ugachaka :: Jacob was here

I am not sure how many people know about methods of tracking traffic and demographics for your site audience. I know that I just discovered a few recently within the last year that have proven invaluable for seeing your results each day and making that information comprehensible. If you are ever interested in adding marketing value to your site.

Two services that I use that have a very easy interface:

Quantcast.com. A free service that gives you demographic information as well as making available to potential advertisers and your audience. Using this service, you can also compare your own traffic to another rival site or larger popular blogs–although it might just depress you to see your traffic reduced to a tiny squiggle at the bottom of a line graph.

Google Analytics. Another useful tool from a site you may have heard of previously. Google Analytics gives you a lot of hard data on your site as well as giving you easy access to AdWords and AdSense tools to marketing your site or add marketing to your site. Check it out if you want more data than you could ever need. Analytics is pictured above with a screenshot.

Both services just require you to a drop a small amount of script code into your site and then wait for the results to pour into their analytics engine.

Try them out.

A collection of recent posts and articles points to the potential of blogging as a career choice. More and more employers, according to the latest “Fresh Starts” column in The New York Times by Barbara Whitaker, are looking for employees to have a knowledge of the blogosphere and blogs inner workings but not necessarily paying them to blog.

Blog salaries can be as low as $100 to $500 a month, but some lucrative positions exist that are discussed in the article.

Having a knowledge of new media can certainly turn a company around though. After Dell came to realize the impact of new media with Jeff Jarvis and “Dell Hell”, they have turned over a new leaf in the Web 2.0 world and become one of the innovators. Matthew Creamer’s article in Advertising Age today talks about the success Dell has had with using customer input on IdeaStorm to drive their products and next steps.

So there is hope for me to become employed as a blogger or at least working with blogs at some point. Steve Rubel just posted on his blog “Micro Persuasion” Saturday about the changing world of the Internet.

Much of the discussion during the day revolved around what kinds of skills PR and journalism students (today and tomorrow) require in this new environment.

Funny. That is exactly what I am, a PR and journalism student. I also already have a pretty good blogging skill building my own and publishing it somewhat regularly while trying to promote it by whatever free means available.

I think blogging is definitely a necessary skill that all students coming out of college should have–especially in the PR and journalism sector. My ideal job would be working somehow in this media because it is something I am passionate about, but I do know for certain that having the skills to write and blog well will come in handy down the road of employment.

Epic 2014 is coming true.

It is a video that I saw several months ago, but the YouTube/Google deal seems to be a lot like “Googlezon”

Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic Online analyzed this video and the updated Epic 2015. He urges some kind of evolution in print journalism–creating portals around the individual columnists and critics that make a paper what it is. This proposition is interesting because it makes me wonder if each community could be created around just one person, one voice. As Hirschorn says, journalists could become the “hub of their own social networks.” I wonder if this would segment the media more or if the charisma of one person, one journalist, could bring a community together and grow it into something much better than any news or social organization that we have today. Could there be something better? I can’t wait to find out.

Quoted below is my online journalism coverage from the 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism. You can see the story online for right now at the symposium’s site or go to the story directly.

Looking at it now, there are some corrections I would make if I was editing this, but for writing it in less than half and hour and sending it in to get online right after the panel, I think it is pretty solid.

A New Digital Divide: Web 2.0 Leaves Society Behind
By Jacob Sloan
Multimedia journalism student at UT Austin

As the Web brings more community journalism and interactivity onto the Web, society leaves entire groups of citizens on the outside. Web 2.0 can only be utilized by those citizens who have the tools and know-how.

“The evacuees in Austin were forced to learn on the fly how to use these sorts of tools,” said Lou Rutigliano, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin currently working with Austin Free-Net. “For many of them, they were signing up for email for the first time.”

Even current community journalism options such as EastAustin.com do not offer citizens much opportunity for feedback. With a great deal of advertising and only a link to send email feedback to the site, EastAustin.com does not give much of a chance for citizens to view each others comments or interact.

The Web 2.0 experience could offer a great deal for citizens in these situations or even the homeless outside of disasters. Similar to “hobo codes,” a type of urban tagging done by the homeless to identify locations where free meals or clothing can be obtained, the Web could be an incredibly powerful communication resource.

The difficulty in getting these citizens to use the Web comes from lack of computers available combined with language or knowledge barriers or simply a resistance to the Internet.

“A lot of people are just resistant to the idea of even getting online,” Rutigliano said.

Austin Free-Net tries to involve computers in the everyday lives of these citizens. Through showing them how to look up bus schedules, use email or even research potential employers, Free-Net integrates the Web into their lives.

