I wanted to include a page of inspiration in my syllabus for the maiden voyage of JOUR 230 Multimedia Storytelling. So I asked friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter why journalism matters. I wanted to show the diversity of opinion but also let them see what I can get from a widely constructed community online, a mixture of college friends, former students, grad school colleagues, and people I have never met but know online. Here is what they said.

“Stories tell us about the world, what it’s like, who’s in it, what they do, how they live. We reach toward understanding and meaning. Stories connect us to that world and to each other. A variety of media allows us to explore those connections to different ways: the stopping power of a single image, the emotion of motion, the depth of words, the humanness of sound, the story in the flow of data. Each form has a different way of taking us into story (none is intrinsically better); the more different ways into the stories that matter to us, the more connections we have a chance to make.” – Mark Hamilton, Journalism instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, via Facebook group “Social Journalism Educators”

“It matters because journalists keep the dirtbags honest.” – Andrew Haire, college friend, via Facebook

“Because the other forms of journalism, without at least a digital component, don’t matter.” – , journalism professor at Simpson College, via Twitter question

“Digital journalism matters because journalism matters. A democracy cannot survive without it. New tools give us new ways to find diverse information and share it with citizens in engaging ways.” – Katy Bartzen Culver, multimedia journalism instructor at the University of Wisconsin, via Facebook group “Social Journalism Educators”

“Digital journalism matters because journalism matters, and this is the way journalism is done now and will be done until the next better technology comes along. Journalists have to be where the citizens are, and the citizens are digital.” – Daxton “Chip” Stewart, journalism professor at Texas Christian University and former grad school colleague, via Facebook

“As people become more accustomed to immediate information, digital journalism becomes their first line of responsible info.” – , via Twitter question

“Using digital tools, social media tools, an individual can reach farther faster than ever before. Education, particularly journalism education, is needed to help us learn what to reach for and how not to overreach, i.e. how not to reach past the people formerly known as the audience and how not to stretch ourselves to the point where we have so much information it becomes almost as meaningless as too little information.” – Mark Poepsel, journalism professor at Loyola-New Orleans and former grad school colleague, via Facebook group “Social Journalism Educators”

“It doesn’t. But journalism, for better or worse, matters no matter the way it’s delivered. I know that’s not the answer you wanted.” – Sharon Kaplan, former co-worker at the Los Angeles Daily News, via Facebook

“Because in an ADHD generation of 140-characters, if we lose the heart of our stories, we lose our readers’ attention. #truth … also, good writing doesn’t win the battle for generation x/y’s attention, good digital/visual storytelling does.” – , former student of mine at the University of Missouri, via Twitter question

The Occupy Wall Street movement (and all of its sister movements) have my attention these days. I don’t have much to add to some of the conversation about the movement other than a few things I’ve posted on Twitter and such, but I hope to have some research completed by next spring that could start to peel away layers about the movement. But in short I think it’s a movement that matters because of the characteristics of how they are organizing and spreading their message, much more so than the actual message coming from the groups.

Last weekend the narrative became much more broad and that’s something I want to talk about here. By that I mean that whatever you think of the OWS movement, something happened that should be of interest to everyone. If you haven’t seen the infamous video of students being pepper sprayed at UC Davis, here you go.

The video is compelling. If you need the whole back story, check this out. But in essence a bunch of students at UC Davis in California were occupying a quad area of campus and were ordered to take their tents and leave. They refused, and in an act of civil disobedience joined arms on the sidewalk and sat down on the ground. An officer of the campus police, claiming he was feeling threatened by the large crowds and the resistance of the students, decided to spray the students with pepper spray in an attempt to break them up. The video went straight to YouTube and caused a viral uproar that has UC officials reeling as of this writing.

Civil disobedience is nothing new in America, of course, and civil rights protesters of the 1950s and ’60s used it effectively to force a change in the conversation. By defying the law, they grabbed headlines for their cause and changed the narrative from one that generally ignored their cause to one that created a conversation about the movement’s goals. The folks who do civil disobedience expect to be arrested, of course, and this is a proper if not expected response; the protesters are willing to face a day in court so that the media starts covering the protests and arrests and eventually starts asking the question about why they are doing it. It’s how you do change when the status quo is entrenched.

The question for the UCD incident, much like during the protests, is what happens when there are more than arrests. Pepper spraying a bunch of students sitting on the ground and not fighting back feels excessive, just as the use of water cannons and billy clubs during the Civil Rights era felt. A flat-out riot is one thing, but passive resistance is quite another. On some level, it starts to feel less like law and order and more like oppression. Picture this video coming out of Iran; we’d be outraged.

This isn’t the only distressing incident related to free speech we’ve seen with OWS. When the NYPD cleared out Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, one of the changes made is that reporters and protesters were cordoned into “free speech zones” rather than allowing them to protest in otherwise public places. At last count 26 journalists were arrested, five of which had press credentials. And this says nothing of the citizen journalists on site, documenting the protests and the NYPD response with camera phones and laptops.

These are attempts, possibly coordinated, by government and their law enforcement apparatus to limit freedom of expression. Zuccotti was shut down under the guise of health concerns even though there was not one case of disease that emerged as a result of the protests. Encampments are being dismantled under city ordinance and public nuisance laws.

Governments. whether it be ours or those of strongmen trying to squelch dissent in the Middle East, hide behind ordinances, health worries, and any laundry list of secondary concerns as a way of squelching viewpoints. These protesters, whatever they stand for, are protesting a system they don’t like and the system is fighting back with legal technicality. I have a hard time believing that Zuccotti would have been emptied if the gathering had been about a socially acceptable cause such as a Lee Greenwood singalong or holding consecutive vigil for 9/11 victims.

