Megan Taylor

I got an e-mail yesterday from The Daily Reviewer congratulating me on being added to their list of the top 100 journalism blogs.

The Daily Reviewer selects only the world's top blogs (and RSS feeds). We sift through thousands of blogs daily to present you the world's best writers. The blogs that we include are authoritative on their respective niche topics and are widely read. To be included in The Daily Reviewer is a mark of excellence.

They even sent me this nifty badge:

The Daily Reviewer looks a lot like Alltop, down to the grid of RSS feeds. But the first thing I noticed wasn't the content. It was the ugly ads. At least Alltops ads kinda blend into the page.

This week I wrote my last Spotlight article for a while. Hopefully I'll get to start them up again sometime down the road, but for now, sayonara.

My last Spotlight is ProPublica's ChangeTracker, created by new intern Brian Boyer.

ChangeTracker is a project at ProPublica that watches three government websites -- Whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov and Financialstability.gov -- for edits, deletions or changes to existing content. Through an RSS feed, Twitter account or daily email digest, ChangeTracker will inform you when a page changes on these sites, and show you what's been added or removed.

ChangeTracker is yet another example of a trend I've noticed in newer journalism projects. Rather than building a single thing, some journalists are building tools that can be used over and over, in different ways, to produce information and tell stories.

It's an important concept, given the restrictions and limited resources available to journalists whose publications are struggling. I hope to see a lot more work like this.

I'm confused. I feel out of the loop.

I get that Obama is the first black president.

I get that he represents a new era in our history.

I get that he represents changes that a lot of people want to see.

I get that his use of social media and technology during his campaign implies some very cool things during his presidency.

But why is everyone going apes**t!?

Why do I keep seeing articles about what the Obamas ate for lunch, or the kids' first day at school or his physical appeal?

Why did a whole bunch of people stand around in the freezing cold to listen to other people talk, and musicians with numb hands try to play?

Why are there iPhone applications devoted to this man and his inauguration?

I remember Bush's inauguration as a bad day, because my family disagrees with his beliefs and policies. I don't remember Clinton's. And before that, I wasn't paying attention to anything other than my skinned knees.

But I've asked around, and no other inauguration has been compared to Woodstock.

I really don't get it. Do you?

So, I write up my post for today, publish and check the site, only to find that three of my recent posts no longer exist! The comments are gone, the posts are gone, and the only record is in Google's cache and my RSS reader.

Does anyone know of recent WordPress vulnerabilities? How can I check to see if I was hacked?

In May announced its intention to build an Application Programming Interface for its data. MediaBistro quoted Aron Pilhofer:

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

More details, if they can be called that:

Once the API is complete, the Times' internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc. They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know."

I haven't heard anything since then, although the article mentioned that something would be ready "in a matter of weeks."

Today I spent some time reading the API documentation for National Public Radio.

That's right, NPR has an API. (mmm, I love my alphabet soup.)

NPR's API provides a flexible, powerful way to access your favorite NPR content, including audio from most NPR programs dating back to 1995 as well as text, images and other web-only content from NPR and NPR member stations. This archive consists of over 250,000 stories that are grouped into more than 5,000 different aggregations.

You can get results from Topics, Music Genres, Programs, Bios, Music Artists, Columns and Series in XML, RSS, MediaRSS, JSON, and Atom or through HTML and JavaScript widgets.

Now, I'm a bit of an NPR junkie, so I'm thinking of ways to access all this information for my personal use. And I can see how it could be useful as an internal product for NPR.

But how would another news organization use this? Oh wait, they can't:

The API is for personal, non-commercial use, or for noncommercial online use by a nonprofit corporation which is exempt from federal income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

This one doesn't make sense either:

Content from the API must be used for non-promotional, internet-based purposes only. Uses can include desktop gadgets, blog posts and widgets, but must not include e-newsletters.

And way down at the bottom of the page is a huge block of text describing excluded content. Boooo.

Check out these blog posts from Inside NPR.org, where they explain some of their decisions.

I think this was a great first step, but if you're gonna jump on the bandwagon, make sure you don't miss and land on the hitch.

Further, really understand what purpose this bandwagon has. If you're going to free your data, free it! Let people and news organizations use it (always with a link back) for all kinds of crazy things. Remember kids, sharing is caring!

RSS has got to be one of my favorite reporting tools. Although my writing lately is limited to this blog and News Videographer, I still have to find something to write about and keep current in my field. That means communicating with a lot of people.

