Entries from May 2007 ↓

My first attempt at a personality profile: The Boss is just like you and me.

I wish I could be back in Miami for this.

Just a mile from my parents’ home, the festival starts tomorrow and runs through the weekend with storytelling marathons, lectures and performances.

The festival opens with a photo exhibit and includes story telling in Spanish by local and international writers.

Hey Mom, Dad, go take notes for me, please!

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries presents a slew of typographical and visual examples.

There are too many to summarize, just check out two or three of these
and think about how they make you feel, what they make you think, and what they are trying to convey.

Never get lost at Disney again with this huge and detailed Google map.

Even better, avoid the crowds and save your money, check out these ride simulations. What great ways to use Flash! I can think of some great technical stories that would benefit from a simulation like this.

Yesterday a post from Lifehack described how to use Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, to stay on top of all the news that’s fit to read, especially in a particular field.

Since I’m always looking for new journalism and online journalism blogs, I thought this would be a great way to bring those blogs to me instead of searching for them.

So I nabbed the RSS feed for a Technorati search for “journalism.” So far, this one has been really great. I’m getting a lot of interesting and relevant articles from this one.

I also got the RSS for the same search term on Digg. This one is not as good. I’m getting a lot of stuff that doesn’t pertain to journalism at all. I may try a new search term or just give up on Digg altogether.

Then I subscribed to the feed for popular Del.icio.us links tagged with “journalism.” Like Technorati, this is turning out nicely.

I’m finding a lot of new resources without having to search for them, which is always awesome. I’m gonna add some more search terms and see how that turns out. Can you think of any other ways to pull in information like this?

Reposted from my class assignment blog:

Online Journalism review (http://www.ojr.org/) is a great resource for how to do good online journalism. It’s essentially a blog written by some of the experts, covering topics from free online applications to RSS. They also have a great discussion board where you can find commentary from OJR’s readers. This site has been in my feed reader for at least six months now, and is always a worthy read. They also put together some resources for online journalism ethics, video and student journalism. They even created an RSS mash-up of what OJR considers to be the best online journalism blogs (another one of my subscriptions).

and a classmate’s analysis of factcheck.org:

The website I had to check was FactCheck.org. It’s a pretty good non-partisan website aimed at checking the accuracy of statements done by politicians, political organizations, and the government. I think it would be a useful site for a journalist looking to find contrasting views of a political event or political publicity. It’s archives have decent depth to look into facts that happened a while back. I did find that though the site claims not to have party favoritism, at the present time, most of the people under the microscope seem to be republicans. Maybe this is just due to what has been going on recently.

We were each assigned a Web site to analyze, in terms of content and usefulness rather than design. Check out some others.

So after my post last week, I decided to look up some tutorials on editing video on Linux.

I found this one via Lifehacker.

Alex Roitman discusses capturing video with Kino, editing, tracking, transitions and effect with Cinelerra, and putting the finished product on a dvd with DVDStyler. This is by no means comprehensive, or even step-by-step, but it is a good introduction to the idea of editing video on a Linux box.

MySpace may be a super popular social networking site, but I wasn’t worried when they released MySpace News. I find MySpace to be very shallow and I only have a few friends that use it regularly. As part of their target demographic, I’m not impressed.

So it was no surprise to me when the reports started coming in that their Digg-like news feature flopped.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

Is this the result of a lack of promotion on the part of MySpace? Or lack of motivation on the part of the users?

Fortuitous gives us seven tips for managing a successful community.

• Take emotion out of decisions.
• Talk like a human, not a robot.
• Give people something they can be proud of.
• Bring users in during community decisions.
• Moderation is a full-time job.
• Metrics spread the work out.
• Guidelines not rules.

Check out the post for a detailed explanation of each.

As a forum moderator and blogger myself, I agree with each of these as important ways to keep any online community healthy and happy. I haven’t had any trouble yet, either here (thanks to Akismet catching all the lovely spam comments) or on the forum I moderate. (I wonder if GTD cuts down on forum trolling, or if I’ve just been lucky.)

I think one of the keys to keeping members of a community happy is to guide conversations. Ask relevant questions and respond to posts with carefully thought-out posts of your own. I think this either prevent the endless opinion war, or else makes harassment obvious enough that no one will blame you for banning a troll.

I finally found a community portal branded to the city rather than a company. DigPhilly looks like a great editorial staff provides a lot of content and news, plus users can import RSS feeds, load photos, videos, multimedia, classifieds, blog posts and calendars. You can even shop from the site.

The design is pretty cool too, with some creative navigation and colors, and I’m definitely diggin’ the skyline. Just tell me where I can get a philly cheesesteak mailed to me, piping hot and oozing Cheese Whiz, and I’m good.