Did I say AP RSS is crack for news junkies? Wait ’til you see this: A couple of posts ago, I linked to this dandy page with AP’s RSS feeds by category. Check out this page with RSS links to specific words
– an indication of where AP is headed with this. (Heck, I even got my RSS feed wish for AP stories about the Titans…ironically, it appears, via the Washington Post’s site.)

(Thanks for the heads up to Steve Kirks (my hero) of Userland,  the host of the rexblog.)

Google bad, google good: How to keep your website from being commandeered by Google’s toolbar’s “AutoLink” (or, as we say on the rexblog, “the ‘what were they thinking?’ feature”). (via Steve Rubel, who got the ball rolling on this issue)

Another Google item. While the new “movie:” operator gets two thumbs up from me, if you’re looking for information about the movie “Nashville” (which, by the way, is 30 years old this year), you need to search for something other than movie:Nashville,
which results in a page of times and locations (I assume the same is
true for the movies Philadelphia, New York New York, etc.) I found “movie:altman nashville” works great, by the way.

Busted: Let me get this straight. An analyst says the search advertising market is “softening” and investors in search engine firms flee?
(That’s a WSJ link, but I’m sure the story is everywhere.) Yesterday I
said it feels like 1999. Today, it feels like 2001. Search advertising
is not going away. But, frankly, I wish people who invest in Internet
stocks would.

News, not news? Wouldn’t you think a near-crash of an airplane full of Nashvillians would deserve at least a mention in a local daily newspaper? I learned about it from the RSS feed of a friend’s blog.

Blog of record: I know there
are some university journalism students who are among the seven readers
of this weblog. I have some assigned reading for you so that one day,
you can say, “I was there.” The conversation taking place now on Jeff Jarvis’ weblog
between Jeff and Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times is one of those
events we’ll all be looking back on and using words like “seminal” to recall it. (Here is an archive of the entire exchange.)

I raised the “Mcluhan” name yesterday in a jestful post,
but today, I’m serious when I say there is something Mcluhanesque
about Keller choosing an
A-List blogger’s blog as his platform for this disucssion. To my
university student readers: this is what Mcluhan meant with that whole
“the medium is the message” stuff. That this coversation is taking
place on a weblog called BuzzMachine.com is as important as the conversation itself.

Keller (who, remember, is responding to a smack-down challenge a courteous invitation from
Jeff) is displaying a mastery of conversational media while he and Jeff
are having an adult and civil exchange. This is big…and you were there and a part of it.

AP RSS – crack for news junkies: I think it’s great that one can now get RSS feeds of a AP stories, but I’m with Jeff. If you’re a newspaper-member of AP, you’d better offer your own version of these feeds — integrated with an offering of local news feeds (note the the Tennessean: an RSS feed of Titans stories, for example)…and do it fast.

(Note to those who don’t know what this is all about. Download a newsreader today. Here is one of about a million beginner tutorials on how to download and set one up. Get over whatever your fear of one is. A newsreader will save you time and help you organize the chaos of information blasting forth at you all day. It’s about simplifying your life. It’s called “Really Simple Syndication” for a reason.)

Oh, I get it:  At first I though MediaPost’s Joe Mandese was seriously saying he thought there is something controversial about
the MPA’s new ad campaign. Then I figured out that Joe’s article is
merely a parody of a news item and not really serious. However, I don’t
think he should write such parodies and present them as columns. It’s
confusing and keeps me from knowing when he’s actually serious. You almost had me there, Joe.

That’s where the money is: Media Life has cobbled together a trend story about new magazines for rich people, “For the haves, a raft of new magazines” (Hey, wouldn’t rich people be in better boats than a raft?) Of course, on the rexblog, this is old stuff. There’s even a rexblog name for this category of readers: the nouveau niche. (rexblog flashbacks)

Yo: What up?

College recruiting: Call me old fashioned. Call me a fuddy-duddy. But as the father of a high school junior, I can say with some authority, this is not the kind of headline you’d want your parents to see (registration required) if you’d like them to fund your sojourn at this particular university:

As for the student self-funding his or her college
education, I’ll let them be the judge of the admissions recrutment
value of such a headline.