But I don't have time to talk to all those people. Many of them have Web sites and blogs, and those who don't get written about online by the former. It's much easier and faster for all this information to be compiled in one place for my viewing pleasure.

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is most often characterized by the orange and white icon you may see on many Web sites. (See the icon at the top of the right column?) An RSS feed basically delivers new content from a chosen site to a feed reader of your choice.

A feed reader, also known as a news aggregator, can be compared to your e-mail inbox. Instead of e-mail addressed to you, it receives the updates you have subscribed to. Some readers let you interact and organize your subscriptions in many different ways.

So start receiving these handy-dandy updates, you first need a feed reader. My favorite is Google Reader, but other options are available such as Bloglines and NewsGator. You can also choose, like e-mail, to use a Web-based or desktop feed reader. You can peruse these options by simply doing a search for feed readers.

Having chosen your feed reader, start subscribing! In most cases, the orange and white RSS icon will appear somewhere on a Web site. Some browsers will also show the icon in the address bar if there is a feed for that site. Some sites do not have feeds.

I've subscribed to a slew of different sites, from news to blogs to entertainment and more. If your city government has a Web site, chances are it has some sort of feed (even Gainesville has one for municipal minutes). State and federal governments are more likely to provide more information. And don't discount blogs! Even though you will have to double-check the information, blogs are an amazing resource, and with a little hunting you can find the good ones.

Now, all you have to do is remember to check the feed reader every day.

This post was also published at Wired Journalists.

The problem with RSS is that every time I screw around with my site, you all have to deal with the overload of feeds. Sorry about that, the flood should be over now.

On the bright side, every inch of the site is now CMS powered, no more hand-coding. Woo-hoo!

I'm always on the lookout for different ways to keep track of the political realm. It is an area that is very hard to cover well, concentrating on the issues without getting caught up in the "who has more money." I believe it is an area that newspaper have so far failed to cover well. So I turn to the Internet.

The Washington Post has a Campaign Tracker, which lists and maps the campaign events of the 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, it lists the state and city with the most events, as well as the top state for fund raising. You can see the results by candidate, date and state, and there's also an RSS feed. This is a nice start, but its focusing on the least important aspects of the campaigns. I'd like to see the issues candidates represent, whether or not they are being consistent, what groups are they getting support from, and links to every article in which they are mentioned.

EDIT: Derek Willis of the Post pointed out that I totally missed the candidate profiles, finance filings, and primary information linked to the Campaign Tracker.

WashingtonWatch reveals the costs behind proposed U.S. federal legislation and regulation. The site also asks for comments, allows responses to a poll and allows Bill summaries to be edited. The cost of a bill is broken down into "cost per family" which makes it easier to digest. Just looking at some of those costs makes me wince.

I may just be getting cool enough for people to send me press releases, cause I got this in my inbox the other day from the Congresspedia Associate Managing Editor:

• Get an early look at Congresspedia's new legislative section

• What’s McConnell Hiding?’ Win $500 for getting Sen. McConnell to answer on the record

• LOUIS—a new database of documents from the Congressional Record, congressional bills and resolutions, congressional reports, congressional hearings, GAO reports, presidential papers and the Federal Register.

• MAPLight.org federal money & politics search engine launched (so far only California and U.S. Congress)

• Open House Project delivers recommendations to increase transparency on Capitol Hill

I really like some of these ideas: pinning politicians down, easy search of Congressional documents, following paper trails and shining a light on Capitol Hill are all great things to put out there. And not necessarily things I expect from my newspaper.

As far as web geeks go, I may be a little anti-social. I visit Facebook once a week, at most. I don't even bother with Myspace anymore unless someone else calls my attention there. I don't have many photos to post to Flickr, I don't usually recommend links via Del.icio.us (mostly because the people I'm networked with usually beat me to the link), Digg is no longer even an RSS feed and I post to Twitter only once every few days.

But I maintain these connections, cause you just never know.

For example, I'm a "twitter-follower" of the NYT. I get instant messages with links to new stories. I've found that this means I actually read them, instead of skipping over the headline and lede in Google Reader.

Last week, the Orlando Sentinel made an account with Twitter, and used it to track and update the launching of Atlantis. The best part is, they didn't just "tweet" shuttle-related updates.

"Fours hours until launch and all anyone is talking about is Paris Hilton's meltdown in court and her return to jail. Sigh."

So having resisted Twitter, finally given in, and being a lukewarm user at best, why does this rock my socks?

Because I wasn't within reach of TV or computer on Friday. I got those updates as text messages on my phone. And being addicted to being in the know, that just made my day.