We also know that there is a strong correlation between oppressive governments and free speech rights. The more of one, the less of another. Even if we accepted the NYPD line that journalists should be credentialed, it ignores the fact that five journalists were swept up in the Zuccotti raid and that you’d have to break the law to get a credential using the NYPD’s own standards! Throw in my own view that I don’t want the government choosing who is and isn’t a journalist when journalists are tasked with holding public officials accountable (a clear conflict of interest let alone public trust) and what I’m seeing merely on the news media side is chilling.

This exercise of First Amendment rights thus became uncomfortable to the status quo, and so it must go. Free expression, the soul of our democracy, is under attack. Whatever you think of the OWS movement those rights they’re restricting are yours.

Or, as I tell my students in my classes: Defending the rights of those with whom you disagree helps ensure you have the right to express your own views tomorrow.

And yeah, maybe a Lee Greenwood singalong is arguably better because it would bond society rather than threaten those ties that bind us. But the First Amendment ought to be blind to the viewpoint, and any effort to bolster our speech rights should be concerned only with the rights themselves and not the views being expressed. The content of the speech is immaterial if we care about the liberty.

That’s the way it should work, at least. Those civil rights protesters who faced the water cannons are heroes now, but they were a public nusiance at the time to many who found the conversation about race and society uncomfortable. They were willing to change the narrative in an attempt to make a better world. Hindsight has been kind to those folks, which is why initial reactions to these protesters’ characteristics (I hear the words “dirty hippie” used a lot) are of little concern to me. I’m concerned about their right to speak, and I am more concerned when I see governments trying to limit those rights using excessive force.

Fortunately it hasn’t turned violent, yet. This eerie video of the UCD chancellor walking to her car, surrounded by students making silent protest, is haunting and beautiful.

So while I am distressed about the restrictions on expression and some of the bizarre defenses of police-state tactics (particularly by Republicans and libertarians who generally fear the hand of government), I do look around and see various attempts to shift us out of our complacency.

This is where media comes in, and the Web is playing a particularly strong role. Powerful images have always shaped the way we perceive movements, causes, and public events. The iconic Associated Press photo of the (WARNING: if you’ve never seen it before this is a disturbing image; and if you need to cleanse yourself, read the aftermath because it will restore your faith in the human spirit), for example, helped shape public opinion on the Vietnam War. Now we have grandma doused by pepper spray in Seattle. Even the viral spread of the UCD video is an example; this probably would not have been as big a deal 10 years ago because we didn’t have the infrastructure for citizen journalists to do this kind of work. Now they have the tools and we have the social networks to spread this information if professional media either miss the story or ignore it.

Web outrage can be cheap, of course. But it also serves to keep issues on the public consciousness and shape public opinion. This has real consequences for those who make decisions.

I love the “Cop Casually Pepper Sprays Things” meme that has sprung up on the web. I am fascinated with memes in general, but this has become an interesting type of open-source public art. It’s a simple concept, take a photo (often a famous one) and add a cut out of the cop pepper spraying the subject. Such as this one of the cop pepper spraying the Declaration Of Independence.

(See more on Know Your Meme)

There’s something artistic and fascinating about this. People are making a connection about the right of protest and the threat of tyranny by connecting it to an image that is a powerful representation of the opposition. The pepper spraying cop is a modern day King George in this motif. Several Tumblr blogs have sprung up on the Web to aggregate these photos, , and the meme has taken off in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. People are spreading these photos and in turn spreading the urgent message that free speech is under attack. Whether they consciously know they’re choosing to spread the message is up in the air, but the societal effect is strong nonetheless.The meme is a Web movement that cannot be defeated with pepper spray.

Another response I’ve seen that heartens me is random efforts on the Web. Someone managed to identify the exact canister and brand used by the UCD cop, and with it came a . And with it came a unique type of virtual graffiti, with users leaving politically oriented comments in the product review section. A sampling:

Accept no substitutes when casually repressing students

Whenever I need to breezily inflict discipline on unruly citizens, I know I can trust Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray to get the job done! The power of reason is no match for Defense Technology’s superior repression power. When I reach for my can of Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray, I know that even the mighty First Amendment doesn’t stand a chance against its many scovil [sic] units of civil rights suppression.

When I feel threatened by students, no matter how unarmed, peaceful and seated they may be, I know that Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray has got my back as I casually spray away at point blank range.

It really is the Cadillac of citizen repression technology.

Buy a whole case!

And again

Perfect for Supressing [sic] Democracy

We live in scary times. Lazy bums are occupying parks all over the country, students are making poignant and reasonable demands, the fabulously wealthy are being called mean names in the media. And worst of all, the top 1% of the US population only own 25% of the country. During terrifying times like this, I always make sure to have my Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream pepper spray on hand. Whenever someone holds up a sign with a pithy remark about progressive tax reform, spray them in the face with one of these puppies, and they’ll run back to their hemp huts crying like the babies they are. Or say you’ve got some dangerous students conducting aggressive tacticts like holding hands or speaking in unison. This baby will surely put some red in their eyes. Remember, someone’s got to stand up against democracy. I’m glad I’ve got this pepper spray to help me.

The comments are interesting because they reflect knowledge of the event but also some of the aftermath, such as the fact that the Fox News spin machine has been activated to defend the cop’s use of pepper spray (reference Megyn Kelly making the bizarre claim that pepper spray essentially is a food product). As of this writing there are 254 product reviews on Amazon for this pepper spray, and the vast majority are a form of graffiti protest.

I find these reactions inspiring. It’s the wild west days of the Web all over again, where people find a way to escape the spin zones of cable news and the chatter class and invade previously unoccupied spaces for protest. There long has been a libertarian streak to the Web, particularly in the early days, and if it takes a bunch of miscreants to tag products and spread photo memes in order to raise awareness of just how our rights are being restricted, so be it.

The sun is setting on the hierarchical model of information flow, at least for now. We’re transitioning into an age of networked information flow. In this new model, information finds a way to reach us. Our movements start to look like the Interne itself.

