Because I’m an uber-nerd, this evening I was playing around with Google maps API. The service sent me a key to my Gmail account. The next time I opened a browser window, there it was - personalized Google! This is a great integration of the Google search page with RSS news feeds, weather, quotes and movie times (screenshot). This is awesome.
Remember EPIC, though? The adoption of RSS news readers has not really caught on yet. Part of the reason people are reluctant to subscribe is because they do not have feed readers. Technology intimidates them, and rightly so. The beauty of the personalization page is its simplicity. Never do you even see the letters “RSS.” Let’s move forward a few years to when Google may have all your news preferences logged. It will know what you read and will filter content to suit you. Not bad. But what happens when Google is the ONLY service that knows you that well? Will it lose market share because Google will know your personality better than Amazon?
At any rate, I’m excited about this. It’s different from that messy Yahoo! personalization page that I tried out when I was about 15. I was turned off to a “personal home page” unitl now. Leave it to Google to prove me wrong.

This is from a podcasting discussion led by Jen Reeves from the J-School and Peter Main from IATS in Clyde Bentley’s Online Journalism class.

Notes about podcasting from the industry side:

• If you don’t advertise it, nobody will know about it.
• The trick with keeping people interested in podcasts is keeping content flowing, especially with news.
• Because audio can be made into such small files, you can convey lots of information.
• With major news organizations, there has to be a lot of buy in by the management, but you need storage capacity.
• Once you offer a podcast, you don’t want to change it. If you don’t keep it up, people will unsubscribe.

Are podcasts economically viable?

1. If you look at the Apple site, some people are using sponsors on their sites.
2. You can do a sponsorship within the show.
3. Some podcasters embed content into their podcast. The image is embedded into the file that can be part of the presentation.
4. Others are selling subscriptions to a particular show (like ABC’s “Lost”).

By the end of the year, there will be 100,000 podcasts.

Time shifting allows you to get the content when you want it, similar to TiVo or the newspaper.
On demand (media on demand) examples including a library, jukebox or TiVo.

Using FeedForAll

File>Feed Wizard
Feed Link: www.missouri.edu/~pawprint
Add an item:
Give it a description
Give it a link
Enclosure
URL: link to the website
Lenght: size of the file
Type: audio file

EndNote is one of those pieces of software that, after using it, you can’t figure out how you ever did without. I downloaded a 30-day trial at the EndNote Web site and fell in love after about a week. Mine and EndNote’s romance was quick — shifting from the puppy love phase to total dependency very quickly. Now, EndNote and I visit almost every day, and I am completely fulfilled.
If you are:

a grad student or someone who loves to research (or both),
tired of those silly works cited and source rules,
someone who is terrible with names but good with keywords,
detail-oriented and/or
obsessed with arranging things

EndNote might work for you like it has for me. The trial is free and requires no credit card. One caution: if you download it, you’ll love it, so be prepared to spend $89 (a steal if you purchase it online). This piece of software will save you countless hours of pulling your hair out, making sure the periods and commas are in the right place in your theses, projects or papers. As a past thesis writer, I wish I would’ve known about this product last year. Here’s a brief overview:
When you open endnote, all you have to do is create a new library and start adding your sources. [image] All are arranged in a sorted list. [image]
For each source, you can type in all the information available. You can also assign keywords for later searching. I like to link the reference to a PDF or Web version of the publication, so I can quickly refer to it when I need a quote. [image]
Finally, the best feature of EndNote is its ability to instantly reformat a citation depending on which style you choose. There are almost 1,400 styles from which to choose, so I doubt you’ll have a problem finding yours.
Another great feature is EndNote’s integration with Microsoft Word. Once you download EndNote, Word adds a toolbar in the Tools menu. The EndNote toolbar lets you reference your sources directly from the EndNote program.
For a lasting affair with a piece of software in graduate school, turn to EndNote.

Because I’m in charge of the Fall Photos contest for MyMissourian.com, I get a lot of e-mail photo submissions. Most of the time, people are having trouble with the “Share a Photo” form on the site because their photos are too big. Our system has trouble publishing photos larger than around 800 x 600 pixels. This presents a problem because most cameras, by default, are set to larger image resolutions. Resizing the image takes a little bit of work, but sites such as Resize2Mail.com give a three-step process to resize images. Programs including Adobe Photoshop and even Windows Paint will resize the photos as well.
The problem with sending such large images to anyone’s inbox lies in space constraints. At MU, we are only allowed 20 MB of space. Some photos are more than 1 MB alone. Multiply that by 20 photos and add the amount of e-mail we receive for other classes and projects, and it’s easy to see why my inbox has lost its oomph.
If you are a student and want to publish a large photo online — one that isn’t resized and maintains its original quality — use your Bengal space. The following post tells you how to set it up. If you aren’t an MU student, look into creating a Flickr Gallery. The Web site is incredibly user-friendly, and it’s free.

