How to Get Famous

Penelope Trunk outlines 6 steps to getting your blog mentioned in the news.

Google + NASA

Google and NASA have joined forces to collaborate on "research, products, facilities, education and missions."

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

"This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington. "This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA's space exploration work accessible to everyone," added Griffin.

NASA and Google intend to collaborate in a variety of areas, including incorporating agency data sets in Google Earth, focusing on user studies and cognitive modeling for human computer interaction, and science data search utilizing a variety of Google features and products.

What does this mean for journalism? Everyone will have access to the data NASA releases with Google. Journalists and citizens. Do we compete or work together? If journalists are the watchdogs, and the Internet makes it possible for everyone to watch, where do the journalists go?

How to get grades in just 3 hours

University of Florida Fall semester grades were released tonight, unfortunately the Web site that would let me see them was down. Fortunately, a few roundabout methods have been discovered (go through the registrar's office Web site was my choice), and I am satisfied, if not thrilled, with the results of a very difficult semester.

More interesting is this graph showing the amount of time users have spent with online newspapers beginning in 2003 and predicted toward 2009 as opposed to time spent on consumer sites. Danger! The newspaper is crashing. But we already knew that didn't we?

Times...

Everyone is surely tired by now of the ludicrous "People of the Year is You" award from Times Magazine.

So turn instead to this neat Google Maps mash-up at the New York Times on travel destinations for 2007. While clicking on the happy little Times symbol to read an article about that area is certainly cool, shouldn't there be another way to access that same information? I guess you can search for it in their nifty search bar, but perhaps a sidebar with links to each article would serve as well.

Find Related...Video?

StumbleUpon now has StumbleVideo which brings videos from YouTube, Google Video and Myspace to your browser based on interests and ratings. Best of all, no downloads.

It just keeps getting easier to find what you didn't know you were looking for.

Find Related

A number of services have surfaced which allow users to easily find and bookmark links related to the Web site being viewed.

StumbleUpon

Sphere

Yoono

I was thinking about how these can be used to find related articles in newspapers. In reporting, one article on a subject could easily lead to the next this way.

Could newspapers incorporate this technology into their own Web sites? And if so, would it be paper-specific or lead also to related article in other papers?

Creative Commons Ahoy!

I wish this had happened a month ago when I was writing my article on Creative Commons. I would have changed the focus completely.

From Poynter Online:

GateHouse Media Debuts Creative Commons License for 96 News Sites
Williams reports that the CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives 2.5 license now covers "nearly all of the 121 dailies and weeklies they own in Massachusetts ...[including] 96 of the company's TownOnline sites, which are grouped within a portal for their many Eastern Massachusetts newspapers."

Little big

My younger brother was published this week in The Clarion, the newspaper produced by G. W. Carver Middle School in Miami, Fla. He wrote an article on cheating in school, and how technological advances make it easier - and harder. They do not have an online edition - yet.

Wake up call!

I posted a while back about how people get and handle their news (News Junky). Well, I got some feedback that I didn't expect.

A family friend emailed me in response that he watches various news channels and reads a few newspapers.

My parents don't get any further than the AOL homepage, watch the 10 p.m. news, and read the paper (The Miami Herald) on the weekends.

My younger siblings spend their time online browsing Myspace and other social networking sites, which I guess qualifies as person-specific news.

I had to explain to a friend of mine what RSS does.

Not so much what I had expected to find out. Sometimes I pay more attention to innovation in technology when I should be paying attention to people.

Multilanguage Tech?

I'm in Miami for the Winter Break, and chanced into conversation with a family that speaks Spanish and minimal English.

While trying to explain what I'm studying and what I'd like to do with myself after college, I had a lot of trouble finding the right words to describe what I do. I ended up using Spanglish, examples and sign language to make myself clear.

I'm fluent in Spanish, but I don't have the vocabulary for many of the things I do. How do I describe the intricacies of the Web, how I bought a domain and wrote my own Web site, blogging, and such in another language? I understand these things so easily in English, but I don't know how to translate them.

RSS aggregate and search

Fredi Bach made a really cool RSS feed aggregator.

"Well, basically this is a feed aggregator. That means it takes the headlines from other sites, mostly blogs and archives them into a database to make them easily searchable even if the original feed was updated. Additionally to those “normal” features it shares with other good feed aggregators, jMe let's you select feed items and arrange them in a collection. This collection can than be posted to other websites, weblogs or message boards."

The tool includes some pretty advanced search techniques, and the collected feeds include posts on OS X, Web 2.0 & programming.

What an interesting way to collect and then find information!

Online Journalism

The San Francisco Chronicle has handled the story of James Kim and his family on their Web site in a truly inspired fashion.

This article, from Thursday, is accompanied by a sidebar with links to all the related stories in the paper.

There is also a great implementation of Google Earth, a map of Siskiyou National Forest showing what happened and where clothing, Kati Kim and her daughters, and James Kim's body were found.

Digg, Dugg, Digger

davenaff at Naffziger's Net put together a list of the sites most 'dugg' by the top 100 'diggers' at Digg.

The result was a list of 50 sites, along with a list of 'Patron Diggers', people who regularly read and submit from a site.

Top 10:

youtube.com, news.com.com, news.yahoo.com, nytimes.com, news.bbc.co.uk, today.reuters.com, thinkprogress.org, physorg.com, livescience.com, arstechnica.com

5 of those 10 are helped along by 'Patron Diggers.'

Mmm, computer-mediated journalism. Digglicious.

Video Killed the Radio Star

and maybe print news?

For my semester project in Communications on the Internet, we were encouraged to make use of multimedia on our Web sites. Professor Carlson encouraged us to scour YouTube for relevant videos, provided that including them would not be an infringement of copyright.

Guess what? YouTube ain't the only thing out there.

Video Jug's upload system looks as easy as YouTube's, with superior quality. The site's focus is on creating "how to" videos, their tagline is "Life Explained On Film."

Toufee is an online video editor which turns your videos into flash presentations. You don't even have to know what flash is to get this running.

Spresent helps you create flash presentations right in your browser, using built-in or custom animation. They have a library of clip art and you can also use your own pictures.

Just more examples of how the Internet dissolves barriers to entrance into the worlds of professionals. These amateur-friendly sites may not produce the next great filmmaker or flash artist. Or they might. It just has to be "good enough," right?

And We're Back!

Sorry for the absence folks, I had three finals on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, plus some projects to finish up before the end of the semester.

My Web site is now live!

Having business cards made has already turned out to be a great idea. I ran into a couple of people the other day who are in excellent positions to help me out in my attempts to get internships, clips, and general newsroom experience.

The last bit of required reading for classes struck me as an excellent post topic: The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

It's a great read, full of applications of citizen journalism to traditional media frames. From allowing public comment on any article to incorporating citizen contributions to the newsroom as a wiki, Steve Outing's article advocates embracing citizen contributions instead of trying to fight them.

What do you think of citizen journalism? Will incorporating CJ make or break the newspaper industry?