Thursday, June 3, 2004

Web Design Awards: AEJMC 2004 The Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication has posted its annual awards for various kinds of Web sites created by graduate students and faculty at journalism schools -- including department or school sites, teaching sites, journalism sites and "creative" sites. The Journalism category awards go to: Andrew DeVigal, San Francisco State University, for Xpress Online John Kaplan, Kevin Allen and Craig Lee, University of Florida, for Florida FlyIns Kim Grinfeder and Bruce Garrison, University of Miami, for Our National Parks (Note to blogging fans: Behind the front page, the SFSU XPress uses Moveable Type and provides RSS feeds for its various departmental pages.) For more information on the contest, including the rules, winners (and honorable mentions) in other categories, and more, see the award site. The competition is in conjunction with the AEJMC annual conference in August. 3:43:48 PM    comment [] Times Stories Cite Syndication Sites For the second time in a month, the New York Times is writing about RSS, but without linking to its own RSS feeds, which are provided by Userland and listed on the Harvard RSS site. Dave Winer, the RSS evangelist, adds an enigmatic smile to his blog about the article being a "milestone" as "the first NY Times article about RSS," but "not the greatest or most insightful piece." (The Times also appear to have adopted "R.S.S." with periods as its style for the abbreviation, although it omits the periods for XML in the same article. You'd think it would save the periods for references to a Hindu cultural-political group it has written about for years.) The story itself, "Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information" by John R. Quain, appears in the Circuits section today and sums up the technology well enough for novices: On the one hand, "Now there's a tool that promises to automatically capture just the information you want, when you want, from the Web." On the other, "As more sites adopt R.S.S., there is the potential for a new kind of information overload... (but) if you can control yourself, you may find that R.S.S. is the best tool yet for taming the Web." His remark that "a tool is only as good as its owner's judgment" hit a little too close to home for me, after "testing" so many RSS aggregators and feeds that I'm greeted by alerts telling me I have 100,000 messages waiting. A sidebar mentions a variety of feed sources, from blogger Adam Curry to the BBC, while a separate item, also in Circuits, mentions RSS services offered by blogger Rory Blyth. Quain's main piece is more specifically about RSS than last month's James Fallows article in the Times Business section under the headline, "The Twilight of the Information Middlemen," mentioning technologies like blogs and RSS. I had a few comments when that one came out, too... but I stopped short of calling it a milestone. Meanwhile, The New Yorker is already talking about how "books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon" thanks to a writers' agent who is already devoting herself to blogs, "sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing." 2:45:04 AM    comment []

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