When will I have time to Wave?

Google Wave, that is. This semester has gone by too fast, but I now have an address on Google's still-in-beta "by invitation" collaborative/conversation system. I'm giving it a quick look, so that I can at least wave it at my students before the semester ends.

I was surprised to see how many public Wave discussions related to newspapers I found, once I'd figured out how to search for such things. See this L.A. Times article, How Google Wave could transform journalism, and other links below.

Wave is part e-mail, Wiki, chat, file-sharing and bulletin board. Once you're in, you can search for public Waves (ripples? currents? tides?) such as the daily ones the Chicago RedEye is running. I joined a Wave discussion of ideas for college media projects, which I'll share with Radford students as I get them invited. It already had a few dozen contributors.

Just after my invitation arrived (thanks to Mich Sineath at AEJMC), I stumbled on this article, which suggests that not having a ready-built community to wave with is a common complaint: What Users Like/Dislike About Google Wave along with this, Why Google Wave sucks, and why you will use it anyway

However, there are already 30 people in my GMail "contact" list with Wave accounts. On the other hand, I could say "only 30," since my contact list has more than 1,000 e-mail addresses. I wonder how many of them are in the same boat I'm in: "Intriguing new tool, but no time to use it right now."

My Wave account gives me eight invitations to send, and I'll divide them evenly between students and faculty. I'll seed some invites in my Web production classes next week and next semester, chain-letter style (invite one student, who can invite another, etc.), and do the same with our school website committee, then see if we can use it for a virtual meetings. I'm also intrigued by a plug-in called Bloggy that lets you post a conversation from Wave to a blog like this one... but I'll save that for later.

"Bloggy"? I see there are also "Embeddy," "Tweety" and "Trendy."

I wonder if someone has created a "Cutesy," but that might be redundant.

Here's the first batch of Wave links from my bookmark list:

• How Google Wave is Changing the News
• Chicago RedEye does daily waves
• LA Times: How Google Wave could transform journalism
  
• Google Wave... journalistic tool?
• 9 Ways to Use Google Wave (in education)
• NYTimes Bits Blog tags for Google Wave
• Top 6 Game-Changing Features, Complete Guide and More (Mashable)
• Wave gadgets tutorial
• Tutorial (10 videos) at Butterscotch.com
• Google's Long Video (80 minutes?!) about Wave
  
• Google's shorter video on ways to use Wave
  

Happy Thanksgiving!

... with thanks to Mrs. G's family archive for putting this on YouTube, including clips from the movie... Should be a wonderful aid to digestion tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/v/b8DtpdXZi0M&hl=en_US

Pickin,' grinnin' and politickin' in Floyd, Va.

Pickin,' grinnin' and politickin' | Blue Ridge Muse

So Virginia is losing a harmonica-playing governor to the Democratic National Committee? Excellent pictures by Doug Thompson, but no audio... Sorry I missed another Friday night at the Country Store in Floyd.

I can't help wondering whether the Democratic tune was the old sea chantey, "Donkey Riding."

More likely candidates for an old-time fiddle-and-banjo jam might be "Flop Eared Mule," "Kickin' Mule" or "Whoa, Mule, Get Up in the Alley," which really is a harmonica favorite of mine... Alas, the only full-length mp3 I've found online does it on banjo.

(This item marks a transition in the kind of content I'll be posting in this blog. I'll be doing my more serious and school-related posting at http://stepno.wordpress.com for now, with items more specifically about newspaper journalism at http://aejmc.net/news )

New AEJMC Newspaper Division Blog

I have yet another blog... this time with a co-editor, Bill Broun of East Stroudsburg University.

It's AEJMC Newspaper Division Blog at http://aejmc.net/news

For a half-dozen years I've posted all my blog items related to "newspapers" to a special-category blog section for members of the newspaper interest group ("division") of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, along with taking care of the group's home page, http://aejmc.net/newspaper

Using blog categories as separate sites was something my old blog software, Radio Userland did automatically, but Userland is ending its blog hosting in a couple of months. So I figured it was time to switch to Blogger or WordPress.

Bill was already familiar with WordPress, and it was already conveniently installed on the http://aejmc.net server that houses our division home page. Randy Reddick from Texas Tech maintains the server, and gave us a hand with a "theme" for the site.

