Interesting bit on CNN about blogs and the DNC
I hadn’t really thought much of the DNC offering press credentials to bloggers initially, because to me a blog is an everyday tool for information dissemination, even if that dissemination is merely the musings of my warped little mind. Then my friend Jessamyn got her credentials as a librarian blogger for the DNC, and I really started to think about it. Librarians warehouse, harvest, process, and disseminate information as part of what we do. It’s very natural to us. I s’pose that’s why the whole blogging the DNC bit wasn’t too surprising to me, or such a weirdly big deal.
While I was watching CNN today, they presented a segment on political bloggers and the DNC. It’s funny, during the segment, they mentioned blogs like the daily kos working closely with the democratic campaign, when a while back Kerry’s site removed a link to the blog as a reaction to some things posted there. That’s a “if they just checked with a librarian/fact checker/ anyone with a clue they’d have known” moment.
All the same, the CNN segment touted blogging at the DNC as the next big thing in campaign tracking and political pundit-ism on the internet, and talked to some high-profile bloggers about how having a famous blog was like being a celebrity in a niche market. The segment also mentioned how easy it is to setup a blog (with shots of Blogger’s signup screen), and how campaigns are using blogs to reach out to the people. Even with the positive spin, the segment still had a weird “isn’t that cute” vibe to it. I’m still contemplating my reaction.
Interesting.
On a side note, I have found searching for the items from CNN Headline News on the CNN site to be difficult. Sometimes I can do a search for a string from the segment and find maybe a CNN online article related to my search, but not much that really resembles the snippet. I did, however, find an interesting transcripts area, which seems to focus on the regular feature programming, with maybe a few transcripts of everything else. The Headline News page itself also focuses on features, as well as the anchors who are on at certain times of day. Nifty, but not as useful as I’d like. Anyone have any secrets or tips for searching the CNN site for TV news snippets?
Tags: technology