The lesson here is that some weird and funky things take off in the online world. News outlets should join in the fun.

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.

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.

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.

I've written about SplashCast before, but now it looks like the embeddable Flash media player has serious potential.

Up 'til now, although you could import content from YouTube and Flicker and add text and audio to a 'show,' you couldn't import other feeds.

The player now works with any audio or video RSS feed.

I'll be updating my channel and showing it off later this week.

Last week in class we talked about the way Web site popularity and growth is measured. Advertising agencies want to know how many people visit your site before they pay you for advertising space. Thus, pageviews, a way to measure how many people click over to a page on your site.

With technologies such as ajax becoming very popular among Web sites, pageviews become an obsolete measurement. Instead of loading a new page, new content is loaded dynamically.

So how do we measure growth and popularity?

In class, we said: time.

And so does Nielsen.

The two major firms that track Internet traffic are playing down the significance of ranking Web sites by "page views," the number of pages viewed on a given Web property each month. Instead, they are offering other metrics, such as time spent or visits.

But there are problems with that, too. I can open up a tab in Firefox (or, now, IE7) and totally forget about it. It's still counting how much time I'm spending on that site. I get most of my news and daily reading via RSS. No time measuring there.

So, in the movement from "static web" to "dynamic web" what metric system can we rely on?

P.S. These metrics aren't just used by advertisers. I check my site and RSS stats regularly to see how you all respond to me and to test changes to the site.

Usually the incoming traffic sources tracked by Feedburner are pretty mundane. People search for my name, or find me through other sites, mostly ones I've also linked to.

Today I saw "journalism student change the world" as a search term that led someone to my site.

Yes. Exactly. Awesome.

Maybe I'm just not paying attention to the right arenas, but it seems like the "real-time screensaver" is becoming rapidly more popular.

You can get Digg and Twitter as screensavers, and I wrote about Twingly a month ago.

While I don't use a screensaver (my monitor turns off after an hour's inactivity), if I did, Newsbreaker would be it.

It appeals to me with all the geekiness of a game of pong combined with my info addiction: you can track up to 14 RSS feeds.

It's also offered as a game. Woohoo!

The New York Times has a great article, Link by Link: Watching the War and Acknowledging the Dead about "ordinary" people who track military casualties in Iraq.

Daniel K. Ropkin is looking for "looking for the best story, the one that really tells that person’s life, finding a picture," with a depth that the Military Casualty Information page can't match.

Michael S. White "allows a visitor to analyze the material in complex and highly specific ways: for instance, how many service members from New York State over 50 have died in hostile actions in Iraq? (One: Sgt. First Class Ramon A. Acevedoaponte, 51, of Watertown, killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee in 2005.)"

Tom Willett includes a single news account for each United States service member killed in combat, with room for comments.

Q Madp created his site “two days before the war started, to make sure all these guys are recognized — I don’t want them to be trashed like they were in Vietnam.”

The New York Times also links from this article to their own coverage.

Each of these sites fills a different need; provides a different perspective. Take this to heart: if you're not providing people with what they want, they'll make it for themselves. No one has a monopoly on information or publication anymore.

or pdf 'zine/news readers.

I checked out the Times Reader when it first came out. And today I looked at Idio, a flash music 'zine.

Come on people, pages are for print. This is slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and for all the page-turning, not interactive.

Not that I mind at all seeing articles about my favorite musicians. But with all the RSS readers, filters and aggregators around, there are much better and more creative ways to provide that service. Especially now that readers are supporting video and music files.

I'd really like to see more from the Gainesville Sun.

As RSS feed of community events.

Hyper-local coverage. The next time I see a homeless person while walking home from school, I'm going to interview him (or her, but they tend to be male, I wonder why that is, someone should do a study or write an article about that) and write an article for the Newsies.

There is so much about Gainesville that I don't know because I am fully immersed in the college scene.

I live literally one block east of campus. I go to restaurants, stores and events that are within walking distance (1-2 miles). I only know about The Fest (an annual, mostly punk-rock show that turns Downtown Gainesville into a roiling mass of people, mosh pits and noise for three days in November, and yet no one seems to notice) because I hung out with a music journalist.

I want to know about the holes-in-the-walls, the hidden deli, the place with the best burgers, the cheapest food. What bar suits what personality and which serves the cheapest drinks?

I want to know the town characters. I want a Web site where people post about odd things they've seen or done in Gville. So far, none of the mainstream sites that supposedly cater to this have caught on here.

I've lived here for three years, and I know none of these things.

Have a seat Gainesville, and tell me about yourself.