ashimitation

Twitter --> www.twitter.com/AshleyMarks87

2009-04-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article on companies and Twitter. The article covers everything from Amazon ignoring complaints of LGBT literature disappearing and a Dominos video showing employees making an unsanitary pizza. But I was distracted by two other articles...

Ashton Kutcher trumps CNN on Twitter

Why was this so interesting? I don't know... the mystery of celebrity. At least this was for a good cause. Kutcher said he'd donate 10,000 mosquito nets in time for World Malaria Day if he had the most followers.

"Ashton Kutcher single-handedly conquered CNN. On Twitter, anyway."

"Earlier in the week, Kutcher realized he had only about 50,000 fewer Twitter followers than the cable news network - - each had more than 800,000."

"I just found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big a voice online as what an entire media company can," Kutcher said in a video he posted online."

In his humor, Kutcher then "vowed to "ding-dong ditch" CNN mogul Ted Turner's Atlanta home if he arrived at the milestone first."

Kutcher ended up with 1 million followers. ONE MILLION.

25 Twitter must follows

I am not sure why I would follow most of these people just to become a number on their Twitter list.

However I may follow them just to see more of these posts...

Snoop Dogg "mad cuties up on twizzle who want to holla first boww woooww"

Kevin Smith "Finally cleaning my office. Why do I bother keeping anything? When I'm dead, it'll probably all just get thrown out."

And most notedly, John Mayer "BREAKING CELEBRITY NEWS: I was sitting with my legs crossed for too long and my penis fell asleep."

Climate Change: Hindsight and Forward Thinking

2009-04-16T10:41:00.001-07:00

In pictures: How the world is changing
This takes you through pictures varying from mountains to forests and the effects of climate change. It's hard to believe anyone could second guess what's happening in the world after seeing these pictures.

Hindsight:
What if the U.S. had never been invaded and never advanced? If Native Americans just kept living their lives the way they did, what kind of impact would the U.S. have had on climate change?

Foward Thinking:
Earth is a habitable planet because the presence of life is kept by hydrogen and vice versa. What if Earth became inhabitable? Would we really consider moving to Mars and is it possible? Think about it. We could send plants, animals and maybe humans to Mars trip after trip and possibly make Mars a habitable planet. What a mind trip.

Facebook: a free for all.

2009-04-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

I remember when people needed to have a credible college e-mail to join Facebook. Those were the good old days without "I love the Jonas brothers" bumperstickers and a suggestion to "add your aunt".

Which brings me to my next point:
All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks

"The trend is still relatively confined. Only about 7 percent of people
older than 65 have online social-networking profiles, according to research from
the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But Facebook's
popularity is growing most quickly among women older than 55, according to a
site called Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook's growth."

I get it. I get it. It's an easy way for companies to look at your profile and older employees to keep up with the times, aunts to keep up with neice's children and moms to see what their kids are up to. But I really don't want to add my mom to Facebook.

Facebook is an online scrapbook of your life, and I have deleted 3/4 of my "college life scrapbook" because of potential employers when I already have 3 other professional sites they can look at. How many online sites can I possibly keep track of?

I know Facebook can't be confined to the college life. But hearing my 53-year-old aunt say, "Well my sister told me to just go on Facebook to look at my nephew's baby pictures," makes me laugh a little.

Gay Marriage - Better late than never.

2009-04-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

In my adventure with Apture, I have decided to write about something more important to me... gay marriage being legalized in Iowa (and Vermont).

I only focus on Iowa because it was such a shock when my friend called and told me it was a real possibility. Iowa. Iowa?! It's so close to home!

From "Iowa Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage" (AP) on msnbc.com:
"We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective," the Supreme Court wrote. Iowa lawmakers have "excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification." To issue any other decision, the justices said, "would be an abdication of our constitutional duty."

I hope people are finally starting to get this because, after writing papers and articles on the subject from both sides, I have yet to see a good argument against same-sex marriage.

Come on Minnesota!

Apture!

2009-04-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

What a better way to start playing around with Apture than with the Beatles? This is actually pretty cool and doesn't take long to download.

Free Royalty-Free Music?

