I’m too busy to think, so I’m letting these people do it for me

I’m finding I barely have time to read, much less actually write anything original these days, so I highly recommend you go away:

SJSU:

• SJSU journalism student Andrew Venegas is trying to build some community by opening up his blog to other authors, and he’s getting a little video-happy, too. Somebody get that kid some server space and a WordPress install already…
• Another SJSU j-schooler, Kyle Hansen, got Scobleized and started using Google Reader and a Reader-driven linkblog. Check out his thoughts on how to build a blogging/online journalism group at the university.

The Future of Newspapers:
Len Witt says newspapers need to “dumb down or smarten up,” breaking open the pieces of Gannett’s mojo experiment in Fort Myers and analyzing hyperlocal content to check if it’s useful information or just coverage for the sake of covering something local:

“Why not send him into a Ft. Myers neighborhood for a week or a month and make him feel like a member of that neighborhood and meet the people, hear their triumphs and tragedies? I think of my own neighborhood. There is the guy who spends his days cutting other people’s lawns, but with the caveat that he will try to save your soul. The guy who painted his house pink, in a place where no one paints their house pink. And he had a reason. The gerrymandering that separates our white neighborhood from the surrounding black neighborhoods. These are real stories that would smarten up the paper and its website rather than dumb them down by asking some random driver what he thinks of the road repair work on a Ft. Myers highway.”(Len via Bryan and Mindy)

Design:

A while back, Dan Cederholm began a live redesign of his site with a swift kick in the ass, and several Web designers followed, stripping their pages down to style-less XHTML and then designing them in full view of their peers and readers. Check out Bryan Veloso’s reception of the kick, and the still-in-progress (as of today, I think) redesign of Avalonstar. Oh, and when you’re done with those two sites, buy Dan’s books.

That’s it for now:

I’ve got just a few days to get a whole mess of things done at work and home before our holiday trip around the Western Hemisphere starts for the year, so don’t expect much more from me.  If you’re loving the links that I’m spitting, get your ass onto Delicious and check out what’s up in my network. That is all.