Holla at your board!

Lately we’ve been getting a lot of “I don’t know where to put this” comments, from document dumping to appointment TV spoilers, so I’ve decided to dust off an old idea and reintroduce The Rag Board, a community forum. This time it’s powered by bbPress, a robust forum software built by the WordPress people.

Sign up today and start posting. Feel free to send me ideas for new Forums, though the 3 existing ones should give us enough fuel for a while. I’m making a goal of 30 discussions going by the end of April. Have fun!

Smosh win YouTube award

As a further sign of how out of touch I am with the YouTube generation, I learned about this from none other than Christina Mendonsa. Local YTers Smosh have won a coveted YouTube award for Best Comedy video of 2006. I’m happy for the two, but I can’t believe more than 4 people thought this was the funniest thing they’d seen in 2006 on YouTube. Video after the jump.

Continue reading “Smosh win YouTube award”

News10.net to “engage and inform”

News 10’s Sharon Ito will be leaving “News 10 Good Morning” on March 23. She will be replaced by Kelly Jackson from KSDK in St. Louis.

Kelly is replacing Sharon Ito, who is championing a new initiative on news10.net. Sharon is currently developing a new approach to news that will engage and inform internet news users.

I wonder if part of that “new approach” is to proofread stories before publishing (or after even, I’m flexible). At any rate, I’m all for making the news we receive via the Internet engaging and informative. Trail blaze, Sharon, trail blaze!

Continue reading “News10.net to “engage and inform””

Calif. Study: MySpace.com Linked To Poor Grades

CBS13 reports that a Fresno State professor, clearly possessed of superhuman intellect, has completed what must have been thousands of hours of painstaking research and concluded that MySpace.com accounts can be linked to poor grades among high school students.

Hey Daniel, I smell a big lawsuit in your future!!! Think of your good friends at The Sac Rag when your ship comes in. These t-shirts are literally not moving themselves.

SNR website revamped; Mayor admits railyard purchase misstep

I’m getting a little behind here, working on launching a new website called BLUE MAG, an entertainment wing to my online mansion. Enjoy…

So a completely new look for the News & Review website. I think aspects of it are very attractive but it seems to me to be way too busy.

A great railyard story in last week’s issue as well. Mayor Fargo thinks that Thomas Enterprises didn’t bargain hard enough to get Union Pacific to move the tracks to accomodate the new infrastructure.

“Union Pacific should have moved their tracks. They could have done it. It would have been easy. … It’s a little bit of a sore subject, because we had hoped that our partners in all of this would be stepping up a little more, but the reality is, we wanted to get this done badly.”

So had we, Heather.

I’m doing research, honest.

I would make this one a “Make us laugh” post, but that clearly doesn’t motivate folks. But, you know what motivates people? MySpace (a place for friends) discussions. With that said…

Access to MySpace has been blocked at the Lodi Police Department.

Police officials say they decided to block access to MySpace on the department’s internal network because officers were spending too much time browsing online.

But, never fear, officers who use the site for investigations or other authorized reasons will still have access.

Hmm, if you have a site that may need to be visited from time to time for investigations and other authorized reasons, do you really need to be on that site for non-investigations and unauthorized reasons?

New day, new digs for Graswich

Reader kit (whoa! redesign) just emailed with breaking news from the Biz journal that R.E. Graswich, late of the Sacramento Bee, is bouncing back after leaving his 35-year gig by taking a new one at the Sac Mag.

He will now be writing monthly columns for Sacramento magazine and twice-weekly blogs for the magazine’s Web site, sacmag.com.

The best part about the Sac Mag’s website is that it can be read in places other than in the lobby of Supercuts. We can’t wait to see Bob’s new stuff.

MySpace & personal responsibility

While we are on the topic, I wanted to mention this story about a lawsuit that has been filed against News Corp. (the owners of the popular social networking site MySpace.)

Four families have sued News Corp. and its MySpace social-networking site after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, lawyers for the families said Thursday.

I know, shocking right? Nevertheless, the debate rolls on whether society should hold organizations like MySpace or 107.9 The End accountable for incidents like this. The site provides the forum for chaos and mayhem, but people themselves actually provide the chaos and the mayhem, right?

“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,” said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer.

Ah, interesting. But, shouldn’t the underage girls know better than to visit the site and chat it up with older dudes? I mean, no one puts a gun to these girl’s heads (if you read the story you’ll find that comes later) and forces them to log on.

Continue reading “MySpace & personal responsibility”

Placeblogger, putting the L in URL

Introducing Placeblogger, the hottest new thing in blogs dedicated to specific cities. FauxPaws pointed this out to me a few months ago but now it has launched, complete with major financial backing.

Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage.

Sounds right up our alley. Here are the Sacramento placeblogs. Now with 33% McClatchy meat!! (Ours is in the queue.) Continue reading “Placeblogger, putting the L in URL”

County’s new mapping tool goes live

Sac County rolled out a new online mapping application “that provides maps and information about services and facilities available to or near a specific property.” It’s called e-Map-It, and it’s available on their page of online services, which is actually a really nice list. As far as e-Map-It goes, it seems pretty useful. If you were looking at houses you could get all sorts of info on utilities and services. I suppose the main reason they can’t just rely on a Google maps for all the map info is because this particular one is tied to parcel number and overlaying parcel number data on GMap would probably be as time consuming as building and deploying a .NET application.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bill G. pointing out that the tool doesn’t even support Firefox, I can take back my wishy-washy approval and give this thing a big fat thumbs down.