There’s nothing wrong with scratching the surface if that’s what itches.

Alltop.com is a surface skimmer, and it looks quite useful. So, if you’re interested in one of the topics they cover, such as, say, cloud computing, you could click to see a compact listing of what bloggers and others are saying about it. Or GLBT. Or Obama. Or what the top stories in the LA Times are.

The weakness, as well as the strength, is that Alltop decides on the topics and sources (although the sources include searches of Google News, Technorati, and other aggregators). So, a search for “stimulus” turns up nothing because it is not one of the topics, although it is certainly mentioned in some of the content Alltop rounds up.

The very amusing “about” page reports that the decision about topics and sources of topics is made by humans and is “highly subjective and judgmental.” It helps that the site wants to push us out of our comfort zone by including sources we might otherwise scorn. But it’s important to keep in mind that — despite inevitable appearances — Alltop is essentially a magazine that reflects the interests and values of its editors. Nothing wrong with that at all. On the contrary. It’s just important that we not mistake Alltop for anything else. (The following is more concerning to me: “We take care of our friends. If sites or blogs help us, we help them,” as a criterion for inclusion. Is that really the best policy for the sake of us readers?)

Anyway, Alltop looks like a useful way to track the topics that it and you care about. [Tags: alltop aggregators news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Habib Battah has an op-ed in Al Jazeera about the disparity between the American media coverage of the Israeli invasion and the Arab world’s. And there’s always Global Voices if you want to hear what bloggers in the region are saying.

[Tags: israel gaza palestine media news ]

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The Berkman Center’s Media Re:Public project assessing the state of the media (old school and citizen/participatory) is now out. (The papers are here.)

The report points to six issues, which I’m paraphrasing rather crudely:

1. Traditional media are scaling back their reporting because they’re going broke.

2. Their webby equivalents are not replacing all their functions.

3. Online news sources are not uniformly reliable, and not everyone knows that.

4. Not everyone is online anyway.

5. Some of the functions not being replaced online are really important, but we don’t yet have good business models for them.

6. We don’t have good data about what’s really going on.

This status report tries to bring some empiricism to the cheerleading (guilt as charged). It also pairs up nicely with a 2005 report about a Berkman conference that brought bloggers and mainstream journalists together for 1.5 days of frank discussions.

[Tags: berkman media citizen_journalism blogging news newspapers participatory_journalism persephone_miel ]

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NYTimes.com has come a looong way.

At first, all the links on the site pointed to more of its own content, except for ads, as if the NYT was the only place ever worth reading. Then the NYT took a big step backwards with the Times Select program, locking its most valuable content behind a pay wall. But the Times saw that, although they were making money, they were losing influence. So, they came up with Times Topics as a place where we could point our links, enabling the NYT to climb up the Google rankings. And they unlocked their oldest archives, which is a great social boon.

And now they’ve started Times Extra: Articles on the NYTimes.com site now are suffixed with links out to other newspapers and blogs that talk about the same topic. So, at the end of an article on, say, Obama’s economic pledge, there may be a link to a Washington Post story, a post at Crooks and Liars, and maybe even a comment section.

Consider how unlikely such a thing would have seemed ten or even give years ago. Well done, NYT

[Tags: nyt new_york_times ny_times times_extra everything_is_miscellaneous media journalism news newspapers ]

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I’ve come to look forward to Jason Linkins ultra-snarky live-blogging of the Sunday morning news talk shows. Very funny. Here’s today’s.

[Tags: news jason_linkins snark politics ]

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Pew shows that the Net is second only to tv as our source for election news. It’s 72%, 33%, 29% for tv, Net, and newspapers.

This can be slightly misleading, though. For me — and I am confident that I am 100% typical of people who are like me — the only election news I get directly through TV comes through The Daily Show and Colbert. Otherwise, the ecology of news works like this: Someone posts a bit of news on some site. That snippet may well come from a mainstream source, or it may not. But like a greasy crumb dropped on the sidewalk, it’s instantly swarmed by ants. The ants — that’s you and me, sister — point at it, link to it, explain it, deny it, make fun of it, connect it with something else, and send it or what we’ve made of it around the world. The morsel is gone, digested, appropriate. The ants are the media.

The mainstream are only noticed if they’re doing as good a job at being a news ant as the rest of us.

[Tags: politics news media ]

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When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

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AllVoices is a new site that lets anyone upload an “event,” which in other circumstances might be called a “news story.” The site enables the clustering of bloggage and msm coverage of the event in what looks like a useful way.

I like a lot about it. I just hope it doesn’t become the preserve of yet another homogeneous group, which is exactly what the site doesn’t want to happen.

(It could use tags. [LATER that day: A helpful person from AllVoices tells me that there are tags for user-contributed items but not for ones that the system susses out.] And, at the moment the registration process is broken.)

Tags: allvoices global_voices media news social_tools everything_is_miscellaneous

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Tonight, a 8:50pm, this is CNN’s list of “latest news”:

Sigh.

[Tags: news cnn journalism media ]

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