I’m not sure how many of my readers are not already part of the Wired Journalists group Ryan Sholin (et al) has launched. But if you’re not, you should be. Here’s his post introducing it on his blog.

Basically, the premise works off of Howard Owens’ challenge to non-wired journalists to, well, get wired. I blogged about it last month.

Here’s part of the group’s mission statement:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

This is something I can, and am, getting behind. It’s incredibly important that journalists — my superiors, my contemporaries and my future successors, those kids already coming up behind me — understand how this stuff works and how it can work to make them better at their job and at reaching their audience.

So join us.

Did anyone else catch that Twitter went mainstream today? Kind of.

Though I’m still defending myself from the Twitter jabs my peers pour on — even the most tech-savvy of them doesn’t “get it” — The New York Times, thankfully, does.

The NYTs’ fourth most e-mailed technology story of the moment is this gem, Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps.

It’s a look at several political reporters micro-blogging the presidential campaigns through Twitter and the like. Nothing particularly enlightening, though a few comic anecdotes.

As Mr. Knox makes clear, news has always come in different sizes. Despite the new gadgetry, these journalists are actually rediscovering telegraphese — the clipped (ideally witty) style that flourished because of word limits imposed by an earlier technology, the telegraph. Today, it is the limits imposed by text-messaging.

“It’s a sign of just how impatient this generation is,” Ms. Cox said. “I don’t have to open up a computer, and it’s no more than 140 characters.” …

To Josh Tyrangiel, the managing editor of Time.com, “the business thinking is the same as almost all of my business thinking: Why not?” The more exposure to Time.com’s material, the better, and no one can afford to be choosy about the setting. So Ms. Cox also has a Flickr feed for her photographs from the campaign trail that Mr. Tyrangiel is happy to promote. Ultimately, he said, it is a hopeless fight.

“If you tell people how to consume their content, they will ignore you,” he said, a truism that experience had taught new-media executives. “Let people do what they want to do and try to be in their circle of choice.”

Why it matters though is, and I have no idea where this ran in print or if it did, this will get Twitter before a mass audience of people who may not even be as tech-savvy as my peers who tell me “Twitter just sounds like a dirty word” or joke when I ask if they read an interesting story about whether I saw it on Twitter.

I just laugh. Roll my eyes. Give them a plea to try it out. And then succumb to the inevitable “Dear blogger” jokes that aren’t far behind it. But they mean well, and one day they’ll get it, too. I’m not giving up on trying to win them over just yet.

BTW: You can follow me on Twitter here. My updates are protected, but I’ll add you. (Since it’s mostly personal observations, I want to know who’s reading.) They’re also fed to my Facebook status, where you can also add me by searching my name.

Everywhere I turn I see Twitter-this or Twitter-that. I even read a post today about how Twitter will come of age in 2008. (I would link to it, but I can’t find it again. Sorry guys.)

I for one am intrigued by the possibilities. Even though last week, a few reporters and I went out after work and somehow we ended up talking about Twitter and they all made merciless fun of me. They don’t get it. I can’t blame them. It wasn’t that long ago I was skeptical, too.

I was off today, and I have been exploring some of the possibilities everyone is talking about.

Recently, I started importing the feed from Meranda Writes and from stumblED. (The latter is my education tumble log, remember that?) I also started following hashtags. Though I’ve only used it once so far to post my #resolutions. I also keep my Facebook mates up to date on my whereabouts by feeding my twitter updates to my Facebook status. None of this makes me a better journalist, per se, but knowing how the technology works is the first step, I guess to commanding it for my craft not just for fun. But even just for fun, me gusta.

Today, I set up a Twitter account, more for my own amusement and use than anything else, that imports RSS feeds off jconline. Of course, I’ll have to see how the powers that be feel about it. But either way, it’s useful for me. It could be useful to other people in the community who use Twitter (including a few who are following me, one of whom I’d never met and happened to run into at a coffee shop this weekend!). I also foresee, if we could establish a sizable userbase, it could be a good crowdsourcing medium or great way to break news quicker/as we get it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was just playing with Twitterfeed.

If only I could figure out how to get just a feed of my bylines. (Funny enough, that teacher memories call-out posted now is mine.) But I am not so sophisticated or intelligent enough to get it to feed just my stories for you all (OK, just my mom and maybe a professor or two curious what I’m up to and wondering just how much I’m producing out here). I’m working on it. So far, the best archive for my recent stories is actually Newstin. Check that, I just scanned the page — apparently I can get Newstin as an RSS feed. Wish granted. I love the Internet. My Twitter followers are now in for a treat: an ongoing log of the stories I write. Yay?

