A few things that have popped up in my RSS feeds lately that might be of interest:

Research Dramatizes Changing Practices\: The ever-inciteful Paul Gillin links to some interesting research about how social media is being used extensively by journalists in their reporting (even Wikipedia!). Lots of other substance in the post as well, so read the whole thing.

Can Informal, Explanatory Videos Increase Engagement on News Sites? - Steve Myers asks the pertinent question, and gives a good breakdown of the difference between a transactional visit and an exploratory one.

Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls - This is more a story to localize, but it's interesting to me because our department recently started a laptop initiative for students.

The xplanation: I received an e-mail about this site yesterday. It covers education, technology and publishing. Looks interesting, and you should check it out.

BookRenter Opens Up Textbook Rentals to Campus Bookstores and Other Partners: Eastern uses a rental system for textbooks, instead of having students pay insanely high prices for texts they'll return in 15 weeks. Perhaps this model will catch fire.

The need for a 'digital media pyramid': Benjamin Davis at OJR shares a new method used to explain how to report a story in the 21st century digital media age.

Like any machine-generated transcription, some words get garbled. But if you have a video that has good audio from an interview (external mics!), and there's not a lot of background noise, it's useful. You can also use it on videos that have already been uploaded to the service. In your account, under "Captions and Subtitles" download the
English machine transcription file (it will be named "captions.sbv") and you can edit the transcript in a text editor like TextWrangler, then upload the file back up to YouTube.

You can see the results in this video:

I spent 10 minutes total figuring out how it worked, tweaking the .sbv file, and reuploading.

Pretty neat, I think

Here's a deeper explanation in a TechCrunch story about some of the limitations.

I came across this story from the Boston Globe about an MIT student whos inventing a new type of wheelchair that is more usable in less wheelchair-accessible areas. The story itself is inspiring, the interactive graphic is interesting, but the video really tells the story of how it works, and illustrates some of the advantages of Internet-based video.

Students working with online video, note:

• It's short (1:44 minus title slide)
• It's told entirely by the subject of the story
• It presents a single topic
• There is a lot of b-roll footage (many close-ups)
• The video matches the sound
• It has a beginning, middle and end (i.e., explain the problem, how the solution was arrived at, demonstrate the solution)

There are lots of potential stories on your campus that could benefit from just this type of "how it works" video.

Here are a few links to some "meta" discussion specifically about blogging - blogs about blogs - that I've come across recently. And all were recommended by one blogger.

They contain some excellent advice and tips if you are interested in the topic, or looking for ways to improve your own blogging skills.

Remarkablogger

Blog for Profit

Chris Garrett on New Media

Via John Haydon

Also, Problogger.net

A sample of a tag cloud

A major problem with any news site is the search engine. If users have troubles locating a specific story that isn’t a few clicks away, chances are they won't revisit your site.

So what’s the best way to please your visitors who want to find that story that never appeared on the front page? The answer is tags.

The second best search engine, Youtube, uses the system of tags. Look at any video, the more hits/pageviews, the more diverse the tags are. But tagging can be a time killer. Here are some steps you can take to save time on tagging and make your tags more efficient.

• Have the writer come up with the tags. They will know the story best.
• Have generic tags like “football” or “Politics” at your disposal.
• Tag the categories the post falls in as well.
• Tag the sources- if a visitor is looking for a specific quote, it will make that quote easier to find.
• For multimedia have five or six generic tags like “video” or the name of your site.

A great example of a publication that tags well is The Whit Online. Check out some of their posts to see how it's done.

Curious as to how your site looks as a cloud of tags? Check out some WordPress widgets that deliver tags in a flashy, user friendly view. Want to try out a single post, then just put in your posts URL here.

But tagging still takes time and getting your writers to sum up a story in 10-15 nouns can be nerve-wracking. Subcategories offer a little less efficiency than tags, but save time and set up a strong hierarchy.

If you don’t have the time or the patience to tag every single story that is posted to your news site, be as descriptive as possible with subcategories. Don’t just limit your category names to “Basketball.” If your site covers women’s and men’s teams, branch the subcategories farther out.

Remember,  Internet users like information at their fingertips. Both of these functionalities of WordPress offer this power, but if you have the time and the manpower, go with both.