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For some time now, I’ve been contemplating starting a new website. Unlike this site, which is my all-purpose soapbox, this new site would be more focused in its scope. That would not only allow me to create a more focused forum, but it would give me the opportunity to practice other skills, such as marketing and promotion.

My first instinct is to write about law and technology issues. After all, this is where I have the most training and experience. I also enjoy researching and writing about both. Of course, I also need to figure out who my audience will or should be. Do I want to appeal to technology geeks, law geeks, the general public, or some mix thereof?

One of the aims for the new site would be a more “professional” style and appearance, whatever that may mean. What sort of standards would I need to follow? Should I try to create something on par with a traditional media outlet, or should aim for a more “blog” like approach, preferring breadth to depth? Should I try to engage in original journalism, such as attending court or regulatory hearings? Do I simply take the Huffington Post route and copy/paste content from other sources?

What about issues of cross posting? Do I share content on both sites, or do I link between the two? How do I address issues of intellectual property? Do I want to try and have multiple contributors? Do I really think this site could become a serious media outlet, or would I be better served creating a site for my own amusement, like my current website.

These are early issues I am trying to work through. If any of my readers has any useful suggestions, I am open to your wisdom.

Newspapers are in trouble, so report the newspapers. So does network television, also facing new challenges from both cable television and the internet. This week, NPR’s On the Media posed the question on how to save newspapers. They played excerpts from a recent Senate commerce committee hearing on the future of journalism. After pointing fingers at one another, with Google News and the Huffington Post on one side and greedy media conglomerations on the other, the consensus seemed to be that the newspapers in particular and “old media” in general needs special help to survive.

Of course, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the media debating the virtues of the media. Journalism is a profession and a business, with its own history, customs and practices. Like all businesses, it has little interest in seeing reform or change come to its time-honored traditions. Unfortunately for the Fourth Estate, the barbarians of new media are at the gate and reform is coming to the industry, whether or not it is welcome.

The media like to use “bloggers” as a straw man to attack when discussing the woes of the current state of journalism. These ambiguous, amorphous figures sit behind laptops and anonymity, publishing the first rumor and hearsay to reach their inbox. Bloggers, according to the media, have no respect for journalistic practices and do not know how to write a story. One key question seems to go unanswered in this discussion — what is the difference between a journalist and a blogger?

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Recently, my hosting company, Laughing Squid, established a new cloud hosting service dubbed “Ultra Squid“.  Today, for essentially the same cost I’ve been paying, I now get over three times the storage, two and half times the bandwidth, more databases, and tons of email storage space.

I’ve been using LS for years and found it to be the most reliable hosting company I’ve ever used.  Hopefully that trend will continue with this new service.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with it all.

Time to scheme…

With daylight savings time coming earlier and earlier (btw, thanks for that, Congress), the return of spring now seems inevitable. Trees regain their color, birds find their song again, and my weblog undergoes its annual makeover.

Stay tuned…

WordPress 2.7 is out now. They’ve really done a nice job on the backend. Plus, it doesn’t seem to have broken my frontend. A victory on both counts!

Upgrade available at wordpress.org.

I’ve just downloaded the alpha release of Adriaan Tijsseling’s ecto blogging software. It’s a revamped version of ecto2, although “ecto3 is not ecto2″.

Among the new features, ecto3 includes a new rich-text editor, as well as support for a number of other blog APIs.

That’s about all I have right now. I’m just posting to test it out.