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Archive for the 'WTF' Category

YouTube: Here Comes Another Bubble

Monday, December 24th, 2007


Too funny not to share with you guys. Newspapers and friendship bracelets? lol.

Apparently from an a cappella group of techies called The Richter Scales.

Wikipedia does not know all

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

When I come across something unfamiliar and want a quick synopsis of something, I generally begin by typing it into Google. Usually, one of the top five or so results is a Wikipedia entry.

So when my friend pointed out this doll for sale on eBay going for $1,200 I was floored. Why the heck would anyone pay that, I wondered. Apparently, whoever Sasha is is a big deal.

I turned to Google to find out about these dolls. A bunch of collectors came up and a few eBay auctions, and this quick-hit synopsis of the craze on About.com was very helpful.

But where was Wikipedia in all this?

We often joke in the newsroom that Wikipedia is omniscient (hey I can’t use big words in the paper, so when I can sneak them in conversation, I do). That is to say, Wikipedia is all knowing.

My prior usage of Wikipedia as a quick-hit summary for things when I don’t particularly care about the authority of the information, when I’m just generally curious about something random, like say why an ugly doll would net $1,000+, has always netted decent results.

But I learned that apparently all the entries on Wikipedia haven’t been created yet, as I kind of assumed they had. Sasha Serie is not in their index. I was able to, after trying to think of several combinations including the creator’s name, find out that there is a listing for “Sasha dolls” that deals with this. But it still did not come up in my Google searches, and that entry could use some sprucing up.

Being that it is Wikipedia, I could try and fix it up (maybe add a photo or some annotations — where’s this information from?!). But I won’t because I don’t know much about it and would have to rely on Google to tell me, thus I’d find myself in that perpetual cycle. My favorite part of that entry is this: Those who Google ‘sasha dolls’ or ‘Sasha Morgenthaler’ will find themselves offered a wealth of Sasha-related sites – some historically-oriented, some devoted to their owners’ Sasha collections, some selling dolls or dolls’ clothing. LOL. No links. Just tell them to Google it. Which is kind of ironic for my purposes, being I was trying to Google to find the Wikipedia entry, and now the entry is telling me to Google the topic. Here we go in that cycle again.

In the end it’s irrelevant anyway: I’m not interested in any doll that costs nearly as much as my computer. No thanks. But seriously. $1,200 for a doll?

Who’s Atom?

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

Because nobody else appreciated it as much as me when it happened, I wanted to share this quick tid-bit with my blog readers, most will get the humor.

Someone was showing me a jib-jab video where local candidates’ heads were set to a night of the living dead/republicans/democrats storyline. It was funny. It was also randomly posted as a single blog entry on a blog that was apparently created solely for that purpose, with no other posts or information on it.

So I asked, “Who made it?” figuring, even though I didn’t see any obvious bio or anything, the person showing me might know because obviously someone had shared it with them.

Then they said something that made me both want to laugh and cry: “Whoever Adam is.”

And, not seeing a name, I was like, “Adam?” And told them to click the name to see if there’s a profile.

They click the link at the bottom of the page, which brought up the Atom feed. Atom not Adam. I explained what that was, to a few eye rolls from the peanut gallery.

A few entirely random thoughts that sum up today

Monday, October 15th, 2007

I don’t have anything profound to say today, but there are several random things floating around my head that I figured I may as well share. Feel free to add your own. This could be a fun game.