The dictator class in the Middle East has learned this repeatedly, and mayors and public officials in the U.S are learning it now after trying to massage the message using a PR blitz. In that sense the pepper spray photo meme is perhaps the most brilliant way to raise awareness against a backdrop of a fairly cynical (and somewhat condescending) response by our public officials.

I gave a lecture about Steve Jobs today. It was a little self-indulgent – I mean, maybe I was the only one who was really feeling it today – but it was for a point. My media and society class talks about the intersection of civilization, technology, and the media content we create. There was no better platform to talk about what it means that we lived in the era of Steve Jobs.

I went through the history of Apple, good and bad. I talked about Steve’s vision, for better or worse, and how his long term sense of where media was headed guided short term actions. I showed them the video I embedded above (go to 0:25 to start), talked about how Jobs couldn’t see this kind of potential in computers without being something of a Renaissance man. You can’t draw parallels between science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and technology like he so often does without being a reader, without being curious. And the building blocks of success start with understanding the small things, the part about how things work.

I wept a couple times while talking about what he meant to me, that professors have heroes that inspire their minds too. I told them that my experience with computers taught me to hack my way through life, figured out how stuff works, and how to troubleshoot. It made me an independent thinking man, not a slave to the Macintosh. I challenged them to be curious, to use their time in Lehigh’s liberal arts environment to stretch themselves, take a class in something they know nothing about, to grow in ways that don’t seem to fit with their major.

I told them to find their passion. It’s the one thing I don’t often see in Millennials, and it saddens me. This age group has had a lot of varied experiences, but I worry they have trouble settling on one or two things that they really freaking love. And it’s that love for what you do that drives you to greatness. You can’t half-ass it. So I practically told them they’re wasting their time if they aren’t pursuing what they love here at Lehigh, here of all places in a place where it’s safe to do so.

I didn’t say it outright, but if they were really, really listening they should have connected the dots and gotten the following charge at the end of class. Go create stuff. Lots of stuff. Don’t wait for me to tell you to do it and - for the love of God – don’t wait for it to be assigned in a class or be for credit on the student newspaper. The great ones are never off the clock. They create stuff because it matters, not because they’re told to.

When I was 8 years old I got to use a computer for the first time. It was an old Apple II, the kind with the green screen and sloping keyboard, and it was shared with about 30 other students who got about 30 minutes a week on it in our classroom in San Jose, CA.

By age 10, I had learned how to do some simple programming in BASIC, the language the Apple II used. For those of you old enough to remember, there was a pretty easy code to get words repeating on screen:

10 PRINT “TEXT”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

With that, the word TEXT would just appear over and over and over, line by line, until you hit the command to stop it.

Given this knowledge, of course, I did what any 10-year-old would do.

10 PRINT “ASS”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

The result:

ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS

…. and so forth.

I grew up in church environments where such things weren’t done. Repeating swear words via computer code, while juvenile, was one of my first acts of defiance. This sounds hokey to say now, but the computer was a way to express individuality about myself in ways I had not – or could not – do to date. What started as a juvenile bit of code turned into other forms of expression. I used the Logo program to draw pictures. My first was a castle, but rather than build a program that would build the castle in one shot I wrote tiny subprograms that built a tower, a base, a drawbridge, a moat. Then I wrote a larger program that combined those. My castle was a big program that assembled smaller programs.

I learned there was logic to the ways we assemble the world and I learned the language of programming, even if it was a simple form. It was architecture for my universe. I was hooked.

So when I say I’ll miss Steve Jobs, who died today at the age of 56, I mean it. I don’t miss celebrities. I didn’t cry at one of my grandfathers’ funerals. But I am a little teary-eyed tonight. I grew up in the Silicon Valley around the tech boom, and it was an amazing time. I loved everything about what was going on there and I gobbled up the San Jose Mercury News’ Science & Technology section every week to keep up with the latest. I was 10, mind you. Ten-year-old boys should be getting into trouble, chasing girls, getting dirty, playing baseball. I was just too curious at my age, wanting to know more about the amazing things going on in the Bay Area at the time. And I was inspired by them.

So I became a journalist. Yeah, not a programmer, but that’s not the point. I didn’t see it as a leap. The curiosity that led me to learn a little programming, teach myself HTML and make my first home page on the Web in 1993, use desktop publishing in the 1980s …. all of that was inspired by these wonderful machines Apple kept putting out. But it was that curiosity that made me want to be a journalist.

I tell my students this all the time. Most of the time, I fear, they aren’t listening. If you aren’t curious about the world around you, if you have no imagination to see stories without me holding your hand, then you’re studying the wrong thing. Curiosity is the one thing I can’t teach you, but I hope I can inspire it in you. Steve Jobs inspired that in me. He was always a bit mythical, a bit heroic. He believed in creating beauty, not destroying things. And he wanted to leave his mark on the world, to make it better.

He was no celebrity, damn it. And I cried tonight at the news. I don’t have many heroes in life, but Steve Jobs was one of them. And I don’t think I’d be who I am now without some of the products he made and the philosophy that guided their creation.I have learned a lot from his approach.

If you have an Apple device and love it, stop for a second and think beyond them. There is a logic and beauty to your Mac, your iPod, your iPhone, your iPad. The form factor, the interface, the look and feel are all part of a bigger effort to make something remarkable. You can’t make those things if you are just a programmer, just a designer, just a manufacturer. You need a good team, and you need to be curious about the world around you. In his , Jobs told the story of taking a typography class and how it influenced the way type was done on the Mac, and then I think about how bored our students get in typography these days. They are missing out. Those little avenues of knowledge are the pathway to bigger things, bigger dreams. I wish more of my students saw this, that success comes from smaller building blocks and you have to give those small things your attention and devotion before you can do something bigger.

Apple products are the It item of our time, but they are not the thing. We don’t need more Apple products. We need more people to be curious, work hard, and dream a little to give us the kind of world that gets us such amazing things. We need that in tech, in music, art, politics, and so many other areas of life.