2008-03-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to find free royalty-free music but am having a hard time. The sites in the packet are hard to navigate and have mostly short sound bites.
If anyone has any good sites, let me know!

iMovie audio

2008-03-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

I am really excited to try my hand at the iMovie audio/video making. I think having an expert in class really helped and so did the hands-on experience. I am hoping to create a really good photo gallery video with audio. After seeing the slideshow of videos in class, it made me realize that still photos can have as much of or an even bigger effect as video. It will be interesting to see how it all comes together and if I can use iMovie.

30 SEO Tips for Newspaper and Magazine Publishers

2008-03-03T08:48:00.001-08:00

I was surprised to see that the first tip was to forget about keywords. I thought we spent so much time talking about putting keywords in the first 100 words. But this article is saying to forget them.

I like that it mentioned opening your site. This means not having to register. The minute a site asks me to fill in information, I try to find a different site with the same information. Don't have a separate archive is more good advice. There have been many times when I have wanted to find old articles and can't even find an archives page.

This article talks about structure. It mentions "siloing", which means having nice categories and a hub page. It mentions looking at what keywods generate the most traffic. I thought we were forgetting about keywords. It seems simple but the article mentions naming headlines and links under names that actually have to do with the articles. Many websites try to be cute and use mysterious titles.
This article made me think of a website that is not too great, my hometown's. It's a lot of ads everywhere and three columns for everything. http://www.gomarshall.net/

I like the idea of linking back to the home page consistently. Using the main URL is best because most people are going to link that main page on their website.

This article mentions using RSS feeds and one reason is plagiarizing. The RSS feeds links back to your site so plagiarizing most likely can't happen. I hadn't thought about that. Another thing I didn't think about was rewarding people for linking to your site. This article mentions creating a contest or offer. People always want to get something for doing something. So getting something for linking is easy.

This article also specifically mentions creating a Google site map. This is interesting to me because being mentioned specifically in 30 SEO Tips must mean you're doing pretty well.

Gant's book all-in-all thought provoking

2008-02-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

After wrapping up Gant's book and considering my thoughts on his views, I have had time to think about what the book really did for me.

I realized that throughout the book I went through what almost everyone is going through with citizen journalism. I had to change my way of thinking. Before reading Gant's book I had never thought of citizen journalism. I never thought of YouTube and MySpace and blogging to be these huge things.

I went through a process of being scared of citizen journalism. This is probably the spot where news organizations and government have stopped in their thought processes.

After reading Gant's arguments and thinking about them for awhile, he makes valid points. With a federal shield law, there should be no worry about everyone wanting to be a journalist. People just aren't that invested.

Kevin Sites.. journalist?

2008-02-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about whether Kevin Sites' journey to war zones is what made him a journalist. (Meaning if that was all Kevin Sites ever did, would he be considered a journalist?)There is no doubt that what he did was brave. The images from the video we watched in class were very real and graphic.

But does traveling to war zones make you a better journalist than someone else? Or a journalist to begin with? Who's to say that reporting on celebrities at the Oscars has a lesser value than reporting in war zones? Yes, that seems like it would have an obvious answer. But people have different values. They place more importance on different things.

Kevin Sites was brave in his journey to make known what is happening in war zones. But does bravery make you a journalist?

Linking

2008-02-04T13:32:00.001-08:00

After half a centruy of scholarly work, new documents about the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have been made public.

"Certainly, after 50 years, the unique historical value of these records outweighs any secrecy rationale," said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, which filed the petition, with support from more than a dozen scholars. The archive, based at George Washington University, is a nonprofit group that uses the Freedom of Information Act to challenge government secrecy.

Among the historians were John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale, and Ronald Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and past president of the Historians of American Communism.

"We're All Journalists Now"

2008-02-03T15:17:00.001-08:00

The first chapter of “We’re All Journalists Now” made me think it’s a good thing my emphasis isn’t journalism. Of course public relations is effected by freedom of the press too. The first chapter raised the question: why should I spend money on four years of college? If citizen journalism becomes widely accepted, at least by the public, as a reliable source of news then why go to school for it?

It is scary to think that we are coming of a new age full of uncertainty and all we have to rely on is a background of uncertainty.

The press clause has never been a stabling backing. No one really knows what the founding fathers were thinking when they added it. Many people believe that they would not put anything in the First Amendment that was unneeded or redundant. In that case, using the freedom of speech clause and the press clause together wouldn’t work.

So how will we decide who is a journalist?

