I’ve experimented with various ways to embed Flickr slideshows into blogs before, but by far the easiest way I’ve found is above. Simply click “info,” and follow the prompts to generate your own code. Watch this slideshow for an overview.

NERD NOTE

1. Use your Flickr display name as your “username” … i.e. “Association of Alternative Newsweeklies” vs. altweeklies.
2. The code autogenerates at 500 pixels wide. Simply adjust the height/width parameters to fit your site.

[via RobbMontgomery.com]

The slideshow above was part of a presentation entitled “Blogging for Journalists” I gave at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg Florida in July 2007 for the 2007 Summer Fellowship for Young Journalists.

During the UNconference “Blogging for Journalists” during the Portland 2007 AAN Convention, I sketched two flow charts that later turned into this presentation. (Thanks to participants for the healthy discussion!)

Last week’s presentation posited the following:

1. The production process for creating online content for newspapers is, for the most part, extremely convoluted and cumbersome, inhibiting what newsroom staffers are able to accomplish online.

2. Setting up a blog is ridiculously easy. Since anyone can do it, everyone has. Many newsroom-produced blogs do not use the medium well; creating illogical editing/production workflows, or giving folks better suited to column-writing blogs of their own.

3. Let’s not waste time critiquing the flaws of existing newspaper-produced blogs. Instead, let’s consider blog software a storytelling tool - how can we employ this tool to further our journalism?

We then went around the room, positing scenarios, and brainstorming possible uses of blog software for journalism.

Is your newsroom considering starting a blog? You might find “Conversation Bullet Points for Starting a Newsroom Blog” helpful.

Create Digital Listening Posts Using RSS Feeds - It’s Easier Than It Sounds

Go to soccer games, Jan Leach recently urged a room full of students at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. You never know the stories you’ll overhear folks talking about.

Leach, former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, spoke to the power of “having a life outside the newsroom” - being present in the community, and having one’s reporter ear constantly tuned for stories.

In a digital age, let’s expand upon that theory - let’s create Digital Listening Posts.

3 Steps To Creating Digital Listening Posts

1. Sign up for Netvibes.com.
2. Spend some time adding links to local sites and bloggers.
3. Check your account periodically to scan for story ideas.

Here’s more detail.

1. Netvibes.com is an RSS aggregator [wiki definition]. Think of it like TiVo for news - you add a feed, and the webpage automatically fetches updates for you. If you’ve visited Google News before, you’ve seen RSS feeds in action - that site is populated by feeds. [Oprah-style intro to RSS feeds]

Your “start page” on Netvibes will offer you some beginning options - little boxes (widgets) that allow you to search for content relevant to your beat.

For purposes of demonstration, I set up a “Columbia Heights, DC” page, which pulls information about my neighborhood. (It’s easier for me to evaluate newsworthiness in my own ‘hood than in a randomly selected city.)

2. Adding links to quality local bloggers will probably take an afternoon’s worth of your time. Treat local blogs much as you would a community newspaper - a place for story ideas, trend spotting, or source-finding. Use technorati.com, a blog search engine, to search for local blogs. Metropolitan-themed blogs tend to link to each other; look for a blogroll to find similar themed blogs.

3. Check your Netvibes page regularly to find story ideas.

What Story Ideas Did I Find?

Image Search

• Interior photos of an extremely nice renovated house in a rough neighborhood; potential sources for articles on gentrification, or an architectural feature.
• A DC Bilingual Public Charter School; which could be the beginning of a profile, or a piece on funding issues.

Adding Blogs, I found …

• DCCabbie.Blogspot.com is a veritable treasure trove of story ideas. This outspoken (and often profane) blogger writes about an underground bar called the BUNKER he’s been going to since “this Russian chick started the joint over ten years ago,” and Ethopian cab drivers who save up to buy mansions at home. Lots of story potential here.
• Mr. T in DC’s Live Journal reports a man in his neighborhood who walks around with a grocery cart, stealing Sunday papers. Does he resell them? Where, and why? That’s a feature I’d like to read. [Mr. T is also exceptionally active in the online Columbia Heights community, posting frequently to the community forum and moderating the neighborhood Flickr group; he would be a good source to cultivate.]
• A WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council Member (DC Metro/public transportation planning organization), keeps a blog of transit developments - a useful source for transit beat reporters.
• For more ideas on using YouTube to find local stories, see Cathy Resmer’s post Finding and Using Local Content on YouTube.