I’m saddened by this news, sadder than I’ve been in some time. Thank you, Steve, for inspiring so many people. Including me. I hope we carry that forward.

Facebook rolled out a few changes earlier this week that had many up in arms about yet another redesign. Turns out that was nothing. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the F8 event last Thursday to announce a slew of new things to come, including a complete redo of the centerpiece profile page that incorporates a new feature called Timeline – your life past, present, and future as a feed. I’ll let you read about all the changes to come but I wanted to add a couple quick thoughts as I digest more of what these changes mean.

In a nutshell: Facebook has had a horrible record on privacy over the past few years, and the more I read about the details the more concerned I get.

The centerpiece of this all is what Zuckerberg called “frictionless sharing” – gulp – which allows folks to share without having to hit a like button or make specific choices to share it with friends. What this mean is that the amount of information being shared on Facebook is about to ramp up big time, which is why the news feed that existed two weeks ago had to go – there simply would be too much information shared and so it had to be replaced with the new .

How is all this extra sharing happening? A combination of OpenGraph, which lets you take your Likes to the Web and connect that to your Facebook page, was a start to this long before the new changes. But now applications and other things you install to your Facebook page will let you make an initial opt-in and then forget about it; in other words, only once do you only give permission to share things you’re reading, music you’re listening to, videos you’re watching. The new interface is partnered with all types of media services, from Spotify to Netflix, and the intention is that all of that will be shared to your page.

Think about that for a second. Maybe music isn’t so bad, but what if you’re watching a salacious video on Netflix and don’t want Grandma to see it? We have laws in place in part because of the right to protect people reading controversial books or points of view; do we really want Facebook to become a place where we can be monitored? Dave Winer compares it to automated stalking, reporting instances of peoples’ visits to Web sites being reported on Facebook walls.

But media you consume aside, that isn’t the most disconcerting news around Timeline. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo pointed out that purchases will be part of this stream. Facebook actually tried this a couple years ago with the ill-fated Beacon, which was turned on with no fanfare and suddenly peoples’ Amazon purchases were showing up on their wall. The backlash was severe and Beacon quickly died, but I still talk about it in Media & Society as an example of how privacy can be tossed aside if we don’t pay attention. And I told my students that Beacon would come back in zombie form; it was an evil-brilliant idea that was a boon to marketers, and for that reason alone it was about as dead as Michael Myers.

So there are elements of Beacon in Timeline, as pointed out, with just a shinier new wrapper. It’s baaaack.

One other quick note. Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook is actually tracking your browsing even when you’re not logged in.

All of this deserves context. I might give some of these things the benefit of the doubt if they were isolated, but Facebook’s privacy problems are ongoing and the company has a horrible track record. Do we have any reason to trust them at this point that they are just being benevolent? And are we able to keep up with all the privacy setting changes needed to block all of this?

Normally I’m not one of the ones who freak out about Facebook changes. Most of them have been cosmetic over the years, just rearranging content. This is a much deeper plunge into our personal lives and habits, and by itself that isn’t bad if we are opting in. But one opt-in, for all time, isn’t going to cut it.

It’s something Facebook needs to address, and quickly. Otherwise it might be time to start making plans for a life without Facebook.

Quick post here about the Oslo explosion news. Since the news broke I’ve been scanning different news outlets to see how quickly and in what ways news organizations jumped on the story. The news broke first on Twitter, but then again that’s not anything particularly interesting anymore. That happens all the time in moments like these. What followed next was fascinating – more on that in a second, but first I want to get into why this matters.

I’m convinced by the work of folks such as  that we’re undergoing a fundamental change in news delivery, and one that journalists don’t always understand well enough. Audiences are being segmented by more choice, sure, but lifestyle patterns also play a part. Most don’t have cable TV in their workplace, so when they want breaking news they are more apt to tune in via online or mobile formats such as iPad or their phone. Thorson & Duffy, in their groundbreaking 2007 research that presented the Media Choice Model, combined the traditional psychological and social needs people have from media with something called “aperture,” the notion that media use is dictated by time-of-day factors. We can better predict what platform (newspaper, online, tv, radio, etc.) a person will choose based on the time of day and their place.

All of this matters because these are important tools journalists can use to allocate scarce resources in breaking news environments.

The cable networks’ slow reaction was interesting. It took them anywhere from 10 minutes to 25 minutes to break into coverage, all while was being throttled with chatter. Slowly they got on board. Meanwhile, what happened on the Web was fascinating. Al Jazeera English, which streams their broadcast online, cut in and so what they had on TV was what you could view on the Web. The BBC soon followed and those were the two major news outlets with a significant Web streaming presence mirroring what they had on TV.

The U.S. cable news outlets, meanwhile, were lagging when it came to Web presence while AJ and BBC were already streaming. An hour after the news broke on Twitter, only MSNBC had Oslo as its top story. CNN and Fox News had it buried as a lower-level link on their front page with no photo. Amazingly, at one point CNN used the “Breaking News” bar atop their page to note that the Senate had voted to table the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill while giving short shrift to what some were calling Norway’s 9/11.

Meanwhile newspapers were doing more with their online effort. The New York Times and Washington Post did get stories and initial photos up quickly and have been slowly expanding coverage as they got more information.

About an hour in, CNN (which by this point was covering it on their cable counterpart) finally moved the link to a more prominent position:

Upper left. See it? That photo to accompany the breaking news was a picture from the scene …. which was on a Norway online news site Web page. It was a screenshot of a Web page.

By a couple hours in, the online news portions of the cable news sites were catching up. But it was a slow crawl to get there.

While the CNN and Fox News sites lagging was bizarre, I’m more jotting this down to make a bigger point about aperture. The news broke a bit after 10 a.m. here on the East Coast in the U.S. By then, most Americans were at work and so online and mobile was the best way to reach them. The New York Times and Washington Post strategy (which really was their only possible strategy because they don’t have TV outlets) was best suited for this. They went straight to the Web and social media with their stories. The cable networks prioritized TV at a time of day when online and mobile would have brought more audience.

