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.

Have you heard of ZIPskippy?

I have to give my friend Grace the hat tip for pointing out this site to me. This site is AWESOME.

I plugged in my zip code, 47904. I learned a lot about my neighborhood I never knew. Including how my neighborhood (one of the downtown zip codes) stacks up to others in the area. Just as an FYI, 47901 is the main downtown zip code and 47906 is West Lafayette, which is where Purdue and most of the Purdue students faculty live.

This looks like a great tool to quickly assess how different areas of the community stack up. There’s a disclaimer that though this is census data, it’s just a sample. So I probably wouldn’t rely too heavily on it as a source. But it’s very useful for me to assess the different school communities/neighborhoods. Right now pretty much what I have to go on is anecdotal, what the DOE puts out and what I’m able to cull from other sources/data in a disaggregated way.

This information, presented in such a readable format, though? Seriously gold mine. Check it out.

As an aside, would this be a great project for a news organization to undertake? Or even just to link to. Lots of papers break things down by neighborhood. This could add another layer to that beyond the news and photos typical of those sections.

I’ve stumbled — ironically, I supposed — upon a few tumble logs before. The idea fascinated me, but given my preponderance of communication methods (what with Meranda Writes, del.icio.us, twitter, facebook, aim and gmail statuses, to name a few) I never actually created one.

Until now: stumblEDucation.

I’ve been thinking for several weeks about how I would like to create an education blog to complement my beat coverage and stories. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, it was kind of shot down for my perceived lack of time to keep it. Enter the tumble log.

Basically, a tumble log is just a quick-hit collection of entries. Could be completely random snippets of conversation or links or photos or videos or quotes you come across and want to post. Its format is both more restricting and yet more free than a traditional blog.

Here’s the rub: Because it’s not a sanctioned work blog, I’ve decided I’ll stick mostly to larger education issues and stories I come across that I want to note or think are interesting. I’ll pretty much stay out of my local beat unless it’s something I think would have mass appeal. This way, I’ll look at it more as a catalog of interesting education-related items and less an extension of my paper’s newshole, which again because it’s not part of the paper, it isn’t. This catalog idea was part of what I wanted to accomplish with the blog I pitched.

I don’t know how successful I’ll be. I have a feeling as time wears on, I’ll settle into a routine of what gets posted and what doesn’t, or I’ll find it too restricting to actually be useful to me.

But I have a feeling, this is a better method of sharing with the world the education stories I’m reading and topics I’m researching than tagging them education on my (quite disorganized) del.icio.us list. It’s also a more effective presentation for this with less work and upkeep than a real blog.

At least this will satisfy my desire to collect the cool stories I read in one location. And then, if I ever do get that blog, I’ll be able to easily port this habit. Or who knows, maybe I’ll decide the tumble log was the way to go all along.

I didn’t believe this post over at the Innovation in College Media blog, even when I saw the screen shot Bryan posted.

But I’ll be damned if the New York Times hasn’t given its motto — “All the news that’s fit to print” — a 21st Century twist at the top of its homepage.

I had to go check it out myself. Here’s what I saw (highlighting the most important part of course):

That’s right folks. It’s not about the print. It’s “All the news that’s fit to blog,” online at least.

As I said in the comments on that post, this just shows there is nothing so ingrained that it can’t be re-thought. Nothing is off-limits.

I think it’s an awesome move to consider switching things up, but is blog the right word? (They do link the text to their blogs section, however.) But What about photos uploaded to Flickr or videos at YouTube? What about non-blog citizen journalism efforts?

I don’t have a better phrase off the top of my head. I’m just glad to see the beacon of tradition is willing to re-think everything.

It’s a quarter to 2 a.m., and I’m still awake. I don’t have a good excuse except spending too much time on Yahoo! Answers and the New York Times and losing track of time.

A good friend of mine also is up at this hour. But he has a damn good reason, and as I just finished telling him over Gmail Chat, he’s hard-core.

The state of Michigan is on the verge of a shut-down, with 35K state employees waiting to hear whether they will report to work today. The legislature is pulling an all-nighter — and so are the reporters. Check out LSJ for updates and the Free Press has them, too. So does the Detroit News. (I’m not linking to specific stories because they’re updating and I don’t want to end up w/broken links.) There may be others, but that exhausts my knowledge of Michigan media outlets.

Ryan, who just started as a mojo about two weeks ago at the Lansing State Journal, was one of the lucky ones tapped to report on the events unfolding in the capital city tonight.

At first I thought it was crazy because there’d be no one up reading the stories anyway. But I stand corrected. There are several post-midnight comments posted on the stories. I guess it makes sense: If I was a government employee unsure if I’d even need to get up in the morning, I’d be hanging out for any word of progress, too.

That my friends is why this is not only hard-core but a perfect example of the mindset we need to take. This is information people need and want to know. They don’t want to know in tomorrow’s paper (which was put to bed hours ago, before the midnight deadline passed) or even on the morning newscast. They want to know asap. They want to know now. This is the 24-hour newsroom people talk about. So maybe it’s not hard-core, maybe it’s the new necessary.