YouTube searches revealed …

• An ‘94 “Illuminati Pedophiles in Washington D.C.” video - good perhaps for a feature on the subject, or a larger piece on the second life YouTube can bring to archival documentaries.

That’s a quick look at the current info in my Netvibes. Like all story tips, it’ll take some old-fashioned shoe leather journalism to see if any pan out.

Twitter has been getting a lot of buzz recently as a networked way to send out micro-updates to your network of friends. [What’s Twitter? web.aan.org/twitter]

Newspapers like the New York Times have been using Twitter to send updates to their followers on the network, following the 2.0 Mantra of Web Publishing: “Get Your Content Out to Your Audience - Wherever They Are.”

But, no denying it, it can be time-consuming to “tweet” every update to your site.

Enter Twitterfeed.com.

Twitterfeed allows you to submit any RSS feed, and select how often it will send updates to your Twitter account.

Admittedly, papers who publish 100+ articles on a weekly basis won’t find Twitterfeed that useful, as it can only send out 5 updates per refresh cycle. And the automagic-posting means you’ll lose a little flexibility on the formatting side:

I think this service could be a good match for papers who update their content periodically throughout the day, or those seeking a new distribution/publication mechanism for their papers’ blogs.

Of course, Twitter can only drive traffic to your site if you have a network of folks receiving updates.

To see how it works, sign up for an account, and add AAN as your friend at Twitter.com/altweeklies.

[NERD NOTE: Pownce is poised to become the new Twitter; it combines short messages with events and file-sharing. Pownce is currently in beta mode, but once it’s open to the public I’ll write it up. if you’re on it, add me as a friend. ]

I’m often asked how I keep up with new media trends. Here’s a simple rule to keep in mind: “People interested in creating new, transparent and modular forms of communication are usually documenting it somewhere online.”

A great example of this is Slideshare.net. A “YouTube for Powerpoint,” Slideshare.net plays host to a number of presentations given at top web conferences around the world, like South By Southwest Interactive, and Enterprise 2.0.

(Slideshare.net also allows you to upload PDFs, so the possibilities for embedding it in your own site are pretty limitless.)

Many presentations can be understood without the accompanying speaker. Others will give me just enough information to go Googling for more. I will often add the blogs of useful speakers to my RSS feeds, or add them as contacts in my other social networks.

Here are some recent finds of merit.

Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?

This presentation gives a fairly cogent answer to the question, How can I use social networking and viral marketing to build my brand?

Bottom up Tagging

This presentation will be most valuable for those already familiar with the concepts of tagging, folksonomy and taxonomy. [Web.aan.org on Folksonomies.] It provides some valuable diagrams that explain the value of tagging from the escalation of personal to social.

I set up a Blogger-powered blog the other day to organize the 50+ responses I received to a roommate-wanted ad. I chose Blogger because - despite my fondness for Wordpress, Typepad and Vox - it remains the easiest and cheapest way to set up a limited-use blog.

NERD NOTE: Blogger is blog software, owned by Google. It produces blogs with the URL sampleblog.blogspot.com, so some people mistakenly refer to it as Blogspot. [Wikipedia on Blogger software].

I was surprised to see that Blogger had eliminated categories from the posting field, replacing categories with labels (or tags). A bit of research indicates this shift took place during the 2006 Google takeover.

This is important - a shift from a rigid taxonomy to a looser folksonomy - in arguably the world’s most used blogging software. It also serves as an introduction to the important concepts of tagging and folksonomy - bedrocks of the Web 2.0 movement.

Why is tagging important? Watch this short video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

So, what is a taxonomy?

A structured, “print-think” way of organizing content, based upon rigid classifications. [i.e. Movies > Capsule Reviews; News > Economic]. Not only can these categorizations be difficult for online editors to make, but they hinder the readers from finding content they might otherwise be interested in. (For example, a Cat Power DVD review could be filed under either music or movies, potentially obscuring it from readers.)

A folksonomy is an alternative …

Looser, “user-generated” categorizations of content, based on tags and keywords. These categorizations tend to be more free-flowing, and aid in the serendipity of finding content. Tags or keywords can be author-applied (as in the Blogger software), editor-applied, or anyone-applied (as in social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us).
[Wikipedia on folksonomy].

You may be familiar with tagging folksonomies from sites like Flickr, which allow users to browse and search images based on keywords.

Try browsing using tags on AAN’s Flickr account.

