Digital Journal — The first of a new regular column, Digital Journal presents a summary of the past week’s most intriguing, investigative and noteworthy posts from the community of Digital Journalists. These are the top-rated articles, best discussions and heated debates.
The week began with wolfman2001‘s probing and totally satirical investigation into the Digital Journal Staff moniker. The article publicized many crazy theories that could only have come from a sleep-deprived blogger, and proved further you can’t trust anyone with an animal profile name. The thread discussed Chris‘s spiky hair, it exposed that Alex is really a gorilla and gave birth to a new avatar for Wolfman that celebrates his kinship to Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Monday also saw a lively discussion about a remarkably unremarkable story: Angus burgers coming to McDonald’s in Southern California. With 475 views and 15 up-votes, museinspiredart‘s article gave clear evidence that the Digital Journal community has a guilty love of fast food.
It was surprising to learn the next morning, as I cleared the sleep from my eyes, that my coffee may not make me as alert as I’d hoped. An illuminating post from Sayovi pointed out how coffee’s boost is merely psychological as opposed to physical. And the article was nicely supplemented with a fun fact from cruiseroo: “I have heard that coffee is great first thing for stimulating the bowels.”
Whoa, that came out of nowhere.
Tuesday was busy, for both breaking news and tech-related news: Iamseven was first to report Lewis “Scooter” Libby was found guilty and convicted of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI, France hampered the progress of citizen journalists, and a humanoid robot was one step closer to mimicking the average man.
A nice break from the heavy flow of serious news, Cruiseroo served up a nice dish of light news; in a lengthy article about being addicted to DigitalJournal.com, Cruiseroo offers a cure to “Digital Journalitis,” an affliction that has befallen many a crusading journalist. Most interesting were a few illuminating comments in that article, especially from GotTheScoop and Gohomelaker who proved the power of the Internet by explaining how they were approached by the very people on which they were reporting.
Wednesday was filled with a wild mix of news, with the relatively new user Carpenter S. Newton showing his research and writing stripes in an in-depth exposé about the business of passports that looked at the passport-application process. Who knew it would be so expensive? What kind of alarm does this raise from government officials who are turning a blind eye to passport reform? DigitalJournal.com welcomes the new writer that currently owns the No. 1 spot in the rankings so far this month. Not bad for a relatively new user.
Buried in Wednesday’s pile of news was cgull‘s article about Digg reaching the one-million user mark. Kudos to Digg on the monumental achievement.
Also on the site this week, we welcomed an extremely active new user this week, hockeygrrl863, who posted a whopping 42 articles since joining 4 days ago. She kept us updated on a quashed John Lennon documentary, Sigourney Weaver baring it all for a new movie on stripping, and U2’s Bono guest-editing an upcoming Vanity Fair. For celebrity news, hockeygrrl knows more than Perez Hilton and Bonnie Fuller combined. Keep it up!
What else did this week give us? Timnleah aka Leah (we can’t figure out what name she goes by yet =P) described how the climate-change supporters found another ally in the World Wildlife Fund; museinspiredart wrote a supportive post on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales planning to build a rival search engine to Google and Yahoo; and cgull reminded us about the early Daylight Savings Time this year, especially in light of the mild scare IT experts are dishing out to the unsuspecting.
So which articles deserve the inaugural TopFinds Awards?
For Coolest Product Launch, missmolly‘s super umbrella article earns our praise for being both practical and outright innovative. For Most Amusing Headline-Writer, congrats to Planet Janet, who has given us such winners as “May The Force Be With The Person With The Biggest Wallet” and “U.S. Girls Would Rather Sleep Than Sleep With.”
Finally, DigitalJournal.com‘s lively video section played home to a few cool posts this week, ranging from a time-lapsed speed-painting to Steve Jobs dissing Microsoft. Our personal favourite is Hillary Clinton adopting a Southern accent during a speech in Selma, Alabama. This is a great example of how video perfectly complements a timely news story, and we encourage all users to seek videos of this calibre (really, you can go to YouTube if you want to see irrelevant motorcycle accidents or grannies who can’t sing on key).
A hearty kudos to everyone who contributed this week. Look for another weekly TopFinds next Friday as we continue this tradition of highlighting buried stories, breaking news, great discussion and titillating gossip on the romantic affair of Wolfman and Jaguar. Khee Mao and GTS ain’t got nothin’ on these two.
Do you have a story worth mention? How about a discussion? Post a comment with a link below.
