Search engines are familiar territory, but I picked up a few lessons from the workshops that followed the panel I was on during the Google for Media event that preceded the Online News Association conference in Atlanta.
I’m sharing what I picked up here, as much for me as for you.
Before the full Online News Association conference kicked off in Atlanta, I was on a panel discussion about lessons from local reporting online during an event Google held for members of the media.
I was joined by Joaquin Alvarado from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Thomas Wheatley from Atlanta’s Creative Loafing and Bryan Leavoy from WSB-TV and the moderator Daniel Sieberg from Google.
Continue reading 5 things I told Google about innovative local reporting online
Google Books released an incredibly interesting time-waster research tool that can graph the use of any word in six language since 1500 from some 500 million digitized books, as I reported this morning for Technically Philly.
While, as showed there, lots of interesting Philadelphia-related graphs exist, I admit that even more broad conversation-worthy displays exist. (Find the tool here)
They show things like: We haven’t written more about ‘peace’ than ‘war’ since 1743.
Other interesting graphs:
What have you found?
After a few months since my first appearance on Carole’s Technology Corner, an hour-long Wednesday radio show on 900 AM WURD, I was asked back tonight, focusing largely on a collaboration of Philadelphians pursuing Google money for a super high-speed broadband network.
The fill-in host was James Cartwright, a former IT specialist for the City of Philadelphia.
Because of some difficulties, the audio wasn’t available to be sent my way.
I don’t want to repeat this anymore, so let me direct you elsewhere.
I got an e-mail from a young aspiring journalist, still in high school and already coming to the questions I just started coming upon late in college. Her question:
how do you buy spaces on a google seerch?
Hey, even she will tell you that I told her to work on her grammar and spelling. (Oh, word processors, what have you done to us?).
But more importantly, it made me realize I never wrote the obligatory “own your name in Google” post. I have surely touched on it in previous posts, but rather than repurpose that information or rewrite what has been written so many times, I say to young reporter or fresh-on-the-web journalist, find out why branding your name online matters, and then read the following – because they’ve already done the job.
In the late 1990s, a host of Web sites democratized the Internet, giving the average Internet-user the chance to have his own online home.
In 2003, MySpace used the model and brought in a new age of social networking.
Last week I posted that MySpace is on the way out, and briefly mentioned that WordPress and Blogger are taking over the role of providing free, easy-to-manipulate Web presences.
Does that make them the next Angelfire or Geocities? Are they just another trend ready to be overcome?
Updated 6/27/10 @ 8:50 p.m.: Added additional Gmail improvement suggestions
Yeah, we’re all on Google’s bird. It may be a phenomenon, financially and socially, but I still have my complaints. I’m sure you do too (even if you just blame them for killing newspapers, like the French do.)
As Google applications have grown in popularity during the past few years, journalists have taken to see Google aps as a way to better unite newsrooms.
The advantages are clear, but having only used Google aps for a couple years, and a couple for half that, but I have already found a number of faults with these free Web-based services, particularly for journalists.
Continue reading My problems with Google applications: holes in these journalism tools
This post has moved here.
As a young, aspiring journalist, I want to know what it is I need to have, what I need to know and what I need to learn. I’ve spoken to some friends, colleagues and with a few professional internships in my past, I think I am ready to fill the vaccum. What needs to be in every young journalist’s tool box?
Continue reading Journalism Tool box: What every young journalist needs
I recommend an occasional IV for everyone.
Yes, the Internet vacation is a necessity. Through the magic of forward posting on this site, RSS feeds of this blog on all my social utilities and a reckless abandon when it comes to e-mail, I can do that with some regularity now that I am in between my post-graduate internship and an upcoming trip that I’ll post about in coming weeks. -I haven’t checked my Google Reader in a week or more – oh the horror!
The Internet vacation certainly isn’t new, even if my pushing the IV for short on Twitter and elsewhere may be.
Continue reading Internet Vacation: Because sometimes you need an IV
