Trying something new

So, I wanted to figure out how to get a photo into this blog. It's too easy for words. There's a photo button you push when composing a new blog post, you browse on your desk top for the photo you put there to upload, hit the upload button, and in a minute or so, your photo is uploaded. Fun stuff. Peter says hi. This image was taken in early January on the northern California coastline about 30 miles north of Petaluma at a sweet place called Sea Ranch. A bunch of Knight fellows rented a big house for a three-day weekend, and we hung out there walking along the cliffs over the ocean and watching seals bounce around in the waves.

Looking for real journalists

I mentioned my Digital Journalism class, where we all have an obligation to blog (on a class site, not this blog). Well, my class is interested in talking to people who work at a real newspaper. If you have any interest in reading the digital journalism blog and maybe interacting online with these undergrad and grad students, let me know. The site is not private, but it's not quite public. I have permission to give you my sign on, it's OKd by the prof. So email me at kjmccoy@stanford.edu and I'll send you the link and my sign on. (My apologies: the first generation of this post linked direct to the site, and those who tried to go got a 'cannot enter' message.

Oh, and here's some reading for you. The Nieman folks have just done their analysis of the state of newspapers, called "Goodbye Gutenberg." You'll find it here. I haven't read it all yet, but there's obvious food for thought. A good one to start with is multimedia reporter and teacher Jane Stevens' "Taking the Big Gulp." Find it here.

Talk about frustrating

About half an hour ago I prepared a post here mentioning some multimedia work my UC Berkeley classmates were now posting back at their home newspaper Web sites, when Google's server went down. There went my web post.

So here it is again. Technology demands nothing if not persistence. It seems so unstable sometimes.

Anyway, Vindu Goel is an editorial writer at the San Jose Mercury News and he's started a blog that discusses politics, technology, immigration -- or anything else he gets activated about. A recent post mentioned Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Wales' new idea is an open-source search engine that will use human intelligence instead of algorithms for searches. Here is an audio interview by a Merc Internet writer with Wales, all about his new idea, to be called WIKIA.