Bob Stepno's Red Liner

Getting things wrong is one thing; fixing them is another. One of the strengths of the Web is that words are just bits of electricity that can be changed, unlike ink on paper. I’ve written about that in my blog before,

This time the person getting things wrong was a university president — wrong enough to be accused of plagiarism, and the ink on paper was in the newspaper where I used to work. Since the Courant has an online edition, the story set me thinking about the way online editions handle corrections.

Linking Errors, Plagiarism and Site Design …

Just in time for the Seusscentennial, my e-mail brought a poem titled, “The Grinch Revisited (with thanks to Dr. Seuss).” Maybe you’re seen it. It begins like this…

The Whos down in Whoville liked this country a lot,
But the Grinch in the White House most certainly did not.
He didn’t arrive there by the will of the Whos,
But stole the election that he really did lose.
Vowed to “rule from the middle,” then installed his regime.
(Did this really happen or is it just a bad dream?)

Like so much “have you seen this…” or “I heard a good one…” e-mail, the copy I received didn’t say who wrote the original. Always looking for new ways to eat up a few minutes online, I decided to find out…

The result was an extended essay on e-mail forwarding, authorship, Google, liberalism and (by implication) Attention Deficit Disorder, but it at least has a few good links. If you’re more interested in just reading the whole poem, here it is.

Otherwise, here’s my longer version of this story, which I wish I’d titled “Grinch brings an epiphany,” as odd as that might sound so far from Christmas. At least a green Grinch would be the right color for St. Patrick’s Day.

Grinch Brings an Epiphany? …

I’ve been neglecting the Red Liner lately, but in case anyone uses this
as a “site summary” (rather than full-length “simple syndication”) RSS feed for my
online scribbling, here’s what’s been going on in the “Other Journalism” blog recently:

• An intro to RSS and Trackback for educators
• A progress report on Bloggercon II
• A newspaper’s editor blogs
• A top-notch discussion of blogs and journalism
• What’s was really wrong with AP coverage of the Content Creation Online report
• Award-winning journalism (by the Center for Public Integrity, that is)
• Several short bits about online news, book publishing,  Wikipedia‘s first  half-million,  media ownership, and more

Catching Up With My Other Blog …

Briefs of longer items in that “other journalism” weblog…

• A New York Times exec says his visit to Bloggercon helped shape the new “Times on the Trail” page, but explains why he doesn’t call it a blog…
• A former U.S. president is blogging from Africa…

• World editors begin to blog, examining the future of journalism at editorsweblog.org…
• Speaking of “world editors,”  Rebecca MacKinnon, Tokyo bureau chief for CNN,
  has joined the Harvard weblog list while on campus as a fellow of the
  Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Like a lot of us, she is looking for ways the Internet can change journalism for the better.

More New Bloggers …

College information offices are beginning to offer RSS feeds, according to an article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. The full text may be available only to subscribers, but it mentions RSS projects at Carleton College, Pacific University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, and the University of Nevada at Reno.

Rochester uses RSS to offer campus news feeds to students’ personal pages on the school’s Web portal. Carleton students can get campus event and movie listings by RSS. TAMU’s Texas Agricultural Experiment Station puts out news releases and reports on everything from cattle research to crop-seed varieties.

The article (Vol 50, No. 23, Page A23) doesn’t mention Harvard or the RSS 2.0 “Really Simple Syndication” standard that Dave Winer transferred to the university’s Berkman Center last year.

Sources of RSS software and information suggested in the article:
http://www.prweb.com/rss.php
http://www.2rss.com/software.php

http://syndication.iop.org/about/software.cfm

Related: My last scribbling about RSS.

PM Update: J has added a detailed critique of the Chronicle article.

RSS on Campus: From Movie Schedules to Cattle Research …

Chris Lydon’s Bopnews (Blogging of the President) has made it to the “Regulars” listing at the New York Times’ bloglike Times on the Trail page, presumably by more than one popular request.

Meanwhile, Chris also appears to have blogged his way back into a morning public radio incarnation again, as at least temporary host for Midmorning, a live call-in show from Minnesotta Public Radio — which broadcast his “Blogging of the President” special last month.
For folks who primarily know Chris via his Berkman blog, that “back again” reference concerns the WBUR program The Connection, where he had a national audience for years… In fact, that was probably where he connected with blogging, for a May 2000 broadcast that’s still in the archives.

    The Project for Excellence in Journalism says top professional news
organizations  didn’t
break much ground with online coverage of the first Democratic primaries. The report,  How Online Campaign Coverage Has Changed in Four Years,
is a study of 10 “brand name” news sites. It found more
comparisons of candidates’ positions on issues this time, but less
original reporting and less use of interactivity than four years
ago… 

    I’ve just browsed the 31-page report and didn’t see
much
mention of weblogs or other Internet features of this year’s
campaign… but when I get back to read it all, I’ll add more about it
and links to “media reform” sites at my more
verbose “Other Journalism” blog… and/or the new Berkman Thursday Wiki page…

Out of the morgue: Online journalism meets e-politics …

Three good things about the new Times on the Trail page that I didn’t notice or mention last week:

• A prominently-displayed “Write to us” button at the top right corner.
  (And it works.)
• The link to Campaign 2004, from LexisNexis.
• The link to Wonkette — in fact, the page’s whole “Regulars” collection is worth a look.

Getting some mail back from the Times inspired a longer “what if” note about newspaper culture, blog culture and “about this page” features I’d like to see…

More from Times on the Trail …

A new “Times on the Trail” feature turns New York Times
reporters into bloggers, sort-of… but they can still do fuzzy math
(see my calculations at the end) and confuse readers on the left and right at the same time.

However, the “aggregator” aspect of the blog like page also provides the first opportunity to see a headline in the Times anything like this one: “Now We Know Why NY Times Wanted Kucinich and Sharpton Out of Debates.”

more…

New York Times Blogging Itself? …

That question from a writers’ group e-mail list was just what I needed
to inspire me to try explaining RSS syndication to newcomers to the
blogging world.

This will seem terribly over-simplified to Berkman folks, but I came up with three main issues:

• delivery (you go to blogs; RSS feeds come to you)
• contents (RSS feeds can be headlines, summaries or more)
• reading tools (desktop and Web-based aggregators)

The essay-page
that grew out of my e-mail reply probably skates onto its thinnest ice
in the section headed “More technical info and abbreviations than you
need…”

I welcome corrections and suggestions, either as comments or e-mail.
Feel free to dope-slap me and just say, “Why didn’t you send them
here?” (Adding the address of a page that does the job better.) I’m a
glutton for punishment.

‘What’s the difference between blogs and RSS?’ …