http://schwanksta.com Journalism...in some form or another. Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:12:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Most people in the online news game probably know Pat Thornton. I've noticed a pattern in his thought process and twittering lately, and took it upon myself to write a generator for his tweets, for those who just can't wait to see the next thing he has to say. I'm releasing ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/07/14/pat-thornton-tweet-generator/ /*I've been having extreme issues with my host, so this post has been in draft form for about a while now. I'm just hitting publish and crossing my fingers....*/ Inspired by the conversation occurring in my last post, and spurred by some video I don't feel like editing, I'm going to ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/06/03/more-on-relational-news-sites/ So I was having a conversation with Brett Roegiers the other day, and he mentioned a blog post by Derek Willis on what he calls "Bomb Throwing" in the newsroom. In a general way, he talks about the new wave of online journalists dropping bombs on their colleagues in the ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/05/28/a-time-bomb-why-any-news-site-without-a-relational-back-end-will-fail/ So I was making the rounds on my RSS reader the other day, and came across something worth sharing. The New York Times has a (new?) interactive storytelling technique that lets you pause the audio, view the primary source documents inside of the Flash window, download them to your computer ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/04/23/how-the-nyt-spread-its-info/ Well, I've been working at the Alligator for a little while now, alongside Megan Taylor, the current managing online editor for the paper. I'm learning the Town News CMS (mostly how to bypass its limitations), and the basic ins and outs of online news. So all-in-all, exciting times. Unfortunately, that leaves ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/03/17/why-you-havent-been-seeing-posts-lately/ Not me personally, of course; I actually sort of like public records (yeah, I know, make fun of me). One of my classmates, however, was annoyed enough with our fact finding assignment on the book "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case" ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/02/20/i-hate-fact-finding/ There's long been a rule, known in some circles as Cheez's First Law of the Internet (no doubt other communities have codified it in different forms), which states that while talking about someone else's grammar or spelling, you have a nearly 90% chance of making an error. Apparently, even ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/02/19/new-york-the-semicolon-and-the-comma/ I've just made the Gainesville Crime Map much more useful by adding links to the incident reports if available. Check it out here, Gainesville Crime Map http://schwanksta.com/2008/02/11/crime-map-update/ I've started a new section of the site called Visualizing Gainesville. Using public records and a little (lot) bit of code, I plan on using the page to provide automated representations of various statistics for the area. The first project, the Gainesville Crime Map, is currently in a preliminary phase, ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/02/07/new-section-visualizing-gainesville/ Note: I wrote this for a class You can hear it from at least 30 feet away, a high-pitched buzz saw noise confusing you on your way to class. “Nnnnnnnnnnnn-whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” From what I can tell, that’s the sound of initiative. It’s also the sound of an ECO 8 model helicopter starting up. When Miles ... http://schwanksta.com/2008/01/31/who-needs-class/