Thursday, October 4, 2007

Trying to Refine the Stream of Debate News


As each month goes by I post a lot of debate stories at Global Debate http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com. Last month I posted 60 stories, or about two per day. This post represents an attempt to improve on the news stream and how I choose things for inclusion.

There are some items which should not be carried because any fair addition of them would totally flood the system. These include:
  • Stories in the local press about how XYZ high school did in the local tournament;
  • Blogs of specific teams talking about how they did at a tournament;
  • Local league announcements and business;
  • Local tournament invitations and results.

On the other hand, there are stories I should probably continue to carry (and perhaps increase), such as:
  • International tournament invitations and results;
  • News about international debate organizations;
  • News about debate appearing in new sectors of society;
  • News about debate appearing in new and unexpected countries;
  • New kinds of competitions and organizations;
  • International debate rankings;
  • Information about new instructional resources;
  • Debate related things that are hard to believe;
  • News about debate being staged and presented in new ways;
  • International conferences and meetings related to debating;
  • Reports from the debate frontiers and front lines;
  • Other new and interesting things that will certainly happen.

I will be adding an infrequent editorial from time to time. Do not worry, it will be clearly marked as such.

I will also be restructuring the news feeds on the side of this page, which is where I get many of my stories.

I want to salute my fellow debate news gatherers who are a resource and an inspiration to me, such as the World Debating Website at http://worlddebating.blogspot.com/ of Colm Flynn as well as the Asian Debating Website at http://asiandebating.blogspot.com/ of Rashedul Hasan Stalin.