So, although I bought the domain earlier this week and I set up the WordPress blog a few days ago, it has taken me a little while to figure out the design I want. After copious amounts of time worrying how to craft the perfect online presence for myself (OK, so actually it was mostly me snapping photos of items on my desk before I went home for Thanksgiving and then sitting in my mom’s kitchen with my MacBook playing with Photoshop and worrying about fonts and drop shadows), I’ve managed to come up with a layout I like.

In my journey to this layout (which isn’t up yet, but should be up later tonight) I discovered a few things I either didn’t know or didn’t realize until I started.

(more…)

Over at Poynter, Jill Geisler posted 10 questions for journalists to ask themselves this thanksgiving. I figured it was worth doing. Granted, the Stater isn’t the same as most newsrooms, but there’s still some answers to this that are applicable.

Getting the Most out of Life: 10 Questions

(more…)

If CNN is to be believed, then the Internet reached a major milestone last month. It hit 100 million Web sites. Pretty impressive for something so young.

I have always wondered how many Web sites there were exactly, just out of idle curiousity. But nobody really knows because it would be impossible to count all 100 million (or more by now) or keep pace with all the new sites being hatched each day.

It’s interesting nonetheless that this is coming in the same month that the U.S. hit the 300 million person mark. I’m sure there’s no causal relationship (hey, all those sociology classes on research methods taught me better than that), but it is still an interesting juxtaposition. I haven’t seen anywhere, not that have I really looked, but I wonder how the growth rates compare.

As a side note, I seem to remember a story coming across the wire earlier this week that mentioned that only 1 percent of the Internet was porn — but now I realize that 1 percent of 100 million (that’s 1 million for those keeping score at home) is still quite a bit. Or, as the guys in my office joked, that doesn’t take into consideration the percentage of people choosing to look at that content instead of the remaining 99 percent.

So, I just happened upon this article Young people don’t like us. Who can blame them?… I’ll pull out the part that was most poignant and truthful for me. Although it is definitely aimed at a British audience, it’s a message I think people stateside should heed as well.

Today’s 21-year-olds were born in 1985. The internet was two years old in January that year, and Nintendo launched ‘Super Mario Brothers’, the first blockbuster game. When they were going to primary school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee was busy inventing the world wide web. The first SMS message was sent in 1992, when these kids were seven. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. Hotmail was launched in 1996, when they were heading towards secondary school.

…

These kids have been socially conditioned in a universe that runs parallel to the one inhabited by most folks in the media business. They’ve been playing computer games of mind-blowing complexity forever. They’re resourceful, knowledgeable and natural users of computer and communications technology. They’re Digital Natives - accustomed to creating content of their own - and publishing it. (Remember the motto of YouTube: ‘Broadcast yourself!’)

…

Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

Definitely something to think about. It also reminds me of why, as one of the editors I met at the job fair in Detroit told me “I don’t have to tell you this… looking at your resume and work, you get it.” Part of the reason I and many of my peers — though I will say a surprising number of them don’t — “get it” is that we always have. It’s what we’ve always known.

I had a conversation with one of my reporters at dinner yesterday along these lines. It’s crazy for me to think of all the things that have been invented just in my lifetime. I mean, I remember a time before Nintendo dominated kids’ lives, back when baseball and climbing trees were the best ways to pass the time. I remember rushing home to watch TRL after school and hurrying up softball games to catch the end of Dawson’s Creek, back before TiVo made the television work around your schedule.

I even remember before we had the Internet. In fact, I remember the day we got the Internet. In all it’s 33kbps glory (and that was cutting edge, 28kbps was standard at the time). I remember when my whole family shared a single att.com e-mail address because Hotmail hadn’t been invented yet. I remember a time before I understood the concept of a search engine and the role of advertising online. (For the longest time, I’d go to Yahoo.com, type in “chat” and the banner at the top was a mouse running into a hole, which somehow advertised for The Globe. I remember how frustrated and confused I was when they changed the banner ad and I couldn’t find The Globe for weeks.) I also remember when chatrooms, The Globe’s in particular, were not java-based. In fact, I cut my teeth on HTML in those chatrooms, trying to make my text bigger and bolder, trying to draw an audience even at age 10. Heck, I remember when Netscape was the only browser.

I remember learning computer programining in the 6th grade on machines so outdated that not only were there no harddrives but the floppy disks actually were floppy. I remember when having a pager was the “in” thing, and when cell phones weighed as much as a text book. And I remember when I felt like the outsider because I had an e-mail address and none of my friends did, back in the years before AIM, Facebook and MySpace.

What I think is craziest of all about this is that I grew up and can remember both worlds. I think no other generation can say that, and therefore my peers and I are going to be the people who have to take the media industry by the arm, lead it toward the light and reconcile the differences between old and new media. For that I feel lucky. Instead of inheriting a dying industry, I look at as an opportunity to trailblaze and create something new.

I hate blogs. No really.

I think they’re mostly shameless ways for people to promote themselves, their products, or at the very least their ideas. And normally, I’d want nothing personally to do with them.

But, here I am. Starting my very own blog. (Actually, I have had blogs in the past. I own a whole other domain, not to mention my ever-popular Overheard at KSU blog.)

I even up’d the ante on this one. I went all out and bought a domain name. I figure that’s some level of commitment. There’s real money riding on the line. And considering my current gig pays in the range of about $2/hour — hey you can’t have it all — this is within my price range. (I did get a really great deal. No joke, GoDaddy.com is amazingly priced. As I said, I own another domain, but I just paid a quarter less for a domain name and three months hosting than I do for just one month hosting on the other domain. I think I may be changing companies if this arrangement works out.)

As for this blog? I can’t promise everything I write will be intelligent. Some will be serious. Some of it will be silly. Most of it will seem random. It won’t be. The point of this blog for me is to keep a log of the things that inspire me. Whether they inspire me to be a better writer and journalist or they inspire me to be a better human, this will be where I keep them. I’ll also raise questions that cross my mind, things that I wonder about and which I wonder if other people think about, too. Mostly, however, you can count on this sticking to journalism and technology as those are my biggest interests.

At the end of a week, month, or even year (that’s the only unit of time you can purchase domains for), this blog and Web site will pretty well encompass who I am and where I’m headed. For now all you need to know is bookmark MerandaWrites.com. As much as I hate blogs, I’ll make this one worth your time.