  • UPDATE, I forgot the most important lesson of today. What happens when you go to make cop calls and get a busy signal. You hang up and finish calling the rest and then head back to the busy number? What happens when that number still rings busy. And half an hour later? Still busy. So, then you call the city (housed in the same building), and guess what, it’s busy? Well, I decided something was up. But since I couldn’t just call down there to find out, I did what any enterprising, curious reporter would do. I walked there and found the IT director. Something was majorly up, apparently there was a huge statewide phone outage. Our police, city and the two city school districts both went without phone service until about 3 p.m. as did several other businesses in our community. Just goes to show, there really will never be a true replacement for face-to-face, shoe-leather reporting. There’s no way I could have worked that story through the phones.
  • Over the past few weeks I’ve done two different stories involving outages with two different phone companies. In light of this, I really think phone companies need to evaluate their media relations. Neither of the phone companies made it easy to a) locate a media representative, b) locate any live person, c) get a phone number that didn’t start with 1-800 and end with my hanging up after getting stuck in a loop of computer mis-guided menus. To sum up my editor’s response to the first of these stories, “The phone company doesn’t have a phone number on its site?!” And then a laugh and attempt to prove me wrong, as if I would seriously admit both my computer savvy and Google prowess had let me down without first ensuring it was worth throwing in the towel. I’m just saying. In both cases, I now have the phone number, name and e-mail of the person I need to talk to should anything else arise. But why make it so difficult?
  • I learned a new word today: akimbo. Apparently it means to put your hands on your hips and bend your elbows. (Think annoyed teenage girl yelling, “But mooooommmm!”) I’m only including this here because I told my editor I would blog about the new word I learned. lol. He used it to describe the “sassy” pose one of the girl’s auditioning for the Purdue Play Boy edition had in her photo.
  • This story, which I first saw on Romensko (and first commented on in my education tumblelog — which is off to a good start, thanks for asking) makes me nervous about ever writing about the ISTEP or other major tests. The reporter wrote a light feature about the testing and inadvertently included the essay topics that many students hadn’t yet written about! Now all the kids have to retake the test. Although, reading his explanation, I’d have to say I do understand he didn’t know he couldn’t include the topics — and really he shouldn’t have been let in the classroom and the teachers and administrators should have flagged it for him not to repeat test questions. Still, I’m not sure I like his defense. I think he’s trying to point fingers by his blog post, and really what it boils down to is, yeah, that’s hella embarrassing and really messes with a lot of kids, but take responsibility and go ahead and say, “I screwed up.” Not doing so is just as embarrassing.
  • I have decided that while I could work the 6 a.m. shift, as in I am capable of waking up, getting dressed and being at work to start posting and picking up cops stuff from overnight, I reaaallly don’t envy the guys who have that regular shift. Yes, it would be nice to have a set shift that didn’t fluctuate from 8 to 4 through 3 to 11 virtually every day depending on meetings and assignments, and getting off (theoretically) at 2 p.m. is so appealing. But if a wonky schedule and a few late nights a week is the price to pay for getting to work during daylight hours, it’s worth it for now. I am way too tired to actually do anything with the rest of today. And as I told the business reporter when he came in at 7:30 a.m., I’m too young to be up at 6 a.m.
  • That’s all I can think of for now.

Where’s the Facebook backlash?

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Last year about this time, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions by the time it was all said and done) of college students protested the addition of the news feed to Facebook.

Since then, there’ve been mere ripples as the site was opened to our parents and bosses. Barely a peep was made as external applications were added forcing us to constantly ignore requests to be bitten by a vampire or take quizzes about our friends. Now we’re asked to declare our top friends and scroll for ages down our BFFs profile because he/she added so many applications that reading their wall (not the super wall or wiki wall or advanced wall) now requires you to hold down the down arrow and wait — for a long time — to eventually reach the bottom where the old-school wall has been relegated.

Now, I’m not saying these additions are horrible. They aren’t. Not all of them at least. Some are fun, some make it more useful. Others are annoying. I guess as long as it doesn’t degenerate into MySpace, I can live with the changes.

One change, however, that caught my eye when I logged in today was this:
facebook profiles going public

Yes my friends, per Facebook, we may soon be Googleable. Where’s the backlash on that from all the privacy-protecting college students who a year ago freaked that their friends would know when they added a new favorite movie?

Clicking on Read more…

Since your search privacy settings are set to “Everyone,” you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren’t yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.

In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook. Learn More.

OK. Fine. I don’t care that people know I’m on Facebook. I don’t have anything to hide, a few of my editors are even my friends on Facebook. I wouldn’t have my privacy set to being searchable by everyone if I cared. Several old friends have found me through this feature, which is why I leave it on. But I don’t know, I’m somewhat leery about the idea of anything Facebook being searchable through Google, etc. I know, I know. The privacy settings are the same. I can up them at any time, or I could just sign off the site all together. I won’t over this, but I do think that they’re chipping away, bit by bit, at our tolerance. One day I’m going to wake up and this will be the top hit when you search for my name in any search engine.

The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

Fine. But, I’m still not sure mixing job-hunting and Facebook is a good idea. Check out this release from CareerBuilder.

But, what do I know?

Beer Pong and the WSJ

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Only the Wall Street Journal could take beer pong and make it this classy.

