A Good Christian Raisin’ and a Eighth Grade Education
Either I’m off the radar or my blog design is average at best, which isn’t good enough. Either way, I’d rather make this list than not.
I’ve got work to do on both fronts. I’m a little behind on some other stuff right now, but hope to improve on both fronts by the end of Q2.
A couple of weeks ago I watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in a long time. It was the first show after the writers’ strike ended, and Tina Fey was hosting. It was one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen. I didn’t get to see last week’s episode, but I started watching tonight thinking they’d gotten back on track.
Nope. Honestly, I think it may be time to end this show. Just a few reasons why…
Weekend Update
Weekend Update, when it was good, worked because of the snarky commentary on current events. But it doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because by the time I watch the Weekend Update snarky commentary on Tuesday’s primaries, I’ve already been reading snarky commentary on blogs for five days.
The Intro Skit
This skit is almost always political in nature, and because of that it is much like Weekend Update…played out by the time Saturday rolls around. This week they did a spoof of Hillary’s “3 am phone call” commercial. That’s great. It was even better on YouTube this week when everybody else did it.
Musical Guests
I know I’m old, but geez. Does anyone care about these musical guests anymore? They had Tom Petty in his prime, The Cars in their prime, and next week’s musical guest is…Janet Jackson? She was on Tyra Banks this week…’nuff said.
Anyway, I turned SNL off and am watching Slapshot for the upteenth time instead. It’s still funny. Besides the digital shorts there’s nothing left worth watching on SNL.
Time to put on the foil coach.
HT to Michael Silence for this.
Sen. Bill Ketron and Rep. Randy Rinks introduced a bill (SB3139/HB3451) at the beginning of the legislative session. The proposed legislation would allow wine sales only in municipalities that currently allow package sales.
Just another one of the many things I don’t understand: we need legislation to allow wine sales in grocery stores? I understand the concept of legislation that disallows something, but I don’t get the need for laws that allow things. Why not just repeal the law that keeps grocery stores from selling wine in the first place?
And what was the original purpose of keeping wine out of groceries? The only benefit I can see is for the liquor stores have the market cornered currently.
Yeah, I know we live in the Bible Belt and that’s just the way things are, but was there a problem with people showing up to church wine-drunk on Sundays because they stopped to get bread and eggs on their way and were seduced into buying a bottle of cabernet?
Apparently there’s a mini-movement going on to expand wine sales to food retailers. I’m not much of a wino–the headache just isn’t worth the great taste, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy some high gravity beers now and then without having to make an extra stop. Either way, what do I care if someone else buys wine? How does that affect me?
I don’t write about tech stuff here too often, but since this blog, and most likely yours*, is backended by MySQL, it’s relevant. MySQL’s business model works like this–it’s free (as in beer) to use, but enterprise level users do pay the company for support. That’s what makes it so great for the web. People can back end blogs, content management systems, bulletin boards, and just about anything else they can imagine using freely available open-source tools. In fact, there’s even an acronym for the most commonly used tools working together (LAMP–Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). For the end user, more than likely nothing will change.
So why does it matter to us that Sun now owns it? Because the fact that Sun owns it means that Google, Microsoft, and Oracle don’t own it.
*HM, I know you do your own blog engining…mad props.
Wintery weather has been predicted to possibly occur somewhere in this vicinity.
In the South, that means one thing–get thee to a grocery to buy all the bread and milk you can fit into the cart.  You’re going to be stuck in your house (after all, the snow piles reaching as high as two inches will keep you from even opening the door) until the dusting of snow that covers a twenty yard stretch of half a lane of the four lane highway between your house and Kroger melts. This could take anywhere from 4 to 6 hours, and you’ll never make it to mid-morning without plenty of bread and milk.
Oh to be in college, when preparing for snow meant stocking up on beer, condoms, and stolen trays from the cafeteria to be used as sleds.
From Michael Silence:Â
Here’s a rule of thumb: It is not incumbent upon you to prove a document is public. It is incumbent upon a government employee to prove it is not.
