On the one hand, we have Healey is a Fraud, which came back yesterday from senescence to ask questions about the way the Romney/Healey administration did or did not handle a case involving a possibly politically connected man convicted of killing two people while driving drunk.
Mark Jurkowitz reports on some personnel and coverage changes at the Herald, including:
... Jessica Heslam will cover local television, talk radio and the blogosphere in a new media beat ...
Hmm, does the above mean she'll be covering "new media," or just that the Herald is starting a new "media beat"? In any case, more coverage for the Interblogs!
Boston is the country's best college town, but it's so easy for the region's many campuses to become isolated worlds.
There's a new blog at the Boston Phoenix Web site that will collect news and notes, both funny and serious, from New England's colleges. It'll show students from different schools some things they have in common; it'll provide non-students with a glimpse of what goes on at local universities.
Read it at www.thephoenix.com/BigBlogOnCampus.
Let me know what you think.
On Saturday, Dan Kennedy posted a serious, thoughtful piece about what he considers a serious mistake by NPR's "On the Media." But every time I read his headline, I get a case of the giggles: Bush's bulge reconsidered.
Blogorelli is sponsoring the Life Cycle of a Relationship (10 Steps) competition: Come up with a 10-song playlist that follows that theme - using songs available for public sharing:
... I and a few impartials will listen to the mixes, pick the top three, and award the spectacular and completely hypothetical blue ribbon on Monday, February 20, 2006. The prize is a $10 iTunes gift card to the winner, and a $5 iTunes gift cards to the second and third finishers. ...
BostonFR is sort of like Boston Citysearch, if Citysearch were entirely in French.
Steve Garfield offers up a short video from yesterday's Node101 session and more background on the effort.
Earlier:
Videobloggers come together; JP to get Globe Pulse Point.
Aaron Hurley discusses what's wrong with Rocketboom and volunteers to help local videobloggers with their editing techniques - as he blends in with a Marimekko print (Abby has more photos).
About 20 videobloggers, new-media types, documentary makers and community journalism fans, some from as far away as Worcester and Merrimack, NH, gathered at Sweet Finnish this morning to begin building a local video effort, under the general auspices of Node 101. Steve Garfield of Off on a Tangent described an attempt both to improve the work of local vloggers and to show other folks that doing video is no longer a complex technical task.
The next meeting is this coming Sunday at 10 a.m., also at Sweet Finish, where Hurley and Serra Shifflett will lead a discussion on video editing.
Tim Wright, a JP documentary maker, said he's looking forward to learning how to turn around video as quickly as folks such as Garfield does. He added he'd love to revive something he did in the 1980s: JP Newsreels, in which local people doing interesting things were given cameras to film them to be turned into short features (only now he'd do it with digital video instead of the Super 8 cameras he used back then).
Michael Oh of Tech Superpowers said Sweet Finnish would soon become the Boston Globe's fourth Pulse Point. Pulse Points offer a way for anybody within reach of their Wi-Fi access points to watch videos, hear music and download other materials at wicked fast speeds (they are not actually connected to the Internet, so nobody out of range can reach them).
Oh said the basic idea is to build community around the Pulse Points (the other ones are at South Station, on Newbury Street and at Roxbury Crossing), letting users create and upload their own videos and stories about the area around the points (using Drupal). He said his long-term idea is to build a distribution network so that all the Pulse Points can share these files.
Pito Salas and friends are planning a geek dinner for Feb. 15 (6:30 p.m. at 66 Church Street in Harvard Square). Topics of discussion to include: Web 2.0, RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby, Mashups, Web Services, Startups, etc.
Anybody who's ever spent more than a couple of minutes in the woods anywhere in eastern Massachusetts has seen piles of rocks. Rocks are our native crop, after all.
But some of those rock piles might be more than just random assemblages pushed together by glaciers (or field-clearing colonial farmers or modern-day builders). Peter Waksman's Rock Piles is a Weblog about markers created by long-ago native-American tribes to commemorate fallen warriors - rock piles - and other stone structures that might have been left by the region's original settlers:
Blogging Boston knitters will represent in the upcoming Knitting Olympics, in which participants attempt to start and finish a project during the Winter Olympics:
John A. Keith, Boston's original real-estate blogger, has a new URL: www.bostonreb.com (the "reb" stands for "real-estate blog" not any sudden love for the Confederacy). One of his first posts is about the double-edged sword of being among the first to move into a new condo development, such as the Washington Grove Condominiums in West Roxbury.
Got a spare Google Analytics invite lying around? Philocrites would be much obliged.
Halley Suitt, of Halley's Comment, today became CEO of Top 10 Sources, a human-edited guide to what are supposed to be the top-10 blog posts or stories in general, culled from a list of top-10 sites in a variety of topics (including Boston). Wendy Koslow, whom some of you may remember from her old The Redhead Wore Crimson blog, was named editor in chief.
The Boston Phoenix has a new look and a newish URL: www.thephoenix.com. It's actually always been there; the difference now is that if you go to the old bostonphoenix.com, you get a re-direct message for a few seconds before you're popped over (guys, if you were using Apache, I'd suggest a little hot mod_alias action so users wouldn't have to wait, but you seem to be on IIS, so go figure).
Not much time to look right now (work and all that), but one key thing for me: RSS feeds are back for their Weblogs (because you know how much I obsess over Media Log) - they also have a sorta mini-aggregator for their blogs right on the homepage now. Other key thing for me: The type is still too damn small. Pixel shortage at the Phoenix? Making the type gray only makes it worse.
LNG Solutions is a new blog aimed at fighting the continuing transit of LNG tankers through Boston Harbor:
Liquefied natural gas tankers traveling through Boston Harbor carry volatile cargo and are terrorists targets. Sixty times a year, these floating bombs steam past thousands of homes and 500,000 residents who are in constant danger. We want these dangerous ships out of Boston Harbor.
What's the sound of a land rush in cyberspace? First the outatownas descended on the local blogosphere. Now we're starting to see home-grown blog networks out to make money through the ol' daily post routine.
Not that that's a bad thing. Under the Golden Dome is a blog that covers:
the "insider" buzz among the young Democrats actually working at the State House, on campaigns and for the various interest groups around the Commonwealth.
Via Blue Mass. Group.
Johnny Bag O'Donuts throws up a white flag in his war with Jay Fitzgerald of the Herald - but maintains control over his identity. Fitzgerald in turn concedes O'Donuts ended on a classier note than he did, but still calls on him to take off the mask.
No, no, I'm not talking about blogging Herald writers going after anonymous media critics this time. While that battle does involve honor and virtue and helmets mit der spikes on top, no money is involved.
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