:Journalistopia

The business journalists at the Globe and Mail have put together a fantastic list of their 30 favorite business blogs. This is definitely a list to share with your business staff (I just did).

However, now I’m looking for other hand-edited blog lists put together by objective pros. Do you know of any good lists of this sort in the entertainment, lifsetyle, sports and other major newspaper categories?

[Globe and Mail: Best of the [Financial] Blogs]

[Tip o’ the hat to Cyberjournalist. Photo by DavidDMuir]

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Just announced: 2008’s Webby Award winners! The Webby Awards picks through the best of the Web and grants awards in more categories than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve pored through the list and extracted the winners from news-related categories, as well as news organizations that won in other categories, such as science or best practices. Here’s the Journalistopia-edited list. Apologies in advance if I missed anyone:

Best Copy/Writing
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com
(Also nominated: HowStuffWorks, Design Observer, NYTimes.com and Slate)

Best Use of Photography
Your Shot - National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.com/yourshot

Blog - Business
FT.com Alphaville
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/

Blog - Political
The Huffington Post
http://huffingtonpost.com

Broadband
ABC.com Full Episode Player
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streami…

Magazine
National Geographic Magazine Online
http://ngm.com
(Also nominated: Dwell.com, Makezine, NYMag, Yoga Journal Yoga Journal)

Music
BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
http://agencyrepublic.net/awards/…

News
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: BBC News, Wired, CNN and Discovery News)

Newspaper
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: The Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal and Variety)

Radio
BBC World Service channel site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

Science
nature.com
http://www.nature.com

Sports
Yahoo! Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/
(Also nominated: ESPN.com, Nike Skateboarding, Spyker F1 Magazine, Sweet Spots)

Television
HBO Voyeur
http://www.hbovoyeur.com

VIDEO CATEGORIES

Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics
The New York Times/T: The New York TImes Style Magazine “Circle Squared”
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/20…

Best Writing
Onion News Network
http://tv.theonion.com

Documentary: Individual Episode
Coney Island: An Uncertain Future
Getty Images
http://www.rickgershon.com/gettyi…

News and Politics: Individual Episode
Finding the Way Home
MediaStorm
http://mediastorm.org/0017.htm

Travel (video)
Frugal Traveler: American Road Trip - NYTimes.com/Video
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_s…

MOBILE

Entertainment (mobile)
Cosmo Mobile: 100 Hot Cities, Fake Calls, Dude Decoder & Cocktails!
http://m.cosmopolitan.com

Listing and Updates (mobile)
The New York Times Mobile Real Estate Listings
http://m.nytimes.com/re

News (mobile)
Mobile NYTimes
http://mobile.nytimes.com

Sports (mobile)
ESPN.com (Wireless)
http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wire…

ALSO: Shoutouts to NYTimes.com for their best practices and best visual design/function nominations, Mama Trib’s Swamp blog for best political blog nomination, National Geographic for their best home page People’s Voice award, Consumer Reports for their Guides/Ratings/Review People’s Voice award, the Guardian and Onion for their podcasts nominations, NPR for their politics nomination, NPR and the BBC for their religion and spirituality nominations, Frontline World for their Documentary: Series and Documentray: Individual nominations, U.S. News and World Report for their Best Writing (video) nomination, the New Yorker’s animated cartoons for their animation nomination, CBS for their sports (video) nomination and many more.

Yep, no news site nominees in the navigation and structure categories. We’ll have to work on that…

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A Connecticut software developer has analyzed 10,000 postings on social networking sites to determine the best and worst times to publish a blog post.

The best times, according to developer Jake Luciani’s work: between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. (Pacific Time) and between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, with Thursday being the best day.

This is a definite must-share factoid for the bloggers at your organization (if you can pry them away from lunch, that is).

More details about how he came to the conclusion here and here.

[Photo by Leo Reynolds]

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Journalistopians, I have a small request: I’m looking for interesting blogs about online journalism and/or design written in Spanish, and I could use your help.

If you know of any blogs that fit the bill, please drop a comment with a link, or message me at dansanufATyahoo.com. Thanks!

***

(Perdóname si mi español no está perfecto…)

Journalistopianos, tengo una petición pequeña: Estoy buscando blogs interesante sobre el periodismo y diseño electrónico, y necesito su ayuda.

Si usted conoce algunos blogs, por favor déjame un comentario o envíeme un correo electrónico a dansanufATyahoo.com. ¡Gracias!

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If you’re wanting to gain a better understanding of how to optimize blogs for search engines (or what some, like myself, like to call “getting some Google Juice”), look no further than SEOBook’s free Blogger’s Guide to SEO.

Being a bit of an SEO geek, I can attest that this is one of the best resources (balanced with length) on blogs and search engines. This may fall under the “obvious” category, but it bears emphasizing: If you’re working on a news site, you absolutely must understand the fundamentals of how search engine optimization works.

A few quick, blog-specific SEO pointers and tidbits that come to mind:

-Don’t be bashful about submitting your blog to aggregators and directories. Blogs usually have built-in pinging mechanisms that spread your blog posts all over the world (really neat interactive graphic here). Because of this, blogs have an advantage over many of the static news site pages out there.

-Avoid starting your blog on a free out-of-the-box hosted service such as Blogger, WordPress.com (not the same as a WordPress install on your own server) . It may cost you a few bucks a month and some initial work to host it yourself, but when the day comes that you want to move your blog to a better domain, you won’t find yourself painfully stuck. You’ll also have way more flexibility to tweak your site.

