NPR looks back at the pioneering music blogs, many of which began a decade ago.  Jesus this makes me feel old.

Here’s a thought: If you’re going to do an article about the changing face of sports column writing four-years late with the angle being a mini-profile of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, arguably America’s favorite columnist (and New York Times #1 best-selling non-fiction author), you should probably be much more thorough on both subjects than the New York Times cared to be.

Go figure that the mainstream media wouldn’t provide an ample description of what the Bart Stupak Amendment is all about and that a little old blog would.  This is hardly surprising, but always disappointing when it happens.  And only reinforces the notion that the MSM isn’t muckraking enough.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about the tragedy at Fort Hood yesterday except that the media’s handling of the event (blaming PTSD when he’d never been to combat, forcing events to fit into their narrative, the thinly veiled notion that he’s actually a terrorist or that jihadists have infiltrated the military) has been specious at best and at worst yet another reason to never watch network news. 

Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

There is no surprise anymore that fetishes have gone mainstream, or are at least accepted enough that when someone tells you they are into say, watching grandmas with chainsaws or pregnant women read books by a fireplace, neither of those scenarios are all that shocking.  And it’s not shocking because chances are there is  a website devoted to either of those fantasies.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by this magazine, Girls and Corpses, that is the amalgamation of sexy girls and dead bodies, because it acts no differently than Equire or whatever gentleman’s magazine you prefer to read.  If I were still nine years old, this magazine would have been my sweet spot.

CNN.com redesign. Nice evolution.  The layout is breathable, but they still manage to pack a lot into the main page, including a feature called NewsPulse and a better method for using inline video.

This is exciting news.  Redlasso, which was a site that allowed people to search and clip and embed live television and radio clips, went dark in July of 2008 due to a lawsuit from NBC/FOX.  Obviously there were copyright issues, but I found the site to always be the first place I would look, when say, searching for highlights from an awards show either while it was still on the air or immediately afterwords.  I was a bit sad when it went dark and completely put it out of my mind.

Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers.  The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.

According to a press release:

The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country.  There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design.  Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta.  The new site will have:

• Daily featured clips
• The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
• The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
• The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
• The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
• A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
• A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
• New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!

It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.

Oh it’s on!  Anita Dunn, the White House communications director: “We’re going to treat them [Fox News] the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Whoa! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve checked in with Boing Boing (not sure why) but they have a very snazzy redesign that I’m totally jealous of.  Kudos to Boing Boing.  Oddly enough it’s very reminiscent of Kottke’s most recent redesign.  Font-wise, etc.

NPR profiles the musical kingmaker through the lens of their recent top 200 albums of the decade list. 

“Pitchfork’s position as indie kingmaker was cemented at the decade’s mid-point, but kings don’t always last in indie rock. The twin peaks of the Forkhype range were Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which showed up at No. 2 on the decade list, and CYHSY’s self-titled debut, which was left off entirely,” writes Jacob Ganz. ”That binary seems fitting for a Web site that’s more emblematic of music in the Internet era than any other: Pitchfork in the 2000s has been the story of how effusive praise can avalanche into a kind of canonization, even as the thrill of discovery sometimes ends in embarrassment and revisionism.” 

This is fairly nerdy musical stuff here, looking at the decade-long evolution of arguably the one music publication that still matters.

Twacy.org is committed to getting Tracy Morgan on Twitter — it seems so obvious!

Eyeball created PBS’s new branding and it looks fantastic.  I love the simplicity of the slogan “Be More” and how evocative the color scheme is.  Well done.  As part of the campaign, which will roll out on September 27 during Ken Burn’s new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Eyeball designed 630 different on-air, online, and print elements to push the new branding into the public’s consciousness.

You can check out other images and videos of the rebranding campaign at Eyeball’s site.

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times died on Sunday. He was 79.

His conservative politics aside, it’s pretty badass to be remembered as the “oracle of language” upon passing away:  “There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ and ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’”