How To Decide Which Bloggers to Give Press Passes To?

I got a call today from a local organization asking for a list of blogger to extend press passes to. I was familiar with the organization and have a pretty good idea who would dig what they were doing. The criteria they were most interested in was size of readership.

From my email reply:

“In the blog world, who is reading (influence) is far more important than how many are (reach). With that in mind, I highly recommend reviewing the above blogs for the topics and perspectives they cover, and review their ‘Authority’ in Technorati (the number of blogs linking to them, higher is better) and base your invitations on that.”

Would you have recommended a different technique?

Carbon Trading in the US and Minnesota

If you caught the NPR/National Geographic segment on the European carbon trading efforts you may have gotten the impression that:

  1. the price of being carbon neutral is so low (+2%) that it’s irresponsible not to pay it.
  2. a market for carbon dioxide, mandatory or otherwise, didn’t exist stateside.

True on the former, false on the latter. First Crack 102 is a conversation about the Chicago Climate Exchange and the University of Minnesota.

baldguyshow calls it my best show to date.

How to Automatically Link URLs in Rails

Let’s say you have a Rails app and you’d like any URLs in any plain text string to be automatically hyperlinked. Well, then you’ll need this:
.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

For example:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Through:
"I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com".description.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

Results in:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Fishwrap Fear

First off, I commend law enforcement officials for their efforts over the past year to diffuse this movie-plot threat while it was still in the planning stage. This is proof investment in investigation pays off more than in airport screenings.

“Several law enforcement officials said, however, there have been no direct threat[s] to the airport and that the suspects had yet to obtain financing or explosives.”

That quote* – buried on A18 of today’s Sunday Strib – proves the story doesn’t belong on the front page. Especially since – also on A18 – a much shorter story (“A Snag in the Plot…”) confirms:

“…the level of catastrophe that may be created is much more limited that most people would expect..” –

Why?

“…jet fuel doesn’t easily explode.”

At startribune.com, the JFK movie-plot threat is the second headline (and falling) in the second section a couple screenviews down. In terms of priority, importance, and relevance, this is where the story belongs.

The asymmetry between the placement as lead story in the print edition and insignificance placement online betrays the actual news-worthiness of the story (none) and the differences between fishwrap news editors and online news editors (apparently, the easily frightened buy fishwrap while the more thoughtful read online).

Lastly, this is the second time in as many days and with as many newspapers where I’ve struggled to find a print-edition story in on a newspaper’s website. Just as I expect retail stores to have symmetrical catalogs between their online and offline offerings, I expect the same from publishers.

*Oddly, I couldn’t find this quote in the online version.

I’m trying to find the online version of…

I’m trying to find the online version of an article in Today’s PiPress. This is really hard.

Searching for the author’s name doesn’t work. Copying the headline from the PDF version of the front page and pasting it into search doesn’t work.

Found it.

I Googled for the headline, the only result – Chuck’s posting of the article.

Here it is: On vacation, but still in the loop. Hi, I’m Garrick and I take my laptop on vacation. Especially to places I love.

Thanks to Julio, Chuck, and Google.

I forgot to mention all the blogging I did on that trip.

Re-reading those posts, looks like we’re just now flirting with the low end of the gas prices I saw in Europe 6 months ago.

First Crack 103. Lunch with Minneapoliscast, How Was The Show, LocalTone and MinnieIndie.com

I bought Tony Thomas from Minneapoliscast, Andrea Meyers from HowWasTheShow.com, and Justin Grammens from LocalTone.com, and Brian McDonough from MinnieIndie.com lunch to talk about the Minneapolis music scene.

We cover the goal of each of their sites, the challenges of finding good independent music, and Brian makes some band recommendations.

Listen to Lunch with Minneapoliscast, How Was The Show, LocalTone, and MinnieIndie.com [35 min].

First Crack 102. Measuring Carbon Footprints with Tyler Patterson

Tyler Patterson just finished up a Masters Thesis project investigating adding all the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ campus energy sources into the Chicago Climate Exchange.

In this numbers and stats intensive conversation, we discuss:

  • The methodology of the measuring the campus’ carbon footprint
  • The economics of the carbon trading and energy efficiency
  • The trade-offs in determining energy sources (fuel oil vs. coal vs. oat hulls vs. natural gas)

Listen to Measuring Carbon Footprints with Tyler Patterson [41 min].