“Matching up offline and online behaviors,” Rutigliano said. “That is how you are going to get people in there.”

Austin Free-Net is attempting to arrange classes on using the Web and software while people wait in line each week at the food pantry in hopes that more disadvantaged members of society will get online.

These concerns come at a time when many companies are concerned about leaving people and countries behind on the Web. AMD has created the PIC, or Personal Internet Communicator, in order to provide a low-cost Internet ready device for first-time technology users in high-growth markets like India, Brazil, Mexico and China.

April 8, 2006

Technorati tag: journalism, multimedia, Web 2.0, AMD, digitaldivide.

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This is a story that I wrote based on looking at transcripts/video from the 2005 International Symposium on Online Journalism as practice for covering this year’s like a true online journalist:

Man vs Machine

“It’s not easy to beat a machine,” Len Apcar, editor-in-chief of The New York Times on the Web, remarked at the 6th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin on Friday, April 8, 2006.

When the Pope passed away, the Times online staff scooped Google News, which they consider one of their competitors, in getting the story on the Web. In the age of blogging and citizen journalism, the Times must consider everyone competition.

“The culture basically has to revolve around the central idea that a scoop is a scoop no matter where it goes,” Apcar said.

By prepping a package in advance, the Times conducted final edits in time to put the story online immediately upon the Pope’s death.

Online Ego

Speed is not the only impediment to publishing online. Editors face the problem of convincing reporters to post to the Web since having the scoop is the only reward for journalists. Other publications often republish the same information without crediting the Web story once the reporter puts it out there. Through feeding egos, Apcar convinces reporters they will be more widely read by publishing on the Web.

On an average day, the Times publishes about 35 or 40 Web stories. Beat reporters usually write the stories for the paper and Web unless a beat reporter is too busy. In that case, a Web staffer writes the story, and when the beat reporter writes an article on the topic, it replaces the Web story.

Online Journalists Earn Tips and Reader Interest

The first Times’ reporters to jump onboard the move online were the correspondents outside of New York.

“They understood the power of this because the people they talked to could read their stories,” Apcar said.

Foreign correspondents suddenly began receiving tips and additional information once the communities the correspondents covered could read their work.

Online journalism also allowed The Washington Post to discover what their readers were really interested about. In publishing a blog following Washington’s new baseball team, the Nationals, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com Jim Brady found that the life of a baseball reporter interested readers more than actual news about the team. The blog is one of the most popular by the Post.

“If you really want to see where the comments are on this blog, it’s all about, you know, what it’s like to be out there traveling the country all of the time,” Brady said.

Readers really wanted to hear about the life of a journalist.

“We have recognized that there is a fascination with what goes on behind the curtain at a lot of major media organizations, which we’re trying to put a light on that and give people a sense of what it’s like,” Brady said.

Getting Citizens in on the Action

Citizen journalism is a hot topic among online journalists right now, and while both the Times and the Post have an interest in interacting with their readers, neither have made significant efforts to accommodate citizen journalists.

Comment: This is probably dated now since I bet both sites have made strides to include citizen journalism

Technorati tag: journalism, multimedia, Google.

Dr. Steven Reese chaired a panel on Citizen Journalism: Possibilities and Pitfalls.

Sharon Meraz started the panel speaking about her paper on the use of the Internet during terrorism and disaster coverage such as the Indian Ocean earthquake, London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. She also brought up the term Citizen Paparazzi with sites like Spy Media, Scoopt, and Cell Journalist. Celebrity disguises are going to have to get better if this keeps up, or they are never going to be safe in public. Imagine 20 people fighting to get a cell phone pic of a celebrity everyday–insanity.

Neil Thurman from City University-London talked to several editors and found that the blogs were seen as a challenge to the tradition of unbiased journalism since many blogs are biased and opinionated. I think blogs should be thought of as Mindy McAdams would later comment–as a delivery system. With qualifiers like diary blogs, journalism blogs, political blogs and so on, blogs can be seen as more than just the spoutings of Bill O’Reilly. I want to keep mine somewhere between an editorial and journalism blog–at least right now, but everything on the Internet adapts and changes. Thurman talked more about the use of message boards on newspaper sites, but he lost me since I was partly starting to work on a story and partly just not smitten enough with his British accent–nothing against Brits.

Lou Rutigliano from good ol’ UT-Austin and UnknownCity.com revealed the large groups of citizens missing out on the whole Web 2.0 explosion that gets talked up so much these days. Never thought about how many possibilities there were for homeless, immigrant workers and other disadvantaged citizens to use the Web–especially the social Web. Rutigliano mentioned things like immigrant workers being able to review and comment on different contractors to work for and to avoid or homeless using the Web to create a new form of “Hobo codes,” or urban tagging used to identify locations and buildings where homeless can get meals, clothes or other free items. Rutigliano was a great speaker and his presentation had some funny moments like when he called EastAustin.com (update: site now MIA it seems) Web .05.

