Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Convergence in Kansas "Lawrence, Kansas, Convergence Capital USA" and "Watchful Eyes on Kansas Media Innovation" are the two parts of a series on National Public Radio this week about The World Co. and its combined newsroom for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper and its cable television news divisions, along with a more entertainment-oriented lawrence.com and a separate website for KUsports. (The company also provides Internet access service.) The NPR program points out a lot that's special about the World Co.'s operation, including its small college community, lack of commercial competition -- and local owners who are willing to accept less than the double-digit profits of large media corporations. The company has been working on its "converged" news approach for several years, as noted in this Digital Journalist column a while back. It has also been repeatedly recognized for its online innovations. Most recently, it took home three Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge awards last month. Back to the radio... Here's how the folks at lawrence.com covered NPR covering them. 11:15:21 PM    comment [] Campus Technology Newsletter Offers Delivery Choice The Wired Campus Newsletter, an adjunct to the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education, is available as a subscribable RSS (XML) feed or by e-mail. The newsletter summarizes and links to college technology news from various sources. Today's edition has stories from the Indiana Statesman, The Daily Pennsylvanian and the Associated Press, as well as the Chronicle itself. Headlines include "Spain's Superfast Supercomputer," "Penn Students Will Pay to Print," "Tufts U. Warns Alumni of a Computer Breach," and more. Most RSS feeds look like their raw "markup language" coding when you peek at them with a browser, but the newsletter's feed uses an XML stylesheet to give you an attractive preview. One glitch -- I've subscribed to the feed with one of my RSS readers (Firefox Sage) without any problem, but another one (Userland Radio) returns this amusing error message: Can't subscribe to the channel. The most likely cure is to check the URL in a web browser and see if you can get it to read the feed. The following message probably won't help you figure out what went wrong, but we include it here because it might. "Semaphore timer expired after 3600 sixtieths of a second." True enough in the "probably won't help" department. Someday maybe I'll read up on the ol' semaphore timer... Happy-ending update: Kudos to The Chronicle & Userland -- a note to The Chronicle pointing out the problem above was answered promptly, complete with a link to a Userland site with a discussion of my error message. It even explained the "semaphore" reference: http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$12098#12115 The discussion was on the technical side, but gave me a feeling that the problem might have been just a momentary (or 3600 sixtieths of a second) glitch. Rather than try to fix anything, I simply waited a day, tried again, and -- success -- the subscription went through. I'm now receiving the Wired Campus newsletter in Userland Radio, which will make it much easier to quote here. 8:21:30 PM    comment [] Librarians are the best search engines So says my news librarian friend, Jessica ("j" for short), and she's right... especially librarians with weblogs. This entry from j's scratchpad. is a great example, pointing to online resources I'd never heard of, as referenced in a publication I'd never heard of: Search Tools & Legislative Tracking. The March issue of Law Technology News, which arrived a few days ago, highlights several useful tools in this Web Watch column. Y!Q Beta from Yahoo! supposedly does contextual searching. Clusty, which has been causing a ripple in the blogosphere because of its organization of search results GovTrack.us for legislative information Government Information Online offers live chat with government librarians from many different institutions. (Librarians, after all, are the best search engines.) Contract and Organizations Research Institute (CORI) has information for scholarly researchers about government contracts. [from j's scratchpad] 7:13:46 PM    comment []

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