Yesterday I asked Dave Winer what he would teach journalists.  He responded with the suggestion that the journalists should blog with existing software with instruction/feedback/conversations involving the local MSM and anyone else who'd like to stop by driving the instruction.

Interesting, but who is going to create checkbox news? Is that something you can create with a Blogger account?

Last semester I helped develop several projects that are really innovative approaches to complicated problems journalists face. 

Notebook - This is an alternative interface for commenting that tries to lead users to categorize their feedback by Tips, Facts, and Sources.  The comments are all fed into Drupal where they can be viewed by publication, journalist, tags, ratings, etc.  The goal of this project is to try to create value from comments instead of simply having a flame war at the end of every story.  The hope is that a journalist would go back to their Notebook before writing about a topic to see what users have said about other stories on the same topic.  I ran into javascript conflicts between fivestar rating, jquery scroll, and jquery tabs that I haven't been able to figure out.

I've submitted a session proposal to 2007 Open Source Content Management Submit host by Yahoo March 22and 23.  My session is titled Developer Eye for the Design Guy/Girl.   If you have the time, please sign up for an account at the 2007 OSCMS website and throw your vote my way. 

We want to apply Web2.0 technologies used in sites like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Upcoming, Delicious, and Google Maps to environmental journalism.

When Drupal sites and Drupal supporters in the Newspaper industry win awards like this, it helps validate what I've been saying making me seem less like a crazy from the future who comes to meeting blowing everyone's minds and talking crazy moon speak.    If you Digg, please Digg this and pass it on to your friends.

I lived in Minneapolis and St. Paul for almost 4 years without a car.  After a big pay day from a consulting gig, I decided that I was going to buy a car I really wanted so I bought an Audi TT.  When I was younger, I was constantly hacking my car.  I learned a lot, but didn't want to deal with a CD player that only worked when the dome light was on.  I really loved my TT, but with almost 100,000 miles it didn't make sense to bring it out to Reno when we had just purchased a new Scion XA and would only need one car.  Before we moved to Reno, we also purchased a Tom Tom.  Anyone who knows me has a story about how directionally impaired I am.  The Tom Tom helps, but my ideal car would have something like this...

PaidContent is reporting, that Ford has gone with Microsoft for a new autocomputing platform that will "allow for hands-free phone communication and other wireless info transfers inside the car, including the ability to receive e-mail and download music." 

Last week Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of Drupal 5 was released. The core Drupal development team made some HUGE improvements in the organization of the administration tools dividing them between Content management, Site building, Site configuration, and User management.

By the end of the week, I have to choose between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 to build a site that will beta in January and go live to the public in February. I'm looking for feedback on the age old question of going with the known, stable framework or the exciting, new framework. Since the task of maintaining content and users is going to fall on the cohort of grad students studying interactive journalism, the improvements to the admin interfaces should reduce the amount of help the faculty and students need from me to run their site.

Drupal 5 includes JQuery, making it easier for developers to add AJAX functionality like Netflix-esque Fivestar module.

Michelle Cox has posted timeline for updating the popular 4.7 modules to work with Drupal 5. Notice the number of modules marked "Not started until after RC". The question I have to answer this week is, how long will it take to update the modules I absolutely need to work with 5? Are the improvements in Drupal 5 worth waiting for module developers to update their code... or taking on the burden of updating the module myself?

In a number of ways SidewalkTheory has been mirroring our lives. By that, I mean it's been a mess.

There are a number of reasons for this..

- changing jobs (and thus changing laptops, servers, internet providers)
- moving to Reno and searching for things that fit our new physical space
- trying to organize all of our "stuff" in a smaller space

This merging of stuff has been the most problematic both physically and digitally. I brought a lot of blogging baggage to this relationship. I started blogging in 1999 when I went to Europe with some homebrew code. I continued to update that code until I bought into the hype about MovableType in 2003. I blogged regularly about the Future of Television until it was obvious to everyone but the person I was trying to convince that the broadcast television model was broken. Rather than lose a friend, I stopped blogging.