Is there an echo in here? 

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard is needled on "Meet the Press" about the details of his uber-replayed emotional story of the drowned nursing home resident. The tale is substantially true, the gist of it was communicated accurately. Doesn't that sound like another investigation into details that never disproved the essence of the story? Hint: Dan Rather... Air National Guard memos...

Conservative blogger tactics are a little like the picky movie or TV attorney in cross-examination: "Aha! Then, sir, you are telling us that you don't recall whether you trimmed your fingernails two days or three days prior to the assault in question. What else are you unable to recall with sufficient accuracy?"

But I'm not completely blaming the conservative bloggers for digging this stuff up. What happens next is the mainstream media comes along and lends credence to these fussy counter-allegations by giving them "equal time." Equal time seems so fair on the surface. The trouble is that fingernail trimming and assault shouldn't be weighed on the same scale. To be fair the MSM needs to say, "Now wait a second. So what's the important thing here? Did Bush breeze through his mililtary service? Yes or no. Did the nursing home resident die because the rescue coordination was screwed up? Yes or no."

(At least that's what I remember from journalism school way back when in the Watergate era. What do you put in your lead, what do you concentrate on? The part of the story that has consequence.)

Survey of podcasters last chance 

Peter Chen is surveying podcasters and video bloggers. I'm glad somebody is doing this. Deadline for responses is sometime soon. Chen doesn't say exactly when; he must be going for a certain response level.

Know what else I'd like to see? Somebody or some group step up to organize a repository for sharing of audience stats among podcasters. Just a voluntary thing, nothing like Arbitron or BPA, heaven forbid. It would be interesting to compare stats with other podcasters. I'd like to see how certain stats in my own podcast compare with other podcasters' stats. For example, is it typical for the RSS feed file to be hit 35 times more often than the average .mp3 file? I assume this is because my podcast is listed in a bunch of directories, but I really don't know for sure.

Plus, the info could provide some guidance for developers of podcast-specific stats analysis applications. Regular web stats just don't tell us enough about clients and about use of feeds generally.

I probably could learn to extrapolate most of this by hanging out more in the podcasters group at Yahoo or on the forums at Podcast Alley, but that's haphazard. Maybe it's a thesis or dissertation project, which could make it a little more neutral.