The division blog and home pages have separate addresses, but also have prominent cross-reference links. I've also created an archive of my old AEJMC Newspaper-related blog posts.

LIFE magazine archives now searchable with Google Books

Not only was there life before television, before television -- and well into the TV era -- there was LIFE, the magazine.

With great photographers and weekly deadlines, it made a visual record of the 20th century, from Vol. 1, No. 1, Nov 23, 1936 (96 pages of text and pictures, mostly pictures).

Now it's all online and searchable with Google, up to the last of the regular weekly editions, Dec. 29, 1972's "The Year in Pictures" issue. You can select by date and cover or search by keyword.

Try it: LIFE - Google Books

Click "Search all issues" in the left column, or "Browse all issues" to flip through those memorable covers.

Search for photographers: Margaret Bourke-White shot the first cover; or try Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson or any other famous photojournalist whose name you remember. They're probably there.

Search for 20th century events -- wars, elections, outbreaks of peace...

Search for celebrities. Life liked initials: FDR, JFK, LBJ, MLK. For some, first names will do: Elvis (it'll find Presley, not Costello), Marilyn, Liz, Liza, Judy, Satchmo. Or try Hepburn (for both Audrey and Katharine in one click), Sinatra, Crosby, the Beatles, or Woodstock (add 1969 to narrow the search, or just go to the special edition).

If you haven't used Google's magazine search, that's probably because it's hidden in the "book search" section. For the ability to search by date as well as keywords and magazine titles:

• Go to: http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
• Click "Magazines" on the "Content" line.
• Put a magazine title in the "Title" field (even though it says "Return books with the title...")
• Enter your keywords and dates.
• And, if you're like me, say goodbye to a Sunday afternoon.

From Google's front blurb for LIFE:

"LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine which chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use."

Elsewhere:

• For just the photos, without the context, see Google image search and the archive at http://www.life.com/
• For a history of the magazine and its competitor LOOK, see this article at magazines.things-and-other-stuff.com, one of many sites for old magazine collectors.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for something NEW in the world of magazines, read this post by Rex Hammock: That Strange Light you’re seeing is the future of magazines -- and add both Rex and Derek Powazek to your blogger-bookmark list.

Is it too late for the Internet to melt our brains? | Salon Books

The author of a new book, A Better Pencil, says the threat of brain-melting goes farther back than Hulu, the Internet or television.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses culture-shifting technology in an interview with Salon Books, aptly titled Is the Internet melting our brains?

"So, what I'm trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way -- and I'm looking at how we make sense of all of this."

Salon's Vincent Rossmeier:

"Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. 'A Better Pencil' is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives."

Too many blogs, but a gonzo idea...

For a possible new blog, I came up with a first post, mirrored below, that I thought might prompt some discussion. Comment here or there, either is OK. (For visitors from other Twitter flocks, AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journallism & Mass Communication.)

Event-design as Rorschach test... Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year's AEJMC Convention logo for a hint that the organization is fracturing? Or took it for an optimistic graph of media industries' ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone...

Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun. I hope I can attend... (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)

Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event:

"Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today's students deal with Hunter S. Thompson's legacy?"

He's in my students' textbook, on a page headed, Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He's relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties -- and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.

So let's make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it's a "yes" for Tim Harrower's Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?

---

Background: This paragraph was at the top of this post before the link to it slipped into the Twittersphere, referring to the part above. Rather than be accused of "burying the lead," I've turned things around.

About having multiple blogs. My old Radio Userland blog had an interesting feature: I could tag items with "category" names that actually became separate blogs. I used that to create a subset of my blog posts so that I could link some of them to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication newspaper division's website, which I've been editing for a few years. I even had evidence that someone read it once or twice.

Now I've been wondering whether to use Blogger or WordPress to recreate that blog as a separate entity, possibly as a more formal adjunct to the Newspaper Division site, which I never seem to get around to updating in a timely fashion.

Among other things, I haven't been able to attend the last few AEJMC conventions, which makes it difficult to spread news about the organization. So here's an experiment: I'm going to point the division officers to a trial site or two and see what they think. With WordPress, I might be able to enlist a co-author or two. Here's the prototype, with a question about Hunter S. Thompson.