This is new…

I haven’t had much time to devote a post to the raging debate in the blogosphere about Drudge going after Gore this week on environmental issues/hypocrisy. There’s been some talk about it on this thread over at Drudge Forum. I have to say that Matt Drudge gets the score today, as he simultaneously publicizes that accusation and “Drudges” the Thinkprogress.org server all at the same time with his link to their site. Looks like their server has been totally taken out by this.

Best wishes trying to access your site as long as Matt keeps linking to you. That’s the down side to taking on Drudge…your server and bandwidth had better be up to the challenge.

Nice finger-pointing image theme going today.

The world is swimming in controversy and discussion of the Da Vinci Code movie. So it’s not just that Drudge has been obsessed with the film the past couple days…everyone else has also. But all this amounts to great PR for Ron Howard & co. to have a nice opening weekend gross. I hope to get some negative PR like that someday…as long as they spell my name right…

In the same vein as Digg, that I wrote about in a previous post, there’s Fark.

Fark’s been around a long time and really honed the super-community news reporting thing. Like Digg, the content comes directly from suggestions of the community. The stories are also seriously categorized in a blog format, and the sources are almost always cited. This makes the actual output of news on the site very different from the Drudge Report. However, like the Drudge Report, Fark is a site that probably publicizes a lot of overlooked news that then gets picked up by bigger news outlets.

It’s geared towards the odd or shocking, although they recently moved all their “Boobies” (basically porn) category posts to a completely different site. So Fark is more office friendly now, but you still don’t quite know what you’ll see over there. Like the Drudge Report, it’s a dirty little secret site that legions of internet users can’t resist checking throughout the day.

This shot was too close for comfort. I don’t need to be able to count the President’s nosehairs. Credit to Drudge for coming up with an intense photo to match the mounting “pressure” on the president. But it’s a bit too late at night for me to digest this photo…or count nosehairs.

Something cool happened on Drudge Radio last night. I know because I wasn’t listening. Don’t even bother filling me in. Something always transpires the week I’m not up to document the show…something relevant to my book, something I could comment on here, something really cool to distract myself from my Monday morning responsibilities. It’s Matt’s Law. If he can think up something really cool to do or say, he’ll do it when no one’s paying attention.

Either he went off on a crying jag, or he proposed to his girlfriend on-air (no, I already debunked those gay rumors), or, even more shocking, he contradicted Pat Buchanan live and on-air. Or the ultimate irony: he addresses our April Fool’s posting from last month and goes off on another tirade about people who call themselves bloggers (meaning us).

Drudge Blog and Drudge Forum have gotten questions about this issue. First, let me go on record as saying, do tune in to Drudge’s show your local station when you can. I won’t lecture you here and now about how ratings work or the importance of supporting radio advertisers and not taking free radio for granted, blah, blah, blah. But if you can’t listen live anyway, here are your options:

Pretend Pundit records and archives the radio show. His online disclaimer should protect him from legal liabilities. If he ever stops, though, you can:

1- Record the show on a radio station with the “Listen live” option (Drudge posts several links in major cities - including NY, LA, Tampa, Miami, West Palm Beach, and Atlanta) a few hours before the show. You’ll notice he doesn’t post the streams on a rare night he has a substitute.

2- Listen or tape at 8:30 pm Eastern time on WABC . The New York”warmup” show starts a half-hour before Drudge goes national.

FYI - There’s always an awkward station identification break during the last 5-10 minutes of the show, so the last quarter hour is generally toast. If you’re at home but want to go to bed, tune in to the warmup show and click off at that point, when things get a little repetitive and the callers get dumber.

Someone else online synopsizes the radio show, but it’s not quite the same thing. I’ve transcribed parts of some shows but worry about the copyright implications of posting too much of it online. I do post excerpts when I’m making a point in a DrudgeBlog essay. (Come to think of it, I’ve got a commonplace book of quotes that deserves a posting of its own…)

UPDATE: Something rather cool did happen last night. A Drudge Forum regular, who can love Matt more than I ever could, successfully made it onto the airwaves. Her brush with greatness is recounted here.)

The topic coverage of the posts here on Drudge Blog will be expanding just a bit beyond the Drudge World. You’ll see a few more posts covering new media, internet journalism, and the news biz in general. We’ve already done this sometimes here and there, but expect to see more. Now you’ve been warned.

Life or Death?
Life.
Drudge tells it like it is today.

Anyone been able to reach the link that Drudge has had posted on his site today - Pimpfants? It’s been “Service Unavailable” all day. He probably unintentionally “Drudged” their server. Not too many servers can handle being Drudged. It’s like in geekdom being Slashdotted where the server is overwhelmed by linking to it on a super high traffic site like Slashdot…

**Update 5:15pm - He removed the story from the Drudge Report and now the site can be reached. He probably wasn’t intentionally bringing their site to its knees. As RegoPark noted, he probably just did what he did for a good story. Nevertheless, their server was taken out for most of today…

Not only did Matt Drudge make Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world, he also made the cover (though he shares it with some other folks ).

Hopefully the power won’t go to his head.

Thanks for catching this one ScurvyDawg!

Mayday! Mayday! Matt Drudge has made Time’s top 100…well, if I had to tell you he was influential, he wouldn’t be so damned influential, now, would he?