Come January '09 I hope you'll be hearing a lot about (and from) athensi.com.
First, a bit of background. athensi.com actually started out as actv7news.com, shoveling content from the student-produced newscast, ACTV-7 News. Then, in February 2001 the site became more of a portal page for Athens-based media. When rss technology came along a few years ago we completely changed how content reached athensi.com.
Now, as athensi.com approaches its eighth anniversary, I've come to realize that the site -- along with the Internet itself -- is just starting to reach its potential to be a real marketplace of ideas. But it can reach that potential only if you, dear users, decide to participate not only as consumers but as producers in the marketplace. Here's how you can do just that.
BLOGGING:
Start a blog and send me the address (stewartr@ohio.edu). If you feel shy, check out what other bloggers in Athens are saying on their blog.
If you are part of a community organization, start up a blog for that organization and pass the address along to me (again, stewartr@ohio.edu). We'll add it to the community section on athensi.com.
If you are a business and want to reach buyers and other members of the community in Athens, start up a blog and write about your business, your products and services, etc., and we'll add it to our business section. Cool, huh?
ADD PHOTOS:
You also can add pictures to athensi.com's photo gallery. Just set up a free account on flickr.com and tag your photos "athens, ohio" (make sure to use the quotation marks so that your tag will be athens, ohio and not just athens and ohio, which won't work).
The reason that I'm excited about January '09 is that I'm teaching a course in the JSchool that will work specifically on getting the word out about athensi.com. Students in the class will go out into the community to teach individuals and organizations that want to have their voice heard on athensi.com how to blog, how to upload photos, etc., so that those blogs and photos can be included on athensi.com Then, and only then, will athensi.com be all that it can be for the community of Athens, Ohio.
Showing posts with label citizen journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label citizen journalism. Show all posts
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
get your own blog (onto ATHENSi.com)!
Want to say your piece to the Athens's Nation? Blog it. We'll subscribe to your rss feed and bingo, you've got a chance to make your case.
No idea how to get started? No idea about rss? This blog will try to explain all of the jargon, starting with "blog" and ending with "RSS." What I'm not going to tell you is what to say.
A lengthy definition of "blog" probably isn't necessary, so I'll keep it short. A blog is an online journal/diary/bully pulpit/&tc., which is relatively easy (and completely free) to set up. Check out blogger.com, host of this blog, if you have no idea of where to start. BTW, a few folks out there in cyberland actually make an honest living by blogging, but everything I read about that says it's a lot of hard work feeding the blog machine.
Once you've set up your account (say, on blogger.com), you need to identify your "rss feed," which allows your content to be "pushed" to ATHENSi.com... and anyone else's "feed reader." A feed reader, in essence, is a computer program that proactively looks for new content on sites to which it is "subscribed." In the case of a blogger.com blog, it has two types of RSS feeds to which feed readers can subscribe: a conventional RSS feed and an "Atom" feed. Since ATHENSi.com's system can't make heads or tails of Atom feeds, you need to know how to identify the "RSS" feed for your blog.
Since I can't ever remember the code ... and there's really no need to clutter up my already full brain with such code ... here's how I find the rss feed address for any of my new blogs.
1. copy and paste the blog address (i.e., the URL; in the case of this blog, the URL is: http://athensi.blogspot.com) into the form at http://feedburner.com.
2. feedburner.com will show you that there are two feeds from your blog (again, if it is hosted on blogger.com)... and Atom feed and an RSS feed:
Atom: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
RSS: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
You can see that they are very similar, with the alt=rss of the RSS feed address being the only difference.
3. Send me the address http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss at robertkstewart@hotmail.com and I'll subscribe to your feed on ATHENSi.com. Presto: your can now speak your mind to the rest of Athens...
NOTE: I recommend that you turn on the "comments" section of your blog, just like I have my comments section turned on. This allows for greater discourse, conversation, talkback, etc.
