Too tired at the moment to add context, but an interesting story from the always-interesting Mark Glaser about the impact of blogs on traditional media.

OJR: Dear Bloggers: Media Discover Promotional Potential of Blogosphere

Jane (not her real name)

Just to be clear on this recent theme of faux blogs, I’m not against the idea in principal. As I said the other day, I actually think the Beta-7 Sega blog was pretty clever. It’s just the lame ones I object to.

Jane Blog is another example of a faux blog done really well. It’s well written, funny, cheeky, naughty, in short full of the right snarky tone of many good personal blogs. Importantly, compared to something really lame like Barbie’s blog which links to nothing, Jane actually reads and links heavily to lots of very hip blogs — Gawker, Defamer, Tony Pierce, Fark, Eurotrash (!), Anil Dash, Suicide Girls (naughty!) and lots more — both in her posts and her blogroll. And if that weren’t enough evidence that this is written by someone who gets blogs, she uses TypePad, not some hokey pseudo blog publishing platform. (E.g., she has permalinks!)
But, just in case you weren’t clear, in her About Me page, she concludes:

(by the way, I‚Äôm not actually real, I‚Äôm a fictitious character on the TV series “Good GIrls Don’t.” But that won‚Äôt stop me from writing to you every day. I mean, every weekday. Cause on weekends I‚Äôm in party mode.)

You go, girlfriend!

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Yes, it’s cool what this political season is doing for blogs, such as that CNN now has a blog for the conference (and, possibly even cooler, a Blog Watch page), but why is it that major media companies think they need to re-invent blog software instead of just using MT or one of the other excellent tools out there, tools that include key blog features such as permalinks?

NOTE TO CNN AND ALL OTHER MAJOR MEDIA COMPANIES TRYING TO JUMP ON THE BLOG BANDWAGON: permalinks are a good thing. In fact, they border on being an essential ingredient of a blog (unlike trackbacks, for example). Without permalinks, no one can point to anything you write, which means much less traffic for you!

(As another example of this trend, USA Today’s otherwise excellent Today in the Sky travel blog by Ben Mutzabaugh has no permalinks, and it pisses me off when I’m blogging for BizNetTravel and want to link to him.)

If you know other examples of this trend, please do tell. Shame is the best medicine in such cases, I find.

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MSNBC’s political commentary show Hardball with Chris Matthews has launched a blog to accompany the political conventions. A group blog, bloggers will include

• Ron Reagan (son of the late president)
• Willie Brown (former SF mayor)
• Dee Dee Myers (former press secretary under Clinton)
• Chris Matthews (Hardball host)
• Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s one-time campaign manager and web/blog guru)
• Chris Jansing (MSNBC anchor and correspondent)
  Joe Scarborough (MSNBC host)
• Andrea Mitchell (NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent)

It will be interesting to see whether the blog lasts beyond the conventions. My guess is it will.

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Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor & Publisher and blog enthusiast, reports on Poynter’s site that the Spokane Spokesman-Review has started successfully selling ads on some of the paper’s blogs, recently recruited from among the paper’s reader community.

CORRECTION:
Ken Sands, managing editor of the new media division of Spokesman-Review, notes this (in the comments field, but I highlight here):

Slight correction: the ads are being sold on blogs that are produced by staff writers. The site also links to community bloggers, but doesn’t sell any advertising related to non-staffers.

Poynter: Newspaper Blogs and Making Money

In yet another example of the impact that blogs have had on the media landscape, CNN has announced a blogosphere analyst to provide perspective on the Democratic National Convention coverage. And a better analyst they couldn’t have chosen.

While much has already been made of the number of bloggers given press access to cover the convention in Boston next week, CNN has just announced (see link in headline of this entry) that it will have David Sifry, creator of the blogosphere monitoring tool Technorati, providing blow-by-blow commentary about convention coverage from across the hundreds of blogs writing about it. As part of the coverage, Sifry announced a new feature to the site, politics.technorati.com.

Meanwhile, political sarcasm blogger Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette has been tapped by MTV to provide conference coverage for that hip media outlet.

UPDATE:
Not to be outdone, Feedster has launched politics.feedster.com offering blog convention coverage as well.

Sifry.com: Technorati and CNN

If this were any cooler, I’d probably wet myself: you can now subscribe to NYT stories via RSS.

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The Seattle Times is looking for a 20-something political blogger.

