Sunday, April 29, 2007

Journalism organizations explore bloglike tools The Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication is the latest professional organization to adopt blog-style software as a way to communicate. Actually, the programs in question may be associated with blogs, but both of the sites below show how flexible they can be as content management systems. Blog regulars will note that http://AEJMC.org/talk is built with WordPress. (Ironically, WordPress and AEJMC both had big gatherings in San Francisco on the same day last August. I tried to attend both, but my conference panel for AEJMC was scheduled smack in the middle of the WordPress workshops across town. Oh well.) WordPress is also the software the Berkman Center at Harvard has adopted to serve the weblogs it hosts for dozens of people with Harvard.edu e-mail address, and a few folks Dave Winer let in when his original Harvard blog server was young -- including a couple of charismatic programmers from MIT and (as of December 2003) a freshly-minted Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill. Meanwhile back in Knoxville, the UT College of Communication and Information is serving a new set of information pages for its four schools (including Journalism & Electronic Media) with Drupal, a software package popular with "hyperlocal" community news sites like KnoxViews.com ... Along with college and school news pages and information for prospective students, every faculty and staff member gets a "user account" page and weblog space -- not that I needed another "home page" of blog... However, I'm very glad to see John McNair, the college's director of technology (and Drupal-adopter) starting a blog of his own. Some of it is insider stuff about getting the site rolling and testing new features, but John is also pointing to interesting sites and services like Awakened Voice. He's tipped me off to plenty of things I've mentioned in this space, but until now I had no way to point back to him (and tip my hat). Another bloglike feature of the college's new site is its aggregator, in the format Dave Winer has dubbed a River of News... It offers a stream of headlines from university Web pages, press releases and the Tennessee Journalist online newspaper... which uses yet another content management system, built locally on the Django website programming framework. What do all of these sophisticated software systems have in common? The price, which is perfect for non-profit organizations. It's all free or open source software. 12:18:07 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2008 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/19/08; 1:20:56 PM.