Week 6 wrap

This week has been a bit of a blur. Work has been crazy. We have been restructuring news and sales and as I mentioned previously I feel I have been fighting a losing battle trying to convince leadership to incorporate some technology into their process changes. I have also inherited responsibility for mentoring several managers who are "at risk" based on performance and reluctance to the changes. From a Human Resource Development standpoint, it has been a good few weeks despite the long hours, because I got to test out some of my new educational chops on creating new job descriptions and using ADDIE to facilitate the changes. Now down to what I have worked on this week. I posted five blog posts. Because of my news background, I was drawn to an article about how publishers can better use social networking tools to get news out there. I also made three discussion board posts. I also finished up the book chapter.

How do you keep track of all your websites?

We've talked about Web 2.0 tools such as delicious and diigo as ways to keep up with your Websites and information you've found on the Web. This article discusses the Web 2.0 curation tools. One of the sites covered is Scoop It. It is kind of a combination between Stumble Upon and delicious because you can set up topics and it will crawl the Web for you making suggestions on sites you might be interested in. There is one draw back, Scoop It is in beta testing and you need an invite to use it.

Discovery of a new useful blog

I ran across a new blog (to me) this week: the social flow blog. This week, there was a post about how news publishers can better use social media, like Twitter, to spread news. The research shows that just because you have a large following doesn't mean every post will reach a huge audience.

Using pseudonyms online

The buzz about Google+ deleting accounts using fake names raises another question. Why do people wish to remain anonymous online. There can be a variety of reasons. Off the top of my head, someone who is a public figure like a teacher, police officer or public administrator might want to remain anonymous for security reasons. danah boyd has an interesting blog post on the subject.
Speaking of Google+'s policy of suspending suspicious names, you will interested to find out that many of the names are legitimate. Sounds like Google needs to rethink this policy or else Google+ will dry up just like Google Wave. Check out this informal survey.

Web 2.0 and work environment

It has been a busy few weeks at work as we are fundamentally changing our production structure and processes in the newsroom. Other changes will follow in the coming weeks. The idea is how to become more efficient at what we do. That said, I feel sometimes that I am fighting a losing battle trying to integrate the available free technologies into the framework. For example, Google calendar is way reporters, photographers and editors can all view the assignments for the day, week, etc. This replaces the (in my mind) the huge grease board in the newsroom where someone has to be responsible for taking assignments, making changes and keeping the board current. The beauty of the Google calendar it is mobile. Photographers and reporters can check their assignments and update them from the road. Additionally, we have nine other newspapers in Florida. the talk is to go to a more regional management approach. Using Web 2.0 tools can make collaborating on assignments much easier so that newspapers 150 miles apart can easily know what each other is doing and share stories and resources. Back to my original point about the losing battle: I felt frustrated trying to convince a high-level editor that this method was better than her grease board. Eventually she yielded, but said she would need extensive training. I never realized that fear was holding her back all along.