Pluck works to bring blogs to the mainstream media with BlogBurst–essentially a wire service for blogs. Julie Neumann from UT-Austin and the Austinist did a professional case study on the use of blogs in BlogBurst.

“For me, journalism was ink and paper and having an editor,” Neumann said on her conversion to the online journalistic world.

As far as the argument goes on whether bloggers are journalists, I think Neumann said it best: “[Bloggers] are in journalism, and they are affecting journalism.”

The advantage of blogs come in their ease of publication and the possibility of linkage interaction–something that should have huge appeal to publishers according to Neumann’s analysis. Hear that publishers? I am waiting.

Neumann explained that new media does not kill off the old media; it just causes it to adapt. New media is always a metamorphosis of old media. Shovelware just won’t cut it anymore. Neumann said blogs could even be better at doing journalism in some ways–like local eyewitness coverage.

As far as blogger rep, Neumann said she got treated as well or even better than her print or broadcast compadres when she told PR people or gatekeepers that she was a blogger with the Austinist. Bloggers allow for immediate berating when you anger them–are you afraid, PR professional?

The panel had great input, but the final consensus seemed to be that blogs, citizen journalism and the mainstream media are going to have to get together in a test tube and make some strange-looking baby that everyone will make fun of until it grows into its own. I bet it will have big pointy ears.

Technorati tag: journalism, multimedia, blogging, Web 2.0, BlogBurst.

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I stayed for the panel on Multimedia Journalism Narrative: Should Online Journalism Embrace Traditional Video, or Try a Richer Blend of Video, Photos, Animation, Text, etc.? to see what the pros had to offer as far as advice.

In using media, multimedia journalists want to be different.

“We are not trying to out-TV TV,” Jen Friedberg, multimedia producer for Star-Telegram.com in Fort Worth, said.

They send reporters out to find stories in an original way–as Len Apcar , editor-in-chief of NYTimes.com, said to me yesterday in visiting my multimedia journalism lecture, the zooms/pans and other camera techniques are designed to distinguish their video on the Web from TV broadcast journalism.

Outside of journalism, Bart Marable, the creative director of Terra Incognita Productions in Austin, uses a variety of mutlimedia to present museum-style presentations online such as an online exhibit on the journey of Lewis & Clark. They make some cool projects but far to intricate journalistically to be anything that current online newsrooms could produce on deadline. From a previous visit by Paco Link from Terra Incognita, I also know that they combat the problem of Google not searching flash packages by completely duplicating their packages in HTML along with the Flash–now that is time consuming. It would be great to cover a feature with this kind of intricate multimedia and interactivity, but the journalism community is lacking the technical know-how and equipment to produce this complexity quickly.

Mindy McAdams is a pretty big person on the multimedia journalism scene as the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Florida–NCAA Basketball Champs. In fact, I am supposed to be using her textbook in my multimedia journalism class with the University of Texas’ Knight Chair Rosental Alves, but I already have enough of an idea about Flash that I think it would be too repetitive to buy. She had some interesting things to say in her presentation.

For one, McAdams said that multimedia is personal and so she wouldn’t show any on the projector to us and instead would just show screenshots–kind of upstages all the prior presenters who showed their multimedia.

How do you use multimedia in the best way? McAdams showed Toxic Legacy to show what making something graphically interesting without infographics and the ability to zoom clearly slows down the collection of information and prevents the viewer from being able to get more data from their map and graphics. I agree with her on this one–the presentation is amazing in appearance but pretty weak in storytelling. I want to work on getting my own images and graphics up to this hi-res quality while still maintaining useful story techniques. A story with 25 or so pages of text inside a Flash package–you lost me as a reader. I don’t even like it when a story is broken into separate HTML pages so that I have to hit the next button three times. Maybe The Record with more experience can make something incredible in the future.

“Hooks” seems like a cool concept that she talked about. She described them as multiple interest-grabbers for readers such as people, places, maps, etc.

“I don’t think a journalism story is ever going to be like a videogame,” McAdams said. Wow, now that would catch my interest. Although, I think the news element would be lost in the entertainment value if the game was any good. 10 hours without moving away from a story–what kind of feature story could carry that much attention? That is something I would definitely explore.

Touching Hearts (update: link removed; no longer online in same locations) reminds me of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. I think this is the future of multimedia journalism–and I like it. This package is not perfect, but the ability to choose what you want to see and leave what you don’t is key. As McAdams said: “The reporter’s mission is not to force people.”