Please note: It may take a day or two (or three if I'm really busy or out of town) to get your blog added to ATHENSi.com. And once it is added, it sometimes takes an hour or two for your most recent blog post to show up on our site. Be patient, but if you don't see your posts showing up within a day or two, please email me to let me know there's a problem.
Please note: ATHENSi.com and its manager (me) are not responsible for the content of the blogs to which we subscribe. At the same time, I reserve the right to unsubscribe to any blog, for whatever reason I deem appropriate. I hope that never happens, but if it does, I'll try to explain why in this blog.
No idea how to get started? No idea about rss? This blog will try to explain all of the jargon, starting with "blog" and ending with "RSS." What I'm not going to tell you is what to say.
A lengthy definition of "blog" probably isn't necessary, so I'll keep it short. A blog is an online journal/diary/bully pulpit/&tc., which is relatively easy (and completely free) to set up. Check out blogger.com, host of this blog, if you have no idea of where to start. BTW, a few folks out there in cyberland actually make an honest living by blogging, but everything I read about that says it's a lot of hard work feeding the blog machine.
Once you've set up your account (say, on blogger.com), you need to identify your "rss feed," which allows your content to be "pushed" to ATHENSi.com... and anyone else's "feed reader." A feed reader, in essence, is a computer program that proactively looks for new content on sites to which it is "subscribed." In the case of a blogger.com blog, it has two types of RSS feeds to which feed readers can subscribe: a conventional RSS feed and an "Atom" feed. Since ATHENSi.com's system can't make heads or tails of Atom feeds, you need to know how to identify the "RSS" feed for your blog.
Since I can't ever remember the code ... and there's really no need to clutter up my already full brain with such code ... here's how I find the rss feed address for any of my new blogs.
1. copy and paste the blog address (i.e., the URL; in the case of this blog, the URL is: http://athensi.blogspot.com) into the form at http://feedburner.com.
2. feedburner.com will show you that there are two feeds from your blog (again, if it is hosted on blogger.com)... and Atom feed and an RSS feed:
Atom: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
RSS: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
You can see that they are very similar, with the alt=rss of the RSS feed address being the only difference.
3. Send me the address http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss at robertkstewart@hotmail.com and I'll subscribe to your feed on ATHENSi.com. Presto: your can now speak your mind to the rest of Athens...
NOTE: I recommend that you turn on the "comments" section of your blog, just like I have my comments section turned on. This allows for greater discourse, conversation, talkback, etc.
Please note: It may take a day or two (or three if I'm really busy or out of town) to get your blog added to ATHENSi.com. And once it is added, it sometimes takes an hour or two for your most recent blog post to show up on our site. Be patient, but if you don't see your posts showing up within a day or two, please email me to let me know there's a problem.
Please note: ATHENSi.com and its manager (me) are not responsible for the content of the blogs to which we subscribe. At the same time, I reserve the right to unsubscribe to any blog, for whatever reason I deem appropriate. I hope that never happens, but if it does, I'll try to explain why in this blog.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
blogging ATHENSi.com
ATHENSi.com has been around since early 2001, making it one of the older web-only services in Athens, Ohio. If you are reading this, you probably already value ATHENSi.com's aggregating service, or some other aspect of the site.
For the record, ATHENSi.com is a community service of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. We created it as an outlet for journalism students learning about new media. With the cooperation of many, many local news media entities, we quickly added RSS feeds from every local new source we could think of, creating a portal aggregating service that makes ATHENSi.com a terrific starting point when you want to see what's going on in Athens, Ohio.
I should also admit before going further that I run site. And if a bus were to run me over on my way home, the site would keep on running for a while (because of the magic of rss), but if and when it were to break, I doubt very much that anyone could begin to figure out how to fix it. Maybe that's why I'm starting up this blog... to create a kind of "paper" trail. Toward that end, this blog is my way to bring more transparency to the production of the site. Strange that it's taken me so long to start this blog, given that I teach transparency to anyone who'll listen!
