Amy Gahran

"For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands. "We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we've figured a better way to get our own back: We've launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube." - Amy Gahran

"Because no reportable consensus was reached at last week’s “API Summit on Saving An Industry In Crisis”, today’s press conference call originally scheduled for 11 a.m. EST has been canceled." - Amy Gahran

Oooh, I like this! This is me! "Don’t be afraid of being a “polyconversationalist” (You caught me. I made up this word. For the purpose of social networking, it means one who converses with multiple people simultaneously.) "You are now part of an asynchronous microblogging world, multiple conversations are a reality. The beauty of it is the expectation that you’ll reply as you have time. When you “find the time” you may find yourself replying to multiple responses at one time. Get used to it…it’s what Twitter is all about." - Amy Gahran

Here's what this offer includes. It's not financial freedom, but it's an option. * You get a free TypePad Pro blog account. It even includes professional support. * You get enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are real display ads, that pay a lot more than simple Google text ads, and you get to keep the revenue. * We'll promote your new site on Blogs.com. It's a fast-growing directory of the best in blogs, and Blogs.com will be a very effective way for all of your peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for your independent sites. * Lots more. Getting started with Six Apart opens the door to lots more ways to succeed in the future. We can introduce you to our VIP program to help drive traffic to your site, help you connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile, make it easy to manage your site's comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote your posts to your Facebook friends. - Amy Gahran

"One of the biggest failures in lobbying transparency is the absence of any disclosure of actual meetings. The current state of transparency for lobbyists is poor. Lobbyists only have to file quarterly reports that do not detail with whom they are meeting, what they are meeting about, and what their client is seeking. Lobbyists are also only required to file semiannual reports detailing their contributions to lawmakers. All of this amounts to a less-than-satisfactory system of disclosure providing the public with an incredibly limited view into the workings of their government. "The idea of far greater transparency in government affairs is spreading fast. How can you tell? Today’s Washington Times carries an op-ed by one of Washington’s top lawyers, Lanny Davis, that includes both a full-throated defense of the lobbying profession and an endorsement for “total transparency.” - Amy Gahran

"The summit concluded that cutting staff doesn't reduce costs fast enough to save the industry, and "erodes" the product in the process, according to Steve Miller, executive chairman of auto-parts maker Delphi Corp who spoke at the conference. "Miller and Shein made several recommendations for the group, including collaboration with outside entities, "leveraging the brand," and being proactive in averting a collapse of the industry. "Although it may seem that the summit did little more than establishing that there is a "crisis," the API stated that the newspaper industry will probably need "outside help" to halt the slide. - Amy Gahran

"Fortunately, the API report on the summit does not mention any consideration of asking for a bailout. Unfortunately, the report does not detail a plan to save the industry. The shortest section of the report is headed "next steps" and the steps are vague. The CEOs agree to meet again in six months. They also will explore more collaboration, invest in research and development and consider sharing information." - Amy Gahran

"I love the concept of ‘citizen journalism’ but I find the use of the word ‘journalism’ or ‘journalist’ misleading in this context." Hmmm, this appears to be conflating the practice of journalism (which anyone can do) with the profession... - Amy Gahran

Interesting critique of Typealyzer's analysis of blogger personality types. Well, tools like that are always more for entertainment value than anything else, I think... - Amy Gahran

"Can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena? We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. A pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. "During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports." - Amy Gahran

"Six months? What are they thinking? They've laid off more than 10,000 people in the last six months—what will be left six months from now? They need to launch a Manhattan project to blow up their industry and start over. Now, not six months from now. "We have nothing to lose" is about right, but they may have nothing left to invest in change, either. - Amy Gahran

"After 50 newspaper company CEOs met behind closed doors at the American Press Institute on Thursday for their “Crisis Summit,” I was tempted to comment, but wanted to wait to see what would come out of the meeting. Would some participants write what transpired that day? The API staff did publish this summary, but it’s pretty thin on detail. There was this at the end, under the heading “Next”: “Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration. Some spoke of joint investment in research and development of both technologies and products, others of more formal means of sharing information.” "Well, I wasn’t the only person taken aback by that statement. - Amy Gahran

