E-Media Tidbits

video.on.nytimes.com In this NYT video (click image to watch) scholars Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago, left) and Eugene Volokh (UCLA, right) debate the relative merits of blogs and newspapers.

Are Blogs Bad for Us? (Bloggingheads, New York Times Video). Thoughtful video discussion touching on the homophily ("birds of a feather flock together") phenomenon, as well as whether blogs aid or hinder the serendipitous discovery of news and information. I'd love to see more news organizations taking this approach to online video discussion. One possible tool is Seesmic.

PBS/Reddit.com Mashup: YourWeek. New PBS TV news show powered by social bookmarking site reddit.com "Beta version of a planned interactive public television and internet show from WETA Washington, D.C., and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hosted by Michelle Cottle and Rich Lowry, YOUR WEEK covers politics, arts, international, science, tech, social, sports, and pop culture."

EveryBlock Does Special Report on Corruption Case (Adrian Holovaty). "We've developed special reports: one-time collections of recent geographic news that doesn't fit anywhere else on Everyblock. The first EveryBlock special report is Operation Crooked Code, about a federal probe into municipal government corruption in Chicago."

Spot Us is Hiring: Developers, Designers and ALWAYS Looking for Reporters (David Cohn). The new Knight News Challenge project Spot.us, which is trying to launch a crowdfunding platform for investigative reporting, is seeking to hire Bay Area reporters. Watch this video:

Living with the Kindle: 30 Days Later (Doyle Albee). Consider Amazon's Kindle portable e-reader as a news distribution channel. "I am reading both the Denver Post and Time Magazine on my Kindle now, and it's nice to be able to catch up on reading like that when I have a few minutes just about anyplace."

BrightKite/Utterz Twitter cleaner (Yahoo Pipes). Journalist David Herrold used Yahoo Pipes to create a tool for cleaning certain kinds of annoying automated update posts from your Twitter feed. It creates a new feed -- which you can view in your feed reader. Doesn't help for using Twitter through interface applications like Twirl, though.

Astronomy, version 2.0 (On Research...). Virtual event attendance is becoming a bigger deal. How are you handling live coverage and participation through social media? "The American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting was this week. Astronomer Pamela Sue Gay said, 'We've had as many or more people viewing our sessions online' as in person. Thirty people attended her roundtable discussion but twice as many watched online."