One of the funny things about reading some print journalists try to “get” blogs is just how bad their information is. You wonder whether an article was written three months ago and just stuck in the can or whether the journalists just don’t bother to read the blogs they write about.

Take, for example, the Washington Post’s latest report on blogging. Opines the scribe: “while blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth.”

Hmm. The final paragraph notes that “people are pushing the boundary of blogging formats.” For example, “CityBlogs.com is pioneering an attempt at locally oriented blogging in New York City.” OK. Click on CityBlogs.com and discover that the site, launched in November 2002, hasn’t been updated since December 17, 2002. Why didn’t the Post get one of its “paid staff to ferret out and vet” the fact that CityBlogs has been shuttered longer than it was open?

Dave Winer, who was interviewed for the story, has some further thoughts.

Rick Bruner hears the President say Iran when he means Iraq. Rick looks at the NYTimes’ quotation but the mention of Iran has been omitted. What gives, Rick asks?

As I recall, there’s some long-standing tradition among journalists of quoting Presidents EXACTLY. No cleaning, no sanding, no smudging. (Is this even codified in the AP style book?) Presidential words, after all, have incredible de facto and de jure power; they are, in some quasi-religious sense, the utterances of the United States itself. So this retouching shouldn’t go unremarked.

While visiting Rick’s blog, don’t miss the BUSH SPAM one slot higher on the page.

Ever dryly hilarious and sloshingly brilliant, Ken Layne explains why a new column in an Australian newspaper is called The Continuing Crisis.

Dave Winer says he gets roughly 5000 visitors when monster-community publishing site Slashdot links to him, and says this is typical of other Manila and Radio sites.

Dave asked why Joel Spolsky, author of Joel on Software, gets 400,000 reads from a Slashdot link.

For comparison, I wrote my buddy Ben Sullivan, who publishes ScienceBlog. He says “For me, the Slashdot effect is spilt in two. Sometime they put a story from Science Blog exclusively inside on their science section. That generates, maybe, 2,000-3,000 reads over several weeks. But a front page posting for all the world to see brings in about 10,000, almost immediately (12-24 hour period).”

So I wrote Joel, noting that other other folks get up to 10,000 page views when Slashdotted. Joel replied: “we get about 30,000 page views on a normal day and about 120,000 page views on a Slashdot day. This includes every page, not just the one that slashdot linked to, and I’m not counting based on referrers because that only gets the first page. … I think my site is quite a bit stickier than average. (Every day I get a few emails of the form: ‘I found your site from a link and spent the whole afternoon reading everything…’).”

On his blog, Joel has added further context, noting that a) the number Dave originally quoted was for “hits,” which are approximately 400% higher than “page views” and b) the Slashdot links always come on days when he’s sent out his newsletter to 16,000 subscribers c) plenty of other bloggers link to him on that day.

For reference, a February 1999 article about the Slashdot effect’s impact on traffic at three web sites concluded that Slashdot could drive up to 4000 readers to a popular link. An addendum to that article noted that the original article got 17,000 visits after being Slashdotted itself.

NYTimes.com: “Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person’s typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic…. Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid….By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.”

Stephanie Miles reports in the WSJ, “In April, readers of NYTimes.com, owned by New York Times Co. will start seeing half-page ads running down the right side of the page as they read online articles. The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad.”

Olivier Travers has some good advice for publishers who think their archives are gold: “They still need to create products that are unique to the web in order to trigger better response rates. Database sites such as Hoover’s or Imdb Pro can’t be done in paper. Community sites, from eBay to ClassMates to Match.com, hook people with one another, and that’s another unique value to the Internet. We need to see more of that, as opposed to premium rate archives of articles that aren’t that interesting to start with.”

I heard what my son calls a “Zuki” concert yesterday, including a teacher’s rendition of this cello piece. You can read a log of the Shuttle’s final two hours here. Now what will happen to these three? The Nytimes business section headlines “Shuttle’s Effect on Economy May Be Small”… why bother with the article?