I generally don't "blog live" from events, but Steve Garfield inspired me to give it a try during his presentation today... He was posting to his "Off On A Tangent" blog while telling a Media Giraffe session about blogging, including audio with cellphone and video with a snapshot camera.

(He also has a link to his Mom's blog, named My Mom's Blog, by Thoroughly Modern Millie. [Hey, my Mom was a Millie too!] Steve mentioned that her blog gets more comments than his. He demonstrated posting audio through Hipcast.com, a pay service that he's involved with, which takes his phone-in audio and posts it to his blog. (He and others mentioned other services, some free, that help people post sound to their blogs, including Odeo, videoegg and loudblog.)

In the same session, Paul Grabowicz from Berkeley said he is skeptical about news organizations that have gotten into online multimedia simply because of the "fear factor" -- not really as a way to do a new kind of quality journalism. Newspapers should not be forcing reporters to add amateurish video to their plain text news stories, he said; they shold use video or audio when it's the best tool for the job, and they should take advantage of the computer itself. For example, his students are working with the UC Berkeley architecture department to tell the story of a jazz and blues club mecca in Oakland -- by building a video game re-creation.

Paul also had a healthy attitude toward "citizen journalism" -- that citizen journalists should be featured on professional news sites, sometimes driving the stories, with the professionals pitching in to get answers the citizens couldn't get.

I agree with him 100%, although I don't mind the idea of news organizations experimenting with audio and video just to develop a better understanding of the tools. But computers can do so much more by being computers, not just a digital printing press. If a story involves a lot of data, the best a newspaper can do is to include an enhanced table or graph, USA Today style. The same paper's online department, on the other hand, should have the tools to post an entire searchable database, perhaps with relational links to other databases.

Some great examples of database techniques have been shown at this week's conference, especially by Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post and Chicagocrime.org

Robb Montgomery of Visualeditors.com gave examples of creatively doing more with less and taking advantage of software on the Web. His examples included the Virginian Pilot's video only site HamptonRoads.tv, combining professional and neighborhood videos, New York Times readers contributions to coverage of the New York transit strike that used Google maps "mashup" of readers' reports, an MIT "zipdecode" project, and his own "snapshot camera" video from Moscow.

washingtonpost.com to allow reader comments on individual news articles: Says editor's blog, "Over the next several weeks, we'll begin allowing comments on articles from registered users of washingtonpost.com." The item explains attempts to fight comment abuse. The paper has had online chats and blog comments before, but this will be a first for regular news stories.

Silicon Valley Watcher--Tom Foremski: "Craigslist is being blocked by Cox Interactive - is this a net neutrality issue?"
Does this mean that Cox Cable Internet subscribers can't get there at all? Sounds like it. Craigslist offers free classified ads, unlike Cox-owned newspapers, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Austin American-Statesman.

Interesting advertising-related figures in this report from England, too.

On the Web, College Athletes Acting Badly - New York Times: "The indiscretions of college students — whether it is binge drinking, cheating or hazing — may be old school, but universities now face the new reality that their students' misbehavior will eventually be exposed on the Internet."

Badjocks.com + webshots.com = worth watching

Cory Bergman at Lost Remote TV Blog keeps up with online-video developments, including Yahoo's plans for a video upload site... and Jay Leno's plug for the already-popular upload site http://YouTube.com -- as a source of a video parody called 'Lazy Ramadi,' which already had "104,000 video views and counting" when Cory got there.

Bergman also estimates what YouTube's 35 million video streams a day could add up to in digital space and dollars: about 200 terabytes of data, possibly approaching $1 million a month in bandwidth costs.

Salon.com Technology | ?Ay caramba! MacBook is hot
"When I smelled bacon wafting from my new computer, I was thrilled -- until I realized it was the smell of my thighs igniting..."
Includes suggestions for using the MacBook to thaw frozen food, dry socks, etc. I wonder if the black or white MacBooks are cooler than the metal MacBook Pro in the article.

Serendipity of (Communication and) Technology Careers: Tim O'Reilly, founder of the technology-focused book publishing empire, told Berkeley information science grads to realize that to many they speak "a private language that sets us apart like one of the secret societies depicted in The Da Vinci Code!"
Not a technologist by training, O'Reilly said that helping a programmer friend with a writing project was the turning point in his life.
"I never imagined that I'd build a career as a technical writer, publisher, and entrepreneur. My training was in Greek and Latin Classics!"
Hey, wait a minute. Greek... Latin... Da Vinci Code... Hmm. Conspiratorial or not, O'Reilly's talk includes a valiant attempt to survey the current "Web 2.0" scene in language that wouldn't completely befuddle the parents in the graduation audience. Well, not completely.
See Full text on his blog.
(tx, rex)