Here’s a short rundown of the main points in the first draft.

What is Google Maps?

A free mapping service that provide easy tools for creating simple, interactive maps that can be embedded in any web page. – And, crazy useful for journalists.

Why you should use it?

Maps are probably one of the oldest forms of visuals, that has been used in news reporting. Apart from static maps, such as jpg images, interactive maps lets you put additional data such as images and video on top of the map. Interactive markers let the user decide what information they want, and when they want it. The web is not a passive media, it’s active and engaging and users want to be in control.

How you use it

First of all you need a Google account. If you haven’t already got one then it’s about time. Google has their own tutorial, and if Google has done something, they’ve probably done it the best, so I will shamelessly steal directly from theirs (btw. if you don’t like to read, watch the video demo). First of all log in to you Google account and go to Google Maps.

Creating your first map.

1. Click My Maps
2. Click Create new map.
3. Add a title and description for your map.
4. Decide whether the map should be public or unlisted. Public maps are automatically included in Google Maps search.
5. Use the icons in the top left corner of the map. These include:

Selection tool. Use this to drag the map and select placemarks, lines and shapes.
Placemark tool. Use this to add placemarks.
Line tool. Use this to draw lines.
Shape tool. Use this to draw shapes.

Adding Photos/Text

You can add photos to your map, as long as they are hosted online. Please use a service such as Google PicasaWeb to put your photos online.

To add photos:

1. Create or open a map.
2. Click the appropriate placemark, line, shape. The info window appears.
3. Click Edit.
4. Choose Rich Text or Edit HTML.
5. If you chose Rich Text mode, click the photo icon above the description field (the last one in the toolbar). Enter the URL of the photo you would like to add.
6. If you chose Edit HTML mode, use the <img> tag to add photos. For example, <img src=”http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/images/maps_results_logo.gif” width=150 height=55> adds the Google Maps logo to your map with a width of 150 pixels and a height of 55 pixels.
7. Click OK to save your changes.

Adding Videos

You can add Google Video and YouTube videos to your map. To do this:

1. Create or open a map.
2. Click the appropriate placemark, line or shape. The info window appears.
3. Click Edit.
4. Choose Edit HTML.
5. Find the video you want on YouTube or Google Video. Copy the snippet of code that lets you embed the video into a website or blog.
   • On Google Video, the snippet looks like this:
     <embed style=”width:400px; height:326px;” id=”VideoPlayback” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-274981837129821058&hl=en” flashvars=”"> </embed>
   • On YouTube, the snippet looks like this:
     <object width=”425″ height=”350″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/hKoB0MHVBvM”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/hKoB0MHVBvM” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”350″></embed></object>
6. Paste the snippet of code into the description field of your placemark, line or shape.
7. Click OK to save your changes.

Here’s an even simpler version of the above for the complete beginner.

This is just a rough draft and intro to why journalists should use Google Maps, I would love to hear if you got any better motivation factors for why journalists should use this brilliant service.

Even though the industry looks pretty dull, the general feeling I got, was that people have now realised that there is no point in trying to desperately hold on to your job, but now is the time to look forward. Naturally, this forces people to think of new things rather than trying to fix the old, – exciting I think.

There was plenty to talk about, and the unconference format really works well when it comes to networking and spreading ideas. There was everything from failed online ventures like Scoopt, new and exciting start-ups like the local news site SoGlos.com, established success stories like London-SE1 who have made hyper-local work in 10+ years. Newly launched Sweeble.com, the poor journalists printer and distributor was unveiled, Ok, it’s been running for a month, but still pretty new ;-).

James Hatts from London-SE1

The whole event was all about the future of journalism and how to make money in an industry that is changing on all fronts. Hyper-local was one of the main topics of the day, and especially how to make it work. As Marting Belam notes in a short interview with John Welsh, there is no reason why every publication has to cover everything.

“Does every publication need to cover horse racing coverage? the Racing Post does that. Or, are we going to end up with a situation were the Racing Post can concentrate on that audience and selling the advertising for that audience, and the rest of us can point to that?”

He also gave re-assurance that there will be news in the future, but the business model will change, thanks Martin.

Live-blogging JEEcamp

I was live blogging the day on behalf of the Online Journalism Blog and had some great discussions and panels to cover. I did a whole bunch of videos with Documentally about journalists use of facebook, why small-talk is important on twitter, the value of your online network and the next big thing.

