Author: Danny Sanchez

Danny Sanchez is the Audience Development Manager at Tribune's Sun-Sentinel.com and OrlandoSentinel.com. Danny has been with Tribune since 2005 in a variety of editorial, digital and product development roles in Hartford, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. He has also previously worked in the newsrooms of the Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald.

Microsoft to give away development software for students

visualstudio.pngFor all you aspiring journo-programmers, Microsoft has a treat for you: free software! Woot!

Microsoft is launching a new initiative, DreamSpark, to offer up development and design software free to students, probably in hopes of weaning them from open-source solutions. The following expensive software will be offered free to students as part of the program:

It doesn’t get any better than pricey software for free, my friends, especially if ASP.NET (Microsoft’s flavor of Web development) is your bag. Kinda makes you want to go take a community college course for that student ID just to take advantage of this free stuff (plus 2 bucks off movies, of course).

Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 application design sins

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article yesterday outlining the top 10 mistakes one can make when designing a Web application. Nielsen says:

Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.

The last one, (c), is most often found on news sites. One culprit (among many) is editors’ desire to spell out as many details as possible to reade…er…users, often resulting in a clunky and convoluted user experience. Folks, a web application is not an A1 news package.

Nielsen covers such usability sins as standard elements (radio buttons, dropdowns) behaving in unexpected ways, small click targets and not having progress bars or other elements to indicate something is going on.

Even if you don’t personally get into the nitty-gritty of designing Web apps, you should take a look at this article. Nielsen’s article will increase your usability IQ and help you provide more insightful feedback on projects that cross your desk.

More from Nielsen here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html

Angry journalist? Let it all out

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Photo by Constantelevitation

Do you ever get upset at the long hours, low pay, public contempt, pinheaded editors or any other tomfoolery that goes on in the newsroom? Well, now you can finally let it all out guilt-free (that is, unless you’re already one of those anonymous Poynter message boarders) at AngryJournalist.com.

There, you’ll find such gems as the following posting:

[Exchange with a newsroom recruiter]
Me: “I just want to be a newspaper man.”
Recruiter: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Me: “What?”
Recruiter: “When you say newspapers people think dinosaur. Let’s not even call it a newspaper, let’s call it a data center .. You know we have a TV studio in our newsroom.”

Go f*** yourself…

Or concise gripes such as these:

bosses sans grammar

And the postings from the students are quite a gas too:

I had to do a story on the janitorial staff in my school and it was a profile. At first they were okay with it, and then they weren’t. I don’t understand why it was so complicated for one thing. JEEZ

Young’un, you don’t know the half of it. Check out AngryJournalist.com for more entertaining rants.

[Hat tip to Will Sullivan]

Future of technology in news symposium in Atlanta

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[CORRECTION: That’s FEBRUARY 22-23, not January. Thanks Melissa. Going to go eat a bug now…] 

Georgia Tech will be hosting a Feb. 22-23 symposium on the future of technology as it relates to the news industry, featuring speakers such as Google News creator Krishna Bharat, American Public Media innovation center executive director Michael Skoler and Fast Company media columnist and Gawker founder Elizabeth Spiers.

Registration before Feb. 10 is $100. After Feb. 10, registration is $150. Registration for students is $50 with valid ID.

The Symposium on Computation and Journalism is billed as bringing together “researchers and newspeople from academia, corporate labs, Internet juggernauts, big media companies, small media companies, and startups, plus a freelancer or two who works at home, solo in pajamas.” Plus,  they’re “setting aside 50% of the seats for students and early-career folks with the expectation that they’re the ones to finish the conversation we hope to start.”

More info about the symposium here.

[Hat tip to April Hunt]

Google News is in your neighborhood

googlenews.gifGoogle announced late last night a new feature for Google News that allows users to receive local headlines from their city, state or country of choice.

