Live from Central Ave

I'm blogging from the Barnes & Noble in Colonie, N.Y., right off Central Avenue — which just happens to be the subject of this Adam Marschilok post.

Adam recently demonstrated a multimedia feature for us from the Times Union Web site called "Central Ave: Broken Dreams, Second Chances." It traces Central Ave from the mean streets of downtown Albany to the malls of Colonie. If you've ever been to the Capital Region, it's worth checking out.

Also around the blogs this week:

The $100 trolley ride. Thomas Chen offers Thanksgiving greetings with the tale of a man who got lucky after overpaying just a bit for his ride on the Green Line. Tom also thinks Boston.com could have done a better job with a video of sports writer Nick Cafardo on such burning issues as whether the Red Sox will be able to unload Manny Ramírez this winter.

Sordid tales from the SGA. Ricky Thompson shares a new blog he found, the NU Governator, that purports to offer the inside dirt on Northeastern's Student Government Association. But Ricky is skeptical of how believable any of this stuff is, citing the "middle school" tone of the proceedings.

Citizen journalism in India. Rajashree Joshi discovers a site called Instablogs, which appears to be a citizen-journalism project based in North India that's focused more on news than it is on opinion-mongering. "On the whole," she writes, "I felt that although the quality of the reports was not all that great, the variety was good. It is definitely a good start."

Digg-ing trivia. Lisa Panora points to a story in Dow Jones MarketWatch, which reports that Digg's system of allowing users to rank stories by popularity could wind up further trivializing the mediascape. She also finds a strange tale of a lost mushroom-picker who was saved because rescue workers saw the glow of his iPod. Good thing it was charged up.

Save the Internet. Jane Mackay catches up with "net neutrality," the term favored by those who oppose an attempt by large corporations to turn the Internet into a multi-tiered system favoring — well, large corporations. She also discovers that the celebrated recent New York Times article on "Web 3.0" was actually 11 months late.

The F-word. That would be "finished," which is what Glenn Yoder says Michael "Kramer" Richards is following his racist, N-word-laden tirade at a comedy club. Glenn asks, "Didn't he learn anything from the decline of George Allen?" Apparently not. The lesson would be that, in the age of the Internet, everything you say can and will be recorded, uploaded and used against you.

Cable news crack-up. Chris Estrada says the debut of Al-Jazeera's new English-language channel and the upcoming launch of France 24 mark the further fragmentation of cable news into smaller and smaller niches. He also gives props to the Houston Chronicle for embracing YouTube rather than fearing it.

Has Yahoo got game? Chelsea Petersen wonders if Yahoo may have gotten back into the game against Google with its recently announced advertising partnership with seven newspaper chains. She also shares her thoughts on the explosion in Danvers, across the harbor from where she was staying that night (thanks for your concern, Chelsea; the Kennedys are fine), as well as on some fine photos by citizen journalists posted on Boston.com (which seem to have moved).

Don't call him a "graphic novelist." Celia Soudry catches an appearance by comic illustrator and writer Joe Sacco at the recent Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism. She also offers some observations on the college student behind TVNewser and weighs in on "the date from hell" — chronicled on the Web for your voyeuristic amusement.