Personally, I like his  Design & Coding rap better, but I like them all.

Flipping a web site sound like a great idea, but I’m wondering how many times someone buys a site they can’t turn around and sell. I think you have to be pretty picky about the sites you buy and have a marketing plan with almost a specific buyer in mind when you sell it.

1. A continuous flow of news.
2. Lots of opportunities for user participation and contribution resulting in being a part of the flow of the conversation, not the whole conversation.
3. Video (and other multimedia, but primarily video), and lots of it.
4. Lots of utility pieces, such as calendars, movie listings, and strong advertising tie-ins for classifieds and internet yellow pages.
5. Lots of databases. If it’s data, and it’s relevant to our community and we can make it searchable and/or sortable, we should have it on our web sites.
6. We should also make sure our articles, our videos, our databases — pretty much everything on our web sites — is easy to share (RSS everything).

Wouldn’t that be a fun newspaper to read and a fun newspaper to work for?

A few years ago my father introduced me to the USA Network program Monk. I think it’s a funny show and watch all the new episodes every summer, but my dad thinks it the best show on TV and watches it whenever it’s on. Tonight’s episode of Monk featured rapper Snoop Dogg as the special guest star. Snoop appeared throughout the show and even rewrote/rapped the show’s theme song. To me any show that is my dad’s favorite featuring a rapper is a culture clash, but I think this is a good example of the way our culture is created by mashing up diverse segments and opinions.

One of the results of the Internet and the Long Tail is the narrow segmentation of interests, markets and values. The mass media has always built mass culture between diverse interests, but the influence of the Internet is turning the mass media into the narrow interests. As web 2.0 blossoms, the convergence of ideas, cultures and opinions will move from the mass media to the individual mash-ups. People will find those mash-ups, be introduced to new ideas with referrals from their friends– online virtual friends who they trust.

Let’s review for the MLB’s sake. Information such as the player’s on a roster, their number, batting average, ERA and game stats and scores are all just information that is not able to be owned by anyone. MLB is allowed to act like my toddler and not let ESPN play at the all-star game for not following their rules, but they aren’t allowed to sue over someone else using their information.

One night at Two Boots pizza, I meet some tourists visiting from Kansas City: Kent Gasaway, his daughter Hannah, and two of her friends. The girls are 15. They have identical shiny hair and Ugg boots, and they answer my questions in a tangle of upspeak. Everyone has a Facebook, they tell me. Everyone used to have a Xanga (“So seventh grade!”). They got computers in third grade. Yes, they post party pictures. Yes, they use “away messages.” When I ask them why they’d like to appear on a reality show, they explain, “It’s the fame and the—well, not the fame, just the whole, ‘Oh, my God, weren’t you on TV?’ ”

After a few minutes of this, I turn to Gasaway and ask if he has a Web page. He seems baffled by the question. “I don’t know why I would,” he says, speaking slowly. “I like my privacy.” He’s never seen Hannah’s Facebook profile. “I haven’t gone on it. I don’t know how to get into it!” I ask him if he takes pictures when he attends parties, and he looks at me like I have three heads. “There are a lot of weirdos out there,” he emphasizes. “There are a lot of strangers out there.”

As you read it, force yourself past the first racy anecdote. It gets better as you go.

• Gannett has trained 380 new videographers.
• Local and hyper-local content is the key in a news conversation future.
• They will focus on developing thousands of microsites.

I’m really proud that a member of Arkansas’ legislature is doing this. I wonder how many other state legislatures (or even Congressmen) have blogs they post to from the floor when their body is in session? I’m thinking that it can’t be too many. This blog is a great example of what open government should be.