Info overload: Web journalism tools and events

I’ve been spending more time in Twitter — and reading Web pages linked to it — than I have in my blog lately, but even among my own students I think Twitter and this blog are reaching slightly different audiences.

So, for the information starved — or information-overload-starved — here is an aggregation of major things that have been distracting me in tweetland for the past few days.

Most of them were mentioned by participants in the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco and/or the Society of Professional Journalists “Excellence in Journalism” conference in Florida. For a hint of how much tweeting has been going on, see this SPJ Storify Page of EIJ12 tweets and the ONA tweets list of ONA12 Awards.

Next, a PBS video, parts of which sound like things I’ve been saying in my intro Web production class this semester. It’s here so that I can play it in class if I need to catch my breath.

It’s being discussed at lots of blogs, and the discussion comments may be informative. I’ll keep the URLs visible so that you can see where they are coming from:
http://www.pbs.org/arts/gallery/off-book-%7C-season-two/offbook-webdesign/
http://www.zeldman.com/2012/09/21/pbs-off-book-video-the-art-of-web-design/
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/20/the-art-of-web-design-video.html
http://gizmodo.com/5945138/the-art-of-web-design-explained
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/22/3372276/pbs-off-book-web-design-art

Two tools or topics that I really do want to catch up with, because they may help journalists (or journalism consumers) keep on top of a firehose of news information. “Spunge” discussion at one or both conferences reminded me that I’ve lost track of something with a similar goal, Dave Winer’s OPML editor and River of News project.

The other links below will have to stand for themselves with very little introduction… while I go look for the bottle of eyedrops and a 10-page to-do list hidden somewhere in the rubble here at home.

Spunge:
http://blog.spundge.com/post/31984648190/a-bloomberg-terminal-for-journalists
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/09/first-look-spundge-is-software-to-help-journalists-to-manage-real-time-data-streams/
http://davidhiggerson.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/spundge-a-tool-all-journalists-should-try-and-10-ways-to-use-it/

Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, News Rivers and Outline Comments:
(Dave mentioned in Twitter that it only would take 10 minutes to give the new tool a try. He was right. Very neat outline commenting; will have to see how it couples with news-rivering.)
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/aTestOfOutlineComments
http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
http://river2.newsriver.org/
http://quick.newsriver.org/
http://home.opml.org/
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/anOpenNoteToDoc

Social Media tips from Liz Heron (WSJ, formerly with NYT, ABC, Washington Post):
http://newsroom.journalists.org/2012/09/22/q-and-a-with-liz-heron-on-her-share-worthy-strategies/

Internet energy explored by the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?hp

How to be a journalism student — a wiki:
http://howtobeajournalismstudent.pbworks.com/w/page/19612154/FrontPage

The bad news: Gallup reports distrust in media
http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distrust-media-hits-new-high.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication

Closer to home, a documentary film maker will be in town talking about her latest in a free event at Blacksburg’s Lyric Theatre:
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/09/091712-sopac-detropia.html

Verizon Wireless Hotspot Still Not So Hot

Update: VZWsupport folks at Twitter have been helpful, offering a different MiFi device, the Verizon Jetpack™ 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi® 4510L.

Quick look at customer reviews found “much better” comments from some users who upgraded from the Samsung I’ve had such problems with, but also many complaints about reliability, speed and battery life.

I’m asking about the possibility of switching the MiFi hotspot device account to a smartphone account, possibly a Droid Maxx, which has hotspot capability. Trying to get a price for that upgrade from Verizon phone support — operator said she’d call back after talking to supervisor. Irony: My phone’s battery ran out 80 minutes after the time she said she’d call.

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My Samsung Verizon MiFi hotspot continues to drop connections — sometimes several times in a half hour. (Other times it’s fine for several hours of uninterrupted service, but connection speed is wildly inconsistent.) This is increasingly annoying now that I’m working at home more between semesters.