And this says nothing of text alerts. I still haven’t received a text alert about this news 2 hours after it broke.

The point is that newsrooms are facing scarcity. We have research that helps us decide which platform to emphasize first when news like this breaks. A text alert that takes me to your website is going to draw me in when I’m trying to work. Instead, I found myself going to Al Jazeera and even to Norweigan news sources online thanks to excellent translate feature. I also found curated Twitter feeds at places like Blogs Of War. I was making my own news, as Dan Gillmor likes to say. I had to – the news outlets here in the U.S. were forcing me to.

Lost eyeballs. CNN was made irrelevant in the early going and there’s no reason for me to go there now. They’re behind. Newsroom workflow can be improved if we are using time of day to help make judgements about what platforms to emphasize first when there’s big news. If this had happened on a weeknight then the TV strategy would have made the most sense, but it’s frustrating to see bizarre emphasis on platforms that get less traction at certain times of day.

In moments like this I see the opening for newspapers making a push in digital spaces. They aren’t burdened by the need to do TV and online and can be nimble, go Web-first, and get the news out there without having to worry about splitting its resources. And they’re what we want when we want a more refined version of the story.

I have a running joke I make during conferences. When I meet a self-described new media guru/ninja/expert and they start yapping about their Klout score, I can take that as shorthand to stop listening. They’re not what they say they are, and I’ve forgotten more about social media than they know.

An exaggeration for sure, and a snarky one at that. But there’s an undercurrent to my joke.

I hate Klout.

Haaaaate it.

I don’t hate the idea (after all, I’ve played with it in an attempt to figure it out and even have my own Klout score), but I hate what it turns people into when they start mingling and talking about the social Web. For the uninitiated, Klout is an attempt to measure influence in the social Web by taking your activity on social media products such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc., and the activity surrounding your activity (retweets, social referrals … basically all the +1 and Like stuff) and turn it into a score. You also can gift Klout “points” to people who you find influential on topics. Your Klout score is a measure of your influence (the higher the better) and you also are scored as an influencer on different topics. Read more

I have already said that I love , and I had a post where I made a case why journalism students here at Lehigh and elsewhere need to jump in the fray now. But I wanted to sketch out some thoughts about why Lehigh University as a whole needs to be looking at GPlus.

The short version is that this tool is going to change education. And I think it’s here to stay. There will be some quoted sections from my journalism post, which I’ll put in block quotes so you can skip if you read the other ones.

As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’ve been an evangelist for as a journalistic tool since 2007 and first used it in my classes at Missouri in 2008. Back then it had a funny name and wasn’t instantly seen as useful. People thought it was silly or a waste of time. I had (and have) a great role model in Jen Reeves to keep pushing, and over time the journalism crowd came around.

I hear similar things about Gplus. “It’s a waste of time” or “Not ANOTHER social network!” or “Why do I need another Facebook?” or “I don’t understand it.”

Some of my rationale for journalism does apply to universities as well. The page feature, for example, is a great way to interact with alumni who might be using a different product than Facebook, so it’s a space you need to be in. And building those connections is a bit easier than it is on Facebook. When I was building my circles, for example, I discovered we had a Lehigh grad working at Google. That it can be used to drive traffic to your news and department pages also is a big one, and I’m already seeing evidence that it’s more effective than Facebook at this for my own sites (it is early, though). You can’t afford to note be in these spaces at the PR, communication, or department outreach level.

Hangouts in potential represent a great opportunity for the university to put its face forward. Chatting with professors, students, senior leadership, and so forth could be offered to newsmakers or alumni to help build that connection to the university. The interactive components are huge for alumni relations folks.

But there’s much more. As a teaching tool, Plus intrigues me. I’m already planning on holding Hangout office hours this fall for students, where they can get on and ask questions about class material. And because it’s multi-user, others can hang out in the lounge and listen. Sometimes I go over the same stuff with multiple students in multiple meetings; this could streamline that process.

Every student in my multimedia class will be required to sign up for GPlus, and I am planning on keeping a circle for each of my classes so that I have another way to communicate, collaborate, and interact with my students. I also have circles for my former students in case I have things such as job postings or articles of interest to share. This is my Classroom Without Walls on steroids; the learning won’t stop just because the semester ends.

The ability to share videos you can all watch at the same time is huge for me. I can initiate a Hangout with a student in my multimedia classes, watch one of the videos they make, and then go over it with them. Real time feedback similar to a paper conference.

But playing with Hangout now is important if the rumors are true that PowerPoint or OpenOffice integration is coming. You can have up to 10 people in a Hangout; imagine if we could hold webinars or research collaboration meetings online. If we get the ability to screencast slides or even shared Google Docs that we can work up while chatting, look out. But again, get the learning curve of the interface out of the way now so when these components come online you are ready.

Already I can see Plus having a bunch of advantages over Blackboard or the Moodle learning system we use here. About the only advantage those products have is the gradebook. Every other interactive tool those offer is inferior to what we have on Plus right now. Facebook has some great collaborative tools, but the privacy interface is so clunky that I rarely used the tools in classes for fear of being seen as infringing on their personal space. Circles changes everything. We’ll be using GPlus in my multimedia courses as perhaps the most essential course-management tool.

Finally, the university should look at Plus because there is more coming. A lot more. Google is looking to connect its myriad apps, products, and widgets with Plus. That means this thing is going to evolve a lot. I, in particular, am looking at Blogger integration, but that’s just one example. The staggering array of tools Google has already is great for education, but when folded into a social tool made for collaboration then they have much greater potential.

Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile.

And if you’re interested in the topic of Plus and education, I recommend taking a look at Brad King’s post on it his own classroom plans.

