CBS has asked a review panel to look at all the their reporting surrounding the Dan Rather fake memo controversy. Foxnews is reporting that everyone is pointing fingers at Mary Mapes a senior news reporter who is expected to take the fall for the story.

Please, please, please someone at CBS standup and make the person who actually put the story on air. The person takes credit for all the good stories take the blame when a bad story goes on air. Get rid of Dan Rather for knowingly broadcasting a false story.

Here’s a great example of creating a great new website with old Content. RadioLovers.com has hundreds of vintage radio shows that you can listen to or download for free. They feature radio greats such as Abbot and Costello, Superman, Groucho Marx, Gun Smoke and Charlie Chan. Most of these shows went off the air when TV became popular in the 1950s, but now you can listen to them online.

In this week’s Time Magazine Andrew Sullivan, founder of The New Republic magazine explains why you can thank bloggers for bringing Dan Rather’s mishaps to light. He goes on to promote his idea of blogs being a media revolution decreasing the cost of entry to the marketplace of ideas to a minimal investment.

Sullivan writes, “What blogs do is provide the best scrutiny of big media imaginable—ratcheting up the standards of the professionals, adding new voices, new perspectives and new facts every minute.”

Jakob Nielsen is even getting into the swing of politics as the election season progresses. His latest alertbox looks at the email newsletters sent out by both major political party’s campaigns entitled Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated. As could be expected he gives both political parties email newsletters very low scores.

As a side to Nielsen’s statements, I’d like to say that I have rarely seen a site that Nielsen gave high marks to, that I did not consider plain and dull. Just take a look at his usability guru site Useit.com.

In her Web Watch column on WashingtonPost.com Leslie Walker discusses howAmazon’s A9 search engine reaches beyond google’s basics. A9 serves up Google’s search engine results (which they buy from Google) and adds a couple of extra features which sound a whole lot like popular Amazon features. For example, they let people store and search their personal web history, bookmakrs and files and then produce recommendations of websites they think you might like based on your surfing habits.

In Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Steve Yelvington points us to the latest survey of broadband penetration. In many markets high-speed internet connections at home now out number dial-up connections.

This revelations pushes us to question if we still always need to be conscious of the download time of our content on a slow line to the internet? It also makes me wonder if we are losing some broadband customers because our content is not as interactive, multimedia as they expect.

Debbie Weil, the web writing wizard, believes a good blog can be an integral part of business and help a business make money. In her email newsletter, WordBiz Report, she is promoting an article entitled Advice to the bloglorn: top 3 tips to banish fear of blogging by Lois C. Ambash. The article is a little technical and very long, but if you want to understand the side of those advocating blogging for business, it is a good read.

In the latest installment of his “Alertbox Newsletter, Jakob Nielsen declares “much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD: many sites don’t fit into the big picture, and are too difficult to use because they deviate from expected norms.” He goes on to complain about how many web sites don’t follow any of the design conventions established on the web.

In several realms of my life (teaching and research), I’ve been trying to define what exactly makes a weblog. I’ve started off on a web search to try to help me find some authoritative resources on this.

One of the best articles that I’ve ran across on this subect is entitled “What makes a weblog a weblog?” by Dave Winer. Winer is currently associated with Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, but he is a blog pioneer founding early blog software company Radio UserLand and part of the team that came up with the RSS specification for syndicating blogs (and all sorts of other things) on the Internet.

According to a post in Poynter Online’s E-Media Tidbits pastor’s may soon start encouraging church members to bring their cell phones to church. Instead of passing the plate, a group of church’s in Denmark have set-up where members can give via a SMS system on their cell phones.