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Blogs in the News
I mentioned Steve Johnson the other day, Internet Critic for the Tribune, well he's written an article about the last Chicago Bloggers Meetup. I'm in it. I haven't seen the paper. There might be horrible pictures.
One gripe I have with the Trib - their insistence on calling it a Web log. I know it's in their style book, but the term is weblog. Web is no longer capitalized and it was a term coined by Jorn Barger and used for years as one word before the Trib came around and discovered them.
Barabara Iverson (Columbia professor and Meetup organizer) is quoted in the article as saying "I'm so busy doing my own blogs," she said, "I don't read many others." This is in response to the Gallup Poll numbers people are throwing around that say that of internet users, only 9 percent are blog readers and haven't risen in a year. Of the 9 percent of people that answer Gallup polls, I bet only 9 percent could name the Vice President too.
I don't read 'many' blogs either, if 'many' means a percent of the ones out there. The best blogs read uncountable numbers of blogs (or at least skim or aggregate them) and the best bloggers are those who spend their day on the web keeping up with all the discussions. I don't know how they manage to do it.
Oh, and since the Media is still afraid of inline links in articles about blogs, here's a list of links referenced in the article.
Barbara Iverson, who shot a photographer that night
KIPlog (you're here you don't need that one)
Phonecamnews: Beginner's Guide to Photos and Phones
Now I have to go read all these.
POSTSCRIPT: After seeing the print edition of the Tribune, I feel the need to correct something in the caption - This was the 3rd Chicago Webloggers Meetup that Barbara Iverson has organized and moderated, but there have been many other 'Meetups' under the Meetup brand, and quite a few others before that before Meetup existed, all the way back to 1999. When people see only a dozen people gathered and ask why there isn't a stronger 'meatscape' community of bloggers, they need to look no further than the Billy Goat tonight or Crew next Thursday.
Knowledge on the Web
Here's some valuable knowledge:
The map that goes with this Tribune story - Stylish shortcuts showing buildings you can cut through to stay out of the cold. I'd like to combine it with this Pedway map. When's Google going to start mapping underground?
World Electric Guide "This is a guide to some important issues when deciding to use your electrical appliances in another country." Includes a plug guide.
What student doctors have learned from their emergency room patients.
Death of blogging?
From the Tribune - Bloggy, we hardly knew ye - an editorial predicting bloggings future as "indefinite". "Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally."
And of course the Tribune blogger Eric Zorn has to defend his medium - "That I still have to define the term "blog" in the interest of clarity is just one reason it's premature to order a tombstone for "Bloggy."" The Trib's internet critic Steve Johnson also had comments on the subject, even before the editorial came out.
I got to meet Steve the other night at the latest Chicago Bloggers Meetup. The meetup was a quite valuable presentation on copyright law for the blogger by law professor Matthew Sag. More on that stuff if I get a minute to gather it.
As for the death of blogs - I've been at this long enough to be able to look at a start-up blog and know whether to bookmark it or say 'dead man walking'. Millions of blogs will surely die a slow lingering death, but blogging itself will never die. (I'm resisting the urge to yell 'Long live blog!' Who style.)
Podcasting
From the piles of CSS links I dump out here, it not hard for my readers to figure out what I do. Web building often crosses into so many other areas and recently I've been crossing into podcasting. You probably won't see a KIPlog podcast, but everyone seems to want to do one now. Here are some links I've been collecting to make sure I know what I'm talking about.
Create your own podcast in less than 10 days A resource filled Squidoo 'lens'.
MacProPodcast The podcast to listen to if you're using a Mac and producing multimedia or videocasts. Lots of stuff on video production, Final Cut Pro etc.
Podcaster Confessions, also by Joseph Nilo of MacProPodcast.
A directory of podcast directories.
That's enough for now, I got enough reading and listening to do.
Random stuff
Zen and The Art of Ink Fade Testing "Important work notes on the wall of my cube were fading fast recently, so I decided to embark on a search for quality archival pens. All of the cheap ballpoint pens I've used in the past 5 years or so turn out to be faders, so I clearly needed to upgrade."
In other writing links - The world's largest pencil
You can own (a facsimile of) the Book of Kells for $18,000.
Lots of cool blogs at the Designers who Blog blog.
The Rolling Stones were rather lackluster tonight at the SuperBowl. Remember the day when Keith Richards could really handle his telecaster?.