December 2007 Archives

Continuing a theme from a Sunday post, here's some more views on how journalists might be compensated in a digital world where every click is a metric:

Patrick Beeson: "I'm not sure dangling CPM as a sole means for earning a paycheck would be appropriate at this point however. Though it would be interesting to use it as a metric for bonuses or raises." (See comments from Mindy McAdams, Ryan Berg ...)

Lucas Grindley: "But I have long supported a bonus structure based on the number of page views generated by a reporter's or columnist's stories.  ... A page view bonus structure favors neither quantity or quality more. Sometimes cranking out posts creates the most page views, and sometimes writing one really good post can do the same." (See comments: Mark Evans, Tish Grier, Jeremy Wright ...)

Yoni Greenbaum sees some value in at least enlightening writers about what is read:  "I think it’s important for desk editors and reporters to understand the habits of their online readers. Desk editors should know what stories play best online; this is not to say that you don't report some stories, but editors should understand of what plays best and where."

Katie Allison Granju: "We online scribes live or die by our ad impressions."

Goodbye to the Cincinnati Post.

Update: Looks like the link died with the end of the JOA last night. There's always Google.

My favorite list of  Top 10 stories for 2007. East Tennessee is certainly a contender for the title of "Home of the Weird Story."

When people need answers, most turn to the Internet, but don't turn out the lights at the public library. Eighteen to 29-year-olds, known of Gen Y'ers, are the heaviest users of libraries for problem solving information, says a new Pew Internet and American Life study released Sunday.

I hadn't really thought of the library as a youth haunt, but Gen Y respondents were startlingly far more likely to go to a library to solve a problem than the next group up, Gen Xers, those who are 30 to 41 years old.

Course, they could be going for free access to computers.- about 70 percent said they used a computer at the library.

We're not talking the homeless or just people on the slow end of the digital divide. The study says::

While libraries have worked to become the place to go for those who cannot afford a computer or an internet connection, people with high access are equally likely to turn to libraries for government information as those with low access. Instead of the internet making libraries less relevant, internet use seems to create an information hunger that libraries help satisfy.

The study surveyed people about 10 problems they might have had in the past two years and how they gathered information about those problems.

The problems were:

1. dealing with a serious illness or health concern;
2. making a decision about school enrollment, financingschool, or upgrading work skills;
3. dealing with a tax matter;
4. changing a job or starting a business;
5. getting information about Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamps;
6. getting information about Social Security or military benefits;
7. getting information about voter registration or a government policy;
8. seeking helping on a local government matter such as a traffic problem or schools;
9. becoming involved in a legal matter; and
10. becoming a citizen or helping another person with an immigration matter.

The study was funded with a grant from a federal agency that supports libraries.

Somewhere, Ben Franklin is smiling.

College bowl coverage by college journalists. Bryan Murley says the best is in Kansas.

Career columnist Penelope Trunk blogs her firing from Yahoo!.

There's a tremendous outpouring in the comments as well as some catty ones there and on Valleywag..

She says she was fired because her column commanded low advertising rates. So reporters and writers out there: How's your CPM doing?

Print media writers look askance at how ratings affect TV news, but in the digital economy, they face the prospect of eventually being tied to their advertising generating power, the almighty CPM,  or advertising cost per thousand impressions.

I've done some rough calculating on my newspaper's Web site and I don't see any writers generating their salary in ad revenues from online. I think others are making similar calculations. On the other side, the same forces are seeing sports cherry-picked from newspapers for six figure salaries by ESPN.

Penelope Trunk; she'll do fine. For hundreds of other journalists, the value placed on their work will be a bleak reality.

(One of my favorite blog posts by her is about the origin of her name, a "brand me" classic. Her Wikipedia entry, however, is over the top caustic, describing her as an "American idiot," at least at the time of this writing.)

(via Sparkwood and 21)

Paul Steiger's been in journalism a wee bit longer than I have and his reflections on how newspapers have changed in 41 years is a fascinating read. Steiger is stepping down as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.
 
His history of the last four decades of the newspaper industry might be summed up by this paragraph:
 

In some ways, what's happening to the newspaper industry is a return to its past. Less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.