-Do your best to build relationships with other bloggers and drop comments on their blogs. Respond to your comments. The more that active bloggers check out your blog, the more inbound links you’re likely to receive.

-Follow the Google News Blog. This will keep you informed of important changes to how Google News picks up your content (this is mostly just for mainstream media blogs).

-It usually comes down to a beautifully keyworded headline. Don’t you forget it!

[Blogger’s Guide to SEO]

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Head on over to the conference site for South by Southwest (SXSW) for free video from the media and entertainment conference. You’ll want to particularly peruse the Interactive Coverage. And yes, the much-maligned Zuckerberg/Lacy interview is there too.

I wasn’t one of the fortunate souls who made it out to Texas for the conference, so if you have any specific recommendations on what to watch, do share in the comments.

And to think I just got Netflix this weekend, and I’ll be spending a couple of hours watching tiny pixelated videos of guys talking about media nerd stuff…

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Don’t live in fear of a blog meltdown. Make a backup. Photo: U.S. National Archives

This isn’t an online journalism post, but a Public Service Announcement to fellow bloggers.

A few journalism-related blogs I read regularly have gone down recently, thanks to idiot hosting companies and soulless hackers. So a word to the wise: spare yourself major agony, go into your admin tools and create a backup of your blog database (and, um, not on the same server your blog is on).

[UPDATE: Richard Koci Hernandez recommends this WordPress backup plug-in.]

Here are instructions for WordPress, Movable Type and Blogger. Do it yesterday. It really only takes a few minutes.

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Twitter, the microblogging application that’s taken the geek world by storm, seems to have grown quite popular with news organizations.

Check out this great list from Carlos Granier-Phelps of media outlets throughout the world that are now using Twitter. The list includes media organizations from South America, Europe, the U.S. and more. [Tip o’ the hat to Andy Dickinson]

[UPDATE: Bill Couch points out in the comments that there’s a great list here too.]

Take a few minutes to scope out what other news orgs are up to on Twitter. Some, like the New York Times, have set up feeds that instamatically post new news to Twitter. Some, like OrlandoSentinel.com, post just the big breaking news. And others have been microblogging the election and branding Twitter feeds to particular reporters.

And if you haven’t already, make sure to grab your site’s name on Twitter before somebody else does!

[A List of News Organizations using Twitter]

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A blog pessimist can usually be identified by his disgusted yet confused expression.
[Photo by Luca5]

I won’t waste pixels tonight re-hashing how, despite their different modi operandi, independent blogs and mainstream news organizations can form a mutually beneficial relationship. Instead, I’m going to point you to a vat of venom so pernicious and long-running that it should make the heads of folks like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis spin.

I’m talking about the Bloggers Blog “blog pessimism” category, ongoing since February 2005.

From ESPN sports analyst Stephen A. Smith proclaiming that “someone with no training should not be allowed to have any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level which they can” to actor Jared Leto opining that blogging “should die a sudden death,” you’re going to find all sorts of fun stuff here.

So hold your nose, and dive right in. It’ll help you understand the views of the self-righteous God’s gifts to dead trees who’ve never had a blog and probably never will.

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Alright, I admit it. I’m a sucker for Top 10 lists. It comes with being a contributor to a pop culture blog; Top 10 lists are our bread and butter!

So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Paul Bradshaw’s post over at the Online Journalism Blog highlighting a list of most popular journo-bloggers based on Bloglines and Google Reader subscriptions. If you’re scouring the Web for quality online journalism blogs, then swing by, and subscribe away.

Also, make sure to take a look at the comments, as there is some hearty discussion and mentions of several highly popular blogs that weren’t on the original list.

And, in a classic Charlie Brown moment, Journalistopia scraped in at No. 11, according to Paul in the comments. Top o’ the B-list! Hoo-rah!

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Shawn Smith over at New Media Bytes queried the hive mind at the ONA listserv, did his own digging and has put together a list of best newspaper blogs for comments, community and readability.

[UPDATE: Also, make sure to check out Squared’s list of Mama Tribune’s most popular blogs. Good stuff here!]

Among the picks: Bakosphere, Pop Candy, Pogue’s Posts, Stuck in the ’80s and many more.

This is a great list for inspiration and to gather pointers on blogging practices (at least as applied to newspaper sites), so check it out!

(And since Shawn for the most part excluded sports blogs on the list, I’m going to plug The Other Football, a soccer blog written by Brant Parsons for the Sentinel, as a heck of an example of how to do a sports blog well all by your lonesome.)

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Live from the ONA conference in Toronto…

Lots of cool folks are now blogging the Online News Association conference:

-Amy Webb is writing up a great string of posts on the blogging ethics working group going on right now (I know this because I’m peeking over her shoulder… muahaha).

-Bryan Murley has been busy blogging too and even took a picture of me looking creepy in the background behind Jay Rosen.

-BlogTalkRadio has been broadcasting live from the conference.

-Steve Safran over at Lost Remote has touched on some of the community journalism issues.

-Matthew Ingram blogged the future of news panel (and entirely on a Blackberry no less).

-Alfred Hermida blogged the future of publishing panel, focusing on mobile devices.

-JD Lasica –who showed off his mad moderator skills during the community evangelist panel– blogs about the future of news discussion.

-The student newsroom is chugging away with stories, photos and video.

-And last but not least, we’ve got Tweets galore here.

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