Google's Purchase of Feedburner

Google + Feedburner = Hooray
I was thrilled to learn of Google's purchase of Feedburner. I learned when my friend Diana sent me sent me a text message as I was driving across rural Oregon. She knew it would make me happy, it did. This is such a perfect fit. Google + Feedburner is such a natural. Google + Feedburner is almost as good as Google + Technorati. Google + Feedburner makes a lot more sense to me than E-bay + Skype ever did.

I see so much potential in this. Google + Feedburner has been one of my favorite combinations for creating Podcasts. For video Google + Feedburner gives you a Vlog plus a Video Podcast. This is the combination that Rayanne Hodson of Freevlog recommends. Google + Feedburner worked very well for my class last semester. All of my students created there own Blogs, Vlogs and Podcasts using this method. This is the workflow I use for my own Vlogs.

It is a great way to create RSS feeds and podcasts, and keep track of who is viewing them. I hope soon Google creates a quick and easy way to enable this to be your default feed for your Blogger blog (and dumps Atom.)

Google + Feedburner is a great way to produce RSS advertising. RSS advertising feeds are a fantastic way to create, engage and build an audience of passionate users. These passionate users, in turn, are your quality consumers who can help you build a better product or service by telling you what works and what doesn't. These are the folks you want seeing your ads and the cool thing is, they want to see your ads. Google + Feedburner will help make this happen.

For educators Google + Feedburner is a great way to see if your students are really consuming your RSS Feeds. Google + Feedburner is good for me. I am stoked!

Technorati Tags: Google, Feedburner, RSS Advertising, RSS and Education, ssloansjca, Instructional Technology, j-school

Hodson and Dedman on Video Blogging

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman at SJSU
On April 25, 2007 Hodson and Dedman came to SJSU. They spoke to Professor Cynthia McCune's Journalism 163 class about videoblogging. Devon Thames, from my class, was there and she shot a video of their presentation. It is being made available here in multiple parts. Here is part one of their presentation.

Tuesday Funnies

Tuesday Funnies
Friday funnies came late. I am planning to use this video today when we talk about Fair Use.

Need to fix SJSU

Opinion: Being a student is hard enough!
We do not need to make it harder. So, why do we make it so hard and what can be done about it?

In my opinion a President's level body should be formed to look into what are the unnecessary stress points at our university. This investigation should be carried out as openly and transparently as possible while respecting the rights of privacy of the individuals involved. Students, faculty and staff should be encouraged to report to this new office processes and procedures we have at SJSU that are unnecessarily cumbersome, bureaucratic, redundant or irritating. The commission of the new body would be to investigate each problem and too keep it on its agenda until the problem is resolved and the process streamlined. Lack of funds to fix a problem is not an excuse for the perpetuation of the problem. If a problem process is investigated and found to be cumbersome and stress causing it should be discontinued or brought to the attention of the chancellor's office and/or the state legislature. In my opinion there is no excuse for the sorry state our higher educational system is in. If we fix these irritating cumbersome, bureaucratic and redundant hoops we make our students jump through we not only will lower the campus tension level we may find we are saving the taxpayer's money.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Campus Life, Virginia Shootings, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Scoble SJSU visit?

Scoble on podcasting
At last night's class we showed this video by Jason Miller. We are using Scoble and Israel's book Naked Conversations as a text in the class. In the class I told the students that Scoble puts his phone number on his blog. They did not believe he would answer so I called him. He answered. It was very cool.

Scobles coming to SJSU?
Besides being an author, a professional podcaster and an A-list blogger, Bob is a long-time friend and a former student of our Journalism School. When we talked to him he said he would be happy to come and talk to our class. A month and a half ago, I talked to his wife Maryam, and at that time she was open to the idea of coming also. I am hoping she is still open to the idea and that they will both come. As far as I am concerned (this is my class) this event, should it happen, could be open to the world. Perhaps we could Skypecast it? It will definitely be podcast. Stay tuned for more!

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, ssloansjca, scoble, j-school

The Greatest Moment

Vlog: The Best Moment of Your Entire Life
When I assigned this to my class I told them I would also do the assignment. So, here is my video. It was actually not an easy assignment and I put a lot of thought into it.

UPDATE - If the video shown above does not play for you!
This movie is posted in other places that may work better for you:

• It is here on Blip.tv in flash format
  
• Also, it is here on YouTube.

Technorati Tags: Madison Sloan, Sloan Family, Blogging, vlogging, vlogs, ssloansjca

Presentation on RSS

My class presentation on RSS
A slight reschedule. We are going to have the session on Second Life the following week. This Tuesday we will be talking about RSS! Here is the related PowerPoint presentation on the subject.

Photoshop User Group Meeting April 11

The next users group meeting will be on Wednesday, April 11. We will have presentations on Photoshop CS3, CS3 Extended and (time permitting) Lightroom. It's not necessary to RSVP now, we'll ask a few days before the meeting.