Jose Manuel Valenzuela, editor of El Pais’ mutlimedia magazine, was pretty hard to understand–mostly probably my fault for multitasking like this during his presentation, but he definitely has an innovative publication. Of course, it better be pretty innovative for the amount of time it takes to load–I mean, forget it if you don’t have broadband or if you have a slow WiFi connection. Check it out if you dare.

Ashley Wells, executive producer of editorial concepts for MSNBC.com spoke on what kind of multimedia journalism is really innovation. Taking from education, one of his examples was an Olympic 100 yard dash game where the reader would play and then hear narrative on how the true athlete could never truly reach that time. Interesting concept to explore further–a game starting a story. When you relate this back to what McAdams said about story coverage never reaching the intricate interactivity of a game, gaming stories seem a little more possible. Flash games mixed with flash story coverage, could I be so lucky?

How long should video in multimedia be?

McAdams and Professor Rosental Alves had some suggestions about videos that kept attention even though they were longer than the typical 2 minutes.

World Health Organization 7 minute Video on tuberculosis and AIDS (I hope this is the right video)
update: This was the correct WHO video. Much thanks to Mindy McAdams.
JCB Music Video–described by the two as a captivating 8 minute song
These videos are great examples of how to captivate audiences–even online. At the same time, what commonalities do you see in a video about disease threatening the world and one about a guy riding construction equipment? I think keeping audiences for longer than 2 minutes online is not quite an exact science yet.

Technorati tag: journalism, multimedia, blogging, narrative, techniques.

Jim Brady, vice president and executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, spoke today in a panel titled The Impact of Journalism and Social Media on Newspapers at the 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism that reporters have started to get bragging rights from how many bloggers are writing about their stories. Makes one wonder whether the scoop still matters of whether now it is just who starts the dialogues. If journalists begin to judge themselves on how much talk they get in the blogosphere, what prevents sensationalism? Regardless of my concern, it is still an interesting development in online journalism.

Through byline linking, the Washingtonpost.com has developed a dialogue with their readers. Brady said many of the reporters even respond frequently to comments as long as they are not just abusive junk–like you kids that use the asterik too much.

Editor Juan Carlos Lujan Zavala presented a pretty interesting presentation on his citizen journalism publication at ElComercio.com.pe. In Lima, Peru, he is getting thousands of comments on popular stories like the ones covering the upcoming elections in Peru. They run commercials encouraging everyone to find their inner journalist including a pretty funny one about a guy taking a cell phone picture of a giant spider (can’t find a link otherwise I would post it). Do we have as innovative a citizen journalism publication here?

Scott Clark, vice president and editor of the HoustonChronicle.com, has a reporter attacked by a roving band of jazz enthusiasts for the Chronicle’s poor coverage of the jazz community–getting rougher and rougher to be a journalist these days. As a newspaper writer, the interaction between writer and reader lacks the closeness and dialogue it has with the community. The Chronicle also experimented with using citizen journalism by having bloggers spread out throughout the coastline and cover Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. They let their reader blogs do almost anything they want. They followed a University of Texas Daily Texan reporter on a road trip to the Rose Bowl.

Fred Zipp, managing editor of the Austin American-Statesman, talked about starting up the reader blogs. Want to read about where the bluebonnets are in Texas? Check out the Stateman reader blog following bluebonnets…of all things. Zipp finds that the blogs are a great way to express opinion but not really creating traditional journalism–depends on how you use it I guess, but I would disagree. At least the community blogs are completely uncensored.

Robert Rivard, vice president and executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News, commented that community bloggers with agendas soon realized that they needed to do some audience building and cool down a bit of their zealotry in they really wanted to succeed. Other panelists–Brady and Clark–agreed that they could just let those who wanted to scream do so in their own little “dark corner” of the website and not be promoted by the site.

Public Relations Blog

During Q&A, the panelists were asked how they could prevent PR professionals from starting spin blogs within their community blogs. Frankly, they didn’t have much to offer in the way of prevention. There has been some recent controversy about a blogger who turned out to be a PR pro already, but none of the panelists could really offer up any method of filtering other than a general ability to smell something fishy and prevention of “spam” blogs.

Technorati tag: journalism, citizenjournalism, blogging, media, washingtonpost.

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What if George W. Bush had a blog? Now, I don’t mean what if he was technologically capable to create and manage his own website and blog interface–that is too much to ask–but what if he had a website or just a newsletter like a blog or a LiveJournal where he would confess his inner thoughts like a diary. It wouldn’t have to be government secrets or damaging information on his thinking about America’s relationship with China; it could just be a daily grind of domestic affairs, what he did that day or where he wants to go with the country or government–his objectives.

