Upcoming: Sleeping Angels Beef & Beer

Sorry I haven’t been posting that often folks. Still here, just nutso busy.

This coming Saturday I’m going to be at the Sleeping Angels Fund’s Fifth Annual Beef & Beer.

Sleeping Angels, ran by my brother’s family, is a non-profit that provides memorials, for infants who have passed away, for families that cannot afford them. The Beef and Beer features fun karaoke, prizes provided by a terrific list of sponsors, some tasty sandwiches and of course – beer 🙂 It’s for a good cause. If you’re in the area, I hope to see you there.

Norgs stories of the week

Craig Newmark doesn’t plan to cash in on the current tech media bubble: “We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards.”

Michael Kinsley in Time asks Do Newspapers Have a Future?.

Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian writes why you might not want a Wikipedia piece on yourself. Leads me to comment on his blog, “I feel craven and souless – but I *want* someone to care about what I’ve done so much as to contribute to Wikipedia article on me and Philly Future. But I’m not *notable*. Just an average Joe. And as some would say (Ben Franklin I believe) – I guess I haven’t done anything worthy of being written about yet.”

Newsvine plans to expand into local news coverage according to Mike Davidson in a thread at paid Content having to do with the economics of local news coverage and an interesting article at The Seattle Times on Citizen Journalism.

Does Bob Woodward have enough juice left to influence the debate on Iraq? Or will his book be looked at as just another partisan hit job (ridiculous considering the other books he’s published painting Bush in a positive light)? Do facts matter anymore? Or is all that matters in this post-modern me-media age is our own points of view?

I’m starting to see technologists waking up to the political situation in the country now. About time. Lets ask ourselves, in this age of uber-connectivity and communications tools – why are we growing ever more divided, and ever more frightened?

Jay Rosen is taking questions about Citizen Journalism at Slashdot.

Mark Glaser publishes a guide to Citizen Journalism referring to a timeline published by IndyMedia’s Chris Anderson.

But where’s the mention of Slashdot?

Terry Heaton says that papers should work harder to provide databases of local information:

Remember that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible. That ought to be the core goal of any Media 2.0 business, because that’s where the eyeballs and the money will be. We can either be contributors to the knowledge/information base by supplying content (the expensive end of the value chain), be the aggregator of local the local knowledge/information base, or we can do both. Let’s see, hmm. Which path should we take?

Hitwise opens up to reveal some interesting information from its datacenter. Look at the market share the top 25 have. It strikes me that it is so… small. Think about it.

Journalists confronting each other was a theme this week as The Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch challenged the Washington Post’s David Broder to do better journalism and Salon’s Scott Rosenberg challenge’s Slate’s Jacob Weisberg to do the same.

Google Reader, Google’s RSS personal aggregator, upgrades. Its new functionality and UI are good enough to provide Bloglines with its first real challenger, as far as I’m concerned. I think I’m switching.

Jeff Jarvis gets on ABC with a clever piece about participatory media.

Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.