Almighty Link

Last year, Steve Rubel waved goodbye to blogging and introduced many people to The Steve Rubel Lifestream, powered by Posterous. Since then, Posterous’ traffic has skyrocketed, possibly assisted by  Austin Statesman’s choice to use it to power their A Day in the Sun project.

I don’t intend to switch to Posterous anytime soon (I agree with Mark Krynsky’s thoughts on Posterous as a lifestreaming service), but I did select it recently when I created Freedom Communication’s Social Freedom blog, mostly because of the ability to create posts via email from multiple contributors.

The magic

In the two weeks of using Posterous, a rarely mentioned Posterous feature has totally impressed me. It magically (okay, “programmatically” might be the factually correct word here) transforms web addresses into pictures, videos and audio players.

I’ve created a post on my personal Posterous blog to illustrate this feature in an admittedly overstated way.

The magic is that I didn’t have to download, crop or resize any of the images that you see there. I didn’t have to embed an MP3 widget and tell it where to find the audio file. I didn’t have to copy and paste any embed codes for the videos. I didn’t even have to tell Posterous the width of those videos or images. See, I told you. It’s magic.

Bonus Wordpress magic

Much to my surprise, previewing this blog post showed met that Wordpress also has similar URL-transforming tricks hidden up its already-powerful sleeves.

I now invite all blogging pros to chime in with “how did you not know about this” comments below.

For those who were as shocked about some of this as I was, I’ve copied and pasted what I typed into the Posterous example. Here, you can see how it turned out in Wordpress:

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Last week, I became part of a small team of Freedom Communications employees who will, for 90 days, explore social media and the ways in which the company (which owns over 100 newspapers and eight TV stations) and its employees should participate in social networks.

As part of that experiment, we launched Social Freedom, a blog to track our research and learnings, from each other and other web sites and organizations.

To avoid some redundancy, I will be posting less about social media here on Almighty Link, my personal blog.

Please come join me and my teammates on Social Freedom. The blog is powered by Posterous, so you can “follow” us if you have a Posterous account.

Photo courtesy of Hazarizal Zainodin via Flickr.

Valleywag recently revisited Adrian Holovaty’s call for more “technical people” in newsrooms, citing examples of “how programming can grow naturally out of writing.” That same week, Editorchat devoted a session to discussing the question “Do editors need writers who are also software developers?”

I agree that some journalists could benefit from picking up coding skills, but I’m not sure that the journalist-programmer path is one that most journalists should pursue.

Most reporters and editors publish content on sites that rely on traffic for revenue. Yes, we need to diversify our cash sources, but I’ll leave those arguments for other blogs, sites and panels. For now traffic equals income, so journalists need to generate page views simply to keep news organizations in business.

Let’s see if programming skills contributed to the most popular New York Times stories last year.

It looks like readers of The Gray Lady were more interested in interesting stories than flashy software. The same is true when you examine the most-viewed posts from the Times’ City Room blog or Bits blog.

Maybe journalists are more interested in pieces storytelling technology than “regular” readers. A quick look at Poynter’s top media stories of the decade blows that theory out of the water.

Well, surely fans of tech-centric sites were interested in programming-driven stories. Not so much on Engadget, Macworld or the ultra-niche Lifestream blog.

Even a look at Techipedia’s best internet marketing posts and Time’s list of 25 best blogs don’t point to content that relies on anything more than basic HTML skills.

Of course, web traffic is only a small part of the big picture, and the sources listed in this post are a very small sample of the many stories that people read, but I have to wonder how critical are programming skills for most daily journalists?

More importantly, what skills should journalists focus on?

Your thoughts?

When is the last time you used Delicious as a discovery tool? That’s right, it’s good for more than just saving bookmarks.

Go to the Delicious popular tags page and (in the field labeled “Type a tag”) enter one word related to a topic you cover. Then hit the return button to get a list of relevant popular posts. For example, here are five popular items recently tagged “journalism.”

1. How News Happens: You’ve likely read many blog posts about this Pew Research Center study that called 83% of the news they examined as “essentially repetitive.” Oh, this was the same one-city, six-storyline study that was blogged and tweeted ad nauseum with triumphant proclamations that 95% of originating reporting comes from traditional media. This link was first saved on Delicious by frasernz.
2. There is no new revenue model for journalism: Robert Niles argues publishers need to review their three options for revenue generation. Then, they can “work to find a publishing and production model that allows a news publication to live within its current income means.” This link was first saved on Delicious by Daniel Latorre.
3. Cut This Story! The Atlantic examines stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post says to make the point – in roughly 1,800 words – that newspaper articles are simply too long. This link was first saved on Delicious by smashcut_media.
4. iPhone News Apps Compared: No, these aren’t the best tools for mobil journalists. Instead, it is a good roundup of 14 sites that deliver news on Apple’s device. This link was first saved on Delicious by hungrymarshall.
5. Finding Dolly Freed: When The New York Times pulled a story two days before it was to run, freelance writer Paige Williams decided to transform her 1,200-word newspaper article into this web site. She also add a slightly humungous “support the journalist” button to accept PayPal donations. This link was first saved on Delicious by Katharine Beutner.