 ... Or at least the locally focused and hotly competitive part.
 
He also says newspapers misplayed their online strategies:
 

A bigger problem was that newspapers often sought to copy fairly closely on the Web what they did in print, rather than offer new products taking full advantage of digitization. The most creative new products came mainly from enterprises with little connection to newspapers. And soon, if you named almost any bit of data you used to rely on papers for -- sports scores, weather, stocks, movie times -- there were Web sites offering more information faster, and free.

 Pretty apt. Applying the precepts of one business to another is seldom a winning gambit, but that's a fallacy we've yet to recognize in day-to-day practice.

(via Romenesko)

A couple of quotes from a Washington Post story:

The [recording] industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,'"

So ripping a CD you bought to put it on your iPod is illegal, the music industry's attorneys maintain.

That's taking a logical law to its illogical end.

Preposterous? Ask a few formerly naive University of Tennessee students about the recording industry's ball peen hammer tactics.

More from Duncan Riley at TechCrunch.

On Thursday I hung out at the family business in North Carolina for a short while.  It's a custom injection molder (makes plastic stuff). As such, it makes parts and assembles products for a number of different customers. One of the more unusual products  (at least for me) they have been making are the housings for the mirrors featured in the YouTube video below that are sold by this company.

A checklist and a contest for the technologically impaired journalist. No cheating with a 13-year-old.

Once the glow of they're finally paying attention to what I say fades, some are seeing crowdsourcing as a one-sided relationship that is all about giving with no getting.

Mary Ann Chick Whiteside says Tara Hunt has hit on the some of the same problems she has with crowdsourcing.
   
Hunt writes in "Please Stop Crowdsourcing Me:"
      

I came and I thought, hey, this is kind of neat-o and it empowered me at first. I thought, “Awesome! They want my opinion! They listen!” and I offered it and the feedback was, “Great idea!” and I watched as you implemented it, then benefitted from it and I felt good. I was great at first, but then after a while, I started to feel a little dirty…a little used…a little like cheap labor, replacing people you probably laid off or decided to save money on not hiring because you were getting so much great value out of my time. Maybe it was because it seemed that you believed you could ‘tap’ my well of ideas or ‘pick my brain’ endlessly? Maybe it was because my generosity goes so far and you overstepped your bounds? Maybe it was because you had a chance to reward my efforts, but dropped me like a wet rag as soon as I asked?

Read her whole post and the comments, too.
 
Hunt's post wasn't particularly aimed at the media from what I could tell, but certainly Whiteside's spin on it is. Whiteside asks:

Will crowdsourcing or sites using only content generated by users help to eliminate more paying jobs for those with journalism or media degrees?

Maybe, but the economic pressures for reducing the size of  traditional newsrooms seems to have little to do with the trend toward user generated content or crowd-sourced journalism. Editors may be grasping at these as partial solutions for what is already happening, but they are not the root cause of sparser newsrooms.

Crowdsourcing or open-sourcing journalism has been one of those hot button topics of late 2006 and 2007. The term crowdsourcing seems to have become popular after a June 2006 article in Wired magazine. In journalism, we have ballyhooed efforts by Gannett and Assignment Zero.
 
At its most cynical, crowd-sourced journalism is a Wampus cat cross of utopian volunteer collective effort for good and a bean-counter's vision of work at zero cost.

But as Tara Hunt's post fleshes out, crowdsourcing is about the complicated relationships with the audience or user, and that -- like most interpersonal relationships -- is tricky. As she says, it's about reciprocating. And in a journalism context -- maybe any context -- finding the proper reciprocity will be the difference between positive aid and feeling used.

(More on Wampus cats for the curious. Illustration from The Atlantic magazine).

A message from the Queen (from 1957 -- 50 years ago ). Royalty goes YouTube. Enjoy, Merry Christmas.

William Hartnett, a reporter at the Palm Beach Post, features the Knoxville News Sentinel in his Paper View Monday series of aerial views of newspaper plants.

