Thanks to a new blogger on my bookmark list, I poked into my own old Blogger account today for the first time in a year... I'd missed the whole "new Blogger" transition that merged the login for Blogger and the one for gmail e-mail accounts. Google is certainly trying to take over my life... So far I've given in to these:

• gmail
• iGoogle
• Google Reader
• Orkut
  
• Blogger

The last three have slipped off my radar, replaced by other RSS aggregators, social networking applications and blogging software... Actually, I think I started using Userland's Radio for my blog before trying Blogger. I liked the security of Radio, which runs on my computer and automatically stores a full copy of everything I post at my main space: Bob's Other Journalism Weblog.

Back when I first tried Blogger, I wasn't sure I could trust it to be around for long. Maybe it's safe to use now. :-)

Speaking of safety, I see a word balloon below this window that says "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically!" -- which is something I wish all Web-based writing programs did. I wonder whether that's available as a module in WordPress, Drupal, Manila or Django, the other publishing engines I have used for "demo" blogs?

I suspect Blogger also has a "backup the full contents of your blog" feature somewhere. If so, I'd have no reservations left about using it as my "most frequent" blog, since I could post from any of the seven computers I use. I'll think about it...

bstepno's bookmarks on del.icio.us
... are where I've been keeping a lot of the "for possible reference later" posts that I used to put in this Blogger blog after starting my Other Journalism Weblog.

(Also known as Couranteer.com)

Blogger Buzz: The New Version of Blogger
For now I'm just testing whether this new version works with my old "Blog This" button on Firefox's menu bar. Seems to...
But no. Now that I've poked around a bit, I see that Blogger is phasing in the new version, and it appears I'm not in the first phase. (The giveaway is that my "Dashboard" page doesn't have a section inviting me to try the new system.)
Oh well.

Blog defamation case at my Other Journalism Weblog

Our discussion of digital news archiving projects and the pitfalls of footnoting online publications didn't even try to approach the issues of archiving video or controversies surrounding Google's book-scanning project. This post by Jeff Ubois at Berkeley links to a larger ongoing discussion of both those topics.

Television Archiving? Blog Archive? Google “Showtimes” the UC Library System: "Digitizing the world’s books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide “universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime.” So it’s troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.

The American Library Association, Library & Information Technology Association, and the Open Content Alliance are among the groups he mentions as being on the case.

Elsewhere on the archival.tv site, I saw this quote from Lawrence Lessig, echoing things he said about "read-only culture" at the AEJMC convention:

“Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in the newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we have created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America?” - Larry Lessig, Free Culture

(As is true of many things, a Scripting News item led me into this series of links. Thanks, Dave.)

I generally don't "blog live" from events, but Steve Garfield inspired me to give it a try during his presentation today... He was posting to his "Off On A Tangent" blog while telling a Media Giraffe session about blogging, including audio with cellphone and video with a snapshot camera.

(He also has a link to his Mom's blog, named My Mom's Blog, by Thoroughly Modern Millie. [Hey, my Mom was a Millie too!] Steve mentioned that her blog gets more comments than his. He demonstrated posting audio through Hipcast.com, a pay service that he's involved with, which takes his phone-in audio and posts it to his blog. (He and others mentioned other services, some free, that help people post sound to their blogs, including Odeo, videoegg and loudblog.)

In the same session, Paul Grabowicz from Berkeley said he is skeptical about news organizations that have gotten into online multimedia simply because of the "fear factor" -- not really as a way to do a new kind of quality journalism. Newspapers should not be forcing reporters to add amateurish video to their plain text news stories, he said; they shold use video or audio when it's the best tool for the job, and they should take advantage of the computer itself. For example, his students are working with the UC Berkeley architecture department to tell the story of a jazz and blues club mecca in Oakland -- by building a video game re-creation.

Paul also had a healthy attitude toward "citizen journalism" -- that citizen journalists should be featured on professional news sites, sometimes driving the stories, with the professionals pitching in to get answers the citizens couldn't get.

I agree with him 100%, although I don't mind the idea of news organizations experimenting with audio and video just to develop a better understanding of the tools. But computers can do so much more by being computers, not just a digital printing press. If a story involves a lot of data, the best a newspaper can do is to include an enhanced table or graph, USA Today style. The same paper's online department, on the other hand, should have the tools to post an entire searchable database, perhaps with relational links to other databases.

Some great examples of database techniques have been shown at this week's conference, especially by Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post and Chicagocrime.org

Robb Montgomery of Visualeditors.com gave examples of creatively doing more with less and taking advantage of software on the Web. His examples included the Virginian Pilot's video only site HamptonRoads.tv, combining professional and neighborhood videos, New York Times readers contributions to coverage of the New York transit strike that used Google maps "mashup" of readers' reports, an MIT "zipdecode" project, and his own "snapshot camera" video from Moscow.

washingtonpost.com to allow reader comments on individual news articles: Says editor's blog, "Over the next several weeks, we'll begin allowing comments on articles from registered users of washingtonpost.com." The item explains attempts to fight comment abuse. The paper has had online chats and blog comments before, but this will be a first for regular news stories.