The feature worked well when I tried it out for Orlando and a few other cities. I’d say this bodes well for small and mid-size publications, since this feature will finally let folks easily find local headlines. Before, Google News was mostly a mishmash of nation and world stories, with online editors hoping to hit on a national story that could get picked up by the aggregator. Follow makersfestival to receive latest updates.

However, — *Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on? — WE MUST START GEOCODING STORIES.

Google is starting to do it. EveryBlock is already doing it really well. Topix sorta does it. A few others are doing it too. Groups of engineers have already written scrapes that scan the text of news stories. They’ve written algorithms that detect and process addresses for geocoding. Let’s not re-hash the whole newspapers-are-always-falling-behind speech; just get moving already.

Screenshots of Local Google News at Mashable.

More at TechCrunch about how Topix needs to be very afraid.

MySpace unveils developer platform

myspace.gifMySpace today unveiled a developer platform designed to facilitate the creation of third-party apps for MySpace, ala Facebook applications. If your team has at all been interested in developing Facebook applications, then make sure you’re taking a look at this.

The Official Developer Platform site is here.

Details from the Wall Street Journal on why they’re doing it and why it took so long here.

Story from PC Magazine here.

And the ground rules for monetization, from PaidContent:
— Developers can monetize their canvas page (the page where usrs add these apps to their profiles) and keep all of the revenue
— Developers can use any form of online monetization: ads, sponsorships, product sales, etc.
— MySpace will add in its “HyperTargeting” and “SelfServe” ad products over time.

A cumulative glance at Romenesko

Steve Outing has took a quick look back at the last four days of journo gossip herder Romenesko’s postings to see if any pattern emerges.  The result: 26% of the postings are about personnel changes (announcements, deaths, etc.); 13% are about the death and demise of newspapers; and 10% are ethics-related (i.e., the kind of postings one references when telling a colleague “Yeah dude, do that. Can’t wait to see it on Romenesko.”)

For the complete list, check out Steve Outing’s Romenesko indicator.

Microsoft makes $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo

Big news this a.m. for …well… the whole Internet. From the New York Times:

Microsoft said Friday that it has made an offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, in a mix of cash and stock. […] If consummated, the deal would redraw the competitive landscape of the Internet consumer services business, where both Microsoft and Yahoo have struggled to compete with Google.

More reaction from across the net here. Mashable offers up a new logo. Original press release at TechCrunch along with a snapshot analysis of what a “Microhoo” might look like. MediaPost takes a look at the advertising side. The WSJ reported almost a year and a half ago that Microsoft was interested in acquiring Yahoo, but merger talks went bust last May.

Google has a free 411 service

I’d attempt to put an online journalism spin on this, but well … whatever. This is just an awesome service.

Google has a free and well-done 411 service that lets you browse their listings via voice. For iPhone-less and Blackberry-less peons such as yours truly, this is truly rockin. Just dial up 1-800-GOOG-411. With absolutely no problem, I just found my favorite Mexican restaurant (I intentionally gave an imprecise city) and a local vegan cafe that have given me trouble on regular 411 and 1-800-Free411.

So cool.

More info: http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html

Now back to your irregularly scheduled Journalistopia…

ComScore releases 2007 year in review

comscore.gifComScore released its 2007 Internet Year in Review report and reports that Facebook, Craigslist, Wikipedia and AT&T have reaped some of the biggest benefits. Internet Broadcasting Systems (IBS) and WorldNow seem to be the only news-oriented properties in the top 20 for audience gains

ComScore reports the following categories as experiencing the most growth from 2006 to 2007:

Politics up 35% (no surprise with the election)
Community – Women up 35% (an area where Gannett has invested significantly)
Entertainment – News up 32%
Classifieds up 32%
Career – Training and Education up 31%
Gay/Lesbian up 28%
Retail – Consumer Goods up 25%
Finance – News/Research up 20%
Teens up 20%
Religion up 20%

View ComScore’s 2007 year in review release here.