We'll have pizza and drinks at 6:30, and the meeting will start at 7:00. The meeting will be in the Park Conference Room, so come to the lobby at Adobe Systems' East Tower, 321 Park Avenue, San Jose. To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use John Nack's name.

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested. If they would like to be on our email list, have them respond to: dan@weinberg-clark.com.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, Photoshop, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Campus Rot

Are we going downhill?
I have been here well over 20 years. I started as a student in 1979. It seems to me things have never been as bad as they are now. Student fees continue to go up, the faculty is on the verge of a strike (that is not going to be good for anybody), parts of the campus are dangerously understaffed, morale is low and we can't even keep the windows clean in parts of our campus. (Photo, March 2007 in DMH building SJSU)

I have seen really good staff leave the university due to stress and low pay. I do not see much hope on the horizon. Something seems seriously wrong at this university to me and nobody seems to be seriously working to fix it.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Akshay presenting to JMC163

Akshay Vyas Presenting to JMC163 [MP3]

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, Short Films, Movie Making, San Jose, ssloansjca

Hope: By Akshay Vyas, SJSU Student

Akshay Vyas makes great films featuring Help Desk Staff
SJSU student and Help Desk staff member Akshay Vyas has made several short films. He has been working with other students, including student assistants from the University Help Desk, such as Rahul Jain, Nupur Sinha, Nirav Patel and Diwakar Mani. In my opinion, these are wonderful short films. They are great examples of what students can do when they apply their own talent and passion despite having limited resources.

Last night, Akshay came and spoke to my class. All the skills used making his short films apply directly to what we are doing in Journalism 163. Akshay is an Electrical Engineering graduate student. I hope he does well with his studies and that he also continues with film making.

The dedication, passion, skill and experience at film making Akshay and our other help desk staff are showing and gaining is available to other SJSU students who need help with their own films and video blogs. This help is available at the help desk located on the first floor of Clark Hall at San Jose State University.

Akshay and all the wonderful students at the university help desk, are an absolute pleasure to work with.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, Short Films, Movie Making, San Jose, ssloansjca

JMC163 Podcast: March 13 Class

Daniel Sato on New Media and Photojournalism
In this unedited raw audio podcast [MP3 here] SJSU photojournalism major Daniel Sato talks about how photojournalism has been changed by new media and Web 2.0 technologies. Sato is a photoblogger and a regular user of Flickr. Sato talks about ethics, tools and the changes brought about by the increasingly pervasive Internet. He also talks about how new media is changing the nature and needs of journalism education and how photojournalism students use new media to build a community that extends beyond the boundaries of the campus.

After Sato: The Joy of Analog & Vblogging with iMovie
This is the balance of the class, presented as an unedited MP3. Included here is a conversation about analog photography and a presentation on using iMovie to create a short video.

The video we created in class
Here for you to review is the video created in the class as recorded in the previous audio. It is shown here for reference only. It should open in Quicktime player.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, J-School, ssloansjca

Andrew Venegas on Vlogging

Andrew Venegas talked to the class about Vlogging
Last Tuesday Andrew Venegas spoke to the class about Video Blogging. The conversation is recorded and is available here as an MP3 download.

Podcast: 01:08:12 duration, 15.6 MB MP3 - Posted March 8, 2007 Raw audio, recorded March 6, 2007.
To listen to lower quality, smaller file size, audio, click here –> MP3 File Here

John Furrier speaks about new media journalism

"Content is the new search engine"
John Furrier, Founder and CEO of PodTech.net, spoke today at a get together for Stanford Innovation Journalism Fellows at Podtech's Palo Alto offices. Furrier really impressed me, this is one sharp guy! Furrier who has a solid background in computer science said, "there is a huge demand for content, content is the new search engine." Furrier spoke about RSS, the engine that enables podcasting, comparing it to TCP/IP and HTTP in it's impact on business. He said, "TCP/IP gave people using computers access to the world, HTTP gave them access to information and RSS gave them access to relationships." Furrier mentioned Robert Scoble and talked about how Scoble reads a thousand blogs a day with RSS and Google Reader. Scoble is a graduate of the SJSU Journalism program, an A-List blogger and a PodTech Podcaster. Robert Scoble was out of town. His wife Maryam was there. She is also a blogger and she also works at PodTech.

This was an event focusing on New Media and Journalism and Furrier talked about what he sees as the future of Journalism. He described a new media model where reporter's roles are more and more becoming about igniting and curating conversations. He said reporters of the future will work in more of a software development model, focusing on parts of the big stories and working as a team with others to develop coverage and conversations in a way that collaborates both with their audiences and each other. He described this world as being like the open source software development model.

Furrier also sees a rich future for virtual worlds like Second Life and a growing role for journalists to both cover and work in that space. He also spoke about politics and said one of the great uncovered stories is what he called the blogosphere primary where politicians are courting the blogosphere. He talked about Hillary Clinton's recent visit to Google and about how Clinton is courting the Google Vote. He said the press is not talking about that much, but they sure are talking about it at Google.

