Tuesday, August 02, 2005



It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.
- Albert Einstein

Major media companies are investing in blogs. Is this a new boom or just a bubble? Cashing in on Weblogs

To get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites Blogs 101: NY Times
Forbes also goes through a selection process: We don't matter Blog Power

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Working the Digital River to your advantage
One of my goals as a press observer is to explain how journalists do what they do

If you tell people about how you gather information and put together a story, you'll gain their confidence a lot faster than by keeping the process a mystery or by writing in stentorian tones to give the impression that you've just engraved gospel onto a stone tablet. In this vein, a friend recently suggested that I try—"try" is the key word—to suggest ways for people to navigate through today's information overload and become reasonably well-informed without making it a full-time job the way news addicts like myself do. So here goes...


• Sydney H. Schanberg Rx for Info Overload [Adult dosage: Take one or two or three three papers and a website daily - add grains of salt and stir the Digital Decade That Changed the World We Are All the Web]
• · Up to 70 journalists, artists and photographers employed by Fairfax Business Media went on strike indefinitely yesterday over job restructuring flowing from the closure of two magazines Fairfax plan spurs strike ; Jay Rosen has a thought provoking post at his Press Think site entitled: PressThink, Live from the BlogHer Conference ; Interactive Storytelling, Rethinking Journalism Check out the five finalists in the 2005 Batten Awards ; The Herald believes city officials are telling other news orgs what the tabloid is up to Boston Herald won't get City Hall comment on exclusives
• · · The writer, Dilpazier Aslam - Rathergate treatment: When The Guardian, one of England's most respected newspapers, printed an opinion piece in the aftermath of the London terrorist bombings this month, nothing seemed out of the ordinary Scott Burgess: N.O. expat scoops London's Guardian; Press Tour getting bogged down in blogs Newspapers have become "strangely enamored" of blogs
• · · · How the bias-spotting industry has turned news into mush ; Miami Herald executives defend decision to fire DeFede
• · · · · It's also led to the worst split in memory between two media giants -- Time Inc. and the New York Times -- in an area where news orgs usually present a united front grounded in the First Amendment, reports the Wall Street Journal Plame case presents biggest test of secret sources in years ; The media give the public what the public wants; Novak: I don't think I've ever talked to Rove on the record
• · · · · · Dean Baquet, the next Los Angeles Times editor, tells Tom Scocca: "The truth is, the great secret is, over the five years that John [Carroll] and I have run the paper, we have cut a lot, and I think the paper is better -- not because of the cutting …. Baquet wants to choke budget guys who say cutting is good ; Is McClellan serving the president well in press briefings?

Robot History: Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel apek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor," from rab, "slave." The Slavic root behind robota is orb-, from the Indo-European root *orbh-, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, "orphan," Latin orbus, "orphaned," and German Erbe, "inheritance," in addition to the Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, "work" (its Middle High German form arabeit is even more like the Czech word). Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant "slave labor," and later generalized to just "labor."
Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet - a female android named Repliee Q1Expo Jozefina Robotova: Will You marry MD?