Weekly round up of links from around the web as well as a summary of what’s going on around the CoPress network.
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last link roundup, but that doesn’t mean there’s been any shortage of news.
- Among all of the announcements made by Google this week, Living Stories struck me as by far the most interesting. This has serious implications the near future of news. Why? Because it’s experimenting with a few important concepts: the topic as the base element of journalism, time as a perspective on a topic, filtering to learn more about specific elements of a story, and personalization to tailor the learning experience. Currently there’s no functionality for users to participate in the production of the page, a key component of the news wiki idea I’ve written about before, but what they have is a very cool start. Paul Bradshaw has more. (tks Brian Manzullo!)
- BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, aka the second annual mecca for innovation in journalism, will be at Temple University on April 24th, 2010.
- On PBS MediaShift, Roland Legrand covers the biggest reasons why young journalists are the most risk-averse in the newsroom. The most astute observation: the younger journalists in a newsroom could have higher opportunity costs in regards to exploration and experimentation because the traditional method of getting ahead in a career is to “acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment.”
- Google Analytics recently added 8 new features. Analytics intelligence and custom alerts look mighty interesting.
- Andrew Spittle built another at-a-glance visualization for the Whitman Pioneer: Grid View.
- On College Media Matters, Dan Reimold has an exclusive interview with the founders of the College News Network. They’re bootstrapping a content-sharing network to fill the void of UWIRE and hope to eventually partner with a publication in every state.
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
- Columbia Daily Spectacle (UPDATED) – Details on what went down at the Columbia Spectator over last weekend. Frustrated with the leadership of the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, the Online Editor decided to take the site offline until a list of demands had been met.
- WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release – Minor security updates including a fix for a Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently affecting a subset of users. You should probably upgrade as soon as possible.
- What does a mobile journalist need? – Paul Bradshaw streams a class on mobile journalism, and lists hardware, software, systems, and mindset required for mobile journalism. (tks Megan Taylor)
- How To Use Your Custom Yourls Shortener with Tweetie 2 – Simple tutorial on how to use your self-hosted URL shortener with Tweetie 2. Yourls is a slick piece of software for hosting your own URL shortener.
- Jonathan Pichot at the Campus Chronicle is looking for the best plugin for Facebook Connect and any tips for implementation.
- News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks – Ken Sands walks through design considerations of recent changes to the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and Spokesman-Review. Ryan Pitts at the Spokesman-Review seems to be doing the most radical rethink of navigation; it would be interesting to know whether they’re tracking user interaction and iterating based on usage.
- Max Cutler and Robert Baskin have been doing a bit of work on Courant News today, including finishing up powerful search functionality I’ve gotten to take a peak at and building an “elegant way to vary site display based on User-Agent or other HTTP headers.”
- Announcing Managing News: A Pluggable News & Data Aggregator – The code is in open beta and available for download. The key selling point to this product seems to be that you can import data from multiple sources, run persistent searches across the incoming data, and visualize it on a map.
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
- According to Mathew Ingram, Communities Editor for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, there are things commenters can actually be useful for: fact-checking, new angles to stories, and market research. “The surest way to improve the tone of the debate in forums or comments is to get involved in them.”
- Ten points for each of Brian Manzullo’s five goals for the CM Life website this fall. Other student newspapers should follow his lead and share lessons learned from the experiments. Building “Hot Topic” landing pages is one of the ways you can change up how news is presented, and educate readers with better context.
- Son Hunyh walks through some of the design considerations of relaunching mndaily.com. In my opinion, the category and landing pages are amongst the best in the nation.
- If you on the web today or Sunday, WordCamp Portland is all over Twitter and livestreaming too. There was a great session this morning on speeding up WordPress and Matt Mullenweg showed up at lunch to answer questions from the attendees. WordPress and WordPress MU might become the same software in version 3.0, and BackPress, an abstraction of the WordPress admin, is being used by Automattic in a few projects but has no timeline for release.
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended distractions for a Sunday of homework for those of you already back in school:
- The Center for Innovation in College Media is now accepting applicants for their fall internship. We’ve worked extensively with Bryan Murley, one of CICM’s directors, and can assure those considering the position that you’ll learn a tremendous amount. The work will primarily focus on producing a variety of editorial content for the weblog, including “podcast interviews with media movers and shakers, reviews of college media online initiatives, and maps and databases of college media online sites.”
- 5 Steps to Increase User Contributions to Your Community Site – Solid synopsis of involving your community from start to finish. Understanding how to incentivize participation, as well as how to foster and educate it, are keys to success. On a related note, Jackie Hai’s new project, PEG Point, is on its way to becoming a highly-recommended read.
- Dan Gillmor has a list of 11 things he’d do if he ran a news organization. Numbers two and three: leverage the intelligence of your community, and make transparency the default. It’s good to see these ideas consolidating; let’s start learning from more experiments.
- andrewspittle: Heading into the first weekend of the @whitmanpio‘s new web-first workflow. Waiting for the first, inevitable quirk or bug.
- Max Cutler is looking for a Web/UX designer to assist in the implementation of Nando, the editorial admin interface for Courant News.
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the long weekend:
- Make sure your WordPress site is up to date with 2.8.4, the most recent version. Yesterday afternoon, Lorelle, a significant voice in the WordPress community, reported that older versions were under attack. There are two reported signatures of a hacked blog: funky permalinks including the keywords “eval” or “base64_decode,” or an extra administrator in your database that doesn’t show up in the WordPress admin. The exploit that the hacker is using has been patched for a while, and should only affect those who haven’t updated their site recently. Making sure your WordPress site is up to date is one of the best ways of keeping it secure.
- On a related WordPress note, johnl1479 says: FYI: #PodPress 8.8.1 breaks thumbnail capability of #Wordpress MU 2.8.4a.
- An alumni assesses the recently relaunched Eagle at American University and identifies some of the value it’s offering her. Good ideas that you should pay attention to.
- Andrew Robinson found success adding the Facebook Connect plugin to the WKU Herald website. Facebook apparently only allows one connection at a time, and having the Fan Box Widget on the site as well caused issues.
- Through Twitter, I found out about @WiredResearch, a Twitter account that teases the facts of upcoming articles. It would be way cool to see this on a super-local level.
- VentureBeat has an inside scoop on the editorial workflow of The New York Times blogs. Posts that are ready to go are marked “Pending Review”, and notifications are still by email.
- Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – The web is actually reviving literacy and pushing it in “bold new directions.”
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
Recommended links for the weekend:
- The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
- Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
- In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
- Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.
Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.
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