Hartnett says the aerial shot (or bird's eye view as Microsoft calls it) of the News Sentinel building was just added in the last few days to Microsoft's Virtual Earth/Live Maps service. Looks like the Microsoft team did a big dump of Knoxville images. The News Sentinel has been in this building since 2002, but finding its address (2332 News Sentinel Drive) is still a bit spotty with online map services so this is pretty good. I think I see my car!

Zoomable version of the shot is here.

Thanks, Will, for the Christmas Eve present! I enjoy your Paper View Monday blogging.

An update on Dustin Ogdin and the MTV Street Team '08 that I blogged about on Sunday. Ogdin has been selected the Tennessee citizen journalist for the MTV Street Team '08. More details are here. I noticed he was a native of Knoxville and I emailed him about that and the project.

He replied:

Thank you for taking an interest in the MTV Choose or Lose project.  I was, indeed, born in Knoxville but grew up in a suburb of Nashville from age 7.  ...

I checked out your blog and see you work at the Sentinel.  The Sentinel has a special place in my heart.  My grandfather, Seaton Warters, who just passed away this fall was a printer for the Sentinel for over 30 years.  He started in the late 40's or early 50's working with lead type-setting and was there long enough to see the process move into the digital age.  I was lucky enough to film some interviews with him this summer and he talked a good deal about his years at the paper.

You asked what I hope to accomplish with the MTV Street team.  My goal is to cover the issues that matter to young Tennesseans, especially young people of voting age.  I am particularly interested in covering those issues that are currently not receiving much attention within the '08 Election Coverage.  As a result, the first thing on my agenda is to hit the streets and hit message boards and ask young people what's on their mind and what matters to them.  I hope to be a conduit for their interests, because that's the purpose of this project - generating youth participation in the electoral and political process.

My larger hope is that this project as whole, including the work being done in all 50 states, can play some small part in encouraging young people to vote and become involved in electoral politics and political issues in general.  We've already seen the affect that YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other other citizen-based media have had on electioneering and election coverage, and this media is very much in its infancy.  Certainly in my lifetime, never has the media been more democratized than it is today thanks to digital technology.  I appreciate that MTV and the Knight Foundation have recognized that potential, and I'm excited to find out what we can do together during the next eleven months.  It's an experiment for everyone involved.

Best of luck to you, Dustin Ogdin, and we'll be following your efforts.

(Photo from spoke digital films)

A Knoxville native is the Tennessee citizen journalist on MTV's Street Team '08, which was announced last week.

The Street Team is made up of 51 citizen reporters who will follow the 2008 election with weekly multimedia reports optimized for mobile devices. See a story with the full list.

The reports will be distributed on MTV's mobile site, its social site think.mtv.com and the Associated Press' Online Video Network, which includes knoxnews.com.

The Tennessee reporter is Nashville-based Dustin Ogdin, a documentary filmmaker, whose latest project is "Shielded Brutality."  He also did a short this year on the "living wage" controversy at Vanderbilt University.

He says on his think.mtv.com page:

I joined Think because I'm truly excited about the possibilities for online grassroots activism and journalism.  Digital technology has leveled the playing field between big, homogenized corporate-controlled media and engaged, concerned individuals with a point of view.  Never has there been a more exciting time for people looking to affect change and become involved in media, activism, or politics.

MTV's citizen journalism initiative is funded with a a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge is spending $5 million a year over five years to fund innovative community news experiments.

I believe we will see the most innovative campaign coverage ever in this presidential cycle. We've already seen video questions from non-journalists in debates in the CNN/YouTube debates and various truth checkers, map mashups, Twittering candidates and other cool election tools. 2008 will definitely be the year of the Internet Election, but it will also herald the arrival of cell phone coverage.

This project's focus on citizen journalists delivering video dispatches for cell phones is doubly intriguing.

The Newscoma points to a new Tennessee Sunshine site.

More Sunshine news in Tennessee:

One of my Christmas music favs from Robert Earl Keen, who has described it as the Rocky Horror Picture Show of Christmas songs. The song has a fairly extensive Wikipedia entry for the curious.

Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party
We were drinking champagne punch and homemade eggnog
Little sister brought her new boyfriend
He was a Mexican
We didn't know what to think of him until he sang
Felis Navidad, Felis Navidad

Brother Ken brought his kids with him
The three from his first wife Lynn
And the two identical twins from his second wife Mary Nell
Of course he brought his new wife Kay
Who talks all about AA
Chain smoking while the stereo plays Noel, Noel
The First Noel

Carve the Turkey
Turn the ball game on
Mix margaritas when the eggnog's gone
Send somebody to the Quickpak Store
We need some ice and an extension chord
A can of bean dip and some Diet Rites
A box of tampons, Marlboro Lights
Haleluja everybody say Cheese
Merry Christmas from the family

Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen
I can't remember how I'm kin to them
But when they tried to plug their motor home in
They blew our Christmas lights
Cousin David knew just what went wrong
So we all waited out on our front lawn
He threw a breaker and the lights came on
And we sang Silent Night, Oh Silent Night, Oh Holy Night

Carve the turkey turn the ball game on
Make Bloody Mary's
Cause We All Want One!
Send somebody to the Stop 'N Go
We need some celery and a can of fake snow
A bag of lemons and some Diet Sprites
A box of tampons, some Salem Lights
Haleluja, everybody say cheese
Merry Christmas from the Family

Several of the Tennessee Twitterers I follow, djuggler, rexhammock and newscoma among them, are participating in the frozen peas awareness and fundraising effort.

Frozen peas endangered or in need of aid? Hardly.

It's an effort inspired by Twitterer Susan Reynolds, who has been blogging about her breast cancer at Boobs on Ice. She explains the peas in this post.

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch notes the social significance of the outpouring of support.

There's a Frozen Pea Friday flickr group with 280 members (at this writing).. There is a frozen pea fund that has raised at least $3,500 in the wrapup report on Frozen Pea Friday.

An interesting use and heartwarming use of Twitter. My best wishes to Susan Reynolds.

If you don't already, follow me on Twitter.

This is getting some buzz, but it deserves a lot more.

Congress has sent to the president a bill this week that substantially reforms the federal government's Freedom of Information Act process by calling the game on some common stonewalling tactics and opening it to more free access from non-traditional journalists, bloggers and other thorns in officialdom's side.

The bill is called the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act and thankfully goes by the acronym laced, OPEN Government Act. Passage was a bipartisan effort in Congress.

President Bush has some quibbles with the bill, but the White House has not indicated that a veto is likely. Hopefully, it will become the law of the land.

Supporters hailed the passage:

"This is the most significant victory for transparency in the federal government in more than a decade," Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy Dalglish said. "There is still much work to be done, but this is a major step toward a more open and accountable democracy."

"This is a huge advancement for open government, thanks to the leadership of Senators Leahy, Cornyn and Kyl and Representatives Waxman and Platts," says RTNDA president Barbara Cochran. "But this isn't just a victory for journalists; it's a victory for every single member of the American public. This legislation will eliminate some of the lengthy delays and persistent backlogs in the FOIA process that create obstacles and limit the public's ability to make informed choices in their communities."

"Passage of the FOIA bill will allow not only members of the press but all Americans to hold their government more accountable. In a time when First Amendment rights are under attack almost daily in this country, this bill is a major step to ensuring America has a free press and a government that is transparent and open," noted Clint Brewer, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and Executive Editor of the City Paper in Nashville, Tennessee.

Most of the regulars who hold this issue among their near and dear weighed in. One lobbying group behind the bill, The Sunshine in Government Initiative, included the major news media trade and professional groups: American Society of Newspaper Editors, Associated Press, Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, National Association of Broadcasters, National Newspaper Association, Newspaper Association of America, Radio-Television News Directors Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Society of Professional Journalists.

But it was more than the mainstream media that was pushing for the bill.

David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard notes that the act importantly expands the definition of who is a representative of the news media, allowing bloggers and other non-traditional journalists to be eligible for reduce processing and duplication fees.

