And if bike paths don’t take you places you need to go, doesn’t that make biking a poor method of transportation?

Or are we just anti-car.

Newsflash: Bikes are not as fast as cars. And bike paths go around lakes. They don’t take you to places you need to go (usually).

Guess what? Biking is the way some people transport themselves. Get used to it, and share the road.

Best practices are emerging for citizen journalism (that may be the most boring thing I’ve ever written). I’m going to a CJ conference next month with a bunch of people way smarter than me to figure out what those best practices are. Then we can hopefully apply that to The Uptake.

The Ramones of journalism — isn’t that Stewart/Colbert?

Joe Mauer?

. . . OC: Replace “bloggers” with “ordinary citizens.”

Chuck, I’m afraid I’m going to respectfully disagree about that.

I am not a blogger, but this year I have been exploring the local blogosphere quite a bit.

My strong sense is that most bloggers are more easily triggered into an excited state than is true of the general population. . . and, again compared to the general population, they’re way more inclined to be hyper-expressive types who’ve got very strong urges to immediately say whatever’s on their mind, whether or not they’ve thought it through very well.

Bloggers typically want their sites to attract lots of traffic. I have yet to come across a site that has high traffic and comments from visitiors along this line: “Keep up the great work! I frequent your blog because you take a slow, measured, approach, posting new material only when you’re confident it’s good enough, and not writing anything when you probably don’t know enough about what you would be commenting on.”

. . . . there is a more professional level of citizen journalism emerging between the ranty blogger and the trained journalist.

I believe you, and I’m in favor of it.

A comparable well-established example of that sort of thing is citizens trained and certified to be credible severe-weather spotters/reporters.

In that example, you get the benefit of lots more eyes and ears, from the ranks of the general public, but you also assure pretty good quality-control. Something along those lines ought to be looked into with citizen-journalism. Any hobby or volunteering activity that’s lacking agreed-upon standards about quality, best-practices, ethical conduct, etc., won’t get taken very seriously.

Nevertheless, there is a more professional level of citizen journalism emerging between the ranty blogger and the trained journalist. For example, there’s not a lot of difference between what I’ve edited for ABCnews.com and Rocketboom.com, except the Rocketboom pieces are looser and quirkier.

I can’t post the full details of the police report, but it’s public information and available from Minneapolis City Hall.

The word monitored implies to me that these agencies were present from the very beginning. Does this mean this was simply a practice round for RNC? Do they call in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department (not even the same county!) to every Critical Mass?