Documentally showing off

James Hatts from London-SE1 talked about local news and we also had some great impromptu panel discussions. One chaired by Joanna Geary from the Times, and the other headed by Dave Harte from Digital Birmingham. The full transcript of the live bogging is also available and of course, every journalist, apart from one, live blogged their own experience, so search the web or head over to JEEcamp.com where everything is aggregated.

Kyle MacRae’s Keynote: The Rise and Fall of Scoopt.com

CoverItLive:

Video Coverage

The live video coverage was not as successful as I had hoped. the Bambuser video was simply useless, and the audio on the Qik equivalent was poor to say the least. Luckily my LX3 held up nicely and I secured a nice collection of JEEcamp clips that was uploaded to Vimeo. A few are also embedded here.

Kyle MacRae on Scoopt.com

Documentally: The detail is in the small-talk

James Hatts from London-SE1

Tomorrow I will be live blogging from JEEcamp – the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship unconference. Joining me, will be a team of online journalism students from the Birmingham City University, some of which are also hard working reporters at my little baby; Birmingham Recycled. We will be using a variety of tools including CoverItLive, Qik, Bambuser, Flickr and of course twitter.

Update: Live archive here

“the hashtag to follow on Twitter is #jeecamp, while jeecamp.com will be aggregating any mentions of jeecamp from various social media platforms (Paul Bradshaw’s, Online Journalism Blog )”

You can see a list of attendees over at eventbrite where tickets are also available (I think they are sold out though).

Here is an (un)official schedule of the event.

10.00: People will start arriving
10.20: Introduction
10.40: Kyle Macrae keynote
11.10: Coffee break
11.30: Speed networking
12.00: Break into groups each with a question to discuss
13.00: Lunch break
14.00: Fringe discussion (whatever that means?)
14.30: Open Mic
15.00: Panel discussions
16.00: Finish

An unconference?

An unconference means that the event is basically organised by the attendees. Everyone have had the opportunity to contribute via the JEEcamp wiki. Here’s the official description of the event.

“JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we’ve learned so far.

It is also an opportunity for people with different skills and experiences to network, share those experiences, and perhaps suggest partnerships or new projects.

It is an unconference, which means no endless parade of speakers, and no predetermined agenda (more info here). It’s a self-organising event, so you decide the agenda (via this wiki), and the focus is on providing the space and time for those with valuable experience and ideas – attendees – to talk to peers.

Attendees might have launched their own journalism project – or worked on one within a mainstream organisation. Or they might just have lots of great ideas, or knowledge about the area.”

Follow the liveblogging and  have a look all the aggregated content from around the web and help us make it worthwhile.

Louis Gray approaches it from a marketing perspective and ReadWriteWeb from a more journalistic perspective, but I don’t think that makes much of difference.

Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe

The main pointers from Louis Gray were as taken from a therapy session (which worked on me), convincing us that we are in control and have the power to defeat the information overload monster. His main points were:

• Your are in control of what you subscribe to.
• Opt out of email lists.
• Use filters to ‘discover’ the important stuff.
• Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe.
• Skim like mad.
• Analyse your sources to determine follow worthiness.

What I like:

• Skim reading
• Quick source analysis

What I don’t like:

• Unsubscribing is not the solution.
• Overly complicated filters.
• No clear mention of grouping of sources.

Subscribe, Subscribe, Prioritize

ReadWriteWeb have their own take on how to control your information overload. According to RRW ‘groups’ are the holy grail of controlling the information of the social web. And in true social media style, they recommend you to subscribe to everyone who subscribe to you. Some pointers from the article:

• Group sources by topic.
• Prioritizing is your noise filter.
• Context brings meaning.
• Have your closest contacts handy.
• Value your weak connections.
• Follow everyone who follows you.
• Learn to appreciate the full stream.

What I like:

• Prioritize to filter noise.
• Using (broad) groups to create context.
• Selective follow-back.

What I don’t like:

• Following everyone who follows you.
• Too many specific groups.

Both are valid strategies or solutions if you like, to a common problem. I believe in a combination of the two. Unsubscribing is a tempting solution as it quickly decreases the noise, but it’s only a temporary solution as you will inevitable keep adding to your stream. Filters are good but can get complicated and hard to maintain. Filters are good for extremely targeted keywords, which makes them great as short term solutions for specific projects (or research for articles).