This tutorial is for Mac users. Most J-School students use Apple computers, so this will be written from the Mac side of things.

Part One: Getting onto your Bengal space

First, let’s figure out how to log in to your Bengal space. Every MU student is allotted Web hosting space and has access to free software to upload files. The free software MacSFTP can be downloaded for free from the IAT Services Software Distribution site.

Log in using your pawprint and password.
Click on the green link for Software at the top of the page.
Pull the first dropdown menu to select MacSFTP OSX, and click Go.
Click the orange Get It! button to download the software.
Once your download is complete, and you’ve installed the program, open the program. Choose File>New Connection…
The hostname will be bengal.missouri.edu, and your username and password are just your pawprint and password. It should look like this:

Click Connect. After you do, there may be an error message, but just click OK.
A new window should open up with some files called .bashrc and others. Double-click on the www folder. This is where you can upload your podcast. The easiest way to upload any file is to simply drag it from your documents folder or desktop directly into this window.
To find the exact Web address of the file you uploaded, go to http://www.missouri.edu/~pawprint/ (substituting your pawprint in for the word “pawprint”). A rudimentary list of directories will pop up. This is where you find the exact address of the file you uploaded.

Part Two: Making a podcast

I’m not exactly sure the easiest way to do this, but I think I would use GarageBand, the software that comes with the Mac. Apple has a tutorial about how to format the podcast on its site [GarageBand - Recording Your Podcast]. I will follow those steps when creating my first podcast. Clyde’s idea to record it in Microsoft Word using the Word Notebook feature would work too. But I would personally like to try out GarageBand because it seems pretty neat.
I’ll update this post with more information about exactly how to do the podcast when I get around to putting mine up. Until then, you know how to publish files to your Bengal space.

Internet readers’ attention spans are shorter, so their time is more valuable. The inverted pyramid style of writing so firmly cemented in journalists’ minds holds even greater weight online. The Poynter Institute’s eyetrack study found that when visiting a page, readers first look at briefs, captions and headlines. If they are hooked by the initial story idea, they will keep reading, usually, for longer than they would a print story. Poynter found that 75 percent of online article text was read; print audiences read 20 to 25 percent. Of course, Web stories are shorter than print, so what is included must be important.
Paper reflects light, and computer screens emit it, forcing the eye to take in an entire square screen instead of a narrow range of words. Storing content in cyberspace may have immensely improved information’s availability, but our brain power and tolerance for prolonged exposure to light do not allow us to read every word on the Web. If entire news stories are posted online, readers have trouble keeping up. As the story progresses, readers’ attention spans taper off, making the inclusion of the most relevant content of the utmost importance.
Crawford Kilian, author of Writing for the Web, cites technological limitations to Web writing’s full capacity:

Until computer screens approach the clarity of print on paper, Webtext will slow down reading speeds by up to 25 percent. This means that you are wasting your readers’ time unless you cut your text by the same amount. If print can say it in 100 words, your Web site better say it in 75 (or even fewer).

Be concise when you’re writing. As journalists, we think we are masters of precision. Take what you would normally say, and slash it. People won’t read screens full of gray text. They like lists. They like breaks. Use them.

This Web log will serve as an easily-accessible resource for journalists, citizen journalists and anyone else who wants to set up their own Web log. For people who want a private place where they can express themselves, this tech blog for the non-techie user should help.
Here are my suggestions for blogging software:

• WordPress: This is what I use, so I suppose I’m a little biased. The beauty of WordPress lies in its ability to house your content on your own server or Web space. If you have the money to buy a server (mine is $4.95 per month through Surpass Hosting), do it. You need a place for your information. If you put your pages on someone else’s server space, you’re taking a risk.
• Movable Type: Back in its heyday, Movable Type was amazing. Now, they’ve switched from a freeware site to a paid site with places for your pages on their Typepad servers.
• Blogger: Ah, yes, Blogger. This is by far the easiest publishing platform. When a reader with any experience with Blogger comes to your Blogger site, at a glance, they can tell you are using a template. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to build credibility and separate yourself from the masses, you need to tweak your template. That’s what I’m here for (hopefully).