Saturday Morning's Links to Top Bloggers

Every now and again, it’s time to give a shout-out to other media and technology bloggers for the great work they are doing. I still hear so much complaining about bloggers from various people — journalists included — that I have to wonder whether they actually are reading any blogs…

The guys I’m promoting this morning are all pros, and their blog posts are always worth a look.

First, there were lots of pertinent questions being raised about Google this week, to wit:

1. Owen Thomas in Valleywag/Gawker noted in his post, “Google, No Longer the Land of the Free,” that by taking a recent set of decisions to charge for features that used to be free, as well as placing ads in products like Goodle News, that never before had them, Google’s management is waving good-bye to the free web, and devoting itself to monetizing as much of its real estate as possible.

2. Here at Bnet, my media blogger colleague, Cathy Taylor, asked, “Will Google’s User-Controlled Profiles Open a Pandora’s Box? Another of our Bnet bloggers, Erik Sherman, raised additional questions about the sme topic in his post, “Will Google Behavioral Ads Increase Criticism and Danger?”

If you haven’t been following the controversy about behavioral targeting advertising, these two posts provide a pretty good tutorial and bring you up to date on Google’s entry into a rich minefield of unknown risks.

3. The leaked media memo of the week came to light thanks to the ever-excellent Jim Romenesko:

Memo from NPR’s director of morning programming

From: Ellen McDonnell
To: ME list; Davar Ardalan; Jenni Bergal
Sent: Thu Mar 12 15:48:24 2009
Subject: saving money

As of April 1 NPR is cancelling all newspaper subscriptions. We are making some arrangments to get the Wall Street Journal either on line or hard copy. You have until tomorrow to appeal this if there is a solid reason why you should be exempt. This is a cost saving measure company wide.

4. Next, Helena Deards at the wonderful site, EditorsWeblog, asks, “Is Twitter lazy and narcissistic or a new editorial product?” (Hint: think different.)
5. Finally, this roundup concludes with a fascinating Ryan Singel’s fascinating take in Wired on the geek who is reinventing not only The New York Times: Times Techie Envisions the Future of News but potentially the entire news business itself.

Now, this is barely the tip of an icerberg of excellent writing on the media industry this past week. All of these bloggers are quite prominant, and easy to locate. Maybe the next time you hear someone dissing bloggers, you should forward these links, and begin re-educating the disser.