Micro

So this week should have been a much better week for blogging, but I haven't been doing it. Ideas flit into my head briefly, usually when I'm working or otherwise unable to update, and then I get home and don't blog. I have been using twitter a lot lately, so maybe I'm wasting all my expressiveness through micro-blogging.

As you've probably guessed, I love the internet. I love social media, although I feel pressure to keep up with all the new toys. Lately I've been meaning to check out 12seconds, which lets you make 12 second videos, and AudioBoo, which is an audio blog tool built specifically for iPhones. For anyone interested in social media, you should be following David Akin (@davidakin) and Ian Capstick (@iancapstick) on Twitter. Besides being prolific tweeters they are also the very first early adopters on the Hill for new tech stuff.

Speaking of new media...earlier this week I had to rush off to a story with about an hour's notice. It was an interview with a veteran from the Battle of the Atlantic. Naturally, I turned to Wikipedia (double-sourced at the Veterans' Affairs website). Let me lay this out for you. My history marks in high school were always in the high 80s and low 90s. I was AWESOME at history. And I couldn't even tell you if the Battle of the Atlantic was in the First or Second World War (it was WWII).

As I often do with the internet, I wondered what people - specifically reporters - used to do without it. Would I phone someone in the newsroom's library to get me some articles on it? What if I were a freelancer and didn't have library access? Reporters have beats, but it's unlikely someone on the defence/military beat would be dispatched to cover an advance story on a commemorative event.

Either we are lucky that technology arrived in time for us to deal with newspaper staff cuts, allowing us to do quick research rather than taking the time to dig through books, or they were able to make the cuts because we had technology to help us keep up with the information we're expected to manage. Maybe I should hate the internet for that.