What to learn next

http://hackshackers.com/resources/hackshackers-survival-glossary/
The hackshackers.com glossary is a great place for May/June journalism or Web production  grads to browse for educational inspiration.

I’ll add more links here as summer goes on.

End of semester links for students who follow my blogs

For Web design or  journalism students getting interested in programming, or programmers getting interested in journalism, see my bookmarks tagged with the keywords “Journalism” and “Programming” at delicious.com.

For Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture students who need one more story for their comparison papers, check the films-adapted-for-radio posts at JHeroes.com.

For journalism or Web design students trying WordPress for the first time, see the “WP Tips” tab at the top of this page and my “Not a blog” site, demonstrating that WordPress isn’t just for blogs these days.

For news writing students — or anyone — following the shooting story at Virginia Tech, try my list of New River Valley journalists using Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep/nrvj

Included are individual reporters at Roanoke and New River Valley area newspapers and television stations, and a few dedicated news-watchers who post useful updates.

The staff of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech did a terrific job, making extensive use of personal Twitter accounts covering both the breaking news of the shooting and the community support following it.  As I pointed out to my students on Friday, during a big story, “beat” definitions go out the window and everyone pitches in to get the story covered — hence some “sports” Twitter feeds passing along timely information about an event that was far from their usual upbeat Hokie news.

Google offers data-analysis tools, liposuction for stats

Uses: Inspiration from washing machines, Rebecca Black

GoogleLabs has a new data-mining tool,  Correlate, which allows folks with data (got data?) to use Google’s algorithms to dig through numbers and visualize meaning. Business folks will love to compare brands; political analysts will look for public-opinion trends; journalists should even more other uses. I hope they don’t all try to figure out the correlation between liposuction and property values.

Making correlations is up to you...

To teach you what this might be good for, Google Labs offers several educational tools: a Comic Book, a FAQ file, a Tutorial and a research Whitepaper (pdf).

Here’s the main GoogleBlog article on Correlate:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/mining-patterns-in-search-data-with.html

If you don’t have data of your own, Google already has had tools out there for analyzing public datasets, as discussed in this GoogleBlog article last year: Statistics for a Changing World.

Here’s the site itself: Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool, and it’s support site.

Here are the Google datamine’s top 20 database topics:

1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

11. Last names 12. Poverty 13. Oil price 14. Minimum wage 15. Consumer price index, inflation 16. Mortality 17. Cost of living 18. Election results 19. First names 20. Accidents, traffic violations

Some of the analysis-visualization is based on Trendalyzer, which Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, whose Hans Rosling has done an amazing job demonstrating how well-visualized data — and his dynamic lecture style — can increase  knowledge and understanding, from the poverty line to the air line via the wash line.

Maybe a combination of Google’s sharing tools for analysis and great examples like his will inspire journalists and journalism students. First, I wonder if his BBC feature, The Joy of Stats will convince more journalism students to take statistics courses…

Back to Google:
So what are people searching for? Cupcakes, cats, government shutdown, health care, Rebecca Black, or maybe Vanessa Fox…?

Vanessa Fox at SearchEngineLand has insights into all of these tools, including Correlate. See her take on Rebecca, cats, cupcakes, March Madness and more in this 5-minute video: What is it in our lives that we care about most?   Vanessa Fox video from the Ignite Conference

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Other Google News:

I was less pleased — quite disappointed actually — when Google announced it is discontinuing its historical newspaper project. I wrote about it over at the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog: Google Unplugs Newspaper Scanning Project