From the header of Blog to America:

Content for Blog to America is completely generated by the readers. Blog to America is a site where individuals from around the world post their opinions on the United States in the form of letters and comments. This can be done by clicking on the “submit a letter” tab and filling out the form or by simply sending us an email. Our site aims to encourage global communication and create an international dialogue between America and the world.

As an American, this is some painful reading so far. The posts range from tough love to just tough. It’ll be especially interesting to see if the comments develop an ethos of dialogue; there’s some hope there so far.

It’s one of those experiments that depends on getting unpredictable small things right. Otherwise, the site might turn into AmericaSucks.com.

(BTW, BlogToAmerica.com claims the copyright for anything posted there. Also btw, the domain AmericaSucks.com is registered to Register.com.) [Tags: america blogs gv global_voices]

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The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that’s entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.

It’s a nicely done piece, although I’m not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —”Hey, listen to me!” — and I’m not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people’s events.

I don’t have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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From the BostonNow blog:

BostonNOW is a new free daily newspaper launching this year that will incorporate both traditional and citizen journalism. Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists. We will promote your work prominently both in the paper and on the website, not in a “local blogs” or “reader photos” ghetto.

Every day, BostonNOW will direct readers to the Web, where they will find real depth and discussion. BostonNOW will become the place to learn what folks around here really think about politics, entertainment, sports, and their fellow humans. This dialogue will create a newspaper of the people, by the people, for the people.

BostonNOW will truly be your newspaper.

Sounds good on paper, so to speak. In fact, it sounds great. They’re holding a get-to-know-the-bloggers party this Saturday, March 10:

RSVP here. (Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link.) [Tags: boston media msn journalism blogosphere blogs ]

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James McGrath Morris has an article at Law.com that tries to de-hype blogging’s contribution to news by saying what bloggers do is nothing new and pointing out that blogs are error-prone.

We’ve all been over the error prone argument forever. As for the argument that blogging is nothing new, well, nothing is really new. The importance of blogging for journalism does not rest on a claim that it’s without any precedent. In fact, James says that the blogs’ claim to a lack of objectivity is a return to the “Golden Age of Journalism,” which would mean that while it’s not new, it’s different. James is arguing against a strawperson, and thus sleighting the real effects of blogging on journalism.

Finally, he goes on to say that “blogging may be more democratic, but it’s also likely to be less read. There is a point when there are simply too many blogs. With 30 million blogs today, we may well have reached that point.”

That last point sounds a bit like the Yogi Berra remark that no one goes to that nightclub any more because it’s too crowded. It ignores the research that shows there’s a short head and a long tail, which means that a handful of blogs are being massively read and — more important — there’s a huge network of nodes each of which accretes a local readership.

And then he sort of misrepresents me. The nerve! He says that I announced in an “All Things Considered” commentary that I am no longer reading many of my friends’ blogs. Not exactly. I didn’t stop reading my friends’ blogs; I gave up on keeping up with them every day. There’s a difference: I still read my friends’ blogs, just not as steadily as I once did. And, fwiw, my point was that it should be considered rude to assume that anyone has been keeping up with your blog. So, James was off a shade. But, then, we all know that articles about blogs and journalism are error-prone. (Damn humans!) [Tags: blogging journalism media citizen_journalism msm everythin everything_is_miscellaneous]

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It’s a little thing, but the headline in Friday’s USA Today about the head of Marriott hotels, Bill Marriott, Jr., starting a blog was “Send a note to Marriott.” Not read but talk. Yup. [Tags: blogs marriott hotels travel everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Micah eloquently makes the case for cutting ourselves some slack. At issue is a blog trying to make a stink over some previous posts by Amanda Marcotte in her Pandagon blog now that she’s been hired by the John Edwards campaign. Says Micah, political operatives and journalists

seem to now want to play “gotcha” over whether something someone said in the past when they were a free citizen of America exercising their free speech and under the employ of no campaign is now the equivalent of an endorsement of that specific speech by a presidential candidate.

If we adopt this standard, then the internet is just going to be a tool for an even tighter straight-jacketing of politics, where no one who ever imagines they might go into politics some time in their life will be willing to ever take a position on anything controversial for fear of damaging their political viability. Yuck! Who wants to live in that world?

Right on.

