Bloggasm

It’s been awhile since I’ve mentioned here that you can follow me on Twitter. I’m lucky if I can post five times a week here but on Twitter I’m tweeting stuff several times of day, and a lot of my tweets are links to media-related content that I often blog about here.

For my PBS article this week, I attended a DC screening of about a dozen mini-documentaries shot by finalists for Project Report, a contest for non-professional journalists that was sponsored by YouTube and the Pulitzer Center. With all the questions as to what sites like Craigslist and Google can do to aid the struggling journalism industry, I thought it worth analyzing what part YouTube can play in the discussion.

Long time readers of this blog know that I don’t hold most of today’s blog awards in high regard. Well, for my latest PBS article I decided to call up the administrators of the awards and several of the nominees and let them argue out their side: Can Blog Awards Identify Quality Online Content?

I met the news that my blog, Bloggasm, had been nominated for a 2008 Weblog Award with a mixture of amusement and apathy.

I had watched last year as my RSS feeds became clogged with the incestuous link trolling common with such contests. The Weblog Awards, like others of its kind, are based on a popular vote, guaranteeing that most of the hundreds of blogs nominated will campaign almost daily to squeeze every available vote out of their readerships. Inevitably, entire factions would take up arms and do battle across several award categories. In truly heroic fashion, bloggers would sacrifice their own votes and direct their readers to vote for another blog in their category to head off others in the opposite faction.

So other than simply noting that I had been nominated, I promised my readers that I wouldn’t campaign for my award. Judging from a blog search, I’m in the minority.

I’m not sure exactly how this happened. I mean, it was just a day or two ago that I found myself apologizing for my lack of quality content on this blog. In fact now I feel even more guilty for not updating more often:

The media needs someone keep an eye on it, and Simon Owens, a frequent contributor to NPR, does a great job at Bloggasm. Sometimes it’s just a breezy post about the nature of linking in online articles (it’s an art), other times he features an in-depth interview with an online media star, and occasionally a takedown of a “new media guru.” For anyone interested in our new-fangled media, it’s all interesting.

For the record, I’m a regular contributor to PBS, not NPR.

My latest PBS article deals with the huge number of friend requests that we must assess every day and the methodology that power users employ when deciding whether to friend someone back on Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc… : Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg

I have a new article published at PBS, this one analyzing Six Apart’s journalist bailout program: Is Six Apart’s ‘TypePad Journalist Bailout Program’ a Gimmick?

My latest article at PBS is about the three remaining pulp magazines — in their heyday giants with hundreds of thousands of subscribers — and how they’re hemorrhaging readers and struggling to survive: Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World