Archive for October, 2007

Date: October 30th, 2007
Cate: Links and People, My Work

Links: October 30th 2007

OffTheBus.Net get’s two stories in the New York Times this week:

The Women Behind the Scenes:
â??The folks over at offthebus.net have been looking at the gender
balance of the major presidential campaigns and have found that Rudolph
W. Giuliani and Fred Thompson have the fewest women in top positions.â?

and
Campaign Coverage That Is Raw and Fresh: More of a broad overview of the work that has been done so far.

Cool startup of the day: DocStoc.com which says it is the "YouTube of public documents."

Do you need a will, an NDA, a lease? Find it or upload it for others to use at DocStoc.

My Friend Ann from New York (remember NY Dave?) posted a photo of me and my roomate/best friend from highschool — from two years ago. Memories. (I’m the one she called "jew-boy").

Cool picture of the day. Me made of Marzipan. hmmmm tasty Dave.

Date: October 26th, 2007
Cate: Environment/Geography, Film, Links and People, Open Source and Community, Travel

Traveling the World on Hope and Web 2.0

I’m happy to say that I spent the day working with my friend Noel Hidalgo. Also known as No Neck Noel.

This is cause for celebration because the last time I saw Noel he was leaving the country on a seven month tour of the world to visit the seven continents, sail the seven seas, see the seven wonders of the sea and….. well, you get it.

His project “The Luck of Seven” has brought him back to San Francisco, where I now live.

Noel hasn’t just been trancing about. He’s been doing interviews. I found this interview with Dries Buytaert to be fantastic. Noel put it up on his site as I was at the height of my research for my masters thesis on Drupal.

Noel has a 112 day beard going on. Which, if you know me, you know I am a fan of beards.

Noel was also critical in my thinking of CopyCamp.org — which is in the second stage of of the Knight News Challenge. So it’s good timing to have him come and look over my proposal.

From SF Noel will go up to Vancouver, back down to LA and over to Ohio. If you can lend him a hand in any way — I’m sure this traveling vagabond of open source wonders would gladly appreciate it.

Noel Hidalgo: You have achieved the status of “Homie and Scholar”

Date: October 26th, 2007
Cate: Journalism Practice, Journalism Theory/Analysis, My Work, New York/San Francisco, Quote

Online Journalism Review: A Look Back at The Networked Journalism Summit

Online Jouralism Review recently asked me about the Networked Journalism Summit.

You can see the full interview and the dopey picture that they used of me (stolen from Facebook) here.

Also see pictures from the Networked Journalism summit here.

Date: October 25th, 2007
Cate: Advertising/Business, Crowdsourcing, Links and People, Weblogs

Should Do This: Catch of the Day

Trying to get into blogging more often. So some posts are going to be quick like this.

Catch of the day: Should Do This
Brought to us by the people of 43 Things and to my attention by Derek Powazek.

It’s a simple idea: If you know a company or entity that should be doing something. Here’s a place to suggest it. Real Example: My iPhone
should
handle images better in Mail.

Instant crowdsourcing for companies that don’t even want it.

While Should Do This is a bit whimsical, the idea is solid. Research and Developers beware – your job will soon just be about filtering through everybody else’s ideas.

Date: October 23rd, 2007
Cate: Journalism Practice, Journalism Theory/Analysis, Web/Tech, Weblogs
3 msgs

What Journalists Can Learn from Stock Traders

This will be a post of brilliant but random ideas – culminating in the idea behind the title

Things I want to know more about.
Animal Stem-cell research. I know human stem cell research isn’t going to get a green light in the US anytime soon. But while taking my kitty to get spayed yesterday, I wondered why animal stem cells aren’t all over the place?

Space Elevators. I’ve always wanted to write a story on the space elevator. One day. I will.

Currently looking for: People who admit to taking money for submitting stories to Digg. If you talk to me — you will remain 100 percent anonymous. I will not snitch. This is for research on a book. Please ask.

Journalism Theory: I need to create two new categories for this blog. One will be journalism theory, the other, journalism practice. Then I’ll have to go back over every single post I’ve ever done and sort them. It just needs to happen for my own clarity.

Journalists as Stock Traders
Not too long ago I tried to create my first Internet meme.

It was an article titled "Internet Multitasking Syndrome," or IMS. I also wrote a post on how I came up with the idea for IMS — what the logic was behind creating a new disorder (which we have too much of anyways).

Both posts dealt with the extreme speed at which people surf the net. This is a new skill set for journalists to learn. When I would watch my older (but wiser) professors surf the web, I would get agitated. They type slow, they don’t use Firefox or any of the time saving plug-ins it offers. They don’t even know how to do a command-f search for a word on a web page if they are doing research. In short, they didn’t develop as journalists on the web. It’s not their fault, but for obvious reasons, there is a skill set that I have which they don’t, that enables me to be far more productive on a computer.

Things like RSS, social news sites, social networking sites and all the rest are great — but they fundamentally change the way journalism is done.

Journalists are still out to seek the truth, but as the job description changes, we have also become information traders. Buy low, sell high equates to publish early and pounce on emerging memes fast, so the links flow back to you.

I’ve got to go check to see who is gchat/Iming/calling me now. Multitaskers unite!!!!