*Read the story which prompted that nugget. Interesting:
Ms. Long again stated that they were not public and would not be public until today. After I insisted that they were public, she finally said she just didn’t care and handed me the bids to review.
*Not Knox County–YAY!
At one time it was the 6th most searched for term on Google today…now it’s fallen like a stone down to 54th. All because of this cartoon.Â
 I told you guys XKCD rocks! Hat tip to Jacob the Newbie, who still hasn’t started a blog or else I’d have linked to him.
I’m not affiliated with and don’t have any knowledge of the newspaper business. You could make the case that this doesn’t make my opinion worth much, but if you consider the performance over the last few years of people who do know the business, maybe doing something different warrants some consideration.
Jack Lail has been posting recently about possible new ways to calculate compensation for journalists, and in a post today hit on something:
At my newspaper, we have been distributing daily top 10 lists of articles based on page views to the entire newsroom for a year or more. The lists are not used for compensation and do seem to provide instant market insights about what readers found interesting.
The way I see it, newspapers, for now, are positioned to provide three things that are at a high premium and that most blogs/bloggers can’t deliver. I think most would be wise to capitalize on these by shifting the state of mind from being a newspaper to becoming a news organization/outlet/center:
Excellent writing
Not just good writing. For now, newspapers have a large market share of excellent writers. That’s a part of the market I’d want to keep. Let the good writers go if you have to, but keep the excellent writers around. That means paying them well. If you don’t, you will eventually lose the excellent writers to their own endeavors, and you’ll be stuck with nothing but good writers. Good writing is nice, but it doesn’t make you much more special that the thousands of independent blogs that feature above average writers.
Investigative journalism
The time, resources, and energy it takes to dig (and dig, and dig) for a story set newspapers and real journalists apart from everyone else. Give us more stories that take time to develop. Give us stories that, in short, no one else can. In most cases, that would mean increased concentration on local news, and pulling back on stories happening elsewhere. And sports? Please. The account of a football game that was attended by 100,000 people, viewed by millions, and opined about (real time) on countless message boards and blogs has little value the day after the event. Does it sell copies? I’m sure of it. Does it sell as many copies as it did 10 years ago? I’d guess probably not, per capita. And if you’re now going to count web clicks instead of copies, newspaper web sites definitely don’t have the market share that the print version of the paper had 10 years ago. It doesn’t seem like a good place for resources long term. It may be time to start scaling back or redirecting resources.
Being community hubs
Newspapers have a huge asset that takes years to create–name recognition in their local markets. It makes sense to capitalize on that by being first to that market with resources that connect the community. Instead of viewing local bloggers as competitors and hacks, find a way to leverage them as a way to drive traffic. Become the place that the community uses to find local blogs. The bad news? It’s may already be too late. In my local market, the News Sentinel caught on remarkably early, and even goes so far as to feature bloggers on the front page of their web site on the weekends and has built a community aggregator. In other markets, it has taken a while, and links to other sites and blogs still aren’t featured or easy to find. As a result, other organizations have stepped up and are trying to fill the void left by what should have been the logical market owner.
It is great to see some newspapers are catching on and are willing to try something new or go in a different direction. At the same time, it’s frustrating to see the industry as a whole belly aching about its problems. Face the facts–not only are the rules of the game changing rapidly, but the game itself is evolving.
I mean, this isn’t the record industry. You guys may actually have to change.
A little over two weeks ago, Ron Paul made a morning appearance on Fox and Friends and made a slightly controversial statement that was talked about (a little bit) in the blogosphere well into the next evening. Pretty sticky story, huh?
Now, as far as newspapers go, our local New Sentinel is pretty forward thinking and aware when it comes to blogs and online media. I’d wager to say they are ahead of the curve. So why did they wait until January 3 to publish an editorial on Dr. Paul’s comments? Did it take that long to pen an opinion? I mean, it may be better than I could do, but it isn’t that well written. Countless people wrote about this within a couple of hours.
I realize Mr. Korda doesn’t have editorials posted very often, which actually makes this column even more disappointing. If you’re going to have me sit on the edge of my seat for two weeks waiting on an editorial, at least give me something timely.
