Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About Technology

Using RSS to track the politicians you cover

February 3, 2007 – 11:21 am

Megan Taylor, an online journalism student at the University of Florida*, has been reviewing RSS feeds from newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post this week.
She points out a feature I hadn’t seen yet in the Post’s Congressional voting database: RSS feeds on every member of Congress full of their votes. (Thanks Adrian!)
Here’s [...]

Do your reporters have OCD or ADD?

January 30, 2007 – 1:54 pm

From Jeff Jarvis’s notes on the something Arianna Huffington said during a discussion at Davos:
She said that bloggers have obsessive-compulsive disorder while reporters (or more likely, their editors) have attention deficit disorder.
I think it depends on the reporter, or the editor, or the town, or the size of the news hole.
But all conditions aside, it’s [...]

RateMyProfessors.com - the ultimate student media vertical?

January 30, 2007 – 8:00 am

Two weeks ago, a little business brief zipped across my workflow radar at the office - mtvU buys RateMyProfessors.com*.
For those of you keeping up with the college newspaper business, last summer, mtvU bought College Publisher, by far the largest hosting and CMS provider for online student media.
Now, the Viacom subsidiary adds RateMyProfessors to its stable.
Awesome [...]

The best thing about being on a team…

January 25, 2007 – 9:15 pm

…is that you don’t have to do everything yourself.
That’s what I’m finally learning after 3.5 months at my new job. Everyone has a specialty, and the best thing you can do is let everyone do what they do best, whether it’s design, code, manage, write, shoot, edit, record, or evangelize.
I spent my lunch hour [...]

I covet your WordPress 2.1

January 25, 2007 – 8:53 pm

So WordPress 2.1 is out, and it comes with some great new features, but if you’re like me, and you run a few outdated plugins and have hacked up your templates based more on instinct than actual coding knowledge, things might not go quite as planned.
I’m not paranoid, I’m just not going to continue hacking [...]