Wow, what a long blogging hiatus for me.
Well, I’m back and tomorrow will be blogging and posting audio from the Networked Journalism Summit, run by David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis.
Jeff wants people to go their and try to start fires, rather than just have high level discussions so I’ll be promoting two-way feeds as the future of news. We’ll see how that goes.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.
http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com
Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned
I have officially accepted a position of Web Development Director with The Hour newspapers in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The company is locally owned by a trust, a much different scenario than the Tribune owned The Advocate, where I previously held the postion of Senior Web Producer.
The current sites are in great need, and the company is hoping I can bring them up to modern standards.
Hopefully the scenario will offer me the opportunity to make the sites a model for other newspapers of all sizes.
I expect to use many of the ideas you folks have given me to formulate a modern strategy that includes consideration of VRM, Attention, Gestures and syndication.
OPML will be an integral tool building these newspaper sites and services, as will the concept of River of News.
I also plan to use open APIs from other services like Twitter and Flickr and Grazr, to integrate these services into other communities.
Similarly, I’ll try my best to expose whatever services we can offer through the use of APIs.
There are great opportunities out there for media companies that are willing to do things right, and I’m hoping this will be a chance to do just that.
Dave Winer asks for an Open Source twitter.
The world is welcome to the code which I created BuddyBuilder with.
I originally made it so I could blog to everybuddy.org with my IM client. 676 people have registered. A few use it regularly. I don’t actively develop it, but I could start again.
I wasn’t planning on it being an Open Source so I need to tidy up some hard coded stuff. Then it’s yours. You’ll need an XMPP/Jabber server with transports to run it, but that’s easy to do or find. I have it working with AIM, Yahoo and GoogleTalk
You can get weather by IMing mybuddybuilder, and typing weather:90210
You can subscribe to users and tags. It’s a little rough, but easily smoothed out.
Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.
I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.
Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.
It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.
Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.
Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.
A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.
Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.
Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.
I’ve posted another hack I contributed to O’Reilly’s “PHP Hack”.
Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger
I know Twitter is getting a lot of attention. I’ve been blogging from IM to everybuddy for years with BuddyBuilder.
I’ve decided to relaunch the project and make it open source. This should be interesting. OPML upload, River of news style rss aggregation will be key features of the relaunch.