"Twitter needs to restore the ability to track, really track, in real time. Like we could back in May before they turned it off." - Amy Gahran

"Google search has now added voice recognition software to their search application on Apple iPhones. Now, iPhone users can request Google results without having to type information on their phones, a must for drivers or those on the go … aren’t phones for speaking and listening anyway? "Google iPhone spoken search will be made available to Apple iPhone and iPod users today via the Apple iTunes store, and will let users ask questions that are not only local directory sensitive (like the 1-800-GOOG-411 experiment) but also basic search questions which request facts or figures." - Amy Gahran

Jeremiah Owyang says "We’re seeing more news stories of layoffs hitting many industries –esp tech. I encourage you to build your network before you need it." I agree -- this is not something you want to be doing at the last minute. Something I've been urging journalists and media pros about for years. Owyang: "First start by connecting with folks in the Web Strategy Facebook group there are 8688 members that are web decision makers, join in the discussions, read the topics, or post questions. If you’re a Community Manager, or trying to become one, this Community Manager Facebook group has 2050 members to network with. I noticed that Community Managers are in demand, as on the web strategy job board, I was able to check the admin panel and see there were far more submissions to community manager roles than all others." And "community manager" is a role that journalists -- especially beat journalists -- might be especially well-equipped to play. - Amy Gahran

CNN's iReport is totally unfiltered -- and it shows. This dreck was on the home page today. It's not even reporting. I think there's a lot to be said for the community model where things have to get voted up to become visible to casual visitors. - Amy Gahran

"One lesson may be that community policing of content can help bury bogus reports. The Steve Jobs report was submitted to other websites including Digg, says Arnold Kim of MacRumors.com. Digg relies on user input to raise or lower the prominence of stories, and it was users who kept this story off the front page, writes Mr. Kim on his blog. "By contrast, CNN's iReport is less mediated by human input. The most recently uploaded stories show up on the home page, as well as the "newsiest" stories as determined by an algorithm that factors in user opinions. CNN spokesperson Jennifer Martin says the Jobs story never appeared under "newsiest." - Amy Gahran

"Unlike previous Web 2.0 events the theme was very clear to me, these social tools are now impacting so much more than the tech blogger circle jerk that we all tire of. ..."It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a tech conference where we didn’t fondle the hammer and actually focused on building the house. Actually choosing an objective to apply these tools to much bigger problems: cancer, health, politics, global warming, energy crises, and connecting the world." - Amy Gahran

Dave Taylor waxes historical and has fun with this excellent keynote from the first Thin Air Summit, held in Denver this past weekend. Presentation titled: Finding a Voice: The evolution of personal media through history - Amy Gahran

Plain-language, engaging primer & resource on data visualization - Amy Gahran

"Newspapers often focus on their newsrooms, and even, sometimes, their sales staffs when looking for strengths that they bring to their local markets. But what about their IT departments? "Great content build traffic for a day. If you want to keep that traffic, you must continue to add new great content. But great functionality builds traffic, too. And keeps it for far longer than content does before it needs to be refreshed. "Instead of trying to play catch-up, to learn to blog, to Tweet, to do what "the kids" are doing, why not turn the geeks lose to build whatever might be the next Twitter?" - Amy Gahran

I'm really glad to see someone teaching student journalists about the journalistic uses of social media tools like Twitter. Way to go! - Amy Gahran

Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, who was recently in Denver & Boulder, noted: "Despite the warmth of this community that’s nestled between the Rocky mountains and the great plains, they’re very insular and don’t share their story to the rest of the world. I’ve visited countries where they actually have government sponsored outreach programs just to tell their story in order to attract buyers, partners, and employees –Colorado could really benefit by not only focusing inward, but being a bit more extroverted and sharing their story with others." I think that's a great point -- not only for the local tech community, but also for the local renewable energy, energy efficiency, and space sci/tech communities. We've got some of the world's best visionaries, researchers, engineers, and business folk from these communities -- as well as online media and tech -- RIGHT HERE IN COLORADO! I think we should promote ourselves more. Thoughts? - Amy Gahran