No one knows why court cases get chosen for review. Courts haven’t come up with any upstanding decisions on the press clause nationally. This poses a problem when the public should be informed of government decisions.
Especially since the press is said to be a check on government.

The press clause falls under an amendment that is supposed to cover fundamental personal rights and freedoms. It says nothing about institutions. This being said, should we really view press as an institution?

In the book it says that journalism should be viewed as an activity and not an institution.

Should the press have special rights then? And would this effect citizen journalism?
What kind of rights would the press have? Withholding information that could save someone’s life?

This brings back the question of who the press is. I think that the court would lean more toward a protection of institution press than personal freedoms.

In that case, it is almost relieving to think that the courts have not made a solid decision on the press clause.

The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

2008-01-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

First off I think that Outing did a good job of viewing all sides of each of the 11 layers. He didn't just focus on the good, easy things. He also acknowledged the drawbacks of each layer.

Opening up to public comment is a great idea. Hearing what readers think and want should be every journalists dream. Without a reader, journalists don't have a job. Keeping what's important to readers important to the newspaper shows readers respect. I hadn't thought of letting readers comment on classifieds, calendars, letters to the editor, etc. I think that is an innovative idea because, again, it shows what the reader is thinking. Outing brings up the problem of innapropriate content which is a valid point. It is always going to be there though. Journalists are threatened by citizen journalism because if anyone can just write news, what's the point of going to school and getting a job in journalism?

The citizen add-on reporter is kind of sketchy. It's good to know from people in the neighborhoods what is going on but at the same time it could get sloppy. The people doing the breaking in and stealing could be reading the articles too. It could become a safety issue for the citizen journalists.

Open-source reporting has some advantages. I like the example of getting interview questions from readers. The more people a journalist has asking questions, the more information he/she will get. Having a reader do the actual reporting may get tedious and expensive if he/she is offered cash pay.

Offering blogging websites is an excellent idea. People love debating back and forth between other "everyday" people. I don't like the selective approach because even if someone is a good writer, it doesn't mean he/she has anything to say. And someone who is a bad writer may have many good points. Also using blogs that compliment what the news staff covers may lead to bias. Outing recognizes that many citizen blogs are short-lived. It takes someone who is really invested in responding with ideas to keep a consistent blog. I don't think money is a good initiative to keep a blog going for a long period of time.

Newsroom transparency blogs seem to be a good idea because it gives readers more knowledge about the process. If readers question or complain, it could give them a reason for how things are done.

The stand-alone citizen journalist site (edited) would be good for communities. Yes, most things aren't interesting to many people but they could be interesting to a few. However, editing it defeats the purpose of a stand-alone citizen journalist site. Plus, it seems that even if the site is unedited, it's still edited to some degree.

The stand-alone citizen journalist site (unedited) seems to be a better fit for citizen journalism. I like the idea of reporting misconduct and having a certain amount of times it can happen before the article is taken off the site. Many people can get heated and write innapropriate and irrelevant things. I also agree with not screening every single article because of liability.

Adding a print edition seems like a waste to me. The only good thing I see coming from it is money. I think the people who are responding online are mostly a younger generation. They are already responding online and, being part of a younger generation, I think going online is faster and easier. Also, I like the two-way aspect of the internet. Isn't that the whole point of moving forward with citizen journalism?

The hybrid journalism seems to be working for OhmyNews in South Korea. But I am unsure of how the U.S. would respond to it. The U.S. tends to be more close-minded. I also like that OhmyNews has created an international edition. Again, I think the U.S. is too stuck up to do that. But is is a great idea. I also feel that journalists may think, "Why did I go to school for this?" If any citizen can just write for a paper, it could make a professional journalist feel animosity.

I don't like the idea of integrating citizen and professional journalism under one roof in hard copy. It would be great online because it is innovative. It would also be good to have the professional journalist's article in hard copy and then the citizen journalist's article on the website. Many people may not want to go to the website as well as reading the paper which could be a drawback.

Wiki journalism works for Wikipedia but many professors have strong feelings against Wikipedia. This makes me think that Wiki journalism may have the same negative reaction. It is a good idea as long as the articles are constantly monitored for innapropriate or untrue content. It is good to have on a community level especially with the example of obituaries. It creates an easier platform for people to write about and to each other.

Overall, I think citizen journalism is a good thing. However, it is very progressive and a younger generation will probably have to accept it first. It may be a slow moving process while people are getting used to it.