being discussed by all sides (and reported by Ed).

GarageBand and the Archbishop

Two items that are somehow related.

Apple follows up their podcast-enabling iTunes update with a nice writeup on how to use GarageBand to create podcasts. Especially helpful are the various GarageBand independent hints and suggestions on how to compose a good show.

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams delivered a speech, published in the Guardian, subtitled by the paper “Humanity, imagination and a real sense of community are what is needed to rescue journalism from its parallel universe”

Chests return; blessed by new AG

Spirit of Justice and John Ashcroft
AP and Jeff Pomerantz report that the drapes have been removed from the Justice Department statues by order of new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The manly bare-chested Majesty of Law and the single breast baring Spirit of Justice were covered during the tenure of John Ashcroft by $8000 worth of drapery.
The Associated Press photographers report that they were not allowed to take pictures of the newly revealed statues though (in the Chicago Sun Times).

Carrie catches Clear Channel

The NYTimes credits ole ibiblio buddy and Stay Free publisher Carrie McLaren with outing a Clear Channel prank called “Radio Free Ohio.” While pretending to be a pirate AM station that rails again corporate radio and controlled playlists, etc, the DNS clearly showed the website was owned by Clear Channel itself. Once disclosed, the web site radiofreeohio was purged of most content, but Stay Free has kept much of the disinformation alive for us. For more updates see the Stay Free blog.

NYTimes blogging and blog reporting

Following the News and Observer which in turn follows the News and Record, the New York Times announced blog inclusive projects in two different announcements. First in the reorganization of their Business Section:

On Mondays, Business Day will focus on media and marketing news, with technology included as it relates to those industries. David Carr will write a column on new media; the world of blogs will be covered as a regular feature. [emphasis added]

Second, in an Editor and Publisher article, we learn:

An internal committee at The New York Times has recommended steps to increase readers’ confidence in the newspaper, including reducing errors, increasing coverage of religion, “rural areas” and “middle America,” making reporters and editors more accessible, and possibly starting a blog. [emphasis added]

and

Recommendation #4 reads: “Consider creating a Times blog that promotes interaction with readers.”

Someone is listening – parts 1 and 2

Sally Greene notices that the News and Observer now runs not only a few blogs, but an NC Blogwatch. She discovered this heretofore well kept secret by mining her refer logs. Turns out that the NandO blogmasters aren’t using Trackback to the posts that they feature. They do have a Trackback for their own post and I’m using it here to Trackback to one of the articles there that links to an article here.

Meanwhile WXDU is being stalked or policed depending on your viewpoint by “an unidentified, middle-aged man.” How you can tell age and gender from email has yet to be explained. The Chronicle reports that the emailer has been reporting on what words and expressions are used on air by WXDU DJs and is also including images grabbed from the WXDU webcam in his emails to Duke administrators.

According to the e-mail sent to the WXDU list warning DJs about the situation, President Richard Brodhead, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta and Executive Vice President Tallman Trask have received the man’s e-mails. Moneta said he is involved in conversations about the situation with people who have expressed concerns but declined to comment further. Several WXDU DJs also declined to comment about the situation.

An Effin’ chillin’ effect?

Friends of Huffington

Nassib Nassar sends this links to a parody piece from the Guardian teasing us about Arianna Huffington’s upcoming Huffington Post project (which begins May 9). The advance press says that the project will be a group blog by 300 celebrity bloggers [are there 300 celebrities that want to blog?] including:

Warren Beatty, Jon Corzine, Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Nora Ephron, James Fallows, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Hart, Vernon Jordan, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Mort Zuckerman.

This list from Editor and Publisher article.

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