One of the first things I was told I would be charged with when I came to the J&C was helping create high school micro-sites at each of the county’s high schools.

The first of those sites finally launched Friday: Today at West Side

I’ll be honest, this was the product of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. (Full disclosure: hardly any of it was really mine.) My task was to help brainstorm what we could include and who we should involve. My main and hardest task was then to use the connections I had made — little though they were, especially when we first started and I had literally just arrived — and try to get the high schools on board. Once I had administration on board and kids lined up, my editor and our online team really took over and made this happen. Though, the enthusiasm of the principal and students helped a lot.

Our first attempt, even with my editor at my side, was a huge strike out. An adamant no-go. And rather than fight the administration, we moved on.

Fortunately, I think the only person more excited about the concept than we were when I pitched it was the WL high school principal. He saw it for exactly what we hope it will become: A great way to get more news out about the good things happening in his school.

I’ve often commented that there could be a half dozen education reporters in this community, and we’d still never be for want of a story. That’s one of things I love and hate about my beat. I always have more than enough I can do, and I will always be missing things I wish I could get to. That’s the void the printed Schools Page we launched this spring and these micro-sites will help fill.

The micro-site, if you can’t tell from the screen shot, is mostly populated by student work. There’s a tab for J&C headlines, but the content you read or see in every other section is WL student work. We decided to team up with the high school’s newspaper to have a guaranteed stream of reliable students and content (they publish every three weeks, but the kids are really excited about the idea of being able to do breaking news between that cycle). We’re also continuing a relationship with the art classes to run student photo galleries (click on the “latest media” tab). We’re working on technical issues of uploading student films from the film lit class, which previously had been seen by a small audience and uploaded in a non-uniform way on YouTube. Eventually we will include the school’s daily Red Devil TV segment on the site. Comments will eventually be implemented on the stories — another thing the kids are excited to have is feedback on their work.

In each of the cases, it broadens the audience of the kids’ work, AND gives the community more insight into what’s happening at the school.

It’s also a great learning opportunity for those students. They are the ones uploading their content into our CMS, and they’re the ones calling the shots on story placement and breaking news stories (something they’ve never been able to do before because their Web site was literally a collection of PDF archives). I can’t think of a newspaper who wouldn’t like to have a staffer who can say they did those things as a sophomore or junior in high school.

But a key component of the site I haven’t mentioned is the wlhsVoice feature, which you see in the right corner. It’s basically the GetPublished feature, but we’re hoping kids who aren’t on the newspaper staff or in the art classes or who just want to be published take advantage. We’re leaving it pretty open to whatever they want to write about or shoot pictures of and, as long as it’s clean and not libelous or anything, we’ll put it up on the site.

You know the past few weeks as I’ve been out at the local schools, especially the high schools, later in the day when classes are out, I’ve really been reminded just how much a school really brings together the community. In a lot of cases it really gives the community an identity and a gathering place. When it really gets off the ground, this site, we hope, will be a way to get more focused and deeper coverage of the school and community on a level that the J&C could never provide on our own. And it will give the power to be heard to the people, so to speak, most impacted.

Eventually, now that we have this template down and once we work out some kinks and figure out our system, we’ll try and port this to the other high schools in our county as we planned. I can’t help but think even the original no-go will give a green light when they see how this positively affects the community.

The concept is deceptively simple. Just ask reporters to share what they’re reporting on with other reporters and the public. Then, let them network with each other for advice/tips/a sounding board on similar stories. Let the public vote up, digg-style, topics they want to read about.

I don’t know if it’ll work, but I like the idea, which is apparently Ryan Sholin’s.

I saw it because when Mindy McAdams joined the Facebook group, “What are you reporting on?”, it showed up in my Facebook newsfeed. When I went to the group I saw the Twitter account and started following it. I only share this process to show you why social networking sites are awesome, not just for posting party pictures or stalking old friends, but also for finding out about projects I’d never have heard about.

Definitely something to keep an eye on.

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:

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?

When I was home last week, Stater adviser Carl Schierhorn gave me a personal tour of Franklin Hall. (In hindsight, as in right now that I’m finally penning this post, I should have taken photos and video and given you all a bird’s eye view. I’ll chock it up to stupidity and the fact that I was officially “on vacation” and instead just send you over to the JMC Franklin Hall slide show about move-in progress and the archived stories about the building at the site.)

Tomorrow (er, it’s midnight, so Today), is the first day of classes in the new journalism building. The Stater is continuing production from it’s Taylor Hall hub for at least the next few weeks, while the converged newsroom is being finished. Meanwhile, TV2 has set up shop in the former Student Media business office next door to the Stater newsroom. Not a perfect situation, but a much closer relationship than was even a pipe dream a decade ago.

This is the beginning. No more StaterOnline. No more tv2.kent.edu. Welcome to the future of student media, Kent State students: Kent News Net. One product, always on, always improving.

Though the layout looks a bit rough right now and hiccups pop up throughout the site, the content of which is mostly the annual orientation issue, you get the idea.

