Roanoke Times Calling All SW Bloggers

Saw this posted up on the Roanoke Times webpage today:

If you live in Southwest Virginia and are a regular blogger, we'd like to consider posting a link to your blog on this page. E-mail us and tell us about the dispatches from your world. We will list and profile some of these bloggers with biographies they've submitted.

We want this to be the place where a community of regional bloggers and their many interests can be found. And we think you'll enjoy the interactivity of trading points of view with them.

The MSM using bloggers as content and to enhance interactivity of their webpages.

Resourceful, right?

What's Wrong with This Picture?

Don't know if this is a random thought or an irregular musing ....

Picked up the Sept/Oct issue of a new mag, Worthwhile: Work with Purpose, Passion and Profit, and found these interesting stats in the mag's Measuring Stick feature:

The top three professions most considered "overworked" by Americans are: nurses (55%), teachers (45%) and housewives (44%). (Source: Princess Cruises Escape Completely survey)

See a pattern there?

Now try to fit this stat into the picture:

The percent of working fathers who "would prefer being stay-at-home dads to being the breadwinner" is 47%. (Source: CareerBuilder.com)

Do you suppose these working fathers know that "housewives" are overworked?

Or do you think that they might be operating on an idealized definition of "stay-at-home" dad that includes taking the kids to the ball game and other "quality time" parenting activities, but doesn't include washing, drying, folding and stowing the family's clothes, cleaning the house, grocery buying, food prep, driving carpool, etc, etc, etc?

Hmmmmm

Bloggers Get Googled

Hold on to your keyboards .... you're about to get Googled. Google announced yesterday that it has launched a new Google search engine for blogs. According to CNN, the first word of the announcement was "disseminated by a blog." Here's what Google's new blog guru said:

"There really has been a need for a world-class search product to expose this dynamic content to a worldwide audience," said Jason Goldman, who came to Google in the Blogger deal and is now the company's product manager for blogging search.

I guess we're about to become mainstream.

New "National Conversation" Launched

For those of you who want to get engaged in a national conversation about 9/11 and Katrina, you've got a new outlet.

From the press release issued today by Phil Noble at Politics Online:

CivisOnline, a new division of sector-leading Internet tools and strategies provider PoliticsOnline, today announced the beta launch of its latest web project, The National Conversation ( www.NationalConversation.net), with a unique conversation on Sept 11: 4 Years Later and Hurricane Katrina.

“Think of it as a national water cooler,” says PoliticsOnline president Phil Noble, “a place where regular people can ‘share and compare’ their thoughts and feelings about the biggest stories of the day in any format they choose – in words, in pictures, on video, or simply by rating the comments and content they find on the site. Once they share their ideas and opinions, users can then compare their responses to others in real time by region of the country, age, or sex. This ‘share and compare’ is a powerful idea, and one that our media partners have been interested in pursuing with us for some time now.”

Any media company, blog, or other public affairs site can become a Partner in the National Conversation simply by cutting and pasting an icon and a few lines of code available at http://www.NationalConversation.netat no cost or obligation. “The National Conversation is a unique new concept, and our free and open distribution and partner system is a part of this spirit of innovation and experimentation,” said Noble. “We’re anxious to see what happens.”

So am I!