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January 27, 2005

Open archives and podcasting...

I promised to write something about the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference this week. I've made several promises recently, and I've done a poor job of keeping them. I'm simply squeezed for time right now.

Jay Rosen has posted a series of three entries about what attendees gained from the conference. Rather than write a lengthy response of my own, I'd simply like to second one of the developments: Let's open the archives America's newspapers so that citizens (and search engines) may have free access. The time has come.

I was unable to follow the conference in real time, but I did learn two things from Rosen's subsequent coverage:

1. I learned about podcasting. Not only did I learn about it, I'm now doing it. This entry is my first podcast--that's what the little button is at the top of the entry. It links you to an .mp3 file. My RSS feed embeds the file so that it may be picked up by portable .mp3 players and newsreaders. Since the Radio Rhetorica show is only one hour each week this semester, I'll be podcasting them. I'll also try to work up a few other amusing tidbits in the weeks ahead.

2. I learned about tagging. That's what those new ugly buttons are in the sidebar. I added them after midnight last night. They look like the work of someone operating on too little sleep. I'll fix them later this afternoon.

Oh, and one other thing. Open-source journalism is here. I've begun the groundwork to create such a project at SMS for my journalism students. My goal, at the moment anyway, is to launch an interactive and converged project for the fall 2005 semester. I'll keep you posted on these developments.

UPDATE (11:15 a.m.): Hmmmmm...my RSS 2.0 feed doesn't look right.

UPDATE (1:00 p.m.): The RSS feed now looks right, but it appears that I must add the enclosure tag to the RSS template. Anyone know what goes in the tag?

UPDATE (1:35 p.m.): Ah-ha! There's something called the MTEntryEnclosures tag. Now, how do I use the darn thing?

UPDATE (2:20 p.m.): WooHoo! It works. Seems I needed a plugin to generate the proper RSS tag.

UPDATE (4:39 p.m.): Now those category tag buttons look better.

Posted by acline at January 27, 2005 9:56 AM | | Spotlight