Verge 08: Afterthoughts

So, Verge is finally over.

Well, technically, it ended on April 4th, but I'm just now getting around to spinning out my thoughts on what happened.

For those not in the know, Verge has been a series of convergent media conferences put on by the Tennessee Journalist. We cover issues in web journalism, web-based media, getting jobs in new media, new technologies, and anything else potentially related to journalism and the internet. We're fully buzzword compliant. Stephen Townsend did a great write-up on the event here along with some great pictures taken by my friend and roommate, Brandon Ball.

We had a pretty awesome group of people and I especially enjoyed the time I was able to spend with our panelists and the students who came down from George Mason. They are just getting their news website started and I can certainly sympathize with their struggles. Steve Klein was their prof and he was exceptionally energetic about the idea of deploying Django in place of Drupal or WordPress for their site.

On that note, it's also important to mention that Harry Montevideo from UGA's Red and Black student newspaper was here largely to weigh in on the future of Ochs and is just itching to deploy it. Hopefully the coming months won't disappoint any of these guys, and they've been very patient as we've been toiling along with it.

I can't continue without mentioning our headliner speaker, Rob Curley, vice president for product development for the Washington Post-Newsweek. He's an exciting speaker and you should jump on the chance to see/hear him speak and present. He and I connected on a Django and Mac level and had a great chat in what time was left after he presented. Also, penguins. He loves penguins.

Now, to the meaty bits. Between some scrimmages between the "old media" types and the "new media" types, and Rob's presentation, many of the profs, directors, deans, and students, were either scared or impressed into some basic trends and facts about online journalism. About the medium in general.

• Things are not only changing, they have changed, and will continue to change. You don't have time to sit around and debate about what direction online journalism is going in, you have to act now. Otherwise, give the kids back their money and shut down your school, you'll save yourself some time.
• Convergence is more than a nice buzzword. It's very real and it means that your news writers are going to have to learn to be broadcast journalists on top of everything else. It's not that hard, trust me, you just have to convince them that they need to hurry.
• If you don't already have an online news publication for you school, get one. You'll probably want to use Django. Can't figure it out? Get yourself a nerd who can. They're everywhere, you just need to find them out and convince them they don't have to know abstract algebra to code in Django/Python.
• If you don't have a personal blog. Get one. Figure it out. Start writing. For students especially, if you don't have a blog, no matter if you're a communication studies major or a journalism major, you need to learn to self-market yourself. Your blog is destination #1 for you. If it isn't, make it so.
• It didn't have to be this way, necessarily. Big news didn't have to get hurt so badly, and it doesn't have to die. Stop doing stupid things like trying to charge for content (archives really? Come on. That's easy ad money right there if you use it right). Micropayment system aren't viable yet so you better work with advertisers to help them fix their end of the machine.

While we got a lot of good info out there, I feel that some fundamental messages were lost along the way, mainly:

• Advertising programs are becoming more worthless the less time you spend teaching kids about how online advertising works. I'm sick and tired of having to teach someone what SEO is, and all the basics of internet traffic. I'm not going to work with someone who doesn't have a basic grasp of this and clients or employers the world over are going to skip you right over if you're clueless on this stuff.
• Video is easy. It is so, super, easy. Spend an hour or two on a weekend, borrow a camera, and play with iMovie. You don't have to be perfect at this and you don't need to emulate the broadcast guys. Rob has an amazing video team who can do some really amazing graphics and know how to produce great content. I'm not saying to forget that if you're really a print guy, but you can get by with shorter pieces so long as you learn how to edit and hold the camera steady. 60 seconds of something will make most any news story worth 5x to a user. (Other rules do apply, but you need to start somewhere).
• Web journalism is NOT limitless. To clarify, you do NOT have unlimited space to tell your story. This is a pretty common misconception. One of our editors even makes a big deal about it in our promo video. While you don't have the same space restrictions that you have in print, you do have restrictions. Namely, the reader's attention span. I could go on all day, but the point is, people scan, they have limited time and attention. Write for people who are just scanning over your page and only ever make your story a mile long if it's just so engaging that most people will want to read it all.

