Monday, July 25, 2005

New Rocky Top Brigade Site Up & Running OK, one last post: While I'm taking a blog break, you'll find plenty more to read at the new Rocky Top Brigade site, which includes an multi-dimensional aggregator of recent posts by the more than 100 Tennessee bloggers listed in the page's left column as "Brigadiers." Multi-dimensional? I mean that the aggregator lets you browse the opening paragraphs of the latest 20 posts on RTB members' blogs, or just skim the headlines of the most recent 50, a nice touch for speed-readers and speed-linkers. And there's a three-column version containing the headlines of the last 10 posts by all of the members, even those of us who don't post often enough to make the shorter "most recent" lists very often. (That's more than 1,000 headlines, so the page may load a little slower than the others.) Just Johnny set up the impressive new RTB site in record time, working in suggestions from a bunch of beta testers over the weekend, while other RTB stalwarts have created a discussion board and more, as SayUncle, the new RTB coordinator, explains in the first post on the new site. Along with the rockytopbrigade.org aggregator, other cool features of the site include an OPML list of all the Brigadiers, which makes it possible to subscribe to all of their RSS feeds at once or repost the list as a "blogroll," a "comment" feature that allows a reader to subscribe to any item's comments by e-mail, info about RSS syndication, and (naturally) a page that lets new Tennesee bloggers join the gang. OK. That's it. I'll still be in town, but other than any last-minute editing to today's posts, this blog is officially on vacation. See you in August! 11:17:00 AM     Al Gore TV launch story, then vacation I was going to post a "gone fishin'" note here today, but when a friend alerted me to the Chris Lydon story in the Times, I decided to tell that story first... and then I read a little farther in the Times RSS feed and discovered another "new media" story that I'll make my last post before the hiatus. This one has  a Tennessean connection: For Al Gore, a Reincarnation on the Other Side of the Camera is about the former vice president's Current.TV project, which starts broadcasting next month. Also see Heeeeere's Al, Thanks to Carson I haven't even read those two stories yet... I'll print them out (or buy the Times today) and try to stick to my resolution to take a vacation break from blogging for a week or two to catch up on other things. 10:30:49 AM     Radio-Blogging Connection -- Times Takes Notice In "A Radio Program Turns to a Blog to Cull Ideas," The New York Times has discovered Chris Lydon's RadioOpenSource, a public radio talk show launched in May, using its weblog, online discussion forum and podcasts -- along with live call-ins by listeners -- to create what Lydon calls "a very different sort of radio conversation." I've been listening from the beginning, but just realized I've only posted a line or two about it here, so I'm adding a few details here... Although its name is inspired by the open source software movement, Lydon's new effort is not a technology-focused show -- topics in the past couple of months have ranged from "Belly Busters" to Bosnia to bespoke suits, not just blogging. Here's how Lydon and his associates explained things in the blog that introduced the show: "Open Source will not be a show about blogs. It will use blogs to be a show about the world." That can mean a call-in interview with the Saville Row tailor who blogs about his work, or passionate poker players telling about belly busters. (All episodes are archived online.) The show has a lot in common with The Connection, a syndicated NPR call-in show that Lydon did for years at WBUR in Boston, until he had a falling out with management over ownership of the show in 2001. (I was a regular listener, and remember a May 2000 "Web Logging" show on which Lydon's guests included bloggers before most people had heard the word, and launched a program blog at TheConnection.org.) After Lydon left the show, he landed at Harvard as a Berkman Fellow and used his Harvard blog to resume doing what he does best -- interview people about things they are passionate about. In this case, blogging itself was the focus of most of the interviews, starting with Dave Winer, the blogging and RSS syndication evangelist who set up Berkman's blog server and invited bloggers to a weekly meeting there. (Unlike Harvard, he'd let almost anybody in.) After Lydon had posted several months of interviews, Winer added an "enclosure" feature to Lydon's blog RSS feed, which allowed subscribers to automate the process of downloading the interviews -- and time the 10 MB downloads for low-traffic hours. (In fact, one of the listeners, also a Lydon interviewee, liked that feed so much that he hacked together a program to not only automatically download those MP3 files, but also copy them onto his iPod -- the birth of "podcasting.") A sad coincidence: Lydon's old NPR show, The Connection, was cancelled abruptly this month in a shake-up at WBUR, the Boston University radio station. It had continued for four years with former CBC foreign correspondent Dick Gordon as host. Here's some earlier background on Lydon, WBUR and RadioOpenSource from the Boston Phoenix. For now, at least, the archives of both Lydon's and Gordon's Connection episodes is still online. 9:51:47 AM

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