Verizon has replaced it three times, but the most recent replacement was a refurbished unit and its connection speeds have been the worst I’ve had in a year, without much improvement in reliability of the connection, although I haven’t had another major outage like the ones in December.

The previous device’s connection speeds sometimes exceeded 15 M/bps between dropped connections. The replacement unit is all over the place, but never that fast. (Today’s samples at right.)

Symptom: The indicator lights on the device and the Airport connection icon on my MacBook don’t show a disconnection. The Mac shows full strength, four bars, but Web pages don’t load. There’s no error message other than the usual “this page is not available.” I’ve tried several browsers and three different Macs. The indicator on my Android tablet, however, sometimes does switch to orange showing that the connection has dropped — my cue to hit the “reset” button on the Samsung hotspot.

On the Mac, I’ve lost work in email, WordPress, Terminal ssh connections and “cloud” services as a result of the MiFi connection just disappearing, not to mention the hours of back-and-forth on the Verizon Wireless Support Twitter feed.

Three months ago I gave up after waiting for a “will phone you…” that never came. Now that the semester-workload crunch is over, maybe I’ll try again.

I have two Verizon accounts: One for my original Droid 3G phone — which does not allow me to “tether” a MacBook and go online the way I thought it would when I bought it, and the second for the MiFi hotspot, which became my main home and off-campus Internet access when I moved to a house not served by the city’s municipal wifi.

Early online-newspaper nostalgia

• Niemanlab.org on: The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early Web’s most innovative newspapers
• CJR.org on: The San Jose Mercury, The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future

Prodigy, mentioned in one or both of those recent articles, was the first graphical online service I used, c.1988. (The Macintosh version of what became AOL may have been earlier, but I was PC until ’88.) Early rollout served Hartford, Atlanta and San Francisco — perhaps the only time those cities have been seen as having something in common.

Designed for e-commerce over a closed network at under $10/month, it started before the Internet was open to commercial use. Prodigy restricted bulletin board discussion topics, but did have general news sections. It began to do newspaper sites under contract — just before a more flexible America OnLine and a more open Web ate its lunch.

I interviewed beta users and experts for a review/article about Prodigy in ’88 or ’89 for PCWeek, which paid me well but didn’t print it; a new editor said it was because the publication’s focus was now business apps, not “consumer” services, and despite the involvement of major companies, Prodigy was aimed at the home-computer market. (It started as “Trintex” — the three being Sears, IBM and CBS. The network dropped out before the service went online.)

So I set aside my research on networks and hypertext, and switched to writing about boats — until the Web happened and I sailed off into a Ph.D. program… paying the bills with a part-time job at another online news pioneer, The News & Observer’s NandO.net in Raleigh, and (slowly) writing my dissertation about another, http://wral-tv.com, across town.

Note: This has been updated since the original post. I’m was reading the Web that day on a Nook-like Pandigital tablet, lowcost device whose software makes it easier to post a rough draft to WordPress quickly than to bookmark. Some of the roughness may still be here.

For the record, the Pandigital has an older Android WordPress app, Tweetcaster Pro with  ReadItLater, but poor keyboard and no direct hook to Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/bstepno).

Until I get something better, I can’t help thinking how GREAT this would have seemed in 1988.

Verizon 4G stands “for grief”

Using a Verizon 4G LTE hotspot as my main Internet connection over semester break — and working on research “in the cloud” —  has been piling frustrations on frustrations. They look like the picture at the right.

An article at AndroidPolice.com is convincing about an “authentication” issue as the possible technical cause of 4G problems that have been plaguing me for months. Verizon has replaced my Samsung 4gLTE hotspot device twice and most recently also replaced the SIM card. In perhaps 10 calls to Verizon tech support, I’d never heard this “authentication” topic mentioned, but that article reads exactly like what’s happening, including why my old 3G Droid phone works even when the Samsung hotspot’s 4G/3G connection doesn’t. Quoting: 

This is what your 4G LTE UICC SIM card does – it’s responsible for authenticating you on both Verizon’s 3G and 4G networks. Verizon 3G-only phones use the old authentication system, because they don’t have these SIM cards… the new scheme is extremely particular about failed attempts to authenticate a device. Your device authenticates regularly, “checking in” with the network to ensure you’re still supposed to be connected. When your device fails to authenticate on the network (for any reason – and there are a gamut of possibilities)… you notice you no longer have a data connection, and throw your phone at the nearest wall.