I can't wait for our next conference. This thing has come a long way and has given TNJN some great exposure. Our next big step is going to be releasing Ochs into the wild and hopefully changing the world, or at least journalism school. I'm going to keep on yelling about things I think people are doing wrong in teaching or employing journalism online, but I have to hand it to our guests, they certainly kept an open mind and really do care about fixing their industry and profession.

As I always say, anything is possible, but here, only time will tell.

PS: For more thoughts on web journalism, check out Patrick Thornton's blog.

The Blogging Cake

When I think about blogging, and all the tools we have to make the task simply easier or possible at all, I can't help but think of a layer cake. I'm going to dive into a bit of an analogy ride here (I am a big fan of analogies) partly to help explain the concept of a blog to my peers and friends who keep asking me to try and explain it to them. If this is simple stuff for you, just move along, this will get interesting in a later post. To define a "blog" in the terms of a dictionary, we would start with something like "a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces and ongoing narrative". In other words, a site that is regularly updated, can also suffice. The use of the word has become so broad that it requires some hands-on use and some refinement.

On with the cake.

The analogy only carries so far, so bear with me. At the base, where the cake is biggest, we have regular old blogs. This site being an okay example, but also other WordPress blogs, Blogger blogs, MovableType, Django-based blogs, etc. Blogging software or systems that allow full and complete (for the most part) customization of the interface, and addition of new functionality through the use of plug-ins or other software.

The second layer in the cake is something called LiveJournal. I first got started with the thing back at the end of middle school going into high school. Needless to say there's a lot of junk there, typical ramblings and rants of a teenager. Had it been a few years later, it could have just as easily been a "MySpace Blog". Same stuff. But nowadays LiveJournal has evolved into essentially, community blogging. There are thousands of group journals that people contribute to covering a massive array of topics. This has been seen before, it was called Usenet, or newsgroups. It's also pretty similar (when you get into the commenting threads) to a typical online forum or other bulletin board system. But really the majority of LiveJournals are personal, structured like blogs, and themselves tie into the greater community at large. Moderately sophisticated commenting tools allow other users to start threaded conversations about that post, or something else entirely. So, LiveJournal allow people to blog in a more or less watered down way (it's hosted, so a lot of the magic sauce is behind closed doors), and it's community centric.

Now we get into the third, somewhat smaller, layer in our cake. Services such as Tumblr and/or Pownce. Now I know there are others in the area, but let's keep this simple for the time being. These services are not intended to directly compete with a service like Blogger or WordPress, rather, they are along the vein of something called a MicroBlog. In this case, Tumblr is a specialized MicroBlog, while Pownce is a bit more broad and generic. Tumblr for instance, is focused on acting as a simple and easy to use online scrapbook. So you post all the neat little pictures and video clips you come across online to Tumblr and your friends can come on up and see them or they can subscribe to your Tumblelog (like one subscribes to an RSS feed). Pownce has a similar capability of allowing you to post up images, audio, video and text, but both have a focus on quick and short posts. They are not set up to carry on extended stories or conversations. Although there have been some creative uses in that application of these sorts of services, that's not the focus.

Which brings us to my favorite part of the cake, the top. The best example I have, is a service I use all the time and love, Twitter. Keep in mind this is a hierarchy of content types/styles, not necessarily the winners or losers or anything like that. But here we get into a really interesting idea. Twitter is rather unlike Pownce or Tumblr in that it not only does not allow you to attach images or videos directly to your "tweets" (posted updates), but you are limited in how many characters you can upload in a single tweet, 140 chars to be exact. Twitter has found a plethora of uses, notably the idea of a "lifestream", the posting of your day, play-by-play. For instance, you could be tweeting weather updates on your way to work on the train while also tweeting about a news story you noticed in the newspaper while tweeting what you're eating for breakfast. Not all at once mind you, but you get the idea. Others use it in much the way one might use del.icio.us, tweeting URLs of interesting things they come across online. There are many more uses we could get into, not to mention the communication theories that are at play here, but I'll save that for another post. Here, we're just getting the lay of the land.

