Driving home last night, I was listening to On the Media radio show on NPR. They were reading their Letters section with corrections to some of their past stories.

After they’d reported on the most recent corrections, they summarized that section of the show by saying:

We’ll do our part to keep screwing up to give you something to write about.

I’m sure they heard my laughter all the way to their studios.

Honestly, I can’t say when I’ve heard a better description of blogging.

Think about it. read more

The Root, an online magazine that feature perspectives from emerging black thought leaders, has launched its political roundtable blog called “The Browntable.” The Root dubs this new blog as venue for smart reporting and analysis on politics, culture, and media.

Dayo Olopade (Washington reporter), Kai Wright (policy reporter), and David Swerdlick (political satirist) will anchor the daily conversation, with regular contributions from other writers from The Root and well known political and media figures. Olopade will focus primarily on politics, environment, religion and the Obama administration. Wright will focus on health care, the housing crisis and economic issues. Swerdlick will focus on the intersection of politics and pop culture.

Well, for now I’d call them house ads, because as far as I can tell the ad block below the follower data on your Twitter profile just links to Twitter search results. Which makes sense really, since the real time search that Twitter offers might be the best way to monetize the site.

Either way, if Twitter can sell these kind of ads, I’m absolutely OK with it. First of all, I rarely visit the web interface, and second, it’s not all that obtrusive in the first place, is it? It would be cool if I could
get Twitter to match the ad with people who might want to follow me, so that I could use it to build a larger follower count. At least, that would be an interesting use for brands and companies.

There’s more on Techmeme, and don’t miss Calacanis’ offer, somewhat related to this.

Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, called “the online magazine rack”, is really just a collection of RSS feeds in various topics, displayed in Popurls fashion. Now you can get your own, because the one year anniversary brings MyAlltop. Get an account and pick any of the 31,000 sources from the 550 topics (numbers courtesy of Kawasaki) by browsing the Alltop site. Then arrange it anyway you like to get your own Alltop page.

Pretty nice actually, although I prefer the feed reader before this. Still, if you’re an Alltop fan this is a must.

Happy Monday, folks! I hope you enjoyed last week’s interview with Byrne Reese. Byrne is back this week with the creation of an open source operations manual. The goal of the project is to create a set of best practices for installing, running, and maintaining Movable Type. Byrne is looking for collaborators, so if you have experience managing MT, consider getting involved.

Plugins

Stop Design Photo Gallery — More from Byrne Reese. This is the set of original templates from the Photo Gallery plugin. As mentioned previously, it’s been spun off into its own plugin for those that want to keep that design rather than the new Mid-Century templates. read more

It is a problem nearly every blogger has at some point. They design a beautiful post using their blog’s composition panel, working hard to get every detail as perfect as possible, only to open it up in their RSS reader after publishing it and seeing that it is an ugly mess.

The problem is simple. As great as RSS feeds are, they don’t accept many of the advanced design and positioning techniques of a full Web page. RSS feeds don’t accept CSS or JavaScript (save some very limited exceptions for some readers) and instead rely on very basic HTML formatting to work.

This creates a problem though when designers create Web pages and posts for modern browsers only to watch them get butchered by stripped-down RSS readers.

So how can this be fixed? Here are some techniques to overcome a few of the most common problems when formatting for RSS feeds. read more

The financial services industry is just one that’s seeing the current and future benefits of Twitter, with the founder of the UK’s IFA Life networking web site warning that financial advisors who don’t use Twitter will miss out on business leads.

The site has just launched a directory of advisors who are already using Twitter to make it easier for consumers to find independent financial advisors online. read more

I have no idea if this is the first book consisting solely of tweets out there, but it is here, via the magnificent world of Lulu: “My Life in Tweets” by James Bridle.

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

Here’s a photoset.

I find this interesting for two reasons. First of all, it is an experiment with a new way of publishing. Secondly, it is a way to ensure the existence of all those tweets written, should Twitter suddenly disappear. Two years of twittering is a lot of content after all.

Created by the Acceletron Corporation, Readello could best be described as a “mellow gReader app” whose simple layout will cater to users unfamiliar with RSS readers in general (at least on their iPhone/iPod Touch).

Although it may not be as advanced as Byline, Doppler or Feeds, Readello does offer some of the basic functionality for Google Reader (such as starring, natural folder view, etc.).

Costing only a $1 (note: it use to be $4), Readello offers users an inexpensive way to view their Google Reader feeds without breaking the bank. read more

if you’ve been listening in on the last week’s episode of TWiT, John C. Dvorak gave a compelling commentary on exclusivity of news with today’s media.

Dvorak’s column for PC Magazine last Friday was based on the notion that the New York Times is considering a pay to read subscription model for the news. He adds that most of the news we read is syndicated anyway — there really isn’t a lot of relevant news items happening within your thirty mile zone that’s actually published. Almost everything is syndicated!

The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?

Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story. Then came the revelation. “Hey, these newspapers are all doing the exact same thing! Why do we need so many of them?” [Dvorak]

The future of print isn’t with newspapers. It’s probably with books. Oh and yeah, maybe with the small community papers that prints exclusive news relevant to your little town.