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.

Here is a line of code from a default blogger template that might not make sense to you:

body {
background:#fff;
margin:0;
padding:40px 20px;
font:x-small Georgia,Serif;
text-align:center;
color:#333;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
}
a:link {
color:#58a;
text-decoration:none;
}

Here is that “de-coded”:

We’re working with the body { of the page; the whole thing.
background:#fff; The page’s background is white. To change this color, pick another Hex color value.
margin:0; The page does not have a margin around it. To flow your text or boxes all the way out to the edge of the page, leave this at 0. To make a space around the content, change it to 5px or so. “px” is pixels.
padding:40px 20px 30px 90px; Around your actual content, there should be a margin of 40px on top, 20 px to the right, 30 px to the left and 90 px below. The measurements move in the clockwise direction starting with noon.
font:x-small Georgia,Serif; The font for the whole page is extra small and in the Georgia script. You can change the font size to “x-large,” “large,” “medium,” “small,” “x-small,” or “xx-small.” The last one is a little hard to read. “Serif” means if the browser does not have the Georgia font, it will default to another font with “Feet” or “Serifs.” Other common “sans-serif” fonts or those “without-feet” are Arial, Helvetica and Verdana. Stick some of those in there for Georgia.
text-align:center; The text is generally aligned in the middle of the page. If you get down later in the page, the text might be aligned left, right or justified. You can change this value from “center” to “right,” “left” or “justify.”
color:#333; The font color is #333 or grayish. Again, check the link to the Hex color generator I included above. Play around with that.
}
a:link {
color:#3366cc; Links are blue here. You can change the color.
text-decoration:none; Links are not underlined. You can change the value from “none” to “underline,” “bold,” “italic” or others.
}

Cascading Style Sheets hold the answer to many of the content-design problems. With CSS, writers can put a plain version of their page on the screen and later add the styling. CSS also guarantees that some form of the page will display.
Older browsers have difficulty deciphering newer programming languages. A reader might experience misaligned fonts or words, tables that overlap in odd areas, or, worst of all, their browser might not allow them to access the page. This frustrating situation is much like a reader glancing at a printed newspaper only to find foreign fonts, a giant graphic in the middle of block of text or being unable to even open the newspaper. Web readers have come to expect kinks in their experience, but conflicting browser versions are not meant to give them trouble. Why should a site barely lose credibility for its design flaws when its print readers would be appalled to find missing pages? Web designers now are giving shape to a standard that will clearly display pages across all browsers.
Tweaking your stylesheet in Blogger is not difficult. If you’re scared to touch code that you don’t understand, don’t worry. You can’t break your site. Stylesheets are easy to reload. Play around with yours to customize your site. (Next post, I’ll talk about how to do that).

Web pages cannot possibly look the same in every browser or on every device. Achieving such a feat is impossible, considering the expanding possibilities of connecting to the Web via PDAs and cell phones, not to mention the array of screen sizes users prefer. The importance of Web accessibility extends beyond merely accommodating people with disabilities. Accessibility is a helpful option similar to those found in the physical world such as ramps for people riding bicycles or people in wheelchairs. Accessible Web content is beneficial to a variety of people with and without disabilities.
Writing a Web site that looks good in one browser is easy, but writing a Web site that renders true in every browser is difficult. Designers use validator services such as the W3C’s HTML Validator to make sure their content will make sense to every reader. A page “validates” if the coding has been shown to make sense to every type of browser.

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.