The early days of a new tech launch are always a test. Should we adopt it or not? Will it be around for enough time to justify the time spent learning and using it? If it dies, will we lose all of our data?

Many are having this same discussion about Google Plus right now. As the new-kid-on-the-block challenger to Facebook, there are many questions out there about whether it’s worth it to learn it. I’m already on record about the fact that I think this thing is a game-changer, and I think it’s time for our Lehigh journalism, marketing, and PR students to get on the train now so they can be ahead of the curve. We don’t want to wait until someone tells us at a leadership or strategic communication seminar 2 years from now.

I’m also making this argument for the university as a whole, and you can read it here. I do think GPlus is going to change the way we do education, but this post is devoted to journalism.

Before I start, I do want to say that Silagh White and I are going to work to have a meeting on campus that goes over the basics and will have some networking for folks interested in using Plus here. More on that to come, but if you want to take part then please email me or leave something in the comments. And make sure to circle me on my profile.

I’ve been an evangelist for as a journalistic tool since 2007 and first used it in my classes at Missouri in 2008. Back then it had a funny name and wasn’t instantly seen as useful. People thought it was silly or a waste of time. I had (and have) a great role model in Jen Reeves to keep pushing, and over time the journalism crowd came around.

I hear similar things about Gplus. “It’s a waste of time” or “Not ANOTHER social network!” or “Why do I need another Facebook?” or “I don’t understand it.”

The reason, young journalists, is because if the past five years have taught us anything it’s that you have to be your own experimenter. When I started out in the business, if I didn’t understand something there was an editor to walk me through it and teach me. Now that teaching editor has been laid off, furloughed or – gulp – YOU are that editor. You have to learn to play with new tools on your own and figure out how to adapt them to your job. Some of them – many of them – will die and be a waste of time. But the more tools you use, the more practice you get and the more versed you are in the concepts of social media. GPlus has a low learning curve for me because I’m immersed in social media tools. If you’re having trouble, it’s because you’re not playing enough.

The other thing is that the new journalist makes the future. You don’t sit around and wait for an editor to tell you that you need to be on Plus. You need to be the one changing the newsroom.

Already I see huge potential in journalism, such as:

• Plus will have a page feature for news organizations, similar to Facebook. This is a space you need to be in. By next year, newsrooms might want a journalist who can manage these pages on occasion. Will you be ready for this new job market reality? For my marketing/PR students, this is the most essential part of Plus that you need to be learning. Now.
• Hangouts - This multi-way web conferencing tool is going to change how we do news. Imagine if newsrooms could make reporters or editors available for a few minutes a day to take questions from random readers. Or what if reporters in the field could chat with editors and other staff? KOMU did what we think was the first-of-its-kind web cast on the air using GPlus. Huge kudos to KOMU, which is a leader in experimenting with new tech and journalism. We need more newsrooms to be imagining ways to use things like Hangout to interact with readers. The ability to share videos with those on the Hangoutcast is already huge. Lots of potential here.
• Circles - As I explained yesterday, to see what your readers are posting you have to mutually opt in. That means you have to figure out the language of Plus, to be engaging enough that people circle you, so that you benefit from the community “police scanner effect” similar to Twitter. Plus is an evolution – it’s not enough to be a brand anymore. You have to add value. This is a completely new social media paradigm, and the time to start learning what works is now. Don’t wait. And by the way, if you’re in marketing think about the implications of having to add value in order to get circled. Being a brand in a space isn’t enough anymore.
• Source building - Circling people in your community, much like finding them on Twitter, will be important. But the granular privacy options that allow for public/private conversations will be another way for reporters to cultivate sources.
• Link traffic - A couple of my blogs are already showing signs that GPlus is a great driver of traffic. If you can connect with people in the ways I talked about above, this will be a big opportunity. As with many social media products, building influence early matters.

Those are just a few ideas. We need journalists exploring this space now. We need young journalists doing this too so they can refresh our newsrooms (and some really original examples of what you’re doing just might land you that dream job). We’re past the point where just being on social media is enough for newsrooms. Can you talk intelligently about it conceptually and use it wisely? Does your use reflect that?

But that is my bottom line. This is gut check time for young journalists. If you aren’t relishing the opportunity to play with new tech now, you might not be cut out for this business because curiosity about tech tools, both current and future ones, is part of the job. Because of the nature of the classroom experience I can only pack in a fraction of the tools I know about, but I try to give them the essentials. What I can’t teach is curiosity. My students can’t afford to wait for me to show them the next big thing and explain it to them. I try to teach students to understand the concepts so that they can figure these things out themselves long after they’ve left Lehigh. When it works well, my upper-level classes become a conversation about new tools I’m seeing and new tools my students are using; we learn from each other.

But the time to start is now. Be curious or think hard about whether you really want to work in media. I’m not sure I can afford to be less blunt about this.

As I’ve played with Google+ more the past few days, I’ve gotten to know the interface a bit more and am seeing some possibilities. To recap, here’s the review I wrote and here’s a helpful post by Jen Reeves about getting started on G+.

As I said in my previous post, one of the more intriguing features is Circles, which gives you granular control of sharing. You can share with the public, with anyone in any of your circles, or with individual circles. At the same time, the only things you see are from people who have circled you.

So I find myself wondering whether G+ could solve the social media spam problem. You know the drill, those unwanted replies you get on Twitter or random friend or direct message requests on Facebook. On Twitter, for example, I can block someone and keep messages from getting through but I can’t do it until after the fact, and it doesn’t stop spammers from creating new accounts to send me replies.

The G+ interface solves this because it requires both people to circle one another for a message to get through. A user can send me a message either privately or to me in a circle on G+, but I don’t see it if I haven’t circled them back. The only reason I see spammers at all is I get followed by random people I don’t know and have never heard of. A quick profile scan tells me whether they’re worth following, but even if I just ignored new circles I’ve learned with social media that discovery through other peoples’ conversations is better than random follows.