Are you interested in this year’s elections? Know your community? Like to talk politics with your friends, colleagues and neighbors? Want an opportunity to blog about your observations?
Apply to join a grass-roots campaign coverage effort by The Seattle Times. We want fresh thoughts and perspectives about the elections from places and people not often found in newspapers — your neighbors, your favorite cafes and other local hangouts.
We’re looking for contributors under age 30 who are following the ’04 campaigns ‚Äî national, regional and local. Each participant will be given a blog on seattletimes.com and periodically appear in The Seattle Times.

And so on.

Seattle Times: Election 2004 Backyard Blog Project

Interesting. The NY Times is conspicuous in its reluctance to start a blog of its own, unlike many other traditional media companies that already have blogs, but the paper can’t seem to get enough of writing about blogs. As if to underline that point, it has recently started advertsing via Google AdWords/AdSense on the topic of blogs. I recently saw the ad pictured here on Duct Tape Marketing’s blog. The ad links to this NYT story about Nike’s new blog.

Huh? Here’s an idea: if you want bloggers to think your publication is cool and relevant, start a frickin’ blog instead of advertising about the stories you write about blogs!

Yeah, I know blogs and RSS are not the same thing, but their related trends, so I end up lumping them together. Anyway, Reuters.com has just introduced RSS feeds. Cool.

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Daniel Weintraub

It will be a long list of blogs if I try to note every traditional media blog here, so I plan to pick off just some of the more prominent ones. Such a list should include the Sacramento Bee’s political columnist Daniel Weintraub, who has been blogging for a year, as of this post. He offers this comment on “Why Blog?” and E-media Tidbits also quotes him with some advice for media bloggers.

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/weintraub/story/6414174p-7366437c.html

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Seattle P.I. has set one of its reporters, Todd Bishop, to cover the region’s biggest corporation around the clock with this popular blog, founded in September 2003.

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Blog from outerspace. No kidding. Expedition 7 NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu actually blog from the International Space Station. He has since completed his mission.

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Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis is the tireless writer of this blog, with multiple posts daily on a range of topics, but with a concentration on media, blog-related news and politics. Technically, this is a personal blog, not a business blog, but Jarvis distinguishes himself as being such an influential blogger while simultaneously holding down the job as president & creative director of Advance.net, the Internet arm of Advance Publications and Condé Nast Magazines. While his blog clearly reflects his personal opinions and not those of his employer (as the standard disclaimer goes), he has acknowledged that Advance has given his blogging its nod of approval. “I type really fast,” he once told me.

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Brian Lehrer

I live in NYC and listen slavishly to our local NPR affiliate station, WNYC. From 10am to noon, Brian Lehrer hosts one of the most erudite shows on talk radio. I’m delighted to see he’s just started a blog. Of course, I proposed he should do this a year and a half ago. Now he’s just got to pave the way for his colleague Leonard Lopate, the other most eruidte talk show host on the radio.

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Wired was a bit slow to join the blogging trend, but it shows signs of rolling out several, with a landing page for all wired blogs (link above). The first two blogs list are:

• Beyond the Beyond from legendary cyberpunk science fiction writer Bruce Sterling
• Cult of Mac by Wired writer and Macintosh junkie Leander Kahney

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First the “Majority Report,” hosted by Janeane Garofalo, had its own blog, now the “O’Franken Factor,” hosted by comedian Al Franken, is the lasted radio show of the new liberal talk radio network Air America to have a blog.

There’s something about talk radio and blogs that is a marriage made in heaven, for the zeolot who has just too much ranting to be contained in a three-hour talk show format. Interesting that Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limblaugh on the right don’t have blogs of their own. (Could RushLimblog.com be a better name for such a site?)

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As all non-fiction book authors should be doing, Howard Rheingold is blogging to support his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. In fact, Rheingold isn’t even doing the blogging: he’s enlisted the help of a team of devotees of the book to do the blogging for him. Smart mob, indeed.

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Weblog supporting nationally syndicated public radio program. Why all public radio shows don’t have blogs is a mystery to me.

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Janeane Garofalo

Actress and left-wing poltical activist Janeane Garofalo is one of the hosts of the new liberal talk radio station Air America and she and host Sam Seder have also set up this companion weblog. That’s a no-brainer. Talk radio and weblogs are a match made in cyber-heaven.

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