A visit from the Scobleizer…

I just got out of a meeting with some of the JMC faculty and Robert Scoble.

I was glad to see most of the right people there, asking all of the right questions.

Here are the important takeaways, in my opinion:

• Context-based advertising is a real live source of revenue. Google, and others to a lesser extent, are dead serious about making money for advertisers and publishers. The many little pieces of technology Google has been dropping on the Web lately all fit into this model.
• Journalism students don’t necessarily need to know how to write code; they need to know how to cut and paste the right code into the right place within content managment systems.
• What J-School students should know, however, is where to find and gather the “right code.” We’re talking about RSS feeds, tagging tools, comment systems, ways to embed video on Web pages. I know where to find this stuff, but chances are most students here are using it without knowing what it is or that they’re using it at all.
• Flash + Journalists = Good. (Hence my desire to take a class/seminar/workshop of some sort next semester to learn Flash. I’m still looking for the right way to learn it, so feel free to chime in and let me know what you think…)

And some links to things Scoble was showing off:

• Memeorandum. Scoble actually has this set as his home page in IE. (No, I didn’t notice if it was IE7). Personally, I subscribe to the Politics and Tech RSS feeds to keep up with what people are paying attention to as the day goes on. I hate the fact that this is based on the linking behavior of 1000 hand-picked bloggers and not Everyone, but I can (and do) always subscribe to more precise searches from other services to bring me information from Everyone.
• Technorati. A popular blog search engine. Search for anything you want to know more about, add it to a Watchlist, then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search. Here’s a feed for San Jose State University.
• ChicagoCrime.org, the Google Maps mash-up a professor mentioned.
• Channel 9, the Microsoft video blog Scoble maintains — this is his day job, incidentally. If I understand correctly, this is what Microsoft actually pays him to do.

[UPDATE: Scoble’s take on the conversation, plus a great comment thread where folks from both the Computer Science and Journalism sides of these ideas are discussing what students do and don’t need to know. Steve Sloan has posted a recording of the meeting — you won’t hear much of me, as I was mostly there to hear what the faculty had to say. By the way, the faculty member in the picture on Sloan’s post is Cynthia McCune, who is using a blog as a teaching tool this semester.]

[tags]Scoble, SJSU, J-School, Memeorandum[/tags]