Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Not that kind of embedded reporter, but still... "Embedded reporter" is one of the subheadings on Apple's page announcing a new inch-thick Powerbook, renamed MacBook Pro. What's embedded about it? A tiny built-in camera hides in the frame of the screen... not a new concept, Sony has had a laptop with a camera for years... However, Apple's software, today's fast wireless Internet connections, and the Web syndication innovations pioneered by non-Apple programmers and bloggers over the past few years, could make a big difference in the usefulness of that little camera, and the MacBook itself, for a grassroots journalist on a budget... With new high-power Intel chips inside, that MacBook could be a combination video phone, broadcasting station and photo syndication service. What more would an embedded "citizen journalist" need? (Well, a paycheck, and maybe a higher quality camera for shooting something other than your own talking head, for one.) OK, I'm fantasizing... Not even Apple CEO Steve Jobs is claiming the images will be network-TV quality, but Apple says MacBook Pro and its iChat program can handle four-way video conferences and record video... Then a new Apple blog-publishing program called iWeb lets you -- the embedded reporter -- send a video blog or podcast entry into the universe "in just a few clicks." (I repeat: This stuff was just announced today. I haven't seen it. But new Apple products almost always work, at least a little.) In any case, a combined blogging-podcasting-videophone beats shouting "Get me rewrite!" into one of those old candlestick phones in your best Cary Grant (or Rosalind Russell) imitation. Even if the new laptop does cost $2,000-plus. Meanwhile, Apple's sound-editing program GarageBand has added Podcast Recording Studio features for 2006, according to Jobs' address at the MacWorld Expo. And Mac's iPhoto program will enable "photocasts" -- basically online photo albums your family or friends can subscribe to, then receive automatic notice when you've added fresh images, even download them into an iPod, like podcasts. (The Expo also heard much about Aperture, Apple's heavy-duty image manager for professional photographers.) In another similarity to podcasting, the idea of subscription photoblogs has been explored by bloggers, developers and entrepreneurs over the past year or two, and I don't know exactly when Apple picked up the trend, although iPhoto always has had a photo-album orientation. The photocasts, like podcasts and news aggregators, use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) coding, which can be received by any computer -- not just Macintoshes. That's good for, as Apple used to say, "the rest of us." 9:32:17 PM    comment [] Free speech, Oldnews, Nerdnews, Facebook, Google and more aggregation Online freedom of expression guidelines from Reporters Without Borders. In the wake of several crackdowns on freedom of expression and Internet search in China, Reporters Without Borders has called on the United States government to persuade Internet companies into agreeing on a code of conduct for functioning in repressive regimes. Microsoft has recently shut down a Chinese journalist's blog after being pressured by the Chinese government, censors its MSN Spaces blog and Microsoft and Yahoo censor their search engines for words such as "capitalism" and "democracy." [From Editors Weblog] The First Amendment, and bloggers, under attack? Does a new law make it illegal to write a blog or post comments on a blog anonymously? Tennessee bloggers are looking for answers. The News Sentinel's Michael Silence is reading and quoting a lot of them at No Silence Here. Old media under attack? Black and White and Dead All Over. Michael Kinsley asks the question about the future of newspapers this way:  "You gotta trust something called the 'Post-Intelligencer' more than something called 'Yahoo' or 'Google,' don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?" Some irony after Kinsley's item: Tech Industry Works to Move Web Content Off PCs is a USA Today "newspaper" story, delivered by Yahoo, telling how Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and others are moving information onto your TV, PDA, iPod, mobile  phone and probably anything else with a screen or speaker. In this case, notice where the "Web content" came from. Digging tech news: Alex Bosworth writes about the ecosystem of Digg, which is emerging as the latest generation of reader-edited nerdnews sites: "Digg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn't seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors..." [From Smartmobs] The audience is the content: Jean K. Min, director of OhmyNews International, has a commentary in India Infoline: Journalism as a conversation. "What happens on OhmyNews is an intensely interactive online conversation. Citizen reporters have to persuade OhmyNews[base '] front-line copy editors to have their stories accepted in the first place. As much as 30 percent of daily submissions are rejected for various reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors, or its lack of news value..." [From J.D. Lasica] Student Life on the Facebook. Fred Stutzman blogs, "Over the course of the last semester, I have been analyzing the behavior of UNC-Chapel Hill students in social network communities... like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut and Facebook... any service that reaches 88 percent of our freshmen is worth trying to understand, so I devised a system to sample the Facebook on one week increments..." [Via The Real Paul Jones] Google Video Store is up for business, for better or for worse. See Cory Bergman's first impression at Lost Remote. MacWorld Expo this week may be worth watching. That's enough for now. Spring semester starts tomorrow, and I wanted a few aggregation examples to show the class. 1:05:18 PM    comment []

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