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.

“Instead, sell a small sub-set of your products that you think may sell well online. For each product, provide a high level of detail describing the product. Follow up with some solid advice on how to choose the correct product for you, or provide expertise and background on the origins of the product.”

People want to trust you, so let them. It’s simple; if people trust you, they will come back. Have a look at the most popular bloggers, they cover a small niche of subjects, they don’t try to be the ‘online newspaper’ with hundreds of articles everyday.

“Most products can already be found online, but there’s often a lack of detail and advice regarding the product. This can become an important and trust-building point of differentiation between you and your competitors.”

Online business is not very different from blogging or online journalism. You are trying to feed your users with the content they want, trust and transparency is one of the biggest factors in building a reliable reputation online.

The best thing you can do for your users and customers, which is not touched on in the article, is to come and play on their playground. You come to where they are, don’t just try and persuade them to come to you. Visit their blogs, offer advice (DON’T SELL) but don’t be that guy. Sign up to forums about your topic or product and start engaging with your users (DON’T SELL), become their friend.

One of the reasons that blogs can become so popular, so fast is that their authors probably had build their reputation way before they started the blog. Most blogs spring up out of interest from the author, bloggers love to engage online, they’ve probably been regulars on forums oand other blogs for years before they started their own. In other words; they already had a brand that people could trust.

As Gavin Wray says in the comments on Michael’s post:

“Thanks for making this guide. You make clear sense out of what can seem a daunting task.”

You see it time and time again. Organisations showing terrible timing and understanding, responding to bad feedback by alienating people and ignoring the community.

If you can answer these questions by a yes or no, you have come a long way in your aproach to bad feedback. The golden nugget being: listen first, then react.

You might want to talk about your latest online project to gain the wisdom of others’ perspectives or share things you’ve learnt along the way. Maybe you’d like to provide your top ten favourite memes on teh internetz, challenge perceptions of a particular form of social media, demonstrate where an online presence works well or just spend 5 minutes educating the room about the most famous cats in cyberspace. This really is open to you – we want the event to have the capacity to be both serious and fun.

Except that I’m going to ‘pimp’ BirminghamRecycled.co.uk, I haven’t exactly decided what to talk about. – But I have come up with an incomplete list.

• Social media: a professional tool or personal pleasure?
• Journalist vs. Blogger is there a difference.
• Teaching social media – It’s not a monologue.
• News as a platform/conversation.
• Is it News or merely aggregation?

I will have to submit my idea to Shona before lunch time tomorrow. Will post when I have more details.

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 .