The reason I bring this up is because I started thinking about what it would mean for the President to have a blog in situations such as the current one with Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney catching heat for the leak incident. Would a presidential blog make America trust W more?

Nixon kept tapes during Watergate, but he never released them. What if he had made daily memo logs like a little Captain Picard throwback diary and released it to the public everyday. Would that bring the President into our daily lives? Today, it seems like Bush is locked away in his White House ice palace with no entry or exit. The gates around the White House get taller and thicker everyday. In a land of freedom, we have to break down a tremendous barrier to actually get to what the President is thinking. I mean what the President is actually thinking, not just what his speech writers have created. Personally, the whole idea of a speech writer seems untrustworthy. Someone can assist you in writing a speech but delivering a message composed by a public relations department and okayed with several different handlers just seems like lying. I want my president to be able to speak for himself and know what he is trying to get across.

Would a presidential blog make our president more honest? If we knew more of what he was thinking, his insecurities and his goals–the good and the bad–would it make for a better country or a worse one?

There are those that want to know what the President is thinking and accept his fears and his concerns with what he is doing and then there are those that don’t want to know when our president is unsure or afraid of a decision; some people just want to close their eyes and sleep at night without concern that the country is all going downhill. I think there is a happy compromise in that relationship where you could take what a president is concerned about without interpreting it as a weakness or a mistake. Our presidents have flaws just like each and everyone of us, and I don’t think it is fair to pretend like just because they run the country at the moment, they never trip over their shoelaces or fall off a couch while choking on a pretzel.

Humanity in the presidency could be a big step in building better morale in the country and maintaining a high approval rating. Granted some people don’t read blogs or look online, but those that do would probably be the most concerned about the state of the country in the first place. Politicians are proving the online community has an interest in politics because of the many viewers of political blogs online and the number of people taking part in new forms of campaign fundraising online. Candidates have had lunch with their supporters online and collected donations through the Internet. This could be the future of elections and of campaigning. What if the candidates didn’t have to travel as much–granted they would still have to visit certain places–in order to visit with their supporters?

It could be a whole different world. W, you need a blog–just ask Nixon. An open White House might not hurt you in the long run if you played your cards right.

Technorati tag: blogging, bush, whitehouse.

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I started college trying to be someone that I was not–someone majoring in something that makes money. I came into college thinking that I couldn’t just major in something that I liked to do. If I am paying thousands of dollars, I want a degree in something that will pay me more than my semester’s tuition per year, and my freshman year I started on my double major in computer science and journalism.

Computer science was the only other subject other than journalism that I really enjoyed in high school–mostly because our teacher let us have a great deal of free time after we finished our work. I know that it probably doesn’t sound interesting to most college students out there, but, in my defense, I also picked computer science because I want to make video games when I grow up–or at least get older–and computer science seemed to be the best degree to go in that direction.

Much to my surprise, the computer science program was not what I expected. Rigorous logic paths and data trees constantly discussed and displayed using webs and strings and lines. It seemed very easy to do for the rest of your life–if you were a computer void of all emotional impulses. I exaggerate this point a little, but, for me, computer science seemed to kill all creativity.

All of my classes were computer science classes my first semester; it was bearable, but I was miserable in those lectures. For a kid who slept maybe two days in class during his entire high school career, I was racking up an unheard of number of in-class naps through all my classes. Trust me–it wasn’t because I was out partying every night. Freshman year all my festivities were on the weekends. I just could not stand my classes. I couldn’t sit next to the kid that stomped your foot anytime you fell asleep for the whole semester, and my foot was starting to get some mean bruises.

My second semester was worse. I started taking my first journalism class in addition to my computer science classes, and halfway through the semester, I found myself hating every minute that I was in computer science classes and actually staying awake in my journalism class despite it being at 8 a.m.

By halfway through the semester, I finally made a decision and dropped the one computer science class that had me doing the most work. Managing to make it through my other computer science course, I finished the semester, and the last three hours of computer science that I would ever have to take.

Clicking my heels, I left behind all the tin men of my former major and became a fully committed journalism major.

Now, yes, I get jokes made about me by super-cool engineering friends telling me how much less money I will make or how much easer my major is–not true, but I am somehow completely fine with that. Of course, I plan on going into video game design anyway and making a quick fortune to rain down upon my friends from college while I spout off a good Dr. Evil laugh–but in the end, I am happy as a journalism major. Poor people are far more interesting anyway, and if I get really poor, I can just look forward to voices in my head to keep me company in my cardboard box by the highway.

Technorati tag: college, journalism, decisions.

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