Last week, my intro to multimedia classes discussed RSS feeds, and why they were a good thing. I love RSS feeds for keeping up to date on matters at the intersection of technology, journalism and college media. A lot of people have started using Twitter as an alternative to RSS readers, but I don’t find that a good thing, necessarily. The real problem for me is the amount of information that come through the RSS reader in a day. I was amazed at how much content some of the blogs I follow was pumping out in a day, so I decided to try an experiment. I “bankrupted” my Google Reader yesterday (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. There were no unread items.

It’s now 2:30 CST on Tuesday, and I just went in to see how many items were in the unread RSS inbox. As you can see, there are 276 unread items. And I don’t follow any traditional media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, etc.).

The main contributors to this RSS glut?

• TechCrunch (42 items)
• BoingBoing (40 items)
• GigaOm (32 items)
• PSFK (30 items)
• Lifehacker (26 items)

Five sites, 170 new items in less than 24 hours!

Now, granted there’s probably a lot of good information in some of those blog posts, but who can keep up? I’m sure most people don’t read all these firehoses of niche information, preferring to focus on one or two. But if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in a certain area, it’s not always an option.
It’s no wonder one of the more recent tech terms to become a buzzword is information overload.

I’m sure someone has a workable situation for this conundrum. I think one of the things we’ve created with the fast pace of the Internet is the need for constant content, some of which is little more than a picture and a blurb from another blog or a press release. And that’s not helping us get quality information, much less act upon the information we’re getting.

This isn’t specifically a college-media-related issue. But as journalists of the future, one of our college students’ key functions will still be to serve as trusted curators or information sherpas for people who don’t have time to follow all this content. And that means they will have to find strategies and tools to go where the information is and discover what’s important without having to spend hours in front of a screen sifting through stories.

Related articles

• Information overload? – Use of RSS web readers as content filters (marketing.yell.com)
• Value Of Curation Comes Identifying Patterns And Synthesizing Information Overload Into Practical Business Advice (waterwayrealty.wordpress.com)
• RSS Update: Not Dead, But On The Watch List (battellemedia.com)
• RSS feeds make comeback with tablets and apps (kevin.lexblog.com)

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Can a Good Journalist Be a Good Capitalist (Carnival of Journalism): Good discussion this month on whether journalists can put aside their proletarian sensibilities and use the tools of the entrepreneur to ascend to the bourgeoisie.

Student Press Version of ‘Lazy Higher Ed Journalism’ (College Media Matters): “There are simply some stories that on a scroll through the archives of any student media outlet pop up again and again and again, sometimes with a fresh spin (although many times, not so much), but always with the same core issue or topic intact.” Man, have we all been there or what?

What’s your problem with the internet? A crib sheet for news exec speeches (Online Journalism Blog): This is actually a couple of years old, but it’s been updated, and, really, the content is evergreen.

10 Inspiring Social Networks for Writers (Mashable): Social networks aren’t just for posting photos of your family and cats. If you’re a writer, these might be sites to explore.

New York Times releases code to help journalists collaborate on WordPress, other platforms (Poynter): The plug-in has a “track changes” feature that looks promising. Here’s hoping it receives further development.

The Death of the Editor and the Rise of the Circulation Manager (Brain Pickings): Brain Pickings is a site that’s found it’s way into my regular RSS rounds because of posts like this. And she finds an essay that points out that everything old is new again. She writes, ”so long as we have a monetization model of information that prioritizes the wrong stakeholders — advertisers over readers — we will always cater to the business interests of the former, not the intellectual interests of the latter.” Yep.

Google already knows you’re a 24-year old woman who loves wombats (Ars Technica) I never looked at my Google Profile until I read this article. It was pretty close. You can see your own Google profile here.

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Image via CrunchBase

The news industry has entered another round of comment concerns. The New York Times just implemented a new “Trusted Commenter” system that requires a connection to your Facebook account. Gannett announced last month that they’re switching their comments system to one that uses Facebook Connect.

And the college media listserv had a recent round of e-mails about the advantages of using Facebook log-ins for comments.

There are obvious arguments for going with the FB log-in. People are less likely to be nasty, brutish or mean when their “real” names are associated with what they say in a comment section. Facebook log-ins are an easy turn-key method of authenticating user names. And the FB log-in is becoming ubiquitous. Randy Lovely, senior vice president of news & audience development, doesn’t mention Gannett’s company-wide shift in an online chat about the new system, but admits that 81 percent of adults in their area have Facebook accounts.

I certainly understand the desire to have a community of commenters who are civil and reasonable in their comments about contentious issues of the day. And I can’t imagine the amount of time it takes a site like the New York Times to wade through comments every day.

But, as I’ve written before, I really don’t agree with the push to associate “authentic” real-world identities with comments on a web site.

First, these papers are outsourcing the “quality” of their site’s community to a third-party. And there are people who have legitimate issues with the entire Facebook platform, who don’t have accounts with FB and don’t want them. My parents, for instance, don’t have Facebook accounts. Should they be required to create such accounts to comment on a news site?

The second concern is a legitimate concern some people have about connecting their IRL (In Real Life) identity with comments they make online. I don’t have to go through all the hypothetical examples that have been hashed and rehashed in this arena, but suffice to say that there can be real implications for people if they say something negative about a controversial topic. So their voices will be effectively muzzled by “authenticity.”

You may think that’s a small price to pay for ridding comments sections of obvious trolls and boors who don’t know how to be polite. I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure I’d be comfortable risking someone’s job because of something they said in a comment section.

There is a long history of pseudonymous commentary in American life. Some of it good, some of it bad. But I always thought the point was that we suffered the bad because the same rules protected the good.

