Bob Stepno's Red Liner

I didn’t realize I was working too hard until I saw Dave Winer editing
a weblog on his Windows PC, using a word-processor-like  toolbar
inside his browser.  Internet Explorer and Safari on the
Macintosh hadn’t given me the same time-saving feature, but now the Mozilla Firebird
browser does.  I’m trying it out with both my browser-based weblog editors. Except for forcing my alternate blue headline, I didn’t have
to do any HTML coding on this Manila page or on my longer Firebird-Radio feature test…

Firebird Browser Speeds OS-X Weblog Editing …

The Boston Phoenix‘s Dan Kennedy asked political types in and around the Massachusett’s governor’s office what they thought of the “nasty, albeit well-researched” weblog Romney Is a Fraud. To paraphrase, the response he reports (in the Phoenix‘s This Just In section) was a resounding chorus of “duh?” Follow-up questions: Do the political types read the Phoenix — and will the “Mitt Romney’s secret tormentor” headline on page six make readers curious enough to type “romneyisafraud.blogspot.com” into their browsers? (more…)

Pointing from Print to Blog for a Change …

This collection of about 40 sources of election-coverage advice and tools is one of many files of bookmarks I’ve collected for journalism students, professional journalists — and interested citizens with weblogs. This list includes organizations andrather than actual “election news” from news organizations. I can’t promise the links — or sites — are all up to date, but I hope you find some of them helpful!

For online examples of New Hampshire Primary Campaign Coverage, see this brief selection from webloggers, newspaper, television and radio journalists. The categories get a bit blurry — one of the weblogs is from a newspaper, and some of the video is from a radio site — but that’s what “convergence” on the Web is all about.

Political Reporting Resources …

This blog’s editing software maintains an item’s original post date and
time, even if I modify it a day or two later. I’ve done a couple of
times with the items on this page. While I doubt that I have enough
readers to notice, the issue has me curious: When and why do people
modify blog entries? (more…)

When is blogging ‘for the record’? …

I’m changing the style of this weblog. I’ve noticed that most items in our aggregator
are pithy little hit-and-link entries, while my wordy (“more in-depth”)
attempts get dumped into anyone’s RSS aggregator in full. To make it
easy on aggregator-readers,
I’ll try to keep entries in this blog short. As an extra navigation
aid, I’m alternating colors to indicate (blue) links to my own longer
entries or (red) links to external sites. (more…)

Blogging Long, Short, or Summarized and Linked …

This spinoff of Ralph Nader’s 32-year-old Public Citizen organization and its Congress Watch
is colorful and has a mission. But it doesn’t hesitate to
link to a a much different site to point out that politicians aren’t the only ones with a bottom line.

White House for Sale Blog …

I’ve found “workarounds” for a problem Apple’s OS-X Safari browser has with some weblog pages. In particular, the links on the left half of Chris Lydon’s page weren’t working. If they still aren’t when you read this, use another browser until Chris’s coding assistants fix things up… or if you’re interested in learning about style sheets and debugging Web pages, read on.

Communal Debugging? …

While plans for BloggerCon are getting interesting, complete with scholarships and a whole day of free meetings for bloggers who aren’t lawyers or software millionaires or media magnates, I made the mistake of getting intrigued by the agenda for another conference — the ACM Hypertext 2003 gathering in Nottingham, U.K., later this month.

One session looks at new genres of works in hypertext scholarship and seems to edge toward blogging, talking about “linked discussions with multiple authors” and “related changes in textual access and self-publication.”

It also would be fun to hear the keynote speech by Ted Nelson in person instead of just reading the notes online, but that’s about all I can afford to do. I got my hopes up, but I was pasting the registration fees into the wrong end of the currency converter.

Hypertext Conference …

Andrew Sullivan, a blogger with print-journalism credentials, and Jack Fuller, the president of Tribune Publishing Co., will be the keynote speakers for the Online Journalism Association conference in Chicago, Nov. 14-15. (If you don’t keep up on your convergence-minded media conglomerates, Tribune includes major papers from the L.A. Times to New York’s Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant, a couple of dozen television stations and a piece of the WB Network.)

It will be interesting to see how blogs fare in the annual ONA awards, described as being for “Web sites — or areas of Web sites — where journalists have originated the content or selected and amplified it.” (Entries closed a few weeks ago. Sorry.)

Big players like nytimes.com, news.com and cnn.com have gotten their share of the awards in past years, but there are categories for “smaller circulation” sites, and for pages that aren’t affiliated with traditional media organizations. For example, last year’s winners included the Benicia News and the Gotham Gazette. Award categories include breaking news, service journalism, enterprise reporting and general excellence.

Incidentally, the awards are co-sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, which puts out the Online Journalism Review, where the latest lead headline, at this writing, is “News Sites Still Figuring Out What to Do With Online Communities .”

As for the November conference, “early bird registration” is open until Aug. 31, at rates ranging from $200 (student members) to $475 (non-members), which may be interesting to folks who have become sensitive to conference costs.

Online News Con Features Blogger & News Exec …

Antitobacco Trend Has Reached Europe.

On Jan. 1, Ireland is expected to become the first European country to ban an indoor tradition. By Lizette Alvarez. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

That shift in temperature is hell freezing over. That howl in the distance is a dog being bitten by a man. That subtle change in lighting is the moon turning blue.
As an Irish music (and Guinness) fan who has been kept away from the pub-music scene by the clouds of smoke, I’ll be shopping for Aer Lingus tickets if this story comes true! I can’t think of better news to use as my first test of this weblog’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) connection to link to news soures.

As a bonus, if I understand the system, readers who bookmark this story directly through the Times, like this, will find the story fades into the pay-as-you-go archives after a while, but my weblog’s Userland-affiliated RSS link on the headline above should keep working.

I look forward to drinking a smoke-free toast in Dublin in memory of my Dad, whose initials were, coincidentally, R.S.S., and my Mom, who got me interested in Irish music. Both my parents might have been online with us today if the restaurants where they worked hadn’t been part of the cigarette culture.

(They’d also be very proud to see me at Harvard so soon after finishing the Ph.D., even if the Harvard connection is just another piece of my endless romance with college campuses and software… no paycheck or diploma involved.)

First Boston, then Dublin …