Google gets the benefits of granular privacy controls. By making it opt-in on both ends, it helps you block out things and people you don’t want to see.

This has enormous implications for my journalism students. The ones who have been focused solely on branding themselves well and selling their links will have a lot harder time getting traction in an environment where it’s easier to ignore you. That means you need to make sure that you are building influence by adding real value to the conversation communities of which you want to be a part. That means being knowledgeable, interactive, and producing something original. Branding still matters, but it’s not everything in this kind of environment.

It also makes me think that marketing and PR folks may have to think about their G+ strategy differently. The usual way it works on Facebook or Twitter isn’t going to work on G+, not when blocking makes discovery harder.

It gets more intriguing when you consider that the ability to share with limited circles or even with individuals means that Google+ looms as a personal email killer down the line. The principle is the same: I don’t see messages unless the users have approved of one another. Obviously the fact that G+ will never be universally adopted means this won’t happen anytime soon, but there are possibilities of linking it to Gmail, perhaps, that allow you to approve messages from some email addresses and have them delivered to your Plus interface. It would take some thinking on Google’s end, but I see it as possible without killing the freedom of passing out an email address.

The email spam possibility is probably a pipe dream for now, but that’s one of the things I really like about G+. There is so much that can be connected to this skeleton.

I love way too much. I just hope it doesn’t go the way of .

I have been tooling around on Plus, Google’s latest foray into social, for a couple days now. Plus is being sold as a social network competitor to Facebook, and the comparison makes some sense (and it’s illustrated hilariously by xkcd). There are equivalents to status updates, commenting, Likes, and posting content that mirror Facebook. But there’s a lot more to Plus than that. It has some of the best features of Twitter in that you can do things publicly but also group yourselves into different types of tribes (more on that in a second). It also has a reblogging feature that mirrors some of what is good about Tumblr.

But the backbone of Plus is essentially a salvo at Facebook’s glaring weakness: privacy and control of how you share. Enter the organizing tool for Plus known as “Circles.” The best way to describe it is that it’s a way to take all the people you connect with and put them in buckets that serve as categories. Then when you want to do a status update, share a post, and so forth, you can pick the circles who see the message. Or you could just enter one user’s profile (or even an email address) and thus it’s viewable only to them. Essentially they have integrated email and your news feed into the same space. Read more

Quick post here to make an announcement.

One of my students took on Brad King’s 90-in-90 challenge, which has someone blogging every day for 90 days. Then she started to wrestle with it a bit; what if it wasn’t worth blogging about?

Nonsense. She’s a great writer and blogging is a way for her to unleash those skills, to learn and grow. Confidentially, I think she’s one of the better writers I’ve ever had in a class. Actually that’s not confidential. She needs to know she has supporters, but more to the point she needs to realize at some point that you write for you; the fans will come.

Time to be proactive here. I’ve offered to take the plunge with her. Starting tomorrow, I’ll blog every day for 90 days too. I’m going to cheat a bit in that I’m going to post some on my dad blog and a few times on this one, but it’s a post per day. They’ll be numbered and such.

You write because you need to, not because you have to. And when the swamp of ideas is drained, you learn a lot about yourself as you keep going.

I also want to invite any of my students, current or former, to join us. Or anyone else. It’s more fun jumping off bridges when you do it together. Your mom never told you that? If you have a blog, get to it. If you don’t have one, create one. And be sure to tell me about it in the comments so we can all read!

It’s end of the semester time for J198 and after last week’s presentations I’ve been going over the sites as the students have been pushing out links to social media.

Presentation Day is one of my favorites. This year, with help from my colleague Wally Trimble, we set up a screen next to the main screen so we could have a #J198 hashtag stream using Twitterfall.

What I really liked about the Twitterfall experience is that it didn’t just have people in the class. Read more

Just hammering some quick thoughts here about the news that President Obama has decided not to release the photos of Osama Bin Laden’s body. I think he made the right call for a few reasons.

First, there are cultural concerns. Some sects of Islam, such as Sunnis, have rules against depicting living things as part of their faith system. The U.S. message has long been that we are not at war with Islam, and release of these photos might would have served to unnecessarily inflame anger among people in the Middle East. Bear in mind that those who might be offended might not all be supporters of Bin Laden; their beliefs are their beliefs even if they hate Bin Laden’s methods.

In a non-Web age, releasing them would have less consequences. But with networked digital media, you’re releasing them to planet Earth and so we have to be concerned with the ability to quickly and perhaps permanently injure relations with our Arab friends who want to help us fight terrorism.

Second, I am not seeing a great deal of outcry to see these photos. Apparently they are pretty graphic. The media will beat the drum because they always want original sourced information, but it’s a mistake to confuse a media argument for the photos’ release for a consensus among the average American. And a U.S. media release might expose people to photos they would rather not see. Again, this is not an overriding interest, but it is a concern.

Finally, I’m not sure the images will be proof for those who are doubting this news. We have DNA proof. We have his own daughter saying he’s dead. Would photos prove it or just be a playground for conspiracy theorists, similar to what happened with Obama’s birth certificate? Who exactly is this group of people that don’t believe the news about Bin Laden’s death, and would a photo suffice?

Generally I’m a sunshine person when it comes to transparency and information but I do think there are cultural concerns that, while not overriding, certainly should be part of the discussion. When you weigh whatever potential good could come from releasing the photos and how that good could still be mitigated by conspiracy theory junkies, it doesn’t add up. And would the need to see this with our own eyes outweigh the potential damage to those who might otherwise fight with us?

Ultimately Bin Laden will tell us he’s dead because we’ll stop getting videos. Releasing the photos would seem to satisfy some curiosity or need other than proof, because in this case we will have proof as a mere product of time. There may be other valid reasons for releasing the photos, but I can’t think of one that outweighs the harm it might do to our ultimate cause.

