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October 1, 2006

Bengals fear Brady; Death-defying photographer; New media panel

Respect from Bengals Zone:

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose an active quarterback to play a game that would decide whether I lived or died, I would probably take Brady. I would take him over Peyton Manning, Bret Favre and even Carson Palmer. I’m terrified of what he is capable of in this game. I know the Pats receiving corps is suspect, but Brady is the type of QB who can take over a single game and dominate. If the Bengals give him the ball with a short field like they did last week, Brady will not toss three interceptions and miss open guys like Little Ben. No game against a team quarterbacked by Tom Brady is a “gimme.” The D-line needs to step up and pressure him, or he will absolutely kill the Bengals.

Pats play in Cincinnati today at 4:15 on CBS.

Peak experience: Professional photographer Hans van de Vorst shot this Grand Canyon sequence in three photos. He writes of the first, above,

I was simply stunned seeing this guy standing on this solitary(!!) rock IN the Grand Canyon. The canyon's depth is 900 meters here. The rock on the right is next to the canyon and safe.

Watching this guy on his thong sandals, with a camera and a tripod I asked myself 3 questions:-

1. How did he climb that rock ?
2. Why not taking that sunset picture on that rock to the right, which is perfectly safe?
3. How will he get back?

The leap and landing photos follow.

Great photos, and a lingering curiousity about the danger the daredevil photographer seems to build into making his art.

I wonder where we can see his photos. (I'm looking for them.)

Amazingly, another photographer captured him a little earlier sunbathing on his perch with a six-pack, below.

Reports from the trenches: I was on a new media panel on buzzwords yesterday at the NEAPNEA (New England Associated Press News Executives Association) fall conference with Damon Kiesow and Ernesto Burden, managing editor and new media manager, respectively, of the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph and technology editor D.C. Denison of the Boston Globe.

Nashua doesn't have a developer, and our programmer is busy with large content management issues, so Damon and I both talked about making do, me with third-party-assisted mashups while Nashua is crunching databases.

Besides that beachmap mashup, I also showed the assembled journalists del.icio.us (public bookmarking and the "folksonomy" of making up your own tags, vs. assigned tags like news, weather, sports) and the New York Times' River of News, created by Dave Winer, who describes it (What is a 'River of News' style aggregator?) as,

...like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up.

(There's also a BBC River.)

We panelists all agreed that readers don't find things that are not on the homepage, the higher the better. How a large site gives all its worthy work a turn in that spotlight remains a problem, but (imho) a scrolling River of ProJo might be a start.

D.C. showed a Globe experiment with local Wi-Fi entrepreneur Michael Oh of NewburyOpen.net that puts Globe news and microlocal information, called Pulse Points, on the homepage of wi-fi hotspots at cafes. Citizen journalists aren't taking them up on the invitation to add their own information, he notes.

Panel moderator Ernesto Burden showed a video he'd created in a half-hour Friday, during the print-media day of the conference, when NYT editor Bill Keller said, "I'm a chew toy for the left and the right." You can see it here on his blog.

Later... Bonus: At the much slicker OMMA conference, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 reports that keynoter Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, called out the language we hear from media execs:

User Generated Content: Since when did I become a heroin addict?

Consumer: I create, I retransmit, I edit, I share — I’m not defined by your stupid brand.

People, that’s what we need to think about.

People, person, human.

Via Doc, who also offers a video link to the speech.

In Texas, Little Support for Putting Up Fences. L.A. Times.

Political phone spam update: So far, the political calls to my Rhode Island home are all from pollsters.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:48 AM | Permalink