If I can stay awake long enough, I may have the seed of my project ready to submit by the noon deadline. If not, I’ll continue chopping at this in the days and weeks to come until I do have something viable.

You can also watch Leo Laporte’s keynote and the ONA Online Journalism Awards ceremony. Video from ONA09 panel sessions are free for members, $25 for non-members. Details on how to watch those are here.

Updated at 2:53 p.m. PT.

Once again, I’ll be acting as control tower on Twitter @ONA09, directing you to discussions of note, posts, articles, and relevant links. The conference hashtag is #ONA09. Keynotes and individual sessions will have their own hashtags for easier filtering. They’ll be posted to the conference website and available in the printed program you’ll receive on-site.

If you plan to blog, vlog or otherwise report about the conference, let me know by leaving your link in comments. I’ll be tweeting from my personal account too. Follow me @MacDivaONA.

The student newsroom will report from the trenches and post coverage at the ONA09 website. I’m told they will be liveblogging lots of sessions.

For the first time, conference keynotes will be live streamed and available to anyone online. In addition, ONA members will get free access to live streams of many Friday and Saturday sessions. Non-members can get access to those streams for $25 a day. Purchase details will be posted at the ONA website soon.

And finally, I made a couple of tools that I hope will make the experience more fun:

• a backchannel (now with Web and iPhone favicon goodness) that shows conference-related tweets

and

• a map of San Francisco bars, restaurants and sights. If you want to add places, let me know and I’ll add you as a collaborator.

View What’s Near the Hilton San Francisco in a larger map

Two more notes, since we seem to get these questions every year:

Weather: The weather promises to be beautiful, with forecasts calling for sunny skies and temperatures ranging from the low 50s at night (12-13 °C) to the upper 60s (16-20 °C) during the day. Nevertheless, San Francisco is notoriously chilly so bring a jacket.

What to Wear: There is no dress code for the conference, but attendees typically come in business casual and dress up for the Online Journalism Awards ceremony (yes, in past years, people have come in tuxes and gowns). If you plan to go out at night, public transport is available on the Muni, but you will most likely either do a lot of (expensive) cabbing or walking. Choose your footwear accordingly.

Like all things in life, a conference is what you make of it. Bring your questions and ideas and have a great time. I look forward to meeting you.

Linda Tischler, who covers design stories for Fast Company magazine, posts 10 tips on how to sell your story idea.

The list is mostly pet peeves, which freelancers must pay attention to. But there are also two excellent guidelines on what to do:

Offer me something nobody’s had before. The quickest way to catch my eye is to give me a chance to be first to report something cool. Editors, a very competitive bunch, love that. Give me some catnip to dangle before them.
…
Do pitch me something that advances the conversation. What are the big issues designers will be grappling with in the next few years? Who are the brightest young talents? Who has solved an intractable problem in a particularly innovative way? What trends are you picking up as you talk to clients? Why should I care about what you’re pitching me?

Read the rest of Linda Tischler’s post, “How to Pitch Me.”

For more pitch guidance, read my post, how to pitch a multimedia story to MSNBC.com.

Photo: Steve Rhodes/Flickr

Web Trend Map, a new interactive site, let’s you do that. Created by designer Craig Mod and information architect iA Inc., the website maps selected Twitter users and displays the trending links among those users off to the side.

The site was sorely lacking in food-related maps, so in the spirit of my most recent post, I made one.

Are there any food bloggers/makers/photographers you love who are on Twitter? Let me know and I’ll consider them for inclusion.

Craig and iA write more about the thinking behing Web Trend Map on their site. And if the words “web trend map” sound familiar, it’s ’cause iA Inc. is the company behind the popular Web trends infographic, now available as a poster.

By moleitau/Flickr via 43 Folders

His stories weren’t fact-supplemental fact-quote or soundbite from a source, but anecdotes told the way broadcast instructors always urge: like you were telling your friends something fascinating.

If you like the “This American Life” sound and story structure, here’s something you’ll enjoy: a four-part video interview with Ira on how to tell stories.

Earlier, I embedded the first video in the series. Then I realized that’s the one you’re most likely to watch. But the really good one, from a content maker’s perspective, is the third segment. So here it is.

For more about Ira and his show, read:

• “His American Life,” Chicago, March 2006
• “The Trouble With Birthdays,” Stop Smiling, December 25, 2005
• A contrarian view, “This American Life and the Illusion of No Illusion,” Zeek, November 2007

Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid/Flickr

A simple but compelling ad by Fairly Painless Advertising tells potential employees why design firm Herman Miller might be the right place for them to work.

Can the news outlet you work for say this?

I’m going to guess you’re intimately familiar with Facebook. FriendFeed, on the other hand, is an aggregation/interaction site that allows users to easily import RSS feeds, collect them in one place, present them anywhere, and comment and vote on posts in others’ feeds.

While Facebook has these features too, the FriendFeed interface makes it very simple to drop in all your social network accounts. And hey, who doesn’t like easy, right?

In the article, “Now Facebook Really Owns You,” Chadwick Matlin writes:

…[I]magine a social aggregator with the size and sway of Facebook. Users would love it because it would make their lives simpler and more streamlined. The other social media sites stand to gain as well, since Facebook would be pointing more users to content offsite. News sites will get more traffic because people will be clicking through on more links. Facebook, of course, would be the biggest victor: It would be able to get people to check in more often and stay longer. Ad rates can then go up, which helps the company’s bottom line.

He doesn’t explicitly mention one thing: user data. Facebook has a lot of information about you, your friends and your acquaintances: birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, relationships, things you like, games you play, who you pay attention to and who pays attention to you, and — if you didn’t delete your cookies before logging in — other sites you’ve visited.

This is valuable not just to Facebook, but to third-party developers and those who use FacebookConnect. It means companies can get a more accurate picture of who you are and who the people you’re connected to are, in other words, more accurate user targeting.

Businesses are interested in making sure you take a specific action. The more they know about you, your behaviors, and what influences you, the better they can tailor their message to get you to do something.

Yes, Facebook got some very sharp engineers, and yes, real-time search will probably make Facebook a bigger player amongst those who need to know what people are saying now, but for profitability, the game has always been about understanding the user through data. In my opinion, the technologies FriendFeed was built on will allow Facebook to fill in gaps.