Where’s Scott?

As the new book is finishing the copy-edit phase of its production cycle, I’ve turned my energy to a number of new projects, which explains the slow blogging here.

I’ve already posted a bit about my entry in the Knight News Challenge competition — MediaBugs, a public “bug tracker” for errors and other problems with media coverage. I’ve now submitted a budget for that project, and we’ll see how far I get as the competition advances.

I’m also working with two great collaborators — Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon — on developing a new site focusing on media criticism. We’re still in the early stages but moving quickly, and I’ll be writing more here about the work as it moves toward public release.

Then I’m also in the early stages of building a site devoted to blog history. In the course of my book research I accumulated a huge amount of material relating to blog history, vastly more than could be included between the covers. There is no reason for this material to be locked away on my hard drive. Much of it is of course public already on the Web, but scattered. Some of it is off the live Web and now accessible only through Internet Archive URLs. Some of it is original interview material that just didn’t make the book but that’s valuable in its own right.

I would like to put as much of this information out onto the Web as I can, in a useful way, as an open public resource on the subject. I’ve been exploring options for wikifying it all and will report more on that as it moves forward.

So that’s all keeping me busy indeed — and staving off anything like the writerly equivalent of post-partum depression.