(Disclosure: I’ve done a little volunteer work for the Edwards campaign.) [Tags: politics forgiveness john_edwards media micah_sifry ]

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Aldon Hynes is going to blog the Libby trial and posts about what value bloggers can bring to such events. He’s not a lawyer, but he also doesn’t want “end up at the other end of the spectrum talking about which outfit which witness wore…” He says that he expects to be writing about the “underlying narrative” and “the impalpable essence of the courtroom atmosphere…”

Could well be. But I suspect what Aldon is going to write about is and should be essentially unpredictable. He’s going to find interesting things to blog, but they are going to be precisely that which he and we can’t anticipate. That unpredictability is a big part of the value of having bloggers at large. We don’t know what bloggers are going to say because we don’t know what will happen and we don’t know what it will mean to them. Hmm, a lot like life! That’s exactly why we want intelligent, committed people like Aldon blogging at events of shared significance.

If that’s citizen journalism, it doesn’t have that much in common with journalism except that both have public events as their topic—just as restaurant reviews, menus, and health inspector reports all may be about the same establishment. What Aldon will blog is not reportage—in fact, it assumes good reporting is being done—but it’s also not mere opinion or editorial.It is perspective. It is how the world looks to this person, and it is how that person looks in the world.

Blogging is the great make-sense-of, and we get to do together. [Tags: blogging journalism citizen_journalism libby aldon_hynes everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Global Voices begins a post this way:

We didn’t want to have to write this article. As Global Voices‘ Latin America editor/Spanish translator/Digest dude David Sasaki wrote on one of our mailing lists yesterday, “I have low tolerance for the amount of internet bandwidth dedicated to the latest and greatest Apple product. . . .” Searching his Latin America RSS feeds, however, David could find “little else other than excited talk about the Apple iPhone,” and several of our other authors and editors reported on similar oohing and aahing coming from their respective blogospheres.

And why wouldn’t GV want to cover this? Only because there are some other issues that also matter, including “Freedom of the press and Saddam Hussein in the Moroccan blogosphere,” freedom of press under attack in the Philippines, freedom to blog under attack in Iran, the St. Petersburg flood, , the holidays and politics in Bangladesh, how Somalia is roiling Kenya, the life of a ten year old girl in Cambodia who peddles bracelets to tourists …

All that and more in 24 hours on the site. Global Voices continues to astound. [Tags: globalVoices gv iphone morocco philippines russia iran bangladesh somalia kenya cambodia media ]

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Thomas Knüwer of Handelsblatt posts about a German blog, autoregional.de, that posted a link to a story in Der Spiegel about a German bus producer suing a Chinese company for stealing a bus design. Autoregional, which is produced by the SEO company Iven & Hillmann, cited the Spiegel article and added a single sentence: “This example shows how fast and ruthless Chinese are when it comes to copying.” So, now Iven & Hillmann are being sued for libel for hurting the Chinese company’s business. As Thomas points out, the offending sentence in the Autoregional post is less hurtful to the Chinese company’s business than the headline in Die Welt: “Chinese steal bus design…” He guesses that Autoregional is getting sued while Die Welt is not because Die Welt is big and Autoregional is little. [Tags: blogosphere libel germany autoregional copyright gv]

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Lisa Williams’ PlaceBlogger launched today. It aggregates blogs that are about the places where the bloggers live. Unlike Steve Johnson’s Outside.in, it is hand-assembled and it focuses on bloggers writing about where they live; Outside.in maintains a list of placebloggers but it also aggregates posts about places no matter the location of the people who wrote them. That gives PlaceBlogger a certain intimacy and the potential to seed local communities of bloggers, while Outside.in is better site if you’re trying to find everything said about a location. It also means that, especially at the outset, Outside.in has more stuff, while PlaceBlogger feels a bit sparsely populated…so pitch in and add to PlaceBlogger the placeblogs you rely on.

I love the idea both these sites pursue, knitting the virtual with the real, words with dirt.

Quintura is copyrighted 2006 but Hanan Cohen just pointed it out to me this morning, so I’m counting it as new in my 2007. Type in a search term and it creates a cloud of related topics (using the Yahoo search engine), which you can use to refine your search by adding them or excluding them. Unfortunately, the site was timing out for me this morning, but you can see a screen video demo here. [Tags: placeblogs blogs placeblogger outside.in quintara everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy lisa_williams steve_johnson]

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