The finished theme is actually not a complete theme, it’s ‘only’ a child theme. As this was the first time I had ever played with child themes, I wanted to write down some thoughts and recommendations. I have done so in an article over at the OJ Blog called which you are welcome to read.

Here are the first few words:

Ever had to modify a WordPress theme, and struggled to find your way around the CSS or template files? Or, have you ever had to update a theme, just to lose all you modifications? Use child themes to modify your blog design.

Catchy right! Here’s the rest of the article

Mapping calendar entries made me think, if this could be used for other stuff than simply putting events on a map, – which is quite useful in it’s own way. I thought it would be cool if you could create an interactive map-timeline, controlled dynamically by a (shared)calendar.

Read the rest of this tutorial in my article on the Online Journalism Blog.

The advanced search features of Friendfeed makes it a pretty good twitter search alternative. It even supports real-time, so you can make your own twitter news monitors.

I wrote this for the Online Journalism Blog, read the rest there.

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.

Friendfeed let’s you publish everything, or a few selected services to Twitter. If you have a lot of stuff going into your Friendfeed stream, you might not want to share everything on Twitter.

Sign up for an account on Friendfeed if you haven’t already got one. Import your Google Reader shared items and go to your Advanced Twitter Setting. Check the box that says ‘Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter by default’, then select to share ‘The services I’ve selected below’ and put a check mark in Google Reader. Save Changes and your shared items will be republished to Twitter.

Link to the original source or the Friendfeed entry?

You might notice that at the top of the settings page, you have the choice of ‘Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)’. If you don’t check this box, the link you send to Twitter will send your visitors to your Friendfeed entry. If you like me, want to encourage people to subscribe to your Friendfeed page you might like this. But for most people using Friendfeed only for this purpose, it makes sense to check it and send your visitors to the source.

Ryan has a great post on a more detailed strategy for sharing links, I encourage you to read it of you frequently share links on different platforms.

And… if you’re not too hung up on the Google Reader interface, consider installing Feedly into Firefox. It allows you to easily share stuff on Twitter, it even shorten the link.

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.

“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.