Time is a big decider as well. You don’t want to spend several minutes analysing every person who subscribe to you, or leave a comment on your site to determine whether you should follow back or not. You could either not subscribe at all, or simply subscribe to everything. I believe (not saying I do this) that everyone who follows you, are worthy of a follow back, IF; they are a ‘real’ person and don’t just spam their stream with links. It takes around five seconds to determine that.

Use groups, but don’t overuse them.

Don’t have too many groups, the more you have the more time it takes to determine where a source goes. Use a few broad topic groups, preferably no more than five.

Make sure you got a group with all your most important feeds/streams/followers. Most people could probably get away with just having one group where all the most important sources go. This is the best way to filter the noise, you know which sources are the most valuable, you should have quick access to all of them. Even if you follow 2500 people on twitter, you simply need 1 group with the 50 most important and you have cut noise significantly. You can pay attention to the important ones, and skim read the rest.

Don’t worry about missing stuff, if you are on twitter, friendfeed or facebbok, you can be sure that the community will let you know if you have missed anything. More importantly, focus on what your friends missed, that’s where the real value is.

If you thought portable devices meant that you had to carry a few of them around, think again. As far as I’m concerned, Chris has a completely different take on this. His philosophy seems to be;  the smaller they are, the more you can fit into your bag. – And I like it :-)

I don’t know if he even got all of his devices out during his stay, but here’s what he dug out of his secret chamber while I was watching.

• Apple Macbook
• 3G dongle
  Gives him a Wi-fi enabled network wherever here is.
• Kodak Zi6
  A nice little HD video recorder.
• Nokia N95
  The device he uses to post Qik videos in conjunction with his iPhone i believe.
• Iphone (with a windscreen stolen from his Zoom recorder)
  The windscreen helps him look more ‘reporter like’, and the audioboo app let’s him record and upload podcast on the go.
• Panasonic Lumix LX3
  Lovely little camera with a bright and wide lens.
• Eye-fi card
  A 2GB SD card you pop into your digital camera and it has a built in wi-fi and GPS chip. It will geo tag your photos and upload them directly to flickr via the built in wi-fi antenna.
• Nikon D3
  SLR for low light, loong zoom and more commercial high res. photography.
• A zoom lens (probably Nikon but didn’t check)

All this, and probably more, stuffed neatly into his North Face backpack – well done for keeping track of it all.

48 Hours in Denmark

I didn’t know about this, but Chris told me about a project called 48 hours in Denmark. Which basically give away a free trip to Denmark for people to come over and shoot some video. Chris and Philip made quite a nice video entry, so please give Philip Campbell and Christan Payne your vote.

Chris was visiting to pour out of his wisdom of multi media journalism in a web 2.0 world, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a quick interview with Paul Bradshaw at the end of the lesson.

Doing a presentation on something like this might seem like overkill. But the more I prepared for this presentation, the more I realised how important this actually is.

It might just be me, but I’m struggling to understand why so many mainstream news papers still don’t link to their sources. I see it day after day, newspapers ripping off twitter messages and giving no credit what so ever. I’m just thinking, who would ever want to work with an institution who consistently pass on other people’s work as their own?

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

Background:

As some of you may know, I run BirminghamRecycled.co.uk and have a great team of online journalism students, mentored by Paul Bradshaw , to help me. We see twitter as one of the most important tools in our online journalism toolbox; both as a research tool, but mainly as a way of keeping in touch with our users. One of the primary objectives of the site is to interact and connect with the local community of bloggers and content producers.

The majority of students have had no prior experience with twitter and have now only been using it for a couple of weeks. Some are starting to find their feet and are now looking to build their twitter profile, expanding on what they have already learned. Others find it harder to get to grips with the social and conversational nature of twitter, and are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ‘stalking’ strangers online.

We hope by arranging a session like this, we will demonstrate how useful twitter can be when multiple people are talking about the same thing. It will give the more adapt twitterers a chance to explore ideas around the use of hashtags , and introduce beginners to @replies and the social aspect of twitter in general. But most importantly it will be a, hopefully, fun exercise for everyone.

