Posted by: greta on October 27, 2006 01:16 PM | Comments (0)

Yesterday I blogged a session about blogs for the bloggy radio show I work for.

That, plus the fact that I climbed up and down 7 flights of stairs to get to and from breakout sessions, made me feel like a character in an M. C. Escher drawing.

Brendan Greeley wants to change the way you think about blogs. Bloggers are more than their opinions about national politics; they're people, and most of them would love to tell their stories to a public radio producer. With search tools, blogs become a searchable database of 50 million people's stories, hobbies, obsessions, and email addresses. When you don't have Scott Carrier's travel budget to wander Antarctica yourself, you can at least find someone there to interview on the phone. (Or if you do have Scott Carrier's travel budget, then find them this way, go visit, and get richer tape).

Brendan suggested a few webby tools to find and keep up with your favorite bloggers:

* Blog search engines like Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

* RSS feed-readers like Bloglines: once you find a blog and a storyteller you like, subscribe to their RSS feed, so you'll know whenever they post something new. Feed readers aggregate new posts on the blogs you like so you can read them all at once.

* Flickr, a photo sharing site where photographers upload pictures and tag them by date and location, so you can easily find a person in a specific location. If a photographer has taken a picture of Sarajevo, they can probably tell a good story about Sarajevo, or direct the enterprising producer to someone who can.

* Better Whois: When a blogger doesn't list contact info, enter in the blog's URL here, and if the writer has registered the site herself (rather than using a platform like blogspot or myspace), you might be able to find a phone number here.

For me, the highlight of the session came when we got to see Open Source methods put to work by an independent producer. Brendan teamed up with new producer Zak Rosen. Zak decided he wanted to know more about the zipper industry, so he contacted bloggers to find sources and "fixers" (so-so talkers who know the terrain and can suggest great talkers) and created a short piece from his material. After a few blog searches and a lot of slogging through boring material, he'd found enough industry insiders to piece together a (slightly scattered) documentary, with incredible turnaround and for the cost of a few international phone calls.

More from Third Coast Festival 2006 :
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