Saturday, December 16, 2006

Saturday at The Bee and at home

It's 10:55 a.m. and I went into The Bee to pick up my paycheck from last week. It really is sad that I can earn as much as I do and still feel as if I'm living check to check.

Anyway, Google Reader told me I had 50 blog posts to review and it took until 11:33 to finish.

The posts from the California Conservative writers are troubling because most of them are coming from the Los Angeles area and deal with local issues. I may have to turn off the politics tag that allows this blog to feed unmonitored into the politics category.

Several of what I call the professional blogs feed unmonitored into the politics category. The FlashReport and California Majority Report are two examples. This is the sort of content I'd like to feed into a politics-only content at sacbee. I could then add individual posts from people who talk about politics and other issues. A great example is Ruck Pad, which proclaims "because rugby and politics are both contact sports."

This arrangement would keep the timeliness of the "official" blogs while adding the value of content I've identified.

For the most part I skim the longer posts, especially the regular writers on politics. My desire to get the job of sorting done pushes against the requirement that I meet a profanity standard that remain undefined. OK, it isn't undefined. The standard is just one I don't think can be applied. Basically, I've been told "shit" in any context taints a blog beyond salvation. Since the VP for News at McClatchy has posted intelligent commentary that included "shit," I'm trying to hold out for a different standard.

Of course reading blogs is not all tedium. I found out today you can find out "Which historical lunatic are you? " by filling out a survey.

My favorite personal post among the early blogs was a discussion of dating. I marked the blog for sharing but it doesn't fit into any of the categories I now have. Unless sacbee takes a massive turn in a new direction, I don't see the people who are in theory supervising my work ever agreeing to a dating subject. But if the goal is to get people to browse sacbee, it is just this sort of content that will attract readers. Here's the post .

Finally, it is 11:48 a.m. when I leave the office.

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