I’ve been struck by an idea, and I hate keeping ideas to myself. Especially with fun communication toys like blogs and Twitter so easily available. But I’m very enthusiastic about this idea, and I think it might be best presented through the Knight News Challenge, which offers moola to ideas that will push journalism forward. I believe this one will — and I believe it might need the funding the challenge’s grants would provide. I know my idea will be better once it’s tossed around in more brains than my own. But since we’re talking about a competition, I truly don’t know if it’s better to throw it into the Knight News Challenge garage or just pass it through some people I trust. That’s where I’m hoping you come in. I’d like to set up a small circle of trusted friends, colleagues, bloggers and Twitter users to whom I could, in confidence, present my idea. I’m looking for journalists specifically, and would be extra grateful for college students or recent graduates in particular. All I ask is that you’re willing to get an e-mail or two from me. Send feedback if you have it, or you can ignore it if you don’t. Mostly, I just want to have a few people to tell me whether or not I’m nuts. Doesn’t that sound fun? E-mail me or leave me your address if you’d be willing to help. Thanks.

Remember what life was like before Social Networking? Yeah, me neither. Actually I’m writing this post to let you all know that effective immediately, I will be resigning from Spotobe to concentrate on my social networking full time. Well, no, actually I won’t, but still, sometimes it feels like keeping up with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn, Flickr and whatever is going to be coming out tomorrow takes an unhealthy amount of time. That’s beside the point though. As you may know, Spotobe is already on Twitter and has been posting photos on Flickr for a while. Now we’ve added Facebook and MySpace pages, both of which could be a resource to the Spotobe community. Please check us out on both and become our fan or friend, respectively. I think both MySpace and Facebook could help Spotobeings see who else is using the site, which in and of itself is kind of cool. Beyond that though, both pages have some other benefits. On the Facebook page, I would really love to see Spotobe fans begin taking pictures when they go out and posting them in the “fan pictures” section. One of our loyal readers was kind enough to post some pictures from the Billy Joel concert a few weeks back, and that’s awesome. We want Spotobe to be as open as possible, and anything you are willing to share with our community only adds to the experience as a whole.  If you are feeling super generous, you could also click on the “share this” option, and stick a link in your profile. As for the MySpace page, it’s pretty freakin’ nifty looking, isn’t it? On there, you can send us messages and see a lot of the bands whose gigs we list every week. Both pages are still works in progress, and if there is any application that you think would be useful on either, let us know, either in the comments section here or on one of the pages. Now get out there and have yourself a weekend.

As much as I want to write more about journalism and less about journalism bloggers, Journalism.me deserves some attention. It’s a simple blog aggregator that takes most of my favorite journalism bloggers and condenses them into a single RSS feed. And yes, it is a full feed, not a partial feed. The true brilliance of the aggregator didn’t reveal itself until after I plopped it in my Google Reader. At first, I was annoyed to see that the author of each post wouldn’t show up. Then I thought: Wow, I love that the author of each post doesn’t show up. I love that a journalism student will have the exact same amount of preset clout as someone who’s been writing about online journalism since he first dialed up on Prodigy. I love that good ideas will rise to the top on their own, and no one will have to achieve any kind of status to have those ideas considered. That was my main contention with the original incarnation of Dave Lee’s bashing together of young journalism heads, when he wrote that a proposed ring of twenty-something bloggers would be invitation only. No me gusta. Barriers to entry will only turn up the volume on the echo chamber. Journalism.me chops out the promotion and personal branding and leaves only the idea. What a wonderful way to be objectively exposed to as many ideas as possible. UPDATE 10:30 a.m.: I should have more clearly mentioned that Dave Lee has since decided to nix the invite-only idea. See the comments on this entry for details.

Pop quiz: Where was my first outlet for these goofy ramblings? A: HBGOnline.com, of course. And thanks to the Wayback Machine on Archive.org, one may peruse virtually any single thing that has been posted on the internet…ever. You see, that’s the thing about the internet. Once you click “post” or “send”, it’s there forever. And being in something of [...]

Oh how I love anonymity. The ones who spew the most venomous hate are the same people who haven’t the guts to speak their mind and say the things they type in a person to person environment. You see, everything I type within this blog, I reiterate in person. And considering how small of a town this is [...]

If you haven’t yet read the comment thread on a recent entry by Tampa Tribune intern Jessica DaSilva, go do it now. There’s no better example of the emotionally charged internal battle that the newspaper industry is facing. Seeing as I already expressed admiration for DaSilva’s blogging way before she suddenly became a celebrity, I’d certainly jump to DaSilva’s defense. She not only had the right to say what she did, she ought to be commended for being passionate enough to say it. We need passionate reformers more than anything. But the comment thread is disheartening in more ways than I can count. Most obviously, those who didn’t like the entry went way overboard with the villainization, and I can only hope Jessica has learned that idiotic statements don’t mean a thing when you’re standing on solid ground. Yet I find myself equally disturbed by the reaction on what you could call “my side,” the reformers seeking the best future for journalism. It was a blanket, unthinking defense of one of our own, no one seeming to acknowledge the blatantly obvious fact that the post was very much insensitive to those who lost their jobs. I haven’t heard a direct argument yet as to why those people’s feelings aren’t worthy of attention, or why it couldn’t have been made clearer that she understood the gravity of those losses. That part was missing from an otherwise fantastic post, and I can understand why its absence led to the reaction it got. As it turns out, “my side” is every bit as guilty of bunkering itself off as the other side. We use labels like “curmudgeons” and “reactionaries” while not doing much to respectfully engage their arguments. Any time those kind of labels come into play, it’s a pretty clear signal to me that not much discussion is going to happen with the people who need to participate the most. Jessica’s post was outstanding yet imperfect, which is no great offense since most everything is imperfect. I hope she’s holding her head as high as she deserves, because the point she was trying to make about the need for a plan was a good one. The far greater problem is the distance between the people who read her post, and how few people are working to peacefully bridge the gap. And that includes “my side” with all of its counterproductive name-calling. John Zhu had a great comment on an entry by Hilary Lehman:

The comments on Jessica’s blog show a definite split along age lines, with veterans mostly taking issue with her fawning over an editor who just laid off people and younger journalists mostly dismissing those criticisms as coming from dinosaurs despite not knowing any of the people who offered those criticisms. What’s more disturbing is that despite having almost 100 comments as of now, there is almost no substantive discussion of the actual criticisms. Instead of the two sides reaching across the battle line to discuss their viewpoints, they are pretty much just deepening the line in the sand, bunkering down in their respective corners, and trading verbal barbs. From that perspective, it seems that the “dinosaurs” and the “naive kids” are more alike than either would admit.

Unfortunately, that’s preceded by more ageism as someone else makes wild generalizations about twenty-somethings. Let’s not make age another battleground that we really don’t need.

Pat Thornton’s interview with me, and his resulting recap, is up at Beatblogging.org. His conclusion: Sometimes a Ning network just doesn’t work. I believe the experience of the Hershey Home is a valuable laboratory for other journalists, especially those outside of the big cities. This is why I love the beatblogging.org project — it’s real reporters trying out new methods, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. Both will benefit journalists who care to listen. And here’s streaming audio of the interview, or you can download the mp3.