I have been lucky to get some fantastic comments today on two of my posts.

David wrote a very insightful comment about the difference between audiences taking a reactive and a proactive stance towards privacy issues on my post about Facebook. He also gave the best justification for the “death knock” (when a journalist calls on a recently bereaved family) that I’ve seen yet.

Jon Walker and Markmedia also left fantastic comments on the post discussing the lack of business knowledge amongst many journalists. 

Jon argues that journalists have very little impact on business decisions and is concerned the production of good content might not be enough to save the industry. Mark argues collective union action to focus on business strategy would empower journalists.

Both have also turned their comments into blog posts (Jon | Mark), which are also worth a look.

What does it mean?! What are Region A and Region B? And why were they doing something in 2003 – 2005 when my blog wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye?!

When I refreshed the graph went back to normal, but I’d love to know if anyone else has had something similar or knows why it might have happened.

The biggest thing for me was how much technology is out there that journalists should and could be using right now.

I remember being very impressed when playing with Google Earth on a friend’s iPhone – the GPS functions was stunning (Any rich person got an iPhone going spare btw? I’d love one, but can’t afford it!). It was brought home to us today that in just a few months everyone will have mobile GPS on their phones and will start expecting information to be geotagged. We should be doing that now!

Another one was mobile video. Here is another view of Preston (can’t get it to embed) and our lecturer Mark streaming video from his Nokia N95, which is now part of the mobile kit for all Reuters journalists.

Mark’s using Bambuser, which streams driectly to the web. It is still in alpha so, as with Seesmic, I’m going to have to put it on the list to play with later. But it made my head spin to think how easy it is to capture breaking news on mobile video and have it online instantly.

Other good sites to play with: Jaiku and ShoZu.

Right, off to the bar…

Seriously! I love this blog. It has been a great thing to write for and it is wonderful to get the comments that I have. It’s all been very exciting.

I’m now hooked on blogging and I hope it will help make 2008 just as interesting!

J.x

(Pic taken at Birmingham’s Christmas Market by Tim Ellis. Check out the Birmingham Flickr group – it’s a thing of beauty.)

At the moment it points to this here blog and, I suspect, that’s exactly how things will stay for the forseeable future. The old one http://joannageary.wordpress.com still works, of course.

So…not really news I suppose, but it’s the first time I’ve registered a domain name, so I felt the need to share.

Top of my wish list is a camcorder, so that I can play around with making my own videos. The problem is I haven’t got a huge budget (£200 max.).

Is there anything small and whizzy that I could get for that price? It doesn’t have to produce the best quality video, just something that wouldn’t be horrible to view on this blog.

Ideas?

Community Affairs in the Second City deals with the issue of social cohesion in Birmingham – a subject I know Rhona feels very passionate about.

One of her first posts is a thoughtful response to an appalling story that appeared on the front page of the Daily Express some weeks back.

The headline was: Migrants take ALL new jobs in Britain. (NB. The story has been removed from the Express website. The link above takes you to a site which also provides a bizarre photo library of international passports!!!)

Not only does the article make ridiculous and inaccurate statistical assumptions, but it is also inflammatory and, above all, an insult to journalism.

Grrr. I find it hard to write about such things as it just makes my blood boil. Luckily Rhona is far more clear sighted.

Thanks Jon

When I started blogging (a little over two months ago) I was fearful of trolls and comments akin to those on YouTube.

Yes, I have been lucky. No more so than this week with the explosion of fantastic responses about The Post website. Taking the opportunity to both paraphrase and name drop, the thing has taken on a life of it’s own.

Yesterday, the blog was even hijacked by my editor, who was sourcing revenue-generating ideas for the new site.

It was quite an odd moment reviewing and approving his comment and, at the same time, realising just how unusual this whole thing is. I will, of course, encourage him to set up his own blog!

Word users can download the original document, or you can get it in html.

It is, of course, a first draft. So comments and suggestions are very much welcome!

After picking up on “Anyone want to help design the Birmingham Post website?“, journalism.co.uk must have felt that I was a credible source. They wrote a story about The Post website and quoted directly from my blog.

It hit me that, actually, that is quite an interesting thing to have done. So much has been said about the danger of blogs being potentially unreliable. Yet something made me quote-able. What was it that gave me credibility in their eyes? Context?

But, whatever it was, it was not enough to give the blog the same credibility in the eyes of holdthefrontpage.co.uk. Yesterday, they phoned me up to verify what I had written on the web and to ask for more details.

Two interesting points here: One is that I probably would have adopted the same approach as holdthefrontpage. I think I’d be happier speaking directly to the author of a blog, rather than just wholesale lifting what they had said in a post.

Second is that when they phoned me, I clammed up. I took the journalist’s name and number and said I would pass it on to Marc to deal with (which I did).

I guess the upshot is that I didn’t feel comfortable being a spokesperson for The Post or for the website project. The daft thing about that though is I already became a spokesperson by having free reign to blog about it!

There’s something illogical going on here…