An important thing to note with all of these, is there are a number of ways to interact with these services. Most notably, Twitter, which has in my opinion, the best desktop companion to the service. It's called Twitterific and is a wonderful Mac application that sits in your menu bar and totally changes the way you think and interact with Twitter. Someone else already gave a pretty good explanation on his views on the matter, but in short, when you use Twitter through something like Twitterific, your use and approach of the information delivered through it is changed. For me, Twitter is an application that lives on my desktop, and dutifully notifies me of interesting tweet every 5 minutes, and to whom I can quickly and easily tweet away with and easily track and form conversations through Twitter's direct messaging option. To someone else, and in fact, very many of the first users of Twitter, it is a website and an SMS updating service. Part of the reason for the character limit system-wide is the character limits placed on the US SMS system. One of the primary interfaces for Twitter when it first launched was the SMS (AKA: TXT or texting) screen on a cell phone and the other was the web site itself. Tweets would be sent to your phone from those you followed, and visa versa. This, so far, is the thinest of the MicroBlogging layers.

All these services exist to fill a need that was not met with the tools that existed prior to them. They are all empowered with RSS, and are all offered (for the most part), free of charge. They are quickly changing the models of communication that we are studying right now in class, and I am extremely excited to be alive right now to witness what is happening. I could gush for hours on end, but the point is simply this. Go out and try them out. Find the ones that work best for you. I abandoned LiveJournal a long time ago, but I am active on my blog once again and I am now an avid Twitter'er through Twitterific. Try them out and get back to me with your findings.

Cheers!

Spring 2008, and then some.

Hooray! So we’re off to another great year here at the University of Tennessee and I’m one more semester close to graduation. I’ve decided to go ahead and go for the minor in Information Sciences. If we had a major I would have switched to that long ago, but since that isn’t available this will have to do.

On that note, IS 102, the introduction to the IS minor is interesting. I won’t lie, it’s far too basic for me. We’re starting on what computers are and not going too terribly far from that. Computer Science 102 and 160 both taught me more than this class can, but the context is certainly different which makes it not a complete waste of time. In either case it’s unavoidable at this point in time since the professor responsible for the minor left but a few months ago. We’ll make this interesting however. As versed as I am in Django, I have not had a chance to fiddle with Drupal. So I’ll be taking some class related time in the coming weeks to develop some Drupalie stuff. Good times.

JEM 222 - Intro to Online Reporting isn’t bad either. We have a great person stepping in for Staci Wolfe and while the class isn’t exactly the most computer literate bunch in the school I have high hopes that they will be in short time. More importantly, I think we can easily recruit some of these sharp souls into TNJN as staff reporters. While I’ve already completed JEM 422 (the last in the online reporting series) I am confident that I will learn something out of this course.

JEM 457 - Media and Society essentially boils down to a social sciences class. Here we’re focusing on how (surprise) media affects society and various theories behind those effects. This one is going to prove extremely interesting. So far so good, solid dialog going on in the class, I’m not afraid to debate anything we’re talking about, I should be able to get a lot out of this.

The other two classes are simply GenEd filler, both fun, but also time consuming. I’m not worried about them, I just wish I could be taking some spare CS or IS classes instead. Second summer session is the plan there. My sights are set on WWDC ‘08. But for now, there is MWSF and all the wonders therein.

127.0.0.1

I figure every site/blog/journal needs an inaugural post. So here it is. This is a second run at making use of this domain, oddly enough, the slightly misguided vision for the first attempt ended up being realized after all.

So to those who ever saw the old edition, I apologize for letting it linger for as long as it did. In the interim, this space was largely utilized as a test bed for some RapidWeaver magic (a fun app worth checking out).

So now, after some time, travel, and reading, I’ve settled on marginally maintaining a presence on the web beyond Facebook and my long abandoned LiveJournal.

What will be on here? Hopefully some insights into online journalism and technical issues related to that (for as long as that lasts), software design, web design, broadcasting, and whatever else strikes me and isn’t ridiculous.

Cheers.