Bloggasm

A headline from The Politico: In reintroduction, Palin to do more interviews and “tell her story”

How the headline should read: “Palin to receive free unfettered advertising from right wing radio ideologues.”

Digg is so in love with a core set of sites that it would rather link to a Huffington Post piece that links to a Washington Post piece rather than just linking directly to the Post. Web evangelists like Jeff Jarvis talk about the power of the link, but something I’ve noticed again and again is that websites try to water down their links in order to get maximum traffic to posts that are basically regurgitations of other people’s work.

UPDATE; Yet another front page story linking to a Huffington Post article that merely blockquotes an AP excerpt.

While Republicans and Democrats engage in their own heated version of the Blame Game for who’s actually responsible for the current financial crisis, the business press has been standing in the corner, hands in pockets, avoiding eye contact. So the question is: what role did they play in not warning us of the coming disaster?

The Columbia Journalism Review:

Your beat just blew up.

From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?

In my opinion, the business press covers the financial industry in the same way the political press covers politics: As a horse race. They couldn’t see the coming storm because they were too fixated on how far the stock market had risen or fallen on that particular day. It was certainly surreal to listen to them months ago declaring that the world was ending one day and then act like everything was fine when the market experienced a brief bounce the next day.

Woohoo!

So after three weeks of me silently and sometimes loudly venting about not having internet in my apartment, I’m finally connected. The relief is palpable to the extent that I feel like a vice has been unclenched around my chest. This may all seem hyperbolic, but think about it; I’m a person who lives and breathes and even makes a living off online media. Not having internet is like a TV critic not having a TV. This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that I just moved to a new city and I have been largely unable to use the vast resources of the web to aid in the transition. No access to google maps or bus schedules or city guides. So yes, it feels good to be here, sitting in my room, writing a blog post.

Does this mean that posting here will pick up pace? I don’t really know. The truth is, my lack of internet in my apartment is only part of the reason that my blogging hasn’t been particularly prolific. Another reason is the fact that I’m writing an article a week for PBS, which takes up a lot of time. But to be honest, I really haven’t seen many things that have been all that interesting to write about lately. This is probably because I’ve fallen behind on my RSS feeds.

Either way, I’m posting on Twitter pretty often, so if you’re looking to get a Simon Owens fix, follow me over there. I’m excited about the weeks ahead, I’m really enjoying my job, and I’m sure I’ll have something insightful to say here about online media at some point. We’ll see.

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