This week the Sac Bee announced another experiment with content in the blog-o-sphere, called Sacramento Connect. Connect will put access to 25 hand picked blogs on their web page tool bar, including some of our local blogs.
When you visit sacbee.com or a couple dozen other sites and blogs in the Sacramento region next week you'll see a toolbar across the bottom of your screen with the Facebook and Twitter icons on it. Also integrated into the toolbar are a Yahoo search engine and an aggregator called LingoSpot, which will list related content based on what you are currently clicking.Both the search engine and aggregator will focus on finding content from sacbee.com and a network of blogs and sites handpicked by Bee editors for their consistent quality. Some of the sites and blogs have been around the region for awhile and have a good number of followers.
More Details here.
I hope this is more successful that some of the past efforts of the Bee to join the blog-o-sphere. In May of 2007 the Bee Launched the Hot House climate change blog. Details here.
The blogger was Stuart Leavenworth, a Senior Editor at the Bee. It was not long before some of the California bloggers who were interested in climate change started challenging the facts in Stuart's posts. He could not answer our questions, and in exasperation he finally declared that Hot House was only interested in the politics of climate change, not if climate change was real. I wrote this on January 20th 2008:Stuart has banned any discussion of global warming on the Hot House blog that questions the belief humans are responsible for global warming. Counter arguments showing global warming has stopped while CO2 continues to increase, that arctic ice melted is a natural cycle, hurricane intensity or numbers are not increasing, and more droughts are cause by the lack of precipitation not increased temperatures which increase atmospheric moisture are not welcome. Stuart is tired of answering all the blog posts that went against his religious preferences, so he banned all technical discussion of global warming from the Hot House. I guess it became to hot in the Hot House. (More details here)
The part of this experiment troubling me the most is this statement: "network of blogs and sites handpicked by Bee editors for their consistent quality." Given the Bee's long history of support for liberals and the environmentalist loons in the Legislature, will Sacramento Connect be any different? Are we going have a balanced selection of local bloggers or just more of the same old liberal . . . . ?
Stay Tuned