Furrier said there are technologies journalists need to learn and he specifically mentioned Java Script and XML, but he also said the story they're telling has to be good. He said, "you need to optimize your behavior because if you don't tell a good story you will be booed."

Technorati Tags: PodTech, John Furrier, Journalism, podcasting, scoble, j-school, sjsu, blogging, ssloansjca

SJSU Technology & Emerging Media Club

STEM is official, has a blog and everything
Having one kid in who is in his thirties and two in their twenties (yes, we started young) I can assure you that what is written above is true, but that is another post. I am thrilled to be the faculty adviser to the coolest club at SJSU, the SJSU Technology and Emerging Media Club (STEM.) They are meeting weekly in the Incubator Conference Room in Clark Hall and are sharing and teaching themselves and fellow students how to use and create emerging media including blogs, RSS, Podcasts, Video Blogs and virtual worlds. STEM meets Wednesdays at 4:30p in Clark 116.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, JMC163, J-School, jmc, stemclub, STEM, ssloansjca

SJSU Technology and Emerging Media (STEM)

The SJSU Technology and Emerging Media Club
The SJSU Technology and Emerging Media (STEM) Club had its second meeting today in Clark Hall. Students discussed their favorite blogs and talked about new tools. Andrew Venegas discussed how to create a blog and discussed RSS and tagging. STEM now seems to have enough members and has completed all the necessary paperwork to become a student organization at SJSU. The next meeting of STEM is in two weeks.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, JMC163, J-School, jmc, stemclub, ssloansjca

Reuters and Second Life

What companies "get" Second Life
Philip Rosedale, Founder and CEO of Second Life, talks about Second Life. A lot of his talk is about Rueters and how their Second Life Bureau reports on happenings in that metaverse.

Vlog: Today's class

About today's class
This short video describes the plan for today's class. Basically, this is today's agenda:

Keystone technologies for the Web
Digital Imaging; Photoshop Introduction. Photo editing and sizing non-destructively.

Guest Speaker(s)
SJSU Technology & Emerging Media Club
President: Jessica Drnek, Vice President: Andrew Venegas, Secretary: Kyle Hansen, Treasurer: Sean Gilpin

Agenda
10 min. Check attendance and new students.
20 min. Guest Speakers discuss new student club
30 min. Presentation on Photoshop
15 min. Break.
40 min. Lab: In class assignment.
20 min. Introduction to Blogging.
10 min. Tour of Academic Success Center

Lab
Non-destructive editing with Photoshop. Tools palettes, layers, filters and masks. There is a related assignment.

Topics
Adobe Photoshop, Layers, Masking, Filters, Palettes, HTML, Markup Languages, Content Management Systems & Web Design.

Book Discussion
We will discuss the reading the class was assigned.

The Future: Hybrid Journalism, are we there yet?

Hybrid Journalism and Anna Nicole Smith
Tom Rutten wrote in the latimes.com column "Regarding Media":

The mainstream journalistic coverage of Smith's death is among the first such stories driven, in large part, by an editorial perception of public interest derived mainly from Internet traffic. Throughout the afternoon Thursday, editors across the country watched the number of "hits" recorded for online items about Smith's death. These days, it's the rare newspaper whose meeting to discuss the content of the next day's edition doesn't include a recitation of the most popular stories on the paper's website. It's a safe bet that those numbers helped shove Anna Nicole Smith onto a lot of front pages.

What makes this of more than passing interest is that serious American journalism is in the process of transforming itself into a new, hybrid news medium that combines traditional print and broadcast with a more purposefully articulated online presence. One of the latter's most seductive attributes is its ability to gauge readers' appetites for a particular story on a minute-to-minute basis. What you get is something like the familiar television ratings — though constantly updated, if you choose to treat them that way.

Is "hybrid news medium" the future of American journalism or the path to something else?
Is this just the transitional phase from the old to the new, yet undefined, reality? In other words: is this the phase where traditional "mainstream" media, riding its past momentum in a gently downward slope as its market dies of old age, and new media, propelled upward by an increasingly pervasive Internet, Moore's law and a younger market more comfortable with YouTube coexists? What do you think American journalism will look like when Gen Y takes the reins of financial and political power?

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, JMC163, CSU, California State University, Newspapers, Journalism, j-school, ssloansjca

Vlog: No JMC163 Today

I am home sick
There will be no class tonight.

Extra Credit
Hopefully you can do this outside of class:

• Have a working Email Account
• Register on Wordpress.com
• Get E-mail info to Steve Sloan with address registered under.
• After I repy that you have been added to the blog, you can post about your reading. What is your favorite (or least favorite) thesis and why?

Reading for next week:
Cluetrain, (free on the web), all front matter including "The 95 Theses" and Chapters One and Two.