I’m a little embarrassed for all of the Ron Paul supporters who bothered writing responses defending him over a story this ancient. The fact that the entire column is based on a comment taken out of context is nothing when you consider that George Korda must have spent most of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays carving it into a slab of stone with hammer and chisel.
If you’re wondering why the newspaper industry is having problems…
Unlike everyone else, I slacked off and waited until 2008 was officially here to do my review. 2007 was my first year of full on blogging. I’d messed around here and there with different blogs before, but 2007 was the year I drank the Kool Aid and went at it for real. I’ll keep this list confined to what occurred on this blog. You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m somewhat guarded about the personal life. Enough about me…here are my thoughts on my 10 most notable posts of 2007:
Ron Paul’s Presidential Run
At times it seemed to me that Ron Paul news was taking over this blog. On one hand I feel like I need to apologize for that, but on the other hand, it’s my blog and that’s what I was interested in. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who was excited by Dr. Paul’s message, and I hopefully played a small part in helping him get elected. More on that later this year, as I have some thoughts on what is realistic, and what is for the best.
Knox County Scandals
There were more in 2007 than I can even count. That makes you wonder how much stuff is going on that we haven’t even heard about yet. Last week I saw a t-shirt that read, “Miami: A sunny place for shady people.” Knox County seems to have the market cornered on shadiness this year.
Steroids in Sports (and Non-Sports)
My bottom line–WHO CARES? Next topic.
People Getting Nekkid and Almost Nekkid
I got a ton of traffic this year writing articles about Vanessa Hudgens, along with a couple of articles about the Inskip teacher who had arguably inappropriate photos on MySpace. I don’t really care who gets naked and takes photos of it, I just wonder how people can do that and not retain ALL digital copies of the material. Idiots.
Barbie Cummings and the Highway Patrol
This was just a funny local story that ended up causing me to exceed my bandwidth when it went national and I ended up ranking #3 on Google for “Barbie Cummings Blog”. Since then, Ms. Cummings life has apparently changed dramatically, much for the better. How do I know that? I’m resourceful, and it didn’t take much digging anyway. Nevertheless, it seems like she wants to leave that part of her life behind her, so I think it’s time this story finally died and went away, never to be mentioned here again.
Tennessee Smoking Ban
Thank you to our state’s elected leaders for writing and enforcing personal choice laws on private property. If you really want to look out for me and mine, stop wasting our tax dollars on this crap. Next thing you know we’re going to have to provide health care for people who would’ve otherwise died if you’d not spent millions trying to keep them from smoking.
Buddies Blogging
Some people I know IRL also started blogs this year. It’s funny that you can go months or years without talking or emailing with someone, and this medium puts you in the position to “converse” with them every day. Even when it isn’t dialog, you read what they write and they read what you write. Very cool. Not to mention the countless other blogs I’ve begun to read that I never would have learned about if I’d not started blogging for real this year.
The War On Education
Also known as the public school system. I feel like I don’t spend enough time or energy talking about this because I think it’s the number one problem facing our country. Solutions are anything but clear and simple, but one thing I’m very excited about for this coming year is that I’ve got an idea that may help a little, at least for individuals. I’m finishing up some other projects, and then I’m going at it full force.
Blogging About Blogging
As I said, 2007 was my first year blogging full throttle, and boy did I learn a lot. I posted a ton of stuff about monetizing, driving traffic, building networks, linking to other people, and I’m sure lots of other stuff that annoys people. I can’t help it…my interest is peaked. Another project I want to tackle for this year is keeping that stuff off of this site and directing it to a different blog that is dedicated to that subject.
The One I Wish Was More Popular
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about The Wire. I really wished more people watched this show, especially the season that starts next week which will address the media. I’ve had several great conversations with people who watch The Wire, and I’d love to bring more of them to this venue. In fact, I think I’m going to, despite the fact that most people don’t know about the show. At least I’ll have the bragging rights that a couple of people heard about it from me when they are finally turned on to it.
