publish first, edit later

test post

candr2
Originally uploaded by jim_mcc

a test photo post from Flickr

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Adding images and video to your blogs

One thing we'll look at today is how to add images and video to your blogs. It's pretty easy to do both. That said, when it comes to adding pictures, you need to think a bit about whether it's right to use pics you find online. We'll talk a bit about this today. I think it's generally a good idea to credit the site where you found the picture and put a link back to it.

Adding video from a service like YouTube is pretty easy. You need to paste in some code to a post, which will embed the video. The embed code is different to the standard url (web address) which you use when linking

Yesterday we talked briefly about the ideas of Clay Shirky. There's lots of video of him lecturing online. For example there's a brief snippet of a talk he gave at The Guardian Media Festival over the summer. Click on the link and you go to the page. But if you want to put the actual video in your post, you need to copy the embed code and paste it in where you want the video to go (in the Edit HTML window). We'll go through this in class - it's very straightforward.

Here's the video...

Some tips on writing online

There are some useful tips on writing online on a special wiki set up by the Online Journalism Review. We'll talk about this a bit in class if there's time. (The other sections of the wiki are worth a look later on - incidentally, the site seemed to be unavailable when I looked for it this morning - hopefully it's back online now).

For an example of media critique and how to use links, have a look at a piece written a year or so ago by Jay Rosen, an American journalism professor - a column for the LA Times, taking apart a comment piece the paper had run before, also written by a journalism professor, arguing that blogs weren't serious journalistic tools.

Rosen is a committed advocate of both blogs and online journalism in general - his piece is a well informed, well argued rebuttal of the first piece. Have a look at it and think about the way he uses links and the way he puts the piece together.

Writing your first post

One of the things I'm going to ask you to do today is to write a couple of posts on your blogs. One should draw on the research I asked you to do yesterday. Remember that I asked you to find a news story online, which you found interesting. I also asked you to find other coverage of the same story, which perhaps took a different perspective.

What I want you to do today is to write something about the stories you found. Think of it as a kind of comment piece. Remember yesterday we talked about media filtering and media critique - two popular ways of writing on blogs. This post is a chance to try your hand at both of those. You should link to the stories you're commenting about. Remember to link to the specific stories, not the general sites they come from.

Remember that writing online is more personal, less informal. So think about that when you create your post. This doesn't have to sound like an essay.

But it should be grammatically correct and properly punctuated. No txt spk. It's ok to be a bit loose on Facebook or wherever. But we're trying to use blogs as journalistic tools. Think a bit too about how you lay out your posts. Once you publish your post, go to your blog. How does it look? Is it easy to read online. Remember that you can go back and edit mistakes.

Setting up a blog using Blogger

The first thing we're going to do today is set up a blog. We'll do this using Blogger - in part because it's free, in part because it's pretty easy to use. It's not perfect, as you'll discover if you continue to use the blog you set up today. But it's good enough for most things.

Before we set up our blogs, I'll talk a bit about a few blogs - so you understand how they work, how they're laid out, what kind of content appears on them.

Last night, I was trying to think about which blogs to show you - so I looked around for something that looked like a typical blog. But they're kind of hard to find now. Blogs have become so ubiquitous, so much part of the online landscape, they've changed into lots of different things. So much so, it's hard to say what a typical blog is these days.

That said, here's some links to some blogs we'll look at briefly in class before you set up your own:

• I am Fashion
• Collision Detection
• Talking Points Memo
• Online Journalism Blog
• Derek Powazek

Today's Essential Journalism session

Today we're going to explore some of the ideas we talked about yesterday. You're going to set up a blog using Blogger, the free blogging service now owned by Google. You'll post a couple of things on it, learn about how to link and how to add pictures and video. We'll look at different approaches to writing online.

In the second half of the session, we'll look at the websites put up by the big newspapers and compare them to their print editions. The idea is to think about how each operation is using the potential of the net. We'll look a bit at online design and usability too, if there's time.

I'm going to use this blog to post links to things I want you to look at in class. Don't worry about the old stuff on here - this is an old research blog I set up a long time ago for my old job - I haven't used it for a long while. I thought it might be a good place to put some stuff relating to today's session.

More links

More stuff to process eventually - Vic Keegan on why blogs haven't really taken off - something to add to my ongoing interest in the way the meaning of the word 'blog' is changing and why that is.

Jonathan Freedland on 'the blogosphere and point-scoring males', many of whom can be seen on Comment is Free everyday - hence The Guardian's over-focus on this aspect of blogging.

Guardian editorial on the whole blog abuse/blog code of conduct thing

Finally - a quote from Polly Toynbee, attacking press hypocrisy over the whole Iran hostages story selling flap...

The British press, the worst in the west, demoralises the national psyche. It makes people miserable. It raises false fears. It proclaims that nothing works, everything gets worse, and it urges distrust of any public official or politician. Now it has the government on the run and a chance for Tory victory, there is no holding back its doom-mongering in this most healthy, safe and prosperous age.

Sounds like an essay question in waiting... I'll come back to this later, maybe.

Links

No time to explain the long hiatus - just need to log some links

The Guardian on newspapers and web video

Need to think about the whole changing definition of blogs - a good start point - Tim Dowling having some fun with Anna Wintour's banning of the b-word

Anthony Lilley piece about 'content still being king' - want to write something about web/biz cliches

Update on people giving up on their blogs

The ongoing flap around the blogging code of conduct - plus an interesting piece on net misogyny -  again bouncing off the Kathy Sierra affair

Oliver Kamm lays into Guido Fawkes' performance on Newsnight and political  bloggers in general

Really interesting piece by David Hewson about two ex-hacks' input into a citizen journalism success.

John Lanchester on Google Book search and copyright

Bobbie Johnson on blogging's tenth birthday

Also, the Today programme today - covered stealth marketing (link back to that old Guardian report on it all) and political parties attempting to use YouTube - interviewed Stephen Coleman - who talked about his research students looking at this area.

OK - enough random stuff to remember and write about

Radio 4 blogs and the London freesheets

By the way, Saturday Live, like seemingly everything else on Radio 4, now has a blog. But it seems kind of pointless, though I did nick the Muriel Gray pic from there.  The R4 show blogs I've looked at seem mostly like places for comment from readers, or places for linking that comment to the occasional post from the presenter. For example on the PM blog, Eddie Mair posts once a day, sometimes just a sentence, and that post becomes the seed for various threads of comments. Am planning, when I get time, to look at the way traditional news media institutions have stressed the discussion forum side of blogs over the other elements.

Incidentally, I went on the PM blog to see if there was any discussion about a really interesting item I heard, I think last Tuesday, about Westminster Council threatening to charge Associated and NewsCorp for the extra work they're having to do cleaning up the mess left by all those free copies of The London Paper and London Lite. But there wasn't anything there - unless it was buried somewhere in the day's comments - but I don't think it was - just a lot of Oscar chat.

But apparently, because they get the LP and LL for free - or rather they're forcibly stuffed into your hand by underpaid workers who clearly have quotas to shift before they get paid, people just chuck the papers on the floor after they're done. And once they're dirty, the old papers can't be recycled, so they have to be incinerated etc. Lots of extra cost for Westminster Council (and other councils and the rest of us) for a product that is supposedly 'free'...