It’s been awhile since I’ve actually sat down with a print edition of WSJ (except the occasional items pointed out by the county reporter whose father bought him a print subscription for his birthday — hey my parents aren’t that thoughtful!). But I do get the CollegeJournal e-mails every day. Mostly it’s recent stories or Q&As from the WSJ. But it’s free and targeted pretty much to my demographic: soon-to-be grads and recent grads setting out in their jobs as new young professionals. I dig that.

My favorite part of the story — other than reading about young people capitalizing on the interests of other young people, (hey why not?) — is the accompanying graphic. I imagine a CEO sitting behind his desk, reading the paper and studying the inner workings of beer pong. That thought makes me smile.

They also have a video (though the audio on it is really wonky, at least it came across that way for me?). I had to watch the video because I wanted to see how you could create a video about beer pong that wasn’t like made for YouTube/Facebook. But, again, there they go making the drinking game classy.

What’s the standard for citizen journalism?

Monday, June 25th, 2007

I’m always a little creeped out when someone ends up here at Meranda Writes by googling my full name. I mean, yes, I Google people several times a day. But the idea of someone else googling me creeps me out. There was a hit from this weekend that was just a google search for “meranda watling.” Curious, I clicked through to see if there was anything interesting that pops up.

On the third page, I saw this post:

High School Awards Student with a Car – Associated Content
Meranda Watling, “Perfect attendance key to a big reward.” Journal & Courier URL: (http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? …
www.associatedcontent.com/article/257564/high_school_awards_student_with_a_car.html

I was confused because at no time have I ever written anything for Associated Content. I’ve seen their postings on job sites and such before. I always thought it was a scam, and was never really desperate enough to do it. I don’t know what it is or isn’t. But I do know this “article” is bad. Basically, it took the quotes, details and background from my story. Padded it a bit with context (where Benton Central is, etc.) gleaned, judging by the “sources” listed at the bottom, with some info off the school’s Web site. What the heck?

I’ve posted before about how I find it interesting to watch a story go out on the AP wire and how everyone handles it differently, sometimes reworking, sometimes adding and deleting content, sometimes localizing, etc. I’ve also been asked to “localize the AP story” or “write through with local reaction” on a wire story. You know, find local people affected by this trend, or replace people elsewhere with someone here, or use this to build a bigger enterprise piece off, or whatever. But we always credit the wire, whether it’s a double byline or a Contributing tag (for our reporter or for the AP/GNS reporter, depending on how much was local and how much was wire) or a simple “STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS.”

This Associated Content story here does say “According to the Journal & Courier” several times and credit the original article at the bottom as a source. But I’m not sure that story is in the spirit of either the AC Web site or of fair use. It’s not like there’s original reporting, or this was localizing a trend, or that they are a sister paper or member of the AP. It’s watering down and repackaging what I wrote into a boring story.

I took a look at the author’s article list to see if this was her normal practice. I’m really not familiar with Associated Content, so i don’t know what’s “normal” and what’s not. This person could be the exception or the norm. I don’t know, and this is the first author’s list I’ve looked at.

What I saw was there were a lot of articles I skimmed to see how much was reporting and how was just speculation/rehashing others. I quickly skimmed a few other authors to see if this was a trend. Here’s an article about getting a truly vegan tattoo, which is an interesting topic, but I’m wondering where the writer got her information or inside knowledge. Then there was this article about a dog sinking a car, which seemed to be like the story someone rewrote of mine, a mere rehash of an AP story on USA Today that was a rewrite from the Spokesman-Review story.

The best way to sum up what I saw was that it was a lot like a middle school term papers. You know, your teachers are still worrying about mechanics and are less worried about making sure you appropriately cite sources. So, it becomes common knowledge how many couples will wed on 07/07/07 or you become an expert on whether to take your child to a funeral or how to make them value their education. Either that, or you’re an all-knowing genius. I’m willing to bet it’s neither, and the sourcing and citing is just really spotty.

The bigger question I have about all this is: Do the readers notice or care? Do they hold these “citizen journalists” to a lower standard or could we slip by with half the work ourselves? If this is the future of news, should we be scared? Because looking at the comments on those articles, they range from “great advice” to “excellent article”. And I know as a working journalist I have higher expectations of my own and others work. Am I just old school for expecting to see a story that is appropriately sourced and original reporting? What does that mean for the future? Just something to think about.