A photographer for ABC 24 News in Memphis recently had a confrontation with a Memphis police officer (click on the Video link at the top of the story). It seems a Memphis Police officer was involved in an accident and his fellow patrolmen wanted to keep the TV cameras back. Of course, he didn’t apply the same rules to the rest of the public. This goes backs to my post several weeks ago about how most police officers from federal agents down to your local Sheriff’s office need training on how to handle the media (because otherwise they end up looking like pigs).

I finally found someone to send me an invite to participate in the beta test of Google’s gmail (with 1 GB (1000MB) email service) and today Yahoo! announces they will up their email limit to 100MB of free storage. I’m partial to Yahoo since I’ve had a Yahoo email account since around 1997 and I like the user interface on their webmail, plus their spam filter works great. Google’s gmail interface is just as clean as Yahoo mail, plus they have autocomplete on the contact information and a great email search engine based off their popular web search.

Besides my Yahoo mail account (lannie_byrd@yahoo.com) and my Gmail account from Google (narrowcaster@gmail.com), I also have five other email accounts that I check on a semi-regular (hourly to weekly) basis. How many email accounts do you keep up with?

MSN sold it’s color palette today as it shifted everything to red to promote Coca-Cola’s new C2. (1/2 the carbs, 1/2 the cals).

Besides taking over the color scheme, they have an interactive surfer catching a wave a C2 spilling out over the whole page. Mediapost has an article about Coke’s Integrated Marketing strategy with MSN.

Today, we will lay to rest Ronald Reagan. He has slowly faded from our minds over the past 10 years, but reappears this week for one final drawn out farewell. Whether you are a liberal or conservative, you must admit that Reagan’s orchestration of the fall of the Soviet empire was one of the greatest events of the twentieth century. Before you read the rest of this post and come to the conclusion that I am (was) one of those liberal media whores, I would like to say that I believe that a very strong argument can be made that Reagan was our best President of the twentieth century.

Watching the events surrounding first state funeral in the United States in my lifetime has brought a thoughts to my head over the past week.

• The media has been very friendly to Reagan’s memory this week. Will the Reagan bashing start anew after the sun sets on the West coast tonight
• I’ve watched the public parade past Reagan’s casket lying in state in the Capitol dome and I have to admit that I’ve wondered what drives people to stand in line for three-to-four hours to quickly walk past the casket.
• Along the same lines as above, if you do feel a need to be quickly herded past President Reagan’s body, please dress more appropriately than shorts and a halter top.
• I really don’t see a reason for all federal (and some state and county) offices to be closed today. If you work on Capitol Hill, I understand that you would not get any work done today because of the crush of crowds in Washington, but I don’t understand why my local mailman needs an extra day today to go out and spend a day on the lake.

I admit it, your likely to find me in church on a Sunday morning and preoccupied with church activities, but one thing that always bothers me is pastors, particularly Southern Baptist pastors, tendency to generalize the media with a broad liberal, anti-Christian paint brush. I found a hilarous caricature of this generalization of the media on the Hartford Courant’s website. Here’s a short excerpt…

“This anti-Bush meeting is nicknamed “Get Shorty,” and is presided over by the Skew Editor, who is generally, but not always, the most rabid Bush hater on the staff.”

Jonathan Dube from MSNBC.com recently published a list of 101 ways to improve your news site. Some of my favorites include

• Create games around the news for wireless devices
• Offer a subscription where people can view the entire site ad-free for an extra charge
• Buy a TiVo for your newsroom so reporters can pause and rewind anytime there’s breaking news on TV – or a live press briefing – and get exact quotes
• Use the Weblog format to cover a breaking news event
• Create a whole special section online for younger readers. Find local student journalists to help write for it

Apple has introduced the AirPort Express which will allow you to deploy a wireless network in your home and plug in your stereo so that you can wirelessly stream music to remote speakers. Interestingly, this product, like the iPod and iTunes, works with both Macs and PCs.

What if all the news you ever read came from blogs? Not from the articles blogs link to, just from what someone writers in a blog themself? You can read how this experiment turned out when Steve Rubel, a blogger and PR executive tried ithimself last week. If you depended on my blog for all your news, you would be in a very sad state.

One of NYTimes.com roaming multimedia journalists recently revealed theirdigital toolkit to Poynter online’s Steve Outing.

Naka Nathaniel carries a G4 laptop for creating his projects and IBM laptop to transfer them, surf the web and check email. He also uses a Canon D60 digital SLR camera, a Sony PD-140 MiniDV camcorder and a USB drive to move files between the Mac and PC. He says about a fifth of his digital toolkit is made up of convertors, chargers and cords to make sure he can stay charged and connected.

Nine months after Congress told the Pentagon to kill their

“Total Information Awareness” electronic snooping program, they are still trolling private databases under different program names. Hawaii Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka said, “The federal government collects and uses Americans’ personal information and shares it with other agencies to an astonishing degree, raising serious privacy concerns.”