Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

Drop me a line here if you’re going too, and want to catch a drink.

I know I haven’t been writing much here in the past few weeks. Hey, that’s why RSS feeds rock — you don’t have to visit a site that isn’t updated just to see it isn’t updated. I hope you’re reading this in your RSS reader. If not, and if you are one of those clicks repeatedly to lots of sites just to see what’s new, I’ve got a song for you…. it goes a little something like this: “Get an arrr-esss-esss reader, baby, get an arrr-esss-esss reader baby, get that reader today.”

That said, this is what people were clicking on off my reading list from April 2008.

1. 8 reasons why your new special section is doomed to underwhelming traffic
2. How Strategic Imagination Happens - Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque: This guy, Umair Haque, has consistently smart-smart-smart insight into the way the internet economy works, and where it’s going.
3. But who owns Javascript? (front-end vs. back-end development): “In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally speaking, we’re split into these two camps. For the most part, our technical responsibilities are split up as such: “designers” do the client-side things (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc.), and “developers” do the server-side things (PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, etc.). Somewhere along the line, we decided the gap between front-end and back-end would be a good place to divide up our responsibilities. But is it?”
4. How We Use Twitter for Journalism - ReadWriteWeb
5. The Long Tail: Of Fly Eyes And Newspaper Revenues

If you want to subscribe to this link feed, you can do that here…

I did an email interview with journalism.co.uk about HappyJournalist last week, they published it this week. You can read the piece over there, or read my favorite bits below.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Well, it’s not a particularly useful site. Fun, yes. Useful, no.

HappyJournalist is a lens on journalists who have something to say, like what they do, and feel comfortable typing and clicking the submit button on the blog.

Until we get to the point where the internet has tools to quantify and publish emotion-related information, HappyJournalist will be a semi-static repository of what was said by the folk who have something to say.

That ‘until’ is a big, big ‘until’.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
I’ve been exploring that ‘What’s Next’ idea and have listed some other ideas (MildlyEnthusiasticJournalist.com and DrunkJournalist.com are my favourites, and a few people have contributed their own).

To make this interesting and forward thinking I’m considering pitching a new micro-format that describes emotions.

There’s no good way to aggregate or publish emotion-based information online yet. Seems like that’s a big gap in the web, don’t you think?

The internet’s gears turn because the robots and computers turn the gears, but it’s the humans that make the internet … sparkle.