Bryanbell.com

Blogging in the News

Every Morning my alarm wakes me up with NPR News. This morning as you would expect they were talking about the DNC convention and how the messages in last night's speeches were resonating with the masses. Peppered in amongst this news was a piece about how this convention was being covered by 35 members of the blogosphere. Which incedently included a tape recording of Dave Winer talking about the how the Boston security officals were "polite". NPR went on to highlight Bloggers irreverent styles, by reading this quote form Dave's first posts yesterday:

"Well, the convention has started. It's boring beyond belief. It can only get better." - scripting.com

Later this morning during a commercial radio top-of-the-hour news segment, sandwiched between Imus and ESPN Radio, a reporter slowly read a different part of Dave's post:

"It sounds like this: blah blah blah John Kerry blah blah Kerry Edwards blah blah values values values blah blah John Kerry blah blah blah standing at a crossroads blah blah. " - scripting.com

They prefaced his quote by describing blogs as website composed mainly of the top-of-the-mind ramblings of their authors. The implication seemed to be that blogging's contribution to news events was more entertainment than anything approaching news. Finishing the segment they said something to the effect of, 'Now I bet you would never hear something like that from traditional journalists'.

It's interesting to me that blogging has been mentioned so much this week in traditional news. I'm also struck by the news media's choice of quotes. Dave's boredom quote was a "top-of-the-mind rambling", which seemed to play into their preconception of what blogging is, so they went with it.

Excellent Edu-Blogging Movie Featuring Hunterdon High

At this years NECC conference Intel presented a movie about blogging in education. It featured Will Richardson and a few of his students at Hunterdon High School in Flemington New Jersey.

Hunterdon gives a Manila powered blog (which features a template I designed) to some of its students to help them hone their writing skills. Kids are encourages to write in their blogs, and solicit feedback from their teachers, peers, and volunteer mentors.

I think this short movie could be a great way to evangelize the use of blogs in school settings. In less than 2 minutes this movie describes bloggings benifits far better than I generally can in 1 hour of conversation. I encourage other teachers who have been able to leverage blogs in education to produce their own short films.

Weblog System Features Compared

Straight off SlashDot:

"prostoalex writes "The question of the best weblogging system out there arises quite often, especially after the new licensing scheme introduced by MovableType. Here's a rather detailed breakdown

of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP andMySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 arelicensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important.""

It's a bummer Manila and Radio were left off the list, but I'm sure many other systems were as well.

An Objective Look at Table Based vs. CSS Based Design

What a great piece, it truly is objective.

"Over the years there have been many great articles extolling the virtues of CSS based design and bemoaning table based design. However there have been very few articles looking at things from the other side of the fence. This is probably because you really have to understand and use CSS based design before you can criticise it. Yet once converted, few (if any) people go back to the old way of coding." [Andy Budd::Blogography]

The New Blogger

Wow a great new design for Blogger.

"For those of us involved in the project, we've been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I'm proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger's first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it's a biggie." [Stopdesign]