In fact, I set this blog up back in December, but immediately forgot about it, which I suppose means I wasn't thinking very seriously about it when I established it. I was a little surprised to stumble on it earlier this week while preparing for an... you got it... online journalism class. As soon as I saw the blog title I realized I had been remiss in NOT having set up such a blog a long time ago. Yes, I do have a little blurb under the site's FAQ section explaining a bit about the site. And yes, I do get an occasional email related to ATHENSi.com ... usually someone wanting coverage for an event, or a business or agency wanting to be linked from the site. I always try to figure out how to accommodate such requests. But I don't go out of my way to solicit such emails, and for that I'm embarrassed. Chagrined. I admit it, it's my bad. My only excuse: I was too busy playing guitar on my front porch, enjoying walks with my wife and our dogs on the Near East side of town, in other words, just kickin' back.
I'd like to think that ATHENSi.com can serve a more important role than being the occasional diversion, or convenient way to aggregate news in a portal-type site. In fact, with our web publishing technology -- which I'll write about in another blog post if anyone wants to know about it -- we can create the community bulletin board that folks say the Web should become in local communities. In fact, it really is up to you... citizens of Athens, Ohio, whether you want to have such a bulletin board, town square, public sphere, etc. in the entity of ATHENSi.com. Let me know if you want to start speaking out through the ATHENSi.com bullhorn, and I'll tell how it can be done.
Oh yeah, one more thing... The preferred "style" for referencing the site is ATHENSi.com. Not athensi.com. And certainly not Athensi.com. Just so you know.
Bob Stewart (robertkstewart@hotmail.com)
For the record, ATHENSi.com is a community service of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. We created it as an outlet for journalism students learning about new media. With the cooperation of many, many local news media entities, we quickly added RSS feeds from every local new source we could think of, creating a portal aggregating service that makes ATHENSi.com a terrific starting point when you want to see what's going on in Athens, Ohio.
I should also admit before going further that I run site. And if a bus were to run me over on my way home, the site would keep on running for a while (because of the magic of rss), but if and when it were to break, I doubt very much that anyone could begin to figure out how to fix it. Maybe that's why I'm starting up this blog... to create a kind of "paper" trail. Toward that end, this blog is my way to bring more transparency to the production of the site. Strange that it's taken me so long to start this blog, given that I teach transparency to anyone who'll listen!
In fact, I set this blog up back in December, but immediately forgot about it, which I suppose means I wasn't thinking very seriously about it when I established it. I was a little surprised to stumble on it earlier this week while preparing for an... you got it... online journalism class. As soon as I saw the blog title I realized I had been remiss in NOT having set up such a blog a long time ago. Yes, I do have a little blurb under the site's FAQ section explaining a bit about the site. And yes, I do get an occasional email related to ATHENSi.com ... usually someone wanting coverage for an event, or a business or agency wanting to be linked from the site. I always try to figure out how to accommodate such requests. But I don't go out of my way to solicit such emails, and for that I'm embarrassed. Chagrined. I admit it, it's my bad. My only excuse: I was too busy playing guitar on my front porch, enjoying walks with my wife and our dogs on the Near East side of town, in other words, just kickin' back.
I'd like to think that ATHENSi.com can serve a more important role than being the occasional diversion, or convenient way to aggregate news in a portal-type site. In fact, with our web publishing technology -- which I'll write about in another blog post if anyone wants to know about it -- we can create the community bulletin board that folks say the Web should become in local communities. In fact, it really is up to you... citizens of Athens, Ohio, whether you want to have such a bulletin board, town square, public sphere, etc. in the entity of ATHENSi.com. Let me know if you want to start speaking out through the ATHENSi.com bullhorn, and I'll tell how it can be done.
Oh yeah, one more thing... The preferred "style" for referencing the site is ATHENSi.com. Not athensi.com. And certainly not Athensi.com. Just so you know.
Bob Stewart (robertkstewart@hotmail.com)
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