Specialized Newsblogs

The Internet has changed the nature of news. News is no longer what a group of editors at the newspaper or radio/television editors decide to report in their time/space for an ever-shrinking audience (they are all going to the 'Net).

News is happening all the time to all of us and it is altering our fields from moment to moment, since news is essentially the emergence of new information, events, techniques, concepts, and ideas. The main forum for this news is the WWW, but we can't possibly keep visiting all the websites we need to every hour or so. RSS aggregators scan the Internet according to our specifications and harvest the latest postings (most update every few hours).

Managing a newsblog for the web is not something you can set once and then forget it. It requires a degree of monitoring and tweaking as new sources for feeds are discovered and added, as keywords are refined to sharpen the focus, and other criteria are developed for how the information should be displayed.

If you have visited Musicing News and Views recently, you will notice it has changed considerably in the past few days. It still looks the same, but the content has changed drastically. There have been new sources added, and the newsblog searches for the most recent entries on the sources and reports them in the order of newest to oldest. For sources that are blogging as a source for the feeds, they may find they are not included if their blog entries have been few and far between. I find I am discovering new ideas as I visit the newsblog. As far as I know Musicing News and Views is the first newsblog of its kind, and several of my colleagues have created newsblogs to reflect their interests and/or needs.

Musicing is expanded to mean making music and music making and all the attendant factors that are a part of this human activity of creating, playing, listening, studying, teaching, learning, theraping, and technologizing that make up the lives of people musicing today. These activities all meld into process in which distinctions overlap and actions complement and stimulate one another.