The big news this week that Patch, as part of a planned overhaul, is recruiting 8,000 bloggers in 8 days to write for their local site hubs. With 800 of these sites in operation, that means 10 bloggers or so per site. The catch, of course, is that these are unpaid blogging relationships which is an interesting move considering it mirrors the Huffington Post model of syndicating writers without paying them. That was a fine arrangement until HuffPo was bought by AOL for $315 million and thousands of contributors realized they weren’t getting a cut.

Local Patch editors have been tasked with finding 4-5 bloggers by May 4, essentially giving them a week to fill those slots (side note: read Patch editor Brian Farnham’s memo comments about running a startup, which are quite interesting). To be fair, the local calls put out by our Bethlehem and Easton editors note that these are unpaid slots, so it’s not like Patch is being underhanded here.

I have mixed feelings about Patch, an enterprise I have blogged little about mostly because it is still developing and becoming the thing it is going to be. It feels too early to judge it with any sort of long-run view.

For now I’m going to leave my larger views about Patch for another post. But this news about the blogger initiative has me a little more concerned.

As I understand it based on the news, the posts will be syndicated by Patch, meaning they will exist on the writer’s own blog and on the Patch site simultaneously. Comments and traffic on those Patch posts will be contained there unless they figure out a way to syndicate comments in reverse, but while that technology shouldn’t be too hard, my guess is most individual writers would find it above their ability. Read more

So one of the things I’m looking to do is hand out a few awards on presentation day for J198, and the blogs they’ve been doing in class are one of them. One thing I’d LOVE to do is give out an award from the community for our class blogs. The students have been working hard on these all semester, so in the spirit of our #winning Morning Call contest initiative (in which yours truly was named Opinion Blogger Heavyweight Champion Of The World or something like that), I figured I’d take a crack at it for the class.

There is no need to read the blog list below. I’m more interested in impact. The students have been posting their individual post links on Twitter this semester. What caught your eye? What was consistently well done?

• “Unheard Voices Of The Undergrad” by Johana
• “Chicks Who Dig Baltimore Ravens Football” by Taylor
• “Callie’s Culinary Corner” by Callie
• “Fit With A Frown” by Allie
• “Technology To Me” by Josh
• “Love Is A Battlefield: How To Survive” by Alyssa
• “All Things Military” by MJH
• “Music From The Underground” by Ben
• “The World: A Classroom And A Playground” by Christine
• “Time To Unwind” by Jessica
• “Adrian’s Music And Theater Blog” by Adrian
• “Antoine’s College Thoughts” by Antoine

So there you go. If you have any thoughts on these blogs, please vote on my survey form. There is a place to leave comments as well. I appreciate all of the help the community gives my classes.

I got into an interesting conversation with a few of our Lehigh students, staff, and faculty on Twitter a few days ago about the job market. With graduation so close it obviously is on a lot of their minds and many of them are thinking about an unsettled future with a month to go.

They’ll find jobs, of course. Sounds easy coming from the professor’s view, but I know it’s true. They’re generally bright and engaged, and they’ll find something in their area of interest.

Eventually, that is. By the numbers, it’s almost certain that some of them will find a job that is a perfect fit for their passions, skills, and interests, but not all. This notion of the perfect job right out of college is more myth than reality. For one, the definition of “perfect” changes so much in even five years that your senior-year passions can be almost unrecognizable for the 20something who’s lived a little. Read more

I noticed the WordPress Stats stopped working on my blog about a week ago, and then I realized I wasn’t the only one. If’ you’ve logged in and seen the following message, you’re not alone:

Your WordPress.com account, (xxxx) is not authorized to view the stats of this blog. Currently access to stats is broken for some users and we are working on fixing this. Your stats are still being counted and will be visible once we restore access for your account.

There seems to be some contradictory theories out there as to exactly why this is happening, but last I saw WP.org was mum on the whole thing. Fortunately, there’s a super easy fix here and it leaves you with a better situation than before.

1. Deactivate the WP Stats plugin (it’s crucial you do this first)
2. Install the Jetpack plugin
3. Activate the Jetpack plugin

And that’s it; you don’t lose any of your old stats in this process too so there aren’t any worries there. And the best thing is Jetpack has a lot of really cool extras beside the stat interface, which already gives you a bit more detail than WP Stats anyway. There are options for Twitter feeds, social sharing, wp.me link sharing, a post proofreader, and so forth. It takes a lot of what I like about several plugins and combines them.

Jetpack is made by WordPress, by the way, so it’s as trustworthy as any plugin you could download. One of the aforementioned theories out there is that WP Stats is going to be replaced by Jetpack as its features are being folded into a plugin that houses a broader array of WordPress functions. So to be safe, I didn’t delete the WP Stats plugin; I just left it inactive.

Spread the word. It’s an easy fix to a problem whose solution was surprisingly hard to find on Google, which is why I’m putting this down in a post.

Jen Reeves, Joy Mayer, and I did a short UStream broadcast on social media and journalism education at the Social Media Clubhouse in Austin last week on the first day of SXSW. We all shared some ideas of what we do and it’s worth a listen. I talked about my “classroom without walls” method, and this is a forerunner to what I’ll be submitting to the SXSW panel picker next year.

Yes, SXSW is barely over and I already know what I want to submit next year. Heh.

from on .

Some things I didn’t want to put in the SXSW Interactive wrapup post lest it get too out-of-control long:

• Year 2 was definitely better. I went with a plan to make my own conference based on themes that emerged from the schedule, and it worked. I highly recommend this approach. But I highly recommend whatever approach you have too. Whatever works for you.

• Having a buddy in the process is great. I spent a great Saturday with Joy Mayer hitting some community sessions, but getting to hear about her work at RJI was also great. On Monday I walked the trade show with Jen Reeves and found myself having lunch with the great folks at Adobe. The people part of SXSW makes it great, and it opens up those weak-tie networks to help you meet more people. Read more