Secular communion

I’ll put a disclaimer up front that this has nothing to do with technology, but I wanted to share an experience from last night.  The local Hy-Vee stores in Cedar Rapids held a charity dinner last night.  I know some might scoff at the idea of eating at a grocery store (aren’t you supposed to buy stuff there, take it ELSEWHERE and eat it?).  For those who have never tried, the food is always good.  Last night, the company was the impressive aspect.  Yes, everyone showed up to eat and, of course, there were some who tested the limits of their stomachs and the “all you can eat” promise.  We were at the Mount Vernon Hy-Vee and I had to marvel at a group of strapping lads decked out in Washington Warriors shirts who seemed to think the more the ate, the more they were helping the cause.

This wasn’t a religious event.  Nobody was leading prayers, there was no choir and most definitely didn’t have their Sunday best on.  It was, nonetheless, a communion of sorts.  Most of the conversations centered around why the dinner was a good thing.  Perhaps the ongoing events in Grand Forks and Fargo have scratched at the scab of our own recent flood experiences.  No matter the personal motivation, it was a wonderful time of talk, bonding and courtesy.  There were no complaints when the pans of spaghetti took a minute or two to be refilled.  The overflow crowd was patient in waiting for seats.  Those who were seated didn’t dawdle or lounge around, but ate with a quiet purpose and usually bussed their own table to open a spot more quickly for others.  Oh, the spaghetti was good, too!

So, if you missed it, you definitely missed more than a cheap, wholesome meal.  You missed the chance to “break bread” in fellowship with others for a common cause.

One more stray

Sorry…I just had to pile on to my last post and, yes, this one is related.

I mentioned FeedReader and a few questions arose about why not iGoogle and what about this one and that one. While I would love to quell things by saying it was just a convenient name of one tool, but I can’t. iGoogle? Yeah, I’ve tried and it is okay. As if often the case, I judge many products and services by how far I can get under the hood and what I find when I get there. iGoogle has a plethora of garbage widgets and, for those that work, the lack of customization beyond the little boundaries of that widget are simply weak. How about some particulars? Blogs and RSS feeds – let’s start there. Pick an RSS reader – you have “thin” ones, “tabbed” one, “striped” ones, blah, blah, blah. That’s nice…nicely boring and generally useless. How many feeds can you have? Well, if you use one of those tabbed widgets that actually works (that would be about 1 of 3), you are limited to 5-7 feeds. Oh, stack the same widget up multiple times and, yes, the sky is the limit, but that’s hardly an elegant solution. For anyone wondering what else there might be, how about Twitter. Oh sure, iGoogle has a widget – in a box, by itself, not itegrated with any of the other who-knows-how-many widget boxes you have lumped together in iGoogle. Sorry…no passing grade on that one, but thanks for playing.

Why is it that tools such as FeedReader will be the default choice for the true RSS-junkie power user vice the iGoogles of the world?
1. Pick your own feeds from the very start – no defaults, no assumptions, no one-size-fits-all mentality
2. Set your own preferred update frequency
3. Categorization and nesting of feed categories
4. Ability to “star” or “flag” any content for later use
5. Extensible XML-coded opensearch capabilities
6. Semantic custom searches
7. Text, pics, vids, etc…it’s all just content and it’s all welcome
8. Twitter plays here and BIG TIME. How about the ability to “follow” somebody without actually following them? FeedReader can. How about listening in on a specific topic (semantics required), but you don’t know all the people involved and thus can’t “follow” them all? FeedReader can. Yeah, chew on that bone for a few…talk about some interesting possibilities.
9. Automatically logs/stores the content – even if an original post is changed or deleted, you still have it.
10. Share your OMPL file.
11. Free with no signup, no email address to give away…just free.

Double digits already?! Ah, that’s enough for now. Anyway, if you haven’t seen fit to break out into the free and clear and run unencumbered across the vast XML landscape, you really should.

If you have never seen Feedreader, here is a screen capture of one of my installs.  Note the current content: a Twitter message being automatically fed from a breaking news RSS feed from Gazetteonline.com. 

Feedreader screen capture

 

Bringing in part of the electronic herd

Image via Wikipedia

Who today doesn’t find themselves swimming in an ocean of information dotted with established islands reached by only some of the waves of content? We all find ourselves being swamped by the waves of email, websites, RSS feeds, tweets, nugdes, pokes, invites, etc.. My own personal routine involves an overly customized fat-client RSS reader, Facebook, Twhirl, Yammer, Outlook, Blackbird and WordPress (freebie version)…each day, often all day long. If that environment doesn’t make me ADD, nothing will. I’m always on the lookout for ways to aggregate content/information/sources. I’ve enjoyed the convenience of some the Facebook integration. I’ve enjoyed more the ability to take my FeedReader client and ingest all my favorite RSS feeds (news, blogs, etc.) and also add in semantic search feeds from a host of sources to include a custom .osrc file for Twitter that allows me to filter through public Twitter to pull tweets from select people or tweets on defined search parameters. That is quickly becoming one of my vital cowhands in wrangling up the electronic herd.

