The other day, a huge group of children came through the newsroom on a tour of the paper. They were cute kids, probably third or fourth grade, and seemed to actually be interested in what was going on (which is a big change from the high school students who often come through).
One of the kids, while learning how the newspaper works, had this question: “Where would the internet get news if there weren’t any newspapers?”
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I know I’m a total nerd. But not everybody is quite as geeky as I am, and you might not know about Diggnation. It’s one of the most popular internet shows, and is distributed by podcast network Revision 3. In the show, two guys talk about some of the most popular stories on social news Web site Digg.com. The hosts are Kevin Rose, one of the founders of Digg, and Alex Albrecht, a former Tech TV host and friend of Kevin.
The two of them recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s new late night talk show and pretty much took over the whole thing. They were funny, self-deprecating and interesting.
For a couple guys who usually film sitting on a couch at home, with two cameras, they didn’t seem nervous at all to be on national TV. Of course, they have some practice with an audience; their live Diggnation shows are extremely popular and well attended.
Check out this video to see Kevin and Alex on the show, which also gives you an idea of what Diggnation is like. Then head on over to Revision 3 and download some episodes. They’re free, so you’ve got nothing to lose.
Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that allows users to post short updates, and follow and respond to others’ updates, has exploded in popularity. Besides keeping up with friends and family, Twitter lets you get a peek at the lives of famous people. Many, many ‘celebrity’ accounts on Twitter are fakes, but there are plenty of real celebs who do tweet on a regular basis. Here are a few that I follow:
Stephen Fry — The fourth most popular account on Twitter (after Barack Obama, CNN and Twitter itself). Stephen Fry is a British actor, comedian, national treasure, etc. He’s done a lot of work with Hugh Laurie, including the classic “Jeeves and Wooster.” Sample tweet: “In the meantime I’m childishly amused by waiter who’s just told me about promotion: in his accent ‘two vodkas and you get a turd free’.”
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I’m always looking for a way to display photos that doesn’t require coding or installing scripts, something that anybody can use. I think PictureSurf could be a good option.
Here’s an example:
Free Photo Gallery by Picturesurf
The free photo gallery maker can be used as an online tool, or installed as a plugin on Wordpress. The Web site also promises versions for Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, Blogger and others are coming soon. Because this blog uses WordPress, I installed the plugin.
So how many elections did we have last year? Seems like at least a dozen, though it was probably only about half that. For the bigger elections, like the primaries and the November general election, the Rome News-Tribune had full results pages to show vote totals as they came in. In the smaller elections, though, I just made a simple HTML table that the numbers could easily be inserted into. Here’s an example of the HTML for one of those tables.
What it looks like:
| xx of xx precincts reporting | |
|---|---|
| Office 1 | |
| Candidate 1 | xx |
| Candidate 2 | xx |
| Candidate 3 | xx |
| Candidate 4 | xx |
| Office 2 | |
| Candidate 2 | xx |
| Candidate 3 | xx |
| Candidate 4 | xx |
Social Homes