Nate Anderson writing in the influential blog ars technica says:

The OPEN Government Act sets up what seems to be quite a reasonable standard for making these decisions: prior publication history. Writers need have no official affiliation; if they have a history of publishing pieces, on the Internet or elsewhere, they should be considered for a fee waiver. Even those without such a publication history may be eligible for a waiver if they offer a compelling explanation of how they will distribute the material in question to a broad audience.

The law reforms the current FOIA law, Ardia writes, by:

• Broadening the scope of information that can be requested by including government contracting information held by private contractors;
• Assigning public tracking numbers to all requests;
• Denying agencies that exceed the 20-day deadline for responses the right to charge requesters for search or copying costs;
  
• Making it easier to collect attorneys' fees for those who must sue to force compliance with their FOIA requests; and
  
• Establishing an office at the National Archives to accept citizen complaints, issue opinions on requests, and foster best practices within the government.  

The battle for open government is one of those continual struggles in which meaningful procedures changes and new definitions in the labyrinth of government rules and regulations are a major victory.

But as Steven Aftergood of the blog Secrecy News notes:

For all of its procedural virtues, the OPEN Government Act does not touch the root of government secrecy, namely the decision to withhold information. The Act does not repeal or modify any of the more than one hundred statutory exemptions from disclosure under the FOIA. And it does not address the proper scope or application of the classification system. That is a task for another day.

Full text of the act.

Scandal fatigue or just maybe people don't care about local government?

Those are two theories from a couple of Knoxville area bloggers who usually only agree that they are both passionate about news and politics.

They are reacting to radio talk show host George Korda's column about an "interesting lack of interest" in grilling County Commission Chair Scott Moore on the various county scandals and shenanigans.

It's not like it has been ignored by the news media.

Last week was better than the week before!  I'm sure I will new found incentives  when this holiday season ends to get  back  into  it with vigor. Happy Holidays!

Month-to-date miles: 21.6

Do me a favor and subscribe to this feed.

An interesting Twitter idea from Kurt Greenbaum and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

And (just for Paul Bradshaw) that's not Twitter shovelware.

Tuesday evening Forbes magazine published its second  "Web Celebs 25."

What's a Web Celeb? Forbes says its a person famous primarily for creating or appearing in Internet-based content, and for being highly recognizable to a Web-based audience.

At No. 21 is Glenn Reynolds of Knoxville, of whom Forbes says:

By day, Glenn Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and an expert in space and technology law. His opinions have appeared in publications ranging from The Columbia Law Review to The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. But to most of the world, he's better known as the voice of Instapundit--a hugely popular political blog with a libertarian spin. In 2006, he published a book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths. With his wife, forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Smith, he produces a weekly podcast, The Glenn and Helen Show.

See the complete list  Reynolds dropped from No. 7 last year to No. 21, but just staying in the list is a feat. Nearly half of last year's list weren't worthy of the list this year. Some of the dropoffs were surprising.

The Newspaper Association of America announced its Digital Edge Award finalists this afternoon and knoxnews is a finalist in three categories!

Most Innovative Visitor Participation

Circ. 75,000 – 250,000
KnoxNews.com: School Matters (Knoxnews.com/Knoxville News Sentinel)
Oklahoma World War II Stories (NewsOK.com/The Oklahoman)
Polkvoice.com (The Lakeland Ledger)
Tampa Bay Area Artists’ Database (TBO.com)

Best Design and Site Architecture

Circ. 75,000 – 250,000
DaytonDailyNews.com (Dayton Daily News)
Knoxnews.com (Knoxville News Sentinel)
Quickdfw.com (The Dallas Morning News Co.)
Varsity845 (Times Herald-Record)


Best Overall News Site

Circ. 75,000 – 250,000
CommercialAppeal.com (The Commercial Appeal)
FresnoBee.com (The Fresno Bee)
KnoxNews.com (Knoxville News Sentinel)
Statesman.com (The Austin American-Statesman)

E.W. Scripps has 11 finalists in all for Edgies.

Yes, the categories are still based on print circulation.

The headline on Yoni Greenbaum's post about innovation at newspaper Web sites got me thinking about NASCAR.

NASCAR and innovation at newspaper Web sites?

