Tag: Gothamist

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About Air Hostesses, Citizen Journalists and Greasemonkey Scripts

Gothamist is a popular blog that uses New York newspapers the same way BoingBoing uses the Internet: they pluck quotes and pictures from interesting new stories mostly from the Post and New York Times, but also don’t consider it below them to pilfer content from other blogs. Unlike BoingBoing they have a few original posts, including interviews with various New York types. Usually these are no talent filmmakers, D-grade actors, performance artists and other artsie-fartsties. Many times I was tempted to write something similar to this Greasemonkey script, but just like with Xeni’s posts, Gothamist’s interviews have an interesting tidbit in them once in a while:

From an interview with a flight attendant:
“Do you live in a crash pad?
Oh god, there’s like 25 people there. All flight attendants and pilots. It’s crazy. if you want to see a good reality show, they should put cameras in there.”

This is an idea so good that I am truly surprised that Mark Burnett did not think of this yet. A reality show about airline workers would be so awesome it’s not even funny. Those crash pads must be overflowing with sexuality and drama. The only problem will be coming up with a name : “CRASHPADS� and CRASHPAD� are Registered Trademarks of Flight Crew Services”.

I could not pass on the temptation to slap together a Greasemonkey Dumbgothamist script (download it here) that crudely attempts to remove annoying “editorial we” from Gothamist. I spent about 20 minutes modifying Dumbquotes.

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IHA: I Heart Acronyms

I am reading blogs with bloglines.com aggregator these days. I have four categories of blogs there : FIMB, PIMB, RB and LJ.

FIMB stands for Famous Incontinent and Mostly Boring. These are “A-list” blogs like Scobelizer, which are updated with the frequency of bunny poop and are so full of mentions of wiki, podcasting and other buzzwords that it’s not even funny. Still, amongst bunny pooplets there are often interesting links. FIMBS rarely generate original content, but mostly comment on what’s going on. Being gadflies they do that pretty well.

PIMB stands for Pompous Incontinent Multiauthor Blogs like Gothamist. These are usually for-profit blogs with several authors that post even more frequently than FIMBs. There’s mindless link and meme propagation galore, but with a twist. First of all they often have a unifying topic, like NYC or gadgets or politics. Then there’s the attempt to emulate print journalism with things like editorials. The most bizarre trait of some PIMBS is when different authors start to express opinions on behalf of the blog : “Gothamist will go back to finding baseball kinda boring” or “All Gothamist can say is we can’t wait to see Douche or Turd”. My guess is that PIMBs happen when a couple of IMBs or FIMBS get together. I separated PIMBS because they are not as boring as FIMBS, but left unchecked they fill my reading with buzz and white noise.

RB is a set of regular blogs, authors of which make well crafted and original posts. There are some FIMBsh blogs lumped in there, but those usually don’t have the most annoying traits of FIMBs. LJ is a set of all of my livejournal reading.