In many ways, I keep coming back to what long-time blogger Anil Dash wrote earlier this year when this topic got hot again. Cultivating an online community of commenters is work, sometimes hard work. And Facebook Connect is a cop-out. And adopting the “authentic identity” paradigm just means the trolls have won.

Related articles

• Poynter: NY Times introduces unmoderated comments for ‘trusted commenters’ (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• The Des Moines Register switch to Facebook-driven commenting system, a traffic killer? (nextlevelofnews.com)

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The stream is in Flash, by the way, so it’s not going to work on your iDevice. Sorry.

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Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Apple just released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS5, which introduced over 200 new features and enhancements.  The past 3 months I’ve had iOS5 running on my personal device as a developer.  During that time I have noticed three key features to keep an eye on over the next year.

One of the biggest features is the introduction to the “cloud.”  Certainly, the concept of the cloud is nothing new as users have been figuring out ways to use other services like Dropbox to sync files and even their iTunes libraries between computers.  As with most things Apple, it isn’t so much the groundbreaking idea as it is the implementation.  iCloud, Apple’s version of Dropbox, is tightly integrated and provides a unified experience across not just the operating system but also across devices – mobile and desktop.

With Apple creating an app “space” in the new version of OSX Lion, this means users can have an app on their phone and their desktop which sync data and information.

Imagine an app with your newspaper on an iPhone and a Mac desktop.  I start reading the newspaper on my phone, then go to my desktop and pick right up where I left off.

Do not discount this as a “Mac only” option either.  The new version of Windows 8 is doing more to feature app friendly things like Lion and emulation software already exists to run Android apps on Windows.  “Apps” are the hot topic item and how the cloud, be it iCloud or just cloud computing in general, pans out is something to keep an eye on.

Another feature receiving very little press is the over-the-air upgrades and “no pc-required” feature.  It took a while for this to work in the development version but once it did, you realized how simple, convenient and easy it is to get updates for the device operating system.

What does this have to do with developing apps?  It means on iOS you are getting a more rapid update which includes new features and makes it easier to know which version of the OS you should develop for based on an installed user base.

Over the past year our developers have put a lot of time in to figuring out which version of Android we would develop for due to how Google lets device makers push out updates, with some device makers leaving relatively new devices stuck on older versions.

Compare this to how many iOS users upgrade and how quickly they upgrade.  Not only does this make it easier to decide which version to develop for, it also appears to have a correlation to how quickly users update their apps.  Based on data from the two Boise State Student Media apps (Bronco Mobile;  Blue Turf football app),  25 percent upgraded within the first 72 hours of the latest update.  After one week we had almost 50 percent upgraded.

It will be interesting to see if these over-the-air updates and the issues with Android upgradeability (which Google is working to address) impact market share.  Never underestimate how much people want the “latest and greatest.”

Probably the biggest update, at least for those in the news/media industry, is the addition of Newsstand.  It also seems to be one of the most misunderstood features of iOS5.  I will do my best to break it down and explain why I think it is the biggest feature to watch out for if you are a college media adviser.

So what is Newsstand?  Well, Newsstand is not an application nor is it a place where you can just place your newspaper without having to create an application.  The simplest way to explain it is as a folder that holds your newspaper or magazine application.  Much like iBooks, Newsstand is a folder where applications (or books in the case of iBooks) can reside.  In order to appear in the Newsstand folder, applications must be coded with Newsstand code in order to take advantage of the features unique to Newsstand.

So yes, to my most asked question, this means you still need an application developed.  Apple didn’t wave its magic wand and make it overnight simple for newspapers and magazines to get on their operating system. Maybe in the next update.

What are the big features of Newsstand? Apple created Newsstand to work better with print publications and better mimic the actual printed counterpart. The biggest visible difference is with a Newsstand enabled application your app icon is no longer static.  Just like the front page of the newspaper or a magazine changes with each issue, so does the icon on your app.  This creates a more dynamic and “updated” feel to the application which could potentially help drive return readership.

Background downloads are another big part of Newsstand.  The ability to deliver new content overnight, ready for a reader’s morning coffee, is a time saver and includes notification update options as well (which are also greatly improved in iOS5).  The app doesn’t need to be running to get new content, rather content can be downloaded overnight with a notification new content is ready to read.

Not only can current content be available, but past issues can be made available as well all depending on how you design your application. Background downloading also supports free, paid subscription or pay-per-view models.  Could something like Newsstand reverse the trend of “getting everything news-related free” if publishers create premium or more desirable content in an easy to use format?  Only time will tell.

I think the biggest game changer with Newsstand is the combination of apps on mobile devices with desktop apps, integration with cloud services and use of HTML5 for app development.  HTML 5 promises a lot features that could not only revolutionize mobile, but change how websites are viewed on a regular desktop/laptop computer as well.  It is this combination of HTML 5 and a convenient gathering place like Newsstand which could quickly change how people consume news.

With over 1 million iPhone 4s’ sold in the first 24 hours, expanding the number of carriers selling the iPhone, world-wide mobile device and tens of millions of iPads and iPod Touches sold - Apple is driving consumer expectations and experiences.

It is important to understand I am not declaring a winner, nor advocating one OS over the other. My point is Apple clearly changed the game with the iPhone and then the iPad.  Others are now following suit. I think Newsstand represents another potential game changer others may copy/emulate, and HTML 5 if done correctly could bring an end user experience changing how news is consumed. Being involved in the media industry, we need to pay attention to these changes and be ready to move much more rapidly than we have in the past.

I will be attending the CMA/ACP/CBI conference Oct. 26-30 and presenting/co-facilitating several different sessions regarding application development and use in a student media setting. Friday morning at 9 a.m. will be Application Development presented with David Simpson from Georgia Perimeter College; Friday at 1:30 p.m., a roundtable discussion on the bright future of yearbooks which will involve a lot of discussion on Newsstand in addition to other ideas.

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