Bizarre, admittedly.

Well, OK, his headline is "Don't let your website get lapped." That happens in NASCAR on a regular basis to the also rans and sometimes to the contenders when things don't go well.

But my NASCAR thought is on the how the cars are continually adjusted during the race to keep pace with changing track conditions and to just make the car to run better. A pound of tire pressure, a piece of rubber in the spring, a small change in something called a track bar. They can't bring in a new car; they have to make the one they have competitive to finish high.

And for newspaper Web sites, the track conditions are constantly changing.

Greenbaum makes the argument to do the equivalent of pitstop tinkering with newspaper Web sites, Tweak it, fix it, replace it to stay in the race. There is no next year.

He has proposes you follow these rules:

If it’s broken, fix it.
If it’s missing, replace it.
And if it’s needed, add it.

Not bad.

Another thing NASCAR and newspapers Web sites need to have in common: Speed.

And with that trackside wisdom, I think I'll have another Budweiser, Bubba.

(NASCAR photo of Kevin Harvick's No. 29 pit crew at work)

The New Media is beginning to look a lot like the Old Media, even down to the need for ink-stained wretches.

“It’s no longer enough to take stories from The New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories.”

Maybe, Nick Denton, the high octane founder of the Gawker media empire of 14 blogs, will reinvent the newsroom for newspapers. He's looking for reporters, preferably with newspaper backgrounds.

More from Scott Karp (Can Blogs Do Journalism?) and Jeff Jarvis (Denton goes to the bench)

Katie Allison Granju and WBIR are up to something new.

From the About Us:

KnoxvilleTalks.com offers lively and opinionated conversation for East Tennessee’s lively and opinionated blogging community. Hosted by WBIR, KnoxvilleTalks is managed and edited by WBIR.com Online Producer and newsroom blogger Katie Allison Granju. E-mail Katie at kgranju@wbir.gannett.com with your comments and suggestions. Direct your technical and geeky-type questions to our webmaster, Jeff Webb at webmaster@wbir.com

It's hard to see this as "cyclical:"

In a historic first, online media companies collectively will sell more ads in local markets this year than such individual hometown media as newspapers, broadcasters and yellow pages, says an independent research firm.

-- Reflections of a Newsosaur

I'm glad to see author and New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell blogging a little more regularly. Lately he's written on race and IQ, Kenyan runners and serial killers.

The quick headline of a Pew Internet and American Life Project study released Sunday afternoon is close to half (47 percent) of people have googled themselves, up from just over one in five (22 percent) in a similar study five years ago.

But the real news in the study, "Digital Footprints Online identity management and search in the age of transparency," is that people aren't that worked up about privacy.

There's been a shift. And for younger people, as you might expect, it's happening at faster rate.

I can remember people freaking out over a land transfer or divorces granted listing being put online, but it was OK to put it in the paper. Huh? The local audiences of the two weren't even close and it's OK to be in the bigger one, but not the smaller?

Sixty percent today say they're not losing sleep over it.

That's dramatic!

And when you slice it into subgroups, the one the Pew researchers call the "The Unfazed and Inactive" group is neither worried about their personal information  online nor taken steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online. Those people are in the largest grouping at 43 percent.

The study offers that privacy. or the expectation of privacy, is a casualty of 9/11. But that doesn't begin to explain how much information people are willing to post about themselves and the comfort people have with online transparency and presence.

How it will evolve is anybody's guess. That crazy thing you did in college or even high school that got posted might be given more latitude in the future as people get used to finding such things. Or people might get more demanding of their ability to control what's known about them.

One thing for sure, these footprints in the sand aren't washed away by the tide.

As for googling oneself; I'd call that prudent rather than self-obsessed. It's a good idea ot be aware of what's out there about you, I think.

(Photo by Melanie Ehrenreich)

I had requests for Christmas pictures. Well, to be truthful, I had one, but then the Newscoma started this with a double-dog dare.

So a double-dog combo to go, photos and a blog meme.

Rules for the game include:

1. Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share Christmas facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Welcome to the Christmas edition of getting to know your friends.

