The latest on the blogosphere and BNN … from David Mastio
… or anyone else in the public who already paid for it. John Conyers wants the public — and libraries — to have to pay again. Why vote Republican when Democrats will give away stupid corporate welfare too?
Last week, the daily newspaper in Memphis revealed a searchable database of the state’s concealed carry permit holders. Predictably, my fellow gun nuts went, well, nutzer, organized the troops and began the barrage of nasty emails and phone calls to the newspaper.
It is easy to understand why 2nd Amendment supporters are deeply suspicious of the paper’s motives. For too long newspapers have had a tendency to be 1st Amendment absolutists while pretending the 2nd Amendment is right-wing fantasy, completely oblivious to the reality that the first two freedoms depend on one another. Since, I don’t know the Commercial Appeal’s record, I can’t pass judgment on them.
But now that the anti-Commercial Appeal crusade has spread into the blogosphere (and you know it is everywhere when both Insty and Romenesko have the story), maybe it is worth stepping back from the gun issue to consider whether bloggers benefit from the newspaper’s increasing practice of posting searchable databases of government information online.
The argument is solid and the reasoning impeccable. Please send us money. (Maybe then I won’t have to turn BNN into a bank so we qualify for TARP money.)
BNN is: You can follow any state at www.twitter.com/STATENAMEbnn (For those of you inside the beltway, replace STATENAME with the name of the state you want to follow. Really, Mitch, I weep for your future.)
or
You can follow BNN news and my random thoughts here. (We’ll follow you back since we’re looking to keep track of as many BNN bloggers as possible.)
An aside, for those of you who don’t yet understand the value of twitter: I figured it out last week after playing with the thing for nearly a year. I tweeted about the fact that my golden retriever waffles really, really likes grapes. Only to be told by at least a dozen people both in private emails and in public tweets that I was killing my dog. For those of you who were worried, waffles is fine.
One of the services we use to track who is reading us and how they land on BlogNetNews gives us a neat overview of what organization is supplying the Internet access used to get to us. One way they let us look at it, is which large companies and government entities send us a disproportionate number of readers compared to their number of employees with access to the Internet.
Here are the results for January, by kind of organization at least 10 times more likely to read us:
Federal government: Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, Space and Naval Warfare Command,
State governments/courts and legislatures (in order from most avid readers to least): Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, Colorado, New York, Indiana, Alabama, South Dakota, Idaho, Arizona, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Mass. — the rest of the state governments are currently reading us more in line with their Internet population.
County governments: Anne Arundel (MD), Maricopa (AZ), Orange (CA), Pima (AZ), Los Angeles (CA)
Media companies: Asbury Park Press, Gannett, Tucson Newspapers, Community Newspapers, Clear Channel, Meredith Corp., Tribune Corp., Detroit Media Partnership, Morriss Communications, Advance Publications, Freedom Communications, Lee Enterprises, Providence Journal
PR firms: Edelman, Fleischman Hillard,
If bloggers agree on anything, it should be on the freedom of information — openness and accountability on the part of our government. The Obama administration has been getting a great ride with lots of promises to be more open than the Bush administration.
But maybe not so much … Obama’s people have stopped the tradition of posting transcripts of the daily press briefing. This is the most basic kind of public information, but failure to put it online means that bloggers can’t link to it and the administration’s history doesn’t build up over time.
Maybe this is an oversight — and the Obama admin deserves a little time to get their web site fully up to speed, but this should not be negotiable from a bloggers perspective. We need access to those transcripts.
I should have written about this a couple days back. I watched the first day’s press briefing on C-Span and wanted to write a post on a couple of the disappointing whoppers told the first day, but I wanted to check the transcript to make sure I had not heard wrong or somehow missed some important context. I went to the new White House site and couldn’t find transcripts. I assumed I was making some kind of mistake in my search, instead of reaching the right conclusion that the Obama folks hadn’t done their job.
Update:
More problems with transparency from our new Secretary of State says National Journal.
BlogNetNews’ Oregon editor has his say. Thoughts on BNN’s RSS feeds, which have always been there, but not given the right level of prominence. This from our Texas editor. Older but interesting reaction to BNN’s newsinnovation section. Here’s what The Next Right has had to say. The Daily Kenoshan reviews BlogNetNews. Democratic Underground calls BlogNetNews a “excellent aggregator.” John Miller from National Review has nice things to say about BlogNetNews, too. The view from BNN’s Hampton Roads editor. New England News Forum uses BlogNetNews feeds on its site. BlogNetNews Colorado makes “links I like.” Robert Bluey on BNN and RightyBlogs. Some publicity for the launch of BlogNetNews/Education is here. An oldy but goody review of BNN. Poynter’s E-media Tidbits on BlogNetNews. More great stuff about BNN here.
Another cool review forBlogNetNews. And another.
Love this one: The problem with BlogNetNews is all the damn bloggers.
Update: All fixed. Thanks Tyler.
Some parts of BNN will be down this afternoon and evening as we restore bits of the database that mysteriously disappeared in the transition yesterday. Sorry for the interuption.
(90)
(87)
(6)
(5)
(20)
(9)
(6)
(15)
(32)
(4)
(5)
(17)
(1)
