Death of religion at the ABC

One of my favourite programs on ABC Radio National is The Religion Report. It's always presented a very balanced, inclusive reporting that appeals to a wide audience, regardless of religious affiliation.

Not only that, but host Stephen Crittenden's introduction, telling listeners about this misguided decision, was axed from subsequent versions of the show on Wednesday. But you can hear what Stephen says and read about it on Crikey, what are they doing to Radio National

More dumbing-down of public broadcasting is planned with another quality program, the Media Report and others, going too.

What are widgets?

Widgets are small programs that run on your desktop, or within your website or blog. They constantly pull content from a third party, so that you don’t need to regularly visit that website. For libraries they are a great way of introducing library content, such as a catalogue search box, into our users’ web space.

Some examples of widgets on my blog are the Flickr badge of photos and LibraryThing random books from my library down the side bar.

New library search widgets are being written for social sites such as Facebook.

There’s a podcast of “widget fanatic” Niall Kennedy talking about how widgets are revolutionising the web on the Media Report ABC Radio National website

Blogging and mainstream media

Blogging is hot news in the mainstream media. Newspapers are in a "dammed if you do and damned if you don’t" situation. Upstart citizen journalists can cut into newspaper profit margins, but if newspapers wish to reach the Web 2.0 generation their journalists need to have their own blogs, and many do.

The Australian boasts about 18 blogs and individual blogger popularity can be seen by how many comments each blog has attracted.

Steve Almond, writing in the Oct/Nov07 Walkley Magazine has an article Attack of the Instapundits “Blogs are cheap and easy. They’re like those cable TV shows with all the talking heads shouting at one another. All you need is the means to broadcast and an opinionator”.

More on blogging: on November 8th ABC Radio National Media Report has a special panel discussion on the power of blogging. Among the speakers will be Hugh Martin from APN online Australia, and Pippa Leary, General Manager of Media at Fairfax Digital. You can download the audio, or read the transcript the next day.

In many ways the threats faced by mainstream media are similar to libraries. We need to also embrace the technologies of the digital generation, or risk becoming irrelevant.