1. Wrapping or gift bags? First, which did you get?

2. Real or artificial tree? Tree. Singular? There are least eight up, not sure that is the extent of the Yuletide mayhem. See the slide show

3. When do you put up the tree? Key word there is you.

4. When do you take the tree down? Another questions with aforementioned key word.

5. Do you like eggnog? Yes, Weigels or Mayfield's. Usually without spirits.

6. Favorite gift received as a child? All were welcomed.

7. Do you have a nativity scene? Yes.

8. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? I better at buying things I don't like for myself.

9. Mail or email Christmas cards? I like mailing cards. To hell with tree saving.

10. Favorite Christmas Movie? Yeah, I'm going to go with Coma's "It’s a Wonderful Life"

11. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Thanksgiving week is the official start of the Christmas buying. Anything earlier is to buy into Christmas sales in August. Wonder why Amazon has thought of "locking in" gifts a year early?

12. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Cookies and cookies.

13. Clear lights or colored on the tree? I like white lights, no tinsel.

14. Favorite Christmas song? Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town by the Boss the E Street Band. Also, John Prine's Christmas in Prison.

15. Travel at Christmas or stay home? We always stay home for Christmas Eve and hit the family trail the day after Christmas.

16. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer? Yes, with the help of the Internets.

17. Angel on the tree top or a star? Both, with as many trees as we have, all options are available.

18. Open the presents Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning? Both and the day after Christmas.

19. Most annoying thing about this time of year? Traffic.

20. Do you decorate your tree in any specific theme or color? Hmmm... a variation of you. We have theemed and unthemed.

21. What do you leave for Santa? Cookies and milk, of course.

22. Least favorite holiday song? Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.

23. Favorite ornament? We have a large collection of Westmoore Pottery Christmas ornaments. I've often given them as gifts as well.
 
I'm tagging Byron Chesney, mocktech, The Kat House, Frank Murphy dot com, The House of Flying Monkeys, Jim Miller's Menial Musings. and Legally Brunette . OK, that's seven!

An update on what's being said about reforming Tennessee's Sunshine Laws:

This holiday season busyness makes exercising hard!


Month-to-date miles: 9.75

Do me a favor and subscribe to this feed.

Scripps Networks' new Frontdoor is getting quite a bit of attention. The News Sentinel's Carly Harrington did a piece.

We want to give people the insight about what it's like to live in a community before they move there. We think we have a unique idea and hope to give someone a sense of what it's like to live on a street.

-- Vikki C. Neil, VP/Real Estate for Scripps Interactive

More news stories and blog posts.

Congratulations and best of luck with the venture.

It's really not as simple as just "going digital."

-- Mike Masnick at Techdirt

Knoxville native Philip John Clapp, aka Johnny Knoxville, has a new movie that is a ground breaking (and potentially game changing) experiment by a movie studio to bypass theater release and go straight to the Web.

The third "Jackass" movie, Jackass 2.5, will be available online first. Here are the key dates:

• Dec. 19: A week of downloads exclusively through Blockbuster.
• Dec. 26: The DVD, and downloads-to-own from movielink.com, iTunes, Amazon.com, others on Dec 26, with exclusive DVD rental distribution through Blockbuster.
• Jan 1: Download-to-rent release on movielink.

Terry Morrow has the details. Silcon Alley's Henry Blodget says the losers are the movie chains.

Paramount can begin to cut theaters out of the distribution chain, it will have more ability to release movies on all platforms at once (or in whatever order makes the most economic sense).

Wonder how this strikes that other Knoxville resident, Regal Entertainment Group?

I don't have any particular angst about Google. In fact, i love the company's products and am a heavy user. Among my favs are Google search, Google Reader, Google Docs, Picasa, GrandCentral, Google tools for Webmasters, Google Analytics, and Google Apps for your domain. Wonderful stuff.

But sometimes the company does remind me of a railroad in the Robber Baron era.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) accounted for more than six of 10 online searches in the United States in November, more than triple the amount of its closest rival Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), a Web metrics firm said Tuesday.

Maybe, it's just me. Certainly Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gould and others would be proud.