So far, I haven’t tried throwing the hotspot at the wall. It’s so small and light that it would be more satisfying to skip it across the surface of a lake. If I had a lake handy, I’d be tempted. Even yesterday, with blogs and twitter feeds reporting a widespread Verizon 4G outage (the third this month), a Verizon tech support person still had me doing things like removing and replacing the SIM card, logging into the device itself from my browser (http://192.168.1.1/)  and waiting for long breaks while he, presumably, scratched his head and tried valiantly to look things up in a support database. Another hour of my life I’ll never get back.

While the Samsung 4G LTE hotspot was useless, my Droid 3G phone performed just fine all day. The  hotspot’s indicator lights sometimes said it was connected with 4G, sometimes with 3G, but my computers could never connect to any website, regardless of the configuration of blinky lights.

Most annoying: Do a Google search for “verizon 4g outage status” and notice how far down the search list you have to go to find anything at “verizon.com” or “vzw.com.”  For a communication company, Verizon doesn’t appear to be communicating with its own technical support staff or its customers. How about an honest “system status” page somewhere?

I did eventually discover these discussion forums, but they have been mostly speculation and questions, no answers:

• community.vzw.com 4G Network discussion
• community.vzw.com outage topic
• androidcommunity.com outage topic

UPDATE: On the 29th, Verizon Tweeted that the problem had been solved and posted a press release that didn’t explain the extent or cause of the outage. It blamed the several recent outages on different “triggering events,” and made no mention of the SIM/authentication issue.

On the day of the outage, there had been nothing useful from the Verizon PR folks, but enough about expansion of the system to make you wonder whether the problem was just a matter of trying to grow too fast:

• http://news.verizonwireless.com/LTE/Overview.html#PressReleases
• http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2011/12/pr2011-12-27.html
• http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2011/12/pr2011-12-14m.html
• https://twitter.com/#!/VZWnews on Thursday tweeted, “4GLTE issue resolved overnight. 3G operated normally; calling, texting were unaffected,” but didn’t say extent of “issue” or point out that 4G devices like mine did not connect to the 3G network.
• https://twitter.com/#!/VZWSupport seemed buried in inquiries about badly timed announcement of a new billing policy, (which was rescinded two days later)

Ironically, but not unexpectedly, my connection flaked out a couple of times while I was writing this post. One of the most annoying aspects is that the 4G LTE WiFi hotspot’s indicator lights always show a normal connection, my Mac’s Airport icon shows a normal connection, but any Web browser attempt to load a page results in a “This webpage is not available…” display like the one shown above on the right.

Today, turning the hotspot off, waiting a bit, turning it back on, and recovering this page from the WordPress cache did the job. (Kudos to the combination of Google Chrome and WordPress.com for saving work in the background.) Yesterday, I was trying to do some online shopping, connect with some friends by email, pay bills and do research. I lost half a day, not counting what I’ve wasted “venting” about this today. Mea culpa. It’s enough to send me looking for an older technology… maybe a pencil. One with “AT&T” or “T-Mobile” written on the side.

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

Launching J-students into Twitter

What feeds should journalism students follow when they first begin to use Twitter?

Here’s my top 10 list, and I’ll be watching Twitter (and the comments on this page) for other suggestions…

1. A local professional news reporter
2. A local news organization’s main feed
3. A national news organization’s feed for a beat they follow
4. A feed about a subject they are passionate about
5. Their student newspaper
6. Another campus media organization
7. A different university’s student newspaper
8. A Society of Professional Journalists feed
9. A journalism review or think-tank like CJR, AJR, Poynter, J-Lab, Nieman
10. Their university’s PR office
11. The professor who suggested Twitter might not be just a colossal waste of time https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep

OK, so I’m not great at “top 10″ lists.

Once a journalism student has a Twitter account and has followed a few people to see how it works, what next?

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Tim Berners-Lee’s “20 years ago this month” article for the December issue of Scientific American is a great issue-oriented summary of Web history  — and a plea for online entrepreneurs to adopt policies of openness rather than creating “closed worlds.”

An excerpt:

“The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone ‘apps’ rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it.

“It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.”

Kudos : I was able to copy, paste and share that quote here thanks to the open Web standards begun by Sir Tim and used by Scientific American, WordPress and my Android phone–with the assistance of a WordPress Android app.

Page formatting at Scientific American’s site isn’t entirely small-screen mobile-friendly, but the magazine  clearly “gets” Berners-Lee’s belief in two-way hypertext linkage.

Considering the future of the Mag-App-Book

Khoi Vinh (subtraction.com), former design director at  The New York Times, offered some design-inspired thoughts the other day on “why most of the current crop of iPad magazine apps have dim prospects for long-term success,” which has prompted dozens of intelligent comments and a follow-up post: My-ipad-magazine-stand and more-on-ipad-magazines.

The combination sent me looking for something I’d read by Bob Stein a while ago,  The future of the app,  and an interview he did on NPR’s On The Media.

Stein’s Voyager company was creating innovative e-books and before that video discs back before the Web was spun. Some of them were so good, I’m thinking of buying an old computer that can still play them.  … which has me worried about the portability, searchability, longevity, archivability and general persistence of material created in the form of “apps” for particular computer, tablet or smartphone hardware.

I suspect folks like Bob Stein and Khoi Vinh are thinking about those issues, too… so I’m posting this here as a reminder to dip back into those discussions at their blog sites more often.

Online magazine or app publishing systems mentioned in the discussion, and related links:

• http://www.magplus.com/ and MinOnline coverage
• http://www.flipboard.com/ and Wired article about it
• Adobe on epub export from InDesign; also, a related blog post and Layers magazine how-to)
• Web edition of Times T-magazine

Footnote: Unrelated, but interesting — The Observer on Khoi Vinh’s departure from the Times.

Related: Recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on Michael J. Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, lamenting the way redesigns and e-comings-and-goings kill links, even on the open Web. (We were on a panel discussion of related issues at AEJMC six years ago.)

Celebrating first “summer of code,” Web launchings, 15 and 20 years ago

A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print.  The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.

That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.

Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on  PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.

That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”

In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.

In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)

The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.

Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)

WRAL among EPpy winners

WRAL.com -- in the early days

The list of 2010 Editor and Publisher EPpy award winners is a long one, but it’s great to see WRAL.com in Raleigh, N.C., among them.

The citation is for “Best Local TV/Cable-Affiliated Website.”

We have some history, starting back in the Happy Valley imagemap days, when I was a regular visitor, first online, then in person. Maybe I should be writing a 15-years-later follow-up to my doctoral dissertation, a case study of WRAL and its site-development process; that 1999 paper was an early chapter-draft.

WRAL.com today

Anyhow, congratulations to WRAL’s John Conway and colleagues… 15 years of excellence — and in Web years, yet!

While it’s great to see an old friend on the list, the other nice surprise in this year’s EPpys is the number of site’s I’ve never visited… lots of new ideas to share with students in the fall.

NPR, CNN and Time were among the more familiar winners. Among the new-to-me sites I’ll be looking at are:

• Krulwich on Science,  the latest incarnation of a long-standing favorite broadcast journalist, Robert Krulwich (see also, WNYC Radiolab)
• idsnews.com, Indiana University Student Media
• LasVegasSun.com The Las Vegas Sun newspaper
• Globeandmail.com The Globe & Mail newspaper