Adrian Holovaty and the Post’s Database Explosion

The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video of pioneering journalists/programmer Adrian Holovaty playing the MacGyver theme song on guitar. (The video is on the YouTube homepage and has been viewed 750,000+ times). Seeing the video prompted me to head over to his site for the first time in awhile....

Fark Launches Redesign, Farkers Hate It

Along with Slashdot, Fark is sort of the granddaddy of social news sites like Digg, del.icio.us and Newsvine. Launched in 1999, Fark lets users submit story links which are then reviewed by editors. The best submissions make the Fark homepage. Digg is essentially Fark (or Slashdot) with user voting in place of the editors....

News Blog Idea: Dissenting Voices

Since writing the 16 Ways The News Media Can Use Blogs post, I've thought of a seventeenth way.

News organizations, particularly newspapers, can publish dissenting voices of editorials on their websites. Not everyone on an editorial board — like judges (including the most famous at the Supreme Court) —...

MajorityAP.com: Conservatives Strike Back On-line

While perusing through Facebook today I learned about a new conservative website — MajorityAP.com, The Majority Accountability Project — that is slated to go live on April 23rd.  It aims to track the Democrats in the House of Representatives and hold them accountable for their actions.  Hill veterans and site co-founders Mike Brady and Mike Giuliani will cover and present investigative reporting on,...

Covering Politics in CyberSpace

I spent the day at a conference on “Covering Politics in Cyberspace” put on by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. Basically, the idea of the conference was to get a group of around twenty five journalists together to discuss how they will be covering the 2008 election cycle. The concept for first day (today) was to bring in experts on online politics and political bloggers to talk to reporters about what they should be looking for....