Blogging For Journalists / from SreeTips.com

Sphere.com joins a growing list of blogs-only search engines.

Try them all out:

• Sphere - newest entry
• Blogdex - tracks "most contagious" information
• Daypop - search 59,000 blogs and news sites
• Google Blog Search - Google does blog search
• Feedmap - find blogs on a map
• Blogdigger - find local blogs

Adrian Holovaty is an online journalists I - and many others in the industry - admire greatly. Even though he’s young - he got his BA from Univ. of Missouri in 2001 - he’s one of the most influential folks working in our business today, thanks to his work as head of editorial innovations at the WashingtonPost.com and his projects, such as ChicagoCrime.org and several others. He was invited to give the commencement address at his alma mater this month and the text of his speech is worth reading. It’s not about blogs per se, but there’s a lot about the changing media landscape.

And if you get frustrated at work, do projects in your spare time. Start your own thing. The Chicago crime site I told you about was just a side project for me; I did it because it was exciting to do something that hadn’t been done before. I know of two journalists in Chicago who both quit their jobs in professional media and have started doing independent journalism on the Web. And I know of more than a dozen journalists who keep blogs in which they write about the industry — what were good ideas, what were bad ideas, what the industry needs to do next. 

Here is a Jan. 2005 Wired piece by NYU’s Adam Penenberg that needs updating but has a lot of useful information about the adventures of some of the big bloggers who also happen to be journalists.

Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66251,00.html

Excerpt:

For all the press that bloggers have received for revolutionizing journalism by bringing Gutenberg’s printing press to the digital masses, when push comes to shove, journalists who operate personal weblogs face an inherent conflict of interest. In the end, it’s the blogs that usually get short shrift.

There’s more interest in learning about blogging than I thought. At Columbia, I am doing a session tonight, Wed., May 10 and we had to stop taking registrations a week early. I thought we’d have 30 sign-ups, but pulled the plug at 80+! As a result, I am now doing a duplicate session on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at Columbia. If you know anyone who’d be interested, send them to this link, please:
http://www.sreetips.com/class/blogging.html

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in blogging:

http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/

Some comments by J-bloggers - journalists who blog - from Tim Porter, who asked several reporters about the advantages of blogging.

Among the responses is this one, from Michael Bazeley, Silicon Beat, San Jose Mercury News:

"I think blogging has also sharpened my reporting some. Because Matt and I put original content that comes from original reporting on the blog, we are spending more time mining our beats, talking to sources and reading about issues. We’re consuming more information, which can only be good."

Here’s a guide to blogs from the NYT’s Rich Meislin. In an example of how things work online, instead of being an internal document, it’s offered up to the public as well.

Blogs 101
By Rich Meislin 

o get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites. Most blogs carry links to other blogs on related topics or that the author likes (known as a blogroll). This page is under development; feel free to suggest your own finds. Business and sports are being built, and suggestions are particularly welcome.

On Feb. 17, 2006, the Financial Times Magazine ran a major story about blogging and what it all means.

Financial Times Magazine
Feb. 17, 2006

Time for the Last Post
By Trevor Butterworth

Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy Internet start-ups that were going to build a brave "new economy" a few years ago?

Also see the temporary blog created by the FT to discuss issues raised in the article. 

In Nov. 2003, New York magazine ran a piece about six of the biggest bloggers in NYC.

Blog Blog Blog
The New York Weblog explosion has created a new wave of chattering-class grandees. So what if they’re sitting at home in their bathrobes?
By Simon Dumenco

Who are these people? Well, there are way too many of them to count (or hire). But what follows is a look at a handful of some of the most compelling players.

Of course, since as of last week there were 2,767 blogs being published in New York City (according to the charming site nycbloggers.com), I expect to be blogged to death for my choices.

 

As part of the Feb. 2006 cover story, NY magazine ran a chart looking at the top 50 blogs and wrote short, useful descriptions of each. 

Linkology
By Stuart Luman

There are upwards of 27 million blogs in the world. To discover how they relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days. Think of those links as votes in an endless global popularity poll. Many blogs vote for each other: “blogrolling.” Some top-50 sites don’t have any links from the others shown here, usually because they are big in Japan, China, or Europe—regions still new to the phenomenon.