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Digging Deeper
Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation
For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. A post about the U.S. attorney general firing scandal might be tagged: "U.S. politics," "Alberto Gonzales," "attorney general firings." But the missing element for bloggers has been a...
more »Your Take
What's the right age for kids to start visiting virtual worlds?
Forget about Second Life. The big buyout talk in virtual worlds lately has been around sites such as Club Penguin, a squeaky-clean world catering to kids aged 8 to 14, and Webkinz, a kids site with games and virtual pets. A recent BusinessWeek article noted that Big Media companies such as Sony and News Corp. were interested in paying upwards...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Reporting from Afar Might Work, But Not for Local News
While much has been made of the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries, until recently the field of journalism had remained largely untouched. Earlier this month local news website Pasadena Now announced its decision to outsource work to India, specifically reporting of City Council meetings. The site's owner, James Macpherson, said the meetings are streamed on the Internet,...
more »Philosophy
No Matter the Format, Interviews Are Not Dying
When you're a career journalist, you often find yourself getting into the deep groove of habit. A story breaks and you approach your known sources on the subject. You call them up for a comment or drop them an email query. But as I re-examine so many ingrained practices of journalism here at MediaShift, I wonder if the habitual...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Doing More Than Just Twittering Our Lives Away
When I first signed up for micro-blogging service Twitter last September, I remember reading that day that Evan Willliams, one of Twitter's founders, was in a horse drawn carriage winding through the streets of Marrakech. I found that fascinating. That day, I wrote one update ("I'm blogging...") and didn't sign in again until April of this year. Why? Because...
more »Digging Deeper
Twitter Founders Thrive on Micro-Blogging Constraints
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone have taken executive transparency to new heights, not only using their own Twitter micro-blogging service frequently to share details of their personal lives, but also publishing their own phone numbers and business address on Twitter's Contact page. So it was easy for me to get in touch with them to set...
more »Guides
Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter
Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called "Twitter", which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.
more »Your Take
"Twitter is like an RSS feed to every boring aspect of your friend's lives. And your friends are boring. How could they not be?" So writes Helen A.S. Popkin on MSNBC in one of many scathing reviews of the micro-blogging tool Twitter. Twitter lets you update other friends in your social network about your whereabouts on a micro-level from your...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Are We Sharing Too Much Information via Social Media?
Social media -- the online tools we use to keep in constant contact with friends and to spy on strangers -- is something many of us believe makes the Internet a more fun, more personal place to be. It makes it easier to keep in touch with people we care about, and facilitates relationships with people we might have...
more »Digging Deeper
Web Leads, Print Pubs Improve Environmental Impact
If you've grown tired of answering the question, "paper or plastic?" you can now consider another nagging environmental question when choosing your news source: "Online or print?" Environmental critics have decried "dead-tree media" for decades, saying that print publications rely on clear-cutting forests, energy produced to run paper mills, and gasoline used to deliver publications to each doorstep.While print...
more »Your Take
Should online video of presidential debates be free for public use and remix?
Just who owns the video of presidential debates? Up until this point, the TV networks that broadcast the events held the copyright to that footage and could post it online, monetize it in whatever way they wanted, and restrict usage by other folks. But Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a proponent of Creative Commons "copyleft" systems, started an online petition...
more »Your Take Roundup
YouTube Video Ads Should Be Relevant, Brief
Video-sharing phenomenon YouTube has built up its online business in classic dot-com fashion: Get the eyeballs first, then figure out how to make money. You can say "Web 2.0" all you want, but this is classic Web 1.0 thinking. So now that Google has sunk $1.65 billion into buying YouTube, those banner ads aren't going to pay the mushrooming...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
U.S. Media Fails to Deliver Spanish News Online
Here in the United States, with over "31 million Spanish speakers", you would think Spanish would be our second language online. And you would think that content for the Spanish-speaking community would be not only available, but also rich and varied, if only for the value it represents to marketers. But that isn't the case.
more »Legal Drama
Digg Users Show Strength in Numbers in DVD Dust-Up
The community-generated news site, Digg, has been an experimental hothouse for online communities. Last summer, there was the move by Netscape to offer to pay top Diggers to do their news-article bookmarking at Netscape, with Digg CEO Jay Adelson saying he'd never pay Digg community members. Now comes the user revolt after Digg decided to remove posts that mentioned...
more »Digging Deeper
'Mr. Magazine' Believes We'll Always Crave Ink on Paper
When Lebanese journalist Samir Husni was teaching students at the University of Mississippi about magazine journalism in 1986, one student had trouble pronouncing his Arabic name and took the simple route, calling him "Mr. Magazine." The student eventually gave Husni a plaque with the moniker engraved, and the name was so apt for the lover of print magazines that...
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