Update – Friday, Oct. 9, 2009: Since I haven’t blogged all week, and I’m too depressed from the St. Louis Cardinals’ loss last night against the L.A. Dodgers in game 2 of the NLCS (Dodgers now lead the best-of-five series, 2-0), I’ll just keep last week’s Friday Five here. Look for a return of regular blogging over the weekend, or possibly Monday.
Random thoughts and links as the weekend bears down upon us:
Anyone got a spare Google Wave invitation? I’d like one, please. If you would give me your spare, I would be forever grateful. I would be your most ardent fanboy.- Sometimes I wish I were British so no one would give me odd looks when I say “bollocks.” Also, I’d feel much more comfortable saying “bollocks” and would say it more often.
- Found out this morning that Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) is from Columbia, Mo., home of the world’s oldest journalism school, which is also my alma mater. In his latest blog post, Rescuing The Reporters, he analyzes — and literally deconstructs — a recent edition of his hometown paper, The Columbia Daily Tribune, and concludes, “most of the substantive part of that day’s Trib wasn’t locally created, and most of it wasn’t news.” of course, there’s much more to his post that is worth reading if you’re interested in the state of the news business and where it may be headed. It’s worth a read. (Hat tip to Michael Stoner, aka @mStonerblog, for the link to Shirky’s post and the Shirky biographical info.)
- Here’s confirmation that I’m not the only one who has to deal with a lack of response to emails. A post on today’s Chronicle Brainstorm blog, Are you E-gnoring me?, laments the lack of response from harried academics, the absent-minded professor types. For me, the chief e-gnorers are administrators who don’t want to deal with my pesky reminders about missed deadlines, etc.
- Sometimes I learn things from the most unlikely of sources. Late last week, an administrator on campus sent me a link to the social media revolution video that’s been making the rounds the past couple of weeks. (The video is related to Erik Qualman’s book Socialnomics, which is also the name of Erik’s blog.) This administrator was one of the last people I thought I’d receive such a link from. I was happy to learn of his interest in social media, and we had a nice 30-minute conversation as a result of his sharing that link.
Bonus: I think it’s awesome that Jim Halpert — Michael Scott’s co-manager in The Office — now has his own World’s Best Boss mug. That just goes to show what a great boss Michael Scott is, to give that gift to Jim.
Have a great weekend.
Higher Ed Marketing 
I never got a Google Wave invite either. Bollocks! It looks so cool, I am hoping it comes out of Beta testing quickly. But if you want I can give you $100 now or $5,000 a year from now. Michael Scott does rock as a boss. This is one of the most random comments I think I’ve left on a blog before.
Thanks for sharing this article and it’s quite informative..It gives the idea of our random thoughts and complete analogy of our brain….
Travis – I hope whenever I get my own World’s Best Boss coffee mug, it too is filled with gin. (Hint hint to any staffers reading this.) :)
A response to Clay’s article (no responses allowed there)…
That Mr Shirky doesn’t consider news about sporting competitions to be news, affects the post considerably. Sports reporting may not be about the topics he thinks are important, but then likely many of the articles considered news aren’t either. The “opinion” pieces may well contain news too (even if considerably watered down with analysis and old information).
Mr Shirky should also consider the ability of the other media in the market to do reporting too. It is not the lone preserve of organisations that put things on newsprint.
MC – Thanks for your comments about Shirky’s post. Here’s another take on Shirky’s news biopsy — from the managing editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune, as posted on the Poynter website discussion about Shirky’s piece: “News biopsy” misleading.