Today, our team began the work for piping our online news RSS feeds through TwitterFeed to custom-created bots on Twitter. Don’t yell at me…I’m not creating spam engines. Twitter users already know they have to follow somebody to get any tweets, so a person would have to make the choice of following one of the Gazette Communications Twitter bots.

I have to end with a great, but not entirely unrelated quote from our High Priest of Webism, the Earl of Electrons, the Duke of WWW, Mr. Tom Altman, “I get really dumb when the Internet goes down.” Thanks, Tom.

Influencers’ Predictions: 2009 Social Media trends

Bump: Retreading the print edition (this time with a process diagram!)

I won’t regale anyone with a recap of this topic…you can scroll down and read about it. I did want to offer up a diagram I threw together to help the visual learners to understand the ebook process.

Producing a Kindle-ready version for $0 and 1% of an FTE's time.

Cotton balls in a hurricane?

An incredibly interesting discussion has finally developed about the archival expectations of our emerging paradigm whereby content gathering/creation is separate from packaged product. In days of old (are there days of new?), the archival of a print edition was an exercise of various means, but the general problem was extremely well-bounded, discrete and completely measurable. It also helped by not worrying about the journalists’ notebooks – shred or burn them after 10 days or whatever and everything was good. Like I said, the whole archival effort was relatively easily defined (not meaning, of course, that it wasn’t necessary and critical work).

Our journalists (they will still be called journalists…we never called them notepad-ers or typewriter-ers, right?), will be utilizing blogs for their content gathering and creation. I like to think of these as “JOGS” as a play on the usual blogging lingo of associating the word “blog” with a key phrase. Video bloggers have vlogs. Since we are talking about journalists, jogs seems like an adequate personal term for this creation at this time. Eventually we will figure out the right descriptive word…until then, jogs it is. I digress, but it was necessary background.

Our journalists’ jogs (see, that rolls right off the tongue) are publicly available. That alone is major shift, given that journalists’ notepads have generally never been subject to public access. It raises an organizational question, however. Do we intend to archive the jogs? Are we interested in just the initial posts or all subsequent comments and replies?

Roll forward to the “packaged” product perspective. Yes, I used quotes around package to qualify the word. It is darn difficult to define as packaged a web-accessible product that rightfully should be exposing a never-ending array of new and different content. When exactly is it, as a full product, ever truly completely packaged? Right…now the problem is starting to become clearer.

This is the discussion we are having. It is not just about jogs and not just about products. The real question is one of internal expectations for long-term archiving of content (and thus ability to search and retrieve such content). We haven’t formulated an answer yet to this, but we are definitely kicking the can around. Archiving ever-changing content on both the journalist end and the product end might be like juggling cotton balls in a hurricane.

You’re doing WHAT?!

It never ceases to amaze me how a concept can be explained multiple times yet be welcomed with reactions ranging from misinterpretation to mockery. I’m not sure if it is resistance to change, dismissal of clear indicators of changes in public news consumption or just those who make up the “what I heard you saying” sect of our society?

The industry reaction has ranged from those who factually reported our actions (layoffs, newsroom transformation, etc.) all the way to a few who have scoffed at our actions. There are plenty of objective accounts of our recent actions and those are to be appreciated for their factual merit. There is also a sprinkling of industry folks laying out extremely personal interpretations of our actions, some of which are patently misinformed. A case in point is the article in the Iowa Independent. “I know that adjusting a newsroom from a print-only model to a print-and-online model can be difficult…” DING – no, but thanks for playing. This has nothing to do with going from a print-only model to a print-and-online model. The Gazette has been online for years already via a web site, an e-edition, a mobile version and text alerts. A critical piece to understanding the name and role of Information Content Conductor is that person is not acting specifically towards one product, print or online. That person and their staff are product agnostic. It just goes to prove the old saying that if you are going to make a mental leap, make sure you can at least see the other side!

Interestingly enough, I have found the public consumer reaction to be more aligned to the concepts of content and information. I would reference a KGAN article as proof the consumer is highly attuned to the content and information. Run a quick article search on “content” and you get 3 very pointed uses of the word content. Do the same with the word “information” and you will get 13 hits on that word, most singing the praises of the breadth and depth of information. These are words being used by the public, not by us. Heck, KGAN is not even on one of our company sites – it’s a competitor’s site! On a side note about the article, I wanted to note many respondents to KGAN mentioned the Gazette by name, even though “newspaper” was the only term used in the question. Thank you, loyal community members!

Whether they realize it or not, the public provides us a mandate, that being they desire content that is convenient, timely and can be trusted. Some want it in print. We are there already and will continue to be there as we have been for now 126 years, providing the region’s premier and evolving print edition. Some want it electronically and we are taking bold steps to reinforce and expand our current electronic offerings. The key here is that we are retooling ourselves to create and gather content with no specific product-based agenda, make that electronic journalist’s “notepad” publicly available and still create the region’s best array of packaged news products, whether they be print or electronic.

In case you think I am just a kook, you might want to check out this article – another vote for the “upstarts, new players, that build the successful news products of the future.”