A couple of good-news items from the AP crossed my desk over the weekend:

At work this week we let another website escape from the zoo. Ruby Baboon is another take on the user-driven context engine concept: a metasite that pulls together lots of interesting stuff around a topic, all nominated and graded and ranked by users. It uses individual item nominations and RSS feed nominations from users, and pulls in related images and videos from Flickr and YouTube.

For about a dozen years now I've dragged around a Windows laptop, starting with a '486 Thinkpad running Windows 3.1. I'm switching to a MacBook Pro as soon as the new hardware arrives.

Don't get all heated up, Mac users; I am not joining the Church of Jobs. But I need to replace my laptop, and I see no point in continuing with the same set of irritations. It's time for a new set.

The Suburban Newspaper Association has announced (warning: PDF file) the winners of its first Local Community Website Contest, and Bob Kempf of WickedLocal.com is going to need a wheelbarrow to haul around his awards. Congratulations, Bob.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a reporter, I occasionally would run across a self-important jackass of a public official who would try to confiscate my notebook, camera, or film to prevent me from reporting or photographing something.

I grew up with the notion that journalists were dedicated to openness and public disclosure, and opposed to the occasional wannabee totalitarian. But lately I've become convinced that in some professional journalistic organizations, the same tendancies lurk just beneath the surface.

It's often said there's no such thing as bad publicity. Now it appears that the war on social networking and the anti-Myspace coverage in the mass media have backfired. Metrics vendor Hitwise is reporting that Myspace.com has climbed to the No. 1 position among U.S. Internet users with a stunning surge in traffic from May to July.

Jeff Jarvis is backing away from that loaded term "citizen journalism," and contemplating "networked journalism" as an alternative. Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but is it necessarily the same rose? I think the real problem in the debate over so-called citizen journalism has been a lack of concensus over what process is being described, not merely the label we attach to it.