Lisa Williams, best known for her H2oTown weblog covering Watertown, just won a $220,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for her work on Placeblogger. This is great for Lisa; she’s been doing incredible work around citizen journalism and I’m happy to see her recognized.

Jay Brewer get a nice mention in a Globe article about blogging for dollars. Congratulations, Jay!

The Globe’s Donald Murray passed away last week. I’ve never met him, but his Writing to Deadline had a huge influence on my writing. His insights on framing a story and constructing a lede are timeless.

The web would be a better read if all bloggers read his book and applied his principles.

I hope to publish more regularly starting next week. All sorts of interesting things going on…

I’m almost back to normalcy. Almost.

Don’t bring a pen when you listen to Katie Couric.

Matt Bartel, owner of the popular MNSpeak blog also was issued an invitation by WCCO [to attend the Couric ‘Town Hall’ event], although the station apparently didn’t recognize the name Bartel (ubiquitous in Twin Cities publishing circles) or his business, until the event was about to start.

“They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog,” Bartel said. “They said, ‘We don’t want you to participate,’ ” then offered him a choice: surrender his notebook or leave the event.

“I wasn’t going to give them my notebook; I had business stuff in there.”

A compromise was reached - the ‘CCO staffer confiscated Bartel’s pen instead.

I’m sure Couric had little to do with this, but the staffer’s actions reflect poorly on her.

More here, on the penless scribe’s website.

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Jay Brewer is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, talking about his success in building out the Blogpire.

[S]ix months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.

By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.

Congratulations, Jay!

(Previously: Jay’s week of Internet Fame.)

I had a horrible time with spammers on Movable Type. I hope that my new WordPress installation will avoid those problems. I missed the comments.

Comment away!

Hi everyone -

I’ve gone and redesigned the site and changed over from Movable Type to WordPress. I’m still working out some of the design and porting issues, but it should be pretty much all set. If you have any questions or thoughts, please drop me a line.

I still have a ton of work to do to port all the legacy parts of the site to the new look, but I’ll work on that piecemeal over the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Jason

I find myself with many more interesting links than I can write meaningful blurbs.

So, I will start putting up minimally annotated links each day, and save the longer write-ups for my own writing or for other items on the web which really strike a nerve. I think that this, combined with the built-in Movable Type search engine, will allow to build a better trail of where I’ve been, or as Rich calls it: breadcrumbs of my mind.

Didn’t notice this before: Globe columnist Hiawatha Bray has a weblog.

As I threatened a couple weeks ago, I’ve cut over the site from Blogger to Movable Type. I think I got everything squared away, but if you run across any wonkiness, please drop me a line…