Domino’s “Pizza Tracker” Puts Obama Ahead by 12 Points October 3
Hey, it’s at least as good as the rest of the polls…
A “Traditional Media” Experiment April 17
The Boston NOW paper I mentioned before was launched this morning, and I’m in it twice.
There’s a blurb about the Museum’s podcast and a callout box on the page of Boston Marathon coverage featuring the latest Boston Behind the Scenes.
I wanted to see if this would convince people to go to my website, but the early returns aren’t good. Boston Behind the Scenes has seen exactly one unaccounted-for hit from the Boston area today – and that was from the servers of the Community Newspaper Company in Taunton. I’m pretty sure they were just thoroughly investigating the new competition.
I’m Carbon Neutral April 15
I watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time today, then went to the NativeEnergy’s website to look into buying renewable energy credits. Using the money from credit purchases, NativeEnergy funds new renewable power projects like windfarms and a diary farm renewable methane project. According to their website:
With NativeEnergy, you can help finance and build new clean and renewable energy projects that help Native Americans and Alaska Natives create sustainable economic benefits, and that help America’s family farmers compete with agribusiness. These projects will displace electricity from fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions on your behalf, making up for the CO2 emissions you can’t avoid.
When I did the calculations with their web tool, it turns out that I probably produce about three tons of CO2 a year (as opposed to the national average of 7.5 tons/year). This wasn’t surprising, as I don’t own a car, walk to work every day, and only fly occasionally. What was surprising was the cost to offset those three tons: only $36.
So, for just $36, I’m now carbon neutral.
Don’t Use the “E-Word” March 29
I found this article on the word evolution last month, and today I finally tracked one of the researchers down for the phone interview below (for release on the Museum’s podcast tomorrow). The paper is about the use of the “E-Word” in scientific articles and popular news stories. I found the topic very interesting, and I’m proud of the way the interview came out.
BostonNOW Newspaper to Launch on April 17th March 28
BostonNOW is a new free daily launching in a few weeks. The paper will compete with the Metro as a mass-circulation paper on the streets and on the T.
While this is an interesting development in the stuff-you-can-do-instead-of-interacting-
with-others-in-public department, it is more interesting in that you will actually have an opportunity to interact with more of the public because of this paper. And no, I don’t just mean that there will now be another person trying to hand you a newspaper as you get on the subway…
According to their blog (which, until the above site goes live on 4/16/07, is the official way to interact with the staff):
Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists.
That means that this newspaper wants you to contribute your writing, your photos, and your videos for distribution to 150,000 print readers and a (hopefully) large web audience. They are going after area bloggers for content right now, but for me, the most interesting thing about this experiment is that anyone can contribute. Just sign up on their site, and you can submit news, commentary, reviews, or even rants. The best submissions will be included in the paper, and – if you are a consistently good contributer – they will pay you for your work.
Unlike many news outlets that encourage community contribution, BostonNOW won’t vacuum up all of this content into its intellectual property vault:
If you post to BostonNOW, you still own your content. BostonNOW will not take ownership of your blogs, stories, photos, or videos, nor will it require exclusivity.
All of these things make for a pretty appealing concept; I know that I’ll be contributing at least once in a while.
Of course, it remains to be seen if this idea will work. They have a solid core idea, they have funding (the guy who started the Metro in Boston and AM New York in the Big Apple got a pile of cash from an Icelandic media conglomerate to set papers like this up all over the country), and they have an audience of Bostonians who are bored with the truncated wire-service stories the Metro tries to pass off as news. Though I’m sure it will be slow at first, they should have a decent number of contributers. Submission quality will be an issue, as will the details of a new media/old media hybrid.
I’ve been to two “Bloggers’ Summit” meetings organized by BostonNOW. At both, the attendees seemed skeptically enthusiastic. I haven’t read many of their blogs, but there were enough people there to flesh out a paper if all of the content they produce is good at least some of the time (a dubious assumption, I know). The leadership of the paper seemed a bit sketchy on some of the details, and had some surprising holes in their plan, but they are open to ideas and seem ready to change anything that doesn’t work.
So I guess it is wait-and-see, but I’m optimistic. I think this is a good idea, and I really hope they can pull it off.
This picture is a detail of one of their layout mockup. The website and the physical paper will look basically the same. I liked this particular section because the standard filler-text deadline could actually be a Sports Section story…
Boston Accent on Boston Behind the Scenes March 27
I recorded a new Boston Behind the Scenes yesterday with a linguist from BU talking about the Boston accent:
It’s a dialect I hear every day, but almost all most people know about it is encapsulated in the phrase “Let’s pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” but that isn’t really the way people talk here. To do a little better, I went to someone who could give us the real deal.