Dave Lee : daveleejblog.com : @davelee

Yesterday, Paul Bradshaw had arranged for blogger Dave Lee to come in and have a chat with the second years online journalism class. It was a brilliant opportunity to talk to someone who really knows about this stuff, and who’s just finished his journalism course him self.

I will try and summarize the nearly four hour class to the best of my abilities. If you’re interested in the formal presentation on blogging that Paul Bradshaw delivered to the student, then head over to the online journalism blog or check it out at the bottom of this post.

Personal- blog under your own name

Unless you know for a fact that your blog will only be temporary, like some my semester specific blogs, then you should always be blogging under your own name. If you want to set up a personal blog to aid your journalistic perspective and employability, your blog should be regarded as a permanent thing of your life, – It’s not just while you’re a student! A blog titled ‘Student Life’, might pretty quickly become hard to justify once you graduate and want to focus on other things. Blogging under your own name, let’s you change your blogs focus so that it suits your current position and interests.

Portfolio – Having it all under one roof

If you want to show of your work, CV, testimonials etc. do it on a separate page on your blog. Don’t have these things on a completely separate website, it’s all part of who you are, and I’m sure if you ask Dave, he would tell you that your blog is the biggest part of your portfolio. Chances are; future employers will google your name, and you don’t want them to either miss your blog or your portfolio, so keep it all on the same site.

Passion – Do it because you love it

This one is hard to fake, this is the fuel of your blog and what will keep it going. My guess is that since you want to be a journalist you have a passion for writing or recording stuff for others. If you don’t, then maybe you should reconsider your journalistic future. There are too many easy excuses for not participating journalistically in social media. But maybe the most important concept in this whole article will be passion. If people know you are committed and love what you do, then they will keep coming back. Remember, you are writing for yourself, not in the comfort of some large corporate machine that you can hide behind. If you don’t like what you do, it will show. Same goes for the reverse, people will pick up on your passion and will be more inclined to engage with your content.

Professional – Your boss WILL read it

It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes professional, but I like to think of it as two things in regards to blogging. First of all, don’t write anything you wouldn’t want your boss or mum or anyone else not to read. But don’t be afraid to write something if you feel you have a valid point. The other thing is to keep it useful for your readers, also the ones that are not directly interested in your personal life. I don’t like telling what topic to blog about except; don’t blog about what you had for breakfast, dinner and son on. If you do, at least turn it into something that’s relevant and useful to your readership. You will write some of your best blog posts, when you can turn events from your personal life into something interesting for your readers. – Even if it’s just something that sparks an idea in your head. But keep it on topic and control your ramblings, although I know that’s hard :)

Perfection – I ran out of ideas for ‘P’

Find your focus, as Dave talked about in the session, he started blogging about journalism but found that it was too broad. You don’t want to compete with all the big guns on broad topics, narrow it down and keep it focused, think of how YOU can add value to a story, not how Wikipedia can.

Post regularly, don’t go stall for three months at a time, find your own rhythm. You will find that the topic and the format of you blog will naturally give you an idea of the best posting interval. If your blog posts are one paragraph with just a link, then several updates like Martin Stabe does is fine, but if you write longer blog posts then once every week or fortnight might be enough. Speed is important, but don’t rush anything out unless it is absolutely breaking news.

Learn from the best. People usually struggle to come up with ideas for what to blog about, especially in the beginning. Pick a few of you favourite blogs and try and see what format they adapt, what tone do they use, how they link and how they make use of multimedia. Also look at the topics they cover, how they structure their headlines engage with readers etc.

Don’t just blog. Blogging is so much more than just writing your blog posts. Try to use 50% of your time on your own blog and spend the other 50% on other blogs leaving comments and engaging with the community. This will help you keep a finger on the pulse, give you ideas for blog posts and will show your passion for what your are covering. Here is a great quote from ‘Save the Media ‘:
“Using social media as a journalist and engaging the community means more work — but it adds more value, too. ”

It doesn’t have to be writing. You don’t have to limit your self to writing, if you are more of a photographer, radio or TV -person, then start a podcast, video blog orphotoblog, what ever suits you.

I highly recommend you keep an eye out for Dave lee’s j Blog & make sure you follow him on twitter. Dave is just out of University himself and does some great blogging on both his on personal website and the BBC Internet blog .

But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:

Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.

The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.

Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.

A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:

@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture

@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?

And a few I just made up to get you networking: