Public journalist

So I lost the Student Society of News Design competition this year and at first I was really pissed and uppity about it. I got mad mostly because the way the judges bad-mouthed broadsheets this year. They said we were boring, lacked impact, good color, concept art, understanding of our presses, hierarchy and dominance.

Such a broad overarching statement angered me because I think broadsheet is a pretty powerful format and though I agree many papers resemble that statement, I know a few papers t… Continue

I've often said this but not in a public forum until just now. Pornography has been ahead of all Internet/user-based businesses for a while in some respects.

I've been an avid Internet user since 1997 and with most early AOL users, discovered the power of unregulated search engines. One of the early incarnations of citizen journalism came from World Sex Amateurs, a Web site devoted to user-generated photos, videos, stories and audio (sound familiar SOUPers?).

The site was wildly and internatio… Continue

I was rereading an e-mail I got from Donica a few weeks ago about how she wishes to stop Ninging for a while and just look at it and read about it. I'm on the other side, I wish I could stop reading for a while and just look at Ning. Well, I've had a chance to do that and I've come to some conclusions about social networks.

First, I'm going to build my analogy and compare Facebook, Ning and Myspace to shotguns for a minute so bear with me.

MySpace works because you can load your shotgun (profi… Continue

In response to this "Study shows that newspaper blogs need to step up interaction with audience"

It doesn't help when the blogs aren't attached to something people can find, such as the RSJ Web site. Blogging by nature is severely fragmented and people find them often by sheer luck or through intensive searches on Technorati.

The problem with political blogs is that they are matter of fac… Continue

Graphic by Michael Higdon, animation by Chelsea Otakan

Each model is representative of actual user models.

1. Blogsphere
Started: 1998 (Open Diary)
Users: 112 million blogs
The blogsphere represents all blogs on the Internet with a single author. Bloggers cannot make friend lists or directly connect to one another. Blogs are fragmented and spread throughout the Web, though some are hosted on Blogger.com, OpenDiary.com and other sites, allowing p

… Continue