Meanwhile, on the JC Twitter account, I can’t figure out a smart way to avoid pulling in stories that are out on multiple feeds. For example, a story on the Purdue feed and on the sports feed about the Big Ten. In fact, I am not pulling in the breaking news/top stories feed because it’s nearly always just the same as the news feed, except for some reason it also pulls in content off our Moms site and occasionally, off the WLHS microsite. Part of the problem is that our RSS feeds (like many newspaper feeds) are wonky. I don’t think anyone actually sits down to think about which 10 stories get pushed out each morning, and only items posted as breaking news AND news during the day get put out on RSS, not the “breaking news” at the top of jconline. (That probably doesn’t make sense to you, but it’s part of the classification you have to choose in the CMS.) So my RSS feed/Twitter idea is only as helpful as those stories it chooses. I wish we had an Opinions RSS feed, because those are popular here, too.

Anyway, to get back to my point, I’m not sure, still, when or if Twitter will “come of age.” But there are certainly lots of cool things going on with it. Here’s a few:

• ReporTwitters (Using the medium to be a better reporter. Sounds like an interesting proposal.)

• Tweet Scan (Search for your own interests, like Apple, or when breaking news happens for fire & California. You get the idea.)
• Hashtags (Tag your twitter posts.)
• Twitterfeed (Import your RSS feeds, or even the RSS feeds of blogs you regularly read, a la ojaggregator. It’s the filter/editor and choosing the best blogs to follow, so I don’t have to.)

That’s just to name a few I use. There are hundreds more and new ones coming each day.

Anyone else know something cool I missed or could use?

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.

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?

For your amusement because it made me smile a little on a down day:

Courtesy of What The Duck, a very funny strip about life as a photographer.

I am a horrible person. No really.

I understand the economics of newspaper publishing. I understand that the number of inches in my story is at the least indirectly related to the number of ads our reps can sell. I know that though we’re certainly not making a killing with our online advertising, anything we can do to draw more visitors’ eyeballs is much appreciated by our ad staff, who can hawk those page views to the highest bidder.

I don’t dwell on these things, but I do know they pay my salary, however meager it may seem. (It’s really not that low.)

And yet, I am a horrible person.

Why? Because the addition of one more set of ads was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. The in-text Vibrant Media ads (featured on, or rather within, news stories here, here, and here, to name a few) has pushed me to a place I’d long considered but held off on precisely because I know the the indirect correlation between these ads and my financial bottom line and therefore to my future.

But I couldn’t take it anymore. I put up an ad blocker on Firefox that means I’ll never see green again. Or at least, not until those pesky advertisers figure out a new way to annoy, err trick, me into seeing their wares.

There’s a lengthy Wall Street Journal story from Tuesday and shorter Business Week article this week discussing the green in-text ads that drove me to the ad blocker.

For an interesting take on this trend, read this blog post, which details the issue at the Indy Star. The comments are particularly interesting. He also has a follow-up post that’s equally worth your time. From the follow-up:

When online (Big Corporate Media) opts for the short-term revenue bump that these kinds of ads promise to provide, they’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Annoying readers is not a good way to increase traffic over the long run. Undermining the credibility of the news they provide diminishes the only product news organizations have to offer. And bilking advertisers with borderline click-fraud doesn’t seem likely to appeal to those advertisers in the long run either.

And all this says nothing of the ethics, which Paul Conley has more than beat dead in posts deriding the practice among B2B publishers.

For me, I’m less concerned about how these in-text ads might influence editorial copy (at least here, I’m confident the answer is it won’t). I am deeply concerned, however, with how this will impact the user experience.

First, it is annoying. It annoys and frustrates me when I highlight a paragraph and end up with a box blocking half the text I want to read or when an ad forces me to interact with it to shut off annoying sounds, animation or to get it out of my way. Though I surely spend more time with news Web sites than the average consumer, I also have a higher tolerance for these ads precisely because of what I said in my introduction, these pay my salary and salaries of my peers. I can’t imagine an annoyed reader is a happy reader, and unhappy readers will likely move on to another site that is less annoying.

Second, not all readers can tell the difference between these advertiser links and intentional links endorsed by the writer/news organization. Sure a green link with a double underline is obviously not the norm for a link, and the blue box does clearly indicate advertisement. But it’s still misleading. This also leaves out the potential for actual meaningful in-copy links, a la NYTimes linking to archived stories on major news topics or companies.

All of this isn’t to say advertising doesn’t have its place. It obviously does, both from my selfish desire to be paid to the need for businesses to reach customers and for consumers to find the items and services they need and want.

Online, I’m a huge fan of the Google text ads precisely because they are unobtrusive and usually relevant, neither of which the Vibrant Media ads can claim. I also don’t mind banner ads that fit in their rightful place, so to speak, stripped across the top, bottom or side of the page — as long as they don’t talk to me without asking first or send me into near seizures. To be honest, even video pre-roll ads and those splash-screen ads that jump up between links I click and stories I want to read don’t bother me, as long as they’re infrequent (maybe one per five or more stories?), and the larger display and captive audience on that page are probably more effective anyway.

I do wonder whether my turning to ad blocking programs is an ominous sign and yet another unneeded hurdle for newspapers to jump in the new media game. It’s so simple to do, why shouldn’t Web users install these ad blockers? If you annoy them enough or push them to their limits, they will.

