Hurricane Ike Media Review: Judging Criteria
September 15, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be writing reviews of the local and national media’s response to Hurricane Ike this past weekend.
What I’ll focus on:
- Update frequency
- Web site usability
- User generated content solicitation and usage
- Multi-media coverage
- Distribution of content outside the “walled garden”
- Innovation, or lack thereof in coverage
Where I’m coming from:
- I have family who lives in a Houston suburb
- I am familiar with the Houston television market having visited several of the TV studios and spoken with employees there in the past
- I live in the Washington DC area, so do not have access to live television or radio coverage from Houston unless streaming media is available
- I work in social media for a major media company
- My background is in journalism, information distribution, and online community building
If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section of any post. Notice someone doing something that I’ve missed? Let me know and I’ll be sure to update posts or continue the series as necessary.
Each of the media outlets I’ll profile and review this week are major operations with large audiences. I don’t want to be too critical of efforts or insinuate that there is any one “right” way of doing things online because there isn’t. What I’m measuring them against are what I consider to be the current “best practices” in online media distribution.
Also understand that each of these companies have very different technical and infrastructure components which I’ll address where possible.
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This post is part of the Hurrricane Ike Media Review series by Jonathan Coffman. I welcome your comments below.
My iGoogle Homepage Favorite Things
February 9, 2008 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
The iGoogle homepage is my personal portal of choice, for a number of reasons, once I just like having the Google search bar right there waiting for whenever I want. I don’t keep a lot of widgets and tabs saved onto it, but enough to get me the latest headlines from my news organizations of choice, and weather (although usually my weather reports come from hitting the Weather icon on my iPhone.
A couple other widgets that I keep on my iGoogle main page is a ‘Daily Einstein’ quotes box (I’m a big Einstein fan) as well as a Joke of Day widget (I only glance at it every couple of days, but sometimes there’s something funny there!).
One other favorite thing on my iGoogle homepage is the Google Gadget Editor, for those moments when I get fed up with going to a website and just want a widget, I use an RSS widget template and roll my own! I’m sure this is what frightens some PR folk, people rolling their own content widgets, but gosh if they did them themselves audience numbers are sure to grow!
Very soon I’m going to roll out some widgets and other gadgets on my blog, mainly different ways to read and access the information contained in it. Some things I’m currently thinking of doing in the short term include a Mac OSX Dashboard widget, iGoogle homepage widget, iPhone application, SpringWidgets widget, and maybe some extra RSS feeds so you can roll your own (just be sure to send me a link, I love seeing what kinds of cool things people can do given some unique content).
The Life of Riley - World’s Oldest Blogger
October 31, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Olive is the world’s oldest blogger, clocking in at 108. She blogs with help about her life and her story. What this leads me to is, all of this content that tweens are creating now, do they care enough to keep is alive, so that in generations future we will have all these MySpace pages, blog posts, and twitter feeds that we can look back upon?
I would imagine that it would be both a dream come true and a nightmare at the same time for historians. Imagine yourself a historian 400 years from now and sorting through landfills full of hard drives and servers with these mountains of data, how and where would you start? Now that’s something to think about!
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