There’s Black Squirrel Radio podcasting and TV2 newscasts right alongside the Stater’s stories. Even prominent linkage to the Burr (student magazine). Add to it helpful links to other key KSU sites — like Flashline (the all-important hub of Student resources online) — and Stater.you action on the sidebar, and it’s definitely a winner.

As I walked the dusty halls of Franklin with t-minus a week to classes in the building, I was more than a bit jealous. I want the big collaborative classrooms and shiny new computer labs. I want the converged newsroom, with its conference rooms and single assignment desk. I want windows in the journalism classrooms (there were NONE in Taylor Hall, the faculty and Stater hogged all the windows on the first floor of the building). Amazing things are going to come out of those rooms. And though I’m excited about the opportunities for future KSU grads, I’m a bit sad I wasn’t able to partake. (And no, as I told every single person who saw and subsequently asked me during my tour of Franklin Hall, grad school is not on my horizon for a very, very, very, very long time, if ever.)

Though the new building is amazing, there are some things that will be missed:

• Taylor Hall is central to campus. Franklin’s out in BFE comparatively, at the very corner of campus. (But, it’s a heck of a lot closer to Starbucks and Chipotle, and even the bars for those after-a-long-night-of-production celebrations.)

• The faculty are in what Carl called “pods,” and though they might like their bigger offices off the main drag, I think the relationship with their students will change as a result. How many great conversations did I have from the hallway door of my professor’s offices while I was on my way in or out of the Stater? How much great advice did I happen upon because I stopped in to ask a non-pressing question or simply say, “What’s new?” as I meandered past. Professor hallway is no more. Now, students will have to deliberately go out of their way, to another floor even, to talk to the professors. Likewise, it will be harder for the profs to track down students who won’t be hanging down the hall in the Stater office or in the JMC office reading room area (which is now in an entirely separate area). How many mentor relationships won’t be sparked? I don’t know. But this seems like probably the biggest loss to me. Then again, the professors will probably be more productive with fewer student interruptions, so who knows.
• The Stater loses its window to campus. Not only is it in BFE, it doesn’t have a window overlooking the commons. I never realized how important that wall of windows was until I worked in an office without a single window to the outside. Now, granted, this isn’t the case for the new newsroom, but there will be some loss in identity to student media when thousands of kids on their tours of campus aren’t marched past the Stater newsroom on their way to the May 4 memorial. There’s something to be said of walking past the newsroom. Even for non-readers, you couldn’t help but notice the Stater existed because you saw it every time you went past.
• There’ll also probably be fewer pick-up games of football, frisbee, four square or kickball — and when the weather was ripe, lunch tray sledding down Blanket Hill — than there were when I was there. This was an amazing de-stresser, not to mention a good way to get to know each other beyond the confines of class and work.
• And finally, there will be no 100 Taylor Hall. I know it’s silly to be sad about that, but I am. The next time I’m on campus, the room where I spent more time during college than anywhere else combined won’t exist. At least not in the way I know and love it. It was hard for me to be there last week and think about that. All the amazing fun times and friends I made, all the great stories we produced, all the days I was proud and the conversations I wish never had to happen, but which made me stronger. All I’ll have the next time I walk past those windows is my memories.

I realize that list seems longer than the benefits. I assure you it’s not. I’m just a bit nostalgic, that’s all.

And on that note, I’m out.

Good luck to all the Stater staffers, who probably haven’t even sent tomorrow’s paper and as is tradition missed deadline by a long shot tonight, the first night of daily production. And Godspeed to the next generation of student media at Kent State.

The first thing I do every morning when I wake up is reach for my phone. There are two reasons for this. First, I use it as my alarm clock, and at 7 a.m. I just want it to shut up. But the second, far worse reason is, I want to check my e-mail.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to check for new e-mail that has arrived since bedtime and dawn. I know, and tell myself each day when I do it, that nobody else was up to send me e-mails. Even if they did, surely the e-mail can wait until I brush my teeth, right? And yet, every morning, I do it anyway.

Today, I read this article, Stop Your BlackBerry From Being the Boss, and I have to confess. Yesterday, when I was at dinner with a friend/co-worker, I was texting another friend, granted the other friend was part of the conversation but that’s beside the point. How many times have I been annoyed when someone else was having a phone conversation instead of engaging in the conversation at table? And though I laugh a bit about it now, I have, most definitely, checked my e-mail while driving. Haven’t you?

Apparently, and I think the story is right, this is a sign I need to let go.

I used to get far more e-mail than I do now. Perhaps it’s just that I used to use one single account for both personal and professional e-mail, whereas now I have my J&C account and my gmail account (which my kent e-mail feeds into so it’s all together). To my credit, I rarely check the J&C account when I’m not sitting at my desk. But my personal e-mail? Constantly. When I’m sitting at my MacBook it’s constantly updating my status bar. When I’m at work, I have my personalized Google page constantly up in a tab which I check several times a day.

So, I’m going to try and internalize these four tips from the article:

• There’s no such thing as an “email emergency.”

• The world does not revolve around you.
• Stick to a schedule.
• Respect BlackBerry Blackout Zones.

And you know what? I’m pretty sure the world will keep spinning and nothing major will fall through. Because as item number one says, if it’s that important, someone will call me instead.