It took about one minute for me to find the appropriate extension to nix the offending ads. I didn’t want to, but for my sanity — both as an annoyed reader and writer — I had to do it.

For my future? I hope the Internet and I, or more importantly other users, can come to some sort of understanding whereby advertisements and tolerance for them can peacefully and profitably co-exist. I just don’t think these in-text ads help that cause. If anything, they are giving it the middle finger.

I noticed something I never have when reading a story at the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun today. There was an audio icon and click to listen in the corner of the story.

I know Springfield has been experimenting with editors doing daily headlines via video. So I thought, maybe they’re having reporters read their stories. That’s strange but kind of cool.

It is the story, read aloud, which you download or listen to. But it wasn’t the reporter, it was a computer. And it was kind of creepy.

When we got our very first Windows computer, I was about 10. And there was this program that would read your text in whatever computer voice you chose. It would try to have the right inflection, but mostly it was just humorous and in some instances creepy. It amused my friends and I plenty as we crank called other friends. (Come on, this was middle school! And soundboards hadn’t been invented yet.)

That is kind of how I felt listening to the story. It was very creepy to me, and disjointed. It stumbled over words and slowed down the flow when it came to numbers and dates.

This service is apparently offered by Newsworthy Audio, which offers its services to other newspapers as well. I couldn’t find a list, but Springfield’s sister paper the Dayton Daily News has the same icon on its stories. Not sure if all Cox papers do or if it’s an Ohio thing, but it’s on some stories at Cox’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, including this one, which I will use as an example here.

Schools plant gardens to sprout healthy eaters

By ELIZABETH LEE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

On the kind of sunny, clear fall afternoon that torments children cooped up in classrooms, a group of fifth-graders is living every kid’s dream.

They’re roaming around a courtyard, soaking up the sun and talking with friends. And their teacher couldn’t be happier. As first one, then another runs up to her with an assignment, Marsha Cherichel checks their work and urges them to plug away at the solution.

The right answer to this math word problem, which involves multiplication, division and decimals, means more than just getting a check mark on a paper. It means within a few weeks, the students will harvest radishes from the garden they’re designing, getting their first taste of one of the hottest trends in hands-on education.

School gardens are enjoying a revival energized by the local food movement and concern over childhood obesity. Growing fruits and vegetables, the thinking goes, will teach science, math, even literature — and, garden organizers hope, a lifetime of healthier eating habits.

… (you get the idea)

I thought, maybe a straight news story would be better. But after jumping over some annoying registration walls, I found one and clicked the audio link and was disappointed to find it’s almost as bad.

I think it’s a good idea in theory, to be able to listen to the newspaper instead of having to sit down and actively read it. Busy lifestyles and all. But as a writer, I cringe at the idea of my words being mangled and interpreted by a computer reading it the way the stories I clicked on were. I’d rather not, thank you. I just don’t see how a reader, or in this case listener, could stand more than 10 seconds of listening. It was painful.

I don’t know if there will ever be a replacement for a real human reading, at least not without a lot of hand-holding and tweaking by audio engineers. Whether it’s audio books or audio stories (or broadcast even), I find it hard to believe these on-the-fly computer-generated audio stories could gain any kind of traction or regular listeners. Perhaps after a while you are able to parse it out and listen beyond the horrible and annoying pronunciation to the stories themselves. I just don’t see how. And again, if I could reiterate, as a writer AND reader, I cringed while listening to these.

Just this morning in the NPD meeting, I was talking about how eventually even the behemoth Facebook will lose its cool and kids will flee it for greener pastures of the next great thing.

Though I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet, or will anytime soon, I did laugh when I saw this Business Week article today that says Microsoft bought a $240 million chunk of the company, which puts its value in the, oh, $15 billion range. (More about the news.)

It’s good news for Microsoft, which beat out Google for the 1.6 percent share, but as I told the ME when I pointed the story out: This partnership with king-of-the-less-than-hip Microsoft could be the first kiss of death for a company that relies on its cool factor to hold the attention of Generation-Permanently-Distracted.

If not that, this: “Zuckerberg, 23, wants to take Facebook public at some point.” There’s something cool about the site precisely because it started as a college kid’s idea to link up with peers. Though it’s cool to be part of something that big, what really makes it a sticky site is that it seems small and personal. Your network is who you know, and who they know, and who may be in your class or in your city. But it’s defined and not really a free for all. Going public seems like opening some floodgates that I’m not sure wouldn’t wash away some of the roots holding kids down there. It’s not like there isn’t a plethora of other options around that could just as easily become the next big trend. Who knows?

But there’s the rub. Nobody knows. Facebook could continue to innovate, stay ahead and predict the turns in preference and consumption of the kids it’s pandering to. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my kids and my kids’ kids will still be posting on their friends’ walls when I’m old and complaining about how “back in my day, we had these CDs and if you so much as sneezed the disk would scratch.” And I’ll be wishing when Facebook had its IPO I’d cashed in. But at the rate it’s going, Facebook’s a bit too rich for my blood.

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.