DISQUS

I definitely rely on omni focus for damn near everything

Great list. I think it's an especially good idea to help other people when you can (#16) - there's a lot of good will in the world, and our whole society is built on reciprocal favors (eventually called "friendships").

I know that there are tons of people who are facing layoffs now and in the coming months. I wish everyone the best.

I like to put it this way: when was the last time people celebrated in the streets after electing a US President?

It's like what Cheney expected when we invaded Iraq. Ironic, no?

Whenever there's a business model, you'll find that the product will inevitably follow the money.

News has been a package business for ages -- the popular, sometimes fluffy stories subsidize the more in-depth reporting that happens because editors think (usually correctly) that it's worth reporting.

One of the big problems with the internet re: news is that it's effectively de-packaged journalism, and provides the statistics to prove it. Suddenly there's clear business logic in cutting out the "important" stuff.

I think, though, that there are a lot of people that care about news outside of sports, and important news coverage will continue to happen. It may not happen on the same scale, but then again, people probably weren't reading it when it was packaged either.

there's a really snazzy wordpress plug in that ranks your most popular posts and can make a list in the sidebar.

I like to keep lists like that features prominently or at least above the fold because otherwise blog architecture ends up making a site so flat it hides a lot of your good content.

I used to throw Twitter updates into my sidebar but it basically doubled my page load time, hope it works better for you.

Also I'm not a big fan of tag clouds, and ruMor has it they're bad for SEO.

Site looks good overall though. I'm always glad when people pay attention to web design, it's so important and so underrated.

Personally I’ve never understood the point of allowing anonymous commenting.

The way I see it, the need for anonymous comments boils down to two basic things:

1. so that people can protect their identity, and
2. so that commenting is effortless, and people will do it

My argument is that #1 can be accomplished in non-public forums (i.e. identify yourself to the journalist, and let them protect your identity), and #2 can be accomplished, technologically, without allowing for an identity free-for-all.

But you're right that more important than the technology is the attitude and participation of journalists.

Don't forget to forward me anything you hear that isn't already on the list! I'm pretty good at answering them, but I sure don't hear the complaints as often as many others do.

Thanks for the link love ;)

One of the areas that I think gets only a small amount of play from the tech sector is using the developments that are happening online to HELP journalism and newspapers instead of HURTING them.

It seems like everyone just takes it for granted that all new online technology is bad for newspapers. That's hardly the case.

I'd love to talk to almost anyone at the New York Times about how they are expanding and experimenting with technology. I'm sure there are tons of tech startups who are working on projects that will also help newspapers, and I'd like to see which companies those are and what they're working on.

I feel like it's time to move past the "OMG newspapers are screwed!" stage and move on to the "look at these challenges and how can we solve them?" stage...

It's funny timing because I actually just wrote a big post about Printcasting, which is a tool for taking RSS feeds and pushing them into PDF "newsletters" where they can earn money:

http://eatsleeppublish.com/questions-and-answer...

You're right about a lot of things here. Most significantly that 1) an e-mail subscriber is more sticky than a blog reader or an rss subscriber and 2) that e-mail has a better established revenue stream than blogging,

I also think that newsletters will continue to have a legitimate business model, HOWEVER, I don't think that we're going to see a mass trend towards e-mail from blogging or other RSS mediums.

The way RSS/web lets you search, chunk, microchunk, reblog, tweet, skim, scan, copy, comment, and interact offers a much richer experience for the USER. Eventually there will be a good business model for blogging - hell, maybe that model is selling t-shirts and events - but content will always gravitate to where the experience is best for the user.

I know this debate. I've been struggling with what my job title is the entire time I've been working with the Parnassus Group.

I'm currently a "New Media Manager," which is meant to both require a little more explanation and allow for a little more wiggle room (what I do changes from day to day and client to client - never too much, but enough).

In the end, of course, our titles will all be whatever becomes the recognized standard. I don't think "social media strategist" is that bad in the grand scheme of things ;)

Instructive case studies, Chris. As many commenters have already said, you're right about full disclosure and its role in maintaining trust both between company and blogger and between blogger and community members.

One question that crops up a lot when I'm talking to clients is "how do you contact bloggers?" - you skate over this in your post, but both Garmin and Nikon provided good examples.

If you're a company, step one is to listen. There's no such thing as a successful cold call in blogging. Garmin did a great job of this.

That does seem a little high for the number of followers.

It'll be interesting to see if that number grows or shrinks once he starts doing sponsored tweets, and what form those tweets will take.

Ian does call it an "experiment" in the auction page, and I think it's worth trying out. Sponsorship may be a viable way to monetize microblogging via twitter, just like it's a viable model for monetizing full-scale blogs.

I think some of the changes that Facebook is making to the newsfeed along with the profile design are intended to help get people talking & interacting within the mini-feed.

Facebook does, however, have the habit of outsourcing a good portion of its feature set to app developers. I'm not sure yet if that will come back to bite them or not.

Also true for the Google home page RSS widget.

Apparently so. Fred, can I add this to my self-hosted WordPress blog?

I think comments have needed some overhauling for a while. I never understood why "regular blogs" didn't have the threaded comments I learned to love at livejournal. There's so much that can be done with just a static list.

Answered my own question. Only Ping-o-matic by default, but for anyone else who hasn't yet figured it out, you can add new ping-lines to the box under Options->Writing in the backend.

Do you have any idea what the default list of pinged sites is for Wordpress?

I find it interesting that my post (Calacanis in the title twice) showed up nowhere.