I've always been a bit baffled by Bebo. Jeremiah explains: "Bebo’s community segment focuses on user sharing and media, and is somewhat in between the experiences of the wild ’self expression’ MySpace and more refined Facebook ‘communication’ experience. They claim to have over 40 million users, and has strong traction in UK, and other English speaking countries." A couple of interesting points for social media developers (including people developing social apps for journalism, news, and media: "...The culture of each social network is unique, don’t expect applications to easily be ported and successfully run on different social networks –customization is always required.""Brands should explore relationships with these application developers who have success on more than one social network, this makes marketing more effective. Brands should first leverage existing sucess rather than build their own –this space is highly fast moving and specialized." - Amy Gahran

I've always been a bit baffled by Bebo. Jeremiah explains: "Bebo’s community segment focuses on user sharing and media, and is somewhat in between the experiences of the wild ’self expression’ MySpace and more refined Facebook ‘communication’ experience. They claim to have over 40 million users, and has strong traction in UK, and other English speaking countries." A couple of interesting points for social media developers (including people developing social apps for journalism, news, and media: "...The culture of each social network is unique, don’t expect applications to easily be ported and successfully run on different social networks –customization is always required.""Brands should explore relationships with these application developers who have success on more than one social network, this makes marketing more effective. Brands should first leverage existing sucess rather than build their own –this space is highly fast moving and specialized." - Amy Gahran

"While some webmasters question the overall necessity of H1-H6 headings. , I insist that they should be used to structure the page content for: * SEO benefit: H-heading is one of the best ways to give your keywords prominence; * Accessibility and usability: headings enable screen reader and some browser (e.g. Opera) users to use voice and keyboard commands to navigate throughout the page (see this video explaining the importance of headings for accessibility); * Web etiquette: like clean (preferably validated) code, good page structure is the sign of proper behavior and trusted brand. "Here is the checklist of proper heading usage..." - Amy Gahran

"H1 - H6 elements 'briefly describe the topic of the section they introduce“. They form a page HTML semantic structure that can “be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically.'"A page semantic structure analysis is an important part of site SEO diagnostics that can help to: * identify on-page issues; * analyze your (competitors’) main keywords; * improve your keyword prominence; * understand if you are outlining your content correctly. "Here are two tools to help you analyze any page semantic structure..." - Amy Gahran

RE: semantic HTML markup (like <h1> tags): "While the benefits for accessibility and usability are quite clear, there has never been any real evidence that there really is any benefit for rankings. Does Google pay any attention to the HTML markup? Another great thread over at WebmasterWorld discusses how much SEO value can the page headings add." AMY NOTES: Keep in mind that this is NOT same thing as the semantic web. It's just a small, clumsy part of that structure. So don't use this info to think the semantic web doesn't matter for findability and relevance. The main point of this article is that so many people use screwy HTML that Google might have to ignore it in cases of obvious inconsistency. Which makes sense -- layout/design cues often aren't the best way to determine content relevance. - Amy Gahran

One of the most poignant stories about why media needs to change, by Charlotte Anne Lucas: "...That didn’t interest my editors in the least. My first draft, which quoted her extensively, was, in their view, not properly critical. To rectify that, the story went through the food processor of a committee-edit. What emerged included one paraphrase of one sentence from Richards, lots of remarks from her “critics” and a statement in her defense from an aide. The editors were then satisfied that the story was suitably fair and balanced. "The story that was published did many things, but it didn’t tell the truth. "Ann Richards lost the election. She was replaced in the governor’s mansion by a swaggering young man who pretends to this day to be a Texan." - Amy Gahran

Want to really see what all the newsroom layoff look likes? Check out this interactive map. Yes, data visualization is a powerful storytelling tool. - Amy Gahran