"The Year in Ideas."

I open this week's NYT Magazine with great excitement. It's time for "The Year in Ideas." Blogging, I'm in a position to notice a lot of the ideas that make the news, and, generally, I'm more interested in ideas than events, so I wonder how many of the things the magazine has chosen will be things that I've blogged about. Actually, I only found 3:

1. The anti-rape condom. I blogged about the "Rapex" here.

2. "Pleistocene Rewilding," I blogged that here.

3. "The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution." Blogged here.

So, I found lots of new things to fascinate me, especially:

"The False-Memory Diet"

"The Hypomanic American"

"Microblindness"

"Preventing Suicide Bombing"

"Splogs"

"Stoic Redheads"

There's a good idea that isn't on the list but is exemplified by something on the list. That is: MSM referring to blogs. A great strategy for traditional news sites to get more readers is to say something about blogs in their stories. Bloggers will tend to notice -- it's about me! -- and devote a blog entry to the story. I know this strategy works on me. For example, last week, I wrote about "food swings," and I'm sure part of the reason the story jumped out at me as bloggable was because there was some material in there about how some of these food swing types blog about their adventures in hunger management.

"The Year in Ideas" makes its plea for attention from bloggers with this entry: "Conservative Blogs are More Effective." Throw that into Technorati and see if there isn't a hot new idea deserving a mini-article titled, perhaps, "Tossing in a Reference to Blogs Is More Effective." Oh, and it helps if the reference to blogs also says something that a lot of bloggers are going to feel isn't quite right, so that we'll instantly fire up a compose window and start typing out the little insight they could so easily have predicted. "Conservative Blogs are More Effective" is a perfect example of this. You know all those conservative bloggers, always ready to go, always monitoring the MSM. They will surely bite at this one!