I have not posted anything in over a year basically because I have been working on other projects. Here is a quick year in review: We got a dog (Belly), I got a contract job with Starbucks in Carson City, Kevin quit his job at UNR, my contract ended, we moved from Reno to Denver over Thanksgiving '07, we got jobs in Denver, spent the next 4 months looking for a house to buy, we bought a duplex with Scott and Jessica, Kevin quit his job in Denver to work on the house, we have renovated the house, we moved into the house, and we continue to work on the house.

Besides working on the house I go to work as an Instructional Designer at eCollege, a division of Pearson Education. Kevin, Scott, Jessica, and I officially are in business together with Playinghere.com. The site is over a year old and though we are not making much money we have lots of users and lots of band moderation to do!

I am going to try not to abandon sidewalktheory.com again but the Denver summer awaits! My broken arm is healing and the biking trails, camping, and summer picnics are calling!

Finally far enough along in the house to post some pictures.  We've actually moved in so everything is a mess again.  Hopefully I'll find the time to post some of the finished pictures soon.

As anyone who follows what I'm doing should have noticed, I've all but stopped blogging. I've found it's pretty common for blogging to get dropped from the list of priorities after students get a job, but I think it's actually a little more basic than that. I think many people blog because they are looking to get a better job. I still write lengthy rants, but now I tend to do it within groups I'm active in like Drupal or in emails to people I'm working with at GenGreen and Playing Here. I spent the most time blogging before I was promoted to the Director of Instructional Technology for the College of Communication and Fine Arts at Bradley.

My brother Scott used to blog actively on Typewiring, but he hasn't updated his blog since Sep 29, 2007.

Other formerly active blogging friends and former students...
Brian McMurray - May 24th, 2007
Dave Look - July 31st, 2007
Dave Knape - November 5th, 2006.

People I know that have started or continue to blog... and possibly why?
Matt DeLio - Looking for a post doc
Travid Alber - Launching a start-up
Chad Udel - Moving up at Iona?
Ryan Jerz - ???

We've been trying to provide some coverage of the Angora Ridge Fire on OurTahoe.org despite our limited resources during the Summer. We've been relying mainly on Tahoe residents uploading images to Flickr and RSS feeds from MSM outlets and blogs.

This morning I read an article in Editor & Publisher about how the Tahoe Daily Tribune was covering the fire news "blog-style".

Blog-style?

We've been working with Swift's online folks with the Notebook project, so I know they have serious issues with their CMS. Because the Tahoe Daily Tribue's staff are just updating the same post over and over, it doesn't show up in their RSS feed... and thus can't be aggregated by OurTahoe.org.

Since the fire jumped the line this afternoon and doesn't look like it is going to be put out any time soon, I put my knowledge of regular expressions and XML to use and scraped their "blog-style" page into useful RSS.

http://www.ourtahoe.org/custompages/scrapes/tahoedaily.php

Let me know if you find this useful.

Sometimes Dave Winer's thought process is hard to follow.  When I asked him what he'd teach journalists in a 10-month program like UNR's Master's in Interactive Journalism, he said to drop Drupal and focus on blogging.  I responded with a few reasons why I thought teaching students to use a bigger CMS like Drupal was important... not the least of which was that it would be difficult to test of concepts like Check Box News with just a Blogger account.  Dave clarified what he meant by, "drop Drupal and blog".  He meant start blogging and I agreed with that. 

I thought that was going to be the end of the conversation, but today, Winer writes "But having a bunch of users is very important feature. You can't just skip over it as if it didn't matter, because imho it's all that matters." 

Dave Winer has been blogging about changes he'd like to see in the way online news works.  Specifically, he's been kicking around an idea called Checkbox News.  I think it's an idea worth exploring, so I was a little surprised when his suggestion about what J-Schools should be teaching journalists was to drop the CMS and teach the graduate students to blog with a commercial solution like Blogger or Word Press.  Both of those are solid technologies, but not something you could build something like Checkbox News on. 

Today, Dave clarified what he meant.   Now he's  suggesting we skip Drupal and START with blogging.  I agree that students need to be blogging day 1.  The only grad student really looking into blogging as a form of journalism is the former managing editor of the Tahoe Daily Tribune, Claire Fortier.   It took her a few weeks to get into a rhythm of posting on a regular basis and build up a readership willing to comment, but Voices is now bringing new users to the site searching terms like "tahoe runway issue" or "tahoe airport environment".  

Yesterday I asked Dave Winer what he would teach journalists.  He responded with the suggestion that the journalists should blog with existing software with instruction/feedback/conversations involving the local MSM and anyone else who'd like to stop by driving the instruction.

Interesting, but who is going to create checkbox news? Is that something you can create with a Blogger account?

Last semester I helped develop several projects that are really innovative approaches to complicated problems journalists face. 

Notebook - This is an alternative interface for commenting that tries to lead users to categorize their feedback by Tips, Facts, and Sources.  The comments are all fed into Drupal where they can be viewed by publication, journalist, tags, ratings, etc.  The goal of this project is to try to create value from comments instead of simply having a flame war at the end of every story.  The hope is that a journalist would go back to their Notebook before writing about a topic to see what users have said about other stories on the same topic.  I ran into javascript conflicts between fivestar rating, jquery scroll, and jquery tabs that I haven't been able to figure out.

Both Linden Labs and Adobe recently opened the source code for products I've been exposed to, but haven't had much interest in until now.  Sharing the source for both Second Life and Flex has force me to reconsider them viable, long term technologies. 

Brian McMurray has been trying to convince me to use Flex on CakePHP in projects like phpLabMan.  I've been pushing back on these because I think they add a level of complexity on top of the LAMP stack that less people will be interested in installing or contributing to.  Whenever a company opens their technology to potential I feel like they are saying, we are capable of competing on a level playing field.  We offer services or interfaces that will add value to our version to the tools or environment. 

As you may have noticed Kevin added the live music in Reno links at the bottom of the nav bar. This info is being pulled from Scott's (Kevin's brother) site Playinghere.com. The site is a cool resource that allows you to see local music venues -- mostly scrapped from MySpace.com. See the About Section for more info.

DESIGNING
Another fun tidbit about this site is I helped Scott with the design. We went through several design iterations. Since this project had no real time constraints and Scott was not sure what he wanted in terms of design, I started with the logo.