So, how do folksonomies and tagging apply to alt websites?

Imagine the alt website of the future. Instead of website categories that correspond to print sections (music, food, arts&entertainment); the website would be organized by keyword content; both editor- and user-applied. When reading a story on recent gay rights legislation; tags like [gayrights family legislation vermont divorce custody gay lesbian alternative children adoption] would offer a user many different options for continuing to read content that interested them. Clicking on ‘gayrights’ would display all stories on the site tagged with that keyword; most of which would be invisible to a reader under the current ‘taxonomy’ organization theme.

Suddenly, dusty website archives would be transformed - into accessible, relevant deep-well evergreen content. How - alternative!

What do you think?

This blog utilizes a modified folksonomy - you’ll see the ‘tag cloud’ labeled Topics to the right of this post. We’re hard at work on a redesign of AltWeeklies.com that will use a modified folksonomy - more on that later.

Do you think folksonomies work for your website? Will print taxonomies continue to be relevant as physical papers downsize and move content to the web? Or is tagging a fad?

It would be a horrific and callous mistake to analyze the actions of the Virginia Tech shooter as the actions of a sane man. My heart goes out to the victims and the families. Cho Seung-Hui was clearly a very disturbed young man; his actions cannot be rationalized.

But the multimedia manifesto - and it’s distribution methods - pose some interesting questions in the age of self publishing.

View graphic full size

I can’t claim to have any answers, but I’ve given this matter some thought.

Why did the shooter choose to send his multimedia package via mail to NBC? Why, in the age of easy, digital self-publishing, did he not simply upload his material to YouTube - create a blog on blogger, add his images to Flickr or Photobucket? An individual with the technical ability to create QuickTime movies and burn them to disk would more than likely be able to use YouTube.

If his goal was to spread his message - to be at last and finally understood - why send his manifesto to a news organization that would have no choice but to ethically edit the material that they chose to brand, publish and distribute?

What are the distribution advantages to utilizing an ‘old-school’ method of publishing?

In a discussion with a colleague, I posed these questions. He posed an interesting alternative - perhaps in the age of self-publishing, granting content exclusivity to a traditional news organization creates credibility in the way that self-published content could not.

Building on this idea, I wondered if sending the material directly to a news organization wasn’t a slick manipulation of NBC - which might, under different circumstances, have chosen not to air the material out of sensitivity to the victims. (Granting an exclusive scoop to one organization, as cynical as it may seem, almost inevitably guarantees that they will publish the material.)

Putting all questions of the individual’s motivation aside - what lessons about the role of news organizations in the age of self-publishing can we garner from this horrifically public, tragic story? Does this mean that traditional news organizations will indeed continue to have relevance in a self-publishing environment?

How do you use the engaged, attentive audiences on existing social networks such as YouTube in order to drive traffic to your own content?

Lonelygirl15, a YouTube user, gave us a case study of how to do it. The actress for an alternate reality game garnered a wide following on YouTube by following these simple steps:

1. lonelygirl15 began began ‘friending’ other youtube users (creating “her” own social network.)

2. lonelygirl15 next began to seek out popular videos and began commenting on them with regularity (creating name-recognition among an even broader audience of those who are viewing these popular videos.

3. lonelygirl15 began posting her own videos and her friends began posting responses and the masses who view popular videos linked through to her after reading her previous comments…the rest is history….huge traffic and a loyal fan-base.

- Marc Levin, Senior Marketing Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network Group, reporting on SXSWi session LonelyGirl15 on his blog dogballs

So how can alt papers put LonelyGirl15 strategies to work for them?

1. Create online presences with authentic voices.

2. Use your online presences (MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr) to interact regularly and meaningfully with real people. Post comments on their pages and content.

3. Link to your content contextually on other people’s sites. Posted a comment about politics? Send them a targeted link to a recent story.

[More about the LonelyGirl15 phenomenon.]

How does your paper drive traffic using social networks?

Can you define “Web 2.0″? It’s kinda like pornography or irony - you know it when you see it (or when you hear a really bad song that misses the point. How was that ironic? How??).

Fortunately for those of us who have short attention spans, Kansas State Professor Michael Wesch has put together this awesome short flick that explains what Web 2.0 really is about without being dull. In five minutes time, you’ll be able to cogently define Web 2.0. You know, for the next time that’s asked on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

[via E-Media Tidbits …. via Steven Snedker via Danish Broadcast listserv … oh, heck, isn’t that kinda the point!]