Thoughts after nos. 5 & 6

In considering the RSS feeds I am most interested in (news and politics) . . .

The radical change in newsreporting since my childhood is most interesting to me. Just looking at Technorati shows me a practical real issue: information overabundance about things we can do little about. In the sixties, at least, in Miami we had a choice of reading one or two local newspapers (one morning, one evening) and one of three major newscasts (since they all were at the same time).

Today significant portions of newscasts are devoted to ads and Hollywood, and much news from hard-to-get-to place is internet-based anyway. So exactly why are the network newcasters making in the neighborhood of $75,000 per broadcast? If it is to control what people take in for news or information, then they are not worth it with the internet out there.

Meanwhile, however, local news sources have dwindled to pitiful levels. Local non-gory news on TV is almost non-existent, and what passes for local papers are devoting less to local news than ever before. Part of the reason, I suppose, is that now, Miami's newspaper and Fort Lauderdale's newspaper are now both considered "local" (when they now substitute for 2 or 3 times as many papers which used to circulate). Also, it is important to consider that in Miami, at least, a large amount of news sources are unavailable to folks who do not speak or read Spanish.

However, the beauty of blogs and wikis and internet is that all can be used locally as well as globally, and with the ease of public blog-like commentary on news articles on the various newspaper sites, readers can actually glean more information than the actual articles.

Whilke one may ask about "reliability" with such sources of information, the question of course may be asked just as appropriately to any source of news, "official" or otherwise.

Finally getting to work

Well it has been busy the past few weeks, so I now have had some time to catch up. Set up some RSS feeds; found out you can label your feeds in multiple ways, which then allow different permissions for different names.



I suppose my most salient initial comment is that social networking in cyberspace does not strike me initially as being radically different than real-world social networking in that they both seem to based on the idea that "birds of a feather flock together" . . . at least that's my initial take!

Hi!

Welcome to Nick's BCL blog . . . portal to 2.0 stuff.